GPBC Blog

By Tanner Woolf --

As many of you know, this last Friday was Fight Night! And if you weren’t there, it’s not what it sounds like! We had an amazing night filled with humor, fresh insight, and new strategies for our relationships. The incredible teaching of Les and Leslie Parrott made for such a fun night! My wife, Kendall, and I will celebrate our one-year anniversary on April 7th, and we have been immersed in so many of the books and education having to do with marriage this year. We’ve gone through such great material together, but Fight Night was a breath of fresh air. We were able to laugh at ourselves, enjoy the company of other people striving to grow in relationships, eat way too much cake, and learn practical ways to fight a good fight. As we go through a season of refreshment as a church, it was so nice to do the same thing for our relationships!

… And then we went home.

As we hovered over our late-night Taco Bell at our dining room table, we started having one of the most intense arguments we’ve had in a long time. (I hope you see how ironic this turn of events is.) You know a fight is intense when you don’t even finish your Taco Bell! We were probably only moments away from a beefy five-layer burrito potentially being thrown across the table when we just stopped and realized what was happening. We just spent an hour arguing over the very same things we were laughing about earlier in the night! From there we were able to use a lot of the language and practical advice from Fight Night and turn it in to an amazing conversation that we have both grown and learned from!

Here’s the thing - relationships are hard work, but totally worth it. It doesn’t matter if you are newlyweds, “oldy-weds”, seriously dating, engaged, or single. It doesn’t matter if it’s with your spouse, family member, friend, co-worker, or even someone in your small group. Relationships require work! Kendall and I could have taken an easy route and discussed nothing, held everything in, and pretended like we were fine. Thankfully, God doesn’t always call us to take the easy route in relationships. Growing relationships cause you to lean into conflict, to serve one another, make time for one another, and overall just love one another. We see in Acts 2 what happens to a community of people that are so in love with God and loved by God that they can’t help but show that love to those around them. The Kingdom of God grows in an incredible way when we decide we are going to work hard in our relationships! Sometimes this looks like genuine moments of love and care, and sometimes it looks like getting Taco Bell and fighting a good fight.

Kendall and I are grateful to be a part of a community here at GPBC that cares about relationships and will do whatever it takes to love one another! Thank you to Joyce Wachsmuth for putting together Fight Night for all of us and thank you to this church for being a place that commits to helping people follow Jesus together.

See you all on Sunday!!

Tanner