A Heritage Passed Down

Have you ever tried to map out a plan for your life?

Alistair Begg says he did that once. I had written the script for my life, which was I was going to get a law degree, a BMW 2002, and I was going to marry this American girl called Susan Jones if I could just manage to keep her on the wire for long enough as I was writing letters across the ocean. I faxed that to God, as one would say, and asked for his signature. He sent it back just with a blank sheet.

He said, if you sign the bottom of the blank sheet, I'll fill in the stuff for you. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are David and Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Whatever plan you have imagined for your life, here's a promise.

The one God has for you is even better. Stay with us. Welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. Many of our listeners know this. About 10-plus years ago, we got a phone call from our friends at Truth for Life, the ministry that Alistair Begg leads, and they were getting ready to make some changes to their program. They called and asked Dennis and me, would there be any way that Bob could be the announcer for our program? That's a compliment.

It was humbling. Dennis and I sat down and thought, is that going to be confusing for people who hear me on Family Life Today, and then they hear me on Truth for Life, and they go, wait, what's going on? You should do a Scottish accent on Truth for Life.

I've tried. Nobody can touch that Scottish accent of Alistair's. So we talked about it, and ultimately I said, you know, I've stolen so much from Alistair over the years in any preaching I've done that I kind of owed it to him. So for more than 10 years now, I have been the guy at the beginning and the end of the Truth for Life radio program introducing Alistair Begg. Yeah, I've heard you. Honestly, one time I heard you and I thought, oh, it's Family Life Today. And then I heard Alistair, and I'm like, oh, it's not. Well, I have such respect, such appreciation and admiration for him.

And recently we were together. We had about, oh, about an hour and a half where we just sat down in a studio and I said, there are things I don't know about your life, about your history, about your background, about your marriage, your family that I think listeners would be interested in. So we recorded an extended interview, and this week we're going to share some excerpts of that interview with our listeners. And for those listeners who don't know who Alistair is, I go, who's this Alistair Begg guy? Alistair is the pastor at Parkside Church in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. He is the Bible teacher on the radio program Truth for Life. He is an author.

He's a well-respected, well-known conference speaker. And if you don't know him, you will recognize immediately that he did not grow up in these parts. Alistair grew up in Scotland. And so I started my questions with him about what it was like to grow up in Scotland a generation ago. My grandfather on my father's side was a shepherd and, you know, literally sheep on the cliffs. But eventually, once you have children, there's only fishing and farming and not a lot of that. And so you have to go down south to find work, not only for yourself, but also for your children.

So I have this strange combination of being raised in the sort of west of Scotland by a father and a grandmother on his side who were Highland Scots, which gives a flavor to things that I'm very grateful for. What did your father do? What vocation? He was an insurance guy. He was pensions, investments, life assurance. He was discharged from the army in the Second World War because he had a sense of call to the ministry. And they discharged him so that he could attend Glasgow University. He never was able to explain to me why that did not happen, that having been discharged, he then reenlisted and did not take it up. And one of his questions for me as I grew and when I ended up in pastoral ministry, he used to ask me, do you think there is such a thing as second best, that God has the best and then he has a second best?

Do you think that my life has been God's second best? Which was always very troublesome to me. And I'm not sure I ever gave a very convincing answer to the question. But I think as a Christian layman, he was a wonderful model of friendship in the workplace that wasn't intrusive. But he always would say to me, even though the fellas may think I'm a little crazy, there will come a day when they will walk into my office and close the door and say, John, I want to ask you about this. And he said, so we just soldier on in prospect of that day. And I always admired that about him because he had a very clear witness without, as I say, being invasive in people's lives. The spiritual legacy in the big family goes back a long way?

Well, on my father's side, yes, it goes back up into the Highlands and up then into essentially Scottish Presbyterianism, which was not my background in growing up. But the legacy of it lingers. Those statements that find themselves embedded, as with every family, like my father would say, what's for you will not go by you. That what God has purposed will be fulfilled, that kind of thing.

