Your Family Needs More From You Than Money

Welcome to ClearCast. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman. I'm here with our producer, Martin, and Pastor Dave. ClearCast is a ministry of Clearnote Church in Indianapolis, and today we're going to talk about relationships and laziness. It's common for us to think that laziness is a quote-unquote work sin, and we can think of ways that laziness might affect our relationships, but maybe there's more to it, and maybe God's standard is actually higher. And we're deceiving ourselves. So, Pastor Dave, what is relational laziness? Well, as a man, I can tell you a funny—well, I thought it was funny. My wife didn't think it was quite so funny. That's always how a good story starts. Yeah, I was reading an article to my family, and it was talking about relationship drift, basically. And it was describing— I don't remember the exact phraseology of it all, but basically it said that a good marriage requires proactive effort, and if you don't do anything destructive, but you also don't do anything constructive, the marriage will still deteriorate. Right. That you actually have to do positive, good relational, you have to invest positively for it to be good. Is this where secular people...

reverse engineer the concept of sin. What do you mean? Well, just that like sin will naturally destroy what is not actively maintained. That's what I think of when you say that, but go ahead. Yeah. Well, I remember when we first, so I was reading that to my wife and of course I'm, you know, I did a good job dating. She would say I did a good job dating her, a good job winning her. I was fun. I was exciting. I was going places. Like it was just a big breath of fresh air. Are you boring now? I'm busy now. Okay. I'm busy. I have a lot of responsibilities. And the spontaneity that was really sweet to her in our early years, like spontaneity, there's a lot less discretionary money to be spontaneous now. There's also a lot less time to be spontaneous. And we're not able, I mean, we've got 10 kids. It's pretty hard to be like, hey, let's go on a day trip. You can't exactly say that at 9 o'clock the night before.

And expect that that's not going to have its cost. Right. I remember this idea of relational laziness. I remember someone giving me the picture one time. They said, you know, if you fill up a bathtub with water and you put two boats in it, just like toy boats, you know, and you set them right next to each other and the water is perfectly calm. There's no anything going on. The water is calm. That over time, what will happen is those boats will just drift apart. And of course, that's because there's wind and there's all these... Coriolis effect. Yeah, right. Sure, in the bathtub. But the point that this lady was making was the same that the article was making, which was just that if you're not putting in proactive effort into your relationships, they're going to be deteriorating. And so I think one of the, at least for men, we just aren't, we're not...

There really is a difference between men and women typically in the way that they're wired regarding relationships. And what I find is that men tend to, once the relationship is established, they'll work very hard to establish the relationship. But once it's established and secure, they move on. We move on. Once the marriage is established, we're on to other things. Once the network of... coworkers is established, we moved on. We've just, we go on to other things. It may not be other relationships. It's just other things that we may be more comfortable doing more, um, more enjoyable to us. Um, I don't find that men tend to, um, enjoy just sitting and talking and checking in and how are you doing? Is everything okay? Um, they'll work together. They'll help each other. Um, they'll sort out conflict or disagreements, but And relationally, their needs tend to be much lower than their wives. And so I think part of it is that, you know, I think when God said that it's not good for man to be alone, I think that I don't know how much Adam actually realized that. And we're sort of speculating back in there, but it's like, I don't know that men realize that their relational standards are too low to maintain healthy relationships. Now, it's not true of every man, but generally.

That's the case, is that God gave men wives, put them together, because she has an interest in the relationship, an interest in building it and growing it and tending it. And so I think that's one way men can be lazy. They just get distracted. They get apathetic. I remember a story one time, a friend of mine, he said, you know, he was joking. He had learned. But he said, you know, I told you that when we got married, I told you I loved you. And if that ever changes, I'll let you know. Yeah. And he was saying what an idiot he was because he's saying that's how he thought as a man. And he realized through years of marriage that that is not how his wife thought. And that she was not, that was not sufficient to keep her.

secure, comfortable, engaged in the relationship. And so I think sometimes men just, like I said, we just move on and leave behind things that are really necessary and really essential. And it is often that our work is what replaces. We may work very hard at the things that are important to us. I've often said of lazy people, I said, lazy people are If you get to know them, there will inevitably be something in their life they are not lazy with, that they care about and that they work really hard at. Now, it might be playing video games. Or it might be teaching themselves how to play the bass guitar. Or it might be skateboarding. There will be something that they are not lazy about, that they sacrifice time and energy and money for. It just may not be of all that much value to other people or to society. And so relational laziness is not...

