166: The Six Stages on Your Stepfamily Journey

Episode Transcript

FamilyLife Blended®

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Season 7, Episode 166: The Six Stages on Your Stepfamily Journey

Guest:Gayla Grace

Air Date: June 16, 2025

Gayla:We don’t know the impact we’re having in our home until later. Our kids don’t know how to express stuff. I remember feeling like a stepparent that “I wasn’t making a difference. Why was I even here? Why did it even matter if I stayed in this family?” And yet we do find out later the influence that we have had if we don’t quit.

Ron:Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I’m Ron Deal. We help blended families, and those who love them, pursue the relationships that matter most.

There’s no better place to pursue your marital usness than on a week-long cruise with FamilyLife. That’s right. Each February we charter an entire ship, not just a few hundred cabins on a boat, the entire ship so we can put on the Love Like You Mean It® marriage cruise. Everyone is there to grow in the Lord, worship together and learn how to have a stronger marriage. That’s the agenda of everybody on the entire boat. It’s the only full ship marriage cruise available. There’s really nothing like it.

Last year, Nan and I had a guy come up to us after the cruise. We were in the airport trying to fly home and he said, “We really didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.” It was the first year that they’d come on the cruise. He said, “But by the first session on the very first day, we were convinced that we were in the right place.” And then he said, “On day two of the cruise, we went and reserved our cabin for 2026.” That just tells you how great of an experience it really is.

That reminds me there’s still space on the 2026 cruise. You can join Nan and I, marriage authors and Christian teachers, concerts, all kinds of fun; great stuff, and about 2000 other couples from around the country who all want a stronger family. It’s a wonderful environment. You really will love it.

Our stops change every year. In 2026, we’re going to go to Honduras, Costa Maya, and Cozumel; all that and more on the 2026 Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise. And you’re probably wondering why am I telling you all this? Well, first of all, I want you to come on the cruise. I really think you’re going to have a fabulous time. We have breakout sessions specifically for blended family couples and that’s my second reason for telling you all this.

Last year, 2025, Gayla Grace taught a workshop for blended family couples on the cruise. There were a bunch of people in the room, by the way. Her topic was The Stages of Stepfamily Development. So what we’re going to do on this edition of FamilyLife Blended is we’re going to share with you that workshop.

If you don’t know who Gayla is, she is a blended family author and speaker who is part of the FamilyLife Blended team. You hear her often on this podcast. She also hosts our monthly live stream called Women and Blended Families. By the way, you can be part of that live audience for the next one. It’s the second Tuesday of every month, and if you miss it, well, you can always go to YouTube and watch the previous episodes. The show notes have a link that will get you to the right spot.

Okay, so here’s Gayla on the 2025 Love Like You Mean It cruise, talking about The Stages of Stepfamily Development.

Gayla:I hope you’ve experienced some Love Like You Mean It moments while you’ve been here this week. My husband and I had one. Actually, it happened before we ever got on the boat. We were coming into Miami and gathering up all our bags. You know how it takes a lot of bags to do this stuff and we each had two bags. We each had carry-ons, and we couldn’t find the elevator to get up to the next floor, so we had to get on the escalator.

Now, one of my suitcases had a really wonky wheel. I knew that and I asked my husband, “Okay, I’m nervous about getting this luggage on that escalator.” And he’s like, “We got to go. I’ll take it.” And so he graciously takes my bag, and we get on that escalator, and we start going up and that wonky wheel, it falls off the step and it falls onto one of his other suitcases that falls onto me.

And here we’re in the escalator and I’m looking down at the bottom and there’s a lady down there just standing there paralyzed. She says, “Oh my goodness.” I’m thinking worse than that. In my head, I look at the top and we are quickly approaching and here we are like this and I’m saying, “Randy, can you stand up? Can you get that luggage piece up?” And he did. Somehow miraculously, he stood up before we got to the top and he managed to be upright when we got to the top and we walked off. He was able to wheel that luggage off.

But man, that was a little too much closeness that I didn’t need at that moment in a different way than I wasn’t prepared for. But I think that’s how blended family life is sometimes. We are walking along minding our own business, feeling like life is going okay, and then there comes a little ripple, an unexpected circumstance, or worse and we have to figure out how to navigate it.

