Bob: If you have a heart to help couples who are struggling in their marriage, Pastor Rick Warren has some counsel for you – be authentic. Be transparent.

Rick: If you're going to teach on marriage, you need to use your own marriage as an example, and the examples are the examples of imperfection not perfection. You don't help people with your strengths. When people hear your strengths, they go, "Well, goody for you."[ Read Full Transcript ]

On the other hand, when I get up and say, "You know what? There are times Kay and I have wanted to kill each other, but we're still here together and, the fact is, for us, divorce is not an option.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, June 27th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Rick and Kay Warren are going to talk about the early years of their marriage today, and there is no sugar-coating here.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us. You know, I remember hearing – and I was really surprised to hear this – I remember hearing a prominent Christian leader talk about needing marriage counseling in the early years of his marriage, and I thought, "That's not the kind of stuff you say in public if you're a prominent Christian leader. You usually keep that stuff kind of hidden in the background."

I was surprised to hear it, but then I was also encouraged to see how many folks kind of felt like, "Okay, so it's all right to talk about the fact that maybe we need some help?" You know, it kind of brought things out of the closet. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

Dennis: I do. In fact, you're not talking about me, because I have mentioned that.

Bob: You have mentioned that on FamilyLife Today.

Dennis: On FamilyLife Today before – Barbara and I have been through situations where we've needed to get the help of a third party to bring some perspectives to issues that we've been facing.

Bob: Yeah, but this guy not only needed marriage counseling, he violated Crown Financial Ministries principles to get his marriage counseling. He put it on his credit card.

Dennis: He put it on the credit card.

Bob: That's right. Isn't that true?

Rick: Mastercard saved my marriage. I'm going to do a commercial.

Kay: Bob, I had no idea you're such a rabble-rouser.

Dennis: Well, that's the voice of Rick and Kay Warren. They join us on FamilyLife Today. Kay, Rick, welcome to our broadcast.

Rick: Thank you, we're glad to be back with you guys.

Kay: Thank you.

Dennis: You're courageous to come back after some of the tough questions Bob asked you on a previous broadcast.

Bob: I'm a pussycat.

Dennis: No doubt about it. Well, you're a pastor, obviously, of a very large church. In fact, at a recent HIV-AIDS summit that you had at Saddleback, I turned around and kind of jousted with you a little bit about your church. I said, "You have a pretty good-sized church. What size is it?" And Rick said, "Very big."

[laughter]

I was trying to get him to set a goal about the number of orphans that his church would be adopting, and he was, like, "I don't know if I want to go there. I'm not going to give you a number."

Well, I want to talk some about your marriage …

Rick: Sure.

Dennis: Because certainly being a high-profile author, leader, and as a couple, giving leadership to issues – Kay, championing the cause of HIV-AIDS around the world, we know that ministry takes a toll on a marriage.

Rick: None of what happened at Saddleback in the last 26 years would have happened if we hadn't worked on our marriage first. There is too much stress in ministry to have stress in your marriage at the same time. So you better get that one solidified and know where you're going on that, and fortunately, in the early years, we got some help. We did get counseling in the first two years.

Bob: I was going to say, that stress happened early for you back in Texas, right?

Rick: Oh, it started on the honeymoon. Do you want to talk about it, honey?

Kay: Where to begin – we had a very strange courtship. I don't recommend our courtship for anyone.

Rick: It was strange and beautiful. She was beautiful and I was strange.

Kay: And nothing has changed.

[laughter]

Thirty-one years later that can still be said.

Rick: She's fable-ishus.

Kay: We were college students in Riverside.

Rick: And both pastors' kids.

Kay: And I was dating his best friend and was madly in love with his best friend, sure that he was Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Right for me. That man didn't share that same opinion and broke up with me. But before that happened, Rick came to my dad's church during the summer where – in between our college years, and I was playing the piano and …

Rick: Yeah, let me tell that part. I was actually preaching at her father's church. I was doing evangelism, revivals and crusades, and I looked over at her right before I got up to speak, and God said just as clearly as I'm talking to you, "You're going to marry that girl."

