Robert Wolgemuth: Last Lap, Best Lap

The older you get, this is going to sound crazy, but the more important your tenderness towards your wife is.

And it's easy because you know each other so well. 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. So we got the chance to go to church on Sunday here in Orlando with our son, Austin and Kendall, and our four grandkids.

All sitting in front of us. Do you remember? Yeah, I remember. Yeah, it was sort of fun to look at them in front of us and remember when we sat in church. Actually, I was always up on the stage and you were sitting there with the boys. Yeah, I was going to say, I was sitting by myself. Yeah.

Well, here's the question. What do you remember about that service? I remember watching our grandkids thinking, they're amazing. Yeah, and then they went to kids, you know.

Yeah, after worship. And so Austin and Kendall came back. Here's what I remember. Seeing a couple that I'm guessing has been married for decades, maybe three or four or five decades, who knows, still in love. At least it appeared they're still in love. Because they're holding hands.

And what did you think about that? I thought, you know, a couple on their wedding day is a beautiful thing. A couple married 40, 50 years still in love is more beautiful. They don't look as good. We don't look as good as we did on our wedding day. Because you know.

But it's more beautiful. You know that they've had to endure a lot. Yeah. And the reason I bring this up is we've got Robert Walgolmuth back with us here at Family Life Today. And he wrote a book that sort of talks about finishing well.

And that sort of was an image of that. So Robert, welcome back to Family Life Today. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Anne. And I love the story.

I love the story. We'll talk about it, I'm sure. But I've been married to Nancy now for six years. And we hold hands all the time. And the truth is, I look back on my life, my first marriage, after six years, I don't think I held hands like I do now. I've learned stuff. In fact, that's the chapter on marriage. And I'll tell you more about that.

But why wouldn't you, every chance you get, to hold your wife's hand? Okay, we're going to have to get into that. Oh, come on, let's do it.

Yeah. Even Robert, when you sent me the book, I loved the image of the track on their gun lap, staying in the race with purpose. Here's the funny thing, Robert. I've asked several people, you know, what they know about a gun lap, and they didn't even know what a gun lap was. I mean, not everybody knows that on the final lap of a race, in a track meet, the gun is shot blank, of course, but it signifies you're on the final lap. Obviously, you use that image in the track image on the front of the book to say how you finish really matters, and the things that matter. And you list several different things in the book.

I just highlighted one of them. But talk about that a little bit. I mean, you really do still hold hands, or it's actually something you've- Well, I want to know why are you doing it more now than before? Like, that's really interesting. Robert, all she really wants to know is, can you get my husband to do it more? That's what she's saying.

That's where I thought she was going. Well, here's the deal. I have, as you have talked already about, I have the experience of having been married almost 45 years, and then saying goodbye to Bobby, and then falling in love all over again. And really realizing that I'm not going to have 44 years this time.

It's going to be compressed. And so actually, when Nancy and I were first dating, I said, so okay, so let's say we get married, and she was 57, had never married. Just let that sink in. She was 57, had never married. And actually, when I asked her to marry me, I said, I'd love for you to have the wedding of your dreams. And she looked at me and she said, I never dreamed about a wedding.

Because she felt called, as a single woman, to be a single woman in ministry her whole life. So I said, all right, so what will our first argument, I may have said fight. And she looked at me and she said, do we have to fight? And I said, well, I don't know. I guess every couple does.

She said, you know what, maybe we don't have to fight. Well, here's the deal. When I got married the first time, I was 22, Bobby was 20, we were kids.

Let me say that again. We were kids. And so we kind of grew up together. But did we fight? Yeah. Did we argue? Yeah. Were our voices raised at plaster cracking decibels? Yes.

Yes. So now I'm 67, Nancy is 57, and we're grownups. We've done a lot of life.

We've had failures. We've done life separately, of course. So I'm going to tell you that after six years of being married to Nancy, we've not agreed on everything. She's a very strong woman.

And let me say that she would say that I'm a very strong man. So we don't agree. But we haven't fought. Why raise my voice?

Why do that? I don't have to. I'm not a child.

I'm a grown up. So and then the other part, and this is important in this book. So one of the things I did was interview men that I know and trust, including my three brothers. So I'm talking to my oldest brother, Sam, who was born in 43. And he's a precious friend.

