The Power of God at Work in Stepfamilies

All families face challenges. Blended families face some unique challenges and author and speaker Ron Deal says some of those challenges come not from inside the family, but from outside. The people within the four walls of your house can be the most loving, godly people in the world. But in a blended family situation, this is why we say they're tall and they're wide. They're multi-generational, they're tall, and they're wide in the sense that there's often another home, if not more than one home, that's impacting your home. And so what happens is somebody outside of your house influences the relationships inside your house.

So the biological mom's hopes and expectations intersect with the stepmom's hopes and expectations, and that just creates some challenge. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You'll find us online at familylifetoday.com. Life in a blended family is often complicated. If you're in a blended family, you can appreciate that. If you're not, you need to be aware that your friends who are, are facing some interesting challenges.

We're going to talk more about those today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I was so excited last Sunday when I got to church. I thought you were going to talk about NFL football. That's what makes Dave excited on Sundays. It's been a long time since the NFL football was on, okay? That's what Sundays are, church and then football.

Not in the middle of summer. Anytime. It never ends, Bob. You've got to get that in your head. Never ends. I showed up at church and I had a copy of Ron Deal and Gary Chapman's new book, Building Love Together in the Blended Family. And I had it with me because there's a couple in our church who are in a blended family. And we've talked before, and I know some of the challenges are going through, and I thought, they need a copy of this book.

So, I got a copy. And when I saw Andy at church, I went over and I said, hey, I was thinking about you, got this book, handed it to him. He lit up because he's looking for all the help he can get in the middle of the complexities of all of this. And I was just thrilled. In fact, I'm always thrilled to have a tool and to know Ron Deal, who has got a tool chest full of tools, that you can give to folks in these situations and just say, I was thinking about you.

I was praying for you. I thought this book might help you out. Ron is joining us on Family Life Today. Welcome. Thank you.

Ron gives leadership here at Family Life to Family Life Blended. You've been doing this for almost a decade now, right? Yeah.

Well, eight years, eight and a half years, something like that. And there's no one better in the world. We are big fans, Ron. I mean that.

No one better. You are an asset and a help to families all around the world. Think about that. And Bob, we have done the same thing because there's so many friends that we know that are struggling in marriage, so many blended, struggling. And so we say the name. Have you heard of Ron Deal? Yeah, right.

Because his resources are so, so good. We're going to talk this week about issues that blended families are facing. And part of the reason we're talking about this is because a couple years back, you updated your book, The Smart Step Family, and brought a whole bunch of new content in. You had a video series, a DVD series, The Smart Step Family, that you've also updated, and it's pretty much all new.

Yeah. Have blended families changed that much, or have you just learned a lot more since you started, or what? It's not that a lot has changed. It's that I just was able to address so many more subtopics within the overall journey that blended families face. I got to tell you, I went back and started the rewrite of the book that was originally 55,000 words, and we more than doubled it. Wow. And Bethany told me, you know what?

We need to take some of this out. Bethany's your publisher. Bethany House is my publisher. Right. We had to take out 30,000 words. It was 145,000 words when I turned in the manuscript.

Wow. And we took out 30,000, put them online as bonus content. They're free to whoever wants to read them. And the finished product ended up to be 105,000 words.

That's more than double most books. Yes. And it's because we started to address all the ins and the outs and the nuances and the, what if you have part-time children? And what if you're a grandparent and now a step-grandparent?

And how do you manage your marriage within? Have you thought about adopting your stepchildren? Is that a good idea? Is that not a good idea? We really dove into all those intricacies.

And by the time I got finished, they told me I had to cut some out. The thing I love about the DVD series is it tees up for couples conversations that happen after they've watched the videos that are personal and transformative. I know I've talked to you about this. If we could somehow ignite people to start these groups, go through this DVD series, or just get people handing out copies of your book to people in their church who know this, your burden is that blended families would see a pathway to wholeness and to restoration and to making the blended family all that God intends for it to be.

