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.