I’m going to talk about The Stages of Stepfamily Development today and how that impacts our stepfamily journey. I’ve worked with stepfamilies for more than two decades. I’ve been in a stepfamily for 30 years. Randy and I, in October, made it to 30 years. I know! That is a milestone in blended family life. And let me just say if we’ve made it this long, y’all can too. You’re going to hear some of our story. You’re going to hear some of our challenges, and we have had a lot of bumps along the way.

Randy and I had both walked through divorce when we married. We had both been married 11 years to someone else and both brought in 2 kids. I had two young daughters. My daughter Jody was three. My daughter Jamie was five. Randy had two kids. His son, Peyton was five. His daughter Adrianne was ten. And then six years into our marriage, we had a child together, our son, Nathan.

So we’re what is called a “his, hers, and ours” family. And we had these two ex-spouses out here. If some of y’all have those, those create challenges; and somehow, we had to figure out how to navigate this blended family life.

I’ll never forget the summer when I was helping Nathan clean out his closet and I’m thumbing through all those school binders. I found a paper that was titled “My Family.” I thought, “Now that sounds kind of interesting.” I identified it as his fifth-grade homework to his class. He had to introduce his family to his class, and I thought, “Now this should be interesting to see how a fifth grader introduces our family. We know we’re complicated, but does he?”

So he starts off and gives some general description of me and Randy says some pretty nice things about us. I’m like, “Hey, okay, yay. Thank you.” But then he gets to the part where he describes our family. He says, “We are a family of seven. I have no full blood brothers or sisters.” Nathan is the “ours” child, remember.

“I have a brother named Peyton and three sisters named Jamie, Jody and Adrianne. Jamie and Jody have the same mom as me, but a different dad. Peyton and Adrianne have the same dad as me, but a different mom. Jamie and Jody are stepsisters to Peyton and Adrianne. My family is complicated, and few people understand us, but it’s my family.”

I sat there for a moment. First, I giggled. I thought “That’s interesting how he describes our family.” But then I felt a twinge of guilt and sadness. This is the “ours” child. He has two biological parents in his home, and yet he still very much identifies as living in a blended family.

Now, we are 16 years down the journey at this point. We’re not in our early years. We’re not in those beginning stages that I’m going to talk to you about. We’ve made it all the way through, and yet, still the “ours” child very much identifies as a blended family. We are forever a blended family with complicated dynamics that show up at time, that make life feel overwhelming.

Stepfamily research says it takes five to seven years for stepfamily relationships to come together. That feels like a long time. It doesn’t mean that it’s totally rocky all that time for five to seven years, but it does mean that it might not really feel like family. These relationships don’t necessarily feel close, and it takes longer than we want oftentimes to really build healthy, close family relationships in a family.

Dick Dunn, in his book New Faces in the Frame, he outlines these six stages of development that I’m going to talk about. We all start at the same place. We start in the infatuation stage. This is a fun stage. We’re in love. We are looking forward to what lies ahead.

For me, I’d had a really dark season back here. My first marriage was rough. I was looking forward to a new beginning at marriage and my house was going to have a white picket fence around it because things were going to be really good.

In this infatuation stage, we often negate our kids’ feelings. We don’t recognize that they’re not quite as excited about blended family life as we are. Research says they’re often a year behind the adults emotionally. They’re not in the same place. They’re not excited about a new family because for them it feels like another loss. Particularly if they’ve walked through the death of a parent, they’ve really bonded with the other parent. Those single parent years are pretty special, and so now they realize that “There’s somebody else that’s moving in with my mom, or my dad, and what’s going to happen to me? What does that mean for me?”

If they’ve walked through the divorce, it’s the same thing. They’ve already experienced loss when their biological parents separated and they might not have worked through all of those feelings and now they got to deal with another transition. “My parent is going to remarry. Not quite sure how I feel about that.”

But for us adults we’re in a different place. However, it doesn’t take long for the illusion and fantasy of infatuation to give way to reality. Generally, within the first year, at some point, somebody within the couple relationship begins to think, “What have I done?”

They begin to recognize some bumps. They begin to see some things that they didn’t see during those dating years. Maybe there’s an ex-spouse over here that’s a little more involved than you thought and it feels like they completely control this home; or there’s way too much interaction between your new spouse and that ex. You don’t know how to navigate that.

