This weekend, I did a marriage conference for 415 people on a Friday night and a Saturday morning; and this was a really interesting group, because it was a marriage conference that wasn’t just for married couples. They actually encouraged a lot of singles to come to this and to learn a lot of the stuff, these truths about men and women before they get married, which I thought was a very productive way of handling this. Something funny happened near the end of one of the sessions when I tell the men that the way women are wired in a sexual way that women have such physiological differences, physical differences, that they need anticipation time. They need to know what their husband has on the menu for the evening before they get to the bedroom. This is one of the principles, one of the main differences between men and women; and any male, I was telling them that men that can learn this can understand how to give their wife anticipation time by flirting with them, giving them some cute little comments in advance so the wife has time to get their brain in gear. And when I left the stage after that session, the emcees, a couple named Jay and Katriel, came up to the stage, and Jay said, “Let this just serve as a notification from all of the men in the audience to their wives that this is your official notice of anticipation time for tonight,” and all of the men in the audience got a pretty good kick out of that one.
This was actually a pretty interesting day, because we were in Raleigh, North Carolina, and this is the first event of the fall travel season. And we learned just a few days before the event that my little four-and-a-half-year-old boy had been accepted to T-ball, to start in a T-Ball League; even though he is not quite five years old, they were going to let him start early. But his very first practice was at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, and it was at least six hours away from Raleigh. So we drove back at high speeds. I literally walked off the stage at 12:02, said goodbye to everybody, explained why I couldn’t stay to sign books, and we loaded the family in the car and drove back quite quickly to Atlanta, encountered a few traffic jams, but managed to walk in only 15 minutes late.
And as I am dictating this, I am watching my adorable little four-and-a-half-year-old son hit a sweet line drive in his first experience at coach pitching in T ball. And I am struck again by how important it is, no matter how busy my life gets, no matter how unusual our life as a family, how incredibly important it is to prioritize the things that matter, which are the family and friends that God has so graciously given us. What a delight it is that I can both do what I love, get up on stage and help encourage people in their marriages and, on that same day, watch my little boy hit a sweet line drive. It’s a great life.