I think really it just boils down to not recognizing the person you're in a relationship with as your neighbor and that you have to have face time with them to build the relationship. So what do you think, what would you say to the man who says, my wife just shouldn't be so needy? What I have said to men who have that objection is, then you should have married a man. Or do you want your wife to be a man? It's not a design flaw. It's a design feature. He who finds a wife finds a good thing. That's what Proverbs says. And if God's given you a wife, then you should presume that most of the things that are important to her are not just terrible, sinful, awful things. That actually she brings different gifts and different priorities. And that together, the two of you are supposed to...

rub up against each other and work out the the priorities of you know i've heard people talk in relationships they say oh well um quality time versus quantity a quantity of time because men always hear yeah oh well you want you want quantity of time and i just don't have time for that anymore and the wife will respond and say no no i just want quality time but here's the thing you can't have quality time without a certain quantity of time right And you'll recognize it when what happens is when couples haven't spent enough quantity of time together, they will get in a fight. This is why people fight on the way to church on Sunday morning or Sunday night once everything's done. As soon as they're like, we're in a car together. We're going on a vacation. It's going to be great. We all held it together while we planned it and organized it and all that kind of stuff. And as soon as they get in the car to drive away, within 30 minutes, they're in a fight. Why are they in a fight?

They haven't spent any time together. Yeah, they've been working. Oh, man, they've been working together. But they've not synced up. And so that's what that fight is. That fight is them relationally getting back on the same page. And so I'm all for saying, we'll get the fight over as quickly as possible so that you can enjoy your vacation or your trip or wherever you're going. But you should also recognize that that fight is an indication that you've been letting some things go. in the normal, in the day-to-day lives. There's a question of, is there any place in which a wife is encroaching too much on her husband's time? Yes, that's possible. And it happens. But that's something that I don't think men should just hide behind and say, well, you just want too much of me. You just want too much of me. You just want too much of me. If you're curious, you could talk to an older man or an older husband and find out,

how much time he spends or what he thinks about how you're spending your time. I remember before I got married, the pastor that did our premarital counseling said to Vanessa and me, or he said to me in Vanessa's hearing, he said, Dave, you're not going to be able to continue to work as a married man the way, you know, the hours that you used to work as a single man. You have a responsibility to be home now. And sadly, I didn't learn that lesson very, you know, when he said it. I've started to learn it now. But I did not learn it right away. But what would you say to the man who hears that and says, but I also have an obligation to provide for my family and I'm doing that. Why isn't that good enough? Provide what? You mean financially? Financially, yeah. Because you have a lot more to provide than just money. Another helpful thing I heard a man say one time about money. It was in premarital counseling. It was not ours, but I just had heard. By the way, he had said this. And he told the guy, he said, when you guys are...

getting ready to get married, you need to decide what your standard of living is ahead of time without respect to how much money you make. Because if you don't, what will happen is your standard of living will always be just in front of the amount of your income right now. And so, of course, that's the top priority is, well, I want to be able to have that. I want to be able to do that. And so you're always going to have a justification for going to work a little more. pushing a little more, picking up that side hustle. Oh, I got this thing. I need to stay up late tonight. No, I'm not be home for dinner tonight. Instead, what I'd say to a man is, you need to be at home with your family most nights. The strange thing should be when you're not home for dinner, not when you are home for dinner. And I'm using dinner as a placeholder. If you work afternoons or something, then it's breakfast. I've got friends that...

work night shift. So dinner is not the thing they're there for, but they're there for the mornings. The fact is they make a priority of being with their family when their family needs them. So would you say, do you think that your relational laziness is kind of a male sin, or do you think women also do it? Or is it the kind of thing where women aren't as naturally tempted to it, so they tend to commit other sins? No, I think that No, I think that both men and women fail relationally. Their failures are different relationally. I would say a man's failure is going to be a failure to love. He's going to be lazy there. He's going to say, well, it's fine. It's okay. She just needs to be content. Look at all the stuff I'm doing. She doesn't know what burdens I'm carrying. And there's some truth in those things. Your wife probably won't ever understand.

the pressures that you feel as a husband and a father. Because she's not a husband and a father. It's also true you won't understand or feel the pressures as intimately as she does about being a wife and a mother. But you're going to be lazy. You're just going to expect her to be okay with that and to assume that you're out doing your best. But it's going to be a lack of love. When you boil it all down, it's just going to be a lack of love for the husband. The wife is going to be lazy with regard to respect. There will be some very...

