Figuring your Priorities

Proverbs 27:18a: “Take care of a fig tree and you will have figs to eat.”

It’s pretty simple really, if you want to have figs to eat, you have to take care of the fig tree. It helps to plant a fig tree to start with. Put it in good soil and water and feed it with good fertilizer. Keep the bugs and birds off it. Check on it daily to see if it needs anything more. If you just plant it and leave it alone, you are unlikely to ever taste any figs off your tree. It’s a deceptively simple concept… if you look after something, it produces what it should produce. This is so simple, in fact, that sadly, most of us fail to apply it.

I don’t know why any of you got married, but I got married because I wanted a companion, a friend, someone I could trust implicitly and share the good and bad things in life. I can’t just plant the tree and walk away, however – my marriage needs constant tending, checking and nurturing if I am to get out of it the fruit that I want. It’s the same principle with raising my children. I want them to become capable adults with solid, God-honoring characters. But if I just produce children and don’t care for them, I will not see that fruit.

Some of you will read this and recognize that your marriage and children are getting away from you. That somehow you forgot to care for them as much as you should have and you are struggling to see any figs on their branches. How did that happen? I don’t know your particular circumstances, but I’m going to take a wild guess and say that somewhere along the way, you got distracted. You stopped making the care of your marriage and family a priority and you made the choice to become occupied with other things…

We know how this works in the military. When we plan an operation we identify our mission, intent and end state. That is, we decide what we want to have achieved by the end of the operation. We then determine the tasks we must achieve and we prioritize them – what contributes most comes first. Knowing what we must do in order to end up where we want to be provides the basis for all our decisions (our choices) as we plan and execute the operation. Put simply, if we have to make a choice between doing something that helps us achieve our mission, or something that does not contribute to achieving the mission, it should be a no-brainer. We do what contributes to the mission.

The problem is that sometimes we are tempted to do the other thing because it looks more fun, isn’t as uncomfortable, offers an opportunity for heroism or fame, or we hope it will be quicker. In land operations we call this ‘chasing ground’. Being tempted to push onto just one more hill at the risk of moving beyond our fire support, or going beyond the range of our logistics chain. What looks good right now often turns into disaster as we get cut off and become exposed to unchallenged enemy fire. That is the danger of losing sight of our mission priorities – we fail to achieve our mission.

We are the same in life. We often start out with an idea of what we want out of our marriage and family. But it is so easy to lose sight of our priorities and become distracted by things that do not contribute to a healthy home life. We need to re-examine those priorities from time-to-time to check that we know what we need to do to produce the outcomes (the figs) that we want. Then we need to commit to doing those things ahead of other (sometimes) more tempting options.

This can be a little tricky when we are deployed for long periods of time, but it is often then that we must be more aware of, and committed to, the priority tasks that will strengthen our marriages and keep our children on track. It will take some extra effort in communicating through calls, emails or even letters! It will take some commitment to using what time you do get together (before, during and after deployments) to best effect, sometimes giving up your own interests for a time. Distance doesn’t reduce the need to care for your family, it just requires some innovation. Ask the Holy Spirit to examine your heart and show you if, or where, you may have strayed from the priorities that you should be maintaining. Ask Him to help you care for your marriage and family in a way that produces plenty of figs.

Questions to Share:

1. What do you want to achieve in your marriage? How do you want to see your children turn out? Take those answers and determine your mission.

2. What tasks do you need to carry out in order to achieve your mission in your marriage and family?

3. What activities need to be removed because they actively work against the achievement of your mission, or be put on hold because they do not contribute to your mission?

4. What are you going to do about these answers?