Psalm 23: Finding Peace in the Storm: Tim & Kathy Bush

Hey, Shelby Abbott here. Before we get started with today's program, I want you to pause and imagine yourself with your spouse sitting on two deck chairs in a very warm and beautiful environment on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. After you're done hanging out with your spouse and relaxing, getting some sun, you head over and have a romantic dinner together and then you go and hear an amazing message that helps to encourage you in loving your spouse and walking with God. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the 2025 Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise. We're having a sale right now and it's a great time to save big on this incredibly unique environment to enjoy working on your marriage, being intentional in your walk with God, and doing it all in places like the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Miami, Florida. So if that sounds interesting to you, head over to LoveLikeYouMeanItCruise.com or you could check out the link in today's show notes.

Alright, let's get to the program. We were living on feelings. Everything was about how Tim made me feel. I mean, I wasn't going to be depressed anymore because he was going to make me happy.

And, you know, all the things I was feeling before, like he thought I was going to change him. The marriage didn't fix that. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is Family Life Today. Alright, so I feel like we're in the middle of like a miniseries. I know. And we just ended the first episode. It's like Netflix, you know, we're bingeing and episode one just ended and everybody's like, I can't wait till tomorrow. What happened? Well, today is here.

Tomorrow is here. We're back with Tim and Kathy Bush. I can't even recap yesterday. You just got to go back.

If you missed it, I'd say hit pause now. Go back and listen to day one and then come back because we heard really a lot of Tim's story in the middle of Tim and Kathy's marriage. And we started out hearing pretty much when you guys were at the bottom of your lives and your marriage.

And you had three adult kids that had already been out of the house and so you'd pretty much given up on your marriage. And we got, you're right, got to hear Tim's story, which was super brave of him to share. Yeah, so I guess we're turning to Kathy now.

Tim's hope was that he was going to marry a church girl. And their book is called Sex on the First Date, which is an interesting title. The subtitle is Our Story of a Broken Beginning to a Radically Transformed Marriage.

We're still on the broken beginning part. Yeah. So I have to say, Dave, when you said that about the miniseries, when we started our book, we had a writer previous who was helping us write our book. She actually passed away with COVID. And while she was writing the book, she was at one of our events and somebody made mention about maybe they should do a movie. And she looked at the person who said it and she says, no, it's not a movie. It's a miniseries. It's like a soap opera. It reads a little bit that way.

But the truth is, you're real people. And what we heard yesterday, you know, affairs, I mean, it was just... There's not even an exaggeration. And it feels like there should be, you know? Yeah. And most stories like this don't end well.

They're not sitting where you are sitting. So our listeners got to hear the journey. We got to know the darkness so we understand the light. So church girl meets playboy or whatever you want to call Tim. And how did that start? So when you say church girl, all that meant was I attended church. So I was raised in a family of seven children and we went to church on Sundays. And I remember, I would say at that point, I believed in God and I even believed that Jesus died for my sins.

I felt like I believed that, but there was not much more than that. But I do remember throughout my life as a child, I remember talking to God. And in my desperate moments, I remember, you know, my family was pretty normal. But then later in life, when I think I was around 11 or 12, I was molested, which kind of changed a lot of the dynamics, I think, of how I felt. After that, I felt like I spent a lot of time depressed.

And my favorite thing to do was sleep. And I remember at night, I would go to bed and I would ask God that I would just go to sleep and never wake up. I knew that I was going to go to heaven, but heaven to me was like a bunch of people in white robes singing church music, which I didn't really enjoy that.

So it wasn't like I was aspiring to go to heaven. I just wanted to go to sleep, I think, because I wanted the pain that I was feeling. You wanted to escape.

I wanted to escape. And so for me, school was really hard for me. I was extremely shy. To the point in high school, during lunch, I would go in the bathroom and sit in the bathroom stall so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. And so it was almost debilitating how shy I was.

It was so hard to talk to people. And I think after I was molested, I think it got worse. And then in my mind, I think I was also raised in a family where all of the girls in the family, what was going to happen was we were going to find a man and we were going to get married.

There wasn't talk about anything more than that. And I was okay with that because I saw my mom and being a mom and I was okay with getting married, but I had to find a man. And so I started dating at 16. I also started drinking because in order to be with a guy and to have anything to say or have any courage, I would need to drink.

So there was drinking and dating and sex with a lot of guys. But every guy I dated, I thought could be a possible husband. And so, especially up, I think at 16, I started dating a guy for a couple years and I thought I was going to marry him. And I thought that would be okay.

