Does My Spouse Know Me Anymore? David & Meg Robbins

Dave: Alright, we’ve got an exciting day today.

Ann: We do. This is going to be fun.

Dave: Never have we had six people around our FamilyLife Today table.

Ann: Don’t turn us off because you’re [thinking], “Oh, no. This is going to be chaos.” This is going to be good; this is going to be really good. [Laughter]

Shelby: Welcome to FamilyLife 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.

Ann: This is FamilyLife Today!

Dave: David and Meg Robbins, the President of FamilyLife^®, [are] back in the studio.

David: Alright! Good to be here.

Dave: Welcome back.

David: Yes.

Dave: Who do we have over here, David?

David: We have Brian Goins and Ed Uszynski. They work on strategic projects for FamilyLife. For any of you who have gone to the new, refreshed version of the Weekend to Remember^®, there were years of labor and love and intentionality and continued improvement, that is still happening because these guys care about it so much; [they] steward the message that’s been around for decades for today and a new generation.

They’ve also done that with the Art of Marriage^®, which is FamilyLife’s farthest-reaching resource that we’ve ever done. It’s gone around the world into a dozen languages and more. It’s reached [more] people than any resource we’ve had.

Brian and Ed, tell us a little bit more about you guys.

Brian: If that wasn’t intimidating enough—

David: —but you’re doing it.

Ed: I’m really nervous now.

Brian: It’s like [saying], “Did anybody watch Star Wars and see how that sequel turned out?” [Laughter]

Ed: Exactly.

Brian: Yes. It was an intimidating prospect to begin with, to try to improve upon a classic. I think that’s one we learned quickly: we can’t.

Ed: We can’t.

Brian: You can’t do that. We had to create something that’s in the same universe, but people will keep using the classic, I am sure. It will still have some great impact, but we hope we’ve created something that is another way to talk about God’s design for marriage—

Ed: —yes.

Brian: —in a creative way.

Ed: How many times did we turn to each other and say, “What are we doing here? We can’t do this! We can’t do this?” [Laughter] You can’t make that thing better, as far as what the core content is. What’s the word we’ve been using?

Brian: We wanted to have something that people would—that FamilyLife, number one, wouldn’t be embarrassed by—that they would like, that would be a resource that the next generation would [say], “Yes, I would love to share this with somebody else.” That was our hope.

Ed: Yes.

Brian: They would want to share it with their friends.

Ed: They would want to share it with their friends, and we keep using the word, “reimagined.” It’s the core content that had us a little flustered [thinking], “How do you retell this same stuff in a way that is new and fresh and will speak to a younger generation while still being something that people that have loved the previous Art of Marriage will say, ‘No, we could use this! This is good, too. We can pull stuff from this new one’?”

Ann: What is in this one?

Brian: The thing that I love about what we did with this one is [we built] around six biblical words, three Hebrew and three Greek words, that really ask the question: “If God is an artist—every artist has an intention; every artist has a purpose; every artist has a plan—they want to display something in their art. So, if marriage is one of the original creations of God—one of His first works of art—what did He want to display through that?”

We found six words, three Hebrew and three Greek, which talk about His love, and different facets, and how, when a couple exercises those types of love towards one another, people get a glimpse of the Artist, which is amazing.

Ed: Yes, you get a glimpse of the artist within your relationship, but the world gets to see. You might not even realize it’s happening, but when you love each other the way God wants us to love each other, it speaks to people that are watching.

Dave: I love how this has morphed. Again, I’m not behind the scenes, but I’d love taking our listeners a little bit behind the scenes because when you interviewed Ann and me—

Ed and Brian: —I think you were the first ones.

Dave: —I think it was early—

Ed and Brian: It was.

Dave: —because there were no six words at that time.

Brian: No, we were fishing. After two hours, we were saying, “Do we have anything here?”

Ed: We kept recording and talking to people. Then we’d meet alone, and Brian kept coming back to—he kept saying, “We need a hanger. These things are not hanging on anything.” There was one day we met, and Brian said, “I think I’ve got it. Let’s just sleep on it. We’ll come back tomorrow.” He came back the next day, and he said, “I think I’ve got it. Here are the six words.”

As soon as he said them, I said, “I think that’s brilliant, man. I think we can do something with that.” They’re not the only six words. It’s not the final word; but if we could get our minds and our hearts around these six words, we’d have a lot to talk about as couples.

