FamilyLife Today®

Jennifer Abbott: When you come out the door on Saturday and you're going to your date night, you're going to be given an envelope. And then there's an opportunity for you to write a love letter to your spouse.

I took out my original books from when Dwayne and I first attended an event and I brought it. I read it last night and I cried. And this is a cherished memory for me of what he wrote to me.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: All right, I'm still recovering from my double knee replacement surgery, which I was crazy to do both knees. I'm just telling you.

Ann Wilson: I'm glad you did it. It's done. Now we're going to be good. But I think it's great that our guests get to hear Cheryl Shumake this week as their host, and she's going to have Jennifer Abbott.

Dave Wilson: Jennifer Abbott, one of our favorites. We love Jennifer. She leads the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember speaker team, and today you get to hear the heart and the mission and the vision of FamilyLife's Weekend to Remember marriage getaways, which literally happen all over the country basically year-round and literally change marriages. So you're going to enjoy today.

Cheryl Shumake: Jonathan and I have been spending a great deal of time as we are nearing retirement age talking about how we want our money to work for us, talking about passive investments that we can make in order to continue the lifestyle that we have without much impact when our income decreases.

We have not done as much talking about how we should be investing in our marriage today for what it will look like in the future when we are retired. Because your marriage goes through seasons, much like your money ebbs and flows, so does your marriage. And you need to be investing in it at all times for the outcome that God has for you.

So we are going to be talking today to someone who is familiar to the FamilyLife family, but may not be familiar to FamilyLife Today listeners. We're going to be talking to Jennifer Abbott about what it is to remember, but specifically why your marriage is worth investing in. Jennifer, welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Jennifer Abbott: Oh, thanks, Cheryl. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here with you today. We've already had a lot of good laughs and I'm excited to continue on.

Cheryl Shumake: So, Jennifer, tell us a little bit about yourself, like how long have you been married? What's the makeup of your family? And what's your role here at FamilyLife?

Jennifer Abbott: I'm married to my husband Dwayne and we both work here at FamilyLife. We have five beautiful adult children. Now, as far as my role, Cheryl, I got to tell you, I have the absolute best job ever. I get to watch God change marriages and lives.

If you want to know what my title is, it's the Weekend to Remember speaker team manager. So I have the privilege of managing our 50 speakers who speak at our Weekend to Remember events. I get to watch God change marriages and lives and legacies forward, and every day I pinch myself that I get to do this and that I get to be here with you today. What a privilege.

Cheryl Shumake: What a privilege. Well, what's one of the most remarkable stories that you can remember about God changing a marriage?

Jennifer Abbott: That's a great question, Cheryl. I want to share this story about a girlfriend of mine. She is in this beautiful blended family and she married her husband and inherited three beautiful children.

I was praying and then I felt the moment was right. I'm going to invite her and her husband to a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. So I did and I set them all up to go. She was texting me throughout the whole weekend. First night, rocky. But you know what they did? They persevered.

Then the second night she said, "I have hope in my marriage." Then Saturday they continued on in the journey and they went on their date night. And then by the end of Sunday she's texting me, saying, "This is a miraculous transformation. I cannot even believe how God has intentionally met us in the season we're in right now and transformed our marriage."

This is just one story, Cheryl, and I get to hear these every single day and it never ceases to amaze me of what our amazing God can do.

Cheryl Shumake: So Jonathan and I, as I said before, we do a lot of investing financially and what have you. We don't always take time to invest in our marriage, not out of malice but really just out of distraction or we're just doing life.

As a matter of fact, we have developed a language in our marriage. When we feel like we're drifting away from one another, again not because of a rift or anything like that, just life, we will say, "I miss you." And that's our cue to each other that we need to turn our attention towards each other in a very intentional way.

So talk to us about what makes a Weekend to Remember a necessary tool for marriage. Talk to us about marital drift and what that looks like and how that can creep in unintentionally and unaware.

Jennifer Abbott: We invest our time and energy in a lot of things. We invest our time and energy managing our stock portfolios or like you're planning for retirement, or maybe we're going to the gym and getting healthy and working out. These are all good things. But what are we doing to invest in one of the most important human relationships on earth: our marriage?

