Mama Bear Special: How to Support Your Wife in the Way She’s Made

I think part of what it means to be heard is to be seen and to be valued. When you see them and value who they are, then those little acknowledgments that you're hearing them, they mean so much more. But if someone's just nodding, saying, Yep, yep, I hear you.

Sure thing right away. It doesn't sound like you're really hearing them, even if they're listening. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. We've been talking this week with Hilary Ferrer. She's the Mama Bear apologetics woman. She helps us answer questions that our kids are asking about God, and it's been some great programs. And if you missed them, go on to our Family Life Podcast Network and download those and listen to them. But today, we wanted to do something a little different with her and actually her husband as well. Yeah, it's fun because Hilary's husband, John, has come into the studio with us. And this is a topic that's really close to my heart of what we're going to talk about today. And it's about women feeling heard and what that really means. And so you guys, I wanted to bring you in and first ask you, Hilary, just as a woman, can you think of a time in your life that that was hard for you because you felt like I am not being heard? Yeah. Naturally, if I'm not being heard, I will just talk louder until I'm heard. I think that's common for women too. Like, someone hear me.

John, is that true? You're over there smiling. Well, Hilary's a unique individual.

A delicate desert flower. Well, I guess I am that too, but a wallflower. Well, I think from an early age, your dad heard you and that helped you feel heard from early on. And that really does change the trajectory of your whole life.

I mean, what did that look like? What does that mean your dad heard you? So one of the things that I noticed when I was a kid is I was aware when people were treating me like a child. It's one of those things where I even remember having a crush on a boy when I was in kindergarten or preschool, but I didn't like the way he sat because I thought it looked childish. And I know a four-year-old should not be thinking this.

You do have an old soul, I bet. I remember when I would play with my friends, I thought we were playing like kids. And you didn't like it? Well, no, it's like I thought, well, this is just how kids are supposed to play, but this isn't actually kind of who I am.

And I look at kids that age and I'm like, no, they're actually acting like that because that's who they are. But at the time, I don't know. And so my dad, he took what I said seriously. He wanted to hear my thoughts. And I've talked to him about this later on that he could tell that when I asked a question, it was coming from a long list of other questions that I'd already like, you know, I understood how A went to B and B went to C and C went to D. But I couldn't understand how E went to F. And that's where my question would come in on. And so he could see that whole progression of thought before him. And so he really would thoughtfully answer my questions, treat me like I had important thoughts. He heard you.

Yeah, he did. And he treated me as, you know, with the unique giftings that I had and didn't mind me asking questions. And not only did he not mind me asking questions, he encouraged me to ask more questions. And even now, he's still like this, John will always joke about when he's out to, you know, dinner or something with us. So, you know, if one of us has a question, it's just a, you know, shot in the dark, who's going to whip out their phone first to try to find the answer to it? Because we're just, we're question askers.

We're interested in the same thing. So I think he made me feel very heard and like my thoughts were important. But I remember this was not the case with my peers. I never felt heard by my peers. In fact, I think I distinctly felt rejected by my peers because number one, a lot of them weren't really thinking or asking the same questions as I was. But there was something about me that especially girls tended to reject.

And I remember like I was a cheerleader and we'd be having some problem like, you know, a stunt or something like that or a choreography. And I would say, hey, guys, what about this? What about this?

What about this? And it's like no one would hear it until the really pretty popular one would say it and everybody's like, oh, that's a great idea. And I'm like, yeah, that would have been great if we'd listened to me 10 minutes ago. And so but I just kind of grew up knowing that probably girls didn't hear me and people my age didn't hear me. It wasn't until I got to college when I started interacting with people who kind of were like choosing to be in that conversation. But what did that feel like with your peers?

That's quite a while. That there's something different that there was something wrong with me and that I needed to keep myself in check because who I was was annoying. And I didn't want to be annoying to people. There's something about who I was that was wrong.

