Signs of Emotional Burnout in Relationships: 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. Like we're brand new at this church and I'm like, I'm not getting up in front of people and sharing our story. And at first I said, you can do this on your own.

And Tim goes, I can't do it on my own. I said, okay, I'll come with you. I'll sit with you. It was a six week class. And so I sat within the whole night. He facilitated our marriage and shared a little bit of our story. We got in the car that night and I started telling him what he should have said. And I started telling him what he should say the next week.

And I felt the Holy Spirit say, you know what, Kathy, you have something to say and you can talk. 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 Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is Family Life Today. Part three of the miniseries on Family Life Today.

Oh, man. If you have not listened to the last two days, go back and listen because we are on the edge of suspense. Tim and Kathy Bush are back in the studio. They haven't left.

They're our good friends. Yeah. I mean, if you missed the last two days, go listen. But we started with the title of their book, Sex on the First Date. And if that didn't grab your attention, nothing will. You're like, what?

Yeah, that's in day one. And then the last two days have really been the darkness that you guys lived in. And right at the end of yesterday, this little light appears through a book called The Bible. But we're still in the dark because, Tim, you're in depression and, you know, psychiatrists are giving you drugs to help you sleep. You can't even sleep. Your brother had been really sick. Your nephew had taken his own life. And you are reeling. A guy that has all of his ducks in a row and who pretty much knows where he's going, what he's doing, you're totally lost. Clinging to Kathy almost as a security blanket and a person that will help.

Yeah. And so the thing that really opened the world is very surprising. When I read it, and I knew it, but when I read it in your book, I'm like, wow, the power of confession is very important. So tell us what happened. Well, I had gone to a counselor. Kath and I had been to these counselors.

In my case, this had been, I kept going over two years. And Jake said, I think there's some things you haven't told me. And I told him, well, I didn't tell you about my infidelity.

And so I told him about it, everything. He said, wow, you need to tell Kath. And I said, but if I tell her, I'll lose her. And I really need her right now.

I mean, I can't lose Kath. And so I chose to go home and tell her. And it was a very, very long conversation. And she kept asking me, is this all? Is this all?

Is this all? And finally, after a very long conversation, I said, yeah. And I went to hug her. She says, oh, no, no, we're not hugging. But I want you to know I'm not going anywhere. I mean, her response was a response of grace. Well, you probably, because of your past too, Tim, you probably expect an abandonment.

Yeah. I figured she was going to leave for sure. Why would she stay? Because all these years, I mean, there was 27 years of stuff that I needed to tell her. And Kathie, you had come clean with all of yours.

And you probably thought you've had every opportunity to share. I mean, why did you stay? What were you thinking in that moment? Because I know your mom or somebody told you, right? Don't stay.

Yeah. Well, I think what happened was the state that Tim was in when he told me he was deep in anxiety, he was suffering, he was sick. And so there wasn't a minute during that confession that I thought I'm leaving.

There wasn't even a second of that. What was happening was it was almost like our marriage was making sense to me. It was like everything that had happened in my confessions and the way I was feeling about our marriage, I almost felt like I was a little crazy. Like, why was this man continually taking me back after I was doing what I was doing? Well, he was doing the same thing. So it was almost like I was detached from my mind and my body because I've been thinking in the distance, this all makes sense.

Like, and why did you not tell me this? And this two years of counseling, why did you not? And I felt like we were at a place that, okay, we can get better now. Like, it's all out there because I thought that we were at that place already, but we didn't have a chance to get better because Tim was sick. So I thought, now we can start from ground zero and we can get better. It probably offered you some hope. It did.

Like, why isn't this working? And now you're thinking maybe there's hope. Yeah. And anybody saying Cal should leave, they were right. I didn't deserve it to stay. There's no way. I didn't deserve that. That was grace I didn't have coming. And Tim should have left me many times because of all the infidelity. But I can tell you with a couple of conversations that Kath and I had in that period of time, I felt unconditional love I'd never felt before. And when my brother passed away on February 28th of 2009, I thought things were going to get better.

