Learning to Say No

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is say no. So you can say yes to the right things and unleash that peace and that joy that comes from a balanced, healthy life. Kevin Harney joins us today on Focus on the Family and your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller. I don't know about you, John, but my life is busy. Is yours?

Somewhat, yes. Never a dull moment. Our world is fast-paced and keeping up. It takes constant effort just to stay on top of it all with work and family and errands and other obligations.

I'm sure people in the audience are going, yep, yep, yep, check, check, check. You know, finding margin can be a challenge, but it is crucial to do so. Jesus did it, of course. In Matthew 11, 28, Jesus tells us, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. What a wonderful promise that is.

And today we want to give you some tools to help you simplify your life by cutting out distractions and making wise choices. Who wants to do that? I see your hand.

Sign me up. Well, as I said, we have Kevin Harney with us. He's the founder of Organic Outreach International and also serves as the lead pastor at Shoreline Church in Monterey, California. He's married to Sherry.

They have three married sons, three grandchildren, and Kevin sounds busy and is. He's learned, though, how to prioritize the important things, and he's captured his insights in this book. Know is a beautiful word, hope and help for the overcommitted and occasionally exhausted. Look for your copy online.

We've got the details in the episode notes. Kevin, welcome back to Focus. It's a joy to be back here with both you and the whole team. You had an amazing team.

I believe you're right. I do believe we have a great team. Now, I'm so glad you didn't say no to being with us, so that's good.

I guess margin was there for you flying out from California to say hi to us. I have some automatic no's, but you guys are not one of them. Now, the problem is no is such a hard word for us, especially in the Christian community.

How do we use it effectively? Yeah, great question, and I think that because we worship a savior who's compassionate, who's loving, when we say amen, so be it. So often he says, I love you. God provides, he protects, and yet we're not all powerful. We're not all knowing. We can't do everything. We're bound by time and bound by space and bound by schedules, and especially those who have families. Once you have a family, your schedule just fills up in ways you never dreamed it would before. That's so true, and it doesn't necessarily get easier as they get older. My oldest son and his wife just had their first child, a little cow.

He's only nine weeks old, and their life has changed. And so just this process of saying no to certain things so you can say yes to the right things has really become a new part of their lives. Now, balancing this, I mean, this is something you learn over years. I feel like I've done a lot better job. The older I get, I'm better at saying no. So I don't know if that's wisdom or just disgruntled.

Hopefully it's wisdom. But balancing those priorities really came into play for you as a dad. I think you had something called Dad Home Night, and what happened? Well, when we moved into our neighborhood that we lived in in West Michigan, we had 11 boys under 11 years old the day we moved in. Not us, but the neighbor, the cul-de-sac, and other kids in the surrounding area. And when I'd go out and hang out with my boys, it would become an immediate neighborhood game time. And I love to play. I love to have fun with my boys. And when they were little, I'd go out. And at one point, my youngest son, he said, Dad, could we ever play with just you?

And I thought, what a great question. I said, yeah. Because every time we come out, the whole neighborhood comes. And I said, you know what? I said, we're going to have times where it's kind of dad-son playtime. And so I told the neighborhood kids, sometimes when you come over here, it's going to be the dad-son playtime. Sometimes it's going to be neighborhood playtime. And so when I say it's dad-son playtime, you've got to go away. And here was the amazing thing. They understood.

Yeah. Oh, they went home and said to their dads, Hey, Dad, when are we going to have our playtime? They might have, but what they understood is, so then they'd run over and they'd say, Hey, is it your playtime with your boys, or is it playtime for the neighborhood? And I'd say, it's going to be playtime with my boys. And they'd say, well, when's our turn? And I'd say, an hour and a half.

Or I'd say, tomorrow. And that simple no transformed my relationship with my boys, because they realized that I was saying no to the neighborhood to say yes to them. And then we also had nights where I committed to be home, come home from work and not go back to work again. And that was a whole other realm of saying no to my work so that I could say yes to my boys. Kevin, it's interesting, because what you're tapping into is an example of prioritization.

And it's so hard for us to do that at times. You know, when you look at that, how do you prioritize? What's your inner circle? What's your next ring? What's your ring after that?

How did you do that? And what were they? Yeah, and I think that for followers of Jesus, we start with the Scriptures. And my boys have always known that my walk with Jesus and my commitment to Him is actually more important to me, it sounds strange, than either their mom, my wife, or them. And then they also know that my relationship with my wife is more important to me.