That's absolutely the case. And all of us sitting at this table believe in ministry. We're passionate about it. We're all invested in various forms or another because we believe the power of God come alive in community, put God's people together, get them talking about stuff that is rooted in His Word and is practical and has wisdom for life, and change happens.

I mean, I just have seen this over and over again. The thing about the DVD series that I love so much, and by the way, my publisher would probably hate what I'm about to say, and that's that the content is good. The power is in sharing the content with others. All of a sudden, they're learning from each other. They're encouraging one another. They're praying for each other. Somebody goes, you know what? This is what worked for us. And a couple sitting across the room goes, ah, that's it.

That's what we've been waiting on. That's the power of group. And this Smart Step Family video series, participants guide, gets groups of couples together. Yeah, you can do it all by yourself. Yeah, you can do a premarital counseling and send it home as homework if you're a pastor. But the real power, the real thing that we want people to do is just get a few couples together in a room and let them have at it. So, Ron, you're saying that change happens more in a group setting even? I believe that.

You know, I can't sit here and document. I just have seen it for so long. I got my start doing Step Family ministry, leading a small group in the church that I was the family minister in. All of a sudden, people are coming alive. Lights are going on. Eyes are opening up. You're putting words.

People are going, wait, wait, wait. That is what I feel. That is, you mean we can do something about this? It's not hopeless? And hope translates into action, translates into change and encouragement. I am a firm believer in the power of small groups. And me too. And it's biblical.

I mean, there's no question about it. Assemble yourself together regularly. When I talk to people at our church, when I talk to people at a weekend to remember, when I talk to people anywhere where they've sat in a setting where they've gotten spiritual input, and again, take a church service, take a marriage conference. Here's the question you ask them six months later. How's your marriage doing?

How's your life doing? And often you hear, well, it was an unbelievable weekend, but it didn't stick. And the next question I always ask, hey, did you ever get in a group? Remember we talked about small groups afterward. Did you plug into an art of marriage, art of parenting, vertical marriage, Smart Step Family group? Did you get in?

No. And the couples that see real life change, their answer is always, yep, got in a group. I had no idea what would happen, but man, I'm in a group.

I'm sitting in a living room. I hear another couple share a story and it's like, that's the same thing in our family. There's something that's catalytic.

When I hear somebody else struggles like we do, and they say, what's Jesus say about this? It's the life changing difference. Yep. And guys, I got to tell you one other element to this new video series that I'm really excited about. For 10 years, we had a series and the number one feedback response I got from groups was, this is amazing. This is amazing.

This is wonderful. It's all designed for the parents. Do you have anything for kids?

And I thought about it and thought about it and dreamed about it and dreamed about it. And when we had a chance to do the 10th anniversary edition of this series, I threw in a session for kids. It's a bonus session. It's short. It's sweet.

It's bite-size for kids, what they need to digest. And we let kids, that is young adults who are now looking back on their journey and their blended family, talk about their journey and give these children perspective. I had one group write to me and say, we just went through the video series. We'd been through the old one.

We absolutely love the new one. All the parents in our group bought the series on their own so that they could show their kids the bonus session. It's that important to parents. Well, and anybody who has seen the first one and looks at the second one, one of the things that's changed is the first one was you teaching in front of a large audience. But in this series, you're still teaching, but now we get to hear from couples in blended families. In fact, you start the series by explaining to those who are watching, we hear couples saying this, this blended family thing is a whole lot trickier than we realized when we were standing together saying, I do. In fact, let's listen to some of these couples as they talk in the video series. The complexity of our blended family looks pretty, pretty obscured to me sometimes.

It's pretty complex. We deal with having to communicate with our other two daughters in North Carolina. We FaceTime them every Monday night. We also have to travel to go get them in the summers.

We drive anywhere between a thousand to 2000 miles to pick them up and come back. My daughter enjoyed having two sisters when they came. So when they came into the picture, she's like, Hey, like this is, I have people, you know, but it was hard because it wasn't the same for them. For them, they always had each other. It's like Lila and Natalie.

