Our lives are meant to function in a specific order, with God being at the top, next being your family, and in last place, anything else that doesn’t fall under the first two categories.

I have said your life is like Mount Everest, and in perfect order, God resides at the top, where no mortal life could possibly live, your family at two-thirds up, and anything else, no matter how important, left at the bottom, the only place it can thrive from the benefits of the valley.

Your relationship with your family is second only to your relationship with God, and your wife being first in the family. In their rightful place, they are two-thirds up the mountain. There are limited resources up there. You have to make special effort to thrive there. There is a limit to the special time and resources we can give to our family. There must be special interaction where we make them feel important and loved. It takes extra effort and focus. I watch my little girl and how focused she gets playing with her little plastic cell phone. She wasn’t born with this special interest. She is a mirror, showing me only what I have first shown her. I make an effort to give her my full attention, not be multi-tasking when I interact with her, not try to talk on my phone while playing with her. She is important to me and loved by me, but she will only feel that when I make our time together sacred.

Alternately, you cannot take your loved ones to the top of the mountain. They cannot occupy that top place in our lives. When I was young, I was prideful that I was a “good person”. I didn’t smoke or drink. And yet, I focused on women from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-nine. They occupied first priority in my life, and I wondered why my relationships wouldn’t last! We cannot take our loved ones up to where there is not enough oxygen and too much pressure. Your wife wants to share in your adventure, not be the adventure. Let her share in your world, not be your world. For a woman, to be a man’s world, to his everything, feels nice at first. The first few months even are euphoric, but they are not built for the top of Everest. It will surely suffocate them. They’re aleady getting pressure from the world about being the all these things, being the center. In perfect order, we lend our wives our strength. We cannot put them as our hope, our dreams, our first priority, and the source of our strength. It’s nonsensical to make the one who needs our strenght the source of our strength. We make our wives the source and the receiver. That’s called a closed circuit. You make your relationship a closed circuit, and you short it. You destroy it.

This doesn’t mean that we spend more time with God than we do with our family, or our work, for that matter. You would have to become a monk. Even a for a proffesional pastor, that is impossible. God doesn’t need our hours. He doesn’t operate on kronos time, sequential time, like we do. He lives in the kyro time. Infinity. Adam and Even just took the bite, David just slew Goliath, and whatever you’re doing right now, it’s all happening at once to Him. 1,000 years is like a day to Him, so our five minutes can be like a day. If we put Him first in our hearts, at the start of our day, giving Him our most, we place Him at the top. We put Him at the top by thinking of Him first in decisions. Instead of talking to our wife or boss first, we go to God first. We make Him our center, and everything else falls into place.

My life has greatly improved since I started to live by a motto I call “Shut Up or Shape Up.” The Word of God says that the tongue has the power of life or death, and those who love it will eat its fruit. I was thinking about that, and I realized that we all love to talk! This means all of us. And if those who love it eat its fruit, we need to be thinking about what fruit our words are producing. Is it good fruit or rotten fruit? The Bible also says that the tongue holds the power of life and death. Frankly, that freaks me out. It freaks me out that we have so much power. I can’t even comprehend that much power, and I hold that power in the words I say. Now whether they are producing life or death- that’s up to me. I can think back on relationships in my life that were altered for good or bad because of things that were spoken.

My parents tried to teach me the power of the tongue because, well, a lot of time I would say not very nice things. There is a verse they made me write every time that went “Let no unwholesome word proceed out of your mouth, but only such a word that gives edification according to the need of the moment that it might give grace to those who hear it.” I can write that even now from memory, I’ve written it so many times. I figure I wrote that more times than days I have lived, and I’m twenty-nine years old. It wasn’t until my twenties that I really understood what that verse meant. I hear that on average a person says 2,000 words a day. When my head hits the pillow at night, I’m certain I’ve met my quota. I’ve probably doubled it. I spend the whole day talking! I communicate a lot – for work, with my family. And although we communicate in the moment many ways, the most powerful by far are the words we speak. That verse, the one I know so well, it says “according to the need of the moment.” Am I taking advantage of every moment I am able to communicate? Not just to stop myself from saying not nice things, but actually use the opportunity to speak life to people?

I credit the fact that I picked up basketball and the fact that I became a good basketball player to one of these moments. My dad and I were shooting hoops outside when I was eleven years old. Like most growing, awkward, eleven-year-old girls who hardly even touch a basketball, I was doing terribly. My dad was giving me a few pointers here and there, and then I did something right. He stopped and said, “Christine, if you keep doing that, you’re going to be a great basketball player.” Those words were powerful. They spoke life into me, and because of that comment, I would go out every day and practice for two hours. I was only eleven years old, and those handful of words from my dad created something that became a huge part of my life. Just as those words held the power of life, I have also been given words that killed. When I was only nine I was singing and someone told me I was terrible and should never sing. Before that, I loved music, loved listening to it and singing along, but after those powerful words, that died in me. I went through a silent period, and even at church I would sing only faintly because I was self-conscious of my voice. That one off-hand comment, and it wasn’t until eight years after that I finally got my voice back. The power of life. The power of death. You choose every time you open your mouth.

It’s true, with children, words are incredibly powerful. You probably have a couple examples of your own, where words changed the course of your life for the better or for the worse. But it is even in the briefest, seemingly insignificant encounters we have every day that we hold this power of life and death. It used to be that when I would run into cranky people at the grocery store or at a restaurant, I would want to tell them they were giving bad customer service. But now, I try to speak something powerful over them. I’ve been challenged with the sheer amount of people I speak to every day to view it as opportunities to actually affect someone’s destiny in a positive way. Even in those few minutes you exchange words with the checker at the grocery store, you’re in a position to change their entire day. I want to be an infectious person. I want to be a person who can completely turn someone’s day around.