Well, that's not just your average sentiment. And so, yeah, the beneficiary of that. And I've heard you describe the church environment in which you grew up as being pretty proper, pretty strict.

Well, it was a combo, actually. It depends on who I was talking to and exactly what era they were referencing when I'm answering that question. Because an interesting thing happened that when my grandparents moved from the Highlands down to Glasgow, as I've said, a man who was a Highland Scot as well, and I don't know the details of it, but he came to become the superintendent of a mission that was established by Moody and Sankey at the turn of the century. When Moody and Sankey came to Britain, as you know, whether to Edinburgh or in certain places to the north of England, certainly to Glasgow, and they did these big tent missions, then Moody would go around and he would seek to raise money before he left and say to people, look at all these folks that have professed faith in Christ. We need something for them. Well, one of those places was called the Tent Hall.

All right. Not a great deal of imagination went into that. We used to have a tent. We'd build a hall. Hey, let's call it the Tent Hall.

So what was that? Well, it was the legacy of Moody. It was a building near the fish market in Glasgow, so it wasn't salubrious surroundings, that seated 2,200 people. It was a combination of evangelical fervor and social engagement. Insofar as street people, because we were talking about the 50s, street people had nothing from the government at all. That had not stepped into place.

We could comment on that as well. But anyway, so if the church didn't do it, nobody did it. I grew up in that environment. I went to Sunday school in that context. The reason was because the person who became the superintendent was a Highland Scot and knew my grandparents.

That became the context. It was there that my father was converted as a 13-year-old boy. So you had exposure to the Tent Hall and to the high church simultaneously. Did you gravitate in one direction or another?

No. At that point, it just seemed perfectly natural to me that this was where my father was, therefore that's fine. Because by the age of 15, then my father's job took us to England.

I introduced another element. I should say as well that my parents were both baptized as believers. Interestingly, I just saw a piece in the Times in the last six weeks where a letter written by the pastor of the church where my mother was baptized. This pastor was on the Titanic and he gave up his place on the lifeboat to somebody who he asked him, do you know where you will go if you don't make this?

The man said no. Then he said, well, then you should take my seat. And the letter from this man just sold for a fairly substantial sum of money, not because of the spiritual aspect of it, but just because of the historical value of it. So now you've got the Highland Scots, you've got the Presbyterian Church, and now you've got the Baptist Church as well.

When we went to England, in the small town that we lived in, we went to the Baptist Church there. The minister there was a kindly man, but he was pretty hopeless. I think he was an interesting soul.

So that gave you very slim pickings. My life then, as I came alive spiritually, went in search of good material. As soon as I got my driver's license at 17, which is when you get it in the UK, the man that was highly influential at that time was a fellow called David Watson, who was an Anglican cleric in York, which is fairly good distance from Ilkley, maybe 40 miles. But I would load up a few of my friends in the car and we would drive to York on Sunday evenings in order that we could listen to this fellow preach. Well, I'm fascinated that at 17, you get your driver's license and you're loading up friends to drive 40 miles on a Sunday to hear somebody preach. There aren't many 17-year-olds then or now who are doing that.

How did that happen? Well, it didn't seem peculiar to me at the time, but as I look back on it, and as you say, as I look out on young people and I say to them, I'm saying, you know, our evening service is an important part of our life and watch as their eyes glaze over and they go somewhere else. And I say to them, you know, I'm not saying this to you because I'm your pastor. When I was your age, you know, they're like, oh, here we go again. You know, you can't convince them.

But how did it happen? Well, we could mix a little Billy Graham into it as well, huh? At 16, Billy Graham was back in Britain in the Earl's Court in London. That material was then relayed to centers throughout the country.

And one of the centers was Leeds, which is about 20 miles roughly from Ilkley, where I lived. I was in the youth group in this church and I had multiple school friends at the grammar school. And so the youth leader said, okay, what we're going to do is we'll get a coach and we will take people, bring your friends and let's go hear Billy Graham. So I, to my friends to hear Billy Graham, I don't know what happened to them, but I know what happened to me.

