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3 Ways To Build A Marriage That Lasts 1000 Generations · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  The world, and I would say even the Christian world, really sees marriage as primarily a romantic kind of love-based relationship. And this is why divorce is so high. Marriage is a pact two people make to spend 50 years trying to build the kind of family that can last a thousand generations. So how do you do that? Well, we've got three different plays in the playbook we're going to walk through and give you guys a taste of each of these. Okay.
• 0:24
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with my lovely wife, April. April, we just finished a crazy, crazy weekend. What just happened in the Pryor family?
• 0:54
  Our daughter just got married. Yes. Our third child, second daughter. Yes. Incredible experience. Yes. I'm excited about, we'll probably get a chance to talk about this some more. I would love to like,
• 1:10
  Share with y'all because yeah, we are getting multiple cracks at this wedding thing. We're getting opinions. And the one thing I'll say that was really crazy about this one was we had, I think at least 30 people come out to help us the day of the wedding that were not attending, but just were friends who were helping put it on at our house, which was unbelievable to see all those different gifts.
• 1:32
  And the way that each of them poured out for our family and so that we could have this epic experience, which, yeah, was awesome. So that was a huge highlight. Do you have one highlight you would call out that kind of sticking out to you about this wedding? Oh, man. There's so many. It was such a positive, wonderful experience. I would say it would probably be their vows. Either their vows or their dance.
• 2:01
  Yeah, they were both amazing. They were amazing, yeah. Yes. Sydney's a dancer and she married a guy who really knew how to dance. That was awesome. Yeah. Toby and Sydney are quite a pair. Yeah. It's going to be good for our New Year's Eve party.
• 2:16
  which involves dancing. Yeah, they already were super. Kobe was teaching people how to swing and yeah, it's gonna be fun. So super cool. Hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to you guys more about that. But today's podcast is all about the romantic partnership. Speaking of marriage, we're gonna talk a little bit more about this. This is the theme for the month of March for the Family Team's Accelerator. If you guys wanna jump into that, if you're a part of the Accelerator, you're gonna hear all about this. We're gonna have a coaching call around this. We're gonna have a town hall.
• 2:46
  We're going to give you guys a playbook and some other content to help build up your marriages and your romantic partnerships. But the thing that's really different about, one of the reasons why this is a theme we really want to emphasize for family teams is family teams see marriage quite a bit differently than the world. So the way that the world, and I would say even...
• 3:08
  The Christian world really sees marriage as primarily a romantic kind of love-based relationship. And this is why divorce is so high. In the past, it was a partnership in that they were coming together to cement their covenant in order to build something that was going to last for generations. One of the things that we write about in the playbook is a marriage is a pact two people make to spend 50 years trying to build the kind of family that can last a thousand generations. Yeah.
• 3:36
  That was the project. We're going to build a multi-generational family. We're going to be fruitful, multiply, feel, so do, and rule. And we're not going to be a part of all of that. You know, we're not going to do all of that, but we're going to develop the kind of multi-generational family that does all five of those things. And that project was what...
• 3:55
  Family was. That's what marriage was all about creating. And it's got lots of other elements. There's a way that God wants that to happen. He wants the center of that project to not be primarily a business partnership, but a romantic partnership. He wants to be centered on the love relationship between the husband and the wife. And so these two elements really dynamically work together. The love between the husband and the wife and the things they're building. The partnership, the fruit that's coming from this partnership.
• 4:25
  And so weaving those two things together is what makes kind of this unbreakable bond that makes a marriage strong and it creates maximum meaning while you go about building the things that God has called you to build as a couple. So how do you do that? Well, we've got three different...
• 4:40
  plays in the playbook. We're going to kind of walk through and give you guys a taste of each of these. The first play is found your marriage on the bedrock of covenant. The second is to establish and level up your date nights. And the third is to establish and level up a weekly co-founders meeting where we actually talk about the work that's being done in the partnership. So I wanted to talk, first of all, and April, get your thoughts about this. Okay. So the first thing you have to do to establish a romantic partnership is you've got to found your marriage on the bedrock of covenant. Okay.
• 5:07
  And this word covenant is super important to God. It's a huge theme in the Bible. God's whole relationship with us is really envisioned through the making of commitments about a future that's unknown. And so God makes covenants with people throughout the Old Testament, and he wants us to make these covenants. And in one sense, making a covenant is kind of crazy, right? You're promising to do things about a future that you don't know.
• 5:34
  You're promising to say that no matter what, unconditionally, I'm going to stay faithful to you and to this covenant for life. And so this is the thing that brings into existence a new family or a new branch of the family. So there are different ways in which you have to have an incredibly deep theology of covenant in order to.