Maybe more important, but I told my boys... Prioritize. I told my boys, don't you ever try to get between me and your mom, because I've known her longer than I've known you. And I'll know her for a lot longer.

I'll have to live with her a lot longer. There's that, too. And we just celebrated 38 years of marriage.

Oh, wonderful. And so they get that picture. But yeah, so just establishing and saying, okay, my faith is going to be... And so often we don't say, no, it's our faith, our time with Jesus, the thing that gets bumped off the plate and kind of disappears, then family.

People say those things, faith and then family, but oftentimes you don't live it out unless you establish those boundaries. Well, and that was the reason for the question, because that was a very practical example of doing that, saying no to the neighborhood boys so you can have unique time with your own kids. And I think that's a great example. You compare our schedules to a buffet line. Yeah. Okay, you got my attention. Okay, yeah.

You're in, you're in. So you walk down the buffet line, and they may be aren't as popular as they used to be, but when I was growing up, it was a big thing for the family to go to a buffet, because you could get whatever you wanted. They had all kinds of options. So you start walking down, well, this looks nice, and how about that, and how about that? But the problem is you get halfway down the line, and you go, oh, I'm out of space. And then you're either taking things off, which is kind of rude on the buffet to put something down.

Yeah, you don't do that. So the visual is this. If your life is like a plate, and with your work, and with your faith, with your family, with your free time, your personal hobbies, whatever it is, at some point, the plate gets full. And then if you slide something onto the plate, if it's truly full, something falls off. It's just the science of it.

It's the mathematics. There's no space left. So everything you slide on, something falls off. What I began to discover in my life, and the people I was watching, is that people who couldn't say no kept sliding new things on and not intentionally taking off something less important.

So what would happen is more important things would fall off the back of the plate. Usually the kids, the marriage, personal health, time with Jesus, and all of a sudden we're saying yes to things, and we're accidentally saying no. I tell people, you say no all the time.

Even the people who say I can never say no, I can't say no. I say, well, is your life full? Yeah. Is your plate full? Yeah. And you're saying no all the time, because every time you slip something new on the plate, something's falling off. It sounds like intentionality. Yes. I mean, that's another way to describe that. You have to be intentional about what you put on your plate.

Yeah. Now, pudding was always the thing at the buffet line. You just keep piling the pudding on there. That's why they have separate little bowls for that.

You love your puns, don't you? Put on your plate plate goes to pudding. I like how your pie works. The pudding.

You say in the book, every yes is a no and every no is a yes. I like that. I get it, but describe it in more detail. Yeah.

It's really revolutionary. And I was sharing this with people for years before I wrote the book, because I was just trying to learn how to balance my life. And with all the things that I do and love, I had to balance it out. And so I began to look and realize that when your plate is full, and so when I explain to people, when your plate is full, when you say yes to something new, you say, yeah, I can jump into that men's softball league, and then I'm saying no to going to my daughter's recital. If I say yes to this new commitment, I'm saying no to something. And so the opposite is true. If I want to really intentionally give guidance and boundaries to my life, and I say yes to something, I know right now saying yes to coming to be with you two gentlemen and with your audience today, I said no to some things back in Monterey.

That's just how life works. So I actually stop and think about those things. I had somebody ask me one time to do something, and I said, well, I said, my plate is full.

Give me two or three days and see if I can remove a few things to make room to do that. And he laughed. He goes, what do you mean? I said, no, I can't say yes to you. I said, if I say yes to you, I'm going to remove something from my life. I have to decide what it is and if I can do that, and if what you're asking me to do is worth it.

He goes, wow, I never looked. And so I ended up saying yes to it. I told him the things I removed. This is later in the conversation. And he said to me, kind of interpersonal, he said, can you walk me through this? My life is really full, and I've never thought about intentional yeses, intentional nos, to keep my life balanced.

He said, and the book wasn't written at this time, but it was being formed in my heart and my mind. And that's the idea. When you say yes to something, you're going to be saying no to something else. But when you say no to something, you can say yes to something even better.

It's just deciding. Kevin, some people listening might not understand that because they don't perceive themselves to be, you know, their plate is full. You know, I've got recreational time. I have space for my family. But, you know, kind of describe that discussion with your friend because even those people may not be realizing that if you have downtime, that's part of what's on your plate. And if you squeeze other things in, then you probably begin to eliminate some of that downtime.