For us, I didn’t know how to be a stepmom. I was raised in a traditional family, had no clue about stepfamily life. Our kids didn’t like each other. They did great in the dating phase. I mean, Randy and I thought, “Oh man”—in fact, I didn’t introduce my sweet husband. Here’s Randy running my PowerPoint—and we thought things would be fine.

So Randy and I both had custody of our kids when we married, and we went from two kids to four, overnight. We didn’t realize how challenging this parenting role would be. As we continued to try to parent each other’s kids, my way was right. Oh no, his way was right in his eyes. We didn’t want to consider how the other one parented and the differences in those kids.

Our biggest disharmony centered around my stepson Peyton, Randy’s son and my daughter Jamie, Randy’s stepdaughter. They were both five years old. Randy and I became very protective of our biological kids, and we could not get on the same page in parenting. It really created disharmony in our home. Randy and I became exhausted and discouraged and confused and had little hope about how this was going to improve. Randy left the house one night. I’ll never forget, he called me from a hotel and said, “Gayla, I’m not coming home tonight. Something has to change in our family,” and he was right.

We had moved into crisis. This is the next stage. Crisis is the most critical stage. It generally happens within the first two to three years of marriage when expectations collide with reality.

Those things that you thought were going to happen over here, that you thought were going to come true, the expectations you had were set too high. The bar is up here and what’s going on is down here and you begin to feel hopeless. And you begin to wonder, “Can we get through this? What is this really going to look like?”

Maybe as a stepparent, you feel rejection. That stepchild in those dating years, they loved you, everything looked great, and then when you live under the same roof, it’s not so great. They don’t know what to think about you.

The biological parent in another home perhaps undermines the parenting, the stepparenting that you are trying to do. You feel lonely. You don’t know where to turn for help. You feel like an outsider. That’s a common position as a stepparent. We don’t know the insider jokes. We haven’t been on these vacations, and we feel lonely and isolated. That can send us to crisis stage also.

The crisis stage can be one of God’s greatest gifts because it forces change or somebody turns back. Particularly for those who have been through divorce, it’s easy to think, I’ve done that before. I can go back to divorce.

You see, for me, I had been a single mom to my two girls. It was not easy, but I knew how to do this. I knew how to parent my girls on my own. I knew how to take care of myself and my two girls. I did not know how to do this. It was too hard. It was too complicated. I had hurt feelings. I felt rejected. Randy and I couldn’t get along. We had ex-spouses who created a lot of conflict.

And let me just say Ron Deal hadn’t written all of his great stepfamily books back then. We did not have the resources that y’all have today and Randy and I were floundering.

Dick Dunn’s material was used in a stepfamily group just down the road from us. We learned about it. It was not at our church. Our church did not support blended family ministry at the time, and there was a church that met 30 minutes down the road in a different town. We drove to that group every Sunday night. And they had childcare! That’s a bonus! Packed up our kids, went down the road. They didn’t have a say about it. We needed help.

Randy and I also started counseling with somebody who understands stepfamily dynamics. Be careful who you go to. You can get some bad counseling as a stepfamily. Between the counselor, between that stepfamily group, which began to help us identify, “Oh, they’ve got disharmony in their home too,” “Oh, that stepmom, man, she’s got some of the same things going on in my head.”

We began to see others who were a little further down the road and they gave us some tools, and they helped us understand better how to do stepfamily life. They helped us lower our expectations a little bit in these early years. We had a lot of people in our home and the more people in your home, the more complicated your blended family is. But between the group and our counseling, Randy and I began to find some tools that helped us understand that maybe we can make it. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s messy. Stepfamily life is often messy, but that doesn’t mean that God’s not in it.

A statistic I read a few years back that I believe still stands true today, reports that of stepcouples who divorce, 25 percent divorce within the first two years and 50 percent divorce within the first three years—of stepcouples who get divorced. Do you see how often it happens within the first three years? These are the integration years is what we call them. We’re trying to integrate two families and there are challenges.

But those who get divorced, it’s because they quit. They decide “It’s too hard, we can’t do this.” They don’t get vulnerable and take the risk to get help. Instead, they turn back, and they never get to experience the rewards of stepfamily life that I’m going to tell you about later. They’re out there, friends, but you have to persevere. You have to play the long game; that you are willing to work through the challenges in your home.