And this is the same message that we're hearing right now. I don't know if this is jumping too much ahead. The LGBT machine or whatever you want to call it has capitalized on this idea of kids feeling out of sync number one with their gender and two with their peers and saying if this is how you're feeling, we have the answer for you. And what would I have done when I was young if someone said if you feel like this, well, there's a whole group of us that feel this way and we have the solution for where you can fit in.

It's very possible that I could have gone down that route. But I think a lot more people than we even recognize. I think even sometimes the pretty and popular girls feel unheard and unseen because who knows if who they're portraying is the real person. I think in my life, I felt like my dad didn't hear me. And being the youngest of four, I felt like my brothers were certainly heard. But I was trying to get my dad's attention and trying to perform so he would hear me or see me. And so maybe I felt like my peers heard me, but to have that gaping wound of my dad never hearing me, it's interesting that we both had it in different places. But the result was the same, kind of that what's wrong with me that I'm not being heard.

And that's hard. Tell me about when you really felt like God hears me. I'm thinking of Psalm 34 17 that says, the righteous cry out and the Lord hears them.

He delivers them from all their troubles. I think one particular time when I knew the Lord just didn't hear me, but he was really making a point to say, I see you and everything that's about to happen is with my knowledge. It's not because I've forgotten you. And that was before I was diagnosed with cancer, which was back in 2010. I'd been having pain for about a year and didn't know where it was coming from. And as it got worse and worse, I remember at this one point before I started having some of the tests that finally did reveal what was going on.

Every little tiny prayer I prayed, the Lord answered. It was stuff like, I need a parking space, please. You know, because I just didn't feel well enough to walk in somewhere or at the time I worked as a teacher and in the summer times I tutored. So I was just like, I can't do this today. I need them to cancel and they would cancel. Or I had previously been a photographer and oh, I have this photo shoot that I'm supposed to do.

Please let them cancel. And it would rain. What did that feel like? That felt like the Lord getting my attention saying, whatever you're about to walk through is under my full knowledge. Because I think suffering, knowing that the Lord is walking through it with you is different than suffering and feeling like it's because the Lord is like, oh, I didn't realize what was going on. Hold on.

I mean, he was completely in control of it and he wanted to get my attention to show me, I am listening to you right now. And so that was one of the things that gave me peace so that when that diagnosis of cancer did come down, instead of it being like this bomb that rocked my world, it was more like I saw a tornado from really far away. And I was just starting to strap myself in and be like, okay, it's about to get bumpy.

Let's prepare for it. And then when it comes, you're like, yep, this is what I prepared for. I felt really blessed that he kind of gave me a heads up. And it might've been because I was listening for that. I don't know if my experience is different than other people's or why, but that was a time that I really felt like the Lord was getting my attention. We talked about a little bit how many times in marriage women don't feel heard.

And honestly, for us, one of the loneliest times for me was in our marriage. And I've heard other women say that as well. But you did not say that.

I am the opposite. Yeah. Talk about that.

So I like to tell my husband that verse that talks about husbands live with your wives in understanding. That's what your Ph.D. should be in. Yeah. Give John's background a little bit. Let's just brag on him.

Yes. So like I had forgotten about my love of apologetics before we got married. And so when he and I first started interacting, it kind of sparked that love again.

And I think he could see everything, all this ministry that I'm doing now is probably more of a surprise to me than it is to him because he saw this in me back when we were dating. Like how long ago? They've been married 15 years. 2006. Yeah, so 2006. Yeah. Our first date was an apologetics conference.

William Lane Craig, God time in the cosmological argument. I mean, you really went to a, I thought you were talking about your conversation. We really went to an apologetics conference. As our first date. As our first date. But we lived on opposite sides of the country.

I was in South Carolina at the time, having just finished up or about to finish up my Masters of Divinity at Southern Evangelical Seminary, and she was in California. So we weren't going to happen across each other in a coffee shop in, I don't know, Missouri or whatever. We couldn't meet in the middle there, so we had to meet online. And that's a big risk.

Anybody who's dated before knows that distance relationships where you haven't met in person, there's a big risk. We even precede Facebook. It was Myspace when we were we were both in this group on Myspace. They're trendsetters.

