Focus on the Family

John Fuller: Welcome to Focus on the Family’s Weekend Broadcast. We hope the following program will challenge and encourage you in your faith journey.

Gabe Lyons: The light came on for me when I could start to see these eight emotions as gifts from God, because I grew up in a home where crying was off-limits. You don't do that.

John Fuller: That's Gabe Lyons, and he and his wife Rebecca are our guests today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. They're going to offer tools for couples to understand your emotions and to connect with each other better and more deeply. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.

Jim Daly: John, I had the chance to speak to Gabe and Rebecca at a conference in Nashville earlier this year, and they shared some powerful insights about the ways your past could still be affecting you and causing conflict in your relationship. If you just stop and think about that, I think you could probably identify two or three things in your relationship that your past is affecting. We're all going to hear more from them on how to process those experiences with your spouse specifically.

John Fuller: Gabe and Rebecca are speakers, writers, and co-hosts of the podcast called Rhythms for Life. They joined you, Jim, to talk about their book, *The Fight for Us*. We've got details about the book online. And here now, the conversation with Gabe and Rebecca Lyons.

Jim Daly: Gabe and Rebecca, welcome to Focus on the Family. It's good to have you back.

Gabe Lyons: Thank you for having us. We love being with you.

Jim Daly: One of the key things, this is a great marriage book, a great life book, *The Fight for Us*. I love the idea of fighting for your marriage. It feels like too few of us in the Christian community are willing to do that. So let me ask that bigger question. Why do we give up so easily? Why is our divorce rate 35% or 40% in the Christian community?

Gabe Lyons: I think people get discouraged easily. Marriage has conflict in it. You have arguments with your spouse, and you start to get narratives in your head.

Jim Daly: Really? I've never experienced that.

Rebecca Lyons: We, though, are professionals at fighting, which felt fitting to write about fighting because I think we see the reason why even Christians walk away. It’s that we see each other as the enemy instead of the ultimate enemy who is really trying to divide us.

The only power the enemy has over us sons and daughters is he accuses and then gets us to agree. So he might say or plant an intrusive thought that's saying Gabe is not attentive to your needs. He's suppressing you or dismissing you. He's transactional. And then I'll be like, that hurt or that felt that way, and so I'll internalize that and I'll ruminate on it. All of a sudden it grows.

Jim Daly: It's so interesting. You write about unhealthy conflict patterns. This is it. This is where everybody needs to lean in because every marriage experiences that. There are things that we do that we learn from our childhood typically that we build on in our adult years. What was happening for you particularly, Rebecca, where you were experiencing that with Gabe?

Rebecca Lyons: We had something that we had cultivated without intention called the dysfunctional dance. It was triggered by these emotions, and it was silent, intense, avoidant, and anxious. As we talked to other couples about it, we found this was a trend.

The silent was always triggered by hurt, like some form of hurt that was never expressed or repaired, that started to grow into resentment or bitterness. So we just kind of agreed with "it is what it is," and we moved on.

The intense one is the one that really was ours. We're good at this. That's triggered by anger. The scriptures say, "in your anger do not sin." So it's okay to go, there could be a righteous anger around some of the things that we feel like we might not be honoring in one another or recognizing well in one another. But again, anger unexpressed is toxic. So we have to express it. So the intense one is one, and as we've polled so many marriages, intense is the top one and silent is second.

Those are extremes, but there's also avoidant and anxious. Avoidant is triggered by guilt and anxious is triggered by fear. These are all stress responses and they happen so much in the margins, the transitions. Because the bottom line is we're rookies. We've never had kids until we had kids. We never had special needs kids until we entered that. We had never done a cross-country move, and there's stressors there. Then launching kids, and kids getting married, and going off to college. We realized that we saw every transition differently based on our origin, which created stress, which created conflict because we're rookies.

Jim Daly: Well, how long have you been married? You're not rookies.

Rebecca Lyons: 28 years.

Jim Daly: You look great, don't get me wrong, but 28 years? You're moving into the MVP category.

Rebecca Lyons: It just felt like the first time we tried everything in whatever season we were in, we missed each other a little bit, so we've learned.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you, people are hearing the definitions and kind of saying, "okay, that's me, that's my husband," whatever. I do feel like there can be some gender application to this. I'm not sure, but I look at the silent marriage. I would have thought that was first, but you're saying the intense marriage is first.