Because it was whenever it would be in 68, something like that. And he was trying to be hip. And his whole thing was, he'd heard that the hippies were saying things like, you know, turn on, drop out. And so he was playing with that and turn on and tune in.

I don't know what he was doing. But anyway, the analogy that he used was some of you, your lives are like a radio that you're actually tuned into the signal, but your volume control is way down low. And the reason it's down low is because of the state of your own spiritual pilgrimage. And I want to encourage you tonight to resolve to be done with that. And so in the midst of all of that and in great embarrassment to my friends, you know, I'm the guy that goes, I go up to the front.

And so I get a counselor who only knows how to deal with the sort of regular gig. So the first person they said, you know, well, you do this and you admit and stuff. I said, no, no, no, no, I've done all that. I said, that's not why I'm here. I can't remember who the person was, but he went away to get like a supervisor.

It's like, hey, we got a tough one here. So I can't remember how it finished, but I went home and my father was up. I don't think my mother was up, but he said, how was it? I said, well, dad, I don't know what happened down there.

I said, and I told him what happened. He said, well, because my father had led me to the Lord as a young boy. He said, well, I think what has happened is simply this, that somebody like you in a Christian environment like this has to get to a point where you make this all your own and where without the divine, the spiritual afflatus of your parents or whoever else it is, you got to decide, are you in or are you out? And he says, it sounds to me like tonight has been at least a point on that journey, which in point of fact it was. But before that, in the Bible class that I was in in Glasgow, I've always been a salesman.

If there's something I'm excited about, you're going to hear about it, whether you want to or not. And so I was in a Bible class in Glasgow for sort of like middle class boys who didn't go to church, although I didn't fit that, but I went. So I took my school friends. I'd go to their houses on Sunday afternoon. It began at two thirty around two o'clock or knock on Graham Clark's door. Hey, Graham, are you going to come this afternoon? I don't know. Oh, come on.

Yeah, we come. We go pick up another two or three up and I would take them. Then I'd mess around in the class. Then they throw me out the class.

And I remember asking one of the leaders, hey, I'm not the only one. Why do you throw me out? He said, I throw you out because I know your dad will send you back. If I throw some of the boys you bring, if I throw them out, their parents will never send them back.

And I want them to stay in here. But you should stop messing around. As you look back on your Billy Graham experience and try to put a theological grid over that. Is this a second work of grace?

Was this your actual conversion? What do you think? You know, I think it was just a step on the journey. Definitely not a second work of grace. I think it was that what he said made sense that, yeah, you might have brought a few of your friends to the thing, but you're a walking contradiction. Partly truth, partly fiction.

Taking every wrong direction on your lonely way back home. Yeah, I think just like I say to people, there's lots of those steps along the way. I think that, I don't know who said it, you know, that the Christian life is a series of new beginnings. You know, I was just reading Genesis 12 this morning because I'm supposed to with the jolly Murray McShane. And, you know, I was thinking, goodness gracious, you know, that the guy has to come to Abram in Genesis 12 and say, why didn't you tell me she's your wife? I mean, this is the man that God picks?

Yes. Yeah, he's trying to get his game going, you know. Well, he had a series of new beginnings.

He did. I think somebody asked Moody one time, do you believe in the second blessing? And his response was, I do, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Yeah, what was the spiritual environment in your home other than church going? Was the Bible read? Was there a family time?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad was a very disciplined man. You know, he'd been in the army.

You know, if you found his Bible, he read his Bible and the marker was in the place. So you could pretty well set your clock by it. And so that was part of our lives as well around the table. I mean, sometimes, and I remember I've thought about it often in my own children of how jolly difficult it is to pull this off with the school bus is coming, the thing, where's the toast and everything. But he soldiered on, you know, and he used to use the daily light, you know, from Richard W. DeHaan or whatever it was, just for those times.

So it was very brief and you had the little thing. Then a word of prayer and then we're on our way. Our home was also populated by other Christian people.