I love this man. But I called Sam because I wanted a story that I knew a little bit about. He was on a board of directors for a business, an organization, and he got fired from the board. And I wanted to know the back story. I mean, the new CEO didn't know how old he was. And one day said, Sam, how old are you? And he told the CEO. And the next day he got his papers. He was gone because he was too old to be on the board.

Somehow their bylaws had, if you turn 70 or 75, whatever, you can't continue to serve. So I asked about how that felt to be fired, just because of his age, not because he wasn't contributing anything. So I got that story, got it down.

It's in the book. But then he said, Are you going to talk about marriage? And I said, Well, and I looked at the outline that I was working on. And I said, No, I really am not.

I really hadn't planned to. He said, Robert, you got to talk about marriage. Because in these later years, it's easy to get sloppy in your relationship with your wife. Don't love her less than you did the first you were married. Don't be more tender and affection and physical in your 50th year than you were your first year. You both need that as much as you did early on. And the chances are really good that she's going to bury you. She will be standing by your casket. And so these years need to be precious years. Listen to me, he said, Take really good care of your caregiver. Because the chances are really good.

Again, actuarial tables, you're going first, man. So pour it on, be more attentive to her than you've ever been in your life. That was so good for me to hear. And again, because I'm relatively a newlywed right now, even at 73, I've been really conscious if you talk to Nancy, and I wish I could just invite her to this conversation. Because Nancy's the left-brain person in this relationship. In fact, I just heard her telling somebody this morning, I'm German, and she's Greek. So you think of Greek people like being way over the top, way affectionate, you know, hugging, kissing, and Germans, which I am, more strategic, more intentional, more bullet pointed.

Well, that's the opposite of who we are. She's very bullet pointed, and I'm very, very relational. In fact, we wrote a book together, and I wrote all the stories, and she wrote all the bullet points. So the point is, the older you get, this is going to sound crazy, but the more important your tenderness towards your wife is, and it's easy because you know each other so well, and you may even have a backlog, skeletons in the closet, and it's hard to get rid of those bad guys. But this is a wonderful time, the story you just told, I love this, I can't wait to tell Nancy, that your kids, your son and daughter-in-law, sat and watched an older couple hold hands during church.

Now this isn't bragging, it's true, but if they had been sitting close to us in church, that's exactly what they would have seen. And I never pass up an opportunity, why would I? To hold Nancy's hand, and just the tenderness. And I talk very candidly, as you know, in the book, about things that your body used to be able to do when you were in your 20s, that it doesn't do now when you're in gun lap, or in my case in your 70s. So what are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with a body that isn't as virile as it used to be? So what are you going to do?

So this is transparency, right? I cannot believe how many ads there are on TV for this, or online, for what I'm talking about right now. For a man who loses his virility and doesn't know what to do with himself. I mean, that's a spiritual problem, right? Would you say amen to that?

That's a spiritual problem, but this is a very sweet time. I mean, in terms of the affection that you're pouring on your wife. She's a responder, she was built to be a responder. So you as the man in the relationship, you go first. I mean, I tell young men a lot in marriage relationships. You be the initiator, you go first. If it's making love, or if it's picking stuff up off the floor. Take the initiative, be the initiator. Your wife will be so thrilled when she sees that in you. The scripture calls that leadership in your home, right?

That isn't just like Sound of Music with a little whistle and having your kids line up. It's serving, it's going first, it's the towel in the basin. That's an incredible thing to understand in your relationship with your wife during these later years. One of the stories you tell in the chapter you wrote about marriage is, if I remember right, it was a friend that was at a marriage retreat with his wife. And the speaker said, hey, turn to your spouse and say, I love you. He says that to his wife and his wife turns to him and says, I don't love you. And as I read that, I thought, oh boy, this is going to end badly. And yet, talk about that, because he responded in a way that basically said, it's not over.

You can do better starting right here, right? He was acting like a grown-up. It's back to the illustration I just gave. This is one of my closest friends. We text every day, this man we're talking about right now. And this was exactly as you've described it. It was a marriage retreat, the leader said, turn to your mate, take her by the hand and say, I love you. And so Dave did this and his wife looked back at him. And I mean, it was eye to eye, no messing around, I don't love you. And for a man to hear that, a man being competitive, a man wanting to win, you say, I'm out of here.

