I'm very careful to put anything on myself as an identity marker besides the very narrow lane of I am a child of God.
I feel very hesitant to attach anything else to that. Mother, wife, author, neighbor, it's all of that can go away. Welcome to Family Life Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. When we first got married. Oh, we're going back there?
Yes. I did not know you're starting there. I was so excited because we were gonna change the world together. We're gonna follow Jesus.
We're not sure what this looks like of where he's gonna call us, but we're gonna follow. I felt like my life had so much purpose as I was following him. Me too. And then I remember getting to a point and you probably remember hearing this over and over. We had three boys, five years old and under, and I had this mantra in my head. Instead of being filled with this purpose, I started saying, I have no life.
I have no life. Do you remember that? Oh yeah. I heard it every day. And I think what's happened now, I see this happening with a generation of people that they have this purpose and they feel like, oh my purpose is gonna be this grand, extravagant, life-changing, that they're gonna be on this platform that's so big. I get a little frustrated by that at times because I'm thinking, what happened to just like, let's follow him wherever he has us go. So we're gonna talk about purpose today. We've got the Needhams in the studio.
You already heard their voices over there. Jimmy and Kelly are with us. And welcome to Family Life. You've been here before, Jimmy. Have you ever been on? I don't think I've been on with you guys before. Get ready for the thrill of your life. I'm buckled up.
You ready? Here we go, guys. We're not messing around.
I mean, Kelly's a veteran of this place. Have you been on one time or several times? Just one time, yeah.
Just one time, once before. But we did more than one show. We did several.
Yes, we did. On your book, Friendish. That's right. You know, by the way, you have the most creative titles.
Well, that's a lot due to the man I married. Really? He titled Friendish. Really? He did.
He came home, he wrote it on a post-it note. I've seen no royalties from it. She keeps every dime. All these years. You have five kids, but she just hoards the money. Unreal. She hoards it all, guys. She needs to.
You gotta pay for those kids. Now, did you title Purpose Fools? No, he did not, actually.
You did? No, I had actually a support team of people while I was writing this book, and I was asking for title help. And somebody actually wrote to me, a friend of mine from Latvia, said, what about Purpose Fool?
Wow. And I thought, that is so interesting. But it was a little too harsh of a title.
So, to just, who am I? Who wants to pick up a book called I'm a Fool, Purpose Fool? But we liked it so much, that play on the word purposeful, and just alluding to, maybe we have it wrong. So, we added the ED. I like it. It's intriguing. Yeah. So, that was the hope.
It would get people to pick it up. Tell us what you guys do, besides parent your five children. Well, that's about 90% of my life. It is about 90%, yeah. So. I mean, you have a one-year-old up to 13. That's right. Yeah. So, we are in the training, obedience stage of that 18-month early tantrum. Yeah. All the way to 13-year-old tantrums. Yeah, that's right. It's tantrums all around, basically. I don't want to wear my helmet on the way to school.
Sorry, on your bike, by the road. No, we were going to do that. So, it's a widespread. And two of those kids are adopted? Yes, that's right. From India, yeah. Oh, from India. I didn't know that.
Two international adoptions. And you've got a podcast. We do, yeah.
So, we have a studio in our little upstairs room. We love doing that together. It's been so fun. For a couple of years, we've been doing that.
And then, on the side, while the kids are at school, you know, I'm trying to find little ways to write here or there in seasons, different seasons. And then, Jimmy is a pastor at our church. Yeah, pastor now. How many years did you travel and tour and do music?
Yeah. So, I first got signed to a label when I was 19 or 20, and then kind of spent all of my 20s and my early 30s touring, doing that, making records. And then, right around 30, 31, I started to roll off, like, the road. Life and started plugging in more to the local church, the church that we were members at. I came on staff and started doing that there. I still write music and do that sort of thing. But I would say the lion's share of my time has been pastoring, preaching, leading worship, those types of things. So, yeah. You went to Dallas Seminary.
Where did you find? Yeah, I'm in it right now, actually. You are right now.
With your five kids and a job. Don't I know it. Wow.
Don't I know it. I'm sitting in class next to these youngsters that are like, just in their 20s, doing like five classes. Also, calling people youngsters immediately makes you old. Youngsters.
It's true. These whippersnappers. Are we oldsters? That's amazing that you went youngsters. I did.
I don't know. You pulled that out. I did. Well, talk a little bit about Purpose Fooled. I mean, did you have the same experience that Ann was talking about as a mom, like, losing your purpose or direction?
Yeah. And actually, surprisingly, I feel like that moment happened for me before kids. So really, when Jimmy's music career took off, it really challenged me.