David: I remember the day you guys came to me and shared, “We think we have a little pivot and framework for this.” I remember responding feeling the weight of God’s provision. The Holy Spirit affirmed in a powerful way. [I said], “Okay, guys, you have walked into this. He wanted you to participate, [and this was] His idea.”

You guys have both been connected to FamilyLife for dozens of years as Weekend to Remember speakers with your wives. Brian, you’ve been on staff officially for eight years. Ed, on staff with FamilyLife and other parts of Cru for 30 total, and 5 years more intimately, officially, with FamilyLife.

I am grateful, as you’ve gone about this, [for] the way you have pursued the Lord to trust Him for something bigger than yourselves. [It] comes out of your passion to steward this message of oneness that you’ve been connected to for decades with FamilyLife and have been pouring into other couples. Who you are has led to set the table of the conversations that will happen through this resource. I’m grateful.

Brian: It’s been an honor to do it. I think the thing that we wanted to do is—you’re still going to talk about the same topics, right? You’re still going to deal with conflict; you’re still going to talk about intimacy; you’re still going to need to talk about all of those things that every married couple needs to work through, but when you walk away from this one, you’ll realize, “Oh, it’s all connected back to what God’s purposes are for marriage.”

The one that I don’t think gets talked enough about, which is—David and Meg, this is your heartbeat—that our marriage wasn’t designed so that we could be happy. It was designed for a much bigger purpose than that.

Ed: One of the conclusions that Amy and I have come to apart from the whole Art of Marriage thing, in doing the Weekend to Remember conferences—in looking out at people, listening to people, having them come talk to us—is that, maybe one of the reasons why we can’t get unstuck, or we can’t get past this place that we’re at, is because we’re spending too much time looking at each other and not enough looking at those that are around us.

There’s something about that dynamic, when you take your eyes off each other, and you lock arms with each other and start to pray for other people and start to be concerned with other people’s concerns, God does that to grow you up. He does it. You start to look at each other differently, right? Maybe not as harshly.

Dave: We mentioned yesterday: we went to the Weekend to Remember before we were married. Six months later, we are reporting to our first job with Cru, Athletes in Action staff at the University of Nebraska, to lead athletes to Christ; and our marriage is—we’re in trouble [in] six months.

People have heard our story. We’re in trouble. But the first athlete I met, named Rick (a defensive back), said to me—on the Nebraska football team—he said, “You guys are here to do ministry. I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of us are married. Could you and Ann lead a marriage Bible study?”

Ann: We’re thinking, “No!” [Laughter] “No, the answer is no!”

Dave: What are you saying [about] ministry?

Ed: “Together? Together, you mean. No, we can’t do that.”

Dave: He didn’t know that we were in trouble. But what do you say in ministry? We looked at him and said, “Oh, of course. We’d love to.” You know what we did? We grabbed the Weekend to Remember manual—

Ed: —there you go.

Dave: —that we really hadn’t spent much time in. We taught it, and guess what? Just what you said, Ed. Our marriage got better. I don’t know if any marriages there did. I think they did. I think, in some ways, it saved our marriage because we were not focusing anymore on us. We were thinking, “What’s God going to do in their lives?”

Ed: That’s good.

Dave: “Here’s a tool. Here’s the material. Let’s teach it.” It saved our marriage.

Ann: I think so often, people feel that they’re not qualified to lead a study. “I can’t lead that. Do you understand what our marriage is like?” It might be bad, and if you say to the people that (maybe it’s just another couple that comes into your home, and you say),
“Guys, we are struggling. We need this; maybe you do. Maybe we could do this together.”

I’m telling you that that would help your marriage; to do this, to go through it.

Meg: Yes, I think that when you’re in a place where you’re feeling you’re stuck, or you’re feeling like, “We’re in the worst place we’ve been,” or whatever, you’re feeling like, “Who am I to do this?”

I think one of the reasons why stepping out and looking towards others, taking your eyes off of yourself, is because it does create this shared sense of dependency. [You’re thinking], “I can’t do this. On my own, I cannot point this person adequately to who Jesus is; but we can link arms together and ask the Lord to do it; see what God might have for them.” 

It does create this—maybe you haven’t been able to have common ground or unity anywhere else in your marriage, but it does create this sense of, “Okay, this is something we’re doing together. We both want the same thing.”

Ann: As you said, “It takes your eyes off of yourself and your marriage.”

David: You know what I think is totally true, and I feel it in myself often when you get with groups of people? Everyone is normal until you get to know them. To have a couple that’s willing to take the risk to say, “Come on over, and let’s watch this together. We need this.” We are not sufficiently good, wise, or gifted enough to make this work on our own. We don’t have to make it perfect. It’s just an invitation. Most people are struggling in some way and want to have conversations, but they think, “How do you frame it up? What would actually prompt it.”

