Mindful Marriage: Ron & Nan Deal

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Mindful Marriage

Guests:Ron and Nan Deal

From the series:Mindful Marriage (Day 1 of 3)

Air date:January 6, 2025

Dave:I think one of the best things we ever did for our marriage was going to the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember® when we were engaged.

Ann:For sure. We didn’t listen much, because we thought we were perfect; but we got that manual out, and we started leading a small group.

Dave:Yeah, we found out what God’s game plan for marriage was, even though we didn’t do it for a while; at least, we knew. And I’m telling you what: for the last 35-plus years, we’ve now been speaking at the Weekend to Remember. The same biblical, amazing truths that we heard, as an engaged couple, we’re teaching now.

Ann:And we’ve heard story after story, after story, of marriages changed; legacies changed. It really is something every single marriage needs, whether your marriage is doing great; or maybe, you’re struggling, and you’re like, “Man, we need a little pick-me-up.”

Dave:And you may be like I was like: “I am not going to a marriage conference.” I’m telling you: this one’s different—you’re going to laugh; you’re going to work on your marriage; you’re going to hear couples on the stage talking about real stuff, the same kind of stuff you and your wife struggle with—and it’s going to be life-changing.

Ann:And here’s the best part: today starts a half-off sale—

Dave:—50 percent off. And again, if you’re like me, you just said, “What?! I can get this for half price?” Yes, you can; go to FamilyLifeToday.com; click on the banner and sign up right now.

And guys, let me tell you: if your wife doesn’t even know you’re signing up—let me tell you—it’s going to go good for you tonight, and it’s going to go good for you that weekend. So sign up at FamilyLifeToday.com; get the

50 percent off. Or if you want, if you’re a phone guy, just call us at 800-358-6329. That’s 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and the word, TODAY. I hope we see you there.

Ann:Half off your registration, now through January 20; you don’t want to miss it.

Nan:I was getting so dysregulated, because he’s dysregulated. He is nippy and snippy; and it’s: “Help me with this cord!” and “Where’s this…” And I, just in a nanosecond, started griping at him about why he wasn’t in the right lane with the GPS. “The GPS is telling you something; that you just want to be you, and do it the way you want to.” And then, we both just said, “Okay, let’s both take a deep breath and stop!”

Ann: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.

Dave:Okay, so it’s always a good day when you have Ron and Nan Deal in the

studio.

Ann:I love having them with us, because we learn as much as anybody else; maybe, more.

Dave:Yeah, I get a little scared; because I think they’re going to do therapy on me.

Ron: That is our right.

Dave:Are you guys going to do that this time, Ron and Nan?

Nan:He might.

Ron:We might.

Nan:Not me, but he might.

Ann:I’m just going to hold your hand the whole time, Nan.

Nan: Yes, “I’ll be with you.”

Ron:Dave, you don’t know; but Ann and I have talked.

Dave:I figured that! It always is that way. Nan and I’ll just leave. You guys can—

Nan:Let’s go outside!

Dave:You can’t counsel somebody who’s not here; or maybe, you can.

Anyway, many of you know Ron and Nan. But tell our listeners, of all the things you do at FamilyLife—which you direct our whole blended family ministry—but is there something that you love about doing that at FamilyLife? I’ve never asked you that question. You speak; you write: “Is there something that, of all the things you do, it brings life to you?”

Ron:It does bring life to me to work with blended families, specifically; because nobody else is doing it. We’re stepping into a space that really needs the church and the Word of God brought to it. Nan and I just spent some time recently with leaders from Latin America, who work with FamilyLife. They are just super energized about this information; because they’re seeing lots of changes in the family in Latin American countries, and they don’t have any resources in Spanish except for the ones that we’ve provided.

Nan:And he lit up when couples came to him, and said, “We have taken your stuff and we’re using it.” These are blended couples in Latin America; I mean, they are so on fire to help other couples. And you lit up: you like creating; you like seeing change in people.

Ron:Yes; especially, when they take kingdom stuff and take it further than we could ever take it. That just really excites me.

But I have to say this thing about blended family ministry. For me, it grew out of marriage and family ministry in general. That’s where we started: working in local churches, doing marriage and family ministry.

Nan:I was going to say it started with youth ministry, and wanting to help kids.

Ron:—and seeing the families.

Nan:Yes, and helping them/helping them change. That was a catalyst for it all.

