Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Rod Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk. I'm Rod Marsh. Today, we're going to hear a conversation about the power of blessing others. Dr. John Trent, president of Strong Families Ministries and bestselling author of the book, *The Blessing*, is joined by his longtime mentor, Doug Burram.

When John Trent was a troubled teenager from a broken home, Doug showed up at his football practices and invested in his life, ultimately leading John and his entire family to faith in Jesus Christ. The discussion we're about to hear, featuring John, Doug, and Dr. James Dobson, explores how creating positive word pictures for others can literally transform lives and why each of us has the power to be a blessing. That's coming up on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: Dr. John Trent is back with us for another visit. John’s written or coauthored more than a dozen books. He speaks and lectures to tens of thousands of people. As a matter of fact, you get around a lot, don’t you, John?

Dr. John Trent: I do. God's been gracious to allow me to speak at a number of different events, and it's a real honor to do that.

Dr. James Dobson: Speaking of an honor, John, I’m going to give you the honor of introducing our guest. In fact, you asked for that honor because this man means an awful lot to you.

Dr. John Trent: He does. Dr. Dobson, today as we talk about choosing to live the blessing and taking that Old Testament and New Testament concept and living it out, well, the guy sitting next to me, I was a high school kid, and Dr. Dobson, you know this story.

I grew up in a single-parent home. My mom and dad divorced when I was two and a half months old. I never met my dad until I was in high school. When I did, he was an angry alcoholic, and I used to hate him. I didn't know Christ, I'm ashamed to say, but I was drinking like crazy and going wild.

Then, interestingly, all of a sudden, you talk about the blessing, somebody showed up and stood on the sidelines. Now he's about 6’3” and weighed about probably 215 back then and was an ex-football player at Chico State. I was a freshman, a 14-year-old freshman football player, and I'm wild and crazy.

All of a sudden, this guy shows up. He begins to invite a bunch of us players to his home, and I get to meet his two sons who were five and three. I would watch him pick up those boys and hug them and bless them. I didn't know that was the blessing. Then this guy here actually, later on, he was my Young Life leader and just loved me. He just built a relationship with me, and then he actually tricked me into going to a religious movie, a Billy Graham movie. I didn't know that's what it was or I wouldn't have gone, I hate to say it.

I thank the Lord because, as we'll get to talk about, Doug Burram led me to Christ. He led my twin brother Jeff to Christ. He led my older brother Joe to Christ. He led my mom to Christ. Well, Doug Burram, who still goes actually now into prisons and meets with kids who don't have a future and never saw the blessing lived out, he still goes in and blesses people today.

Dr. James Dobson: Doing for others what he did for you. Doug, it is good to have you here.

Doug Burram: Thanks.

Dr. James Dobson: You're a busy man too, aren't you?

Doug Burram: Boredom isn't in my vocabulary.

Dr. James Dobson: Take us back to the time when John was 14 years of age. What did you see in him that made him worth reaching out to? At 14, it's hard to see past the adolescence and the drinking and the other things. You saw something valuable in him, didn't you?

Doug Burram: I have to be honest. I wish I could say I really had a great, wise perception and perspective on people, but I was scared myself. I was 28, 29 years old, and I was working with kids, and I was kind of scared of them. I would hide behind the bleachers and look through them out onto the football field. I hung around the freshmen because they were less intimidating.

John was probably the smallest guy on the team. He was like a hand grenade football player, small but powerful, and I was drawn to him. He was the quieter of the twins at that time. He got over that. We just hung around together, and the friendship just plainly grew. So over the years, it's been special.

Dr. John Trent: But you know what's interesting? As we're talking today about living out the blessing and making that choice, it's funny. Those pictures to me are so vivid. I can remember the theater. I can remember the red seats. I can remember walking down the aisle. I guess the thing that I'm getting at is, and as we get to talk today about living out this blessing, which is really, I think, what the Lord wants us to do, is to bless people like this. Those pictures are so vivid to me. And I know for Doug, I was just one of a whole bunch of kids that he was blessing.

Dr. James Dobson: But they’re burned into your heart. When you talk about the blessing, you’re referring to your new book. The essence of this book is not simply to bless your own family, which you’ve written about before along with Gary Smalley, but this is urging Christians to bless others the way Doug has blessed you and was with you at a critical time.

Dr. John Trent: We've had the privilege of sitting here, remember when we had Dave Dravecky with me and we talked about blessing kids, and with Gary and I. But as I began to look at this whole concept of the blessing, I ran into a passage in Deuteronomy. I know most of us had our quiet time there this morning, but Deuteronomy chapter 30, there's this passage where it's dramatic, Dr. Dobson.