I'll go find somebody else who will love me. And I said to him, when he told me this story, I said, all right, so you went to that retreat. Was that a surprise? He said, I guess it was. I said, all right, it's like on a scale of one to 10, where would you say your marriage was? He said, seven or eight. Well, his wife would have said one or two. In fact, Gary Smalley, remember Gary Smalley? Gary Smalley, he actually counseled thousands.

That sounds incredible. But thousands, you guys are probably way up there like that. And one of the things he says to each person, to the man he says on a scale of one to 10, to the woman he says on a scale of one to 10. And as I remember him telling me this story, he said, in every single case, the man gives it a higher number than the woman does. So in this case, Dave's wife looked at him and said, I don't love you. And Dave tells me this story and says, I resolved to fix that problem.

Instead of running from it, I decided I'm going to fix it. And the first thing he did, he didn't go to a seminar. What he did was he found an older married man. And he said to this man, here's what just happened to me, and I need some help with my marriage. This is both the mentoring chapter and the marriage chapter.

This is pouring into a younger man or a more inexperienced man. So he found a man who I also know who was younger than he was. And that man poured his life into this younger man, Dave, in this case. And I'll tell you what, I see Dave and his wife a lot. And their tenderness toward each other is astonishing. But Dave got to the place where he realized either I do this or I lose her.

Either really I lose her, she walks out the door, or our relationship just becomes so stale it's just humdrum. There's no joy in it. So he did the right thing. He sucked it up and he said, you know what, I can do better than this. Found an older man, a married man, who helped him fix his marriage. It's an amazing story, but it's a gun-lapse story of an older man who has experienced more experience, failure, victory from those failures, whatever, poured his life into a younger married man and said, this is how you do this. Yeah, and I thought as I read it, that's exactly how it hit me. It was inspiring. I mean, Ann and I have shared in our vertical marriage book the very same story in terms I thought we were 10.

She said we're a point five, not even a one. And it could have ended there, but it was like, oh, my goodness, I've got to change this. And I realized it had to go vertical first. My relationship with Christ had to be the foundation. I can preach it, but I had to live it. And then I had to work on a marriage. But you think about doing that in your 20s or 30s, but you don't think about doing that in your 50s and 60s.

You just coast. And you wrote another story in there that also challenged me about just how Bobby, your first wife, was such a woman of the word. And you realized that you were just spiritually lazy in the marriage. I was.

Exactly right. And again, your vulnerability there challenged me as I read it. I'm like, I can do the same thing. And I can blame it on, well, you know, we've been married 40 years. We're good.

Rather than, we've been married 40 years. Let's make the next 10 or 15, 20 the best. Let's do. Oh man. Preach it. Preach it, brother. Go.

Yeah. The story I tell, Bobby loved the word. She didn't love the word so she could write a book.

She loved the word because she loved the word. And the Lord spoke to her early, early every morning. And so I'd walk by her chair, and actually that chair now is in my daughter's home and she uses it for the same purpose.

Wow. But I walked by that chair early, early in the morning. I'd go upstairs, study for a Sunday school class, write a couple chapters for a book. Then when Bobby stepped into heaven, I sat on that chair the morning after we buried her body. And I heard the Lord say to me, Robert, you're a lazy man. You have been letting your wife spend an hour every day or more in the Word, in my presence. Now it's time.

Get that baton and pick it up and start running that track. And this isn't boasting. In fact, in many ways it's confessing.

But maybe in my seven years since that day, I probably have missed ten mornings, maybe even less than that. And this is a gift I'm giving myself. Now here's another thing that I think is very cool, and I just made this up. So of course I was wooing this lady who hadn't prayed for a husband and hadn't dreamed about a wedding. And I'm wooing her, right? I'm breaking all the rules in her spirit, because I'm not going to get married.

Done. I'm not going to get married. And I'm fairly competitive, like you are. So anyway, early in our relationship, after that experience on Bobby's chair, I thought, you know what, as I'm reading the Word, I'm going to just look for stuff to jump out at me, and I'm going to text it to Nancy. And so I started doing that. And again, maybe ten mornings since we've been married. And I mean, some really early mornings, like I fly out of an airport that's a hundred miles from my home.