This is where I think it matters because marriage matters and it's worth it. Now, the drift. This is something we really talk about because really, Cheryl, no marriage is static. We're either intentionally heading towards God and oneness or we're drifting towards isolation.

I think about when we first moved here to Florida. Now, I love going to the beach. Do you like going to the beach, Cheryl? So fun.

Cheryl Shumake: I like the ocean. I don't like the sand. So sand is messy but I love it all. I love the outdoors. Michigan girl, sorry.

Jennifer Abbott: Sand is messy. There's baby powder that gets the sand off. But okay, we started going to the beach when we first got here. And I would be out there swimming and boogie boarding with my kids even though they're older.

We would go out into the ocean and swim for hours. And then my husband would be sitting there by our umbrella laying out, catching the rays, getting a tan. He's got a great tan.

And we'd be swimming for hours. Then at one moment, I looked up and I tried to find my husband and I couldn't see him. So we walked out of the water and we started walking down the beach and we were probably a half a mile from my husband. We could see him because of the color of the umbrella, so we knew what it was.

This is just like it is in our marriage. There is a natural drift. See, if we're not doing something intentionally going together towards God and oneness, we're naturally going to drift.

So this is the Weekend to Remember. It's a moment where you can put a stake in the ground and say, "I'm going to halt our drift and move towards you intentionally and towards God." And it's just, this is why to me it's so powerful and it's something that we can continually do over and over again in different seasons in our life because we're all always in a different season in our life.

Cheryl Shumake: What causes drift or how do I know that I have drifted away?

Jennifer Abbott: All couples are facing drift. We're going to work. We get busy. We have chores. We have kids. We're taking them to dance, to ballet, to sports. All these things are vying for our time and maybe it's interrupting any intentional time we're spending with our spouse.

Maybe it's just we're talking about all these logistics or a to-do list or a calendar but we're really not sitting down talking about the heart and the things that matter. The Weekend to Remember is designed for a couple to intentionally spend time together, to get away from the busyness of life and talk about things they may never have time to talk about.

And then we have these gifted speakers who are going to talk about here are some things, like we just talked about, challenges that every single couple faces. All couples are facing these challenges. Then they're going to learn these time-tested tools to strengthen their marriage and then we're going to give them special moments to work on these things throughout the weekend and after the weekend.

When my husband and I first got married, we never fought.

Cheryl Shumake: Really?

Jennifer Abbott: Before we got married. We dated on and off for two years but never fought, not one fight. We get married and we start experiencing conflict. And we are both believers and we're thinking to ourselves, "What is wrong with us? We are broken."

We did not know what to do. No one had told us that every single marriage has conflict. This is a normal part of life. But what are we going to do with conflict? Because conflict when it's handled correctly can lead us towards oneness.

So when we first got married, we experienced a lot of conflict and honestly, my husband moved out for a little bit. And I don't think we were going to make it. But God intervened and he rescued our marriage and he brought some people into our life to help us.

And then in 2007 we had some friends invite us to a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. And we went to this getaway and both of us are sitting here in the sessions and thinking, "This is amazing. Why have we never heard this before? We could have used this when we first got married."

Now, we are both believers. We're trusting in God, but you can know all the things but knowing and doing something are two different things, Cheryl. We knew all the stuff in our head but we didn't know how to do it.

Another story that I could share is a gal I was working with and she said, "I just feel like we're roommates. Like we're sharing the same space. We're not getting to the heart level in the intimacy."

It's another thing that can come up and cause the drift towards isolation. Busyness is another thing that can cause the drift towards isolation. And all these are moments if we let God in, he can do it.

You know, and I think of marriage more like a marathon instead of a 100-yard dash. The 100-yard dash is start to finish really fast. But marriage is like a marathon, which is 26.2 miles. So we have the marathon. What do you need for a marathon?

You need to have your nutrition. You need to have your water. You need to have your rest stops, people encouraging and cheering you along the way. You need to have your energy gels, a nice pair of running shoes, all the things. What are all these things? Tools in your tool belt to help you finish the race. Why? Because marriage is hard sometimes, isn't it? And it's okay to say this is hard or things are hard. But it's worth it to persevere towards the finish line, because we're all running this race.