• 5:54
  maintain a relationship that's going to go through and come out the other end of all the different challenges that a romantic partnership that a marriage is going to face. And so we want to talk to you guys about some of the real elements of that. The first one here, for example, is believe that the covenant you made is with God and not just one another. This is something that Jesus highlights in Matthew 19, where he says what God has brought together
• 6:17
  This belief is why in the church, there's really this new idea that marriages are really undissolvable. You can't end a marriage because it's not a promise that you're making to each other alone. You've also promised something to God. And so you can let each other out of that contract, but...
• 6:36
  Only God alone can let you out of that covenant. That's why Jesus then ends his statement. What God has brought together, let man not separate. So man needs to be really careful not to monkey with a covenant that God himself is established. And so that's that.
• 6:51
  is so helpful. And I know that that's really difficult for people who are struggling in a marriage that is got, you know, lots and lots of challenges, but it's, it's the thing that really causes families to come into existence and not just temporary romantic relationships. It's the belief that God is the one overseeing this covenant. So that's one of the, of the many things that we kind of walk through in the playbook. I wanted April, you to pick up one more of these. What's, what's one of these elements that stood out to you and has been meaningful?
• 7:21
  Yeah, I think envisioning your future grandchildren and great-grandchildren as the fruit of the covenant, I think that has been really something I've grown in. I don't think I entered our covenant really thinking that way yet.
• 7:39
  I was kind of experiencing the fruit of that on both sides of my family. You know, my parents, my grandparents on both sides, they all had been married for 50 plus years when they died. So there was like, you know, I come from lying on both sides of committed marriages. So I think I intrinsically valued that. And I was a valued grandchild. I was a valued daughter. But I didn't really, in my own sense,
• 8:08
  immaturity in life, I hadn't really started to think that way yet. And so I remember the first time I really, really, really had to practically apply this was I had an elective surgery to decide if I was going to do something. And this surgery would help me very much long-term. And I knew that the only reason I would do this is so that I could get on the floor and play with my grandkids.
• 8:33
  down the road. And this was way before any of our kids were married. Our kids were still pretty young, actually. And I decided to go ahead and do this thing that would be super hard to go through. But knowing that on the other side of it, I would be more flexible and physically capable
• 8:51
  And I could have just lived the rest of my life without that surgery, but I think it would have hindered me in some ways. And so I remember that just being like, oh, I am doing this for my grandchildren. And then it just kind of shifted my thinking. So there's all these other things like how I eat.
• 9:09
  how I exercise, things like that really started shifting with like, oh, I'm not just doing this because that's what you should do as like a person to be like a good person or healthier, responsible. But I want to do this for my grandkids. And wow, what if I get to meet
• 9:24
  a great grandkid or two. That would be really awesome. So I think it just can really shift your mentality about the covenant when you can understand why the covenant matters and why you don't want to short circuit that covenant by doing something selfish or stupid, being able to really grasp onto the depth and the meaning of the covenant so that your grandkids and your great grandchildren, they're implicated in this. Right. Yeah.
• 9:51
  design your family tree or draw out your family tree and see how many broken branches there are and how, like, does it look like a tree or does it look like a bush or, you know, and like, we don't want our kids to have to go through that kind of confusion. So I think that allowing that to be part of your motivation and getting a long-term perspective, because I think, especially in America these days, we're very like immediate gratification. So it's hard to think about like,
• 10:17
  grandkids I haven't even met. My kids aren't even married yet. Like that's way down the road. But being able to have just an inkling of a vision for that has been really helpful for my mindset. Yeah. I think you really see this in these big events like a wedding. Have you guys ever been to a wedding where there's been a lot of divorce in the family
• 10:38
  you know, the wedding is super awkward. Everyone's like, the pictures are really like, you know, who's walking? It's like, there's just a thousand questions that just everyone is like dancing on eggshells and just like, how do we, how do we get out? You know, this happens in funerals too, really sadly. Like when there's lots of divorce, people haven't seen each other. There's lots of rifts. You can imagine in those really awkward family events, people really resist them. And what that really says to me is nobody's trying to,
• 11:08
  in a situation like that to say, let's all get together with the grandchildren and the great grandchildren. And like, no, everyone's kind of avoiding that, right? Everyone's like, no, that's where pain and brokenness and awkwardness is. We're trying to do that as little as possible. Um, it's like night and day different when the covenant's kept, uh,
• 11:24
  So when the covenant gets kept, it's like, you can't wait for those events. Let's do more of those events. Let's do more reunions, more Shabbat dinners, more festivals, more multi-generational family meals. Like let's get the family together more often because there's so much life. There's so much excitement. The cousins are together. Everyone's like unified. And that's the power of the covenant. The covenant is supposed to generate this thing. It gets stronger and stronger and bigger and bigger. But when there's brokenness, it gets more and more awkward, more and more broken, more and more fragile. Yeah.