Ron:In many ways, I feel like that’s what I’m still doing: helping kids by helping their parents.

But this latest project is sort of taking us all the way back to where we started. This new book is about marriage; it’s got our testimony wrapped in the middle of it. It’s back to the kind of thing that I was doing 35 years ago, before blended family, specifically, became an area of focus for me.

Ann:So this isn’t a book necessarily just for blended families.

Ron: Right.

Ann:This is a book for everybody: The Mindful Marriage.

Ron:In fact, I would say it’s for singles as much as it is for already-married people.

Ann:Why do you say that?

Ron:Because the principles in this book, and I’m sure we’ll talk about how we came to—

Dave:Oh, yeah; we’re going there. We’re going to do a little therapy on you guys.

Ron:You’re going to do therapy on us this time.

Ann:Right!

Nan:Well, because we all have pain; and we all get dysregulated—

Ron:That’s right.

Nan:—whether it’s with our spouse, our children, a coworker—so I think this book is for everybody.

Ann:There’s not a person on the planet who doesn’t experience that.

Ron: Exactly; exactly. Life is imperfect for all of us; and that leaves a little residue on us, emotionally, spiritually; even, we now know, neurologically. And those are things that we end up carrying into all of life, whether it’s marriage; or relationship with family/extended family; parents—as adults—our relationship with our parents; parenting our children; friendships; the body of Christ; you name it. The stuff in this book applies to all of it. We just happen to make the first application: marriage.

Nan:Well, we live in a fallen world. Whether you’ve brought it in from childhood into your marriage, or other relationships, this broken world is going to cause pain. Whether it’s from childhood—or like us, the loss of our son—that was a pain that didn’t start back then, but it is a pain that we’ve had to navigate for 16 years. Everyone experiences pain some time in their lives—whether it’s from childhood; or it’s in marriage; or just in this fallen world, unfortunately—and the enemy doesn’t play fair.

Dave:Okay, so talk about your pain. I mean, we just were with you at a retreat. You guys got up on stage, with these bags of luggage; and we’re going to give the next talk, and we had bags of luggage. We’re like, “Oh, no!”

Ann:But let’s talk about Ron and Nan—

Dave:Yeah, let’s talk about your luggage—

Ann:—instead of ours.

Dave:Nan, you just said, “We all have pain”; and we did not understand when we got married 44 years ago—the kind of luggage [I brought in]—I say, “I didn’t bring a carry-on; I brought a freight truck; it’s like a semi.”

Ann:—a U-Haul pulling up.

Dave:But I didn’t know that!

Ron:That’s right; I didn’t know either.

Dave:I really underestimated for both of us.

Walk us through a little bit of your story. A lot of our listeners know a lot of it; so you don’t have to do it all, but give us some of the—

Ron:What we’ve learned is that really all of life for healthy relationships comes down to: “Do we feel loved?” “Can we give love?” “Do we feel lovable?” and “Are we worthy of love?” Love is sort of that fundamental thing that we must have. And the other thing that we must have is a sense of emotional safety in our world, in life, in relationships.

So just think about that for a minute: “Love and safety.” The word I would use with safety is trust. If you can trust your spouse, for example, then you feel safe in the relationship. If you can’t trust them—if they’re keeping secrets; or they’ve done something in the past that betrayed you, like trust is broken and you don’t feel safe—it doesn’t matter if you think they love you; at that point, you don’t feel safe. You really need both of those things for your us-ness to be strong and stable.

Dave:There’s a word that we don’t know: us-ness.

Ann:But you use that—I like that word a lot—what is that?

Ron:Well, our mentors, Terry and Sharon Hargrave, have taught us the concept of us-ness is the thing you created on your wedding day; it’s the thing that was born on that day. Yes, you made a covenant—yes, you have two people, and you’re trying to fulfill vows to one another—but there’s now this third entity that exists, and we simply call it “marriage.”

But us-ness calls attention to the fact that there’s this thing there that we, now, have to nurture: we have to support; we have to be intentional with. It’s sort of like having a child—if you’re not intentional, if you don’t nurture it, if you don’t feed it; you don’t care for it—that child’s going to suffer. Your us-ness will suffer as well. And what feeds it is love and trustworthiness; that’s what helps keep your us-ness strong, and alive, and thriving. Anytime you have a relationship, where you are lacking one of those two things—or even, momentarily, it’s called into question—all of a sudden, the level of life of your us-ness begins to diminish a little bit.

