Quarantine Quotient
What is yours?
Many of us are living life through windows and screens and drive-thrus. Did you ever think the world you knew would change forever in an instant? Today we welcome our new normal where 6' of personal space and a mask is our everyday routine. How can we maintain closeness and connect in relationships and still show our neighbors without we care without making them feel threatened or uncomfortable? It's time to upgrade our Quarantine Quotient QQ! What is QQ? It's the skills and tools needed to cultivate and develop healthy relationships?
Unlike IQ, which we are born with, QQ can be taught and grown when practiced daily, like service, selflessness, empathy, and grace. Feeling skeptical and need some evidence, let's enter into one of our neighbor's homes Gil & Renée Beavers, who have shared more than 35 years as a couple combining marriage and dating.
They live in the same home, their new reality, like many of you, they are now working together. Gil&Renée live by the principle of prioritizing alone time. Each begins the day with God by reading the Bible, prayer, and singing worship songs; they believe whatever you make first is your priority. Night and day best describe Gil and Renée's personalities while their personalities are polar opposites. It's their values and character that binds them together.
They give each other the freedom to be different, with all this time together. It easy to focus on what we don't like; we must change our focus. Grace is when the stronger lends their strength to the weak. We will all need the strength of the other. Let's give grace generously. You will only find them competing to serve one another out. In healthy marriages, couples understand competing with your spouse to win only causes the marriage to lose.
Yes, 35-24-7, that is a lot of time together; how do they do?
Gil is a fantastic listener, and Renée is an exceptional communicator. Together they have served couples in marriage ministry for over 15 years. They are also the Host of Rich Relationships Podcast with Gil&Renée and will launch their new Anthology with 17 couples and three subject experts titled Rich Relationships Our marital Code to Oneness in October. All of their years as a couple and working with couples can be summed up in the essential elements of the QQ, which is empathy.
What is empathy? It is your pain in my heart with all the uncertainty and sickness, death, and divorce in our present world. What we are all in need of is empathy. Empathy is a great attribute to cultivate in our marriage skill set. We should value it and look for opportunities to put it into action. When our spouses feel that we are making an effort to empathize with them, we communicate to them that we see and feel them and their pain; this is one of the key elements to The Marital Code to Oneness.
Gil and Renée have discovered the one missing element needed to improve marriage and relationships drastically is our ability to increase our empathy. We must listen to understand, we must feel, we must hear the other person's story and try to see ourselves in their shoes. Together we can Increase our QQ. The Rich Relationships project is more than a book, podcast, and app. It's a community where couples can go for support, gain new tools, and have healthy accountability. Through Rich Relationships, Renée and Gil have been introducing the world to healthy relationship practices via TV and radio interviews on CBS, NBC, TBN, Atlanta Live, HOT 108 FM, Blog Talk Radio, and others. Renée has also been featured in Huffington Post and LV & Sheen Magazine. Learn more about Rich Relationships at https://www.richrelationshipsus.com.
