A Heart That Beats for Home

40. 25 Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Marriage: Creating Margin, Finding Mentors, and Keeping Christ at the Center / Lessons 21-25

• Nikki Smith • Season 1

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Jump into the final week of 25 lessons learned over 25 years of marriage. Reflect on the transformative journey my husband and I embarked upon, filled with wisdom from mentors and inspiration from couples we admire. Embrace the joy and challenges of marriage, and hear how a supportive community has helped us navigate through every stage—from nurturing a young family to wholeheartedly welcoming the adventure of empty nesting and retirement.

Gain insights into creating space for what truly matters by exploring the concept of margin in your life. Uncover the peace that comes from decluttering not just physical spaces, but also managing time and finances wisely. We share the joy found in spontaneous, joyful family moments and highlight the importance of intentional family investment while keeping Christ at the heart of all our decisions. It's about making choices that place family first, even amidst the chaos and noise of modern life.

Embrace the profound role of faith as more than just a fleeting crutch but as a cornerstone of meaningful relationships and daily life. Learn how treating faith as a relationship can breathe life into marriages, guiding us through the unpredictable journey of life. Discover how scripture can shape your prayers and enable you to lead a faith-centered life, providing stability and strength for you and your loved ones. As our series on marriage draws to a close, we hope these insights inspire and encourage you on your own journey.


Resources:

Praying the Scriptures for Your Children:
https://amzn.to/3Yg6cs5

Praying the Scriptures for Your Teens:
https://amzn.to/4gZaP0Y

Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children:
https://amzn.to/3ZZFtBw

Praying the Scriptures for Your Marriage:
https://amzn.to/405neu6

Praying the Scriptures for Your Life:
https://amzn.to/4dFb7r8

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Speaker 1:

Hey friends, I'm Nikki Smith, your host here at A Heart that Beats for Home, the podcast where we're ditching filters and diving headfirst into the raw beauty of all things home. Now, I am no expert when it comes to this whole parenting and marriage dance. I'm simply a gal who's been riding the mom roller coaster for 22 years and a wife still untangling the mystery of it all 25 years after saying I do. My goal is to bring you unapologetically messy and boldly genuine conversations about cultivating strong families. We're gonna laugh, possibly cry, and straight talk about the joy and chaos that comes within the four walls that we call home. No judgment and certainly no perfection, just real talk from my heart, a heart that beats for home. Let's dive in. Hello friends, welcome back to another episode. We made it.

Speaker 1:

We are in the fifth part of a five-part series here on marriage 25 lessons learned over 25 years. Thank you so much for sticking it out with us. If you're joining us, maybe for the first time, I encourage you to go back and find part one of this series and listen through all 25 lessons that we have learned, are learning, are currently working on in 25 years of being married, and I say it over and over again, and I will continue to say it, because it's super important that we are never done learning. We have never arrived, and each day is about getting better than we were yesterday and progressing in all areas of our lives, and marriage is included in that, and so it has just been a really fun kind of process for me to go through and take notes and pick the 25 things you know obviously there's so many more that have been parts of our getting to this point in marriage and being able to still really say that we love each other and, more importantly, we really like each other. I guess maybe not more importantly, but equally important and makes it a lot more fun is that not only do we love each other, but we really like each other and we really love being together.

Speaker 1:

And I know I talked quite a bit last week about just that awesome 25th anniversary trip that we got to go on and one really cool thing that came from that was in being gone for 12 days. That's a long time to be out of routine, out of work, out of having your kids activities and all the things that you typically are doing in a day and just to have that much time together and it was probably day seven or eight that I looked at my husband and I said you know what? We are going to kill empty nesting. We are going to kill retirement. We are going to just have the best time because we really love being together. We have fun together, we just co-inhabit really well. Together, we enjoy a lot of the same things. I feel like we respect each other and we support each other and it was just like a really sweet glimpse into what the next chapters are going to be for us as we move out of this active stage of parenting with kids in our home in the next handful of years and adjusting to a whole new normal. And I am super proud of the fact that we not only love each other but we really like each other and I think that ultimately is a big part of the goal right, that we get to move through life and we get to the end of this really intense, busy, full season of raising kids and just the intensity of schedule and work and career. And if you can get to the end of that with your spouse and say we made it through those things, we still love each other and we really, really like each other. I think that is a complete win.