Think about a USC-UCLA game. Remember back to those? Well, God took the nation of Israel and he put half of them on one mountain. He put the other half on another mountain. Now those mountains, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, are facing each other. Right down the middle, it's kind of like here's two opposing stands there, like USC and UCLA. He put the priests down the middle, and then to Joshua, you know what he said to him?

Now they were one mile from the promised land. They're getting ready to go in. And yet the Lord says to them, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse." You know what? I guess what I hope to communicate today to that mom who is the only one in her home right now, maybe the dad's not interested in blessing the kids, but she is, or maybe that guy that's thinking about bailing out on his family right now. It is a choice every day that we have to bless or to curse, to add life and light or to subtract it, which is what the literal word for curse means. So that's what I'm excited about getting across, is that even if you came from a home like mine where the pictures weren't wonderful and beautiful, I thank the Lord for guys like Doug who were willing to say to a guy like me, "You can change the pictures."

Dr. James Dobson: Doug, talk about your work today. You're still involved in Young Life.

Doug Burram: I was on staff for 17 years. I do it as a volunteer now. In our little town, we call it Prime Time. At the beginning of the year when the kids all come to club, and that's a result of the relationships of hanging around the football practice field, I'm still going to the freshmen.

Dr. James Dobson: You’re still intimidated by them?

Doug Burram: Not quite as much. But I stand in front of those kids and I tell those kids we want this to be a safe place to come every week. I try to communicate how valuable they are because I feel it. Last year when I did this, I started crying because I told them, "I don't know most of you kids, but I think I would die for any of you because that's what Jesus means to me and what he's done for me." He has filled my heart and I'm just blown away by how I feel about kids because they're just kids, but they have infinite worth.

Dr. John Trent: That's what you felt when you were 14 years of age, wasn't it? Can I give you two quick pictures? My dad left when I was two months old. So we weren't just real close when he left. But years would go by, and we weren't the greatest football players, but we did end up on the front page of the sports section for the *Arizona Republic* one time. Twins in the same backfield, that's kind of unusual, so they put a picture of my twin brother and me.

Guess who read the paper that day? It was my dad. Now he had lived within a 20-mile radius of us the entire time growing up.

Dr. James Dobson: And you'd never seen him?

Dr. John Trent: We never saw him. He never bothered to call. There's no restraining order. This is back in the fifties and sixties. We knew he was somewhere, but we didn't know where. He calls and he says, "I want to meet you boys." So you can imagine the hype. We're playing this team and we're just so excited about the fact that up there in the stands was going to be my dad.

So we played our hearts out. I won't tell you who won the game. All right, I will. They had this pathetic quarterback, this guy named Danny White, who went on to play for the Cowboys. No, it was Westwood High School. They beat us right at the last three minutes mark of the game. But you know what? I remember standing on that field after the game, and I was so excited because I was going to meet my dad. Jeff was there, my twin. Joe and my mom.

We wait and we wait and we wait. We got permission to stay put. It was an away game. The team left. We waited and the lights finally go out and we're still standing on that football field. He never showed up. He never called, didn't say he was going to go. I had so much anger in my life. That was like lighting a fuse and it just exploded. Well, it was at that time that Doug showed up. And who goes to freshman football practices? A few cheerleaders that are paid, a few parents. My dad never went to a game. Doug did. When I was a JV wrestler, and I did better after that, but I remember my first varsity match, I got beat 23 to 3. You know who the first person was off the mat when I got off? It wasn't my dad. It was Doug.

Dr. James Dobson: You became a father to John.

Dr. John Trent: Yeah, and I used to go to his home and watch him with his kids. Obviously, John, I have your book and knew that you might share that story. In fact, I was going to ask you to tell the story with your father. I have brought something with me into the studio that I think will provide a word picture as you talk about it. This book is really based on the notion of creating pictures. I want you to hear one of my commentaries that was aired recently. We have it cued up, I think.

Several months ago, I talked to a man who described one of the most painful experiences of his life. When he was 17 years old, he was one of the stars on his high school football team. But his father, a very successful man in the city, was always too busy to come see him play. Quickly, the final game of the season came around, which happened to be the state championship, and the boy was just desperate to have his dad there.

The night of the big game, the boy was on the field warming up when he happened to see his father arrive with two other men, each wearing dress suits. They stood talking among themselves for a moment or two, and then he saw them leave. The man who told me this story is now 58 years of age, and yet he stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks as he relived that moment so long ago.

It's been 40 years since that night, and yet the rejection and disappointment are as vivid as ever. I was struck again by the awesome influence a father has in the lives of his children. When he's uninvolved, when he doesn't love or care for them, it creates a vacuum that reverberates for decades. That man's father died not long ago, and he stood by his dad's body in the mortuary and said, "Dad, I never really knew you. We could have shared so much love together, but you never had time for me."

Dr. John Trent: Does that sound familiar? I spent eight and a half hours the last day of my dad's life feeding him ice chips and talking to him. When he died at 4:43 in the afternoon, Dr. Dobson, I just grieved for what I didn't know. He was in World War II. He went through tons of struggles in life and all that stuff, so I'm not slamming him.

I loved my dad. After I became a Christian, I sat down and I asked his forgiveness because, you know, the interesting thing is that for a lot of us, when we're so blocked up with anger, no wonder we don't bless anybody else. I was so filled with anger. I sat down at a restaurant and I looked him in the eye and I asked him to forgive me. I told him I loved him and I tried to bless him. He goes, "Well, you know, all right, if you need that, fine." I said, "I do need it, Dad."

I tried when he had his first heart attack. I was right there. I was there the day that he died. But that anguish of not knowing... and so, Dr. Dobson, one of the things that you shared in your commentary that's so powerful and what this book is really all about is the fact that we know through clinical research and all the studies that we do with people, that people don't tend to remember decades. They don't remember weeks. They remember moments. We need to deal with those. Every time we choose to bless someone, to live out Jesus's love, we're giving them a picture that can change their life.

Dr. James Dobson: Doug, put your own spin on John's understanding and explanation of blessing others. We have talked here in the studio as we said about blessing your own family. That comes out of the Old Testament where the eldest in the family was actually blessed by the father. But this is an expanded perspective of it. As you do work with kids and with prisoners and with the down-and-outers, tell me how you see this concept.

Doug Burram: Well, I think the source obviously is our Lord. When I consider the myriad of ways that he has touched us and blessed us, accepts us, values us, grants us dignity, it becomes a very natural thing. Again, all the kids that I see, there is deep pain. There's a lack of identity. There's a lack of worth. There's a lack of clarity of the future. We have just an incredible privilege to just reach out. I think it's as Jesus lives his life through us. If we've truly received the blessing, then we have the blessing to give.

Dr. John Trent: Jesus himself was the picture of God. You make that point in your book, don't you? Absolutely. And I can remember Doug pointing me to the pictures. Okay, maybe I didn't have an earthly dad there. Then as I grew older and got out of high school and went away to college, Doug wasn't there. But the thing that really kept me going was I could look at a Heavenly Father who has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." Those pictures of how Jesus, remember how he dealt with a woman at a well and how he dealt with the disciples and how he dealt with Peter when Peter denied him?

Dr. James Dobson: The essence of what you're saying, as I understand it, is that every experience you have at every waking moment throughout your life creates a picture, whether it's a negative one, one we do in our own effort and a lot of times we mess up in, or whether it's a beautiful picture. Even whether you recognize it or not, Doug, you were creating a beautiful picture of fatherhood for John, filling a void, and you don't even remember much of it. Yet you were creating a picture.

Doug Burram: What I remember is how much it meant to me. I had very little sense of was I making any impact on John. I think that's the way it is with the Lord. The more we give, the more comes back. I think so often of our society and how hurting we are as a society. If in a community we have a thousand kids, let's say a thousand people who are hurting, I'm convinced we don't need any programs. We don't need any money. All we need are a thousand healthy adults who will each love one and give the blessing, paint the picture, a new picture for one person. Jesus says if you do it unto one of the least of these, not all of them, just one.

Dr. James Dobson: And we don't have to be great artists to pull this off. It can be a stick figure if the Lord uses it.

Dr. John Trent: Whether, again, it's that single-parent mom and she's the only one leaving positive pictures, whether it's us and we're a grandparent and there's those kids on our street and we're the only ones that are smiling on them and blessing them. I get letters all the time from people who said, "I never got the blessing, never got affirmed by mom and dad, but I did from my coach, from my teacher, from my Young Life leader, from my grandparents." That's the kind of thing that I'm saying, is that this isn't just for pastors and missile scientists. When Joshua laid before the nation that choice, it was for all of them, life or death, the blessing or the curse.

Dr. James Dobson: John, we're surrounded by 40 students today. Doug, you know these young people even though you haven't met them personally. You know them well because you spend so much of your time dealing with the next generation. Apply what you all have been saying to those who are here in this studio and also many others in college today or high school, perhaps. How do they extend this blessing onto others?

Doug Burram: I would say first of all, make sure that you have truly received and are currently on an ongoing basis receiving the blessing from Christ. You can't get it from a program. You can't get it from a lot of rah-rah stuff. It's got to come from him.

Dr. James Dobson: You can't give it if you don't have it.

Doug Burram: That's right. Then as you just open your life to say, "Lord, I want to be a conduit and let your grace flow through me."

Dr. James Dobson: Are people still hungry, Doug? Some of these young people here today are going to secular universities where there's no evidence at all that God is even there. I mean, they're surrounded by kids that are doing all kinds of things. Are they really hungry? Is there a need?

Doug Burram: Society tries to answer with money, with programs, with all kinds of conferences, seminars, hoopty-doos to make it happen. But a heart is touched by another heart. We've lost that I think even in the Christian family. I don't mean family nuclear family, I mean as the Christian family, the church, that our lives are touched one at a time. What a wonderful investment, to give your whole life to one person. That would be your whole vocation.

Dr. John Trent: I just think too, at the time I was so hungry. Now you couldn't have shown it on the outside. In fact, Dr. Dobson, I had a guy stay at our home recently, and my kids I think tricked him into this, Carrie and Laura, or maybe Cindy set them up. I walk in and they've yanked out all the old yearbooks, which is embarrassing. The hair and those bell bottoms that went way too far out and all that stuff.

Dr. James Dobson: So much you used to look like.

Dr. John Trent: I used to have dark hair. I remember sitting there and he's flipping through and he's laughing and he's looking at the pictures because that's what we're talking about, the pictures. You know what he said to me? He said to me, "You know what? You never used to smile, did you?"

See, I was the quiet one. I was the angry one. I was the one that was ticked off at life and at God and at people. All of a sudden when one on one and we would do these things at Doug's house, we'd go over and we'd play Bull Moose Football. We invented it. It ought to be an ESPN 2 sport today. He knew that a bunch of high school guys who thought they were real studs, how is he going to get to their heart? Well, we'd play football and then we would have a Bible study. I would watch him pick up his kids and hug them. Now that's what I do. I try because one man poured his life into me. I'm trying to do that with my kids. I go out all over the country and do seminars on the blessing and try to tell people to do this. But it started because one guy showed up at one practice and said, "I'm going to look at a bunch of freshman kids as valuable."

Dr. James Dobson: You started to say, I thought, that your photographs from your album show you not smiling, show tension on your face. Do you know that there was a study that was just released in the last few weeks about that where they took high school annuals from 1958 to 1960? They divided them into two groups: those who were smiling, those who had laughter lines around the eyes, those who seemed to be enjoying themselves, as opposed to those who were tense. You could see it in the pictures. They followed them from those years to today, and those that were laughing and smiling and relaxed are significantly more healthy and have had a significantly better life than the others. You can see it in the photographs at 16, 17, 18 years of age.

Dr. John Trent: And see, that's when I needed to know that God loved me.

Doug Burram: Four years ago, I started going to the county jail to see kids. I'd known them in the streets. These were in most cases Hispanic gang kids. I noticed that when I would come out of jail, I would be choked up and I would cry walking to my car. I don't mean bawl, I'd just be very tenderized. It would confuse me. I said, "I'm not sad, I'm not mad. Why am I doing this?" I'd get in my car and I would just automatically break into a worship song and sing.

Finally one day, I was looking at Matthew 25 where Jesus is making that funny statement, "The poor you'll have with you always, but you won't always have me." I didn't understand that. But I looked across the page at chapter 25 and it says, "You reached out to the poor and you touched my life," the sheep and the goats story. What struck me there was that if I want to encounter Jesus, I go to the hurting person. Jesus is in the poor. He's in the lost. He's in the alien. He's in the prisoner. So I think what was going on was I was seeing Jesus when I saw John even before he was a Christian. Jesus was touching me because he said, "If you touch one of these, the least, the hurting high school kid or whatever..." and that was a marvelous... then I understood why I was crying and breaking into song after being in jail. I'd just been with Jesus.

Dr. James Dobson: Inasmuch as you were doing it to the least of those, you were also doing it to him. And it's one of the least of those. It wasn't all of them, just one. Doug and John, thank you for being with us and for providing the stimulus for this discussion. Thank you, John, for your book. I think we get the idea. We’re going to go out and create some pictures whether we’re artists or not. Doug, keep ministering to those young people. What a tremendous thing.

Rod Marsh: What a meaningful conversation about the power of blessing others. Today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, Dr. John Trent and Doug Burram have reminded us that we don't need a title or a program to change someone's life. We literally just need to show up.

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This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.