Here at Family Light Today, we believe all scripture is inspired. And 2 Timothy 3.16 puts it this way. All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and training in righteousness. And what you just read, that's how the CSB translates it. And it just captures the weight and purpose of God's Word so clearly.
Thanks to the Christian Standard Bible for supporting Family Life Today. Visit csbible.com to learn more. Ah We knew we didn't know much about parenting godly children or living a God-honoring marriage, and so we. developed a little bit of a mission statement as a family. And we just prayed, Lord, we want to go where you want us to go.
We want to do what you want us to do. We want to say what you want us to say. We want to serve who you want us to serve. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.
And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifetoday.com. This is Family Life. Today. What do you think of my knee scars? They're pretty sexy, aren't they?
They're amazing, but I'm excited for our listeners today. Hey, Wayne, I'm just trying to tell people why we're not there today. I'm still, you know, recovering from double knee replacement surgery.
Okay, just wanted people to feel bad for me. I do feel bad for me. And pray for me. I appreciate that.
Okay, go ahead.
Okay, so today, Cheryl's going to be talking to Trevor and Tanya Kravik. And the topic is marriage on mission. Yeah, and you're going to love this conversation because a lot of us don't realize God has a mission for our marriage, and it's bigger than us just being happy. It's pretty epic, actually. And when you understand that, everything changes.
You're going to enjoy today's show.
So here's Cheryl Shoemake and Trevor and Tanya. Enjoy. If I How would it ask you to describe a couple living on mission. What would you imagine? Would you imagine the couple that you support who travels to great distant lands preaching the gospel?
Okay. Or would you imagine the couple at church who has adopted 30 children in the last 20 years? I'm actually thinking about a couple who retired.
Sold everything they had, moved to a gang-infested area to be light and salt in that community. Yeah. While these are amazing and commendable and beautiful expressions of living on mission. We would do a disservice to what it really means to live on mission if We only started and stopped there. We would also miss the amazing and wonderful and extraordinary things God can do through your ordinary everyday life as well.
Here to help us unpack what it means to be a couple living on mission is a couple doing exactly that. That's Trevor and Tanya Kravik. Welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you, Cheryl. It's an honor to be here.
So I just want to kind of get to know you a little bit more. We were talking, we were chatting a little bit before, but I would love to know how the two of you met, how long you've been married, how many children you have. Yeah, all great questions. The love story began in the beginning. In the beginning was our high school.
Yeah. So the quick, the short answers. We met in high school. We became fast friends. And several years after high school, we were reconnected by a mutual friend.
And he called and he said, hey. I saw Trevor. And he would love it if you would join us out at the bars. Yeah, this was my 21st. Birthday celebration.
Okay. And I was a prolific drinker already before 21 because of some things in my past. And I was walking very closely with the Lord. And so I was like, well, I am not going to be going out to the bars drinking with you.
However, He called a year later. This mutual friend of ours. And he said, I ran into Trevor. Here's his number you should call him.
So I call him on the phone.
Okay. Uh well, his roommate answered the phone. And he said Cover. It's a girl. Yeah.
And I thought, okay, I'm 24. I'm working at a law firm. I have a pretty good job, pretty subtle. Do I hang up the phone now? Or what do I do?
Are we 15? Like, what's happening here? I thought, well, this is pre-colour ID.
So, if this gets weird, I'll just hang up and it'll be okay. Oh, it got weird, and she didn't hang up. But just to clarify the story, so when I hear it's a girl calling, I'm thinking, what girl did I give my number to that might be reaching out to me? And I'm not going to remember their name based on their voice because it was so loud in the clubs and the bars that I was at. And I pick up the phone, and it's Tanya.
And I immediately recognized her voice because my brain wasn't scrambled back then when we were sharing locker space. And so we got to catch up a little bit. And then I said, Well, hey, I'm in Milwaukee all the time. Would you like to go out to the bars with me? Of course, because that's my lead.
And I said, I don't, I don't drink. And I said, Well, how about the club? Do you dance? I was like, No, I'm not really. Much of a dancer.
All right. I'm like, okay, you know, bottom of the ninth, I'm on my, you know, third Tabat. If I strike out on this, she's going to be gone.
So I said, well, what do you, what about going to a play? Would you go to a play? I was all in for the play.
Okay. So he came in to visit. We went to the play. And in the morning, he visited my church. And I was attending a 90% Hispanic church at the time.