You can have people over to a meal and dive into each other’s stories. But what I love about the resources that FamilyLife does, and what I’m so excited about that Art of Marriage is, it does that: allows normal people, because everyone’s normal until you get to know them, to have some conversation, and then have some profound reflection with one another and walk away continuing to have those conversations.

Brian: One thing that we tried to do with this version—again, not to compare it to the other version, one of the differences is—number one, we have a lot of couples. We have couples who are speaking, but almost every session, the first few minutes are just you guys sharing where you’ve messed up in that area; your own personal foibles. We lead with vulnerability.

It's like when you—just like what you were talking about, David; it’s like when you—have a chance to lead with vulnerability, it gives people permission to say, “These aren’t just marriage experts, but they are fellow sojourners in the marriage journey that have fallen down along the way.”

Ed: There’s something about doing that in community. You guys talked on the show about the need to be connected to other people. Maybe now, as much as any time in American history, isolation is such a problem. The surgeon general is calling it an epidemic. People are longing to have some kind of human connection that goes beyond social media, where you can talk about real things; you can talk about what’s actually happening inside of us and find other people that are experiencing the same thing.

God does something with that. Especially amongst His people, He uses that to “stir one another up to love and good deeds” [Hebrews 10:24] and to become something different than what we would be on our own, which is cool.

Brian: Yes. Meg, you said something in Session Six that I thought was great: thinking of the obstacles to my marriage being on mission and the idea that it can be intimidating. I feel like I’m not qualified. We take that away. You just join in and say, “Yes, we’re not qualified. Good! Let’s all get together—" [Laughter] “—and let’s talk about our disqualifications and how God can then move us in the right direction.”

Ed: That will carry us through the first month, at least. [Laughter]

Brian: It will. [Laughter] But Meg, you talk about how we don’t have to make it so difficult. Impact doesn’t have to be so difficult. One of the things you talk about [is], you use the illustration of one of your neighbors and just looking out and looking up. Maybe speak to that, that it doesn’t have to be as hard as it [seems like it] needs to be.

Meg: I remember one day, I was walking through the neighborhood. I had my headphones in. I was listening to a podcast. It was—

Dave: —listening to FamilyLife Today.

Meg: Sure. [Laughter] For sure, it was you, Dave and Ann. But I saw this woman trying to get her trashcan up the driveway. I had that moment of thinking, “I’ll keep my air pods in and keep walking,” or I felt the Lord [prompting me], “Just ask her if you can help her.”

I thought, “I’m going to save the day and help her take her trashcan up.” I took my air pods out and asked her. She would not let me help her with her trashcan, but it led to a 30-minute conversation. I don’t always have time to do that, but that day I did. I was so grateful.

It reminded me, “Do I have my eyes open for where I am right now?” It doesn’t have to be that I go somewhere and find some people, but who are the people that God has around me every day that I don’t always see, because I am so focused, and often I choose to keep my earphones in and keep walking?

I wish I could say that I do that well all the time, but I definitely don’t.

Ed: You were available, and you asked a question, “Do you need help?”

Dave, you talked about thinking, about people, that they don’t want to talk about anything, but you talked about being in the gym and sitting with guys after playing ball or at a workout facility. Talk about that: having some questions available to open up the door for somebody to talk if they want to.

Dave: I was taught when I was a college athlete [that] whenever you competed, it was never about you anymore. That was a big shift for me, because my whole life was about me, and even competing was about what I could do [to help] our team win. When I came to Christ, the guy who mentored me, who wasn’t an athlete by the way, and I thought, “What’s he going to teach me? I’m a big….” And he just took me to where God goes, “It’s no longer about you. So, when you compete, it’s to point others to Jesus.”

I remember, as I finished playing collegiate athletics and was playing pickup basketball games, I thought, “This isn’t about me. I am a representative; I am an ambassador of Jesus Christ on this court. How I talk, how I compete, how I treat others matters, and when I sit down to take off my gym shoes—because you can’t wear regular shoes; you’ve got to have the court shoes—

David: —when you have Dave Wilson gym shoes.