Speaker 1:

So let's jump into the last five, number 21, through 25 of the 25 lessons we have learned in marriage. So number 21 is find your mentors. This has been super important for my husband and myself, just as we have navigated through so many different stages. You know the old saying is hang out with those you want to be like. If you are hanging out with five people who are ahead of you, who are doing well, who are excelling in the things that you want to excel in, that is always a good thing. You never want to be the person in the room that's the farthest along in that journey or in that task or in that thing that you're trying to build and grow in.

Speaker 1:

And so for us it has been so important since we were young married, to find those couples, to find those families that we could look at and we could say I really love this element that you have as a family. I love the way you guys work together as a couple. I love the way you respect each other. I love the energy that I see between you guys, the way that you interact with one another. I really admire the way you interact with your kids. I like who your kids are. Your kids are enjoyable to be with and align ourselves to be in proximity to those kinds of people, and we have gravitated to a handful of couples who we just really really love and adore and who we like to get in front of. It hasn't been as much recently as our kids have gotten older, but these couples that we can get in front of and have dinner with and ask questions and say, you know now to some of our friends who are in the in-law stage and the grandparent stage and say, talk to me about that, what are you doing to build relationship? What are you doing to create the distance that you need to give your kids but still be involved and just having these conversations and getting ideas and praying through concepts that are presented to us about how those that we admire, how they're doing it and how we can implement or grow or learn from them in their process.

Speaker 1:

I think it's really important when there's hardship in your relationship which you will have, you will not go through a lifelong marriage and not come into seasons of this feels really hard. This feels like we're going to have to lean in a little bit more than we have in the past, and we're going to have to fight a little harder for what is important to us and what we want in this relationship, and we might need some accountability and some partnership and some encouragement and some prayer partners to go in this with us and just to have those couples that you can show up honestly with and say, hey, here's where we're at, we're really struggling. We need to talk this through with you, we need you to be honest with us, we need you to hold us accountable, and just having those people in your life that you can go to has been so, so important for us. One couple in particular is just someone that we feel super safe having time with, being open, with being vulnerable. We know that anything that we share is kept in total confidence and that they're prayerful and they're wise in how they counsel, and so that has just been a really important thing for my husband and I.

Speaker 1:

So no 21 is find your mentors. No 22 is that the accumulation of stuff in life is heavy, and this is one that has taken a couple decades to really figure out. I think you start out on this journey young and there is a lot of ambition around accumulation and we might not look at it as accumulation, but when you really stop and think about when you're a young married couple and it's all the things that you're looking to work for, it's the job, it's the the things that you're looking to work for, it's the job, it's the cars and the homes and the things that are inside your home and we work really hard to acquire a lot of stuff. And it was for me, I don't know probably 15, even 17, 18 years into our marriage where I was just feeling such overwhelm. All the time I felt like all the time I just felt overwhelmed.

Speaker 1:

Everywhere I went in our house there was just stuff. There was so much clothes, five people that all had way too many clothes, way too many shoes, and the laundry room was always a disaster because there was so much clothing in our house that everybody had plenty of clothes to have. You know, 10 days worth of clothes in the laundry room, still have 10 days of clothes on the floor in their bedroom and 10 days of clothes in the closet. And you open the pantry and there's three and four and five of some of the things that you forgot that you bought. So you bought another and it's just accumulation. And you go in the garage and there's stuff piled everywhere. You go in the basement there's boxes and bins I mean it's everywhere.