Now, I immediately doubted it for two or three reasons – first, number one, I didn't love her; second, God had never before or ever since talked to me that clearly in my life – ever; and, number three, she was madly in love with my best friend.

Kay: Some significant reasons to doubt that message. I didn't know anything about this …

Rick: And I didn't tell her.

Kay: … we came back to school at the end of that summer, and this young man broke up with me, I was heartbroken, crushed, sure I'd never love again and, all of a sudden, this Rick Warren guy started coming around and sitting down next to me in the cafeteria. Well, this freaked me out because I had asked this other young man when I had been dating him why Rick never dated. Rick never dated. He was just always busy out doing revivals, youth revivals and things, and this guy said, "Well, Rick just figures why waste the money on a girl you're not going to marry. When the right one comes along" …

Rick: That's a Crown principal, I'm sure.

Bob: I think it is.

Kay: … "God will show him who that is, and that will be that."

Dennis: It's a little bit like his theology of socks.

Bob: Why buy stuff you're not going to wear.

Kay: So when he started coming around and sitting down next to me in the cafeteria, I was scared to death. It's like what does he know that I don't know? Because I remember what this guy had said to me, and he did, indeed, ask me out. We went out to church, I was playing piano at a revival, eight days later we went out again, and he asked me to marry him.

Bob: Eight days later.

Kay: Eight days later, he asked me to marry him.

Rick: This is a story we do not pass on to our children.

Kay: Yeah, and I remember, again, if Rick had his moment of clarity from God before we started dating, I had my moment of clarity in that moment when he asked me to marry him, because I instantly said to God, "Okay, God, I don't love him. I'm in love with his best friend. What in the world do I say to this guy who has asked me to marry him?" And God clearly said to me, "Say yes, and I'll bring the feelings." So I said yes.

Rick: It was an act of obedience.

Kay: So began the sage of Rick and Kay Warren.

Rick: And right after we got engaged, we were both very involved in ministry. Kay moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to work in an inner city African-American church, and I moved to Nagasaki, Japan, to work in a Japanese church teaching English. Our entire engagement, we were apart from each other.

Bob: You barely knew each other.

Kay: We didn't know each other. No, you talk about violating principles, if somebody were to do a premarital counseling with us, and all the things they would check off and say, "This is bad, this is bad, this is bad, you haven't done this, you haven't talk about" – we had done none of it.

Rick: So we're not good examples for that, in fact, looking back now, though, we see the hand of God in that Kay and I are so exactly opposite in every DNA cell of our bodies. I say high, she says low; I say white – black; obla di obla dah , you know, it's just ..

Kay: Tomayto, tomahto.

Rick: It's not yin and yang, it's as far apart as you could possible get.

Dennis: Okay, who is the fast processor and who is the slower processor?

Rick: Oh, I'm the fast processor.

Kay: He is the fast processor, yeah, and I'm the slow processor.

Rick: And in every single example, if we had gone on eHarmony, we would have never, ever …

Kay: We'd have gotten kicked out of the system.

Rick: No, no, we would have never – not in a million years. But God wanted us together, and we believed that marriage is not to make you happy, it's to make you holy.

Kay: I wish I'd had Gary Thomas's book.

Rick: As Gary Thomas's books had talked about, and the truth is, marriage is all about learning to be unselfish, and there wasn't any major problem that we couldn't have overcome if we were just more mature.

But when we got married, we were both quite immature.

Bob: And you said the honeymoon was where things first …

Rick: Oh!

Kay: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Hell on earth.

Kay: Well, honestly …

Bob: Really?

Kay: Well, here's what's so sad, as I look back, and sometimes we – I mean, we've been married 31 and a half years, and so that's …

Rick: Twenty-nine really good years.

Kay: When I look back, it seems almost like those were – who were those two poor young 21-year-olds?

Rick: We feel sorry for those people.

Kay: We feel sorry for those who were us. But on our wedding day, I remember standing in the back of the church by myself waiting to walk down the aisle going, "Okay, God, those feelings that you said you'd bring? It would sure be nice if you'd bring those feelings sometime soon."