Yeah, yeah. So it's like I don't think we were intending to, you know, meet someone on there, but it was like, you know how you can join the like discussion groups or whatever. So that's actually more common.

I think Myspace was trying to do what Facebook is really good with now with creating those discussion groups. We got to see each other's writing and our minds mingled before we ever met in person. And I fell in love with her that way.

You have your MDiv, you have your Ph.D., so you both love learning, you love apologetics, you love scripture theology. So you saw that part of Hillary and you wanted to pull that out. Well, I think part of what it means to be heard is to be seen and to be valued. When you see them and value who they are, then those little acknowledgments that you're hearing them, they mean so much more. But if someone's just nodding, saying, yep, yep, I hear you, sure thing, right away, it doesn't sound like you're really hearing them, even if they're listening. You know, you might distinguish between hearing and listening, something like that.

But as a husband, part of what I can do to really hear Hillary is to acknowledge that I see her, I see where she's at, I see where she's coming from, and I value who she is and where she's at. And what I'm good at. Yeah.

You were able to pull out things. So I like people to know that John basically was in grad school for 12 years to do what I'm doing now. So an MDiv is a pretty, I mean, that's 120 hour program. Some of them are shorter.

Some of them are shorter. His was 120 graduate level hours onto a THM and then onto a PhD. And I was all prepared to be the little wifey poo that was, you know, following him around to apologetics conferences and the professor's wife having the kids over, you know, after class for worldview discussions and all that stuff. But because once I got cancer, all our employment decisions revolved around who had healthcare. And so when all the professor jobs went to adjuncts that didn't have healthcare, he had to sacrifice basically his academic trajectory in order to be at a job that would provide me healthcare to the point of where my now Dr. John, Dr. Ferrer is working on a manufacturing line making windows and now doors and supporting me in a ministry that really he was It's his passion too. It was his passion too. And he's the one that has the education. Now, I have been into it probably longer than he has just because I was into it when I was 12.

But I haven't put, I mean, grad school for 12 years. That's as long as you're in from first through 12th grade or K through 12 to not make me feel guilty for basically doing this ministry and doing whatever he always talked about. Talk about how I'm your garden, John. You always talk about that.

Oh, that's a good one. These are the things that have made you feel heard. This is what has made me feel heard and supported, and I'll go into the stuff that he's done on top of this, but talk about how I'm your garden. So going into marriage, our conversations back and forth, part of how nerds have romance is we talk about what biblical masculinity and femininity look like. We talk about our theology of marriage, and we work through some of this stuff beforehand to make sure- Were you in agreement? Okay, so I have to say that our fights are different than most couples. Like, we don't fight a lot, but like this week, one of our big fights was how to chart the ideas in the book, like the flow chart. How to script out a worldview chart.

How to script out a worldview chart. That's what our fights are. That's your argument, huh? That's our big argument. Marital conflict. I think we're some of the other ones that have the- Divine impassibility.

Divine impassibility. That's the other one that we just don't even get in that conversation anymore. And so we kind of joke, I mean, because it's funny to know that that's what we fight about. But we recognize that everybody has to figure out what their marriage is going to look like beneath the glory of God. And I see Hillary, and going into marriage, I knew she's my garden, and whatever public ministry I may have, if I fail at home, I failed. My first and foremost job as a husband is to make sure that my garden flourishes and to invest and bless her.

So seeing her as someone to cultivate and see her ministry flourish, that's a blessing to me. It's not a competition. We joke about how the secret to healthy marriage is trivial competition. But obviously it's not.

That's the joke. We recognize that when it comes to the real controversies, the real competing forces out there, we're on the same team. It's us against the world when it comes down to it. That's something he says to me all the time is, like, if we're just frustrated with each other, he'll just be, we're on the same team, Hill. We're on the same team.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sitting here looking at you, John, thinking, OK, here's a dude with a Ph.D., like you said, 12 years of graduate school. And you're not telling anybody that. You're not like jumping in front of Hill where you're going, hey, hey, hey, by the way. You didn't say, hey, I'm Dr. John for air today. Well, people start acting weird around me when I say I'm a doctor. Well, some of them want to show me some, you know, rash and ask me if it's normal. Then I have to clarify, OK, not that kind of doctor. But once they realize I've got this ministry training and I've got this theological training, they change their language, they change their body language.