So I'm just not so sure everyone is as aware as you were of what their inventory is. Yeah. One of the things, the world has changed in the last, you know, probably five to eight years. The world's always changing. But with kind of the accessibility of on-demand video and shows and TV, I'm finding people's schedules are getting more and more filled with things that probably aren't that important. People binge watching this show, this show. At screen time.

At screen time. And so I'm finding that most people actually have a sense of feeling like they're pretty busy. But when I say to them, busy doing what? Right. That's the next question. That's the question.

And so people don't often stop and look. And I would say for your listeners, it's not a hard process to stop and say, okay, even if you don't keep a written schedule, say, okay, what did I do yesterday? What did I do the day before? What filled my time?

And are the things that are filling my time the most, the things I really want to be saying yes to? You know, the thing about the way media works now is when a show is done, it pops up and says, by the way, here's the next show. You ought to watch this. Let's keep on going. Right. And it's boom, boom, boom. And there's a point where you've got to say no. Or even in advance, say, you know, maybe there's a show, a family in Jewish. We're going to watch one show.

Then we're going to turn the TV off. It's all these decisions. And it's, again, it's saying, usually it's saying no, no, no, no. So I can say yes, yes, yes. Describing something that can be difficult for people, it's called discipline.

Yeah. So if you're saying I'm going to allot myself an hour, fill in the number. I don't want to offend anybody.

Two hours of watching the news or whatever it might be. And then, you know, a half hour of doing my morning devotion or praying with my spouse, whatever it might be. Are you a fan of allocating and regimenting yourself to that kind of discipline? Yeah, I think the more you do it, the more intentional you are, the less it feels regimented, the more it feels like life.

You feel like you can actually, you can breathe. Just the way you do your day. It's just the way you do your day. And so, you know, when you say no to certain things, here's what I find most people do. They go, oh, if I say no to that, I'm going to feel guilty or I'm going to feel bad or I'm going to miss it so much. But when they start to say no to certain things, they're just time fillers.

There's almost sort of like this, wow, I got room. And then they begin to slow down and spend time with people they love or spend time doing something that's more meaningful. And also their life becomes more rich. And so people are afraid to say no. But once they learn to do it, it is incredibly freeing. Well, and that leads to the other question, the power of saying no. And how have you won at this within your own family?

Do you have an example or two? Oh, yeah. I mean, one of my, a life changing moment for me was when we were away actually in Colorado with our boys on a little ski trip.

They were probably maybe seven and maybe six, eight and ten, something like that. If my wife was there, she'd tell you exactly how she'd be right. But I say I estimate. And so while we were away, I brought some work with me, which I shouldn't have done.

I should have said no to it. But I brought some work and I was working on it. I went to my wife and I actually said, you know, I was reading this thing. And this pastor was talking about how he blocks out three nights a week where he just doesn't go back to work. He makes sure that he's you know, because they had like Sunday night services made Wednesday at family nights.

But there's three nights where he would come home and not go back to work. And I said to her, you know, if I am not careful, I could end up going back to work every night or working at home every night. And my wife very graciously said, you do. And I didn't know it. And so I very maturely said, no, I don't. And she said, she said, I think you do. And very gracious.

She did not. And Jim, that was my reason. I turned into a seven year old. And so I said, I'm going to go get my schedule and show you. And I got my schedule and I had to turn back three weeks to find one night.

I hadn't brought work home or gone back to the office. And it broke my heart. Because I promised I would not become that kind of pastor or that kind of dad. And so I actually said to my boys and to my wife, I made a commitment. And to my congregation, I shared with them, three nights a week, I'm going to go home and I'm not going to go back to the church. I'm not going to church work.

My congregation members, they said, we agree. We don't want you to work seven days a week. They weren't asking that of me. But here's the fun part. First night I come home, I walk in and my son Nate, my youngest son, jumps on my back. Dad, you're not going back to work. You're going to play with us the whole night.

I said, I am, buddy. And we had a great night. That happened like three or four times in a row. Then about the fifth or sixth time I come home on a dad home night, I wait for Nate to jump on my back. He's not there.

I looked up on the, he was always standing on the wash machine. I said, Sherry, where's Nate? So he's playing with DJ. So where's Josh? He's playing with their friend. Where's Zach? He's off with a friend. I said, don't they know it's a dad home night? And she said, oh, they said you're always here.