Bob: You're about to go on your honeymoon with this guy.

Kay: I am about to on my honeymoon, and he's so sweet. He was so loving and so tender, and I loved him, but I wasn't in love with him. I was scared to death. And one thing that he didn't mention that really was a major problem, we just didn't realize it yet, was that I had been molested as a child.

Dennis: It actually happened at church.

Kay: It happened at church, in my dad's church. The son of our church janitor molested me at church, and I had kept that hidden and secret, and when I told Rick about it right before we got married, I was completely unemotional about it, feeling like it didn't have anything, it was not that big a deal, so he didn't realize it was that big a deal. And so, really, our poor honeymoon was so bad and so terrible, and we got back from it, and people would say, as they normally do, "So – did you guys have fun?" And we're, like, "Sure, great." But inside we were dying, we were just dying.

Rick: Within just a couple of months after we got married, I ended up in the hospital. I was so sick from the stress. I was angry. It was, like, wait a minute, I saved myself for this? I was just flatout angry at God, and felt cheated, and Kay thought she was going crazy. And that's where we had to say, "Okay, we're going to get help."

Bob: But there's a stigma for a guy who is a …

Kay: Well, he was on staff, he was a youth pastor at a church, and we didn't – at that point in time, to talk, we just felt like there was nowhere to go, nowhere to turn.

Rick: And even 30 years ago there was much more of a stigma even than there is now. I was making $800 a month working at a Christian college. I was actually going to college and teaching college at the same time, and our counseling bill cost – it was $100 a week. So half of our income was going to counseling, and we racked up a $1,500 counseling bill. That's the best $1,500 I ever spent.

People say, "Well, I can't afford counseling." I say, "You can't afford not to get it. How much is your happiness worth?" My wife is my best friend today. There would be no Saddleback Church, no AIDS ministry, no peace plan, no tens of thousands of churches going through our seminars without that. And I'd pay $1 million for that counseling today – really – if it put me in the rest of my life.

Kay: It didn't solve everything, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like if you go to counseling, man, everything is going to work great. It just opened the door for us to begin to talk. We didn't even know how to talk to each other about all the places that you have conflict – sex, money, marriage, in-laws, communication. And we had conflict in every one of those.


Rick: Five for five.

Kay: Yeah, we were five for five, but it at least began to teach us how to start talking to each other and sharing our hearts.

Dennis: You know, a lot of people look at marriage conferences the same way as they do a marriage counselor – to go to a Marriage Conference means we're admitting we've got problems. Well, hey, just hold your hand up – all of us have problems.

Kay: Hands and feet, yeah.

Rick: There are two kinds of people who are married. There are those who admit they have problems in their marriage and those who are liars. So which camp do you want to be in?

Kay: Well, here was the dilemma for me. Because we descended into marital hell so quickly and felt there was no way out, nowhere to go, no place to get help, I couldn't see any future, I didn't have any hope for us, and yet I was determined that divorce was not an option.

Rick: We had locked the escape hatch and thrown away the key.

Kay: That was a commitment that I had made, and I wasn't going to go back on the commitment. But I just saw no hope. What I saw was, I had just consigned myself to a lifetime of misery. And so I wished that divorce was an option. I knew it wasn't for me, but I wished it was because I was so miserable.

Rick: We had made this commitment, "We're going to make this thing work if it kills us," and it nearly did in the early years. The first verse Kay and I memorized – we actually memorized it on our honeymoon – Proverbs 13:10 – "Only by pride cometh contention," which means anytime you've got a conflict, there's ego involved. Every time there's a conflict, ego is involved. That was the first verse we ever memorized together because when I get mad at her, when my ego, my pride bucks up against her pride, I want what I want, she wants what she wants, there's going to be sparks.

Dennis: I want to fast-forward in your marriage, Kay, to when you were diagnosed with cancer.

Kay: Cancer is a hard diagnosis in a relationship. It creates – it would bring to the surface anything else that was maybe lying underneath it because of the stress of treatment and the possibility of death and the fact that you have to be unselfish to care for someone who is sick.