They start acting fake around me and I don't get to meet the real person then. Not to mention there's a higher standard of expectations. They expect me to never do stupid stuff.

Even if you've got a Ph.D., you know, you still forget where you leave your keys every once in a while. But let me ask you this. When you watch Hillary thrive in what God's given her and created in her and through her in Mama Bear apologetics and her ministry, what does that do to you? When my garden flourishes, I consider that an honor to the gardener. I look at what Hillary does and I'm reminded of one of these lessons within the Henry Black Be Experiencing God series that I did back in high school. Find where God is working and join him there. I've tried to do different kinds of ministry things and, you know, writing and speaking, debates, preaching, teaching, all sorts of different things. And, you know, God's blessed that, but nothing like what I've seen here, nothing like what I've seen with Mama Bear.

And there's a real need there. She's not just doing something that she enjoys. She's addressing a very thirsty ground with life-giving water. There's a lot of women out there who felt marginalized in the whole apologetics community and thus disempowered when it comes to training up their kids. But when she says Mama Bear apologetics, it's like a light goes off.

They get it because they recognize, oh, I'm defending the faith by defending my family. And you don't have to revert to football and military analogies all the time and go into, you know, stereotypically masculine framing for it all to do apologetics. You can do apologetics in a deeply feminine way because there's nothing so feminine and yet fierce as a Mama Bear protecting her cubs. That's not a compromise of her femininity.

That's an exercise of it. And she's been able to develop that concept and to unleash it into the world. And I think part of it's because I can be by her side and she can run an idea by me.

We can interact over this stuff and she's that much more empowered because of that. It reminds me of when we were with Howard Hendrick's wife, Jeannie. He was a Dallas professor and we're like, he had this big personality. Jeannie was a little more quiet and somebody said, Jeannie, what's it like to be married to Howard when he's so big?

And do you ever feel lost and do you ever feel forgotten or do you feel like you've lost your voice? And she's just calm and cool and she goes, oh, girls, girls, I know something about Howard that nobody knows. You know, we're all like, tell us. We're on the edge of our seat.

Here it comes. And she goes, Howard would be nothing without me. And we're all like, yes, it's so true. And John, what you're saying is the same thing. Like, I'm the wind beneath those.

I will say it. This ministry would not have gone anywhere without John. So first I thought, well, it'll be a blog and maybe we'll do some podcasts. I did not feel confident enough to even post anything because I thought as soon as I post someone, someone's going to poke a hole in the logic and say, well, you haven't thought about this. But knowing that John had the background that he has, I would run everything I wrote by him. And I never thought I was going to have original thoughts. I even thought, well, you know, I guess my goal is going to be to present the same things that everybody else is presenting, but just presenting it, you know, for moms. And Hilary, your podcast is like at the top. You are doing so well.

That's amazing considering that we didn't record for like at all last year. That's just a testament that the Lord is working in this. So having John be able to kind of be that second set of eyes that are an educated set of eyes, knowing that if I'm saying something stupid that someone else has already said and some 13th century philosopher already addressed this, he'll know about it.

And so I would run it by him and put it on there. But it got to the point where I realized I was saying things that he hadn't heard anyone else say. And for the first time, I thought, well, maybe I do have original thoughts.

And the way that I piece together information is just different than the way other people have, which, you know, right there is how maybe I've had a disconnect maybe with some of my peers because it is a different way. And you're funny. You're funny when you do it. Well, thanks. Well, speaking of being heard, you've got a unique voice and I don't know that you realize early on that what you offered was different from what's out there.

Yeah, I don't think I did. But you're doing practical apologetics. And I've read a lot of apologetics. I've I've interacted with a lot of apologists. I've been at events in the green room talking with folks who are coming up next.