Dave Wilson: Dave Wilson here to talk about the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise that you've got to be on with Ann and I. It's epic, it's life-changing, it's marriage-changing, and it's a lot of fun in the sun. It's on a boat and we work on marriages. So hey, it sells out and you don't want to miss it. So here's how you can get in. Just go to LoveLikeYouMeanItCruise.com, promo code familylife. We will see you on the boat.

Cheryl Shumake: We tell our girls now, we have a daughter who was married as of this taping about eight months ago, a daughter who is getting married in a couple of months. And we do a lot of talking with them about marriage.

Before they were married, one of the things that we would say to them often is, "Listen, you can fall in love with anybody. You really can. But you cannot build a life with everyone."

So you want to pray and choose wisely. Choose the friend that you can build a life with, that you can have conflict with, that you may have a disruption of intimacy with, but you know that this isn't the end of the relationship. This is an invitation from God to look to him, look to his word, look to what tools he's provided, look to one another and say, "Okay, this is how we're going to begin to move back towards each other."

And I think what that does is it infuses our relationships with hope that we're in this season and this chapter is not the whole book. This is a chapter that we are living right now and we can recalibrate. We can come back to God's intention for our marriage and here are some opportunities to do that.

I will say this: Jonathan and I for the first, we have been married now for 18 years, and the first 16 years of our marriage we spent pouring into every other marriage that we could think of. Every time we went to a marriage conference, every time we went to a marriage retreat, we were speaking, we were coaching, we were doing something at that conference.

Two years ago, another one of your colleagues, Metta Whitney...

Jennifer Abbott: Love Metta. Hi Metta!

Cheryl Shumake: She gave us a Weekend to Remember for Detroit. And it was the first time in all of that time that we had been married that we got to sit and just receive. And again, we weren't in a bad place at all. I don't think we've ever been in a bad place. We certainly had disagreements and things like that, but we weren't in a bad place.

But we were in a place where some things were routine because we were in the middle of life. We had a lot going on. And we decided we were going to take that weekend and we were going to act like tourists in our former city. We were going to go downtown and we were going to get the hotel and we were going to do all of the activities and really just pour into each other.

That was such a phenomenal time for us, again because we had spent so much time pouring into others. We finally took the opportunity to get poured into as well. That was one of my favorite memories from a Weekend to Remember, because that's the only memory that I have, but I so appreciated that that tool was available to us. What's some of your personal favorite memories from Weekend to Remember?

Jennifer Abbott: My personal favorite memories? I really feel like session two, it's let's talk, basically communication. What are your natural communication styles? Some people are just like, "We're going to go like this. We're going to land the plane." And other people, you know what, we're going to go along and we're going to tell a story and we're going to totally enjoy the ride.

Cheryl Shumake: Can I interject a question right there? Okay, if I'm coming from a difficult space with my spouse and I'm walking into a Weekend to Remember and you guys are telling me, "We want you to be transparent and vulnerable," I am probably not going to be receptive to that positioning. So what is happening in the space that allows people to feel safe enough, again, to be vulnerable?

Jennifer Abbott: First of all, you came to this event, you're in the right place. God has you here for this time. And what we like to say is draw a circle around yourself, or a hula hoop, and the person that you're going to work on is the person inside the circle or the hula hoop.

At moments we can sometimes have a tendency, right, to nudge our spouse or think, "Is he hearing this? I want him to work on this. This is for him."

So this is when we're going to stay in our hula hoop and we're going to let God work and listen because we're listening then to deliver God's biblical blueprints and giving us moments throughout the weekend, non-threatening moments throughout the weekend, to apply what we've learned.

This is a moment where we can say, "Okay, Lord, work on me and in my life and transform me." So if we say, "Okay, Lord, let me take up my cross daily and follow you. Let me do that and work on me. Help me to surrender."

This is my prayer every day. I get up in the morning and I say, "Lord, help me to surrender to you and transform me so that I can love my family and my husband in a watching world, looking not only to my own interests but also to the interests of others."

These are the things that the Weekend to Remember is doing and giving you moments to say, "Okay, Lord, steer me back and put my eyes first on you so I can see my husband." First of all, I got to believe that God gave my husband to me as the companion for me. Really, I got to believe and receive him as my spouse.