Speaker 1:

Right, this consumer mentality of more, more, more, and just really realizing that in life, anywhere that we create margin, we find rest. And the accumulation of stuff is heavy, it is very heavy. Every single thing that comes into your home has responsibilities attached to it, whether it's you have to clean it, you have to move it, you have to pick it up, you have to rearrange it. And getting to the point and this is still one that is a huge work in process, especially when you live with multiple people is that margin is king in our life, and not just in stuff. It's king in your calendar, it's king in your finances, anywhere that you can build in margin, of free space.

Speaker 1:

There's a sermon series I listened to that was talking about the guardrails in our life that we can set up that just give us that little bit of room. So when we're starting to feel like we're veering off, when you have that margin, when you have that space on the road that's empty, it creates safety so that you don't fall off the cliff. And when you think about this when it comes to stuff right the freedom of after you clean your refrigerator and there's empty space. The freedom of cleaning out a pantry and having an empty shelf or the coat closet where now there's margin in the hanging rack instead of things being thrown in there and falling on the floor, and the shoe closet when everybody has way too many pairs of shoes and you narrow that down and now it's neat and orderly. Every single place in your home where you can get rid of stuff that's not necessary. Donate it, give it to somebody that needs it. It took me a long time to realize I don't need four and five sets of sheets for every bed. I need one, maybe two, because I have the ability now to wash sheets in a day. If I take them off the bed and put them back on the same night, I don't even have to have a backup set.

Speaker 1:

But for so long there was this need to have excess and to have multiples and just learning how to start to thin that down and consistently do this so that you're looking. What is that thing? Is it bringing me joy? Is it weighing me down? Is it being used? If not, get it out and create margin, and once you do that with physical things in your home, you can start to do that with your home, you can start to do that with your calendar and you can start to say, okay, there is no margin in our calendar. We literally go from thing to thing to thing to thing to start to say where do we need to create margin, where do we need to get rid of some of the accumulation that's happening in our calendar so that we have margin, so that we have breathing room to keep us from going off the cliff? And then also in your finances, anytime that you are living so close to the edge of the zero or the balance running out, there is anxiety and there is stress and just the ability to live in a way that you create margin in your finances and you don't accumulate as much stuff, so that there is freedom in the extra freedom in the extra space in the cabinet, the extra balance in the checkbook, the extra time in the calendar. These are things that allow you to just live at a more peaceful state. They allow your family to operate in a more peaceful state and I have just realized more and more that accumulation of stuff is very heavy.

Speaker 1:

Lesson number 23. Is. Sometimes you just need to dance in the kitchen and I will tell you there is nothing like a bunch of teenagers and college-age kids in the house to help you recognize that. Sometimes you just need to let them play the song on the Alexa. You need to let them turn it up way louder than you would prefer it to be. You need to let them put on the song that they're all obsessed with, and sometimes you just got to relax and you just just gotta dance it out in the kitchen. There is nothing like a good old family dance party in the kitchen. It's fun, it's funny, it lightens the mood. Sometimes it's hey, we're gonna put this song on and we're all gonna dance and be crazy While we're taking the five minutes to power clean. We're gonna do this together, as a group. We're gonna laugh, we're gonna have fun. Some of us dance way better than others, but regardless, it's a blast and it creates a lot of memories and it releases a lot of stress and anxiety. Sometimes we just get so serious and everything is so task driven that we just need to be able to say let's just dance it out, let's just have fun, let's just laugh, let's learn the new dance, let's do the silly TikTok, let's just let our guard down and let's just have fun. So sometimes you just need to dance it out in the kitchen.

Speaker 1:

Number 24 is family is the best investment you will ever make in your life for the things that you are building. I know that kind of goes back to number 22 with the accumulation of stuff, but we have a lot of demands on us in life. We have a lot of things pulling at us, specifically careers and achievement and health and I mean you name it right Volunteer stuff, our kids in school, accomplishments, sports. There is so much that is going to pull at us all day, every day. That's never going to change. That draw is going to be there to be more involved, more spread thin. And we are going to have to make choices.