And so we left to do our annual Mexico deal where I go down and serve on a board. And on the way down there, my anxiety didn't get better. It got worse.

I was literally sweating, claustrophobic, wasn't even comfortable in my own shoes, sitting in a first class seat. As soon as they closed the door, I completely lost it. And I was pouring down the alcohol, taking Xanax to get me down there, just thinking it was going to get better. I know Kath thought things would get better, too. I did.

I thought it would get better. Were you still reading your Bible? I was. Were you reading it together yet?

No, no. And he was, his reading was sitting with his drink in one hand and he's just speed reading through it, kind of picking it up at the house. He didn't take it to Mexico. Did you have it for Mexico? I don't.

I'm not sure. No, I don't think it, no, it wasn't, it wasn't any, we weren't reading it together. Because you weren't even really understanding it at that point. I asked a friend of mine because our psychiatrist guy, he would not get me more Xanax, it was just to get me to Mexico and back on the airplane.

And I knew, so I knew I could get it in Mexico. So I asked my friend to get me some and he went to Kath and said, why is Tim asking me for this? He wanted to know what was going on. But I was radically different than the guy he knew. I'd known him for years and I was this in control, game on guy. Confident.

And it was interesting when we went to Mexico, I remember, so we had been going for years and we were kind of the life of the party with all the partiers there. So we go this time and Tim's still, Tim's still drinking at this point, but he's also on the board and he's, he's, he's, he's a crucial member of the board and they look to Tim for things. But Tim wasn't there mentally. Like he was, he was off. He would try to talk.

I would watch him and it was like he was kind of losing his mind. And so we'd come into a room and sit down and everyone sat at the other end of the table because they didn't know what to do with him. And Bob said to me, like, what's going on with Tim? And he wants, he wants me to get him drugs. And I just said, Bob, if you don't get him something, he'll get it someplace else. I don't know what to do. So he came to me with and said that, hey, would you consider reading the Bible? I've been doing it and it's been working for me.

I said, dude, I am. Seventy pages a night, whiskey in one hand, Bible in the other. It's not doing anything for me. He says, well, maybe you should consider slowing down a little bit. I've been doing a thing called the Proverbs.

I read one every day. Maybe just do that once a day. And I said, you know, I'll consider that. I didn't say I would. I just said I would consider it. And so literally a week or so later, I came home and I said to Kath, would you consider reading the Bible with me? And let me tell you, that was the sexiest thing Tim had ever said to me. Really?

Why? It was just like, there was something in my heart when he said that to me, because I can say that there were years before I would get a Bible and I'd say, I'm going to read the Bible. And I'd start in Genesis and I'd get halfway through and I'd quit.

And I didn't understand anything. And so when Tim said, will you read the Bible with me? I just like, my heart melted. I looked at him like, of course I will read the Bible with you. I mean, it was really the first godly thing that Tim, the way he led me in our marriage. It was big. It was your first step toward God together as a couple.

Yes. Well, it's interesting too. I was looking at my Bible, James 5, when you talk about your confession and you said, okay, I'm finally going to tell Kath everything. And you already had, Kath. So now it's, what was in the dark is now in the light. You know, James 5, I'm sure you've heard this passage says, therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another.

That what? You may be healed. You may be healed. And we often think, oh, there's going to be this miraculous, God's going to touch our body and our, you know, our limbs, the cancer is going to go away. And I think it's deeper than that. It could be that. That happens. But I think it's like when you get the sin out and you share it with not just God, because we're forgiven.

And a lot of us stop there. Well, I'm forgiven. Good.

No, no. I think that was the day that you've hurt or that needs to know. It could be your wife, could be your, but you tell Kath, I think that was the day you started healing. You didn't sense it right in that second. And you hadn't given your lives to Christ, but you were on the right path. On the right path. And there was a, you had to create space. Yeah.

So like, I remember we started taking these products to lose weight and there was a 28-day cleanse and you couldn't drink during the cleanse. So we quit drinking. We're still reading the Bible. Well, then also the guy that walked my brother through his death at hospice there every day. I was so thankful for him. Pastor Bill, he's still alive.