So I got to interact with this stuff. And for the most part, there's few exceptions. For the most part, they weren't doing practical apologetics. They weren't equipping laypeople, normal people who don't have advanced degrees. They aren't necessarily equipping them to do this with folks who aren't also educated. They were for the most part saying, here's some of the arguments, here's some of the evidence. Go do with it what you will.

But there wasn't that layman's learner that's communicating how to go apply this stuff. John, talk to the husband whose wife has told him over and over, you don't hear me. You don't see me.

I'm not a priority to you. How would you encourage him to be able to be there for his wife? That's David Ann Wilson with Hillary Morgan Farrer and John Farrer on Family Life Today.

We're going to hear John's response in just a second. But first, as a listener at Family Life Today, you have heard many stories of how God can do amazing work even in the toughest marriages. And the amazing thing is that God chooses to use people just like you to help. One way you can make an impact for more marriages and families is by financially partnering with Family Life Today. All this week, as our thanks for your partnership, we want to send you a copy of Hillary Farrer's book as our thanks. It's called Mama Bear Apologetics, and you can get your copy when you give this week at FamilyLifeToday.com. Or you can call us with your donation at 800-358-6329.

That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. All right, now back to David Ann's conversation with Hillary and John Farrer and how a husband can engage and be there for his wife. It's not a bad idea to every once in a while just say, I see you, and pause and literally consciously see her where she's at.

Tell her one or two things in your own words that she just told you, communicating that you've heard her, and then identify one or two things that are valuable about her to you. I'm telling you guys, just a guy does that, a husband does that, so she'll probably cry. Ann is tearing up. I am tearing up.

Do you know what that says? She's married to a guy who hasn't done a good job of that. No, you do do that now. No, I mean, yeah, now. And also learning, I was going to say learning how to ask for it, because I think- That's good, Hillary.

Yeah. A lot of times women don't know- She makes it easy, by the way. She literally will say, tell me 10 different ways that you love me. Yes, I will.

I will say that. If I'm having a particularly insecure day, I'll ask them, you know, tell me 10, why you love me in 10 different ways, or, you know- That's so sweet. What are some things that you, this is why you're glad that you married me. And, you know, of course, I'll do it back to him if he asks, but a lot of times, honestly, it's just me asking because I'm having an insecure day. As we all do. As we all do. And so he will sit there and he will think, and he won't just, you know, rattle off something stupid.

He will really sit there and think, okay, what's a new way that I can say this? I mean, this is really rare. Isn't it? That's what I was going to say, Dave. I mean, I'm thinking that.

I don't know. You know better because you work with so many women. She has a heard women's night once a month up in Michigan, and it sells out in five minutes and all these women. And I was at the last one playing guitar in the band, and the band never left the stage, right?

And we just did music through the whole night. And so I got to sit there in a room full of women and listen, and I was shocked at, I didn't hear this. I didn't hear women saying, I feel seen and heard.

I heard the opposite. And they weren't lamenting as much as going, here's my story. And the story was a lot of guys like me and others that just are so focused on themselves and their life. They just put their woman or even their daughter or their mom to the side, like you're not as important as me. They don't even realize they're doing it. I did it for a while. But to sit here and listen to you is so refreshing to think, wow, this is rare.

It shouldn't be rare. And I'm hoping women that are listening are going to think, I am seen. First of all, by God, He sees me. I was going to say, David, that's the theme of our nights together with women, is you are seen.

You are heard by the God of the universe that created you, that knows you, that knows every cell in your body, and He celebrates you. You've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Hillary Morgan-Farer and her husband, John, on Family Life Today. Hillary's book is called Mama Bear Apologetics, empowering your kids to challenge cultural lies.

You can get your copy when you give this week at familylifetoday.com. You know, miscarriage is often seen as something women suffer from. But what about the men? Eric Shoemaker will be joining Dave and Anne Wilson next week to address just that. I hope you have a great weekend and get to worship at your local church. 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 production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.