Prepare/Enrich: Marriages and our Relationship with God

Yesterday I attended a day long training from Prepare/Enrich for premartial and marriage education. It was a very positive experience all around. Though there were only three participants, each of us were coming from very different sorts of calls: a minister in a second call who serves alongside several other ministers, a college chaplain whose chapel sees 50 weddings a year from students and alum, and me, a pastor in her first call. Because of the varying experiences a lot of great questions were asked that I probably would not have come up with on my own.

The Prepare/Enrich curriculum is structured around an assessment that the couple takes that asks questions about many facets of relationship. Based on the results of that assessment there are various exercises the couple and minister can go through to address strengths and concerns about the relationship. I would highly recommend this training to any counselors or ministers looking for a structured foundation to marriage eduction. I found it particularly helpful as it gives me a foundation and resources to draw on when speaking to couples about marriage, since I am single and do not have personal marriage experience to draw from.

Aside from the actual training in marriage preparation and enrichment, the big takeaway for me was how so many of the exercises of the curriculum can and should be applied to our relationship with God:

• One of exercises encourages a daily check-in, nearly identical of the Examen process we engaged in throughout Project Burning Bush. The P/E check-in involves talking to your spouse about the days highs and lows, and PBB’s Examen involves thinking back on when we feel closest to and farthest from God within the span of a day. Each of these exercises help us to be in touch with how were are affected by the other and requires us to articulate our desires for that relationship.
• We also talked about active listening skills, and how we need to understand what someone is saying before we respond. Applying that to our relationship with God we can listen to God in scripture, in God’s activity in our lives and the world, and throughout history before we go about the business of asking God for what we want. When we continually listen to God (or a spouse), we become more aware of the desires of God’s (or a spouses’) heart and can tune our hearts to those desires as well.