It's always been Lila and Natalie. And when Nellie came in, they're just like, who are you? So they, they kind of pick at each other sometimes. It's like, you're not my real sister, or you're just my friend, or you're not my sister.

And they try to do those hurtful words because in their mind, it's hard for them to realize that they are brother and sister, that they are one family now and not two separate families. I'm imagining the small group watching that couple share their experience. And I'm just seeing all of the heads in the room nodding and bobbing and going, that's what's happening in our house too.

Yeah, see, that's the thing. We want blended family couples to be seen. And when they're watching this, they're going, yeah, that's my life. And typical marriage and family ministry material and books and resources really don't address those complexities. And so the first thing that happens is people feel affirmed.

Like they're not crazy. Wow, you know, we have that between home thing too. Wow, we have to travel. You know, I don't get to see my daughter very often. And when I do, it's short and, you know, and then you want everything to go right. And sometimes it doesn't go right because like with this couple, the step siblings aren't always open to one another to the same degree.

And so how do I make the weekend great when they don't even get along? That's the real stuff that people are dealing with day in and day out. Talk about how couples get blindsided because they come into a blended marriage with expectations. They've got to have some sense of reality. Yes, we know it's going to be hard, but then they get in and go, oh, this is, I never knew it was going to be this hard. Well, let's remind ourselves, all of us walk into anything a little bit starry-eyed, whether it's a marriage or whether it's having your first child, or no matter what it is, a new job.

You know, we always have a lot of hope and a lot of high expectation in it. And then life teaches us what we really got to have to deal with. The same thing is true for blended families, but sometimes they're still blindsided. Well, I've had my first child. I know what parenting is. Well, but this is your first stepchild. And it turns out that relationship just is different.

It evolves in a different level. You don't immediately have authority and relationship, and you've got to grow that over time. And in the meantime, you got to get the kitchen cleaned up. So how do we do the logistics of life and build relationship all the same? So yes, I have a sense of what life can be like, but the realities of it just aren't real until it's real. Well, my thought, Ron, listening to that couple was, when we get married, it's hard.

We have difficult adjustments. But with a blended family, I know that as a mom, and I think as a dad too, you're feeling the weight of what your kids are already dealing with and experiencing, and have experienced the pain that they've gone through, no matter what the circumstances. Now you're in this new family, this new marriage.

I would be so focused on my kids that it would be easy to have my marriage take a back seat. Is that pretty common? It is common.

And you nailed something. When two people get married for the first time, you have two sets of expectations. When a blended family comes together, you have five or seven, or including grandparents, 18. All of a sudden, you have lots of expectation.

And then how do we bring all those things together? And the mom factor, the parent factor, I see my children's expectations and hopes and desires not being met. In the story we just heard, one child is excited to have siblings, new siblings, step-siblings. But the other set of step-siblings on the other side is going, wait a minute, we have sisters, we don't need you.

What are you doing here? And so this child is disappointed. And of course, mom sees that, and her heart's like, ah. And what is she going to do? Well, she's going to fight for her child.

And protect her child. And then she's going to go to her husband, and she's going to go, hey, can't you get your kids to be nice to my kid? And now all of a sudden, the conflict is between the husband and the wife. And we've said this before on this program, what is a parenting issue in blended families is immediately a marriage issue in blended families.

And so yeah, that puts strain on the couple's relationship. Is it possible for couples to enter a blended family relationship with eyes fully wide open? Or are they always going to get blindsided by something? I think we're always blindsided by something in life.

Always. I do think people who get educated on the front end, who read, who watch this series, can learn a lot and have their eyes open. That doesn't mean your children are as open as you are. It doesn't mean all the expectations for everybody are just magically coming together. So there's still challenges in making it happen.

But at least you have a running start to know what to do about the challenges that you face. There are other couples in this series. In fact, there's one couple or one set of couples, I forget which, who talk about expectations they had coming into marriage and kind of like, oh, yeah, we thought it was going to be this way.