Dave: —exactly. No, I’m kidding. But I remember one of the first times I was playing ball in Michigan, this guy sat down beside me. His name was Paul; he’s a good friend now. He’s some single dude. He turns to me, as I’m taking off my basketball shoes and putting on my regular shoes, and he said, “Hey, man, what’s different about you?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “You played basketball different from anybody else.” I remember, I looked at him and made a joke. I said, “My three pointer? You think it’s pretty good?” [Laughter]

He said, “No, your attitude is different than anybody in this gym.” It was some guy I didn’t know. I turned to him and said, “What’s your name?”

He said, “Paul.”

I said, “If there’s anything different about me, I don’t want to freak you out, but I’m going to tell you, the difference is Jesus.”

He said, “Yes, I’m religious, too.”

I said, “I didn’t say religious. I said Jesus.” That led to him bringing a door to my house, a front door. We needed a door; he worked for Stanley Door. Long story short, I led him to Christ [while he was] putting this door in our house. We ended up re-parenting Paul. I’m going to tear up right now, because I was on the phone with him the other night. He’s married with kids now.

Ann: He lived in his car for a while in downtown Detroit.

Dave: Yes, he was kicked out of his home as a kid, and God brought him into our lives at a basketball court. If I hadn’t had the perspective that I’m not here just to win basketball games, [but] I’m here, like Meg just said, “I’ve got to look around me. Who’s around me? What is God…?”

“Make a dent where you’re sent,” we said yesterday. You have neighbors who literally—I know that I mowed my grass the other day, and Dean was standing there looking at me. It’s what you said, Meg. I [thought], “I’ve got to keep mowing this yard. Why is Dean looking at me?” [Laughter] 

Brian: He’s probably thinking, “You missed a spot.” [Laughter]

Dave: I could tell he wanted to talk. I didn’t want to turn off my mower. I thought, “I’ve got an agenda, and I’m going to be done,” and I thought, “Okay, God, here we go.” I said [begrudgingly], “Hi, Dean. What’s up?”

You know what he said? “Have you ever seen that thing called The Chosen?” This is a non-religious neighbor who brought it up. I said, “Yes, why?”

He said, “I’d like to talk about that.”

David: Wow!

Dave: [I answered], “Let’s talk about it.” I ended up getting him a Bible. We started this thing. Here we are. Look up.

David: What I love about how you guys described that—Amy Sherman coined the phrase of “Is your life…”—and I would say, is your marriage”—a doggy head tilt, where you live in such a way, and—

Dave: —I love that.

David: People look at you and think, “Really?” with a little head tilt of, “What is different about you?” It’s not perfection. It’s an authenticity. It is vulnerability, and it is an invitation, and I think when that invitation comes, or you get prompted and initiate to help, it’s breaking down those thresholds.

We lived in Italy. The way Italian homes worked, at least the ones we rented and the ones our friends rented, there’s that first gate on the road, then there’s the door, and then you walk up and there’s another door. There are those layers of trust in that people need ordinary people, not with everything all together, but doing everything they can to love Jesus with authenticity, to be the doggy head tilt people out there, the next threshold of trust. “Okay, and now they’re letting me in more, and now they’re initiating the question about, ‘I need to talk about that.’”

Sometimes it’s spontaneous. Those are two great spontaneous examples. That spontaneity is important, of just an ordinary person responding to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it’s more planned and intentional [saying], “Let’s take a resource like this, and let’s have people over for dinner, or let’s put it on together. Let’s be intentional a little bit and see what happens.” Take a step of faith.

Ed: I like that. Sometimes the head tilt is created by the way you handle a fight with each other. Even as you’re talking, it’s not perfection; it’s not that the head is tilted just because, maybe, you kept your composure while you played basketball. That’s definitely one way to create it, but it’s also, “We had a bad fight, and this is how I went back and apologized,” or “This is what I had to do to make things right,” or “how we got back into the same bedroom with each other again after that fight.”

Meg: I think one thing we’ve learned, too, with some of our close friends, friends that have become close now, is that most people are hurting in some way—

All: —yes.

Meg: —and what’s happening behind closed doors is not what you see. The quicker that we can take down those walls and show our own gaps and our own struggles, yes, it invites other people to say, “You feel that? Well, I’m really hurting, too.” It sets the tone for people to be real.

Dave: If I’ve studied anything about the next generation—and part of it is our own 30- and 20-year-old kids—vulnerability is the language of that generation. They are done with Christians and church people being perfect.

Ed: Yes.

Dave: When they see a believer say, “I struggle. There’s victory in Christ, but I struggle,” they lean. It’s, “Really?” because they’re feeling that.

Meg: It’s so true.