We had done a lot of hard work, and it wasn't even just in those first two years. It's an ongoing process. We are so different, and we are both very strong-willed, intent people.

Dennis: Still?

Kay: Still – but Rick demonstrated such incredible love to me, and I have said this many times – if I didn't love him before, which I did, I would have loved him forever because of the way that he took care of me when I was sick.

Dennis: How did he do that?

Kay: Well, I got very sick with my chemo treatments. Most people don't. They have great drugs that keep nausea at bay, but I was one of those one percenters who got very sick, and so I was hospitalized with each chemo. And Rick rarely left my side. He was in that hospital room, we were just getting ready to launch the peace plan. We preached that message together, and I started chemo the next day.

So we had this whole big plan going. He pulled out of that …

Rick: Canceled the six-week series.

Kay: Canceled the series, he did not speak at Christmas Eve services which, for him, is an enormous deal. As an evangelist, he lives for Christmas Eve and Easter because so many lost people come. And I started chemo in November. So instead of doing those 14 Christmas Eve services that he would normally be doing, he was with me.

So, for those three months that I was going through chemo, he was with me almost entirely. He put his whole life on hold for me, and it makes me cry because it was very sacrificial, and, as I said, if I hadn't loved him before, I'll always, always love you and be grateful for the way that you took care of me.

Rick: Can we take a break right now and let me go get a room?

Kay: At least give me a kiss.

Dennis: You know, Kay, watching you cry reliving that, I was just thinking and contrasting that with the only man I have ever gotten down on my knees and begged not to get a divorce – 50 years old, his wife had had cancer five years before, and he was divorcing her. And I contrast Rick's love for you with that man's abandonment of his wife at 50 years of age.

And, you know, a woman was designed by God to be loved by her husband sacrificially. It had to cost you, Rick, to not go to work. I mean, you're leading a huge church.

Rick: You know, I really don't think it was a sacrifice. Kay talks about it as sacrifice. There was nothing I would rather do because when you love somebody, it doesn't seem like a sacrifice. I don't really think I'm that big a hero on this. I just – why would I not want to be with my wife?

Bob: Well, you were having opportunities right and left "Purpose-Driven Life" was taking off, and …

Rick: You know what? That year taught me a great lesson. It was the greatest year of my life and the worst year of my life in the same year. And I used to believe that life was hills and valleys – that you have big mountaintops and then you have valleys, you have big mountaintops, and you have valleys. I don't believe that anymore.

I think life is more like a railroad track with two rails, and you have them both at the same time. There is always something good in your life, and no matter how good things are going, something bad is in your life. And then there are bad things in your life and no matter how bad things are, there's always something good you can thank God for, too.

And you get them both at the same time. It's not highs and lows, it's like you have them all at the same time, and the goal is not to focus on the good or the bad, the cheers or the jeers, strokes or the pokes – keep your eye on the goal, and the goal is Jesus. The goal is finishing the race, and if you look over at the stands at the crowd, some of them are cheering and some are jeering, you're going to stumble.

And so, really, part of life is just realizing life is a combination of everything.

Kay: Well, and for us, just back to that idea of sacrificial – you know, Rick is an influencer, and he's influenced a lot of people in enormous ways, but I think one of the greatest legacies of his life besides building Saddleback Church, besides building a network of churches and writing this book and all of those things that people will hold up as Rick Warren's accomplishments, one of his greatest legacies will be a legacy of love, and he modeled for other men, whether he is aware of it or knows much, he modeled for other men. They have told me. They have talked to me, and they have said, some of them with their own wives when they're diagnosed, they'll say, "I remember what Rick did and how he took care of you, and it showed me how I needed to love my wife."

And so there will be a lot of great accomplishments listed next to his name, but probably the greatest one will be the way that he loved me.

Dennis: Isn't that was 1 Corinthians 13 says? "Now abide faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love." And, you know, every woman listening to our broadcast right now is asking that question, Kay – "If I got cancer would my husband do what Rick Warren did for me?"