This is where you might need to get help. If you are sitting in crisis, if you came on this boat looking for help because you’re in crisis, I hope you’ve reached out to somebody. There’re counselors on the boat. There’re workshops. There’re resources. I hope you’re looking to get the help that you need.

I also encourage you, if this is where you’re at, deepen your walk with the Lord. We’re not meant to do this alone. As believers, we have the Holy Spirit who is here to guide us, to counsel us, to comfort us, to give us direction, to give us the power for forgiveness and grace. I could talk all day about the need for grace and forgiveness in a blended family because the other people in your home, they don’t know how to do things either. They don’t know how to make these relationships come together. They get it wrong at times. Grace and forgiveness have to be extended in blended family life.

Now, the crisis stage, just like other stages, they’re not linear. It’s not one and done. You don’t get to crisis, and you move straight on, and you just keep going and life is perfect. You can go back and forth. Maybe you do get past crisis and then at some point you go back to crisis, or you go back to the questioning stage of, “I thought we had made through the hard and here we are again.”

And for some you don’t reach crisis until many years later. Maybe you married with a young child who easily accepted you as a stepparent and you can’t relate to others in blended families who seem like they’re having such a hard time and you’re thinking “We’re great.” I’m thankful for that, but it could be that when that young child reaches their teenage years, or their young adult years, they want to get to know their biological parent a little more. They want to go live with their biological parent, the other parent, not your home. That can feel like crisis. That’s really hurtful when it happens and it doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong. It just means they want to get to know their other biological parent in a different way.

Sometimes crisis happens as you’re planning weddings, even events—graduations, graduation parties—when you have to see that former spouse so many times. It can create some hard feelings. If you’re not able to express those feelings, talk about them with somebody, maybe not your spouse, but with somebody, work through those feelings, journal them. Do something with those hard feelings.

There’re many things in stepfamily life that can lead to crisis. One of the things that I’ve learned that God has really taught me is “Trust Me, even if you don’t understand what’s happening.” Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight.”

He does not say lean on your own understanding. There are so many things in stepfamily life that I don’t understand; that I don’t like. There are a lot of things that have happened in our stepfamily I don’t like and yet, God asks me to trust Him. Sometimes we see things backwards. Sometimes, in hindsight, we understand things better, but when we’re here in the midst of uncertainty is when God asks us to trust Him.

When we had been married about eight years, we went back to crisis. We had begun to form relationships, and we were beginning to feel like family, and we began to think, “We can do this. We’re going to make it.” But we had a far bigger, a far harder challenge this time. My stepchildren’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. Treatments didn’t work. She got very sick and a year after her diagnosis, she died.

My stepchildren—Adrianne was 19, my stepson Peyton was 14—very vulnerable ages to lose a mom. Randy and I didn’t know how to parent grieving teenagers. All of the relationships in our family were affected. All of our relationships took steps backwards as we tried to navigate this tragedy that had happened.

But this time Randy and I had a few tools. We had a counselor that we could go back to. We had a stepfamily group that I had friends with, and Randy had relationships with, and we could ask for support because this was a very hard season for us. But we had done hard before and we knew we could make it through hard again, and we did. God gave us the tools and the grace and the wisdom to get through this season.

Now, not every blended family experiences dramatic crises, but many do. Stepfamily life is complex. I just want to say there is hope on the other side of crisis. If you’re in crisis, when you get to crisis, there is hope on the other side of it.

After the crisis stage, the last three developmental stages usually happen between the second and fifth year in a family that is blending. It can take longer with more complicated dynamics. Randy has always called us remedial blenders. Yeah, it means we were a little slow, but we got there. Blending does occur, but there’s no magic formula. I’m not going to sit here and say within four to seven years your family is going to blend. There are lots of complicated dynamics for blended families, so don’t put a timetable on it.

The next stage, the possibility stage; okay, this is the fourth stage: these struggles that led up to crisis. It doesn’t mean they’ve all been worked through and everything is perfect. It just means you begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. You begin to see that this crisis doesn’t have to rule your home. Perhaps you’ve gotten some help. You have figured out how to work through the disharmony that was happening. You and your ex-spouse have developed an amicable relationship hopefully. Maybe that feels better to you.