It exposed those holes in my understanding of what makes life meaningful, what makes my activities meaningful, really early. So we were 20 when we got married. We were in college together expecting to have fairly normal, quote unquote, normal jobs, you know. And then while we're engaged, he signs a record deal. We're on the road. We get married.
We're traveling every weekend. He's doing concerts, signing autographs, doing TV shows. And I'm just along for the ride using a lot of my business degree.
So I naturally fell into this role of merchandise management and road manager and general manager and do the website and all the things. So here I am at these concerts. My husband's preaching the gospel from stage.
People are telling me every day, you know, he's this music has changed my life. And all I'm feeling is I want to do ministry, too. And I'm stuck here on the bench, on the sidelines, doing the nitty gritty that has to get done. But it really was hard for me. And I felt very unsatisfied in that that space.
And I felt it again in motherhood when I had two kids in diapers. It was the same experience, sending him off on the, you know, on these tours and all this. And I'm home. I have one moment where you two, you were at a photo shoot for your album, Clear the Stage. And you're sending me these photos of you. Oh, I'm going to do a photo shoot today. What are you doing?
They're buying him new clothes, hundred dollar jeans, you know, all this stuff. And I literally have a baby on one shoulder. I'm in the same clothes I slept in. And it's 3 p.m. I think I have spit up. There's a, you know, the house is a mess.
And I'm at home texting him back. And I remember getting on my knees in the bedroom with, Lord, help me be excited for him and be happy. I'm just mad right now.
I want a new pair of jeans. Did you guys, did you ever talk about it? Like, oh, yeah. Was that a conflict in your marriage or did it come out?
Absolutely. It was a conflict. Jimmy, what did it make you feel? Well, I don't know. I think it took a little while for you to even be able to identify the feeling, you know, the feelings almost came first and then the logic behind them came second. So I think early on in our marriage, it was more just like, oh, man, we're fighting a lot or there's conflict or my wife isn't happy.
And neither of us kind of know why. Yeah, that's right. Would you say that's true? Absolutely. I did not have words for any of that.
Yeah. I was mad at my circumstances. That's really what was happening. And I was mad at the Lord ultimately for that. But I was taking it out on Jimmy, which I have a ton of grip for that first year. But I was really not a pleasant person to live with in that first, really that first nine months of marriage. It was hard.
Did you feel any guilt? Because I know when I was the chaplain of the lions, we go on a road trip. And when you go on a road trip with an NFL team, you're on a charter flight, you get on the plane and the flight attendants know, hey, Dave likes to add coke. So by the time you get home, you've just been catered to all weekend.
I'd walk in the house and she'd be like throwing a baby to me. Yeah. And there's part of me that's like, wait a minute, I'm important. All weekend I've been treated like somebody important. And now, and so at some point I was like, I'm living a life that's not even real.
She's living the real life. So I'd feel sort of guilty, but we would get in conflicts and it was all because I was so selfish. And also, though, I think if you're a mom and you're at home with your kids, even if you're working, there's still this guilty part of you. I felt guilty for not just embracing all the parts of motherhood.
That's right. There's this like, I know that I should be so grateful and I was grateful and I was thankful. But there's, when you're in the trenches of it and you're not sleeping and you have a colicky baby, it's easy to feel resentful and we oftentimes take it out on our spouse.
Yeah. Well, and I think that wrestle for me, one of the biggest transformations that happened in it as I started taking those things to the Lord, is realizing my deep ache is really that my life and my activity, my work would be meaningful. And it's hard for it to feel meaningful when all I'm doing all day is changing diapers. And my husband is, quote unquote, changing the world, sharing the gospel.
Right. And there's this hunger for my work to matter. And I think one thing I felt really comforted by the Lord through his word in is that that longing is good. That's actually a good longing that I that I want my life to matter, that I want to do things that are meaningful is a good godly longing and Jesus doesn't despise it.
Yeah. And I'm actually made for something great, but it's actually bigger than my work. It's bigger than motherhood. And I think that even helped me in motherhood to go, mother, it isn't enough.
No, it's not. And if I was on the road with my husband, that still wouldn't be enough either. I'm actually made for something even more than that. And feeling a validation to those deep longings was what began to change things and actually grant me the contentment that I knew I needed to stay in the seasons that God had put me in. Well, take us back there.
Like, how did that come about? Because I think as a listener and especially as a mom or you're just feeling what is my purpose? Everyone has that thought. How did you get to that point of did you come to a crisis point? But one of the things you just slipped in there as I spent time with God. Yeah. Sometimes it's easy for us to get resentful of our role and our where we are in life.