Cheryl Shumake: What is the one thing that you would like each couple to know? There's a couple out there that says, "Jennifer, I am excited about Weekend to Remember. I am ready to go." What is the one thing that you would want them to know before registering for an event in their area?

Jennifer Abbott: First of all, I already talked about this a little bit but I'm going to reiterate it: work on you. Draw your hula hoop, draw your circle around yourself, let God work on your spouse, you work on you. Go in, I would say, with a surrendered heart saying, "Lord, meet me here and transform me."

And I think with the Weekend to Remember there's a little bit of a stigma. People think you're going to a marriage event, you must have a problem in your marriage. This could not be further from the truth. It is not a large group counseling session with 1,000 people and everybody sharing. Nobody's calling you up to the microphone and asking you to share your private intimate struggles. No one's going to call on you.

I think people come into the Weekend to Remember with a little bit of fear because they don't know what to expect. And this is why we're talking about it. Every marriage is worth it.

Now, the second one is a fun one. It's logistics. Saturday evening is date night. Let's say you're in an event with 500 or 1,000 other people. You probably want to make date night reservations at a restaurant of your choice or plan accordingly ahead of time. So the schedule is on the website. You can go to WeekendToRemember.com. You can see the itinerary.

I would recommend kind of planning a little bit ahead and making dinner reservations. Now, if you're not a planner and you didn't, it's okay. But I do recommend that. That's so fun.

I do want to share one more thing here about Saturday night. Saturday night, we have this really great thing that happens. Maybe you remember what it is. When you come out the door on Saturday and you're going to your date night, you're going to be given an envelope.

That envelope's going to have questions for you to talk about on your date night, so it kind of takes the pressure off for your date night no matter what happens. And then there's an opportunity for you to write a love letter to your spouse.

I took out my original books from when Dwayne and I first attended an event and I brought it. I read it last night and I cried. And this is a cherished memory for me of what he wrote to me and how much he loves me.

We give you the opportunity to do this for one another. And you may be thinking to yourself, "I'm not really liking my husband right now and I don't want to write a love letter to him." That's okay. We have a draft with questions to help you and guide you. But I will say that people say this is one of their most favorite experiences of the whole event because this is a cherished memory that they can look back on.

Just like you see I'm tearing up because I was reading what he wrote and it was so long ago but it's so meaningful to me that he took the time to write that to me. And then you read it out loud to one another. So it's so sweet.

So that's on Saturday night and then Sunday is really sweet because we have an opportunity for the men to get real with the men. And then after the men we have time for the ladies to get real with the ladies. And to me this just is a powerful time to affirm you who you are as you follow God. And then we all come back together for the last session about making your dream a reality and being a...

See, I'm crying already because I'm just crying because you know it's so tender reading that letter. It really just is and it's a cherished memory for everyone.

Cheryl Shumake: I will also add that for couples out there who are leading a blended family, that there is a blended family session as well. So there is some consideration for you and you need to know that that's made available, which I think that's a level of thoughtfulness that is greatly appreciated as that demographic is kind of growing. Jennifer, if I wanted to attend a Weekend to Remember, how would I do that? What do I do?

Jennifer Abbott: First of all, I do want to say that no marriage is static. We're either drifting towards isolation or we're moving towards oneness. So if you're thinking to yourself, "I don't know if I really want to attend this thing," I would say do it. Go to WeekendToRemember.com.

Go there, it's so great, and I'm so excited. Just go register and take a chance because marriage is hard but it's worth it.

Dave Wilson: I feel proud that we've spoken at the Weekend to Remember marriage getaways for 36 years. Like it's a great conference, it's a great investment in your marriage, and it brings the gospel, brings biblical truth about marriage to every single couple. And I feel like it has saved our marriage.

Ann Wilson: Oh, it saved our marriage. And we've seen it save thousands. And maybe you listened today and you're like, "Man, we need to go to one of these" or maybe take some other couples to go to one as well. Here's what you do. Just go to WeekendToRemember.com. You can pick any city, anywhere you want, including your own city if you want, and literally watch God change your marriage and maybe put you on a mission to help change other marriages. Hope you do that. Go to WeekendToRemember.com.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.