Autopilot

There is one thing most people don’t know about me, years ago I was a boat captain. When I ran this boat, we fished in a lot of billfish tournaments in the Gulf of Mexico. One night I was headed out about 120 miles south into the Gulf of Mexico.  I was sitting up top driving and placed the boat on autopilot. I put in the coordinates of the place I wanted to go, hit a button and the boat would drive itself.
One night at dinner my friend, who is a pilot started talking to me about this new autopilot he was having installed in is plane. We started comparing different systems from boats to planes. By the way our wives we so entertained by this conversation. (NOT!!) I asked him more questions about the functions of plane autopilots. I learned something that night that I never knew. He flies a two-prop plane and his buddy who is a commercial pilot, shared with him that these new commercial planes have such top-notch systems that the pilot will drive the plane to the runway and then push a button and then the plane could take off and land itself by only using the autopilot system. Then the pilot would then drive the plane to gate.   I thought wow that is awesome and how scary at the same time. That’s when my friend told me that this was the reason they train all the time, so they don’t lose their skills if something goes wrong while in the air. If they didn’t practice and only depended on autopilot all the time they would lose their skills. I thought, well this is good to know. 
I started thinking and relating this to marriages/relationships. How many relationship/marriages have crashed because we put it on auto pilot and not work on our skills. I can talk about this because I’m in my 2nd marriage and I know in my first marriage, it was on just auto pilot.  My wife and I work on this in our marriage every day because we both know what happens when a marriage goes on autopilot. Now when I talk with groups, I have seen marriages fail because they were operating on autopilot.
A man and woman start dating and they work hard to get to know each other and try to understand how to meet each other’s needs. They get engaged and continue to work on their relationship. They get married and because its new they continue to put in the effort. After a few years things seem to be going well, so they hit the auto pilot button and start to relax. Instead of working on things and keeping their skills up to date in the relationship, they start paying more attention to the kids or their careers. And the marriage seems to be doing to fine on autopilot. But what happens when something happens like a storm, or the marriage is running out of gas? This is when trouble starts. Because if you go on autopilot in any area – communication, romance, your spiritual lives – you begin to lose skills. You start to neglect each other. You start ignoring each other and this puts you in such a dangerous place.
Marriage can’t survive on autopilot. Every relationship requires human input. It takes two people working on it daily for the relationship to remain healthy. Remember, marriage is a team effort. Just think, there is a reason in commercial planes there are two pilots. If something goes wrong there are two people that can take control.
Remember, people get hurt when a plane goes down. If you value the lives on board a marriage, which include your children, family, and friends then you need to be paying attention. You can’t coast on autopilot in a marriage or your relationship with Jesus.