He's 89 years old. He knows we're on the air with you guys. He said, I want you to go through grief counseling. And I got a group. I said, you lost me a group.

I'm not going to be in any kind of group, Bill, but I appreciate you asking. We said, what if we did it one-on-one, just like that? I said, well, I'd do that.

I'd try it. So we'd met three or four times. And then he said, you know, Tim, he said, I need to bring you in here and close the door this time. Are you comfortable with that? And I said, yeah, because I was actually feeling better.

No drinking, reading the Bible. He's walking me through grief counseling, which I'd never done with Pop either or my nephew or my brother. So this was now the time our nephew and my brother. So I remember he said, he closed the door. He says, Tim, I could lose my job for this. I've been a pastor for 40 years.

I've never had this conversation with another person. And I think it's from the Lord. He said, Tim, the Lord's got a calling on your life. And it's a big calling.

And it's not here. You need to go find yourself a Jesus loving Bible teaching church and figure out what that calling is. Now you guys, I didn't know what a calling was. So I went home.

You're like, what's that? I went to the church girl, went home. I went home to Cal and said, do you know what a calling is?

Well, first you told me what he said. And then you said, you know what a calling is? And I'm like, no, I don't know, but that sounds good.

Let's go find it. And I thought every church was a Jesus loving Bible teaching church. I just thought that every church you went in was a Jesus loving Bible teaching church and that everyone that was at church was going to go to heaven.

You know, I just, I just thought that's what it was. And kind of what you were just saying about, you know, we get to that place where we know that our sins are forgiven. Like I believe that Jesus forgive my sins, but if you stop there, there's nothing else. And I think that's why I would confess to him because I thought that if I confess, but I never knew you needed to turn around and change your way.

And we never... You had confessed, but you hadn't repented. Right. Yeah.

Right. But we never heard that. So when did that happen? That was around April of 2009. And we started immediately looking for that church and we looked at several of them. And then we had, Kath had went to a woman's deal for this company called Advocator.

I don't think they're in business anymore, but she went to this deal for them in Portland, Oregon, which was about three and a half hours from our house. It was a women's conference and there was women up on stage. It was a Christian business. And so the women were up on stage and they were talking about Jesus and a personal relationship. And this was foreign to me. We didn't say Jesus.

People who said Jesus were Jesus for us. They were weird. They were weird.

But there was just something that... So we were reading the Bible and they're talking about Jesus in a personal relationship. And I knew one of the women there lived in our area. And so I went up to her and asked her about the church, that she asked her what church she went to. And we had heard of that church. Our niece had gone to that church. We'd heard good things. So I went home to Tim and I said, I think I found us a church.

I think I found us a Jerusalem and Bible teaching church. But before that, we didn't say that, you know, our counselors for those two years, Tim was probably two and a half. They continued to say that you guys have a drinking problem.

Every problem you have in your marriage is stemmed to drinking. We didn't want to hear that. We would leave the counselor's office.

We'd go to Olive Garden, get a bottle of wine. By the time we left, we were in a fight. You know, we were paying a counselor and they're telling us this. So we did come to the realization at one point that we said, you know what, maybe we should consider not drinking.

But that didn't happen right away, though. We fought that because I was class president. We had a class reunion coming up, my 30th class reunion.

We had no way we were going to stop drinking before that. It's like becoming different people. Well, I was always the party because I was class president and we always bought alcohol, rented a suite. I was a big deal, you know, in my mind, in my own mind. It was part of your identity.

Right, right. Yeah, and I remember, I remember the first time we went to that church, too, that we talked about. We went in there and we sat down and they played this stuff called worship music.

I did not like it. I got up and left, left Kath in the church by herself. You stood up and just walked out. I walked out to the foyer. I was like, wait, this is a Jesus of a Bible teacher. I walked out to the foyer and there was a guy standing out there and we'll call him Jim.

And that was his name, but I won't say his last name since my permission. But Jim said, what are you doing? I said, this music just isn't for me. I said, I'm just not into this kind of music. He says, I think it is for you.

Get your butt back in there. Really? And I love this guy. I know him now really well. He was an elder of the church. Really, it's funny because that guy's a really quiet man.