And then, oh, it wasn't exactly that way. Listen to these couples talk. So at the time that the Lisa and I decided to get married, I felt great about things. I felt like we were in a good place. We were going to get along and we're going to have a great new life together. My boys were happy at the time.

They were happy to kind of go into the marriage. I expected from things I hadn't seen growing up or in adulthood that my new wife, Felicia, would get along with my ex-wife, that they would be able to have conversations about our boys. But the first night that they called her and they started telling her about all the fun stuff that they had done that day with us, she stopped them and said, I don't want you to talk about that.

It hurts my feelings and I don't want to hear about her. So that was kind of my first, you know, example of how, okay, well, maybe it's not going to be as smooth sailing as I thought it was going to be, you know, because I would feel like we had built a good relationship and, you know, like I said an hour earlier, they're hugging my neck and telling me they love me and we're having a great time. And, you know, it's, you know, I think it's just they stop and they remember, oh yeah, I'm not supposed to like her as much as I do. I'm not supposed to feel this way.

I'm supposed to, you know, and I, you know, I think they feel an allegiance to the other home. For me, especially early being five, six, seven, eight years old, I didn't quite understand it. So to me, it was just my parents fighting all the time, even though they weren't together anymore.

It was just them fighting. I guess it was hard just trying to, I guess, balance time and connection. And how do I make myself seem respectful to one parent, respectful of the other and make it not look like I'm spending too much time with one and not with the other. I mean, there would be times that we would have great weekends and there would be no issues at all. There would be times on the flip side of that when we didn't have the boys for that weekend and we would go to one of their baseball games and they wouldn't say a word to us. They would just act like we weren't even there. And when we would try to say something to them, they would just look at us and say, you know, it's not our time with you. We can't talk to you right now. It's not coming from them.

This is coming from the adults in their other home. And so you have to have a lot of grace and you have to have a lot of patience and you have to have a lot of thick skin. It's not for the weak. I was listening to that clip and I was thinking there was a movie came out years ago called Trouble with the Curve. It was a baseball movie. Great movie. But I remember it was.

I remember that's what we're talking about here. There are curves there are curved balls that are going to get thrown in marriage and you're expecting a fastball or maybe maybe a change up. You get the curve and all of a sudden it's like, oh, I don't know how to hit this one. You swing and you miss and you go, this is not going the way. Actually, in a blended family, maybe I'm wrong. Ron, you're the expert. It's almost like there's not just one ball coming at you.

You know, I don't have to hit this ball. There's seven or eight, you know, and every person in the blended family is dealing with all of this. It's juggling at multiple times. Yeah, and the insidious part of this one is the stepmom gets thrown a curve because she's trying to develop a relationship with her stepson, but the biological mother in the other home is doing or saying things that is making it tough for the stepson.

And that never happens. You know, I think this is one of the biggest things that I want to try to help people prepare for. The people within the four walls of your house can be the most loving, godly people in the world, but in a blended family situation, this is why we say they're tall and they're wide. They're multi-generational.

They're tall and they're wide in the sense that there's often another home, if not more than one home, that's impacting your home. And so what happens with somebody outside of your house influences the relationships inside your house. So the biological mom's hopes and expectations intersect with the stepmom's hopes and expectations, and that just creates some challenge.

You heard this young man. I mean, doesn't your heart kind of go out to him? I want to sit down and cry after listening to that because I'm hearing the angst of how the stepson is so torn.

That's it. And he doesn't know which way to go, and yet I'm hearing the angst of the stepmom thinking, oh, I thought this was going to be great and I thought they liked me and it seemed like it, and I'm also feeling it for the mother, the bio mom, because she's feeling insecure. Well, my two boys love her more than they love me. I remember when I would go down and visit my dad and my stepmother and her son, and I didn't spend my life with them as much as I did with my bio mom.