And I've had five o'clock a.m. flights, and I've still done this before I leave the house. So every morning, including this morning, Nancy, when she wakes up, because she stays up late, I get up early, she probably has three or four Bible verses on her phone that the first thing she sees when she wakes up. That has been such a gift to me, knowing that my wife gets to look over my shoulder, see where I have underlined something in my Bible, and have sent it to her, just to inspire her, just to bring her joy. And that's stuff you can do. You know, sometimes you read a book and the guy says, you ought to do this, you ought to do that, and you go, man, I don't know if I'm capable of that.

This is something you're capable of doing. And it would bless your wife, and may even say amen to that. If you would, and I'm not telling you, I don't know what you do, Dave, but that kind of thing reminds my wife that I'm not in charge, that the Lord is in charge of my life. And I'm submitting to Him, I'm taking precious hours, early in the morning, dark 0-30, and I'm asking Him, what is it that You want to say to me?

Then what is it that I could bless my wife with? And so I texted to her. I love technology for that reason.

Sometimes technology, it's a wonderful thing. And so, see, I learned that from Bobby. I would not have done that probably if I hadn't seen it, if I hadn't seen it every single day. And now my daughter gets to sit in that chair, so sometimes early in the morning I'll text her, and she'll be texting me Bible verses that inspired her that day, sitting in her mom's chair.

It's really sweet. I was intrigued, too, as I'm thinking about men getting older, and you talk in your book about talking to your dad as he was getting older, and you asked him how he was doing, and he said, just fine. And then you laid your hand on his hand, on the top of his hand, and then you said you just waited. And then he said, I feel useless. And I was struck by that, and it made me wonder, because I've talked to other men that have a sense of loss and feel useless. So you talk about that a little bit, and you even talk about in the middle of the night having those ponderings. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting, because you think that only happens to younger people that are asking those questions like, am I worthwhile?

Is there significance to my life still? Talk about that a little bit, Robert. You've been listening to David Ann Wilson with Robert Walgamuth on Family Life Today.

We're going to hear Robert's response in just a moment. But first, did you know that Family Life Today is listener-supported? That means we rely on generous gifts from listeners just like you. And this week, when you give any amount to Family Life Today, as our thanks, we're going to send you a copy of Sam Albury's book, What God Has to Say About Our Bodies. You can give securely online at familylifetoday.com, or you can give us a call with your donation at 1-800-358-6329.

That could be a one-time gift, or you can give a recurring monthly gift. Again, the number is 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. All right, now let's hop back into David Ann's conversation with Robert Walgamuth.

Back to my daddy. I'll never forget it, and it happened just exactly as you described. And I remember him looking at me and saying that word, useless. I'll never, ever, ever forget it. And I knew what he meant. In fact, the previous night, we had had like a little family reunion. Well, there's no such thing as a little family reunion with my family. And it was noisy, and there were little kids running around, and the older kids were comparing notes on technology, and you know what?

It really is easy to feel lost in that setting. And I remember my dad sitting quietly. I mean, there was no way he was going to engage about the latest movie or the latest musicians or the latest technology, the latest software. He just sat quietly. So it was the next morning that I had this conversation with him, and that's why he was feeling useless.

He felt like out of it. And so I said, you know, you can pray for your kids and your grandkids and your great-grandkids. I said that.

You can pray for them. And he looked at me, and he said, I do. I can see him smile.

He said, I do, every day. I said, Dad, that's the most important. I don't care how old you are or how useless you feel. That's the most important gift you could possibly give your children or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren. And I can see him smile to realize, you know what? I'm not useless. I can bring these kids, as tired and feeble as I might feel, to the throne of grace every single day. So that was that. Now, to the late-night conversations that you have, in fact, that chapter is called Self-Conversation, and I think that's an older man's nemesis.

In fact, this was one of the inspirations to write this book. I'm lying in bed, and Dave, you'll know that no man our age goes the whole way through the night without getting up at least once. I don't know what you're talking about, Robert. Yes, you do. You're lying to me right now.

Yes, I am. So you go back, and you crawl back in bed, and you're trying to go right back to sleep, and you can't. And so these things begin to pop up in your brain, and I found myself being very critical of myself.