I thought that I would be satisfied with that. But I just feel like I was just depressed for a lot of my growing up. And getting married was probably part of an escape plan as well.

Like, well, that's the next thing that'll happen and maybe that will help. So how did you and Tim meet? So we met through my sister and Tim's brother and they kind of got us together. And I remember my sister saying, she told me about Tim and said that he would spend a lot of money on me and he would take me to a nice restaurant and he had a house and he had cars. And because I had heard about Tim and his reputation, and even though my reputation wasn't that great, I wasn't sure about Tim. And so I did say, okay, I'll go out with him. I saw Katha track me at the junior high school that we both went to.

We didn't go there together. And I saw her at my brother's and her sister's track me. And I said to my brother, who is that? And Kath thinks it's pretty shallow. I was about her looks.

But she looked so good to me. And I told my brother, I said, I want to take her out. He said, dude, you got a girlfriend and you don't even treat her that good.

So he said, no way. She's a good girl. In fact, I know her family and she's a church girl. Way out of your league, dude. Way out of your league.

And he was right. But I really, in the back of my mind, thought if I could get somebody like that, maybe I could change some of the things about me because I knew some of the things about me. I never was with a church girl.

So I thought that would change. Well, I can see why he was attracted to the church girl and the church family, because we had dinners together. We were a family.

We were a family unit that Tim didn't see. And so that's what he liked. And I know, too, when I saw her family like that, just exactly like Kath said, the family unit, what I was attracted to. They had dinners. They did things together. And her parents looked really stable to me.

A long time married. And he liked the way my mom looked, too, because then that would show what I was going to look like when I was older. I've always been about to leave and I see Kath's mom, who's 20 years older than her, and she looks good.

So Kath has a good chance of looking like her mom. So I thought, this is a win-win for me. Because I really thought that was important. I really thought that was important when I was 20. Yeah. So when you guys started dating, did you fall deeply in love quickly? Do you want to talk about the first date?

Yeah. The first date is the title of the book, so there's nothing to talk about. So I finally told my brother I was taking this girl out. She came to a party at my house and I asked her to go on a date. She said yes. And so I knew I had to go meet her dad, which her dad was an immigration officer, carried a gun. And I had no intention of having sex with her, even though that was kind of my MO, kind of who I was, because I just thought that was normal. I really thought it was normal back then.

I didn't really know any other way of doing it. So I went to her, shook her dad's hand, said, I'll take really good care of your daughter. He asked me where we were going. I said, pizza and a movie. And I said, what time do you want me home?

I want her home. And he said, one o'clock in the morning. And I thought, this is great.

I didn't think anything of it. And then we got in the car and I opened the door for her, which I found out later she really liked. And then you want to say with some other things you said? Are we talking about, uh, well, Tim was, I felt like he was the first man that I dated because I dated high school guys. Tim was out of high school.

I usually flex my arms about that. Yeah. He was the first man I dated. I mean, he had facial hair, he had hair on his legs, you know. Bigger legs than you. Yeah. I remember sitting in the car next to him and we had short songs. It was in August. And I was always self-conscious of my body and, and he had bigger legs than me.

You know how guys have twiggy legs, you know? And so I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. We were in a red Pontiac Grand Prix, red and white, and we drove to Portland to Old Town Pizza.

And then we came back to the Andreessen Drive-In. But what was interesting, when we went to Old Town Pizza, Tim had fake ID. And here I'm 18 and he gets a pitcher of beer and pours me a glass of beer. And I thought, wow, like, this is kind of cool. And I have kind of a tolerance. I can drink beer, but I found out after camping about a quarter of a bottle. I had no tolerance.

I think about a quarter of a beer that she was getting a little loopy. And so I thought, uh-oh. And then when we literally walked out of that pizza parlor heading to the movie, she kind of had her hands on me. And so I thought, well, this wasn't scheduled.

I wasn't planning on this, but how do you fight it off? You know, so we just, so we went to the drive-in and, and I had a six-pack of beer, had some weed in the glove box. And, and I had sex on the first date in the backseat. But then after that, like I fell in love with him really fast. And I felt like he fell in love. Like it was like, we couldn't talk enough on the phone. I went home that night and told my roommate, which I didn't tell Kath till we were married about 35 years, that this is the girl I'm going to marry. I'm trying to get my head around this and we'll probably edit part of that for the radio. But I'm trying to get my head around it.

Here, you've had this night where you're basically high the whole night, but then you feel like this is the person I want to marry. I didn't feel that way. I did, I did. But he said that, yeah. I went home to my roommate and we had a beer and a bong hit at two o'clock in the morning and I told him that. So that was, that's what happened. I mean, I was 20. I'm 62 now. So it's just a few years ago. I still remember, I still remember. There's no more beer and bong hits.