Dave: That’s what I saw as I saw the Art of Marriage. I thought, “Man, everybody in this thing is real. They’re going there right away.” That lays a foundation to say, “Let’s talk out of our shared experience. Where is there hope?”

Brian: I think the other thing that I can see people saying [is], “You just play these videos? What do you do?” Some people may have never had a small group before.

It really is flexible. It’s amazing how many people we’ve talked with on this journey that we’ve been on that love to use a resource like this, whether it's at a church event where they’re putting something on for the whole church, like a date weekend, a date night, or a date day, and they go through all six sessions. They’re only 25 minutes long. Or they might use it in small group, or just couple to couple, like you just said: “We’re going to invite that couple over, and we’re going to go through six weeks.” There’s something about that intentionality.

But then, you’re probably thinking, “Well, what, after the video, do you do?” We have these workbooks with great questions. Ed, that’s one of the things that you brought to the table—making sure that we didn’t have just your basic questions. These help dig underneath the surface a little bit and allow us to go deeper more quickly and be vulnerable with each other. I enjoyed how it all came together and seeing how people could use it in a lot of different settings.

Ed: What I have been thinking about is, “Why would I not want to look up and see people?” It’s almost like you’re asking me to get to a second level of perspective shift. Because when I come into marriage—Dave, you talked about this yesterday—I want to be happy, I want to be in a “me” marriage; I want marriage to be about me. That’s what we all sort of come in with at some level.

The first shift to be made is, I’m actually here to bring something out of you. I’m actually here to make Amy a better person. I’m to present her before the Lord more complete, which is taking my eyes off of myself for the first time.

Then, as we’re doing that, there’s this next level of us looking up, seeing everything around us. I have to grow up. That’s what I keep thinking. We talked about this a bunch in the sessions, how our love needs to grow up. Sometimes we take two steps forward, and we go three steps back. But that’s really what the process is: “How do we grow up in the love that God wants us to be putting on display through our marriage?”

Dave: A word that comes to my mind—I don’t know if you guys would agree when you think of, “Why wouldn’t I reach out?” is one word. What do you guys think it is?
 

Ed: Fear.

Meg: Fear.

Dave: Fear. I am afraid, at times, to reach out to my neighbor, to invite somebody into my home.

Brian: Why is that?

Dave: Are you kidding me? One of the great things about this tool is it takes away some fears because the first fear is, “What are we going to talk about?” Well, we’ve got content for you. Here you go! But I think we’re afraid of the relationship [and] where it’s going to go.

Ed: You don’t have to have all the answers. That’s the other thing the content does. You don’t have to have answers.

Dave: Growing up is part of, “You know what? I need to step into that.” It might be a little scary. Step in and say, “God, do something.”

David: As we take steps of faith, He will show up. You may be thinking, “Why are they so about marriages on mission? What is this all about?” That is our mission at FamilyLife. It’s been around for decades. It’s rooted in what we do: effectively developing godly families who change the world one home at a time.

We want to help you grow as a godly family, pursuing oneness in authenticity and vulnerability, and experiencing that calling up and calling out of one another, and getting your eyes off yourself to the Lord and to one another.

We love the “who” in our mission statement: those who are experiencing that ongoing transformation in Jesus, turning outward and looking up to their corner of the world and trusting the Lord; ordinary people doing the extraordinary thing of trusting God in their corner of the world.

Shelby: I’m Shelby Abbott. You have been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson with David and Meg Robbins, along with Brian Goins and Ed Uszynski, on FamilyLife Today.

You know, at the beginning of this month, we released an all-new Art of Marriage. You just heard David and Meg and Brian and Ed talking about how Art of Marriage can be used to “make a dent where you’re sent.” It features a diverse array of new couples and artists who, over the course of six sessions, unpack six biblical words that describe God’s love for us and how each can be displayed through our messy, imperfect marriages. Yes, even yours; your messy, imperfect marriage.

Whether you’re a newlywed or you’ve been married for decades, FamilyLife’s Art of Marriage is your path to a stronger, more beautiful masterpiece of God’s handiwork. You can go to the show notes right now or the Art of Marriage website—it’s ArtofMarriage.com—to learn more and grab your leader kit today. We’re excited to share the all-new Art of Marriage with you and hear your marriage impact stories.

Now, coming up next week, Kevin DeYoung is here to talk about the importance of submitting your life to the will of God rather than following your own desires. That’s next week. We hope you’ll join us.

On behalf of Dave and Ann Wilson, I’m Shelby Abbott. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife^®, a Cru^® Ministry.

Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

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