So for him, God just totally used him to get Tim back in the seat. And I did definitely go back in. But at that party, back to the class reunion, we did, that was our last time we really drank was on August. That was the last time that we got drunk.

August 20th of 2009. And I have to tell you, I woke up that morning and I think that was like my first conviction. Because I looked at Tim and I said, we can't do this anymore. I don't want to feel this way anymore. I don't want to wonder what I did, what I said.

I don't want to do this anymore. And that's when we said, okay, let's quit drinking for one month. And we would start in about 10 days because there's a couple other things we want to do first.

But no more drunks, just a glass of wine here and there. Yeah, Tim always had to have a plan. He always had to, we had to go with the plan. And so we went with this plan. And we were reading the Bible every day at that point. And August 31st of 2009, we did quit for that month. And that's when for me, I believe I was saved through God's word.

I didn't have someone, you know, I didn't have anyone discipling me. And so I'm reading the Bible and I'm just like understanding it. We're reading the Proverbs.

When we first started reading the Proverbs, we're like, this is in the Bible? Like, this makes total sense. Now you can understand what the words mean.

Now we can understand it. And then after the month, we said, let's do things like I normally would. Let's do a thing like Benjamin Franklin would do. Make a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and do pros and cons.

Why we should either drink or not drink. We couldn't find a reason not to, so we just did it for one more month. Didn't want to be too serious. But during this time, the church we were going to, they were playing this Christmas concert. And they said there wasn't going to be a Christian when it was going to be a Christmas one, but there was a hook to it.

I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew what the hook meant. But they wanted people to serve setting up. And this was nothing I was interested in doing. I said, we'll just go and we'll just pay a little extra money, but we're not going to go set up. I'm not going to do that kind of stuff.

Not interested in that at all. And we went to that concert, you guys, and didn't know what I was expecting, but went there, went through the whole concert. And the very end of the concert at the Coliseum, which was a large event, they sang a song called The Lighthouse. And that song played.

And I literally felt the Holy Spirit come inside me during that song. And I reached down to Kath and said, you know, our lives are going to change forever. We're going to go all in for Jesus. This is what we're going to do. We're going to serve God the rest of our lives, and we're going to go to this church.

And tears were just coming down his eyes. And I knew, I'm like, our lives are going to be different. This is a calling. Yeah.

This is it. Well, we knew this was, we thought, it took us a while to find out our calling. But that was what we thought.

Yeah, it started right there. The calling was the church, was the church, but we didn't know there was more to a calling than even that. If you had to say, if somebody came up to you guys and said, hey, Tim and Kathy, what's your calling?

What would you say now? Our calling now is 100% to serve Jesus. Give hope. Give hope to marriages.

Give hope to marriages by sharing our story, our redemption story. We know God wants us to do that. That's what, that's our calling.

And their hope is in Christ. Yes. Yeah.

Just like where you found your hope. Yeah. Dan, tell our listeners how you do that because you've been doing it for how long now? Well, we've been, we, the very first time was at that church. We used an Andy Stanley thing called I Married.

I Married, I Remember. Yeah. 2010?

That would be 2011. And so then we- Well, this was Tim's grand idea of, you know, we're, we're baby Christians. We don't even know that we're baby Christians.

We're Christians now. I want to do more. I want to do more.

I'm all in, you know. And Tim's like, we're going to start sharing our, I feel like we need to speak into marriages. We need to share our story. And I'm like, wait, what? And I asked the pastors and they said, do it.

This is great. Like we're brand new at this church. And, and I'm like, I'm not getting up in front of people and sharing our story. And first I said, you can do this on your own.

And Tim goes, I can't do it on my own. I said, okay, I'll come with you. She was my eye candy. It was a six week class. And so I sat within the whole night. He facilitated our marriage and shared a little bit of our story. We got in the car that night and I started telling him what he should have said. And I started telling him what he should say the next week. And I felt the Holy Spirit say, you know what, Kathy, you have something to say and you can talk. And so I started sharing.