You don't have to be a Rick Warren to do it because the same spirit of God that raised Christ from the dead lives in you if you're a believer in Christ, and He can give you the ability to make that statement of love.

Rick and Kay, I want to thank you for sharing your love story. You know, it's a real love story. It's not some kind of plastic veneer love story. I appreciate your friendship and appreciate you guys being on FamilyLife Today.

Kay: Thank you so much. You are a great guy. Bob, the jury's still out on you, but thanks for inviting us.

Rick: Well, I will leave this thought with the listeners. The greatest use of life is love, the greatest expression of love is time, and the greatest time to love is now, because you may not have that opportunity tomorrow.

Bob: That's right. And, Dennis, I'm thinking of the younger couples who are listening to this program who may be going through difficult circumstances early in their marriage, or they may be thinking, you know, "I want to make sure we pour the right foundation in these early years so that our love will go the distance and so that we can have the same kind of testimony that Rick and Kay are able to have today."

You wrote a book a number of years ago with your wife, Barbara, called "Starting Your Marriage Right," that we've passed along to a lot of couples because it's 52 short chapters that give the foundation for those early years of marriage; the things that you're going to build on in all the years to come.

And we've got copies of the book in our FamilyLife Resource Center. If you know somebody who is newly married, whether it's the first year or just the first few years of their marriage or if you're one of those couples, contact us and get a copy of the book, "Starting Your Marriage Right," and then have them spend the next 52 weeks going through a chapter a week on their date night, and it will help give them the kind of foundation that they can build on when the storms come, because all of us are going to experience the kinds of storms you guys have experienced, and you've talked about today.

Again, the title of the book is "Starting Your Marriage Right." You can request a copy when you go online at FamilyLife.com. There's a red button in the middle of our home page that says "Go" on it, and if you click that button, it will take you to the area of the site where you can get more information about resources available from us here at FamilyLife Today designed to help strengthen your marriage, including this book, "Starting Your Marriage Right."

There's another book you and Barbara wrote called "Growing a Spiritually Strong Family." These are foundational issues in marriage and family that couples need to make sure they're paying attention to. Again, go to the website, FamilyLife.com, click the red button that says "Go," and that will take you right to the area of the site where there is more information about these books and other resources available from us here at FamilyLife Today.

You can also call 1-800-FLTODAY for more information about these resources. 1-800-358-6429 – that's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.

Let me say a quick word of thanks, Dennis, to the folks who not only listen to our program but to those of you who help support this ministry. FamilyLife Today is listener-supported. We have folks around the country who from time to time will call or will go online and make a donation to the ministry of FamilyLife Today usually after something has happened – they've heard a program that God has used some way in their life, they've been to one of our events, they've benefited from a resource, somehow God has used this ministry in their lives, and they will go online or they'll call us and make a donation to help support the ministry so that we can continue to provide practical, biblical help for marriages and families.

Summertime is often a slow time for those donations, and this summer is no exception. So we wanted to ask you today if you would consider making a donation to help support our ministry. You can do that online at FamilyLife.com, or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY and make a donation over the phone.

And this month when you donate, we'd like to send you a thank you gift – a new book from Dennis Rainey called "Interviewing Your Daughter's Date." It's designed to help dads with a resource so that you can have a good heart-to-heart talk with a young man who is expressing some interest in your daughter. Again, it's our gift to you when you make a donation of any amount this month for the ministry of FamilyLife Today.

You can donate online at FamilyLife.com, and if you do that, be sure to type the word "date" into the keycode box, and that will let us know that you'd like to get a copy of this book or call 1-800-FLTODAY. That's 1-800-358-6329, make your donation over the phone and, again, mention that you'd like a copy of Dennis's book as a thank you gift, and we'll be happy to send it out to you. We appreciate your financial support of this ministry.

Well, tomorrow we are going to hear yet another classic love story. This time from Joni Earekson Tada and her husband, Ken. I hope you can tune in for that.

I want to thank the staff at Saddleback Church for their help with engineering on today's program, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.