FamilyLife Today®

Letting Go of Control: Lauren and Michael McAfee

Michael and Lauren McAfee discuss how surrendering control, confronting anxiety, and processing grief through faith can strengthen marriages and deepen trust in God during life’s trials.

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Letting Go of Control: Lauren and Michael McAfee
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Show Notes

About the Guest

Photo of Lauren and Michael McAfee

Lauren and Michael McAfee

Michael McAfee is the president and founder of Inspire Experiences, a PhD student studying public theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and an Oklahoma City Thunder fanatic. His greatest accomplishment in life is escaping the friend zone with Lauren when they were in high school. Michael and Lauren wrote a book on next-gen Bible engagement titled Not What You Think. They are covenant members of Council Road Baptist Church where Michael serves as one of the teaching pastors.

Lauren Green McAfee is the founder and visionary of Stand for Life and also serves as the ministry director at Hobby Lobby. Lauren is the author of Only One Life, Not What You Think, Legacy Study and Created in the Image of God. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Ethics and Policy. Lauren previously worked for her father, Steve Green, while he founded Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, serving as curator, artifact collection manager, and director of community engagement. Lauren and Michael are happily married with two fierce and feminine girls, Zion and Zara.

Episode Transcript

FamilyLife Today® with Dave and Ann Wilson – Web Version Transcript

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Letting Go of Control

Guests:Lauren and Michael McAfee

From the series:Beyond Our Control (Day 2 of 2)

Air date:January 30, 2025

Ann:We’ve led a lot of small groups over the years, but one of the frustrations is figuring out what to use.

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Ann:And this sale lasts until the end of January, so you can check it out in the show notes or@familylife.com/shop, and you can start your small group off right this year.

Dave:Yeah, you can check it out in the show notes, or you can go to FamilyLife.com/shop, and you can start your small group off right this year.

So I got a question for you.

Ann:Okay.

Dave:When did you let go of the expectations you had for me as your husband, and you realized he’s never going to meet them? Was it—

Ann:Do you think I’ve let them go?

Dave:Oh, yes, you have.

Ann:It makes me glad.

Dave:I just want to know, is it the first hour, the first year?

Ann:Oh, I tried for years. I had so many expectations and then I just kept thinking if I just try to tweak you enough, you’ll get it.

Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave:And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

We’ve got the McAfees back with us, Michael and Lauren. I brought that up because part of your subtitle, Beyond Our Control, and by the way, we didn’t even talk about this in our previous episode. Why not Out of Our Control? You wrote Beyond, and again, I’m going from let go of unmet expectations. In our previous episode, we heard about really, you’re walking through infertility and your daughter being diagnosed with cancer. You talk about unmet expectations.

Ann:Adopting; that took a long time.

Dave:But talk about beyond our control because the common thought is it’s out of our control, but you’re like, no. What do you mean beyond?

Ann:Is there a difference?

Michael:Yeah, yeah. Well, because it’s in God’s control, right? The whole idea is we want to control our own lives in small ways that mean nothing on the way here.

Ann:Wait, Michael, does that mean you try to, sometimes?

Michael:Oh man.

Ann:Oh, are you the controller?

Michael:Oh, big time.

Dave:Something happened on the way here?

Lauren:Well, everyone was in their own way, right? That’s the funny thing about having written a book on control is it’s, I kind of felt like, “Oh, some people really care about control and some others don’t,” but it’s like, “Oh no, it just comes out in different ways.” Everyone tries to have control just in their own way.

Ann:Yeah, see.

Michael:Exactly, exactly. I’m typically the driver. I don’t know where my driver’s license is, so she has the rental car under her name.

Lauren:So I’m driving

Michael:And I’m not used to driving, and so I’m giving her a lot of—

Lauren:Oh my gosh.

Michael:—coaching

Lauren:Coaching.

Michael:—advice.

Ann:Isn’t it terrible.

Dave:Is that what it was?

Lauren:“Hey, that’s the exit right up there,” right? “Yes, I know.”

Ann:I’m like, “Oh, really?”

Lauren:“I’m going to get there.”

Ann:“Thanks Dave.”

Lauren:I will cross all—

Michael:We’re like a quarter mile. We’re two lanes away, so—

Dave:I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.

Ann:You have?

Dave:I just don’t say anything.

Ann:What? You don’t.

