Sometimes work necessarily takes over most every other activity in my life. Such has been the case over the last two weeks.
I led a team pulling together a large, complex price proposal for one of my company’s main products. The effort was extremely grueling: administrative leg-work, meetings, a huge punch-list of issues, language and cultural barriers, and not enough time. That effort has wound down now, although I still have monitoring and support functions this week.
Nevertheless, I proudly say I maintained some home life during this time. In fact, on Friday I kept a promise to my wife to keep dinner plans we had with friends. Keeping that promise was not at all easy. Before dinner, I resolved a very difficult and highly stressful issue. Then I got my wife and went to our friends’ home, and later I dropped the wife off at our place and I returned to the office. I worked from 10:00 pm and made it to bed by 2:00 am.
The next morning, my wife and I went to a Baptist church, where we attended a marriage conference. It was led by a husband and wife speaking team (both PhDs), giving advice on how to strengthen a marriage. As advertised, the advice was heavily inflected with Christian teaching and biblical passages. I’ll tell you about my conference experiences in a separate post.
I feel great today about having been able to juggle work, family, and marriage. My wife is very understanding and would have been cool if I couldn’t make the dinner or the conference–or both. But I like being married to my wife and I want to honor commitments to her. She’s more important to me than my job. My kids are more important, too. That’s how I feel, and my behavior needs to reflect it. So it was important to me to do both the dinner and the conference.
So, stay tuned for that post on the conference. For fun, I wonder if y’all can guess which biblical verses one is most likely to hear at a Christian marriage conference.