All of us had imperfect parents, and imperfect childhoods, and life experiences, and early relationships in life—whether those be dating relationships; or maybe, a first marriage for some people, or what have you—and somewhere, along the way, you began to wonder: “Am I lovable? Because it only feels like I’m lovable when…” or “Am I safe?—because you seem to be angry at the drop of a hat, and I don’t really know what I did or what…” All of a sudden, now, I’m calling into question who I am in this relationship with my parents.

And that lingers—that little thing sticks in your brain—and you begin to figure out ways of coping with that question mark. And what’s so incredibly amazing to learn is that that doesn’t leave us—that’s now a part of us—and we all carry it with us into our most important relationships.

Nan:And you asked us about our pain. I would say our pain is:

Mine is abandonment from childhood and family-of-origin issues.

Ron’s is inadequacy.

So when the abandonment and the inadequacy bump up together,—

Ron:—oh, it’s not pretty.

Nan:—it’s not pretty. And it doesn’t do anything for our us-ness.

Ann:I think I would start saying, “You know what the problem is? It’s you-ness! Because it’s you!”

Nan:And that was the problem for 30-some years [with us]. And really, I brought in that abandonment, going—and not from a faith-based home—going, “Oh, you’ve got this amazing faith-based home; the Lord used you to bring me to Christ. So fix this: take away all this abandonment. We’re married now; and we are going to church; and okay, it’s your job.”

Ann:“This is what you do!”

Nan:Yes; right. Oh, definitely, after that.

Ron:So let’s just paint the picture real quickly. We were talking about this morning at breakfast.

Nan:We were.

Ron: We’re still having “Aha!”s into our us-ness.

Ann:Don’t we all?!

Nan:Driving from the airport last night, when we both got dysregulated, we were like—

Ron:—stressed.

Ann:Another word: dysregulated.

Ron:We have a lot to define; don’t we?

Ann:Yes.

Dave:You do.

Ron:Okay, let’s come back to that in just a second.

Here’s a summary of the narrative of our marriage. I came from a family that was very loving, never questioned that.

Nan: —very much so.

Ron:Strong spiritual family. We were taught, if anything, to be good examples for other people who needed to see Jesus. Somewhere in there, I figured out, “Yeah, you know what? When I perform well as a child”—when I keep the rules, obey Mom and Dad, do what they say, and then win their favor and applause by being a good athlete and excelling on the field and all that kind of stuff—”then, I’m somebody special.” My special-ness came from performance.

What I didn’t realize, for 40 years, was that special-ness drove me to excel and perform in ways to get the applause of other people; that became my God/my idol, if you will.

When Nan and I got together, my major source of—and still is—of approval is her, not God; that’s wrong on the outset! But I didn’t realize that, really, what I was trying to win—was her favor and her happiness—“Happy wife; happy life.” That’s dangerous! Okay; I know we kind of jokingly throw that stuff around, but that’s dangerous. I chased that.

Well, guess what? On her end of life was: being abandoned by her parents—emotionally, supportive-wise—had very little nurture. And so here I come; and I’m all about her, which makes her feel special and loved. It met [her] need, if you will—sort of met it—we’ll come back to that, because we never really meet the needs.

Ann:At first, it appeared.

Ron:It appeared; that appeared. That’s exactly the way to say it.

We were all about each other, and life was going great. And then, my performance extended to—well, now, I’m a professional; and I got to work; and I have responsibilities; and so I’m going to excel in those spaces—and that was to the demise of our us-ness. It was, again: I’m chasing the next best thing to help me feel like I’m lovable and safe. If I excel well, then I’m settled in my work relationships and everything.

See how that’s driving me? I have no awareness of that whatsoever. But when I start chasing those things, that’s moving me away from her, which taps all into that abandonment stuff for her. Now, she feels abandoned. We go on with life. Eventually, that hits a wall; because it all comes to a head. She’s looking to me to fulfill her abandonment. I’m looking to her to fulfill my need for: “Am I adequate?” or “Am I a failure?” And then, our son dies; and well, you can talk about feeling abandoned by God.

Nan:Oh, for sure. There’s six attachment styles that a child should get, and there were none. My sister and I have talked about this: none. I think my dad tried to do one of those, later in life—which was very helpful—like make amends and come back around. But when you don’t have those, you’re already empty.