Speaker 1:

To invest in our family first, to take the time to say no to other things, to not maybe do what is norm, to make the commitment to sit down at the dinner table, to make the commitment to go to church together as a family on a Sunday, to make the commitment to get the kids to the youth group thing, or for the husband and the wife to go to the marriage retreat or the different things, but family is the best investment we will make, and I know so often I have to remind myself if, at the end of my life, if I become the most successful business person, if I've smashed different charts and I've beat the odds and I've saved the money and I've got all the accolades and the initials, but my family has fallen apart at the expense of that, I believe that I have lost. I believe that my life was not well spent, because I truly believe that my number one priority on this earth is to invest into my family, is to invest into my marriage, is to invest into my children. And that doesn't mean that we throw away our other responsibilities. Clearly that's not what this means. But this means that we have to intentionally fight day after day, week after week, year after year, to keep our priorities in check.

Speaker 1:

It is very easy for our jobs, our commitments, these different things to pull us away in kind of that same slow fade that we talked about last week, where we say, okay, well, just for this season I'm going to do this thing and I know it's going to really pull me away from my family, but it's for a season. And it's very interesting how quickly. What was going to be for a season becomes a year, two years, five years, a decade, and we look back and we go, wow, I really let that come in, I really let that take precedence. And you guys, these are simple things in our family. These are little things. These are making it a priority to schedule in, investing in our family. It means scheduling in breakfast for my husband and my son when they go out on their Thursday morning breakfast dates.

Speaker 1:

It means making a commitment to show up for my college daughter on her campus and be there in person when she needs me there to support her when she's injured or when she's on the basketball court, even when it means I have to not get things done at home or in my job that I really want to get done. Or do I make that a priority because it's a season? I need to invest in her Now that doesn't. Again, I know that not everybody can walk away from a job that they're actually physically in. I have a beautiful opportunity to work from home and get to rearrange my schedule to do that, but I have to make that a priority, otherwise I will fill that time with something else.

Speaker 1:

I need to make an investment in my family by being willing to say no to electronics that constantly, all day, every day, want to draw me in, want to suck me in, are literally made and manufactured and programmed to make me addicted to them, so that when I'm with my family I'm not really with my family because I have this apparatus attached to my body that I'm checking and I'm looking at and it's a complete disconnect from connection. So I have to fight to invest in my family and there are times where me and my husband have had to make hard decisions, have had to pass up opportunities, have had to say no to really great opportunities because we knew in our heart that saying yes to that compromised the core stability of our family. Sometimes it's been things that he's had to say no to. Sometimes it's things that I've had to say no to. Sometimes it's things that I've had to say no to.

Speaker 1:

But if saying yes to certain things are going to put strain on your family, are going to make you not be able to invest in the way that is a priority to you, to invest and again I'm not talking about just basic nine to five job stuff you guys know what I'm talking about here it might be saying no to the extracurricular sport that you have loved your whole life. And now, as a young parent, specifically, maybe a young dad, you can't. For this season you can't do that because your family needs you to be home at night, your wife needs you to be home at night, and that doesn't mean that you're never going to be able to do it again. But there are seasons where we have to say really hard no's for really beautiful yes's, and that yes is your family and the yes is building relationship, and relationships cannot be built without time and without intention.

Speaker 1:

And so, just over and over and over, my husband and I, over the last 25 years, have seen that we will never, ever regret when we say yes to investing in our family, even if we're saying no to other good things that a lot of times the world would be drawn to. When we say yes to our family, there is never one time that we have regretted investing there. So number 24 is family is the absolute best investment you will make. And then the last one. I would be totally remiss to not put this one in, and this is just total proof that this did not go in order of importance. Number one was not the most important, and 25th is the least important. These all have unbelievable importance in our marriage, but this one, actually, I would say, is the number one key component to what I would say has gotten us to this point in our marriage, and it's that we have decided, we have made a commitment to keep Christ at the center of it all, that when we operate in our marriage, when we operate as parents, when we operate as a family unit, our tribe, we are operating around the nucleus of Christ is the center and our decisions are being made based on the word of God. Our prayers are being prayed over our children and over our decisions, and choosing to know that Jesus is not our genie, but that Jesus is our king.