• 11:50
  And people get more and more isolated until they're living alone. And so the trajectories get really dramatic when you go into the future. And we're just talking about kind of your lifetime, you know, and you can think about as it goes past your lifetime, what are you leaving behind as a legacy? Is it a collective family that's really unified and excited to be together? And of course, you guys, none of this I'm saying because I'm trying to make people feel bad that have gone through divorce. We know that's a real thing and that God can redeem that.
• 12:17
  But we really aim so much of this at, you know, those of you guys who are married and are trying to figure out why would we create a marriage that would last a lifetime? How are we going to get through those really tough, you know, those tough years when there's lots of temptation to like break the covenant? And I think that one of the things that we need to have is an awareness of how in a multi-generational family and a family team.
• 12:42
  Like what a blessing it is to give to your children and grandchildren, a unified family line. And so fight for that, you know, really, really work hard to bring that and protect that and preserve that. So founding your marriage on the bedrock of covenant. The second one is really practical, you know, and you've probably heard lots and lots of people talk about the importance of a date night.
• 13:02
  And it is really important that you are finding ways to experience your relationship with each other. And so this is just one tool, but it's a tool that we found really valuable and that we practice every week. And so Saturday night, April and I go off on a date night and we've been doing that for many, many years. And it's been a really important part of our weekly rhythm and our relationship. And so if you guys want to get some of our best tips, so, and this is from us and friends of ours as well,
• 13:32
  who we've talked to about like, what are the things that really, really have helped you the most in date night? So we've got a free download. If you guys want to go to familyteams.com slash date, and we're going to send you guys the seven tips for leveling up your date night. So I wanted April to just pick one of these seven and we'll kind of talk about it. So which one of these has been helpful for us, you think? I think side-by-side and face-to-face has been helpful.
• 14:01
  I think that it's been, I guess I would say seasonally helpful. Like sometimes this is just where we're at. So I feel like where this has been helpful. So what this is, first of all, side by side, then face to face is
• 14:14
  doing your date night in such a way where the first thing you do, you're side by side. So maybe you're going for a drive or you're going for a walk or you're sitting on a bench and like, and then your face to face is maybe then going out to dinner or something like that. And this has really helped me because it's oftentimes hard to transition from what I was doing in the day, or even like the condition of my own heart is not necessarily like,
• 14:43
  ready for date night or like ready to be vulnerable. Maybe I'm still like, I'm upset about something that I didn't realize I was upset about. And it's helpful for me to start the date night by just like not feeling like confrontative or that I have to like, if, oh, this is our one chance to have a date night. And if it doesn't go super well, then I'm going to ruin it. I'm going to be really upset with myself and I'm going to start a fight. I feel myself starting a fight or something like that. Just like,
• 15:11
  getting annoyed and then so i feel like there's something about just being able to sit and not look at each other that i think for both of us that this has really helped with just kind of getting our stuff off our chest and getting off into the right place and then we can transition into the place of like being able to enjoy each other and um
• 15:34
  Have a conversation about something that's different. And sometimes it's not even talking. Just like being together is just a really nice change of pace. Yeah, 100%. And I would say this is especially important for the guy in the relationship. Oftentimes guys don't even know that they need this. I did not know that I needed this. But...
• 15:54
  You know, if you look at girls getting together, there are some women who get together and it's just like girl time and they're holding each other's hands and are staring into each other's eyes and talking about the deepest things they're thinking about. And they just are so connected and immediately intimate. I don't know if you guys noticed, there are no guys who do that hardly at all. Like when we guys get together,
• 16:11
  You know, we're like at a bar facing something else. You know, we're all staring at a football game. We're all staring at a fire. There's a famous kind of like if we guys get together, they're never like face to face. They're always at an angle, like even when they'll move their chairs. So they're not facing each other oftentimes when they're even having lunch or coffee.
• 16:29
  I find myself doing that all the time. I'm like, I just, I, I want to get to the place where we're just face to face, but it's really hard to do that right away. Like, and I think that a lot of it is just like, I'm trying to process, like you just said, April, like what's going on in my own heart. And sometimes I don't know. And so I just need time.