Honestly, I wasn’t tapping into God, and letting Him be my first and foremost. Ron was my idol: “Fix this,” “Fill this need,” “Take away the abandonment.” And then, we get into marriage; and I’m feeling abandoned because you’re over here, seeking all these other things. It looks like I’m not enough because you’re chasing all of that, which left me feeling so abandoned.

And then, I was good at being a mom; that kind of filled that void in a lot of areas. And then, our son passes away; and I don’t feel like I’m hearing from God. It was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me:

“I’m abandoned here. My family has never wanted me—never felt like—and told: ‘We should never have had you,’—not feeling like I’m loved or cherished in my marriage; you’re going after all these other things.”

“And here, God, I am at the bottom—bottoming-out moment—the worst thing that could happen, and where are You?” And I really honestly took it upon myself of: “Why am I not good enough for this, over here, in Your love? Why am I not good enough for You to stay here? And God, why am I not good enough for You to allow me to keep my child?” or “Therefore, where are You?!”

I just felt like I was never good enough for anyone to stay. Does that make sense?

Dave:Oh, yeah.

Nan:And that’s a deep, deep pain. So then, when the straw broke the camel’s back, it was like I—and for years— was taking things on myself to defend my heart. I just became the biggest defender of my heart.

Dave:What do you mean?

Nan:I’m going to be angry with family: “I’ll get married,” and “This will help; so see ya!”

And then, with Ron, it was: “I’m going to either try to control this narrative,” or “…talk this to death,” or “…be very angry at you,” or “Try to get you to see why this is so wrong—what you’re doing—why you’re always constantly chasing things.”

Ron:—which remember my whole thing is about adequacy. So that criticism and anger says what?—“You’re inadequate.” So here, I am,—

Dave:So you did what?

Ron:Well, there’s four major ways that we all respond with lack of love or lack of safety: blame, shame, control, or escape.

Dave:Hey, by the way, we took your assessment; so we know which one of these we are.

I want to tell our listeners, right here; I mean, they’re listening, going, “What did you just say?” There’s four ways I cope; you can find these at FamilyLife.com/Mindful Marriage. Your assessment’s there; we did it.

Ron:And you’re going to learn how you respond to feeling unsafe or unloved in moments of your key relationships. And it’s very eye-opening.

What I do—and we outline our whole story; it’s laid out in The Mindful Marriage book—what I do is: I do blame, and I do control. Control has various forms; they all have different aspects of it, too. Performance is the “control performance” thing: “Do,” Excel,” “Exceed,”—that’s my MO. So if I’m behind the eight ball with Nan, I’m going to try to perform my way back into good graces.

The other one is blame; I figure out a way to make this about her: “It can’t be about me; it’s got to be about her.” I figure out the little nuance, the one little piece of the story that you got wrong. I’m trying to help you see: “You got the narrative incorrect. And so, if you understand it correctly, then you’re not going to be disapproving of me; and all of a sudden, I’m going to have safety back.”

Notice the themes here: when I feel unloved or unsafe, I take action to try to get that back. Neurologically, that’s fight-or-flight activity: blame, shame, control, or escape. I’m actually trying to get you to come back to me; I’m trying for our us-ness to be strong again. But all I end up doing is making it worse; because, in my blaming posture or in my controlling posture, I’m unavailable to her; [her] abandonment gets activated; and now, she’s feeling worse, not better. We sort of escalate ourselves into the worst places of who we are: dysregulation.

Nan:And I do all four. For those of you out there, who do all four—

Dave:You’re a superstar, Nan!

Nan:I’m an overachiever. Those first three I did for years until our son passed away; and then, I did—

Ann:—the first three being:—

Nan:The blame: I’m going to blame Ron for all of this: “It’s not my fault. It’s you, because of the overworking.”

And in this, I’m going to shame myself: “Why am I not worthy of love and someone staying?”

Ann:The sentence that I would use toward myself is: “It must be me.”

Ron: That’s shame; that’s it.

Nan:Yes; so then, when he would blame me, and I’m blaming myself,—

Ron:—boom! Boom!

Nan:—that’s tough. So blame, shame.

Control: “I’m going to control this narrative with words and tell you how wrong this is,” or “I will just stop doing that, and control what I’m doing; find something that I can be good at”—or what have you.

And then, the escape—escape, for a long time—was just withdrawing from the situation.