Rebecca Lyons: Right, or maybe they recognize that and then they grow silent over time.

Jim Daly: Right, there's not any one thing. You just don't fall in one bucket and stay there. But the silent marriage I see as a husband's domain because we're little boys, I don't know that we truly ever emotionally grow up. So when we are wounded or we're frustrated, we tend to pull out of the battle. Gabe, was that yours?

Gabe Lyons: That's true. I think for men, we want to de-escalate. We don't want to get so angry and puffed up, so we tend to just turn inward. It's intimidating when your wife's really great with emotions, understands emotions, can communicate to you the hundred different emotions she's experienced over the last few days.

As a husband, I know there were many times I was at a loss for words. I didn't have the same feelings, the same emotions that would lead her to feel disconnected because I couldn't relate. For a lot of men, this journey towards understanding our feelings, realizing that they're valuable, they're not just soft things that you should avoid or you should press down, but you should learn how to express them. When I started to do that, that's when we began to have better conversations.

I'm still not an expert the way Rebecca would be, and I think most husbands need to feel comfortable that you're probably never going to be that. But to just spend some time and energy learning how to relate is going to open up a whole new dimension of the relationship instead of going silent. When we go silent, what happens is we stop talking. Rebecca and I have learned this time and time again: if we're not talking, we're not healing. A marriage that stops talking over time, the silence becomes resentment, the resentment becomes contempt. As we know, contempt is the marriage killer. We want to avoid that at all costs by getting the conversation moving again.

Jim Daly: I can appreciate that, and I think men struggle. A vulnerable example of that: Jean's second brother committed suicide probably four years ago. It was one where it was heavy, rightfully, understandably. But as the months went by, I remember talking to Jean, and my experience in life was losing my mom at nine and my dad at eleven. You've got to pick yourself up, you've got to go, because we can't just sit here.

I was giving her that speech, the husband speech. "We've got to get up, we've got to go, we need to deal with this." She just looked at me and said, "Jim, not everybody's wired like you. I'm not wired like you, and you've got to choose to sit in this grief with me or just keep moving." It scared me. It literally was one of the few times in my life I was fearful. What do I do? I didn't know what to do, Gabe.

Gabe Lyons: As husbands, we do freeze in those moments. We know we're supposed to be feeling something, but you're like, is this on? I remember in a counseling session I was having at one point, having a conversation, the counselor just asked me a simple question about how I was feeling about our marriage and our family. I responded, and he says back to me, "Gabe, I feel like I'm talking to an Excel spreadsheet."

I thought, wait, is that a compliment? I love Excel spreadsheets. I can do a budget. I love analyzing logic. He goes, "No, this is not a compliment. That distance between your head and your heart, if we can't work on that to where when Rebecca's expressing need, you can't meet her in that space, then there's going to always be a disconnect." That really began a journey for me of deciding I'm going to better understand emotion so I can at least start that journey towards better connection with my wife.

Jim Daly: It's so good, but it can be scary. But it's so good on the other end of the reward of that intimacy.

Rebecca Lyons: Emotion is energy in motion, and it's given to us by God. You think of David, God's bestie, a man after His heart. If David wasn't emotional, I don't know who was. He lamented before God, he prayed, he praised, he danced, he rejoiced. I think there was a fullness because he wasn't betraying the heart. When we suppress emotion, we betray our hearts. But the scriptures tell us that out of the heart the mouth speaks, and it's the wellspring of life.

It's the source of life, and so recognizing that the heart needs to be in tune, like it's part of the soul, the mind will and the emotions, that it needs to be in tune with the spirit. Grief, if Jesus was a man of sorrows well-acquainted with grief, then grief and living through grief, He comforts us so we can comfort others. This is part of God's design. I think part of it is a recovery of that, not in a way that emasculates men, but gives them the fullness of understanding the wellspring that comes from our recognition of that emotion.

Jim Daly: There's also a deep honesty with what I see David as humanity. He seemed to be a really straightforward, honest person. You often have to ask yourself, "Lord, he made the big errors, and yet You say he has a heart after You. How do I reconcile that, Lord?" I think it's in the space you're saying.