Dave:Oh my goodness. She always complains I drive too fast. You should see her drive. It’s a hundred miles an hour. I do not go fast. I’m like, I’m telling you, you’re going 85 right now instead of 55.

Lauren:We probably should have used more driving examples in our book. Apparently, everyone’s got their—

Ann:So you control, Michael. Lauren, do you try to control things?

Lauren:Oh man. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean certainly I tend to be a personality that likes to achieve things, and so that comes with its own desire to control things, right? Control the next thing that I’m going to accomplish in my life and the next thing I expect to be happening in my life. And so in one season for me, of course, as we just talked about in the previous episode, that was, okay, this is the timeline that I expected to have kids. And so that didn’t happen. Again, it was like, “Oh, I don’t have control over this at all.” So yeah, certainly.

Ann:Well, and then the other part—

Lauren:I started to realize the desire for control in my life in a new way that I hadn’t even previously understood.

Ann:That’s bad enough. Let go of unmet expectations. But now and beyond your control, and now you have to overcome anxiety, which when you’re out of control, it can spin you into anxiety.

Lauren:Exactly, yeah.

Dave:We didn’t even get there.

Ann:We didn’t get there at all.

Dave:So let’s talk about anxiety. That’s a fun topic.

Lauren:Super fun.

Dave:How do you overcome? I mean, there’s nobody on the planet that doesn’t want an answer to that because we all experience it.

Michael:Very anxious generation.

Dave:Some are listening right now, and they’re really struggling with waking up at night. We’ve been there.

Lauren:Yeah.

Dave:So what would you say to how do you overcome?

Lauren:Yeah, so interestingly, when we were doing research on the topic of control for this book, we were obviously living our own experience of things not being in control and dissecting in our own lives what has that meant? But we wanted to look at research and we found that the correlation between control and anxiety was very strong. They’re the most closely related negative emotion to not having control is being anxious.

That certainly resonated in our own lives. I mean, we had walked through situations in our life that were completely beyond our control and just the anxiety that that brings because you are then worrying about the things that you couldn’t control and you recognize you have maybe less control than you thought you had in life in general, which brings its own kind of level, underlying level of anxiety of like, “Oh man, what else can happen in my life that maybe I’m not prepared for or wouldn’t expect or don’t want to happen?” And just the unsettledness, that underlying unsettledness that can bring can be just kind of a constant anxiety.

So there’s certainly a correlation there that is very present in our world today that I think because of technology and advancement, we in the Western world think that we should have a lot of control over our own lives. We should be able to impact our own destiny. We should be able to control what happens to our lives. We just have to work hard and do these things. We have technology that should be able to help us. We have all these things at our fingertips that we should be able to control to get what we want. That whenever that lack of control hits, it’s very disorienting. And so I think that has led to a lot of anxiety in our world, especially in our own culture.

Ann:Well listen to this quote that I found in this great book; your book.

Dave:Who wrote this book?

Ann:You guys wrote this book, but you have in it a quote by Tim Keller who you guys knew, but he says, I’ve never heard him say this, “It takes pride to be anxious.” I’m like, “Wait, what?” “I’m not wise enough,” he says, “to know how my life should go. Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.” Whew; that’s get in your face; that’s convicting.

Dave:That’s why I told you when we sat under his teaching, we’re like, “We are so bad.”

Lauren:So amazing.

Dave:He is so good and so insightful. So hey, you guys sat under his teaching. So tell us what that means.

Michael:I think when you look back at Genesis 3 from the garden, the original sin that came in in the garden, was the serpent coming to Adam and Eve tempting them by questioning God himself? Did God really say, “Oh, well God is withholding from you. You’ll not surely die. God knows that when you eat of this fruit, you’ll become like him knowing good and evil.”

And so that’s what we try to do at the beginning of the book is show we have these high expectations, these assumptions about how life is supposed to go, that we are in control, that then when you start drilling down and you recognize, “Oh, things are not going the way that I want and I can’t control it,” all of a sudden the ground starts to shift around you and you realize that you don’t have this control, and then what do you do with that? How do you respond?

And the hope is that that leads you to a place of surrender, of realizing “This is beyond my control. This isn’t something that I can do anything about, and so I can turn to the only one who does have control, turn to the Lord and surrender over to him my situation, trusting that not only that he will do better for this situation than I could do for myself, but also recognizing I’m giving over the control I never actually had in the first place. I’m surrendering the mirage of control in my own life to the author and creator of life.”

Dave:It is really a mirage, isn’t it?