Men tend to, what I find is women tend to have a lot of, a lot of things that they would appreciate. And they're all kind of about the, there's like a dozen of them that are meaningful. And if you hit a few of them, they can kind of, they can make their peace with you not having done the other ones. Men don't have necessarily a dozen. They tend to have just like two or three. Yeah. But if you don't do those things, it's really bad. Right. Because there's not anything else to fill it in with. And so what is it for the man? I don't know. It could be that dinner is ready at a certain time, or it could be that his clothes are hung up, or it could be that his wife greets him with a hug and a kiss when he comes home. I don't know what it is, but each husband's going to be different, but there's going to be a few things that are really important to him relationally, where if his wife's not doing those things or prioritizing those things, she could do a hundred other things for him.

But if she doesn't do those, you know, some of those things, one or two, you know, those top priorities, like he's going to be like, you're just being, you're just being selfish. And she's going to say, everything I do is for you. And he's going to say, no, I don't care about all that other stuff. What I care about is this. And you don't do this. My wife and I have had this fight. Yeah. And so, and so it's not, it's not only a, you know, where men, it would be our work is what takes us away with women. If, you know, if God's been good to them and given them children, it's going to be their children.

I don't have the time for that, honey. I don't have the energy for that. I didn't, you know, the kids, it's just going to be sort of this catch all excuse. It was the kids. There was, they were up, they were tired, they were cranky, they were fighting, they were hungry, they were teething, they were whatever. And all of that can be true. Then the same way that all the pressures, the man feels at work. He's like, my boss is breathing down my neck. The project's due next week. There's layoffs coming up. My review's in two months. Like, yep, yep, yep. All that's true. But you're married. Yeah. You've got, a spouse that needs in the midst of all of that, your time. Now I'm sitting here thinking like, I'm talking about this. I'm, this is a constant frustration for my wife. So me talking about this, I've learned a lot of what I've am saying from my wife because she's pointed out to me, this is an area where I'm just an idiot. And she's like, you know how to talk about it. Like, you know how to tell other people to do it. Why don't you do it? And I'm like, I, cause I'm an idiot.

And as soon as you tell me, you know what, you haven't done this or that or the other, and that's been important to me for years, and you're still not doing that thing, I'm like, yeah, Lord, help me. I don't want to continue to fail. It's a real area of weakness. And so she has to have grace for my laziness, and I have to have grace for hers. But we both have to acknowledge that we have it. I think in our culture, it's much more common to think that men are just... homer simpsons they're just relational dunces they don't have any relational needs it's not true um and that women are the perfect keepers of the relationship and that's it's it's just not true um there's all kinds of failures and ways to go wrong but generally i would say that wives are going to be are going to be lazy or make excuses for prioritizing their husband over their kids um and uh yeah or vice versa or logistics over yeah

and that men are going to fail in dating, being romantic, being home when they say they're going to be home, saying no to their desires to be with their wife, be with their kids. Well, the other thing I think of is that if it's not work, sometimes it's something else. I know we talked about in the earlier episode about how I used to spend a lot of time on social media and I don't think, I think in retrospect, I was being, I was being lazy with my wife because I would be physically present with her, but I'd be on Facebook instead. And like our tendency as men is to want to be doing something all the time. And sometimes the thing you ought to be doing is actually like looking your wife in the eyes and connecting with her. Yeah. I often, I've said in our church, and I was just talking to my son about this earlier this week. I said, I've always defined hard work as doing the work that's hard for you. That that's actually what a hard worker is, is someone who does the work that's hard for them. What did you accomplish sitting down and talking to your wife about her day and the relationships she had or the conversations? I mean, not just the logistics, but where her heart's at in that, how she felt about it and what she's thinking.

At the end of the list, what did you accomplish? You're like, oh, well, I could have been on social media saving the world talking about politics. But one is much more valuable than the other, and it's not the social media warrior that's creating real value. And so, yeah, being present. And I think what I've said to a lot of men about relational laziness, and this is all stuff I've learned through, The conflicts my wife's been willing to have with me to teach me these things is this idea of being present. I think a lot of men, they work real hard and then they come home and they're not all wrong in thinking like my home is my, it's the downtime place. I'm not at work. I'm not having pressures. But the thing is, if you're married and you have kids, you have work there too. Right, right. But you don't have a boss that's watching over you.