Rebecca Lyons: He withheld nothing from God. It was all out there. Vulnerability is risk. I think for men and for women, that can be the reason why we don't go there because maybe we were vulnerable in our past and we were betrayed or silenced.

Jim Daly: All the things that create that wall.

Rebecca Lyons: As a child, I needed to disassociate for survival, but sometimes the skills we learn as children don't serve us as adults. Definitely not. So it's coming back to that younger version of yourself and going, "How does God want to continue to reveal what He wants to heal even as I become an adult?"

Jim Daly: So with the silent marriage, the intense marriage, the avoidant marriage, the anxious marriage, people need to get a copy of the book to read more about that, we're not going to cover it all right here. But how do we avoid those behaviors so that we have a stronger marriage?

Rebecca Lyons: It's basically what we call "notice and name," because there is an emotion behind our triggered reaction. Often we focus on behavior management. We erupt or we're silent, we finally come back together and I'm like, "I'm sorry for how I handled that." But we never go to root cause. Why was that so triggering? Why is this topic on money so triggering, or sex so triggering, or parenting so triggering to me?

In psychology, that popular phrase says, "everything hysterical is historical." Where has this bumped up against us in the past that has been a trigger that we really respond to? The amygdala goes offline, fight, flight, freeze, all the cortisol, that stress hormone is surging. It takes four hours to leave our system. We've got to get to the root cause.

What we've encouraged a lot of people to do, when you take 15 minutes apart, you de-escalate, you get with the Lord. "God, show me what You want me to know about this. Is there more to this topic that just keeps becoming friction for us?" Then coming back and asking God to just show us places of pain, places of wounding in our past that He wants to heal so that when we talk about parenting, we're in unity. When we talk about money, there's an honoring and a showing of empathy to one another because our origin stories didn't look the same, which does now reflect in why we see things differently.

Jim Daly: So much of what you're saying for some people, "Wow, that sounds like a lot of work."

Rebecca Lyons: It is! It's confession. It's like a rhythm of confession.

Gabe Lyons: If you have a vision and understand God gave me Rebecca because she was going to likely be the healing agent in body. He was going to use to help me grow closer to Him, to better understand my story, my blind spots. Instead of seeing her as the enemy, this is what happens in the fight. We see each other as the enemy versus recognizing if she's curious, which she's been with me, she's asked me better questions than anybody's ever asked me about my childhood, about the story I've lived, which helps reveal to me all kinds of new things with someone with insight that I need to unpack and process and bring to God. Then I can do the same with her. I can bring curious questions.

We invite couples to say, "Hey, instead of the stalemate, let's re-enter the relationship with curiosity, understanding that what's going on behind the dance is deep pain, deep hurt, and you're the person, you're the one that God can use to help reveal and help see that healed."

Jim Daly: There's an example of that in the book that you talked about. I think in the area where you allowed busyness and distractions to keep you from connecting with Rebecca. I can say amen to this.

Gabe Lyons: I call it the dopamine of distraction. We get that dopamine hit from activity, production, and that was kind of how I've went through my life, my career was just I stayed busy. I always had something on the calendar, didn't like a lot of time to just sit idle or quiet. That's what was ultimately tripping me up in our marriage because I wasn't creating the space for Rebecca and I to have time for those types of intimate conversations. These conversations do take time. It is work. Many of us just want to avoid it like I did. Playing golf was way more fun for five hours than sitting with Rebecca and having a deep dialogue about my history growing up and the trauma related to that that I experienced that was impacting us.

As we move into this, especially as men, we want to just take account that we're giving the time necessary to this relationship. We're saying we're going to prioritize our relationship. We encourage couples to look at the next year ahead and say we're going to give this a year of just investment of higher priority, maybe canceling some other things on the social calendar and giving ourselves some space to do this kind of work together.

Jim Daly: One thing that is helpful is having good friends that can help you in that way. I have a friend Randy, we're just talking about that intimacy and how to develop that emotional intimacy with your wife because it is a stumbling block for us. We can go play golf for five hours, come home and Jean will say to me, "So how's Bob's marriage? Because they're struggling." I'll say, "Yeah, it never came up. But he does have a new driver." Five hours and his life didn't come up? Yeah, who wants to talk about that?