Michael:We first started working on the book when Zion originally her cancer was declared to be in remission. It was the first week in March 2020, and so we started working on a book on control. Then a couple weeks later—

Dave:Really?

Lauren:Yes.

Dave:In March?

Lauren:March 2020.

Michael:There was this event in mid-March called COVID-19. I don’t know if you remember it.

Dave:March 14th we were supposed to do a marriage conference in Nashville that day and it got canceled. This little thing that’ll be over in two weeks. Two weeks to recover, whatever that was.

Ann:You’re writing a book on control and Covid hits.

Michael:Yes.

Lauren:And then Covid, yes. And it was like, “Oh, everyone’s experiencing on some level the understanding that our own control over our lives is such a mirage,” right? That’s such a disorienting season.

Dave:So what’d you do when you feel the anxiety, like feel it? And I know you’re shaking your head like we’ve all been there. Maybe you’re there now, but it isn’t just a concept. I’m feeling it in my soul. I can’t sleep. I can’t, in that moment, where do I go? What do I do? I surrender, but what’s that look like? Especially you guys have walked through it and you’re going to walk through it again. We all are, but when you’re in that dark place in our previous episode, you’re talking about, man, I’m angry. I’m crying out to God. How do you get a reign on that, so it doesn’t overcome you? You overcome it.

Lauren:Yeah. So for me, I’ve certainly seen the need to go to the Lord with it, and that’s usually not my first reaction whenever I’m in those situations. And so I really have to, I mean, that’s something I have to try and make myself do the first thing.

Ann:I’m so glad you’re saying that because I don’t want to go to him because I’m mad at him.

Lauren:Yes.

Dave:What do you want to do?

Ann:I want to run away from him because I’m mad and it—

Dave:I thought you were going to say you’re going to blame me. That’s what happens.

Ann:I probably would blame you or try to get you to fix it alongside me.

Dave:That’s true.

Ann:But I love that you’re saying it’s not always easy.

Lauren:It is not. It is not easy. So I mean that’s certainly the thing that I have to be really disciplined about is go to the Lord with it. But also, I think it’s really important for us to have safe community, Bible believing people in our lives that we can go to with our anxiety. Because part of the way that we metabolize and kind of work through our own anxiety is by sharing that with others, with community that can help carry that burden of what we are walking and point us to, again, the promises of God and who he is and his character and help hold me accountable to that. Because like I said, it’s not easy for me to go to the Lord whenever I’m in those really anxious seasons.

Dave:And sometimes isn’t it hard to go to somebody else because you sort of want to hide it like I am not supposed to be feeling these. Maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s just fear, maybe it’s anxiety and you sort of pretend the Christian little thing. You go in, “How are you doing?” “Oh, I’m doing great. How are you doing?” “I was in the Word today. It’s great.” It’s like you’re literally—

Lauren:Exactly.

Michael:Struggling.

Dave:—unable to sleep. I’ll never forget years ago—it’s a long story. I’ll keep it real short, but I lost my two front teeth in an accident. I was coaching high school football; a kid’s elbow hit me. I lost two front teeth. So these are implants.

Lauren:Oh, wow.

Dave:And because the amount of time between getting the implants and losing my teeth ended up being two years because of infections and different things. So a lot longer it should have been. I had this thing called a flipper, which is basically a retainer with two teeth on it. You stick it in and let tell you as a preacher, it’s not good. It would fall out during a sermon. I’d have to turn and go. I had to get denture cream. It’s a. long story.

Lauren:It’s amazing.

Dave:But anyway, all I know is that for a while there was a lot of pain with it because I was having infections and different things. But I remember being in meetings and talking to people and thinking, I have this thing in my mouth that I’m thinking about every second and there’s some anxiety, like what’s going to be the future? But it was something always on my mind and I thought, “Nobody here has any idea I’m dealing with this. It’s not something they see. I sort of close my lips and it’s hidden.

It hit me one day. How many people have something that, not their tooth, but it’s something that’s on their mind constantly, and we’re all standing there with our little Christian smiles on, and nobody will say it out loud. It’s like I wanted to go, “Hey, I have this thing,” and they go, “Oh, tell me about it.” You sort of wanted to have some community, and yet in the church we often hide that. Do you think anxiety and fear is something we have to bring others into?