Ron:—emotionally, just unhooking. A lot of us do that in different times.

Nan:Yes, unhooking.

But I escaped into numbing behaviors, after Connor passed away, for a decade. And that can be anything: that can be TV for hours and hours of binging; that can be shopping; that can be Amazon; oh, my goodness, food.

Ann:Food.

Dave:But it also—as you guys know better than anybody—for the person listening, who’s like: “I eat too much,” “I am drinking too much,” “I’m looking at porn,”—they need to connect the dots that there’s a reason behind those.

Nan:Right; “Why do I feel… when he shames me? Man, a glass of wine sounds really good right now; it might take the edge off.” And honestly, when I am in the depths of a deep pain, it’s really—the lie of the enemy—it really was the thing that—

Ann: —it worked.

Nan:—it worked.

Dave:You can escape.

Ann:People are saying, “It worked because you did escape.”

Nan:It worked; yeah.

Ann:And most people can escape into something.

Nan:Sure; sure.

Ron:Blame, shame, control, escape are breadcrumbs. This is the “Aha!” for us in our journey in our life. Again, our mentor/our coach helped us; our therapists helped us understand all this stuff that we’re now teaching.

These are breadcrumbs:

When you go: “Okay, anger”—that’s a blame tactic—”I can just turn around and make this about you, and get all large in the room.” That anger is intimidating; and I now, control the situation. Somehow, I’m trying to get our us-ness back by doing that, which is just stupid when you say it out loud; it’s not going to work, but I’m chasing something.

Escape: oddly enough, I escape into porn, addiction, behavior, shopping, food—whatever it is—I’m running away from something. The question we got to ask ourselves is: “Why am I doing that?” “What is that?” “I’m running from what?” Well, I’m escaping away from the pain of not feeling loved or feeling like I’m emotionally safe in this relationship.

Most of us never trace the breadcrumbs back to: “What’s going on with me?” We just keep it external about you—the you-ness, as you said—we stop focusing on: “What’s going on with me?”; and we, instead, focus on the other person, and what they’re not doing, that makes us feel unloved. We have got to learn the discipline of looking in the mirror; that’s what this book is about. And it’s wild, and amazing, and very helpful.

Dave:I mean, how common? Because when I—even at the retreat, when you guys told your story; and then, right now, as you’re telling your story—I’m like, “We have the same story.” I’m thinking a lot of couples are resonating—whether it’s backwards—or “Ours is very similar. I’m out there, chasing the world, not even knowing I’m feeling inadequate and proving myself.”

Ron:Every person listening to us right now, or watching this video, gets dysregulated a few times a day—

Dave:What’s dysregulated?

Ron:—to many times a day.

Dave:Define that one.

Ron:It is so incredibly common that we just don’t even realize it. Dysregulation is a big neurological term that’s being thrown around these days. That really means we get unsettled about who we are. We get unsettled about our relationship; we get anxious about it. We get concerned that it’s not going well.

And here’s what’s crazy about it. We’ve been married 39 years, as of this broadcast; and we can be having a wonderful day. And then, I can say something that basically sounds critical, or is critical, or—let’s do last night—we’re driving from the airport.

Ann:Yeah; I was going to say, “Give us an example.”

Ron:This is real!

Nan:Yes, let’s go back there.

Ron:This is media—we’re getting in the car; we’ve been traveling a lot; we’re dead-dog tired—I’m trying to plug in my phone to the car so I can get the GPS to get us to the hotel. All I want to do is get in bed; this has nothing to do with Nan. But all of a sudden, I’m frustrated; and I’m putting cords plugged in; and I’m [angry sounds], and that just makes me an unsafe person for her in that moment.

Next thing: I’m dysregulated because of the stress of the moment; I can’t control this—that’s really what that’s all about—and then, my dysregulation taps her dysregulation. Now, we’re backbiting one another; now, we’re nipping at one another. Our S in the DISC test goes from a 10 to a 2 in nanoseconds. I think everybody listening, who’s ever been in any sort of significant relationship—again: parents, friends, children, marriage—you know what I’m talking about. It’s that thing that you haven’t been able to shake your whole life.

Dave:So what’d you do last night? I mean, you’re the experts on this. You’re thinking about this; you’re writing about this. Did you get out of it quickly?

Ron:Yes.

Nan:Quicker than we used to.