So this friend Randy, he and I were talking about how to deepen that emotional moment, and he said to me, "Well, why don't you treat that time with Jean like you would prep for a broadcast?" I went, whoa! Because I spend time reading a book, looking at questions that are prepared, all the connections of that. I know your story because I've been briefed and read it. I thought, what a great example for me at least in what I do to have that same intensity to do prep.

Gabe Lyons: I do that too, Jim. I will now on my iPhone I'll put in the notes questions to ask Rebecca when we're having dinner one night. It feels dumb to do that, like why do I have to do that?

Rebecca Lyons: I love it! I'm like, "You prepared for us? Thank you." My light lit up when you said that.

Gabe Lyons: Guys need to feel that permission. When you hear an interesting thought or you're learning or you're listening, you're reading a book, think about a question you could discuss as a couple. This for Rebecca does enliven the relationship. It shows interest into her. The definition some have used of intimacy is "into me you see." You can only do that through some good conversation.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you about the list of emotions, since we're putting out the list of questions. List of emotions that we need to be aware of that we can communicate better. What do you think, Rebecca?

Rebecca Lyons: We take this from Dr. Chip Dodd in his book, *The Voice of the Heart*. The eight primary feelings are hurt, lonely, sad, anger, fear, shame, guilt, and glad. Gabe would have thought that I was an ocean of emotion with a thousand feelings because of all of those eight, they each kind of encapsulate. It's kind of like the notes on the scale, the primary notes, or the four primary colors.

There's so many things that come under that. You say, "What are you feeling?" He's like, "I'm frustrated." I'm like, "Well, that's under anger." But often we don't know what we're feeling. There were years where I'd ask Gabe like, "Well, what do you feel?" He's like, "I don't know." He wouldn't even be able to name one or recognize. He's like, "I'm not feeling anything." I'm like, "Well, you seem kind of frustrated. You seem angry." He's like, "No, I'm not angry. I'm just frustrated."

It just felt like a little bit of a loop, but the emotions are being triggered by something. Again, like we said, if it's something historical, then maybe we've had this fight for a while. I would just give an example for us, the feeling of fear. The fear, there's an impairment to every emotion, Dr. Chip says, but then there's also a gift. Fear, the impairment is anxiety. It's imagining a future without God in it. But the redemption of fear, the scriptures say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So a named and confessed fear to Gabe goes from anxiety that might be ruminating in my head to wisdom on how can we come together around something that's concerning.

Gabe Lyons: The light came on for me when I could start to see these eight emotions as gifts from God because I grew up in a home where crying was off-limits. You don't do that.

Rebecca Lyons: He was told it means you're feeling sorry for yourself.

Gabe Lyons: If you grow up like a lot of people did, our parents didn't have these emotional health conversations, most of them didn't. There wasn't a language for this. A lot of our parents were in the silent generation. They just did their work, provided for the family, and that's how you did it. For me to understand emotions are actually a positive that God's given us, even though they might sound negative. Sadness. I don't want to feel sadness. Why should I feel sadness? I feel sad that my mother passed away recently.

Rebecca Lyons: That's appropriate. That's grief.

Gabe Lyons: Right. Sadness is honoring. It's honoring the memory of someone.

Jim Daly: Most of this is the tools to be able to do this. What we found: we have something called Hope Restored, which is a four-day intensive. It can be tailored for different days, etc., but the one that is the workhorse is a four-day intensive. It's like 36 hours of counseling right in a row. Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday lunch. It has a post-two-year 81% success rate, and about 30% of the couples coming already have divorce papers in hand.

What's so interesting about that and the predictability of it, it's exactly what you guys are saying. Sunday's rough. Monday's rough. Tuesday's rough because all the stuff is coming out, stuff that the couples don't even know about each other. Then Wednesday the healing starts. Thursday the Holy Spirit just stamps it. I think that's why it's got such a high success rate because you loved each other at one time and it's undoing the woundedness, the pain that we've inflicted on each other and learning how to do this in a more healthy way.