Michael:Yeah, absolutely. It’s so easy to isolate, and this was a fallout of Covid and of the internet generation is on one hand, we’re extremely integrated and well connected because of social media and stuff. At the same time that drives you to where you don’t think you need in-person community like you desperately do. And that’s why having that safe space for us of people that you could share life with and confess sin with.

I mean James 5:16, “Confess your sins to one another, pray for one another that you may be healed.” There’s something even healing about sharing your burden, sharing even your sin with other believers that you don’t have to confess to each other in terms of getting forgiveness. But there is something that is healing that happens when others are walking with you. They know your struggles, they know your sins, they know your burdens, and they’re saying, “Hey, I know how messy things are and I’m not leaving. I’m here and I’m with you, and I’m going to walk with you for as long as you need.”

Ann:I like that you guys pointed out to go to Jesus first because sometimes if I’m mad at God, I’ll go to my friend first. One time I called my friend just to tell her about how I was mad and my anxiety and this is happening. And she goes, “Have you talked to Jesus about it yet?” And I’m like, “No, I called you first.”

Michael:“I’m calling you, so you’ll pray.”

Ann:“I’m calling you. Isn’t that a compliment?”

Michael:Yeah, a prayer request.

Ann:And she said, “Well, why don’t you hang up and go talk to Jesus first?” I was like, “I don’t even like you right now.” But man—

Michael:That’s so good.

Ann:That was such a good, get back to the gospel. Get back to the one who can take away your anxiety because I can’t. And then call me and tell me what he says or what happened and how he met you. I thought that was wise because both combined are really powerful and important.

Dave:Well explain a little bit because when you talk about going to Jesus, one of the things in chapter four, “Grief: How Loss Feels and How to Respond,” part of that going to Jesus is lament. And you guys even in that chapter are talking about, man, we’re walking through our daughter’s cancer and she’s in remission, but we never really grieved. Walk us into that.

Lauren:Yeah, we walked through Zion’s cancer journey, and it was all so fast because we had just become parents and we’re figuring that out. And then cancer diagnosis and hospitalizations and then chemotherapy. And then right after that, when she went into remission, it felt like, “Okay, she’s in remission. We should just be grateful and we’re really happy about that and just move on. We just want to figure out getting into normalcy. We can finally start to think about, what does it look like to be parents and not constantly be nervous about her life being under threat of cancer.”

So we were just so ready to be a normal family and get to be a parent that we moved on past processing the real fear that came from living day after day after day for months. This fear of, is our daughter going to survive? We don’t know. And the anxiety that that brought; that for me, it was about ten months after Zion went into remission, I had a major panic attack and ended up in the emergency room because I was experiencing such chest pain and tightness, and it was hard to breathe. And they ran all the tests and the EKGs and all these things, and they were like, “You’re fine.” They’re like, “I think you have anxiety.” I was like, “About what?” I was like, “About what?” And then I was talking to a friend later, actually our friend Dr. John Townsend, who’s a psychologist and wrote the forward to our book—

Dave:Oh, we know Dr. John Townsend. He’s pretty famous. Tim Keller…

Lauren:We’re so grateful. But he was reflecting. He was like, “Well, consider what you have experienced this year and that if you don’t take the time to really process your grief through the form of lament”— So lament means you are expressing your grief. Lament is expressed grief. So if you don’t take the time to lament and really express that grief that you have, then it really just stays inside you and then it starts to do things so it will impact you in some way. And so for me, that manifested in a panic attack. So I would not have even told you that I was anxious or that I knew any of that I hadn’t processed that grief.

Dave:You thought you were through it.

Lauren:I thought we were through it. I’m fine. But it was having that happen that caused me to have deeper reflection. And then the more that I had to take the time to let myself sit and think about what that was like. Dr. Townsend gave me some helpful—he was like, “How about you just take some time and when you have a minute, ask yourself, what was I feeling whenever she got the cancer diagnosis? What were you thinking was going to happen if the worst case, what was that going to be like?”

And to just really process through that in a way that whenever I was allowed myself to have the space to on my own kind of process through that, which came with a lot of tears, whenever I reflected on that real fear, the fear that I was living under every day and allowed those tears to come, and then also talked to someone else, a safe person about how that felt, that really then helped me move forward through that way of expressing that lament both silently with myself and the Lord, and then with someone in my community that then has led me to kind of find healing from that fear and anxiety and grief that I wouldn’t have had had I not taken the time to honor the way that the Lord had created us, right?