And looking back over the previous day with regret, maybe something foolish that I had said to a friend, or maybe something I didn't follow up, that I should have, whatever, whatever. And so I'm listening to myself, and it's not good stuff. And so I bumped into a great quote. Martin Lloyd Shones, the great Welsh preacher of the previous century, wrote this very thing, and he said, don't listen to yourself, talk to yourself. Then I realized in the Psalms, the Psalms are filled with David, King David, the psalmist David, imploring the Lord to speak to him, to not just listen to these voices, they may be good, they may be demons, but speak back to yourself. You say, you know what, I can do better than that. I'm not going to listen to that voice. I'm going to hear myself say, the joy of the Lord is my strength.

And I'm not going to be subject to the voices that I hear. In fact, one of the most graphic conversations I've had since writing this book was with a colleague, a former colleague, and this man was brilliant, trained, smart. I mean, I had clients who are very smart, writing really deep, heady books, and this guy kept up with them. And I said, I haven't talked to you for a while, how are you? He took a deep breath, just like I just did, and he said, I woke up this morning and my first thought was, there's no reason for me to live.

I can't tell you guys how shocked I was to hear that, but that's exactly what I'm talking about. When you get to the place where you can't do, and men are doers, right? You can't do what you used to do. Those demons come in and say what my dad said, you're useless, you used to be productive, like what have you done lately?

You're useless. And that's exactly what my friend was saying to me. And I'll tell you, for days I prayed for him, I sent him texts, I tried to encourage him, but that's not uncharacteristic of men our age. You know, you finished doing your productive stuff, you retired, you got the gold watch, you got the party, and now you're looking at life and saying, what's next?

What am I going to do? In fact, the actual aerial tables has men dying after they retire like crazy because they look at their lives and say, I used to get my self-esteem from what I did, now I can't do anything. Why should I live? Well, Robert, let me say for Anne and I, as we wrap up, way to finish well. I mean, you're not done, but as you wrote in Gun Lap, you're on that final lap, it could be a long one, it could be a shorter one, we don't know, but there's so many, you know this as well as anybody, who started well, who may have run well in the middle of the race, and I'm thinking of Christian leaders, of authors, of influencers, as you and I know, who did not finish well, and you are finishing well, and it's a model for all of us. We need role models that don't quit, that don't even get mediocre. I mean, if you're going to finish a two-mile race, that last lap matters.

You've got to prepare and be trained so that you can run as strong in that last lap as you did in the first, and you're modeling that for all of us. So from just one man to another, thank you, way to go. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, Robert, we really appreciate you in all ways. Thank you, Anne. You've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Robert Walgamuth on Family Life Today. You can get a copy of Robert's book, Gun Lap, Finishing Your Race with Grace, at familylifetoday.com. If you know of anyone who could benefit from today's conversation with Dave and Anne Wilson as they spoke with Robert Walgamuth, tell them about this station, or you can share today's episode from wherever you get your podcasts.

And while you're there, it'd really help us out if you'd rate and review us. I've got my favorite president of family life with me today, David Robbins, and I'm wondering, as you hear about finishing well, does anyone come to mind for you? There are two people that come to my mind that I go, I'm so grateful to have these two men in my life running their gun lap well.

One is my dad. It's so great to see how he's purposefully living and passing on wisdom he has to people in his community. And the other is Dennis Rainey, the founder of Family Life, who passed the baton to me as president. I'm so grateful for his continued mentoring in my life and the way he has cheered me on as he continues to have his own impact with writing and speaking. He has this unique balance of continuing to run the race God has set before him, while he's also looking at his legacy and passing it on so well and saying, David, this is yours.

Take the mantle and run. And that's why at Family Life, I'm emboldened to continue to trust God for the mission of family life, that mission of effectively developing godly families who change the world one home at a time. When I think about the mission that God gave to Dennis to steward, that now has given to me to steward, I think about people like you, people who hear the truth and will keep growing closer to God, but will also think about how will I pass it on to the people around me and my own community.

Yeah, that's so important. Passing on what we've received from others. If one of the things God has used in your life is family life today, we'd love for you to consider passing it on. You do that when you share this podcast, you tell others about this station, and when you give at Family Life Today. Again, you can do that at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY. How would you respond if a surgeon, instead of removing your child's defective kidney, removed his only healthy kidney? Eric Reid will join Dave and Anne Wilson next week to talk about trusting God when life doesn't make sense. That's coming up next time. On behalf of Dave and Anne 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.