Rebecca Lyons: The reason we continue the dysfunctional dance is there's a secondary gain. We get to avoid the pain. We just get triggered, we repeat. But you're right, if we actually go, we're scared of something that's like you felt, like this feels off-limits, this feels like this could be a black hole. We might really lose each other because it's just too painful to go back to. But with God's help, He exposes and resurfaces and heals. That's the only way to move forward.

Gabe Lyons: Rebecca and I do retreats. We just came off last week, six couples, that was four days going deep with them in the midst of their pain. The thing that happened by the end, like you said, by the last 30% of this, you start to see couples realize, "Wait, you're not my enemy. And I also am not going to try to make you in my image." God's given us two distinct personalities. That doesn't mean one's right or wrong, we're just different. The more we can learn to respect the differences and see how God's created a gift in our marriage, then there's hope again. They start to dream again and they go back to those dating years and those falling-in-love years and they start to reimagine. God does have a vision here, and I need to just forgive and move forward with His help.

Rebecca Lyons: You're watching the heart soften, you're watching the tears to begin to flow, you're watching unity in prayer just transform within three to four days. It's so beautiful.

Jim Daly: Gabe, in the book you talked about dropping your son Cade off at camp, and you're in the middle of this emotional kind of review. How did that connect to your marriage with Rebecca? What was the Lord showing you?

Gabe Lyons: My counselor had said, "Look, you're having a hard time having tears because I hadn't cried in a decade." He said, "I want you to pay attention the next time you do have tears." It was a few months later, I'm dropping my son at camp. He's 12 years old. Driving away, I am crying for like an hour. I can't stop crying. The signal for me was to go back and go, "Why is this so traumatic for me? What am I feeling?"

It took me back to a really hard time in my story when I was 12. I hadn't put any of this together until I started to process. In my origin story, it was at a camp-type environment where I had a youth pastor that really created a trauma moment for me. I realized from that moment on, that's where I started to turn my heart off because I had trusted this youth pastor. This is a mentor to me. It was somebody that I had shared more with than I had ever shared probably with my parents. All of a sudden I get harmed in that.

When Rebecca and I were finally able to start processing that, I realized I'm in tears right now because I'm scared for my own son. I'm dropping him off at a camp. It's an environment, it's where this trauma happened to me. It was the tears, though, that led me down the journey to better understand and give weight to the story I'd lived through and the story that I'd really tried to suppress, not talk about, make it go away, keep moving forward. Yet it was what was really locking me up in my inability to connect at the heart level with Rebecca.

Jim Daly: What an impactful story from Gabe Lyons. It's pretty inspiring when a couple is willing to push on through to work through the hard things together and to really give all of those to the Lord. I'm glad we got to hear the first part of the conversation. I'm looking forward to the next part.

Jim Daly: I'm grateful for Gabe's vulnerability. It's hard for guys to be that vulnerable. It's not an excuse, it just is true. To hear him search his own heart to find the depth that was required there. Of course, Rebecca, his wife, is pulling that out. "Come on, Gabe, connect with me." Boy, do I know that feeling with Jean and I. Same thing. He was describing something that many of us experience, which is how the past tends to show up in the present. For those of you who are tipping into this, I hope the conversation has helped you understand the conflict in your marriage. I want to encourage you to listen to the next episode to hear Gabe and Rebecca talk more about developing community and honoring one another.

We have so many resources here at Focus on the Family to support you in your relationship. 50 years of building help for you in marriage and parenting. If you're hurting because you are dealing with a crisis in your marriage, I want to encourage you to check our Hope Restored marriage intensives. It has an 80% success rate for those couples who participate. Don't hesitate to sign up to find healing together. Don't put it off. It's something you should work on today if you are limping.

Another resource for learning how to develop a more connected marriage is Gabe and Rebecca's book, *The Fight for Us*. When you make a monthly pledge of any amount to the ministry of Focus on the Family, we'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you for helping others. Everything Focus on the Family offers, including Hope Restored, continues because monthly partners make it possible month after month.

John Fuller: Donate today, get your copy of the book by Gabe and Rebecca Lyons when you call 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY, or learn more about Hope Restored and find the book details at focusonthefamily.com/weekend. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back for more of the conversation with Gabe and Rebecca Lyons as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.

John Fuller: You’re listening to Focus on the Family’s Weekend Broadcast. We’ll take a quick break and then return with the second half of this program for your family. Stay tuned.

Jim Daly: Gabe and Rebecca, it's great to have you back.

Rebecca Lyons: Thanks so much for having us.

Jim Daly: Rebecca, you share in the book about connecting spending issues. This is the wide variety of things that we're talking about, something of a sexual nature and then you're talking about what made you anxious about spending money.

Rebecca Lyons: You know, it's wild. We have found in all the marriages we've counseled that the top two arguments are sex and money. We found the same! Isn't that wild? So I'm like, oh well we got some stories for both of those things. It's where we kind of find our identity and security sometimes, in just the way, whether that was a healthy or a very toxic version of that.

I grew up in a home with two Christian school teachers as parents. I got to go to these schools because it was free tuition, but definitely it was a more elite school. I was wearing all homemade stuff and eating leftovers for lunch. I wore culottes because it was Fundamental Baptist. That's when skirts and shorts are trying to be the same thing, but it doesn't work. Jean just told me a story in elementary school she took a safety pin to make culottes out of her dress because all the cool girls had culottes. That's commitment. I love it.

My mom's dad left when she was two. She didn't really meet him until she got married. So she very much was a survivor. My dad struggled with mental health stuff starting with mid-life. So my mom was a primary provider into my teen and adult years. I watched my dad have a mental breakdown when I was a senior in high school. The bottom line is money was tight. They would always talk about money being tight. You got double coupon Tuesdays every Tuesday.

They sent me to Liberty, which was such a gift to college, but there was only money for the first year with a bunch of scholarships. So then I was just going to have to go back home. At that time, my first year after school, I'd made my faith my own. God had gotten so loud in my ear. He was just transforming me. I thought, oh man, I'm going to have to just go back home. Instead, I just became that girl that stood in line at that financial aid office. I said, "I will do anything. I will work two jobs." I had a job on campus. I had a job off campus. I had full loads to finish in three years to save more money because if you took more credits, it didn't cost more money. I was just this survivor because to me money meant freedom. It meant I got to stay and learn communications. I got to do all the classes that were so inspiring. I got to be independent.

Ultimately, God was so kind to provide. Then He gave me a job right out of school and then I had to pay for our wedding and all the things. But money began to be the savior or the rescue for me, or if that's lacking, then the bottom falls out. That was true in college, but it's not true today. But still, I found myself going, "Gabe, how much did you pay for those eggs? Like what's the price per ounce?" I still was living throughout our whole marriage in a scarcity mindset. It didn't matter how much money we were making. I was like, "No, we can't spend that." Because there was a fear that when this all goes away or the bottom drops out, I'm back to that girl standing in that line. I didn't realize that until a couple years ago. I felt shame. Why am I acting so dumb and controlling about money? Gabe, in his mercy, is like, "Yeah, you need to go work on that."

Jim Daly: But let me ask you this, because this is one of the top things in marriages for all different reasons and all different descriptions. How did you respond to that, Gabe? Rebecca coming to you and saying, "How much did you spend per ounce on that?"

Gabe Lyons: I was annoyed and angry. What are you talking about? I thought it was just an overreach, but it was happening so consistently. I wasn't sure what to do about it except to keep some conversations just off-limits. We just won't talk about that. Or I'll try to participate in your game, like I'll remember what the ounces are next time and I'll try to tell you. Ultimately that led to us more faking it than getting to the roots, which once she did, it opened a whole new door for our relationship to realize that origin was what was impacting her. It gave me compassion for her. It let me know that what she is feeling in those moments is actually deeply rooted and comes from somebody who appreciates the value of the dollar, which is valuable to us in our family and how we raise our kids in a way that it wasn't to me.

Jim Daly: Rebecca, where did you find that freedom, the revelation of that?

Rebecca Lyons: I literally went to the Lord and I go, "God, why is this always the thing? Why does this have a grip?" Because that's what bondage is. It's like a certain topic just keeps coming back and you feel enslaved and you're like, "I don't even know why I do." Paul is like, "I don't know why I do it. I don't want to do it." That happens in the bedroom for a lot of couples. They're enslaved, they don't feel the freedom to just confess like, "I don't know why I don't desire you. I don't know why I avoid this."

If we could just go to the Holy Spirit and go, "God, would You please just show me the places of pain that are connected here? Because this is deep stuff that we just don't really want to visit." In the revelation of it, it was so freeing. I was like, "Okay, I'm not crazy. I mean, while I feel very crazy about the price of eggs, it now at least makes some form of sense to where I go, I have compassion for who she was. I ask God to do the healing work so that I don't function as an orphan versus a daughter spirit. That I don't function out of scarcity versus abundance." That's a daily decision, but God has done the work now and there's not this constant chronic thing that we don't know why it's happening.

Jim Daly: Would you say you're attentive to that emotion when you feel it? Like you can capture it. It's kind of like we speak words that we wish we could take back. So in your thought process, when you start feeling that insecurity, you're able to grab it and contain it and not let it manage you.

Rebecca Lyons: Yes, I think with everything, renewing the mind is a daily choice. It's like, "Lord, am I going to invite You, Holy Spirit, into my thought life right now that's starting to spin up into anxiety or control?" That can still happen no matter how healed we are because the triggers of the enemy are still going to be there. He still wants to divide. He wants to divide us now, He wants to divide us after we left a four-day intensive. He's not going to stop because he hates family, he hates marriage. But as a result of that, as long as we keep going, "Holy Spirit, would You show me what I need to surrender to You right now and receive the grace and mercy," God has just been so gracious. It's kept us very tender, but it's also kept us together and tethered.

Jim Daly: One of the things I so appreciate about both of you is your intentionality. You strike me as the couple that if there's a problem, you're going to work spiritually to get to a better place. Not every couple has that desire for whatever reason. In that context, let's assume one spouse is in, they want to find solutions, they're desperate, they're feeling lonely, they're feeling all those emotions, "I don't know this person I've married," and they're not getting the response. It's like, "I'm comfortable, let's just keep going this way," and you're not able to move. What do you suggest to that spouse to hang in and keep trying?

Gabe Lyons: Because marriage is two becoming one, I think the spouse that is feeling that and has a continued burden, they're feeling the sense of longing for their spouse but they're not getting reciprocation. The first thing is humility. It's prayer. It's all the things we would know to begin with.

The second thing is being willing to raise the longing and desire you have for your spouse. I think lots of times the divide keeps growing because one of the spouses isn't willing to just take the risk to say, "Hey, I need you. I long for you. I long for this to be the way it once was. I know I've contributed to this distance in some way." If a spouse can take responsibility for the area that they've contributed, they might think in their own mind, "Look, I'm like 2% of the problem here, my spouse is 98% of the issue." We would invite you to ask the Holy Spirit, investigate my heart. Where have I built up walls? Where do I actually have a spirit of resistance towards this person? Once that's revealed, confess that to your spouse. Start with humility, confess it to one another, and you'll be amazed at how that can tenderize the other person's heart and just create enough of an opening to begin a new type of conversation that maybe they're not experiencing today.

Jim Daly: It's really good because we use so many clichés, "own your own stuff." This is what that means. Don't project their problem. Don't talk about their problem. Talk about what you can bring in humility. It's always a good place to start.

Let me ask you about your son Cade. He has Down Syndrome. How old is Cade now?

Rebecca Lyons: He's 25. We've been parents a long time. He made us a mom and dad.

Jim Daly: How has that impacted your marriage?

Rebecca Lyons: Honestly, that was year three. I was 26, he was 25. There's a high divorce rate with parents with special needs. God in His mercy turned us toward one another because we were young, we had no idea, again, rookies, no idea what we're doing. That was actually a fortifying thing where our perspective shifted overnight. The things we used to think were important kind of went back-burner. The things we'd avoided, even special needs families, they became front and center. So God shifted us that way.

I believe God gave us Cade because He knew 13 years later there would be a joy and this time we would get to choose Down Syndrome. Which is why we adopted our little girl from China about eight years ago. She has Down Syndrome. She's 12. So they are now our Down Syndrome bookends, and she is every bit her name. She's a joy bomb that goes off in our home. She's a cheerleader and she just makes sure everybody knows. We're full-nesting now with a 25-year-old and a 12-year-old with Down Syndrome. They have probably impacted us more and given us a vision of the kingdom of God than anything else we've touched.