God created us with emotions, and He created us for community both with him and others. I was not honoring the way that the Lord had created me by trying to just bottle it up, say like, “Look, she’s fine. We’re okay. We’re moving on. What’s the next thing? How can we just now be parents?”

Dave:And we often think, don’t we as Christians? That’s what faith looks like. You just move past it.

Lauren:Yeah.

Dave:I believe God; I trust Him. And obviously it is that, but sometimes I think we use that as “I’m not going to go through the valley that I sort of have to go through and God actually wants me to go through, even though He’s with me in that valley.” We just think, “Oh, it’s faith. I’m beyond it.” Would you encourage that communication and lament even to be with your spouse?

Lauren:Yeah, certainly. Absolutely.

Dave:You guys do it together.

Lauren:I mean, certainly Michael, and I don’t want to say obviously, certainly we’re talking with each other throughout the process, but sometimes it was even hard to recognize like, “Oh, we need to create the space for those conversations to happen.” Because especially in that season after we had Zion, we were parents and so there’s not a whole lot of just catching up and hang out with no kids around time. And so it took the discipline to, “Hey, we are going to create the space to have conversations with each other, to allow each other to process our grief in our own way.” And that often looked very different from the way the other was experiencing it.

Dave:That’s what I was going to ask.

Lauren:And so it was having grace for the other person to experience their grief in their own way and recognizing that we are different, and that is okay.

Dave:How was your grief different?

Lauren:I ended up wanting to be talking about it more, I think. Once I got to a point that I recognized, “Okay, I can’t just sweep this under the rug,” then I wanted to talk about it all the time. And too, was also willing to see the different things that were impacting me throughout just everyday life. Whenever something would happen and it would trigger a memory of how I felt, like whenever we had to do follow-up appointments, and I was taking Zion to the oncologist and being back in the hospital and how stressful that was because it triggered in me and then wanting to talk about that.

Dave:Michael, were you the same way? I think I would be if Ann was doing that; to be like, “Please, please, please don’t.” I sort of want to deal with it by not talking about it, which is not dealing with it. But that would be my MO, wouldn’t it?

Michael:Yeah, no, I mean I definitely think, I think that there was helping to recognize the importance of that space because being that we’re both seminary students in ministry and things like that, and just in general, my instinct used to be whenever people would say how life was not fair, questioning God like, “Well, I need to defend God here. I need to get them to the right”—

Dave:You can.

Michael:—and instead to say, “Oh no, what they need right here is space to grieve, space to lament.” They’re not actually, my wife is not out here questioning God himself and looking to walk away from faith.

Lauren:Even just reading a Bible verse. And I was wanting to talk about how triggered I was by being in the hospital again.

Michael:And I need space not to say that was likewise for me. There was the temptation to say, “Well, because I know that God’s got this and whatever, I don’t need to walk through, talk through it with anyone because I know at the end of the day God’s good and He’s going to take care of me.” It’s like, well, no, actually, even though I know that it was really helpful.

We had some close friends that in a season shortly after losing our son failed adoption, not, but my friend had a couple of twins that died shortly after birth, and so it was a different loss, but a similar grieving of the children, the sons that we imagined ourselves having and walking through that together of having a space where both of us had the opportunity to grieve, to lament the loss of this relationship in different ways, and yet having a space where we weren’t trying to throw Bible verses or just to get the other, to get past their pain and to see the goodness of God, but to allow that in the same way that the one place that very clearly we have that Jesus cried was at a funeral. It is okay for us to have time just to lament and to weep like Jesus did.

Ann:I think that’s a really good tip too, just as parents with teenagers or when our kids are starting to question things about God or they’re struggling, I know that I wasn’t great at this because what happens as a child is complaining, like, “Why would God do this?” Or they’re struggling with some issues. I have a tendency, just as you said, Michael, to defend God. “Oh, but He’s good.” “Oh, but the Word says…” “Oh, but”…

And I wish I would’ve let them just talk or vent or share and then say, “Man, that sounds like you’re struggling, but thanks for sharing that with me.” Maybe later I could come back and ask the next day or is it hard to think about God being good, but not, I don’t need to say, “But God, He’s good” because they’ve grown up in our homes. They know what we think. Well, hopefully they’ll know what we think and what the Bible says, but to give that space for people to lament, I think that’s important. God allows us to.

Dave:My last question for you guys would be, did walking through this help your marriage? Did it hurt your marriage? Did it help you?