Speaker 1:

And there is a really big difference and I've lived in my relationship with the Lord in both of these places. There have been a lot of times in my life where I treated him like he was the genie and I kept him on the shelf and when something got hard, or I had a hard situation or there was an illness, and you go and you, real quick, you have your Jesus as a genie and you say your prayer and you hope that he's going to make the magic happen and it's not the way it's intended to be. And the more that I've grown, the more that I've come to understand what it means to have relationship with the Lord, that it's communication between me and him and it's me growing and wanting to invest. And when you think about the kind of relationship that you want to have with your spouse and what that takes right, it's a ton of time, it's a ton of investment, it's a ton of getting to know them and having conversations and being real and really leaning into that relationship. And that's ultimately what my relationship and my husband's relationship and, lord willing, all three of our kids' relationship is with the Lord. It's a relationship.

Speaker 1:

It's not a religion. For me it's about a personal relationship with Jesus and wanting Him to be in charge of my life, wanting Him to be over my entire family, to be over my marriage, and in that is submitting to the Word of God. It's using the Word of God as a guidebook, and in parenting and in marriage and in big decisions. I can't think of a single time in our 25 years of marriage or our 23 years of parenting where we have come up against something that we haven't been able to find guidance or clear direction on how to move forward through the Bible. There has always been something that we can take out of God's Word and say, okay, I think this is how we're supposed to move forward. It also is one of the biggest ways that I become convicted of patterns in my own life that are causing harm in my marriage or causing harm in my family.

Speaker 1:

When you dig in and you read that Bible and you don't have to understand it all to open it up, I will tell you there are times that I open up my Bible and none of it makes sense and I pray God, just show me one thing, one thing in this reading today. And if you're brand new to this, maybe you just open up the Bible and you start in the Gospels you start, you know, in Matthew, mark, luke, john, you start and you start reading about Jesus' life. Or maybe you open up to the middle of your Bible and to Proverbs. There's 31 Proverbs in the book of Proverbs, 31 chapters. And maybe you read one chapter a day, one chapter a day every month. There's 31 chapters, 31 days in a lot of the months of the year, reading one chapter of Proverbs. It's a book of wisdom. A lot of the verses that I pull when I talk about our words and about how we can either speak life or death over our family come right out of the Proverbs.

Speaker 1:

And when you start to open up that Bible and you start to read about it and you start to want to understand it and you have this relationship with the Lord where you're talking to Him and you're praying with Him and you're praying these prayers over your children and over your family. And I will link I have the best resource. It's three different books Praying the Scriptures for your Adult Children, praying the Scriptures for your Teen. There's also one for young kids and then there's one for marriage, and it is literal Bible verses that have been changed into prayers. I'm actually just going to pick. I had it next to my computer here. I'm going to actually just pick it up and read an example. So again, praying the scriptures for your adult children, your teens, your young children and your marriage. And there maybe is some more, but it's taking this and in the young adult one or your adult children one. When I look in, I'm just going to open it up here.

Speaker 1:

Guys, when I open it up, it's divided into categories. So, praying for your adult children. Praying for your adult children's relationship, their future spouse, their young marriage, their troubled marriage or a divorce. It then goes into milestones praying for a good place to live, praying for their job, praying for your children to have children, your adult children's wellbeing through health crisis, through emotional health, through protecting them from harm, from job loss and financial difficulty, struggles with infertility, and then over temptations to avoid the party culture, sexual sin addiction. Praying for your prodigal son.

