Recently my husband and I had a few days away. Before we went, we decided we wanted to read one book and take time to discuss it.

Over the years we have found that when we get away, it’s easy simply to “veg out.” After all, we’re exhausted. Our lives, like yours, are full of people who need us, projects to complete, and responsibilities at home and work. The list of “needs” never ends. So when we do have a few days away, we want time to “veg,” to let our brains rest, to sleep in, and to do nothing but simply be together!

However, we’ve also found it’s easy to relax to the point of not really talking about anything significant other than kids, us, or superficial stuff. So this year, we took along Tim Keller’s “Counterfeit Gods, The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters.” We both read it and then set aside two different times to discuss it. We shared the same copy and underlined things that were meaningful to us and simply wrote questions in the margins. There were several reasons we liked this book:

  • It’s small, short, and can be read in several hours.
  • It’s incredibly relevant to today’s culture.
  • It caused both of us to ask, “What are the idols in my own life? How do they impact how I view myself? How do I replace these idols?”
  • It was an encouraging book because Keller says aloud what we often feel but are not able to articulate. He makes us feel normal while encouraging us and pushing us to a deeper faith.

It was refreshing to our marriage to do this together. We found that we were picking each other’s brains in ways that we don’t have time to do in the demands of everyday life. Dealing with a topic we would not ordinarily discuss was invigorating to our relationship. And yes, we still had time to “veg.”

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