Ann:Walking through which part?

Dave:Just the valleys you’ve been through. You lost an adoption. You thought you had this boy. You have the daughter that’s dying with cancer. I mean, that’s hard, and you don’t know what’s coming next, but marriages usually in those situations either fall apart, whether they end up divorced or not. They isolate.

Ann:They can drift and isolate.

Dave:Or they can really become closer. How’d that work for you?

Michael:I think about—one of the things we talk about in the book is Romans 8:28, God works all things together for good. That is a promise of our eternal joy, not our temporary circumstances. So because you can’t look at me and say, God works all things together for good, and that’s why he took this son who you expected to adopt for a year away. There’s no reality where I’m happier in this world without him. For my friend who lost his twin boys, that promise is not for the here and now. It’s for our eternal joy. It’s for the intimacy that we discover with God. And so I say that because I think in a similar way, transparently, we haven’t processed this, but in a lot of ways

Ann:You haven’t processed it.

Dave:Process it right here.

Ann:Process it with all of us.

Michael:Let’s just do it.

Ann:—millions of people.

Dave:Let’s go for it.

Lauren:Great, let’s do it.

Michael:I mean, I think it has deepened our relationship and our love for each other. While at the same time, this all happened as we’re becoming parents and becoming parents after dating for so long and then being married for a decade with no kids, we got tons of time to just play and just have—

Lauren:Hang out, go on dates every other night.

Michael:It was tons of relational time. And so over the last five years, a little over five years, it’s been a lot harder to have that time. And so just in terms of that playfulness, there’s been less of that maybe happiness between the two of us, but the deeper joy and commitment of, “This is the person that I know I have rock solid confidence in and can lean on and has my back,” that’s deeper than it ever has been because of it.

Lauren:Yeah, that’s really well said. Praise God for His grace in our lives that through the valleys, I think we both did our best to seek after the Lord. And I think that as we both ran toward the Lord, even when times when we didn’t want to, and even in phases of us trying to run away but then continuing to turn back to the Lord. With us going to the Lord, that also brought us closer together because we were both also then journeying together alongside one another arm in arm through these valleys and seeking after the same thing, seeking after the Lord and His glory. And so there’s certainly something that I think when you go through the trenches with someone through your hardest seasons is really beautiful and unique later when you can look back on that and know that you, kind of were in it together. And that’s by God’s grace and really attribute that all to him. But I’m so grateful for it, yeah.

Dave:No, I was thinking, I’m trying to pull it up right here on my iPad. That’s us on our wedding day. I mean, it’s sort of covered up a little bit.

Michael:The background went away.

Dave:But yeah, that’s us on our wedding. I actually had hair the whole thing.

Ann:Me too.

Dave:Yeah, you too. I’m 22. Ann’s 19, and the reason I think of it is your good friend Tim Keller in his book The Meaning of Marriage uses this illustration I’ve never forgotten about he and Kathy. He said, “You look at our wedding picture and it’s stellar. You’re the best you’ve ever been. Bodies, you’re young; there’s not wrinkles. And I showed you that picture, that’s the image that people think is a marriage, but what Tim said is the picture of a marriage is 50 years later. You got the wrinkles; the body’s falling down. He died of cancer, but it’s a battle-scarred couple who’s been through the valleys. Many you have as well. We’re not married as long as they were, but that image is the image; it’s so much more beautiful. It doesn’t look better.

Michael:That’s right.

Dave:But it’s better because you held onto the covenant. You know the best and the worst about each other. You’ve been through the hard times

Ann:And you’ve seen the faithfulness of God.

Dave:And that’s what you guys have gone through. It’s hard. You don’t have the playfulness that you had in those days, but you have something—

Ann:—richer.

Lauren:Richer, yeah.

Dave:—some couples never get because they bail out because it gets so hard. And I understand; my parents did. They lost a child, and it was hard, but man, it’s the way to go.

So let me just say this to our listeners. You got to get this book. I mean, what we’ve been talking about and we barely touched it. Seriously, there’s so much more in the book we didn’t even get to, and we’d love you to have it. Just send us a gift, FamilyLifeToday.com, financial donation of any size; we will bless you with this book. Or call us at 1-800-358-6329. Thanks guys.

Lauren:Thanks for having us.

Ann:It was great being with you.

Dave:Seriously, you guys were awesome.

Lauren:You guys are great.

Dave:FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife®, a Cru® ministry. Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

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