You know, I was thinking about that the other day when, you know, we were reading in our team meeting in 2 Timothy where Paul says to him, so Timothy, pursue righteousness, faith, peace, and love, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. And the great benefit of this sort of larger environment of recognizing that it's not just, you know, because when you're young, maybe my parents are just the weirdest people in the entire community and then say, oh, no, there's a number of these really weird people and they keep coming to my home. And my parents were given to hospitality if someone was a visiting preacher or something.

They would be in the home. And so it was a very happy environment that was then broken in upon, of course, by the premature death of my mother. Tell me about your mother's faith. Yeah, my mother's faith was genuine, simple, quiet, and very, very sensitive to people when people try and press people into public statements and professions and particularly in public prayer times. My mother would never have intruded in a conversation, in any kind of conversation, except invited, and therefore it would have been strange for me to hear her pray in that kind of public environment.

But it wasn't because she couldn't or didn't, because I do have recollections of hearing both my parents praying for us as children when they thought I was asleep. My mom was a very funny lady. She loved laughing. I mean, she found humor in some of the strangest places, much to the chagrin of my father.

I mean, when we would go on vacation, we would almost inevitably find ourselves, quote, in the funniest church you've ever been in in your life. And my mother's supposed to be keeping us under control and getting some of the dirtiest looks from my dad, you know. But she was a doer. She was kindly.

She was very good at the domestic duties of motherhood and wifedom. And I really got the great benefit of that when, for a period of my life, for one year I was at home. And it turned out to be the last year of my mother's life, which neither of us knew. And by that time, I was probably 19, and you've moved into that realm where you're starting to become friends with your parents. And I would have said that I would have picked her out as a really good friend in that context.

And even though my dad didn't get half the jokes, that was his problem. To see genuine faith in the life of your parents, and no, there's not a disconnect. They're not just church-going people. These are people. This is real for them. I look at how many young people today abandon the faith, and I wonder how many of them grew up in the kind of home you grew up in, as opposed to just a church-going home.

Yeah, I think so. Because when, as a youngster, you begin to voice your concerns, your challenged things and so on, my father, one of his great lines was, I said to him, I want to go to this. And he didn't say you can't go. Sometimes he said, no, you definitely can't go. But where there was maybe a marginal decision, he would say, well, son, you can go, but you can't go with my blessing.

Now, unless that means something, you're in the car so fast and gone that you'll make the wheel spin. But where there is that connection and where you value that, then it may not prevent you from making dumb decisions in every case, but the fact that it did it enough times for me is the fact that all these years later I can still recall it. A lot of people who have some spiritual awakening in their late teens also have a lapse in their early 20s. Did you go through a rebellion period? Did you ever have a, do I really believe this kind of check out for a while?

No, I think the biggest challenge for me was at the age of 20 to lose my mother and to stand at an open graveside for actually the first time in my life because she preceded the death of her own parents. And for me then to say, OK, do I really believe in the resurrection? Do I really believe that the promises of Jesus will be fulfilled? You know, in the goodness of God, as I struggled through that, I said, yes, I do believe, I will believe, you know. No, I'm a bit, as you know, I'm a pretty simple soul and I trust that the Bible is the Bible. I trust what the Bible says about itself.

And if I won't trust what it says about itself, why would I trust anything else that it says? Again, that's the product of good teaching. It's the product, again, of the mercy and grace of God, because I'm sure you find yourself saying, why is it that I believe this? Why is it that I still believe this? I mean, I don't have to posture this. You know, if you cut me open, I believe this.

This is the grace of God. The circumstances of your mother's death? A traumatic heart attack out of nowhere, just sitting in our house and dying. Were you with her? No, my sisters were. I was gone.

How did you get the news? I was a student at LBC, and gloriously known, I was the London School of Divinity. And I roomed with a boy from Rhodesia who had been a geography teacher older than me. And early in the morning of November the 2nd, early in the morning, someone came knocking on the door. One of us said, yes, and it was the principal, the Reverend Gilbert Kirby. He said, I just need to come in and talk to Alistair. I thought, golly, I've only been here three months, and it's like the Bible class again. I'm going to get thrown out of here.