So totally 180. God redeemed it, right? Because I just made those decisions. And I can tell you something. From that point on in our family life, I kept that kind of that rhythm. And my boys, they love the church. They're not bitter towards the church for taking their dad away. Wow. So many pastors need to hear that.

And so many professionals. I mean, same thing. Kevin, let me ask you, are all nos the same? And what does the menu of nos look like?

Yeah. So in the book, one of the fun things about this book is that because I was just doing it for myself, some of the chapters are a paragraph long. Some are three or four paragraphs. Some of the chapters are two or three pages. I think the longest chapter is three pages long. It's 68 chapters long, but you can read a chapter. One chapter you can read in about 24 seconds. And then you feel like, hi, I finished a chapter. You feel really good about yourself. You are a high achiever. Exactly.

Exactly. But one of the things is section is called know your nos. And I go through all these different kinds of nos.

And they're very different. I have a nuclear no. It's what I call no, never. I'm offended you asked me. Don't ever ask me again. That's my nuclear no. If somebody comes to me and asks me to do something immoral or illegal, I don't say, oh, no, thanks. I need to find the right words to say, you know what? That's not who I am.

And you don't ever have to ask me that again, because that's against my character. That's a good parenting tool. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Teach your kids nuclear no. Yeah. And there's times where, and I have. And I have. But then there's sometimes there's a no where somebody asks you to do something and you go, you know what? I'm not the best person for that.

No, but I know a guy. I know, but I know a woman who could help you with that so that I even know there's no, but I know someone. And then when you pass off the opportunity to someone else, there's a no, but maybe another time. And you keep the door open. There's all kinds of ways to say no. And once you learn them and you have a menu, then when a situation comes, you go, okay, which of the no's am I going to use?

And I find in most circumstances, you can find two or three or four. And I tell people, make up your own no's. And then I tell them, know your no's. And then I tell them, pick your no's and pick them wisely. N-O apostrophe yes. Know your no's and then choose or pick your no's and then don't feel bad when you say no.

Maybe yes to something better. I love the balance that you're bringing to this topic. Kevin Harney is our guest on Focus on the Family. We're talking about his book. No is a beautiful word and I hope you'll contact us to get your copy.

We've got details in the episode notes. Kevin, let me come back to that nuclear no. It may not be in that category, but something happened for you in that way at 13. What decision was that? I think this is a great parenting example. Yeah. Yeah. And this is one that's become an automatic no.

I don't ever consider saying yes to this one. And so let me tell you what happened. At 13, my dad's mom sat me down, my granny, and I loved my granny. She was one of the... an extended family of over 100 people, one of the only Christians in my whole kind of atheistic agnostic family. And she sat me down and she said, Kevin, your dad, my son Terry, is an alcoholic. And she said he's very functional, he's very successful in what he does, but she said he's controlled by alcohol. And she said, my first husband, his dad, died in a gutter as a drunk.

His father, she gave me the family history, and his father, and his father. And she looked at me with tears in her eyes and she said, don't be the next generation of men in this family who is controlled by alcohol. Will you promise me you'll never drink? And I said, it's too late, but I was already drinking and already smoking marijuana. And I said, but I promise I'll never do it again.

And so from that day, I have never, at a wedding, a toast with champagne, not even a sip, I just made the decision, and I made the decision that that is an automatic, absolute no for me. Kevin, let me talk to you about a parenting tool that I've actually expressed in some of the books I've written, The Good Dad and Other Resources. Many of us as parents, we want to try to say yes to our kids more than we say no, because we can get into a rhythm of saying no to our kids. And I just wanted to offer you that opportunity to differentiate between kind of the scheduling no, where you get overcommitted, your plate is full, and in parenting the yes-no decisions that you make. Fill me in on that.

Yeah. So I talk about saying no to the no monster. Don't become the no monster. Don't become that parent that says no to everything, that's so kind of controlling and overcautious. So Sherry and I, when our boys were young, we agreed that we would say yes as often as we could, so we could bank away those no's that we really needed to speak. It's a great strategy.

Yeah. And so one of our boys came to us and said, I don't like my bed, I just want to have a mattress on the floor. And I don't like wearing a sleeping suit with a little pocket, no, pajamas, I don't like wearing pajamas.