I started talking, started sharing with him and Tim says, I haven't shut up since. And you guys, there was 36 couples in that class for six weeks and it was almost a hundred percent attendance. I mean, people were riveted. They wanted to hear it and they said, man, we didn't know that. We didn't know that. And we only shared a little bit of our story. We didn't know that our story had an impact. We just, we didn't know what that even meant.

You know, we didn't know. And here you are basically baby Christians impacting people with Jesus and the gospel. On marriage. And how'd you get connected to family life? Well, it was kind of a funny deal. When we changed churches, we felt God calling us to a different church. We went to the largest church in the Tri-Cities and the bug for marriage ministry didn't go away. I was kind of hoping it would go away. I wasn't completely sold in, especially going to the largest church in our area.

I'm thinking there's going to be masses of people that Tim's going to want to keep doing this. And by the way, I started in that church in a men's group. It didn't even start out in the church. I was invited by the pastor to go to a men's group. And that kind of was a game changer for me to be in an accountability group with five other men.

And it's something I still do 12 years later. But I can tell you that when we got the call to do it there, Kath's negotiating factor was, well, we'll do this. But I said to Tim, okay, if we're going to do this, we're going to go do some things ourselves. We're going to get some experience. We're going to go to some marriage conferences so that we can see how things are done. And so I googled Christian marriage conference, and that's where I found Weekend to Remember.

And then I found the Love Like You Mean It cruise. So I signed us up for both. I told Tim, so if we're going to do this, we're going to go on the cruise. So we go to the Weekend to Remember in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and we're going to use iMarriage for our first week in January. We're going to do it again.

It doesn't work before, we're just going to do it again. And we're going there, and they kept on talking about this thing called Art of Marriage. And those little things at the Weekend to Remember, and it was just amazing when they talked about it.

We knew this was what we're supposed to use. So Sunday morning, Pastor Dave was going to teach at back of the church. We were still in Coeur d'Alene, and I knew he was preparing his final prep for his sermon. I called him at six o'clock in the morning. I said, hey, Dave, I think this is a God thing, but we should be doing the Art of Marriage, not iMarriage. What do you think?

He said, if you think it's a God thing, I think it's a God thing. Well, and I want to say back to that, when we attended the Weekend to Remember, this is our first marriage conference where Tim and I are in a good place. And we have found Jesus, we know Jesus, we're growing in Him. Yeah, we still have things to work through.

Yeah. But we're sitting there, and I'm just at peace thinking, we got it. We have been searching, we have been doing all these things, and Jesus was the answer. And hearing the message of the Weekend to Remember, it's just like, there's so much peace that washes over me. And we're watching all the clips of Art of Marriage, and that's when God worked in me. And I knew at that moment that this is what we're called to do.

He already knew, but I wasn't 100 percent on until we attended the Weekend to Remember. It's so fascinating, too, because as you go through your book and you're going through the videos that are in the book, one of the most fascinating things to me was listening to your kids talk about where you were spiritually at this point. And grandkids. Yeah, because the kids were like, all right, it seems like they're going through this new phase, a Jesus phase. And it's going to go away. Yeah. Yeah. And it has never gone away.

No. And so to hear your kids and your grandkids talk about your faith, the impact that you've made, not only in your community, but on them. It's our legacy. Their marriages, you know, your grandkids, the legacy. Like, I look, I think about where you've been, what you've gone through as kids, really.

The trials that you faced, the addictions that you had. And to now hear your legacy saying that Jesus is our only hope. And why do we know that? Because we've seen God change our parents.

That is powerful. That is the testimony and story of the gospel. Yeah, I mean, we've done marriage ministry 40-plus years now.

And I don't know if we've ever seen a couple. And I didn't know the back story. But, you know, when we stepped into your lives, you were already at the stage where you knew your calling. And we got to watch it. And you guys are just, God is using you. And the coolest thing is, like, Satan had a plan.

Yeah. And you let God override a plan of divorce and isolation and a broken legacy to allow Him to use you to create something. And I was going to say, a beautiful legacy. But it isn't just your legacy. God's using you to change all these other legacies. And a lot of it's because you're so honest with this story.