Ron:It used to take a couple of weeks, something like that. It wouldn’t just be small; it would escalate—then, she’d do; and I’d do; and we do—and then,—

Nan:We would have carried that forever.

Dave:Really?

Nan:Yes.

Ron:We’d spend two weeks before we could unpack it; and then, it really wasn’t—what I’ve learned is that we would unpack it, and we would sort of forgive—but we didn’t know why we did it in the first place. That’s what has been so amazing about this journey for us; we now know why!

When I got dysregulated, I am like, “Okay, I’m off”; I know that about myself. “What do I need to do?” I need to take a couple of deep breaths; I need to settle my heart. Literally, my brain is neurologically-dysregulated; I’m no longer using the frontal lobe anymore. I’m using the midbrain, and I need to activate my new self in Christ: “So take a couple of deep breaths, get ahold of yourself, slow it down.”

Now, I can sort of chuckle, within a couple of minutes: “Boy, that was/why was I all frustrated? I know I just can’t…” And I’m beginning to do that reflection out loud, and Nan’s seeing that I’m getting ahold of myself; and if Ron gets ahold of himself, she doesn’t have to fix me; because Ron’s fixing me. See how that changes that dynamic?

And in the meantime, you were over there—

Nan:I was getting so dysregulated, because he’s dysregulated. He is nippy and snippy; and it’s: “Help me with this cord!” and “Where’s this?!”

And I’m like: “I should not have picked that up. I should have stayed in my lane, and said, ‘Okay, this is about Ron right now. He is tired; we are weary; he’s frustrated. He just wants to get us to the hotel.’”

But I took on that shame of: “I’m not good enough. I can’t do this fast enough for him. He needs the control; he’s a perfectionist.” I just, in my mind, started going down all of those archeological digs of: “You always do this; you’ve been doing this forever. You just try…” I, just in a nanosecond, went there and started griping at him about why he wasn’t in the right lane with the GPS: “The GPS is telling you something; that you just want to be you, and do it the way you want to!”

And then, we both just said, “Okay, let’s both take a deep breath and stop!” I had a choice in that: that I could have stayed in my lane and said, “Okay, Lord, this is about him, not me. I know where my identity is, and I just need to be patient. I need to see this through with him.” But I just went down the road with you; correct?

Ron:Yes, that’s correct. And let me just—

Nan:That’s what we did.

Ron:—point out: you see the compassion in that posture that she can get to?—now, within a minute. And that compassion is about: “Ron’s in pain. What’s going on with Ron? I need to let go of trying to fix his pain, because he’s a mess right now.” She can see me for what I am, and who I am, in that moment, not what I’m not doing for her; totally different!

Nan:And that’s God’s eyes; that’s God’s identity. That’s the thing I love so much about The Mindful Marriage: it is our mind being set on what our identity is in God, and in Christ. It’s not about Nan doing this; because in my own way, I’m not ever going to do this. I’ll go to shame, blame control; I’ll go to numbing; I’ll go to the escape.

But with the Lord’s help, and knowing what my identity is, and being grounded and rooted in Him—then, that upside-down economy that He has—I can see that. I can see Ron in that; I can see myself in that. There’s grace there; there’s mercy; there’s trust; there’s a peace. I really never had that before; I have a peace now, because—and it’s not my peace, and it’s not what Ron’s doing differently—it’s that God is my peace.

Dave:Well, I mean, hearing you tell this story, it’s like you’ve been on a journey, which you’ve written about. And the listeners’ are going, “I want to go on that journey.”

Ann:—because we all are in it!

Dave:Yeah; so tomorrow, we got to talk about: “How’d you get to where you are?” Because that little illustration, last night in the car, for most couples, can’t happen; they can’t snap out of the dysregulation.

Ron:And we couldn’t for 25 years of our marriage. We didn’t know either. But we started a journey, 17 years ago, with our therapists, that has culminated in this project; and we’re still on the journey.

Ann:And it’s never too early to start, and it’s never too late to start.

Nan:—never too late.

Dave:Well, the good thing is we would love to send you a copy of The Mindful Marriage. Any donation, financially, to FamilyLife, we will send you Ron and Nan’s book, and you’re going to love that. You can give us a call to get that at 800-358-6329. That’s 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word, TODAY. Or you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com; you can make your donation there. And again, we’ll send you the book for any amount of donation. And you can take the marriage assessment, which you’re going to love to do. It’s literally going to change your marriage. So do that today.

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