Can I just sleep on a mattress on the floor with a blanket and just like some boxer shorts or shorts or something? And so Sherry and I had a conversation, I said Sherry, because Sherry's a little bit more, she grew up in a little bit more structured home than I did, and I said, honey, this is a yes. This is not a big deal. I said, we don't have rodents on the floor, it's not unclean, you know. And so we said yes. And within a few months, all three of our boys were in mattresses on the floor, and they thought that was kind of cool, and so we stored away the, you know. The wood frames and all that.

The wood frames, right. But it was one of those things where when we did say no, they knew we meant it, but they knew we would try to say yes anytime we could. One of my boys came to me and said, Dad, can we build a ramp off the end of this little dock into this little pond and ride bikes into the pond? And I went to Sherry, I said, Sherry, you need to go inside for a while. And we built this ramp, and it was beautiful. I mean, it was so fun to watch. They'd shoot off this ramp and into the water, so it was pretty safe, you know. And I said, but only do it when I'm here.

So I'm out there watching. Eventually they run up to me and they say, Dad, do we have any life jackets? And I said, well, that's your mom's department, I have no idea. So they run in and say, Mom, do we have life jackets?

Oh, she was so excited. They're going to use life jackets. So she gets a couple of life jackets, they run outside again, they tie the life jackets on the bike. Right.

To keep the bikes up. They were sinking, they were tired of diving down and getting off the bottom of the pond. And so Sherry was kind of like, oh, I thought they were being safe. But we said yes, but only when I, but here's the caveat, but I need to be out here to watch in case something happens.

And it was a blast. And I think that boys need to be adventurous and do stuff that, I got another story I won't tell you. Well, before that, though, the disclaimer, you know, no children were hurt in the taping of this interview. We're not suggesting you do this.

No children, no small animals, and all responsibility comes on me and not focus on the family. I love it. But what's your next example? Well, I don't know if I should share the story. Yeah, of course.

Okay. So my, one of my sons came to me and said, Dad, we were sitting out by, we had an above ground pool and a middle part that was dug to about nine feet deep. And he said, Dad, he was looking up at the roof and he was looking at the window of his bedroom and he said, Dad, do you think if I went out the window of my bedroom and ran across the roof, I could jump in the pool?

And here's what I knew. He was going to do it. If I, if I said, no, definitely talk, not talking to your wife about this. No, no, no, no. Well, I, I said, sure.

You got to stay inside on this one. But I said, I said, listen, buddy. I said, here's the thing. If you do, you got to hold the edge of the dormer. You got to go about five feet and they got to jump feet first into the middle. I said, your friends can't do it.

Only you. Cause I knew if he did it without me there, it was going to be dangerous. I knew if he did it with me, there was, it wasn't that dangerous.

It wasn't that it was above ground pool. It was only about four feet from here to here, but he did it perfect. He did it for maybe four or five times.

He got bored and never did it again, but he did it with dad there to watch. He said to me, dad, if I slipped and fellow would hurt and I saw, buddy, it would hurt. You could. Yeah, you could like, you could hurt yourself. Yeah. So you got to do it super careful. But I said, I said, I told him, I said, I think you can do this sometime anyways. Aren't you?

And he kind of smiled at me. I thought, let's do it in a controlled environment. Now, I don't know if you want to cut this off your program or not.

And again, all responsibility comes on Kevin Harney and you blame me. Not the program. Hey Kevin, let me ask you to, you write about a little change you made when you're checking out at the store. I think this is a great application for just Christian worldview.

What is it and why did it change you? So it's more like at Christmas time for about six or eight weeks, I realized everywhere I was going, it would be like, you know, it'd be the salvation armory bell ringer. It would be the, hey, can we round up your bill for food for hungry kids? Could we, you know, do you want to give a dollar towards this? And I, I was getting so irritated.

I just like, can I just buy a dinner and not round up my bill? And I just go and I found myself having a crummy attitude and I, and I finally thought, you know what? I'm just going to say yes. Every single time. It's 43 cents. And if mine was, if what I'm buying is 5.93, it's seven cents. And so, and so I thought, I'm going to not only say yes, I'm going to say yes really enthusiastically because I watched their faces, they're like, do you want, and they're so used to no's and they don't want, they don't want to be asking this question, but their work makes them do it.

So I basically, I made this decision. And so since that time, this was years ago, I'll say, I'll look at people, I'll say, yes, I'd love to. And some people like, they're startled. They're like, whoa. And they'll say, I haven't had anybody say yes all day. And I said, now, now I'm starting to actually ask what it's for because I don't want to be giving a thing.