And I think one of the things I've always loved about you, and even to watch you do a conference, you demonstrate prayer together and reading the Bible together. Without a glass of whiskey. Whiskey's gone. Even in the video, that's actually apple juice. When I modeled it on the video, that's apple juice.

That was apple juice. But I know that I remember sitting in the audience as you guys demonstrate. Because you walk out and you're like slippers in a bathroom. Because you're demonstrating this is what it looks like as a couple to spend time with God in prayer and in the Word.

And I remember thinking, man, we should teach it like this. Give us at least one little indication. When you're leading, I know you just did one. I mean, anytime we talk to you, you just did one.

A conference. Because you're always leading conferences. And Tim, you shared it even when we're with the guys about when you have the guys pray for their wives. Talk about that for a second. Well, it's just so huge. And it's been something that's never changed. Like I would say, even when I was at that hunt with you with the guys, I called Kath every day and pray with her on the phone.

It's just a non-negotiable. But this is something new 11 years ago, 12 years ago. And when you saw that on the stage, that's what we normally do. We were doing every day at that time. We do other things now, but we still do it every day. But the fact of the matter is we want to bring the Christ in the center of our marriage every day.

And the only way you can do that is to be in His Word and pray together. And so what we started doing in our events is we would model that. We'd use a thing called Moments With You. We'd read the day event of the day. We'd read that and we'd walk all the way through. It takes about five to seven minutes. Not a big deal. And then we'd pray.

But then I made it even simpler than that. I would take Kath's hand. I'll kind of show you this. They're taking each other's hand.

I hope you're watching on YouTube. Take it to Dave. And then I would make it this simple. I would say, okay, fellows, follow me. And I would say, make this prayer really simple because some of you have never prayed before. I know that.

And from these conferences we do, we find out that most men have never prayed with their wives, ever. And so other than meals. So I said, let's do it this way. So say this after me and I'll say it. And then Dave, you can say it.

You can model it the same way. Lord God, thank you for the gift of Kath. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Lord God, thank you for the gift of Anne. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Okay, Kath, you do it now. And then I say, Lord God, thank you for the gift of Tim. In Jesus' name. And Lord God, thank you for the gift of Dave. In Jesus' name.

Amen. And so when we see couples do that, we'll look out and we'll see tears in some of the wives' eyes. That simple little prayer because their husbands had never done that before. Some of them have been married 25, 30 years. Because they don't know how.

And no one's ever told them. Because I can tell you, when Tim started praying with me, our pastor told Tim he needed to start praying with Kathy. And I didn't ask him how to do it. I started doing it. And so Tim came home and so we'd read our Bible and Tim would pray. And that's what he thought was praying with me. Well, it was about nine months later, I finally said to Tim, do you think when you finish praying, you cannot cut it off? You don't say in Jesus' name, so in case I have something to say. And that's when we started praying together. And I also say cast never stops since.

Which is great. But we have to do that. We never want to go back to where we were.

This is a non-negotiable in our marriage. We want to be in, we love being in God's word. We want to know what God has to say. And I just believe as Christians, if we're not in God's word, we're starving. And we don't know what to, we don't know how to live. There's a few non-negotiables and they're all in our book, but those are definitely spiritual ones. And then there's boundaries.

There's lots of them. It reminds me of the verse that we're doing. Psalm 34.8. Psalm 34.8.

It reminds me of that because it's a verse that we're talking about all year. Taste and see that the Lord is good. And you guys are a demonstration that you have tasted a lot of different things in your lives. But the best taste that you have had is seeing that the Lord is good. And He's demonstrated that in you. And now you're demonstrating it all over the country and the world through your marriage.

Well done, Tim and Kathy Bush. To God be the glory, you guys. And it's the only thing that lasts.

Everything else is temporary. Yeah, and I got to just tell you, you inspire us. Yeah, you do.

I mean, we can get exhausted on the road. I know you do too. And you're doing these things and then we just look at you guys like, look what God's doing. You've given it all. And it's so cool to see. And thank you for being a partner with Family Life, with your gifts and talents and finances. You are with us. We're teammates.