Unless you have a wife who's the boss watching over you. But we could call it that way and say, oh, well, she shouldn't be doing that. Or we could more accurately say she's being helpful to you in a way where you want to come home and just veg out and just get on social media or watch a movie or the game or whatever it is you want to do. And she says, hey, there's people in this world that all have your last name and they need you. Like, and you're only here a few hours a night. So these, these need to be our hours. Um, I think being able to, I think one of the things men have to learn to do is communicate ahead of time what they're relationally to think of your wife and to say, Hey, this is what I've got going on. Or, Hey, I'm not going to be home or, or tonight I'm looking forward to this, or I need to do that. Just simply helping her have expectations for what you're going to do, what you need to do, why.

Because you might think, well, that's not going to accomplish anything. And I'm going, well, actually, if you'll call her and tell her that, what it communicates to her is that as your life was going on, she was a priority. You were thinking about how what you're doing is going to affect her. And so simply calling her and saying, honey, I'm not going to be able to be, I'm not going to be home. I'm not going to make it to the kid's game. Or I'm so tired. I need to go to bed. I've had early mornings. I've got an early morning tomorrow. I'm not going to be.

it's like, yeah, you're actually not doing the relational sitting and caring for your wife, but you are caring for her and telling her, this is, I was thinking about you as I was processing my own life. Right. And that I found to be a lot better than nothing in terms of, it's not like, oh, you can say that and then you don't have to put in the effort later. Right. But it's actually a communication and you were important enough for me to tell you this. Instead of for you to fall asleep on the couch or come home and get in a big fight because you didn't tell her these pressures, those struggles, these limitations ahead of time. Right. Yeah, I think a lot about how we often are willing to put the time and effort into things that are important to us outside of relationships and even outside of work. Like if we really care about watching the football game.

Like something I do is I will try to, as much as possible, clear my schedule for at least the first weekend of the NCAA men's basketball tournament every year. So I can watch a bunch of games. There's like 16 games a day the first two days. And so I don't watch the whole game of all 16. That would be nuts. But I do watch a lot of basketball those two days especially. And that's something that's trivial because there's going to be another tournament the next year. And I just think about, like, there are things that are important to us that we do, like, find ways to make sure they happen. And we ought to have that sort of mindset for our wives and our children as well. And the other thing I think about, too, is that, like, this is me in particular. Most of the time, if there's a problem in my marriage, I don't see it until my wife points it out to me. That is almost always what happens. And what I, and I think that's a failure on my part that if I actually like sat down and thought about how my marriage is going more often, I could probably figure it out. Like actually it's like we, there's a sense in which thinking of men as like Homer Simpsons and relational dunces is a cop out.

Because it removes the responsibility from us to actually sit down and figure out what's going on. If the car breaks down, we can go into diagnostic mode. But if the marriage is breaking down, we're like, oh, well, that's an inscrutable mystery. Those are just some things I think about when I think about relational laziness. We have a tendency to offload responsibility. We have a tendency to not put the time in that could actually produce the results we want. Any final thoughts on that, Pastor Dave? I mean, I think most of the Christian life, in whatever topic we're talking about, is going to boil down to you making proactive effort in this area. If your view of husbandry is...

If it ain't fixed, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I have a real high threshold for when it's actually broken. Right. Like, unless it's like really, really broken, then you're lazy. You're lazy. Like, I mean. The things we care about, we take the time and spend the money to make sure they're maintained. Yeah. Yeah. So my challenge to our listeners is that Pastor Dave recently preached through Matthew 6 and it says, I had never thought of this before, but where your treasurer is, there your heart will be also. And so let's treasure our wives because that's where we put our treasurers, where our heart's going to be. Yeah, and I think at the risk of offending or stepping on toes, your wife is not the perfect keeper of your relationship. And if you're a husband listening to this, you actually have a responsibility to tell her what your needs are, to take the time to figure your own self out.

