Why Take 139 exists

Twenty-three years of asking the same question

I have been a pastor for twenty-three years. Most of that has been at College Avenue Church in San Diego, where I am the senior pastor today. Across those years — in counseling appointments, in premarital classes, on the front steps of the church after the sermon, in the hospital rooms of dying parishioners — one question has come up more often than any other.

"Why do my husband and I keep having the same fight?"

Or some version of it. "Why does it always end the same way?" "Why can't I make her see what I'm actually saying?" "Why does the same thing set me off every time?"

What the question is really asking, underneath the words, is this: Is there something underneath all of this that no one has named yet? And the honest pastoral answer is almost always yes. There is. There usually is.

Paige

I was married to Paige for ten years. We had five children together. She was the most attentive person I have ever known — the kind of person who remembered the name of your barista from a story you told her six months ago. She read voraciously. She thought carefully about hard things. She made our home a place where people came in and didn't want to leave.

Paige died in 2021. I am still her husband in the sense that grief makes a person still a husband — she is part of how I see and how I write and how I pray, and our five children carry her in them in ways that surprise me every week.

What our marriage taught me, especially in the last years of it, was that even the best two people can keep returning to the same hard moment over and over because neither of them has names for what is actually being asked underneath. We had names for some of it. We were both readers; we both went to therapy; we both worked hard at saying things plainly. But we didn't have this language — the language of a trigger, a core question, a mechanism, a breakdown — and I have thought many times since 2021 about how differently certain moments would have gone if we had.

I cannot give that back to her. I can give it to you.

Carolyn, and what came after

I remarried in September 2023. Her name is Carolyn. She did not have to take on a grieving widower with five children — the five children Paige now mothers as her own — and yet she did, and she does, with a kind of attentive love that I did not have language for until I lived in it.

Two adults bringing two whole histories into the same home is a particular kind of education in patterns. The fights Carolyn and I have are not the fights Paige and I had. The triggers are different. The core questions are different. The mechanisms by which we each protect ourselves are different. The breakdowns look different.

And yet the structure is the same. The four-part shape — trigger, question, mechanism, breakdown — holds across both marriages. It holds across every counseling session I have ever sat in. That is what made me think it might be worth naming.

Where the methodology comes from

I hold a master's degree and a doctorate in theology and counseling. The framework behind Take 139 sits at the intersection of four bodies of work:

• Attachment theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth, then Mikulincer and Shaver; popularized for general readers by Levine and Heller). The four core questions Take 139 measures are drawn from the attachment literature on the basic things we ask of close others.
• Family systems theory (Bowen, Friedman). The mechanisms — how a person manages the anxiety that the trigger creates — sit closest to this tradition.
• Biblical counseling (the conservative Reformed tradition; Powlison, Welch, Tripp). The framing that the question underneath a person's relational pattern is, finally, a theological question — that comes from this tradition.
• Pastoral practice. Twenty-three years of being the person in the room when a couple is finally honest about what's been happening at home for a long time.

The four-part diagnostic was first sketched on a yellow legal pad on a flight from San Diego to Nashville in 2019, between two pages of sermon notes. The first paper version was used with three couples in 2020. The first digital version went up in 2023. The version on this site today is the result of two years of testing, refinement, and revision with real users.

For the long methodology — the full theoretical grounding, the citation list, how the item bank was constructed — see the methodology white paper, available on request.

The two products

There are two assessments on this site:

Take 139 is the relational diagnostic. It is named for Psalm 139 — "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me." Take 139 measures the four-part pattern of your relational conflict and gives you, in writing, a pastoral reading of it. It is designed for individuals to take alone, and for couples to take and then pair.

IMAGO is the hardwiring profile. It measures, across one hundred items, the way you are made — the deep aspects of personality, motivation, and orientation that are present in you from very early on. The name comes from imago Dei, the theological claim that you are made in the image of God. IMAGO is designed as a companion to Take 139: where Take 139 names the pattern of your conflict, IMAGO names the substance of the person doing the conflicting.

Together they are the closest digital approximation of what the first two or three sessions of careful pastoral counseling might give you, if you had the time and the access to do it that way.

What we believe these tools are for

Take 139 and IMAGO are not meant to make you better at winning arguments with the person you love. They are not meant to give you new categories to use against your spouse, your fiancé, your friend, your parent. If you finish one of these assessments and your first thought is "this is exactly my husband and now I know what he is," we have failed and you should ignore the report.

The work these tools are for is the work of self-knowledge in front of God. The honest naming of the pattern you carry, so that the Spirit can do, slowly, the work of making you a kinder and more grace-filled person to be married to, to be friends with, to live near. That is the prayer behind the whole project.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." — Psalm 139:23–24

That is what we are trying to give you a small set of tools for.

Reaching us

If you have a question about your report, want to bring this work to your church, or want to write because something in a report landed, you can reach us at hello@take139.com. We read everything.

For the longer methodology white paper, or for permission to use Take 139 or IMAGO in an institutional setting (seminary class, counseling practice, premarital ministry), see For Churches & Counselors.