And so we start pulling away thinking that our happiness is going to come through being purposeful. That's right. Doing. Yes.
Doing. That's it. That's right. We want to do for God. Yes.
The problem with verbs. Yes. I love that little section in your book. Yes. Explain that. Yeah. So that's what I was seeing in myself.
I want to do. Doing is what makes life meaningful. But it's actually a noun that makes life meaningful.
The person of God is what makes life meaningful. And one of the first places that I saw that is reading a book about Corrie Ten Boom. I don't know if it's a book her assistant wrote about the later years of her life. So Corrie suffered a stroke in the last like four years of her life. And her assistant is writing about watching this experience from this book called, you know? Yeah. It's called Safer Than a Known Way.
Safer Than a Known Way. It's wonderful. And so she watches Corrie go from this very busy, active in ministry woman in her later years of her life in her 70s or 80s, to suffering a stroke and lying in bed and receiving care and learning to communicate through blinking and all of that and watched her do it with grace. And she says something in the book like this, I realized in that moment that it was much more difficult for a very gifted woman like Corrie to do nothing when God's will required it than to do much. And I was not the same after I read that.
Really? I was not. Just hit you. Well, I realized if God asked me to do nothing, that would be really hard for me. I want to do something.
I want to be the active agent in the world change. And what if through my circumstances, God says, no, actually what I want you to do to glorify me is to be still, to do nothing, to just receive. And I realized I think I have something, some misunderstandings.
And so through like that book, and then I had two kids in diapers, Jimmy's on the road, and I think I felt this confidence to come to God and go, all right, help me understand what I'm missing. And I remember reading the apostles come up to Jesus a couple of times and ask, who's the greatest? Who's the greatest in the kingdom? Come on, Jesus, let us know.
I know there's a ladder here, you know, who's at the top? I mean, today we do that. We do that in social media. Of course.
How many followers do you have? You have the blue check. Yes, that's right. Exactly. By the way, we don't.
We're nobody. So go ahead. He has a blue check. Just go.
Should we call him that? I hear you can get your own blue check now anyway. You can't just pay for it, you know.
Jimmy didn't pay for it, I hope. You know, let's talk about this later. I remember, though, reading those moments, those conversations the disciples have with Jesus, and having this realization that he didn't rebuke the question, that he gave them a very direct, clear answer, which to me honors the question that he doesn't look at them and say, you fools, how much longer will I be on this? You know, he has moments like that. He doesn't. He says, no, there are people who are great in the kingdom. He even says that, you know, men born of women.
John the Baptist is the greatest, but the least of these are even greater. So Jesus has an understanding of greatness and he's trying to pass it on to them. He loves the desire for greatness.
It's just misdirected. That helps to know that my desire isn't wrong. That's right. My desire is not wrong. Yeah, that was so affirming to me and then gave me the courage to go that whole path down with Jesus, to go, all right, if that's true, if you care about my desire for greatness, you want me to be great and I'm misdirected in trying to actualize that, then will you show me the real path? And I'm going to study that. What does Jesus have to say about greatness? So I just took to the Word. What does he have to say about greatness? And I realized as I was reading that he was actually not only teaching me about greatness through the Word, but in my life situation with two babies and learning to serve them, he was giving me a training ground to actually learn greatness in experience as well.
Yes. And it just changed my experience of motherhood even, because even my motherhood now became not just about my kids and learning to be the best mom I could, but learning to be, what is kingdom greatness to my Lord? It became about Jesus. It elevated me above my situation, my circumstances, to the very person of God, which is where I think that desire for greatness is actually actualized, is in the very person of God. When I surrendered everything to Jesus, I was 18 years old and I was, I said to him, Lord, I'll do anything.
I'll go anywhere. And I felt in my spirit, I felt like this, oh, and you know that I have great things in store for you. But because back then there were no famous Christians, maybe Billy Graham. So when I heard greatness, I wasn't thinking of a platform. I wasn't thinking speaking. I was just thinking I will be used by him, which is all of us. But I'm seeing as I talk to younger women today, when they hear greatness, they want it to be, and I say, what do you think?
What's that look like? And they'll say like, I can see myself speaking to millions. And the next person...
I can't tell you how many times the anise come home from an appointment with somebody in our church. We had to go, well, they want a platform. They want to be a social media influencer. They think we do that. I'm like, that's what they want to do?
She says this many times, like that's their vision. That's their definition of greatness. Yeah. And of impact.
Right. In some ways, it's a noble desire misdirected. That's a good way to say it. I think women and men need the validation that you're longing to be great, to make an impact for the kingdom is good. But it's misdirected into something that's actually not in line with what Jesus teaches about greatness.