I mean, you're ambassadors for this ministry and it means a lot to us. It's a privilege to be a part of it. We love Family Life. We feel like part of the family.

Yeah, we do. This is our family. You are. Yeah, speaking of being partners, not just with your gifts and time, because you give a lot of time. I don't think I'm at a Family Life event, you guys aren't there. It's awesome.

It gets us so excited to go. But you've financially given for years. Why? And if somebody's out there listening thinking, I don't know if I would or should, why should I? What would you say? So first off, I think God created marriage before the church. And I believe, I'm not saying don't give to your church because obviously that's what we're supposed to give to the local church. But when we see the things that Family Life does and how it's changed our marriage and how they partnered with us and even said we want to be your partner and helped us along. We never feel like we're out alone and they've helped us equip other people.

There's always been somebody that was a phone call away. I think to know that they're working in marriages, which is our calling, which is our passion, and our kids are part of that, our grandkids are part of that. And when you think of all the lives this ministry touches and the legacies that this ministry touches, I just don't know where you can invest your money better. It's just 100% win-win because it's going to benefit you, your family and other families that you might not see till eternity. And if that's important to you, to lay your treasures in heaven versus here that you can't keep, then I think Family Life is a good avenue.

What do you think, babe? Well, I love giving to Family Life because, like I said, you guys are our family and the support that we feel from you with the ministry that we're doing. And through the years, it's been easy for Tim and I to give with money. I mean, we're financially able to do, but we want to give the money to Family Life because we know it's going to help so many marriages. But to be able to give our time and to do the conferences we do and use the resources, the art of marriage we have loved, we're excited for the new art of marriage.

But we do, we just feel like we're partners. Well, and the transparency, too. When David Robbins shows where the money goes, there's not excess. The money gets spent and it gets used for good things. And when you find a company where people raise their support, 70% or whatever it is, it's pretty cool that other people go alongside of those people. So it touches so many people. And I just don't know whether their ministry like it. And I've got a lot of friends that are involved in it, too, that we've met.

Yeah, we are grateful. If you want to come alongside the Bushes and partner with us like them to support things that are going to help change marriages for the glory of Jesus, like the art of marriage that they mentioned, like Family Life Today, you can go online to familylifetoday.com and click on the donate now button to partner with us. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson today with Tim and Kathy Bush on Family Life Today. You know, Tim and Kathy have written a book called Sex on the First Date, very, very provocative title.

But it's really the story of a broken beginning to their relationship and how Jesus radically transformed their marriage. You can get a copy of their book by going online to familylifetoday.com, or you can find it in the show notes, or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. If you've been listening to Family Life Today for any amount of time over the past few years, you remember the beloved Bob Lapine. And Bob is not only someone who has championed Family Life Today for so long and left an incredible legacy here on this program, he's also an author, and he's written a book called 12 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Easter. Now, we're about a week away from Easter, and I'm very excited for that.

And this book really helps you explore the 12 weird and wonderful facts that Bob has come up with that span all the way from Easter's origins up through present day that really show the enduring significance of Easter for all Christians. So, this book by Bob Lapine is going to be our gift to you when you give to Family Life Today. You can get your copy now with any donation that you make to Family Life. Just 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-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us your donation in the mail if you'd like to.

Our address is Family Life 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida 32832. And just make sure to let us know that you'd like a copy of Bob Lapine's book 12 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Easter when you send us your donation in the mail. Now, I want to ask you to pray for all the weekend to remember marriage events that are happening this weekend up through Sunday. They're happening specifically in Anchorage, Chicago, the Poconos, and Seattle. Now, there's over 40 events across the country still happening all this spring and there's still time to find a location near you.

So, you can just go to weekendtoremember.com to find a date and location for you and your spouse to attend a weekend to remember marriage getaway. Now, coming up next week, Cody Wilson, Dave and Ann Wilson's very own son, is going to be with us talking about the fact that despite in his early years of being exposed to the Christian faith, he felt an emptiness and inadequacy during his college years as a football player. So, he's going to talk frankly with his parents. We hope you'll join us next week for that. On behalf of Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. MUSIC