That's the church that I really started growing in my relationship with the Lord at. And it was not necessarily a seeker-friendly church. It was a church where you came to learn and grow. Yes. But he wanted to visit, so he did.
Yeah. And I can only articulate that the Lord met me in that place in a very unique way, speaking to my soul and asking me a question of what was I doing with my life. And I don't know about you, but when you hear a voice in your head that asks you a very personal question like that, you can't deny it's from outside of this universe. And so I thought, well, I got to be honest. And I was making a mess of my life.
And so the next part of the conversation was, would you surrender your life to me? And so in that very moment, in a church that was very uncomfortable to me, picking up banners in the background and tambourines. And the lead pastor was playing the bass guitar. This was a serious and I just felt out of place. But the Lord like took, ushered me into like a.
Like the children's area, right? In that moment, I just gave my life fully to the Lord, surrendered 100%. Yeah. I love how God uses everything, right? He wastes absolutely nothing.
So he would use your desire to reconnect with an old friend to bring you back to him, how precious that is. And that you were in a place where you were stretched already, right?
So to ask you. In a place where you are already uncomfortable, to get a little bit more uncomfortable and lose yourself to me is such a loving thing for our father to do. Yeah. You were a Christian in high school. How did you come to faith, Tanya?
So I grew up knowing about the Lord and knowing about who He was, but it was sometime later in my early 20s. that I really came to kind of a Not a crisis of faith, but a question of faith maybe? Mm-hmm. I had been surrounded by individuals who were from many different denominations. that were saying a lot of different things.
And so I just really wondered, like, what's really true? What is this God all about? They're all reading the same Bible. But they're all telling me very different things. Um and so I had a moment where I made a decision that I really wanted to know who he was personally.
And so I was led through a prayer. To really talk to the Lord and invite Him to take control of my life. I was on my way to a job. and when I got there one of my coworkers was there who wasn't expected to be there. He worked at one of the churches that I had been visiting during this.
journey of trying to spiritual curiosity, I guess. And I said, John, you know, what are you doing here? I didn't see you on the schedule. And he said, I was on my way to work today and I really felt like I needed to be here'cause there was something you needed to tell me that happened. And so my very first moment after that was really realizing that.
It wasn't a god who was out there in the clouds. It wasn't a God who I just knew about, but that he saw me. He knew me in that moment, and he knew that I needed to know how real he really was. And so he showed up real quick. Which was just his kindness, right, in that moment.
And his mercy. Yes. Because there's a vast difference between knowing about God and there's even a vast difference between believing in Jesus and surrendering to him as Lord, right? We can go for many, many, many, many years believing, even going to church, even being active in fellowship without really surrendering our lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And that is what he is after.
He's after our whole life so that he can transform that life and conform us to the image of his son. I don't know if this is true for you, but it's super easy for us to let our schedules squeeze in everything except for the person I married. Oh, yeah. Work, kids, everything competing for our attention, and before you know it, Your marriage has slipped into autopilot. You don't always notice you're drifting apart until it's already happened.
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So, how did the two of you know that you were it for each other and you got married and you now have how many children? Go ahead. Yeah, yeah.
So, not a glorifying story for our own standpoint, but we started dating after that date, quote-unquote, date and time at church. I knew that I was interested in going. long term with Tanya, but I was resistant because of my past. I didn't have a good model of what it looked like to go the distance with another person. And I was unsure myself.
You know, I had just fully put my faith in God at that time. And so, as we dated, it was a struggle as I felt like I was a long-distance runner catching up to the lead runner in a team I couldn't compete with spiritually. But the Lord is faithful, and He allowed me to start to learn more.
So we. We're spending a lot of time together. I invited her on a camping trip, and in that camping trip, we shared a tent. And I gotta tell you, Christians, don't share a tent with the opposite sex that you're attracted to. Point blank and period.
Just don't. Yeah. There you go. And so we decided to be intimate. And after that, both.
In August. Shockingly, in August, I thought I had the flu. Oh, okay. Yeah. Went into the doctor and they said we you know, we want to do a pregnancy test.
So I said, Well, I can't be pregnant. When I was nineteen, I was told that I couldn't have children. And so they said, oh, okay, well, we need to run this anyway, so we're going to run it. And I said, okay. And before I'd even Returned home, the phone was ringing telling me that I needed to start taking prenatal vitamins and so excited and congratulations and It was a very difficult phone call.
