Go Have Fun

The advice that fixed more in two weeks than years of trying harder.

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago, a coach I’d just started working with told me to stop.

Not stop working on my marriage. Stop working on my marriage. Quit the serious talks for a while. Quit trying to grow, trying to fix, trying to improve. Just go have fun with my wife.

Ericha has been telling me the same thing for years. Apparently I just needed to hear it from someone whose role isn’t loving me through my blind spots.

So we did.

I was a bit thrown off at first about that advice. I’m a get down to business guy. I don’t like icebreakers or the team building exercises. I’ve run them, I know they work, and something in me still can’t stand them, especially when they’re forced. So being told to stop working on my marriage and just go have fun (what I heard was go play) felt almost irresponsible. Like skipping the important part. Or like go be kids. The achiever in me wanted to push back.

I rolled with it anyway because deep down I knew it was good advice and something I needed to hear.

Over the next ten days, Ericha and I went on four dates. A couples’ date in the middle of them. Family hangouts stacked throughout as well. And I’m telling you, we had all the fun.

In the process of having all the fun, something we’d both been holding without knowing it let go. It can only be attributed to the Holy Spirit because the shift happened quick and both of us are still processing through it.

Eighteen Years of Building

Here’s something I realized this past week I had never really thought much about.

Ericha and I only dated four months before we got engaged. Married six months after that. Welcomed our first kid a year and a half later. We have barely come up for air since.

Eighteen years of building. Six kids. A hybrid academy we helped start. Careers, moves, ministry, a business, all of it. We became world-class teammates. We know how to divide, conquer, cover, and carry with the best of them.

What we forgot, somewhere in all that building, was how to just enjoy each other. Not just partner with each other or coordinate with each other. Enjoy one another.

We didn’t stop loving each other. We stopped playing.

And I think a lot of good, faithful, hardworking marriages die a slow version of that death. Not from a lack of love. From a lack of delight.

What the Fun Actually Did

Here’s what surprised me, and it’s the part I can’t stop thinking about and pumps me up as the party is just getting started.

The fun didn’t just make us happier. It started aligning us. And once we got more aligned, some of the harder conversations got easier.

I want to be clear, because I know how this sounds. Having fun didn’t mean we skipped the serious conversations. We still had them and are having them. We’re still navigating parenting decisions and the normal stuff every marriage has to work through. The fun isn’t replacing the work.

The fun is making the work land in ways it hasn’t in the past.

Think about any team you’ve been on. When a team actually likes each other, when there are real bonds and shared memories and people who’d go to the mat for one another, that team performs. Watch the World Cup right now and you can see it. The teams that look like they love each other, love their country, love the thing they’re doing together, they play at a different level. It’s true in business. It’s true in sports. It’s true on every team that’s ever accomplished anything hard.

It is most true in a marriage.

I’ve always known that down deep, and still resisted it, because the relationship building always felt like the soft part, the sort of optional part, the part you do if there’s time left over after the real work. I had it backwards. The relationship isn’t the thing you get to after the work. It’s the ground the work stands on.

When Ericha and I are aligned, when we’re actually enjoying each other and rowing the same direction, the hard conversations go somewhere. When we’re not, the same conversations just spin. Same words. Same issues. Completely different outcome, depending entirely on whether we were a team first.

The Smoke and the Fire

There’s a second thing the alignment did, and it’s almost sneaky.

The small stuff went quiet.

The little daily conflicts in a marriage are almost never about the little daily things. They’re smoke. When the big thing is off, when you’re not aligned, when you’ve stopped delighting in each other, every small thing becomes the place the tension leaks out. You fix one and another shows up, because you were never actually fighting about the dishes.

Get the big thing right, and most of the small things just dissolve. Not because you solved them. Because they were never the real fire.

The Part I Almost Missed

I’ve spent a year now writing to you about becoming a saint. About transformation. About the slow work of being made more like Christ.

And I think I quietly believed that work always had to feel like work. Effort. Discipline. The next hard step. The next thing to white-knuckle thorugh.

There’s a lie underneath that, and I think a lot of us believe it: that the serious version of faith is the real one, and the joyful version is the lightweight one. That suffering is spiritually trustworthy and delight is a little suspect. That if it was easy or fun, it probably wasn’t holy.

But becoming like Christ is not just a grind. There’s also the joy part. Part of it is delight. Part of it is a God who invented laughter and marriage and the specific way your spouse looks at you across a table when you finally, finally slow down enough to look back.

Sometimes growth isn’t the next step. Sometimes it’s going deeper in the step you’re already in. Being present in the life you already have. Receiving the gift instead of trying to optimize it.

We Haven’t Arrived

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want this to sound like Ericha and I have it all figured out. We don’t. I’m not writing you from the finish line. I’m writing you from about two weeks into something that surprised us both.

Things weren’t bad before this. That’s almost the point. We both knew, somewhere under the surface, that God had more for us than the good but tired teammate thing we’d settled into. We just had to be willing to loosen our grip and let Him lead us somewhere we hadn’t mapped.

There’s a scene in the old Peter Pan movie where a grown-up Peter has forgotten he was ever Peter Pan at all. Life got too serious for too long, and he lost the part of himself that knew how to play. And then he remembers. And everything changes.

That’s a little of what the last few weeks have felt like. Something got reignited in me, and in her, that I’d practically decided wasn’t available to a guy with this much on his plate. I’m often too serious and not good at having fun. I’ll be the first to admit it. I think I’d quietly stopped believing it was even possible, and I’m not sure I’d ever really asked God for it. I have been now.

Wherever you are reading this, you’re somewhere different than we are. Maybe your marriage is in a harder place than ours has been. Maybe it’s in a great place and you’re just tired. I’m not handing you a formula. I’m telling you what happened when we finally asked God for something bigger and stayed open to an unforseen little answer.

Don’t be afraid to ask Him for big things that line up with His will. And don’t be afraid to do something outside the box to get there.

Pull Into the Driveway

So here’s your permission slip, from the guy who’s all about intentionality and growth:

Go have fun.

If you’ve been white-knuckling your marriage, your faith, your family, working the problem, grinding the growth, trying to improve your way into peace, the next holy thing you do might not be another serious conversation.

It might be a date. It might be laughing until it’s too late to be up. It might be remembering that the God who is forming you also delights in you, and made you to delight too.

I don’t know what’s next for our family. There’s a lot Ericha and I can’t see yet. But I know the order it has to go in. God first. Then the two of us, actually enjoying each other. Everything downstream of that gets lighter. And when those two are off, nothing downstream is heavy enough to fix it.

So by the grace of God, we’re going to keep seeking His will. And we’re going to have all the fun we can while we do it.

I want Ericha so freaking pumped up when she hears the truck coming up the driveway. I want to be stoked about getting home to be with her and the kids instead of wanting to bust a U-turn and head back to the office. For a while, neither of those was true.

They’re becoming true again. Not because we are trying harder.

Because we finally stopped for a minute, were open to trying something a little different, and started letting the Lord work through some fun.

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“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” — Psalm 118:24

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NEXT WEEK: For almost twenty years our family has thrown something we call the Barker Bowl. It’s the kind of tradition that’s helped quietly built our family culture when we weren’t even looking. Why the traditions you keep might matter more than you think.

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