There's some things out there that I don't support. So I'll say, what's it for? They'll tell me, I'll go, absolutely. If it's for hungry kids, if it's for helping foster programs, then I'll say, absolutely.

And it brings a smile to their face. And here's what I figured out that first Christmas time at the other, at the other Christmas I went back and I figured out it was like $25 or $35 all together. For the year? For the whole Christmas season. And I made like 20 or 30 people happy that I said yes.

And I was less cranky because I knew I'd have an automatic. So that's one of those ones where at the end of the book I go to kind of the yeses and how it freezes. I'm not going to say no to these things unless they're asking me to give towards something that I don't support for my own values.

Yeah. Kevin, you were right at the end and I think this has been great. It's a good reminder for us in our own self-discipline to remember to say no so that we have to yeah, we don't have to push other things off the plate. And to say yes to our kids as much as we can when it comes to involvement, engagement, time spent with them, et cetera. I'm thinking of a mom who maybe volunteers at school and sounds a little bit like my wife Jean when we had the kids in school. Maybe church too and runs her kids everywhere because they're in soccer or this or that or the dad who's trying to get ahead at work.

So he's working a bit late like you were. They say yes to a lot and it costs them. What's the Christian thing to do? What would you say to them at the end of the program and how could they get on better footing and move toward a more confident no? Yeah.

Well, I would say, you know, know your nose, come up, you come up with lots of different nose. I actually tell people practice saying no. Go in your bathroom, close the door and say, no, no, thank you. No.

And just practice different tones and get used to the word coming out of your mouth. Right. Don't do this around your spouse. Yeah. Don't do that.

But also I tell people saying no is a great act of love if you can understand that. I'll tell you one last short little story. I was in a restaurant with one of my sons and there was a mom with another son about my son's age and the son was just out of control, just out of control. And everyone in the restaurant was kind of watching because it was just really kind of not a pretty sight. And as I'm watching this, I looked at my son and realized that he was watching also. And he looked at me, he said, dad, why doesn't that mommy love her son?

And I said, buddy, what do you mean? He says, well, if she loved him, she wouldn't let him act that way. Hmm.

Wow. If she loved him, he realized that the reason that I wouldn't let him act that way, the reason that Sherry and I have boundaries is because we love him. He understood that at a young age. And he realized that this mom didn't, he was like, she doesn't love her son enough to say no. So I would say to that mom, sometimes the most loving thing you can do is say no so you can say yes to the right things and unleash that peace and that joy that comes from balanced healthy life.

Yeah. Kevin, this has been so good and I hope people will be encouraged and take some of these lessons away from the discussion today. And I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time and saying yes to being with us.

And you guys are an automatic yes to me. I love what you do here. I love your ministry.

It is impacting people all over the world. And so to come alongside and do anything to help is a privilege. So thank you for the invitation.

Appreciate that. And I want to remind our listeners, we're here for you. And if you're struggling in this area and your life is chaotic because you're not finding God's Shalom, his peace in your life, because you're saying yes to too much, get in touch with us. We have caring Christian counselors who can help you and discuss that issue with you.

In addition to great resources, one of which is Kevin Harney's wonderful book, Know is a Beautiful Word. And if you can participate with us in ministry, we don't pay shareholder dividends like the online people do. All the money that you send to focus goes right back into ministry. So if you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy of Kevin's book as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry and helping others. And you can do that through a monthly pledge or a one-time gift. Either way, we'll send you a copy of the book.

Yeah, get in touch today. Donate as you can and get a copy of Kevin's book. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family, 800-232-6459, or click the link in the episode notes.

Have a great weekend and be sure to join us on Monday. Ken Costa will help you better understand how to discover God's purpose for your life. If you know your why, you'll find your way in life.

If you don't know your why, everything else is in the way, but if you know your why, somehow those mountains don't appear to be as big as they were. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Man I knew my marriage was falling apart.

I just didn't know how to fix it. I felt like I would always be alone, even if I stayed married. At Focus on the Family's Hope Restored marriage intensive, we offer hope to couples in crisis so they can have the marriage they've always dreamed of. For the first time, I felt like my husband truly heard me. I've received some great tools from the counselors that have changed my life and my marriage. To begin the journey of finding health, go to HopeRestored.com today.