I'm out. Especially because he said to Peter, he said, Peter, could you just leave us for a moment? I had no idea what was coming, and he sat down on the edge of my bed because I was still in my bed. He said, Alistair, I can only tell you this one way. Last night your mother died, and it was just unbelievable. Nothing could prepare you for it. And that was it.

That was it. Gilbert then was a key part of my journey from that point on. I mean, I ended up with Derek Prime in Edinburgh as a result of a letter written by Gilbert Kirby to Derek Prime to say you ought to consider this boy. I hadn't seen him in a long time, and I was speaking at the Keswick Convention, which is kind of like, you know, was then in those days the Super Bowl.

You know, you get to play. And there was a minister's house party that Gilbert Kirby now is a man probably in his deep into his 70s was he was caring for those ministers. I was staying in the speaker's house party, which was a separate hotel. But I remember as I came up the hill, he came out of this property, and it was pouring as it does in the Lake District. And he had a cagoule on, and he saw me, you know, and he just came towards me, and he just enveloped me.

He was soaking from his cagoule and everything else. And I don't think we hardly said anything. We didn't need to say anything. It was just that it was that bonding that happens, and we've seen it in pastoral ministry, where we deal with people at the extremities of their lives.

We may not say much, but we're privileged to be there. That privilege was given to him, and there couldn't have been a better person to have essentially had that responsibility than Gilbert. He was a wonderful man. How did your father do after your mom passed? My dad was very good at stuff. My dad, because of his involvement in the Second World War as a Batman to a general, knew how to cook and would easily turn out a really splendid Sunday lunch.

But what he did, he had to do. He had two children at school. He would stop by the grocery store either on his way into work or out of work. He would come home, and I was gone, you see.

I was then at college, and then from college I was in Edinburgh. He did really, really well, but he lasted for seven years and then remarried. To my shame, it never really occurred to me to think about what it meant for my father, because my mother was only 46.

So I think my dad was probably 48. As a 20-year-old, it was all about what it meant to me. But yeah, it was tough. I mean, it had to be tough.

I can't imagine doing what he did, but he did. Again, of course, a deep conviction about faith. Incidentally, the man's name was Harper, the Reverend Harper.

It was the Harper Memorial Church that was built as a memorial to Harper who was coming to America to preach. Yeah, and that's where my mother's funeral took place as well. When your dad remarried, was that a challenge for you and your sisters?

I think a big challenge for my sisters. It was a challenge for me only in absentia. Ironically, he married my best friend's mother. My best friend's father had died some years previously.

I can't remember the details, but he was a man who had a poor heart, and eventually a heart failure took him out. So my best friend's mother was a widow, and his best friend's father was a widower. There was no relationship between the families, despite the fact that we as children were friends and school chums and so on. I guess in the sense of shared loss, they found comfort and affection in one another, and so were married.

I would not suggest that for everybody. My youngest sister, who was only 11 and has only the vaguest recollections of my mother, has a new relationship with her father, and this lady foisted now upon her with all the elements that are attached to that. None of it was bad or anything, but it's just so different. It's a challenge. Any time we work with families in the best of situations where there's loss, every step family comes out of loss. So everybody's processing the loss, and what used to be, and who was, and who is now, and what's my relationship with my dad now that this new person's there, all of that. The dynamics are fraught with all kinds of disappointment and getting sideways with one another.

I've seen some wonderful illustrations of it. I've seen a lot of the other kind, too, in pastoral ministry. Your call to pastoral ministry? That happened in your teen years?

No, I wouldn't say so. I wanted to do law. I thought I could be Perry Mason. I didn't realize that nobody can be Perry Mason. There's no such thing as Perry Mason. You have to write a script for that to happen. But I love those shows.

I think they were in black and white when I was watching them. Without delving into all of that, when I stepped away from where I was and took this year out to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up, I came to another one of these points along the race where I had a strong conviction that although I had written the script for my life, I was going to get a law degree, a BMW 2002, and I was going to marry this American girl called Susan Jones if I could just manage to keep her on the wire for long enough as I was writing letters across the ocean. I faxed that to God, as one would say, and asked for his signature. He sent it back just with a blank sheet. He said, if you sign the bottom of the blank sheet, I'll fill in the stuff for you.