Yeah. Because I thought, this isn't how. It's supposed to be. Mm-hmm. This isn't what I thought.
But also, so overwhelmed that the Lord would allow me. To have something that man had said I couldn't, but the great physician said you can. Absolutely. And so. Less than three months later, we were married.
We had our first child. And then we continued to have children. Oh, did you?
So four children in five years in their MS Carriage as well. And so in his sense of humor and the God of Abundantly More just showed off. That was an aphid's three twenty mother. Hmm.
Okay. So we are very thankful. We are the. Parents of four of the most amazing people we've ever known in our whole lives. Yeah.
And parenting them has been a great joy. They're all adults.
Now we have our first grandbaby. And we'll be celebrating 25 years of marriage this October. Oh, congratulations. That's so wonderful. You know, God is the best redeemer of our stories, right?
Every bit of our story is woven into his greater story, right? And he redeems. all of it. And here you are with four children and 25 years later. And you are a couple on mission, which we are getting ready to talk about right now.
But before we do that, I know that there are a lot of people at home thinking, what is mission? Yeah. Yeah, I think early on we knew we didn't know much about parenting godly children or living a God-honoring marriage. And so we developed a little bit of a mission statement as a family. And we just prayed, Lord, we want to go where you want us to go.
We want to do what you want us to do. We want to say what you want us to say. We want to serve who you want us to serve. And I think mission for us was realizing that. We wanted to live for something bigger than ourselves.
So, when did that realization happen? Was that like after you immediately got married? Was that after some time? Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, obviously, if you have a household with toddlers or young children, you realize that it feels like chaos. And so, I-organized chaos. It was organized. You were organized. I'm organized, yes.
So it was organized chaos. Bless you. With four children in five years. Bless your heart. Like, I'm applauding you over here.
I don't know if I can do it in the mic or not. We all have different gifts, right? We do. We all have different gifts. That would not have been mine.
I'm just telling you right now.
Well, the Lord had surrounded us with people who really believed in us early on. And so I remember some of the first things we got invited to consider doing were running a nursery at the church, like being part of that. Keeping a financial class was really early on. I literally remember holding Sebastian in my arms as we're walking around our small group group that we're leading in this financial class, and they just loved having him there. And so.
We would hand them off while we're leading small groups in the church on finances. And then, for our, you know, once we started leading marriage groups, then it was our daughter Tirza or our daughter Shiloh or our son Tanner, all being walked around while we were engaging in community with other people who wanted to live for something bigger than themselves, who wanted to keep learning and keep growing. Right. And during this time, like I was holding down a full-time job in the IT sector. And so anyone who works IT, they know it's more than 40 hours a week.
Yes. And then Tanya. Or anyone married to anyone who works IT. Yeah, yes, right. And Tanya was at home doing the heavy lifting of managing our household and the children.
And so there were times that we weren't clicking together in the same direction. And so there were moments that we had to just realign the wheels. As we ventured in and out of these different ministry opportunities, we met with a pastor who was very wise. And he gave us a challenge, and the challenge was basically that God has laid a buffet out in front of you, right? As a leader of the church, we can have you plugged into all these different things and giving, giving, giving, and serving, serving, serving wherever we need you to.
But what would be your best contribution to the body of Christ? And so that allowed us to take a time of reflection in that same timeframe. We transitioned away from that church actually, even though that was a great wisdom, into a larger church body and decided, you know, at six years into our marriage, maybe we ought to go and attend a getaway to invest in our marriage relationship. It was the first time in six years that we weren't pregnant or breastfeeding. And we had started or continued on the path of hosting these small groups, but started changing our topics from finance to marriage because it's sort of what we needed at the time.
Yeah, we actually had a really healthy marriage. We were doing very well, but neither of us had an example of, like Trevor said earlier, how to live out a godly marriage, how to raise our kids to know and love Jesus. We just didn't have that example, either one of us coming in. And we'd heard about the Weekend True Member on the radio. And so we thought, well, let's go do this.
Like, if it's our first time. Away in six years, let's go do something that will be good for our marriage. And I had no idea what to expect. We went and we laughed so hard and we had so much fun. And when we came home from that event, we brought lots of resources home.
I remember having all these conversations and telling people we had the greatest time. We laughed together. We got to talk through things that we don't necessarily have time for. And Every person without fail that we shared that with said, we are so sorry. We had no idea your marriage was struggling.
