Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Solomon showed his love for the Lord by walking according to the instructions given him by his father David, except that he offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places.
The king went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices, for that was the most important high place, and Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar.

• 1 Kings 3:3-4

Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honored his name.
“On the day when I act,” says the Lord Almighty, “they will be my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as a father has compassion and spares his son who serves him. And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.

• Malachi 3:16-18

(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

• Acts 17:21

In my Tuesday afternoon posts, I have been writing a biography of my wife.  She had said that I should not do that for she was not that special, but she was special to me.  And by the comments, it seems others have shared that sentiment, wanting me to keep the chapters of her biography coming.

But as I started talking about our dating, the subject of talking came up.  As I wrote more, I wrote more about our talking.  Since we had not known anything about each other prior to dating, and we had no shared experiences, we could have talked for a long time on what it was like to grow up in our environment.  When you marry the girl next door, you already know that stuff, but we didn’t.

But we also talked about our values, our beliefs, and the old question about being in a burning house and what item would you risk getting singed to get.  You know, the most important thing.  It’s odd that Solomon worshipped at a high place that was the most important high place, but the most important thing was to not worship on the high places.  A lot of our discussions were on such topics.

Years later, my wife read an article that said that the average married couple in the United States had twenty minutes of meaningful conversation each week.  On Oprah’s website, she suggests twenty minutes each day – meaningful topics, excluding work, weather, the children, etc.

But thinking of twenty minutes of meaningful conversation, something we kept up most of our married life, we would do more than that on a bad day.  The last few years, my wife spent most of her time watching television shows she had already seen before.  The conversations were still there and they might make the casual listener think they had walked into a Sunday school class.  Taking a deep dive into Scripture and applying it to our lives was meaningful, otherwise, my wife’s mental faculties had little time for anything else until the phone rang and a sister or our son sparked her mind into action.

But in our good years, we might average over an hour every day.  With the average less than twenty minutes in a week, my wife turned to me and asked, “With us bursting the curve on this average, how many marriages in the USA are on the rocks because we break the curve?”

I told her a whole lot of them.  She said that she was disappointed.  She wanted my engineer mind to give a number.  So I suggested that our daily average conversation, of meaningful topics, was an hour.  It was probably more, but this was just for giggles.  That meant we talked for 21 twenty-minute time spans in a week, instead of one twenty-minute stretch.  Thus, if we looked at the far extreme, and couples did no meaningful talking in a week, there would have to be twenty mute couples in the USA so that the average with our conversations included to be twenty minutes per person.  Now if the worst couple talked for at least five minutes, that complicates it a little bit, but it would be even more.

She said, “Wow!  We should be ashamed of ourselves!  All those marriages ending in divorce, just so we can talk longer.”  She then went back to figuring our what we would have for supper.

But then in the latest biography post, I mentioned that we planned our wedding in six weeks while most people these days take more than a year.

First, I considered her a flight risk, and I had good reason to do so.  Any more time, and she would have bolted for less green pastures.

But it dawned on me that the modern concept of the year-long engagement, or longer, was spent on a lavish and expensive wedding.  There was no time for talking, there were too many things to plan.

So as more and more marriages fail, do we increase the wedding cost and planning time?  Or do we cut that planning time down to a few weeks, pay the bill out of your cash on hand (which she did on a surgical tech’s salary with no help from mother and father), and spend the rest of that year talking to each other, talking about those most important things, especially about God, His kingdom, and how He would want us to live our lives?

I don’t know.  Maybe we were just one of those outliers that the statistician ignores and doesn’t even include in the statistics.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.