It's a metaphor, of course. But I came to a strong conviction that I had my thing upside down, that I was simply asking God to bless my plan. I had had all these things. I'm taking my school chums to the thing.

I'm loading the car up. We had a singing group. In the singing group, in the coffee bars of the 60s, I was the one that did the talk, not because I was any good, but because the other two guys wouldn't do it.

So all of that is in there. Also, I remember I told you that the ministers used to come and stay in our house when they were the visiting preachers, and they would say things to me like, maybe you'll be a minister one day, Sonny. Nothing could be further from my mind than that. Now, remember I told you about the Campus Crusade? I had been introduced to all these crazy American Campus Crusade people who had come to London to try and advance the cause. So those people are, hey, sign up, let's go. I wasn't ready to do that, but I was fascinated by these young, intelligent, often athletic, zealous people, and I thought, you know, I admire that. I admire that.

They haven't adopted this because they've got nothing else to do. So then I said, well, what I'll do is I'll go somewhere that I can do a theology degree and prepare myself for whatever God has for me. But the one thing I know he hasn't for me is pastoral ministry. Really?

Yeah. I will not do that because I could never tell my friends because there's nothing cool about that. I could tell them I'm involved with Christians in sport. I could tell them that I'm involved in a student ministry, or I could tell them I'm involved in a music ministry, but I couldn't tell them that I'm a pastor of a church.

I mean, that cannot happen. And so the definitive moment that just took the rug out from underneath me was in the spring of 75, and I was doing things with an English evangelist at the time for sort of work exposure, and we would go and do youth weekends, and we would meet the people and sing to them and do whatever we were doing and try to encourage them, lead them to faith. And so one Monday, I have returned from one of these ventures down in the south coast of England, and I'm sitting at lunch with some of my friends at college and a couple of the faculty members.

And one of them, the Reverend John Balchin, who had Coca-Cola glasses and used to squeeze his eyes all the time. And so, you know, nobody's saying much. So I said, you know, I don't like these things anymore. What things? These weekends. Why don't you like the weekends? I said, no, no, I can tell you why I don't like them.

Because the end. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I go down there on a Friday night, and I'm introduced to a whole group of people that I've never met before. And come Sunday night, I get in the car, and I drive away, and I'll never see them again. I don't like that.

Balchin leeches forward, squeezes his eyes together, and he says, no, I can tell you why that is. He said, that is because God has given you a pastor's heart. If you were an evangelist, you could come and go.

As a pastor, you can't. And I remember, even as I tell it to you now, I remember, like, it was like the death now and the opening up of the future. I remember I went back to my room, and I wept. I wept because I said, no, you know, this is ridiculous.

And plus, I'm 23 years old. How do you become a pastor? What does Balchin know? He didn't know anything.

You know, I didn't go through all of this. A notice comes in from Derek Prime. It's put up on the board. And it's Derek Prime, dear Gilbert. My assistant is moving to take a church on his own. I wonder if you have anybody down there that you may care to recommend. Gilbert writes a letter to him.

I go meet him at the King's Cross railway station coffee bar. And you know, the rest is history. I've never applied for a job in ministry.

I have never. It was the call of God. When I was ordained and I wore a clerical garb, I think you've heard me say this before, I might just as well have stood up with no clothes on in front of the congregation.

That's how vulnerable. And I said, if I'm going to do that, I'll never quit on this. I'll never quit on this. And so that was it. And then when I was ordained, then I trusted the elders. They said, yeah, we believe that your subjective sense of being drawn to this reluctantly is a realistic sense. So I trusted them. As you look back on the family you grew up in, your father, your mother, the spiritual influences, how did that carry into your own marriage and family and how you chose to raise your kids?

Yeah. Well, not as well as I would have liked, I think. You know this from your own varied career, if we might put it that way. There is, I think, a distinct advantage in being a father who is in the normal sphere of life. Works in insurance. Works in a job, goes, comes.