That stepchild that you’ve had such a difficult time, you begin to relate to them, you begin to understand them better and you begin to feel comfortable in your role. The stepparent role can be very ambiguous. It’s very confusing, but as we move down further down the road, we begin to understand our role a little bit better and broken relationships begin to heal.

The fifth stage, the growth stage, it follows the heels of possibility. There’s been growth from the beginning, but now you feel the growth often. You begin to recognize the rewards of your efforts, and you begin to feel that you can take more steps forward than backwards. You can relate to these kids in a different way. As stepparents, we began to feel more comfortable in our roles.

I want to stop here and say something to those of you that are stepparents, particularly if these kids were older when you married. If they were in their late teens or their young adult years, these kids are not interested necessarily in bonding with a new family. The natural developmental stage for kids as they get older is to leave the nest. That’s how it’s intended to happen, so it doesn’t mean that they want to invest in the relationships in your home. We want them to, but it doesn’t mean that they care about that.

It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong if you’re still being rejected as a stepparent. It just means that that child is on their own journey. It doesn’t mean that you quit trying either. You nudge them in gentle ways. You help them to know that you do care. You send them a happy birthday message. You text them on a difficult day just to say, I’m praying for you. You don’t go in hard, and you don’t insist that they love you, you just continue to stay in touch.

My friend Lauren Reitsema has written a book called In Their Shoes: Helping Parents Better Understand and Connect with Children of Divorce. So she grew up in a stepfamily. She was in her later teen years, young adult years, when her dad remarried and brought a stepmom in. She did not care about developing a relationship with that stepmom.

She’ll say her stepmom was a dear person, but she wasn’t interested in a relationship with her, and she knows, she’ll talk about it, years later, and say, “I know what I did was hurtful to my stepmom. I can see that now.” But what she also says is “You cannot refuse forever someone who loves you well.”

Stepparents that stepchild cannot refuse forever someone who loves them well. Press on. Pray for your stepchild’s heart that they would want a relationship with you. Ask for wisdom on how to be in this stepchild’s life. In the growth stage, children’s overall behavior has improved and tension within the family has begun to relax.

And then you sail right into the reward stage. The stage that we all want to get to. This is where we experience the fruit of our labor, but this stage is only reached after years of intentional effort. It could take five, six, seven, more years before you reach the stage of rewards.

It doesn’t mean that if it takes longer, you’re doing it wrong. It just means there’s certain dynamics that are in your family that are impacting relationship building. It’s not that there haven’t been some rewards. There are rewards along the way, but when you get to the final stage, you see far more rewards than challenges. But sadly, for many stepfamilies, they don’t get here. They quit. They decide it’s too hard. They don’t reach out for the tools, and they never get to experience the rewards of stepfamily life. Y’all, they’re out there. I can tell you. I’m going to share some with you.

For those who persevere, the reward of harmony in relationships far outweighs the burden it costs to get there. You began to reshape those difficult years with hope and anticipation for the future. And once reached, the rewards continue to come reshaping the memories of difficult years with hope and anticipation.

Now, I’m going to show you a couple of pictures. Our blended family began in 1995 as a family of six. There we are in all our glory. I want you to notice something about this picture. My biological girls are right next to me and Randy’s biological kids are right next to him. If you go back and look at your early pictures, this is likely how it is because our biological kids, they feel safe with us. They know that we are right there protecting them. And what we didn’t know was we had a long road of blending ahead that would include a lot of bumps.

Here we are almost 30 years later. This is at our son’s wedding last July, so that is the son we have together. I’m standing by Nathan and let me just tell you something different about this picture besides the fact that there’s more people in it.

The gal standing next to me, that’s my stepdaughter. It’s Randy’s oldest daughter. My two girls are the ones on the end. My biological girls are on the end. You see kids no longer have to stand next to their biological parents. They can stand next to a step sibling. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter because love and redemption and hope has won over all the challenges that started in those early years.

We’ve added two daughters-in-law, two sons-in-law, and two grandbabies. Let me just tell you, grandbabies are a sweet thing for stepfamilies. Grandbabies don’t know step-grandparents. All they know are parents. All they know, I’m Gigi. This is granddad. That’s who they know.

Now, both of the girls holding babies are my biological girls, but Randy is their step-granddad. They will never call him that. Grandparenting is another way that a family can unite and bring relationships together.

