My Legacy Marriage

32 years with my Proverbs 31 W0man!

Today we celebrate 32 years of marriage ... and it just keeps getting better!

Throughout this fall season, Laura and I have been teaching the Legacy Marriage material to a group of younger couples.

You may remember my definition of Legacy Marriage:

A Legacy Marriage is a marriage that is a blessing to us now,

and that will be a blessing to others for generations to come.

Our marriage has certainly been a blessing to us. And we sincerely hope that it is a blessing to others!

We will wrap up this session of Legacy Marriage next week. As I was reflecting on our marriage this morning and thinking about what we hope to be teaching and modeling, it occurred to me to ask and answer this question:

What have we learned in 32 years?

1. Marriage is not about me.

2. The main thing is to make your mate the main thing. Focus on meeting her needs. I call this the principle of reciprocity. If I focus on meeting Laura's needs, her response is to meet my needs. And she meets my needs in greater abundance than they would have been met if I had just been focusing on myself. I would like to take credit for this idea, but I can't. It is actually a biblical principle based on Philippians 2: 3-4:

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

3. Its not my job to change my spouse. That's God's job. My job is to be the husband I am supposed to be - regardless of what she does or doesn't do.

4. The greatest inheritance a father can give his children is to love their mother.


Today we celebrate 32 years of Legacy Marriage.

I am looking forward to at least 32 more years!

The Catalytic Mindset

Organizational inertia is the tendency of an organization to continue moving in the same direction until acted upon by some force that changes the direction.

Like individual people, organizations often become creatures of habit - continuing to follow the same routines and the same strategies. The status quo becomes the dominant force and stagnation sets in. Borrowing an image from ecology, when the organization fails to adapt to the changes going on in the environment, the environment will select that organization out.

The catalyst for changing an organization's trajectory is often a leader who recognizes that while changing will be uncomfortable and risky, not changing is an even riskier proposition.

Challenging the status quo in this way is an inherently high-risk position, but this is a differentiating factor between managers and leaders. A manager’s tolerance for risk is often trumped by a dominant need for survival. Leaders, on the other hand, are often temperamentally predisposed to seek risk. They react to the mundane nature of managerial work as to an affliction.

Where managers act to limit choices among potentially acceptable compromise positions, leaders actually seek to develop fresh approaches to existing problems. They seek to open issues to new options that may have never been considered. Leaders challenge long-standing assumptions and raise expectations by casting a vision that appeals to the head and the heart.

Leaders are change agents who change the trajectory of their organizations. They facilitate the adaptive work of their organization and seek to position the organization for long-term sustainability.

Change is always risky because we never have absolute certainty on how it will turn out. Leader's understand this. But they also understand this crucial fact:

If there is cost for changing,

there is a cost -usually an even greater cost - of not changing.