A Weekend to Remember

This past weekend Aaron and I went to Family Life's "A Weekend to Remember." It was in Little Rock at the Peabody. Even though it wasn't really a "vacay," it was such a treat to get away together and have some "us" time. (I'm getting kinda crazy with the quotations ... sorry about that.)
Greg Speck was the main speaker and I really think he is one of the best speakers I have ever heard. He touched on so many things that I needed to hear and delivered it in a way that I was actually receptive to- Not always the easiest thing to do with me. I think one thing that was so great about going to this marriage conference, is that sometimes there are things I want to talk to Aaron about, but I don't want to be that nagging wife, so I just ignore it and wait for a better time. But at the conference whenever you leave a session, you leave with an application project and they always have questions about what you just heard to discuss with your spouse. Ahhh-mazing. It was just really good for us. My sister and brother-in-law went and a couple from our community group, the Friedmanns and we all really really liked it. I'm still on information overload. I was seriously worn out by the end. But it was all so good, I'm just still trying to process everything I heard.By Sunday we were all kinda getting antsy, but still thinking it was a great weekend.

Here are some of my favorite "nuggets" from the conference ...
~ "Difficulties do not mean something is wrong with your marriage. Your response to difficulties will either drive you apart or bind you together."
~ My favorite thing from the whole weekend was this. It was seriously revolutionary to me:
"Always respond to EMOTION with EMOTION and FACT with FACT." He gave an illustration like this ... "If your husband looks at you and tells you, "honey, we aren't going to be able to spend $5000.00 on new living room furniture right now." and you have an emotional breakdown, sobbing "you don't love me." That's responding with emotion to fact ...I seriously busted out laughing ... GUILTY of that on so many occasions. I thought that was such good advice.
~ "The point in an argument is not to agree, but to understand."
~2 Things I want to work on in communication is "focus on what is being said, not the way it is being said." and to "think before I speak."
~ "If we don't purposefully find time to connect, we will accidentally drift into isolation."
~ Other couples fight too ... there are lots of times I think we're the only ones.
~ The idea of "unconditional respect," I had always just thought about unconditional love ... this idea of unconditional respect is much harder, but obviously of equal significance.
~ We talked about the word "submit" in our woman to woman session. She talked about how the word submit is also a military term having to do with two officials of equal rank, equal experience, same gender ... equal in every way. But one will submit to the other for the sake of the mission. I thought that was really really good.

We really had a great time and I just really enjoyed getting out of the house for a couple days with Aaron. It made me realize that it needs to be more of a priority. Today I went to a talk that Bill and Ann Parkinson gave at our church. They were talking about raising their kiddos and such. They talked about how there are 2 kinds of couples: Ones that made their marriage the priority and ones that made the kids the priority. It is so easy to let your lives just focus on the kids ... but we really want to be better about that!

I would highly recommend the conference ... for more info check out familylife.com/weekend and the main speaker has a website too gregspeck.com.
I know Family Life has the conferences all over. I think it would be fun to go to one in a fun city where you go to the conference for the first couple days and then stay and do other fun things for a few days too! :)

That's my plug ...