And figure out what's important to you and not just accept everything that's given to you and think that that's just how it's supposed to be. But your wife actually needs your help and leadership in figuring out how she can invest the best way in your relationship. Right. You actually have to work together on this stuff. And it's going to mean fighting. And it's going to mean disagreements. And it's going to mean needing to forgive each other multiple times because this stuff's hard. But your work, everyone works hard. You're a financial advisor, Tim. You want people to work real hard so they don't have to work forever. And so men, at some point, your work is going to stop. You should want it to stop at some level or scale back. Your wives, your children, if you've done a decent job, they're going to leave your house.

And you're going to end up spending the majority of your married life, just the two of you. It's so sad to see all those people who their kids move out and then they get divorced. Yeah. And so it can't be the bare necessities that hold you together. You have to work at the relationship. And that's going to require a lot of humility. It drives me nuts when I hear men. When I see their wives making effort to show them that they're failing at something, and the wife's right. The husband's failing at it. And his answer is, well, you just need to trust me because I'm the head of the house. I'm like, dude, you're such a fool. If you think you know everything, then you're placing yourself in judgment over God who said it wasn't good for you to be alone. That actually you should regard what your wife has to say to you.

Even if she doesn't say it perfectly. Right. Because none of us ever do. Right. Sometimes you're Nabal and your wife is Abigail. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like your job as a husband relationally when your wife is like fit to be tied because you've been dropping the ball and failing so miserably that like she's had it. Like you still should listen to what she says because there's going to be good necessary things for you to learn in there. And you should also not just accept. you should also tell your wife what you need from her. Like in the end, I think relationships, part of the reason, you know, maybe it's laziness, but relationships are hard because it requires vulnerability. Yeah. It's hard for us to admit that we need something. I realized with my wife, we had some massive conflicts at different points because I would, I would like kind of let my need be known. And the minute there was any like, well, I don't know about that. Then it'd be like, oh, I don't actually need that. I'm fine. Like I'm, I'm, I'm okay. Well,

it was really frustrating for her because it was like, do you actually want this or do you not? Like, do you care? Do you not care? Because you keep saying you don't care and then you get upset. And I had to realize, oh, actually I have needs. Like I actually, and finding the balance of where just because I have needs don't mean those needs become the all important thing that everybody in the house has to meet. And my need is supper on the table at five o'clock and it doesn't matter who was sick. It doesn't matter what happened. Like I'm gonna be so angry if, I don't get my need met. Finding that balance of saying, well, yeah, it actually does kind of, it kind of bothers me when this particular thing isn't done, but I can roll with the fact that all of our needs in this household have to come into consideration. But it was a big deal when I finally realized, oh, you know what? I need to actually articulate this and then not back down from the articulation. Just be reasonable about it. Yeah. And I think that this whole issue of relationships is,

The difficulty of it is exacerbated by social media because people have, there's a whole generation that's coming up that has interacted, has learned to interact with people via a screen and not real life. Well, the problem is you can't do that in marriage. Yeah. You have to relate with a real person. And so you're much less likely to behave in person the way that you would behave online. However it is you would behave online, you're not going to behave that way in person. And so then you have this growing inability to know how to deal with conflict, how to relate to people, how to talk to them, how to hear criticism. I mean, you think online, like what do you do if someone criticizes you? You either ignore them or you block them. Or you attack them. It's like, but none of those things are viable options in a marriage. If your husband comes and says, honey.

This is, I need this from you. This is not okay. Yeah. Like you're not allowed to say, well, you can't need that from me. Yeah. I mean, what, what? Yeah. You're his wife. Of course he can need that from you. Right. Doesn't mean he'll always get it, but it does mean you're the only one who can provide it or you're the one who's supposed to provide it. Like, and you know, he can't go buy it off the shelf, like a box of cereal. Yeah. And the same is true for the wife. It's like, well, she's given her life to you. Like where else is she supposed to go get what she needs?

So she tells you you need to do this, then you need to listen. Forsaking all others. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's a real work. And I think the vulnerability, you know, we get lazy because we get tired of getting hurt. Sometimes maybe our relational laziness is the result of being hurt and not forgiving or not knowing what to do. Maybe not being prepared. I mean, this whole podcast has turned into us talking about relational laziness in marriage. Maybe that's just because that's where the stakes are the highest. Yeah. But the principles that we're talking about apply in every other relationship, whether that's at work or extended family or amongst siblings or with your children. The idea that you're going to withdraw because you've been and be lazy because you've been hurt is just not an acceptable. It's not the right answer to the problem.