Setting Your Sail For The Coming Year

Setting Your Sail for the Coming Year

Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

Proverbs 3:5-6

You’re driving to a new location when the following takes place:

“Does this seem right to you?” she asks.

“I’m not sure, but let’s see what’s up the road a bit,” he replies.

“Why don’t we ask for directions,” she urges.

That’s when you know you have arrived at one of those prototypical marriage moments. And that’s when your husband begins to drive faster, right? “I know where I’m going,” he will say, as if he’s suddenly tuned into an internal gyroscope that only he can read.

We all know an experience like this. And more than likely we will repeat it many times. But when it comes to setting out on the metaphorical journey of marriage each year, we can’t afford to wander without a clear sense of direction. So we dedicate this first meditation to helping you set your sail for the coming year.

What does it mean to set your sail? It means being proactive about where you’d like to be as a couple twelve months from now. Rather than simply reacting to outside forces, it means taking charge and sitting in the driver’s seat. Far too many couples ride like passengers on a bumpy bus, watching the scenery flash by their window as life passes by.

We’ll be honest. Setting your sail for the coming year is not easy. It requires initiative. It will ask that you take responsibility for the condition of your marriage. It will then demand that you make the sacrifices to make your dreams a reality. In other words, the kind of marriage you want will be forged by your efforts. You will never achieve your ideal marriage as a mere passenger; you and your spouse must have a hand on the wheel. It is as George Bernard Shaw concluded, in his play Man and Superman: “Hell is to drift, heaven is to steer.”

Some couples look for any reason to avoid charting their courses; they go through life piling one excuse on top of another for the state of their marriage: fate, in-laws, lack of money, temperament, the government, or even their church. Setting your sail does away with the blame game and puts an end to excuses. It gives you the opportunity to make your marriage everything you want it to be.

Take a moment here at the beginning of a new year to talk with each other about where you want your marriage to be in twelve months. Be as concrete as you can: What awaits your relationship out on the horizon in a year’s time, and what can you do to ensure that you will get to the destination you desire?

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry