MARRIAGE CONFERENCES WE’VE GONE TO IN THE LAST 31 YEARS
DEBRA: We used to call each other our ex husband and our ex wife because we were different people before Christ. So after serving Christ for 20 years together, we’ve probably been to 25.
CHRIS: Wow, you must be a slow learner.
DEBRA: Yeah, I am. It’s more than that. I think it’s interesting. Every time we go with a one I think, “That is so good.” These are truths that we know. But it’s so good to be refreshed in those areas.
FIRST MARRIAGE CONFERENCE
DEBRA: Oh, that was Tommy Nelson going through the Song of Solomon. My big takeaway from that was that I have my own race. I’m running my race. And if my husband lags behind, I don’t stop my race. Because my eyes are fixed on my goal. I don’t stop my race to run back and make sure that I dust him off and ask him if he needs help and give him a drink water. And I keep running my race. And I keep saying, Come on. Come join me. It’s really awesome up here. And he’ll catch up. And the same goes for him.
MOST MEMORABLE MARRIAGE CONFERENCE
DEBRA: So we go to, it’s the Encounter Ministries, they put on Art of Marriage every year in Branson, and we go down to that. And it was the first year that we went, and I was sick as a dog for a week. Coughing, couldn’t sleep, and I had respiratory stuff really bad. I thought, “Man, we need, we need to go to this.” We were taking somebody from the ministry, and we needed to buck up buttercup, and go.
So I don’t buy a lot of medicines for the house. But the bad thing is, I probably should have looked at the expiration date. So I took some cough syrup. And so we get there, and I said, “I need to get up. I need to go to the bathroom.” So I got up. And the whole room was spinning. And I felt drunk. And I have not touched a drop of alcohol since the year 2000. So I thought, “Oh. My.” And I say, “Chris, we’ve got to leave. I can’t do this. I can’t do this right now.” So he knew the fear in my eyes. And so we took off out of there. He’s holding me up on the way out of there. And we made it past the first point. And I thought, “Oh, there’s the door. We’re gonna make it.” And there were these lovely people stationed at the entrance. They were the prayer team, really the intervention team, I don’t know. But we were headed out to doors and they said, “Hi, can I help you? How are you enjoying it? Where are you going? I think they were like, “Oh, she’s escaping.” And I said, “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. I’m just done. I’m finished. I tried.” And I remember just trying to get out of there. And they were trying to do I think an intervention. And Chris and I finally got in the truck. And he looked at me and he said, “You realize that they think that we’re heading out to get a divorce.”
Every year we go, we take away something. And that’s really, really good. And it’s not that we’re slow learners, even though I think we’re all slow learners when it comes to marriage.
BEING TEAMMATES WITH YOUR SPOUSE
DEBRA: The most common reason for divorce is irreconcilable differences. So it’s because we’re two separate people. And marriage conferences recenter us and it reminds me “Oh, hang on. He’s your brother in Christ to love him in that manner.” And it reminds him to treat me like a precious princess.
Chris used to do this to me all the time, he’d say, “Deb, I’m throwing you the ball.” So he’s reminding me, we’re on the same team. And especially when it came to parenting. If I’m not practicing on my end, and he’s not practicing on his end, then one is always holding the other one up, one is always stronger, and that can’t be the case all the time. Sometimes you have to be, but, you’ve got to have a strength.
So I’m always listening to books and reading and doing my own studies. And so is Chris, and we talk about those things together, so even though there’s a separate growth, there’s a together growth. One of the things that we do at church, or we’ve done in the past, is lead a group called committed couples. Every time we do the curriculum of committed couples, it kind of takes us back to the creation and, reminds me that God created me to be his helper. And also, his role as a husband is very, very strategic. It plants those understandings into our hearts. So it helps us because we’re sitting there as a part of the group and as we’re facilitating, we’re also members. So it’s good to take small groups to help one another.
GETTING THROUGH DISAGREEMENTS
CHRIS: So when we get in a disagreement, not a fight, or an argument, but a strong disagreement, one of the things we do is usually one of us gets ahold of ourselves and sometimes it’s really corny, but we’ll say something like, “God is so good. God is so good. God is so good, He’s so good to me.” It takes the fire right out of our tongues.
DEBRA: It says in the Bible that we’re supposed to, with one another, sings songs, hymns and spiritual songs to God. In our spirit, we should praise God together. And when we do that, then all the other things don’t matter. We are inviting HEAVEN DOWN into our marriage.
WHAT HAS HELD US TOGETHER
CHRIS: Probably the thing that has held things together from day one… (no one told us to do that no one told me to do this.) I was a brand new Christian, and for some reason, I just felt like it was important first thing in the morning before I left to pray for my wife and my kids. This was before we had any training at all. God just put that on my heart. At the time, I didn’t realize this was going on, but it’s something that we’ve done for 20 years. We don’t always sing a song, but usually sing a song, and we’ll ask Tabby what she wants to sing and she’ll say, “Jesus in the Morning” or ‘the blood song’ – which is “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
DEBRA: It is corny if you’ve never done it before. It was odd and it felt foreign when we first did it. In fact, when Samantha would invite friends over, she’d be like, “You have to come and stand, and we sing, and pray. And they’d be like, “Okay…?” So they’d come over to our circle, and we’d all hold hands and we would do that, but it became a part of our family makeup.
CHRIS: The Bible talks about not letting the sun go down on your anger. And the reality of that is sometimes we can’t resolve a conflict in that moment before we go to sleep. So sometimes, we’ll just table that. And I think what God is saying here is “Hey, don’t let this go on and on and on. Forgive quickly. And so one of the things that this singing helps with is that, say we’ve had a disagreement the night before and haven’t resolved it completely, but then we come together in the morning, and we grab each other’s hands. As we begin to pray for one another, whatever that disagreement, or whatever we were bickering about the night before, begins to fade away.
DEBRA: In fact, sometimes I’m a little high spirited, and sometimes it’s after I’ve had a couple of cups of coffee first thing in the morning. And so he will sometimes ask me if I’m still holding onto something, “Why don’t you pray for us this morning?” He knows that the one thing I don’t ever want to do is, I don’t ever want to scream at God. So if I’m going to bow my head before our Father, I’m not going to do it with anxiety in my heart toward my husband. And inevitably, it breaks me and reminds me that He’s more important than this and that God gave me this man and my family to be kind to.
FINDING THE FAMILY
DEBRA: We just talked about how we join hands in the morning, we, we sing a song of praise, and we pray to God for our day. And we teach our families that too. Do they do it when they leave? We don’t know that. But we tell them that it will benefit them greatly if they do the same thing. And we just had somebody tell us, It feels really weird to hold hands like that.” It does when you’ve never done it before!
CHRIS: It feels really weird. It feels weird to pray for one another. I tell people it’s it’s the most intimate thing that you’ll do with your spouse is when you pray a blessing over them.
DEBRA: He prays a lot that I would have laughter and giggles. He asked the Lord for that, to plant laughter and giggles in me.