• 16:46
  let's say for us to go for a drive or go for a walk. And then by the time, you know, we're kind of through that sort of phase of the date, then we can go and like, we can be face to face and talk and like, you know, share those things. But yeah, there needs to be a little bit of an easing in to the date night. And so a lot of what we're trying to do, you guys is in these tips is like, it's really important to find ways that, you know, tools or practices can,
• 17:09
  that will help you do what is the goal of a date night, which is to, you know, have an intimate connection, to get to a place where you really are, like, sharing from your heart with each other. And that, you know, that's a process, that's a dance that every marriage has. And if there are things that, you know, you're frustrated with each other, you're annoyed with each other, there's just things you need to process and kind of get out of the way before, you just know that, like, oh, there's just too much, you know, noise, there's too much,
• 17:37
  on undiscussed, you know, accounts that we need to like shorten and, and resolve. They'll, we've got to, you got to have a way to do that. That doesn't sort of blow up the entire date night. Right. So you don't get to this nice restaurant or something and you're sitting there face to face and then it's like, okay, now I got this really annoying thing that I have to say. And then, you know, wow, that can be really rough. So, um, I think it's a really helpful practice.
• 17:58
  So that's one of these seven tips. So again, if you want to jump and grab that, that's a free download. If you guys want to go to familyteams.com slash date and grab that, then head over there and grab those seven ways to level up your date night. Okay, the last part of the playbook, and we go into lots of detail on this one, is that this is a romantic partnership. In other words, the first thing was the covenant. So you need to know what kind of relationship that you're really building. This is a covenantal relationship and there's ways in which you need to build that up. So that's the context or the soil of...
• 18:28
  of the relationship. But there's really two elements of the relationship. It's romance and partnership. Romance, we talked about with date night. That's a tool we're going to go deep into this month. But on the partnership side, you also need to learn how to like have a business meeting for lack of a better word. And a lot of people don't know how to have a business meeting. We're calling that a co-founders meeting because you guys are both founding this branch of the family or this new family line.
• 18:49
  And that requires a partnership where you guys actually do fruitful things together. Obviously part of that, just raising a family, but it can get really complex with like your, your stewarding assets. You might even be building a business. You're educating children. There's a lot of businessy things that you got to discuss. You know, you got a house to like maintain and you know, there's budgets and like all those fun things that April loves that I love. Yeah.
• 19:12
  So there's a place and time for that where we got to like talk about these things. So yeah, what's one of the things that we're going to work through this month on how to level up our co-founders meeting? Well, the one that has meant a lot to me is engage your business brain.
• 19:29
  So I think there are a lot of times like in a typical schedule might be like the husband being gone at work all day and then coming home in time for dinner. And then after dinner is like baths and bedtime for the kids and then comes post bedtime at like 8, 830 at night. And for me.
• 19:49
  That was not a good time to start talking about the things that we needed to talk about in order to make decisions. Either I was totally exhausted or feeling like I wanted to rather connect with my husband rather than talk about...
• 20:03
  you know, who we're going to be hosting next week for Shabbat dinner or something like that. You know, so it was very hard to find a time where we had energy and even like the desire to have these conversations. But then Jeremy would go off to work the next day. And then there I am, like, I still have that question that we didn't answer. And I still haven't gotten back to this person about this thing. And so I still don't know. And, you know, I could maybe send a quick email to
• 20:30
  him. This was before there was a lot of texting going on, but I could have a quick communication with him to answer one simple question. But it kind of creates this survival mode where you're just like quickly answering one problem as it crops up at a time. And I think it's important that at some point in your marriage and the life of your family, you're going to transition from survival mode into thriving. And
• 20:56
  I think it kind of goes up and down throughout, depending on what's going on in your life. But as you transition to thriving, what oftentimes is simultaneously happening is this intentionality that comes with thriving. So you get like one extra ounce of bandwidth and it's like,
• 21:13
  okay, I'm going to think about next week. I have been thinking about today and then tomorrow, but what about next week? And so with that comes like, oh, we were, you know, I think it's been a while since we handled that HVAC problem, or we've been putting off this one roof repair, or we need to get the car fixed in this one way, or we've been putting off making the decision if we should upgrade our car. Like all of these things that like...
• 21:38
  feel annoying to talk about, but you have to talk about them. Like Jeremy said, like choices about your children's education, things you're noticing about your kids' learning styles, hosting possibilities. What kinds of things are we going to be hosting this week or this month? And then therefore backing it up and saying, okay, well then what are we going to serve and who's going to cook and how are we going to...