Really? And so that is really the statement that the Lord used to draw our heart into starting to get involved with family life because. We thought how could we be part of changing the way that people think of proactively. Investing in their marriage. Yes.
Because we did not attend in a place of brokenness. We were in a very good place. We just needed some tools, some encouragement. We needed to hear that we weren't alone in the things that we were learning and facing and wanting to grow in. And we found that.
And so that's really how the Lord drew our hearts to family life as a ministry. We started volunteering with a Weekend to Remember team. At the time, that was really the only way to be involved with Family Life as a volunteer was to be part of the Weekend Tree Member team. And so we started that. That was in 2008.
And I want to say, like, the reason why we decided volunteering at a Weekend Tree Member was the best next step wasn't because we just showed up there and we're like, oh, we want to be part of this team. It was in part due to the fact of the responses we were receiving. But there was a couple that was praying mightily for the Lord to do a work in this city that we are part of. And they came over through a connection and had coffee with us.
So they were the directors of the volunteer team.
So this was an exploratory conversation to learn more about what it looks like to serve.
Okay. So mind you, I'm on the floor changing diapers. Tanya's managing things in the house. All four kids are in like either pull-ups or bedrocks. They're at our house and they're like, we think you guys would just be perfect to be volunteers for the team.
We were like, we are high. See what's going on here, right? We're like, we have no idea what we're doing, are you kidding me? And so we we said yes. They said we believe you'd be perfect and we're going to help teach you and we think you're the right people to say yes.
So that was the start of you. Beginning to make intentional moves to being a missional couple, correct? Yeah. Connected to family life. Connected to family life, right?
Because we'd already been leading ministry in different contexts and very much caring for people in our community, in our church, family. And that's missional, and that's significant. Absolutely, it is. I think what I'm hearing you say is that mission is to live for something bigger than yourself. And that we're talking, since we're talking to a hopefully a faith-based audience, right?
We're talking about that God has called you into.
So, living for that, for his purposes, for your life. And that living as a missional couple, how would you define that? What does it mean to live as a couple on mission?
Well, just real quick, I just want to go back to what you just said because we believe very strongly that God prepared the good works for us to work in. He absolutely did. In advance. Let's just say that scripture, right? What is it?
Ephesians. Is it 210? We've been created in Christ Jesus to walk in good works. We are essentially a masterpiece with a mission. That mission has eternal implications.
It came from eternity for us to move in history in it, and it has impact into eternity. Yeah, he prepared the good works. And so I think as believers, sometimes we think, oh, I should be doing more. And that verse should really free us up: that he prepared the work. We don't have to manufacture it.
We get to walk in it. Can we say that again? Right. He prepared the work. We don't have to manufacture it.
Right. We get to walk in. We get to walk in it. Right. Yeah.
So it really is just a following of God into where he's already working and that he has already designed us to work in alongside him, right? You got it. Yeah. Sorry, thanks for letting me go back to that. No, it's great.
Yeah, so being a missional couple and what that means to us is, again, it is tied out that God has created a work for us to walk into. And it shouldn't be like walking outside in Orlando in 98 degree temperature. No, it shouldn't. It should not, especially, no, it just shouldn't. Yeah, it just shouldn't.
And so when we encounter resistance in something that we want to try to accomplish, knowing that we can set that aside and that we can pursue something different and knowing that God's going to make the path clear. But that doesn't mean sometimes our first step might not be in the mud or off the path a little bit or through the humidity as we try to struggle in. Understanding what's mine and what's God's with this. And so, I think a lot of it has to do with just that question: like, will you give your life to me? And I said, I would surrender it to you.
And so, what does that surrender look like? And it's truly letting Him in all aspects of my life. Right. And He controls the outcomes. Absolutely.
Our job is obedience. God's is outcomes. Right. It's almost like the waving of the white flag. Like, I give up.
You have complete control of every bit of territory in my life. It belongs to you to reconstruct, to manage how you will. And it's yours. And that really is what it is to surrender to Him. And then also, consequently, you'll follow Him into the mission that He has pre-purposed for you to fulfill, right?
Mm-hmm. All right, what a great conversation about marriage on mission. And by the way, we have a family life couple study called Your Marriage Has a Mission. It's something you can get at familylifetoday.com. Just click on the link in the show notes, and I think it will help you and your.
Marriage takes off to be all that God wants it to be. And guess what? We've got Cheryl back tomorrow with Trevor and Tanya. We'll see you then. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry, 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
Yeah.