Sunday he's in this and whatever else it is, both for the individual and also for the child. And so for me, one of the things that has always been so daunting is, for example, you know, weekends are not weekends. There's none of that wonderful Friday night feeling. And it's not even shareable with your children in the same way.

Added to that, I'm doing this in America. If it was in Scotland, I would be teaching my children all the things I knew about Scotland and sports in Scotland. I never shot a basketball. I never had my hands on an American football. I never played baseball. So you've got this weird role reversal at one level in the raising of your kids that your children are introducing you to a world.

I never rode a school bus. Now, all of that is superficial stuff. In terms of the drumbeat of our focus is on Christ, on the scriptures, we're going to read them together despite the toast, despite the bus. All of that we sought to do. And we're in the happy situation of our children, not only understanding that, but embracing that. Well, that is just a portion of a conversation that I had recently with my friend Alistair Begg, who is the host of the radio program Truth for Life and a pastor in Cleveland, Ohio. And just fascinating to me, families mark us for life. The home you grew up in, for better or for worse, marks you for life.

Yes, it does. And it's not determinative because I know a lot of families who have done everything to the best of their ability, according to God's design, and they've watched their kids walk away. I know families that have messed things up right and left and they've raised kids. That'd be me.

That'd be my home. No perfect parent, right? But these are kids who are walking with the Lord today and they didn't have a spiritual heritage. In Alistair's case, there was the mark of a mother and a father who loved the Lord.

His mom's death, of course, marked him as well. And it's a heritage he has sought to pass down to his children. If our listeners are interested in the extended conversation with Alistair, you can go to our website, familylifetoday.com.

The entire conversation is available there as an MP3 download. Again, go to familylifetoday.com. Alistair's also written a brand new book about faith. It's called Brave by Faith, God-Sized Confidence in a Post-Christian World. And we've got copies of the book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. We'd love to send a copy to you. Go to familylifetoday.com to order Alistair's new book or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY.

Again, the title of the book is Brave by Faith. You can order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-FL-TODAY, to get your copy. Now, I know most of us are kind of looking forward to the official opening days of summer and maybe the opportunity to do some things this summer that we haven't been able to do for a while. Summertime is a glorious time for ministries like Family Life. It can be a challenging time because as people get busy with other things, we often see donations to ministries like Family Life Today go down. We've had some friends of the ministry who have come to us recently, though, and they've said during the month of May they want to help get us ready for the summer. So they have agreed to match every donation we receive this month, dollar for dollar, up to a total of now $350,000. That's a very generous offer. We have been hearing from some of you who have been making donations this month.

Thank you for those. Those donations have already freed up funds from the matching gift fund, so that's exciting for us. We also want to let you know if you become one of our monthly legacy partners during the month of May, every donation you make month in and month out for the next 12 months is going to be matched dollar for dollar. Your giving for the full year will be maximized thanks to the matching gift opportunity that's available. And as a new legacy partner, we're going to send you a certificate so that you and your spouse can be our guests at an upcoming Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. We've started having those again, people coming out for those, getting great response to the Weekend to Remember in the fall.

We hope to have a full slate of events coming up. Your certificate is available to use any time you like, and it's our thank you gift for you becoming a legacy partner during the month of May. And again, your donations will be matched dollar for dollar for a full year when you join us this month. Anybody who gives, whether it's to become a new legacy partner or it's a one-time donation, we have some gifts for you as well. We have a pair of books by Erin and Jamie Ivey, a book for husbands and a book for wives. Both books are called Compliment, and it's all about how we complement one another in marriage. And we've got a flash drive that includes some extended conversations with Dave and Ann and me about some of the significant lessons about marriage and family that I've learned over the course of 28-plus years as cohost of Family Life Today. The flash drive and the books are our gifts to you when you donate this month and help us take advantage of the matching gift opportunity.

You can do that online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate, and we want to say thanks in advance for your support. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to hear about how 16-year-old Alistair Begg met 13-year-old Susan Jones, how they fell in love, and we'll hear the shocking story about the first time he kissed his bride-to-be. It's coming up tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. Got some extra help today from Mark Ramey and 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.