Jim Daly: Describe that, because most people don't touch this area, they don't have this situation. Why would you say that?

Rebecca Lyons: Because they are the barometer of our home. They can tell when there's tension, they absorb it. They're like, "Daddy be nice to Mommy." Then she'll go, "Just kidding," and of course she can get away with anything with Gabe. But they also are very present. They're not stressed about the political climate. They're just about what is happening right now, who's coming over, what friends can we be with, what fun thing can we do. They really keep us tethered in ways that I think sometimes the mind can spin out a little bit.

Gabe Lyons: I think the ability to be present is crucial with them, and that helps us. There’s certainly been limitations in our schedule, trips we can go on that some of our friends are able to do and we can't, or even not being empty-nesters. We understand what our future looks like, but we see it as a grace that God's given us that's kept us local, tethered amongst a strong community, slowed us down. We've learned patience, fruits of the spirit I probably would have never learned without this life.

We're grateful for it. I think God's used them in spite of us because we are both kind of hard-charging, we're both very driven. The Lord's like, "I'm going to give you something that's really going to round that out so that you are near some quiet waters and some green pastures." And they are. They will smell the roses and they will take their sweet time, and it has been so good for us and our spiritual disciplines. It's helped our marriage because we're both like, "We're doing this together." We said yes to joy in our late 40s. We're in our 50s now. We need each other, and that has been such a beautiful thing.

Jim Daly: That's so good. I mean, this has really covered the gamut. I love it. You've touched on so many issues here. It is true, the fight for us. It's about your marriage and finishing well and doing that well. Wouldn't that be a good place?

Gabe Lyons: Part of what our hope is is that couples who aren't familiar with some of the emotional dialogue or how to connect, that they'll just begin by taking first steps of just starting conversations with each other, turning towards one another for repair and listening and learning and beginning to have healthier conversations that can lead to them ultimately experiencing the joy that I think God's design for every marriage.

Rebecca Lyons: We don't stay in the marriage out of duty or obligation, but that if we are committed to marriage as a covenant before God, then ask the Holy Spirit to reignite our desire and find that in that beautiful... there it is, for even people who've been married a long time and have felt like roommates. Ask the Holy Spirit to just stir and awaken that desire once again. If you're going to be together, you might as well really enjoy it.

Jim Daly: I love it. That's the pitch. We want people to improve their relationship. If you're living like roommates, get a copy of the book and start discovering how to live a more fulfilled relationship. That's a great goal. Thanks for being with us.

Rebecca Lyons: Thank you so much for having us.

Jim Daly: I was so encouraged by that conversation with Gabe and Rebecca, and I hope it also encouraged those of you listening. Even if your marriage is broken or not where it needs to be, God can bring healing to your relationship. If our program today really hit home for you because you are struggling in your marriage, please consider attending Hope Restored. It is the most amazing program that I'm aware of. It has over an 80% success rate for those couples who participate, and many of the couples coming already have divorce papers in hand. I don't know of anything doing a better job to repair marriages. Couples who participate go through a few days of counseling and are taught tools that transform their marriage, literally. John, you'll have more details at the end here for people to sign up.

I also want to recommend you get a copy of Gabe and Rebecca's wonderful book, *The Fight for Us*. I love the title. When you make a monthly pledge of any amount, we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for being in ministry with us and helping other marriages. It only takes about 90 seconds to set up that monthly contribution. It's automatic and you can adjust it or cancel it at any time.

Going back to Hope Restored, one participant told us this: "We arrived hurt and hopeless. We're leaving full of hope for our future with God holding our hands the whole way. We learned that we are loved and known." We hear amazing stories of transformation from those participants at Hope Restored. We need monthly donations to keep programs like this running all year long. But if a monthly gift doesn't work for you today, we'll still send you a copy of the book for a one-time gift. Just jump on board and let's do ministry together.

John Fuller: Partner with Focus on the Family. Learn more about Hope Restored, donate, and get your copy of Gabe and Rebecca Lyons' book when you call 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY, or we've got all the details at focusonthefamily.com/weekend. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.

John Fuller: Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family Weekend. For more shows and encouragement for your entire family, stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.