No, there sure isn't. So you guys, go on your first date, I'm thinking this is where they'll edit that part for radio. You go on your first date, you basically fall in love and you think, I'm going to marry her. How soon then did you get married? Well, five months and five days from our first day, we got married.

Five months and five days because? Because Kath, on about the three month period, Kath got pregnant. Which caused, when Kath told me she was pregnant, I immediately saw a girl, I got pregnant at 16 and I didn't want that to happen again. What happened at 16?

I wanted this baby to have a name because it was real important to me. And so I told, and Kath even said, you don't have to marry me. And I said, I want to marry you.

And so we did. And how old were you, Kathie? I was 18. You're 18. And I was a senior in high school and I was like, woo hoo, I get to drop out of high school. I hated school so bad. And it was my ticket out.

No more lunches in the bathroom. Exactly. Yeah.

Now you're going to be a moon. Yeah. You're a honeymoon. Are you guys excited? Are you like, this is one of the best things we ever did? I remember feeling excited as we kind of left the church.

I was thinking, this is so cool. I don't have to go back to my mom and dad. Because we were living on feelings. Everything was about how Tim made me feel. I mean, I wasn't going to be depressed anymore because he was going to make me happy. And, you know, all the things that I was feeling before, like he thought I was going to change him. The marriage didn't fix that. And so I remember when we went on our honeymoon, kind of having this sinking feeling, kind of that depressing feeling again. Like, what did we do here?

I didn't know Tim. Kind of like, it didn't work. This didn't fill the hole in my soul. Right.

Like, I'm not extremely excited right now. And also now I'm pregnant. So now the fun that we had together with the drinking, I'm not drinking anymore.

And so he's on his own with the drinking. Well, actually, the couple months before we got married, that last two months of our dating, we'll call it, I was still sowing wild oats. And because she wasn't fun anymore. So I was, I still wanted to marry her. And I realized once I could do this until the wedding night, once the wedding night happened, I couldn't do that stuff anymore.

So I wanted to make sure and get all that wildness out of me. So it wouldn't be there after we got married. You thought it was going to change.

I did think it was going to change. Because he was going to get sex nine times a day. I was getting sex as often as I wanted. I was in expectation and Kath would take care of all my needs.

There would be nothing that she wouldn't take care of for me. And I found out on my honeymoon that wasn't the case. And we both really much felt that we made a mistake on the wedding night. Did you talk about it? Like, we made a mistake?

No. We didn't talk about it with each other. We didn't talk about it with other people.

We just kind of sucked it up, went on with our life. And I did get a hotel with a kitchen. Thinking I was going to cook on the honeymoon. Expecting Kath would cook.

But she didn't know how to cook. On the honeymoon? On the honeymoon, he got a kitchen.

What? Bought groceries. Had a cooler with groceries in it. I remember thinking, does he think I'm going to cook on the honeymoon? So I made poached eggs on our first morning. I made poached eggs. That's what we had. We had pizza on our wedding night on the way there. And Kath, I didn't even know Kath did until years later.

I didn't even know Kath didn't even like the Oregon Coast. I didn't even like it. He didn't ask me. It's just what I could afford. So I just did what I could do.

And we did what I wanted because I was selfish. So welcome to the next 25 years of continued drinking, continued cheating. And pretty much 27 years.

27 years. More pregnancies. More pregnancies, yeah. I had our three kids before I was 21. Yeah. So you were kids. Yeah, I was kids. I was with kids and I was busy and that kept me going. I was taking care of all the home things and Tim was working and providing.

75 to 80 hours a week. Which I thought that was what a husband did and I thought, this is what a wife does. It's interesting. One of the things I love about your book is that you have videos that you have inserted throughout. How many did you say? Eight total.

Eight total videos. And to hear your kids talk about this time in your marriage in those videos was pretty fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I just watched one of them a couple days ago and T.J., your oldest, or not your oldest, second. The middle one, yeah. Yeah, he's saying, yeah, they fought on every night.

Drinking every night. We just figured they're going to get a divorce any day. I mean, that was their reality in your home for much of their growing up, right? Yep. That's where you were.

Yep. And then you hit bottom that we just shared with. If you didn't hear that, go back and hear. That's day one, first 15 minutes of the show. So, okay, when does this thing turn?

Because it's spiraling to a bad place and we all see it and you know it, but here you are. So, what happened? Kathy, and you had confessed to Tim pretty much everything you had done with other men. Yep.