Just what Jesus did with the disciples. One of the first things he actually says about greatness is he picks up a child. He says, whoever becomes like this child will become great in my kingdom, which a child is really content with being a recipient. I mean, that's how I ended up defining it in the book that children are just recipients. They're happy for everything to be provided for them and to be receivers of that. It's actually growing them out of that, that we're trying to move them toward adulthood out of childhood is to be contributors.
That's good. And so when I think about even my greatness in the kingdom, how content am I to be utterly dependent on God in every moment of my day? To be a receiver of his strength and everything I do. That's true greatness. Let me ask both of you. How do you do that?
How do you sit before God and be that recipient? I mean, did it really change this perspective? Because you still got kids. You still got spin up.
You still got poopy diapers. Yes, it did. It did. I would say in that season where I was learning that, it was probably one of the most significant shifts of joy and contentment and peace and passion for God that I had had in my adult life. So much so that you at one point said to me, I feel like you're having a revival or something.
That's what I was going to ask you. Did you see it? Yeah, there was an absolute shift. She was one way and then she over time, and not even a very long time, over time was not that way. And the only difference in between that was some of these discoveries, these aha moments of, oh, it really is about me tethering myself to a person, not an activity.
That changes things. Kelly, how did you do that when you have these little babies? Because most of us, when we get in that stage, we're like, I don't have time to read my Bible. I haven't had time to do nothing. You don't lock yourself in the bathroom just to get a moment. Because a lot of young moms are in that situation where they feel spent.
They're giving everything they have away. How did you get those moments with Jesus? With little kids on my back.
Now that sounds silly, but it's true. I was in the living room. They're crawling around me. One of them, I have a picture of one of my kids napping on the floor.
You know, she was like six months old on a blanket. There's a pile of laundry by my feet. And my toddler was playing in the background and I've got my Bible open. But my answer to how that happened is I was just hungry. I was really hungry for this problem to be solved. In the same way that if you're hungry as a mom, like physically hungry, you'll find a way to get a snack in.
Somehow it will be on the go, it will be with your kids, but you will feed yourself or you'll find a way to get sleep if you're exhausted. But my soul was hungry. And so I was just eager for that. And then was realizing, too, as I'm spending time with God, I was like, well, this is my first commandment. Before I even get to the serving others, loving your neighbors, you love yourself. Before I even get to loving my kids, God tells me, priority number one, love me with everything you have. So I feel like it gave me permission as a mom, too, to supplant my kids from priority number one in my day. That's, I mean, that is hard to do and many of us put our kids as number one. How'd you do that?
What's that look like? Occasionally, and I don't know who will love this, but occasionally it meant I'm going to put a show on for my kids and I'm going to sit in the kitchen and I'm going to read my Bible because it's the only way, because again, Jimmy was traveling a lot at that time. He was home every week, but there were some days in a row where it's like, it's just me. And so that's what I could do. And I was like, all right, you guys are going to watch a show and I'm going to sit right here and I'm going to read my Bible.
I don't know how else to do it. It was law and order, wasn't it? That's what you normally sit on. That's right.
Yeah, SVU. Somehow it captured your attention. It did. Just sucked them in.
Or it was in the car, right? Buckle them in, go for a drive, get a coffee. I'm like, you guys are okay back there.
I'm just reading. You know, they wanted to be with me. Yeah.
So I'm like, I'm going to let them be with me, but I need to not be chasing them around the house. I mean, was there any resentment that Jimmy's gone as much as he was? Because Ann had that when I would travel a lot.
I'm not saying, well, we're so much less than you guys. She probably had no struggles. We struggled with that because I would even come home and she'd look at me like, seriously, you got to leave again in two days? Like, yeah. And somehow I was, I was committing myself to too many things I shouldn't have, but that brought some tension in our marriage.
Did you have any of that? Oh, yeah. Well, for a lot of the time we were actually, especially in the early years, we were traveling together. That actually exacerbated it more than, in my opinion, more than being apart. I think there was hard things about me being away for sure. But my memory was the most difficult times were when we were traveling together because now you're, as Kelly, especially being confronted. I mean, you're seeing the thing that's, that's sort of poking you.
He walks on, the lights pop on. Yeah. Well, and what was subtly being communicated to me in those early years of travel is that I'm important because I'm married to Jimmy.
That's your identity as his wife. Yeah. So that's, and that's the only category people had for me. It wasn't wrong that that's how people connected with me, but they were impacted by Jimmy. That's why they were at the concert.