• 21:58
  clean up and like all these things are ways that help your family become more productive for the kingdom more you're able to pull things off better and I just want to encourage you guys for this side of it because if you're if you're someone who kind of resists schedules or resists any kind of like planning this might sound hard for you to be like oh I don't want to the one time I have with my husband I don't want to or my wife I don't want to like
• 22:25
  be talking about businessy things. I think it really is super helpful for a long-term. Like you get reps at this and then you can pull bigger and bigger things off. You can have more and more, you know, you're running a tighter and tighter ship. You can enfold more people into your family. You're able to represent the gospel better because you're not just like barely staying above water. So for us, what ended up happening was finding a time where I told Jeremy at one point, I was like,
• 22:54
  I need some time where your brain is still awake and active and I can get the benefit of that. I need your business brain. And so that's when he realized like, oh, wow, I give a lot of my business mindset to the business and not to my family. And he started to kind of transition into that. So we realized that we just needed an hour, hour and a half a week.
• 23:16
  So we set up a time in our rhythm. I set up a babysitter for that day to get a bunch of stuff done. And one of the things was our business meeting. So we would have our business meeting at a Starbucks or something for an hour. He would be able to get away from work for an hour. And then I would stay and work on all the things we had just talked about because I knew as soon as I got home, I wouldn't be able to focus anymore. So I would make the phone calls or send the emails, the invites.
• 23:40
  or order the food or whatever the thing was, I would take some time to kind of implement the things we just talked about in our meeting. And it really helped us kind of catch up and start to have a flow. But I did need his like morning brain or his like business brain. Yeah, there's some guys I'm sure that can come home and they've got all that energy still. Yeah.
• 24:01
  But for me, yeah, that's like the worst time to possibly bring up things that are going to be hard for me to talk through logistics. But I know another season you came in to, when I was a CEO of a company, you came in during lunch and, you know, once a week and we would like, literally we had whiteboards and I was just going from meeting to meeting to meeting all of a sudden, you know, and then like you had an agenda planned and it felt so natural for me to go from solving all these problems and kind of working to just working on our family. And that was super helpful for me and not to like get hit with that in the morning. Yeah.
• 24:31
  We've had to do this. I know some families do this on Sundays. You know, that's kind of like their maybe time of the week where they can really do businessy stuff. Other families or Saturday or whatever, you know, if you have a day of rest on Sunday, but we tend to work half days on Sundays. It's just really about finding a time that where you have this energy. And I think one of the things you have to be really careful of in this is not to think sometimes people have very short fuses for businessy stuff because they have an expectation. Yeah.
• 24:56
  Like a lot of times anger, frustration comes from violated expectations. And a lot of people have this expectation that family shouldn't require any planning. Family shouldn't require any kind of this kind of activity. And this is part of what we're constantly trying to express to people. This is a very modern situation.
• 25:13
  way of thinking about family. The word economics actually came from the word oikos, oikosnomics, which is the word for household. This was a family thing. Families were economic entities that had a lot of businessy things to talk about. And we still are. I know that as much as the world and kind of the current modern kind of capitalistic idea that families are only consuming units and they don't produce anything. Well, one of the reasons why we don't produce anything is we never plan to produce anything.
• 25:41
  Now, hopefully you're going to produce children and you're going to disciple those children. But, you know, if God wants you to do ministry in and through your family, if God wants you to do economically productive activity in and through your family, you're going to need to be good at this. So anyway, we'd love to kind of help you guys for how to run a really successful, virtually prep free business meeting or co-founders meeting that you guys are working on together.
• 26:05
  So that's our goal this month, just weaving together all of these things, right? Weaving together the romantic side of the relationship. We don't want to leave that behind. We want that to get stronger and stronger. But we also want to talk about what are the things that we're doing to actually make the partnership side of the relationship thrive and function so that your family is progressing. And this is actually a fun and exciting part. So I'm really curious what your questions are. So we're going to have a couple. We're going to interview next week.
• 26:35
  through this topic from the perspective of Rhett and Ange Barber, who've been friends of ours for over 20 years. They're an amazing couple that have figured out how to do this. They've started businesses. They've raised such a successful family. And they've really thought about how to, like, increase the romantic side of the relationship. So they're going to bring their whole toolbox together
• 26:52
  to next week's podcast. So stay tuned for that. And then they're going to be our community coaches for the Accelerator this month. So the month of March is coming up. So we want you guys to jump in there. And if you have questions about how to level update nights, if you have questions about how to like...
• 27:08
  pull off this co-founders meeting, go to familyteams.com, click on the accelerator, join us for this month or join us for this year. And you'll get, you know, this for every month, we're going to have a different theme, but this is the theme that we're going to be focusing on for this month. So I'm excited for you guys to jump in there and join us. And like I said, if you just want to get the free download, just go to familyteams.com slash date and go grab that.
• 27:31
  and see the whole list of tips we have for date night. And yeah, we're excited to help you guys figure this out. This is, again, different for Family Team than oftentimes the way that other families function. So April, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.