So, we're at rock bottom then. And as I said, I begged him. Our daughter had been seeing a counselor, a Christian counselor. And I told him, I said, we'll go see her.

And she has a husband who's a counselor too. So, you can go see him. I'll go see her. And then, so we did that. I made the phone call and we got in right away. I'm not sure if all four of us met at first, but I saw her, Tim went to him.

And then the four of us would come together. For two years. For two years, we did this counseling.

Oh, this is why you said 27 years you walked through. And we had many counseling sessions before with multiple people. And one counselor really helped us back on our nine-year part, but the others didn't really. But the behavior of the marriage was not changing. Because there was, even though throughout all this time through the counselors and through all these things we were trying to do to fix our marriage, because we would, that's the thing with Tim and I is we wanted our marriage to be good. If we were going to be married, we wanted it to be good. So, we'd go see counselors. We'd go, I went, we went to self-help conferences. But this two-year process was the start of it.

The start of really digging deep into our marriage. Before I wanted the counselors to fix Kath because I didn't have any problems. It was all about me.

You didn't have any baggage or anything. No, you didn't bring anything into the marriage. But for those two years, we worked through the stuff in our marriage. But what's interesting, I found out after those two years, Tim still had not shared all the things he needed to share. So, I felt healed.

I really felt healed because I felt we had talked about everything and I had shared everything with her. And I got to the place where I actually told the counselor, I think we're done. There's really nothing else to talk about.

And so, we did that for two years. And then this is the place where Tim hits rock bottom. Yeah, what happened, Tim?

I know, well, I read it. Tell us how you got there. Well, I think it was, you know, it says in the Bible, I think three places, pastor, maybe you know better, that every knee will bow. And this was about a knee-bowing moment.

Bowing to Jesus, every tongue will confess, Philippians 2. I did not have, this was a time where no matter what I did, I couldn't work my way out of it. I remember in 2006, 2007, those were the best financial years of our lives. I mean, we're making seven figures, everything's going really good, on fire, cast back. I got some control going on in my mind. Things are getting back. And then I remember in 08, in the middle of 08, my brother, Ned, he is limping across a field of 10 acres that we're building buildings.

And I'm building my own kingdom, what I call here on earth. And he was a part of it. And I was really excited about him being a part of it because we'd been disconnected, which we talk more about in the book. But we were disconnected for a number of years because of miscommunication.

But we were in a good spot, him and I. And I saw him limping and I called him on his phone and said, Bro, what's going on? And he said, I don't know, it's a funny little thing. Well, this went on to a couple of different things where finally he went to the doctor. And the doctor said, I recommend we do some kind of a scan on your brain. And they found a spot in the back of his head. And the spot they thought was probably MS, but they had to do a biopsy to find out for sure. And so his wife and I both recommended that he do that, even though there was some potential danger in it.

And so he did that. And Kath was gone to an ecstatics conference in Istanbul, Turkey. I went to the neurosurgeon with my brother and his wife, sat in there. And the neurosurgeon said, Ned, I don't know how to tell you this other than to tell you, get your affairs in order.

You have stage four glioblastoma and you're going to die. And Ned said, that's a heck of a note and stood up and he never worked again, I can tell you that. But I immediately wanted to figure out how I could help him.

And he wanted to do the standard of care and do things, have the best quality of life that he could have. This was in the summer of 2008. A friend of his asked for us to meet with him down at the river and my brother got baptized. I watched it happen and I watched three other guys get baptized with him. It was really cool. They asked me if I wanted to.

I said, no, I'm good. I was baptized as a kid. I'll take pictures of you guys.

And those pictures are also going to be in those videos or in the book. But it was really quite a time with my brother. And then he went into hospice before Thanksgiving. But during that time, too, our nephew took his life and it changed our family. I mean, our whole family was broken and completely broken where we didn't know what to do.

None of us could work. It was just a mess. And at his funeral, I felt myself getting sick. And I'd been having anxiety over the years for 25 years, once in a while.

And I would just either work out or drink or both and I would take care of the anxiety. But this was different. It just wouldn't let go. And it just couldn't get better. And then in December of 2008, I didn't sleep the whole month.

Wow. And so with no sleep and I don't know if you recall, but in 2008 is also when the economy changed and the bank that I was building this kingdom went in receivership and they called all of our loans. So I had no bank and all of a sudden I couldn't work. And so I was back with my counselor and he thought maybe there was something to do with the abuse when I was a kid. And he gave me some ways to deal with it.