That's the reason they were there. They meet me. The only connection they have is you're married to this person who's transformed my life through his music, but I'm hearing that all the time. Yeah. It took a lot of effort to then go, hold on. What is my identity? Because I am a wife and I am married to a very godly man who I love very dearly and who I am so thrilled about what God's doing in him, but I've had to work through those kind of identity, that identity piece for myself, but it was challenging.
It was really challenging those early years and then even off the road. It's the same thing, you know? Yeah. I mean, how do you understand identity now? Is she, you know, that's a big word.
It is a big word. And it's a big theology to understand who we are in Christ and this ties into it so closely. So how do you, how do you talk about it now? So I'm very careful to put anything on myself as an identity marker besides the very narrow lane of I am a child of God. I feel very hesitant to attach anything else to that. Mother, wife, author, neighbor, it's all of that can go away. I think even our travels to other parts of the world in India, we have two sons from India and going, if you can't universally apply this to believers around the world or if I can't have this identity in old age or if God strips things from me and sickness.
I mean, we've watched mentors go through very severe sicknesses who were active in ministry to now just receiving care. Yeah. Can this identity stay with me through all of that?
If it can, then I'm good with it. I'm a creature that's part of my identity. I'm a human being that's part of my identity. But then in Christ, I'm a child of the living God. That's who I am and that has to be enough meaning for me and a weight for me to hold my whole identity.
And if it isn't, then I've got work to do. Everything else though, I actually feel like I'm better as a wife, as a mom, as a neighbor, as a friend, when those things aren't identity markers for me. I now can serve those people. I mean, that's even what I noticed in our marriage. As soon as I was able to separate a little bit, I'm not just a wife. God, I'm your child and you gave me marriage and you can take it away one day. Okay, now that I understand that, now I can see Jimmy, not just as my husband, as my brother in Christ, I can think about how I can serve him instead of how I can use him to make me feel better as a wife. Yeah, and it's not that we're saying you can't say, oh, I'm a Bible teacher or oh, I'm a mother or things like that.
I think we need to begin to appreciate the temporary nature of those titles. Because if you do like tattoo that on yourself permanently and then like one of our mentors who is one of the best Bible teachers we know, you get MS and now you can't do anything and your family's just taking care of you. Have you lost your sense of who you are because well, God has made me a Bible teacher.
Well, maybe a better way to talk about it is God has made me a Bible teacher in this season until he changes the plans. But the one fixed given, the one thing that's not changing is I am his son. So, I think if we can appreciate that all those other identity markers are really temporal, but the one that sticks, that's the one we need to live and die by. I think that sorts so many things out.
I think this is just rich. Even as a listener for you to ask that question, what is my identity? Who am I? But then that other question too, what's your purpose?
I feel like I just can't get it out of my head. Your purpose is a person. It's Jesus. And so to ask yourself, is that yours? Or where are you finding your identity? Or where are you trying to get your purpose? Because as you said, if it's in what I'm doing, that's always shifting, always changing. You know, when she would lead the Lion's Wives Bible study, she would tell me this.
I would lead it once a season, by the way. They'd have me come in. She didn't even come and have a husband. Anyway, she said, you know, you would often ask them every season, I want you to tell me who you are. You can't mention who your husband is, what you do, you can't even mention an occupation.
Just tell me who you are. Where you went to college, any of your training, even your job, because these are incredibly sharp, beautiful, gifted women. And when I asked that question, crickets, silence, because they had no idea. But if one of them, there was one woman, one year, she said, I'm a child of the living God. And I was like, oh, she's got it. She's got it.
That's exactly right. That's a great question to ask our kids too. Yeah. It's so important to know where our identity rests. Who are you? Who are you?
You know, that's a really good question. Maybe a great question to ask around the dinner table tonight when you're having a meal with your family, but then make some qualifications with your spouse and your kids and get to the heart of who they believe they are. And then, like we were just hearing, point them to Jesus. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Jimmy and Kelly Needham on Family Life Today. Kelly has written a book called Purpose Fooled, Why Chasing Your Dreams, Finding Your Calling, and Reaching for Greatness Will Never Be Enough. Wow, what a title.
Provocative and just one that I think so many of us need to dwell on in this culture that champions perhaps the wrong thing. This book is gonna be our gift to you when you give to the ministry of family life. You can get your copy right now with any donation that you make. Just go online to familylifetoday.com and click on the Donate Now button at the top of the page. Or you can give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number's 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us a donation in the mail if you'd like to.
Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. It's a fantastic conversation today, and I'm really looking forward to it continuing tomorrow. Jimmy and Kelly Needham are gonna be back with the Wilsons to talk about overcoming insecurity and finding true fulfillment. That's tomorrow, we hope you'll join us. On behalf of David and Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