The rewards are too many to explain, and we do not take credit for them. I’m going to tell you some of our rewards, but to God be the glory for the rewards that we’ve experienced. For me, I told you about my stepson. Peyton: had many, many challenges with him, especially after he lost his mom. Our relationship was really tenuous and almost 20 years later—Peyton was in his young adult years—he wrote a handwritten letter to me on Mother’s Day.

He says to me, “Happy Mother’s Day! I want to take the time and express my appreciation to you as my MOTHER. It’s in caps. He never calls me Mom. You’ve been there through everything: my first love, my first heartbreak, college, high school graduation. Literally, you’ve been there through it all. Thank you for giving me advice and good examples over the years, even though I know I pushed back, you were still there for me.”

It goes on to say some other things: “I know I had a great mom all along,” and then he closes and says, “Thank you for always being there for me. I love you, Gayla. Your son, Peyton.” You see, we don’t know the impact we’re having in our home until later. Our kids don’t know how to express stuff. I remember feeling like a stepparent that “I wasn’t making a difference. Why was I even here? Why did it even matter if I stayed in this family?” And yet we do find out later the influence that we have had if we don’t quit.

Randy’s had his own rewards for my girls. Their dad stepped out of the picture in their teenage years. We didn’t even know where he was for many years, and Randy continued to invest in my girls. They eventually asked if they could call him “Dad.” “Of course.”

Now that doesn’t happen for everyone. It depends on the situations and the circumstances. My stepkids don’t call me Mom. They call me Gayla. But for him, he was there, and they really related to him as a dad. And so then my youngest daughter married first, and she went to Randy and said, “Hey, Dad, will you walk me down the aisle?” Wow, what a blessing for a stepdad. My older daughter married a few years later, same thing, “Hey, Dad, will you walk me down the aisle?” Huge blessings in blended families.

We didn’t go this journey alone. We had churches, ministers and friends and counselors and people who invested in us along the way and helped us recognize there was hope on the other side of crisis. I pray it’s the same for you, and I want you to think about: what stage are you at? I’ve been through these stages. I’m going to briefly mention them again, and I want you to think about where are you at?

I would guess nobody’s—we’re past infatuation, right? I mean, that’s kind of that early stage and yeah, I can see y’all are done with that stage. So where are you at? Are you in crisis? Are you struggling? Are you trying to figure out: what’s my next step to make it in this stepfamily? Maybe you’ve worked through crisis. You’re in possibility or you’re in growth and you’re beginning to recognize that you’re experiencing the fruit of your labor. There’re still some bumps. These relationships aren’t where you want them to be, but you see some growth and you recognize it looks like you’re going to make it. You have renewed energy to invest in your relationships.

Or maybe you’ve made it all the way to the sixth stage. You’re in the reward stage. You experience far more rewards than setbacks, and if this is where you are at, I encourage you to invest in other stepfamilies. They need you. They need to know they can get to where you’re at. You see, our churches don’t do a great job of supporting stepfamilies. Randy and I have tried, and we have done stepfamily ministry in churches, but they just don’t seem to grasp on. They need other believers who are in good, healthy stepfamilies that can help them.

But I’m going to ask you to do a little exercise. It’s not hard, I promise. I’m going to ask you: what stage do you think you’re at? And what do you need to do to get to the next stage? Think about where you’re at and where you’re headed.

Ron:Well, if you want to learn more about Gayla and her ministry, check the show notes to get connected, and if you want to learn more about FamilyLife’s marriage cruise, there’s a link in there as well.

I should also mention that our next Summit on Stepfamily Ministry is coming up soon—October 23, 24. It’s going to be in Nashville, Tennessee this year, and I’d love for you to make plans to join us. If not you, maybe somebody from your church.

The Summit is a two day in-person equipping event. We bring together leaders from around the country to discuss resources and strategies to minister to blended families. You can go to our dedicated website for that event, it’s SummitonStepfamilies.com. Learn all about it, learn how you could register. It’d be fun to meet you there.

Okay, next time, we’re going to be talking about loss, grief and blending a family. I’m talking with Stanley and Myrna Brown. That’s next time on FamilyLife Blended.

I’m Ron Deal. Thanks for listening or watching. And thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible.

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