And I tried to do that and it still wasn't working. And I was thinking about suicide at this point and talked to my insurance agent and say, hey, I've got a guy that I know that I think you might want to commit suicide. And how long does it take for life insurance to be in effect? And he said, well, a year. And I'd been two years, so I knew I was good. I didn't tell him that. I told him later, but that was my reason for calling. I wanted to find out because I felt like I could help my family one last time.

They have a couple million dollars. I could manipulate things one last time and take care of my family. And that's how I was going to do it. And I was so sick at this time. Are you scared, Kathy?

I don't know if scared was the word. What happened at that point. So we talked about how Tim was the controlling husband. Well, all of a sudden his control, I'm watching all of the things that he was controlling, he can't control anymore.

And I really thought it was because his brother was sick and he couldn't fix it. But the sicker Tim got, it was like all of a sudden that wife that I depended on Tim for everything, to do everything, to take care of me in every circumstance, all of a sudden I had to take care of Tim. So I wasn't scared. I stepped up. You kicked it in. I kicked it in.

I had no idea I even had it in me. And I had my own business at the time. I had a little spa and like I would go to work and I'd be with my client in the treatment room. I'd come out and I had a waiting room and Tim would be sitting in the waiting room waiting for me. And at home, I'd be in the laundry room.

No, he couldn't work. I'd be in the laundry room. I'd turn around. He'd be standing there because I was like his blanket. I had to be with him. I had to take him to hospice to go visit his brother. And then he had nothing to say to his brother. And I would kind of coach him like, maybe you could do this or maybe you could say this.

And so I stepped up in the marriage. And I think watching Tim and it wasn't even, it was even mental. I mean, I had to call the kids at work and I had to tell him that dad can't come to work. He can't talk to bankers.

He can't make any business decisions. He's not mentally thinking right. And during this process, too, I'm trying, I'm watching him drink alcohol. And so I'm trying to help him with natural anxiety stuff because I don't want to, I don't want, I know if he goes to a psychiatrist, they're going to put him on drugs, but he keeps getting worse.

And so it comes to a point where his friend from Boise calls me and says, if you don't get him into a psychiatrist, I'm going to drive down there and take him. And so I finally took Tim to a psychiatrist. Which got me some sleep so I could start to think. It got him some sleep. And there were heavy duty drugs.

But it wasn't the answer. And I did go down and buy a Bible from the local Bible bookstore. And I was reading 70 pages of the Bible a night, whiskey in one hand, Bible in the other. And I wasn't, I still have that Bible today, but I didn't get anything from it.

I remember watching him and he was like thumbing through it, like he's speed reading. Where's God? Where's God? You're looking for him. Yeah, I'm looking for him. It's like he's waiting for us.

One source in one hand. Yes. You know, is he in pleasure? Is he in this book?

Yeah. And we're at the end of day two. And people are like, so what happened? Because what happened, you got to hear tomorrow.

You got to hear this because the next step is the, your whole life's different. It's interesting that you bought a Bible too. Yeah. You know, because you're looking, you're looking for peace somewhere. You know, it's interesting what Ann said just now. You're looking for peace somewhere.

Isn't that true of all of us? If you're honest with yourself, you're looking for peace too. And the question is, where are you going to search for it?

And in your searching, will you find it in any other place than the person of Jesus, our prince of peace? And I can't wait to hear more from Tim and Kathy tomorrow. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to David Ann Wilson with Tim and Kathy Bush on Family Life Today. The Bushes have written a book called Sex on the First Date, a very provocative title, but it's the story of the broken beginnings of their marriage and how God radically transformed their relationship. If you want to read more about that, you can get a copy of their book, Sex on the First Date, by going online to familylifetoday.com, or you can find it on the show notes.

Or just give us a call at 800-358-6329 to request your copy. Again, that number is 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, if you've been listening to Family Life Today for many years now, you will remember, of course, Bob Lapine. He was the one who was the voice of Family Life Today for 30 years, and he was the one who trained me. And we just love him so much. And not only is he a gifted communicator through spoken word, he has also written a book called 12 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Easter.

Easter's only about a week and a half away, and this book will really help you to discover the 12 kind of weird and wonderful facts about the resurrection, about Easter, spanning all the way from its origins up through present day to really show the enduring significance of Easter that we need to hear about as Christians today. So this book that Bob Lapine has written is going to be our gift to you when you give today to Family Life. You can get your copy right now with any donation that you decide to make. You simply go online to familylifetoday.com and click on the donate now button at the top of the page.

Or you can give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800 F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. So how's the story going to end is my question. Tomorrow we're going to talk about numbness to anger to emotional burnout in relationships. Bob and Kathy Bush are back to unpack more of their story and how God continued to work. We hope you'll join us for that tomorrow. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.