I was mostly with my mom, but I remember coming home after a week or four or five days with my dad and stepmom, I felt like I could not share with my mom how great my stepmom was to me. I mean, I just kept it. It was a secret.

Oh, you know, we just sort of hung out and yet I'm like, we were on a boat and we did. I couldn't share it because I was that son. Like, I don't want to hurt my mom's feelings. And even after we got married, I thought Dave's stepmom is amazing. And yet Dave's mom, his bio mom, was always trying to get hints like, well, she probably really wasn't that great, right? And so you're torn right there even as an adult.

Yep. And this young man was saying when he was five or eight, you know, he's trying to figure out how to love everybody and not hurt feelings, which is the natural bind that kids feel. And by the way, I should, I should quickly add, not every child in every blended family experiences this, but it is pretty common. This is one of the things I talk about in the bonus session to kids. So we put words on it.

So we help them understand what that, what you just said there, Dave, that split part of you. I really enjoyed, but I can't share that with my mom. Like, what do you do with that feeling?

And is it okay to actually like and appreciate or value your step parent? Can you imagine, think of this, if I would have had a place to go and hear other sons or daughters say similar things, which is what a blended family, step family, small group offers, I would have had somewhere to process that. At least I'd be like, I'm not the only one. I had not a single person. And I really thought nobody else feels this.

I would have been sitting in a room going, oh my goodness. Now let's talk. That's what you offer through the DVD series. It opens the door to conversation and moves the heart of parents to their kids. And that is one of the biggest steps that needs to happen. If kids feel safe and comfortable talking through these challenges with a parent, it ripples into all sorts of positivity within the family. Like all of a sudden I'm free to enjoy my step parent. All of a sudden I'm not living in fear and hiding what's going on inside of me.

I'm able to be a kid again, instead of having to be an adult taking care of the adults. It really changes the dynamic for children and for the adults. So a series like this, you're talking to churches that are doing this as a part of their regular curriculum, but even more than that, it's just one courageous step family saying let's get three or four of our friends together and get in the living room and let's go through this together.

More often than not, that's what's happening. You know, the people that are motivated are the step families themselves and it's absolutely the way to go. We've also found great success with pastors who will assign this as sort of premarital counseling with couples that they're working with. And I'm sure there are some folks who would go, yeah, we need to get our step family in a little better order before we would try to host a small group series.

No. Start now. The beautiful thing about God's people coming together is we're all sinners, we're all messed up, we're misfits and we belong together and we should grow together. I think we call that on Sunday church. You can go to our website at familylifetoday.com. There's information about the video series about the book The Smart Step Family and we should mention the event that you're planning for the fall, which is the summit on step family ministry. We've been doing this for many years and people from all over the country have come and spent a couple of days kind of encamped together, networking with other people to figure out how to be more effective in ministering to step families in local churches or in communities.

These have been great events, but every time we've done them, people have said we wish there was a way for those of us who can't make the trip and spend a couple of days in another city. We wish there's a way we could get access to this content and still be able to network with other people who are engaged in step family ministry and this year we're doing that. So, the summit on step family ministry this year is going to be a two-day live stream event, October 1st and 2nd.

Mark those days on your calendar. There's information about the main sessions and the breakouts available on our website at familylifetoday.com. Go there and click the link for all the details about the upcoming summit on step family ministry that's happening October 1st and 2nd.

Again, it's a live stream event, so you and others from your church staff or from your community can plan to be a part of the event this year and the only hotel reservation you need to make is in your bedroom because you can stay at home for the event this year. Again, go to familylifetoday.com for information about the event or about the DVD series The Smart Step Family and Ron's book by that same title. All of these are helpful resources and Ron, we are grateful for your ongoing investment in the lives of blended families all around the world. Now, tomorrow we're going to continue our conversation with Ron Deal about some of the complexities facing blended families and we're going to talk about the challenges between step parents and step children and how you navigate your way through those complexities and those challenges. Ron will be back tomorrow.

Hope you can be back as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.