Speaker 1:

Each of those are chapters that it gives you a little bit of information about, but then you can go to the back of that chapter and it's written out different prayers. So, for example, this one, the back of that chapter, and it's written out different prayers. So, for example, this one is just praying prayers for your child's transition to adulthood and it says and I'm going to just fill in a random name instead of one of my own children but it says do not let Emily, worry that people will look down on her because she is young. Instead, she set an example for other believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. 1 Timothy 4.12. Another one says thank you that you created Emily to do good works. Lead her into those things that you have prepared in advance for her to do Ephesians 2.15. Or, as Emily reaches adulthood, may she put the childness behind her and learn to think, speak and reason like a woman. 1 Corinthians 13.11.

Speaker 1:

And you can go through these. If you're someone who maybe even struggles to pray, you don't know what to say and you just are heavy burden for your family, for your marriage, for your kids, these are the best resource. They are so good. I feel like I open these books so many times a week. I send them to so many people, I screenshot prayers, especially when there's things that are happening to friends, kids or maybe your girlfriend's marriage, and you just want to be able to pray some of these things over them. It is the most amazing resource.

Speaker 1:

And when you have this as part of your core plan, if you will, towards having a successful family, to having a successful marriage and by success I don't mean perfect. Successful parenting to me is not perfection. Parenting Successful parenting to me is we are going to fail every single day. And then how are we going to recover from that? How are we going to mend relationship? How are we going to restore a heartache that's been caused? How are we going to take what happened? How are we going to go to the Lord to go to his word, to pray about it and come out of that situation stronger as a relationship, stronger as a relationship between me and Jesus? And how am I going to implement things and learn and grow to make that thing not repeat, to make that habit less likely to happen, to move farther away from that sin pattern that I keep falling into?

Speaker 1:

Because here's the reality when we look at our nucleus of our family, when we look at our marriage, when we look at our relationship with our kids, when there is a lot of issue, when there is a lot of strife, if somebody comes and says, man, I love these people, but we are struggling, we are struggling people, but we are struggling, we are struggling. It's going to always probably come back to sin issues in my life, in their life. And how are we going to address that? How are we going to work through that? How are we going to partner together and say these things are all our humanness. We all came here, we all came to this family, we came to this marriage with a lot of humanness, and humanness is flesh and it's sin and it's craving my own desires, my own needs, my own wants.

Speaker 1:

What is the thing, what is the thing that is going to help us not be like that? What is going to transform us from the humanness that we're born with to something more supernatural, something that is full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control. What is it going to be? And it's found in the Bible. It's a peace that comes from knowing and loving Jesus and having relationship with him, and I know that this is probably so foreign to so many people that say yeah, no, nope, that feels way too scary.

Speaker 1:

Or I have church scar from when I was younger. The church hurt me, I was abused. First of all, I'm so sorry. I am so sorry that that is your reality and your experience, and I want to challenge you, outside of the formal platform of church religion. I want to challenge you to start digging into personal relationship with Jesus. If your marriage feels like there's something missing, or if you just keep butting heads, or if you so badly want the reality of what's happening in your household to have a different feel, a different tone, and you just can't figure it out. You can't figure out why nothing is working. I want to challenge you to dig into relationship with Jesus, to take him off of that genie position on the shelf that we go to for the magic. Dig into relationship with Jesus, to take him off of that genie position on the shelf that we go to for the magic prayer and to say I really want to start to create relationship, I want to learn to pray, I want to understand the Bible, I want guidance, I want to be more like you so that my family can see that, so that my family can be softened to the idea of you and relationship with you, and so that we can start to form a family around a nucleus that believes that Jesus is king over all.

Speaker 1:

And when we live that way, it's totally different. It is absolutely totally different. And again, it doesn't mean it's easy. But I will tell you, our faith has grown more in the crises in our life, in the times where we were on our knees, begging for health for our children or begging for my husband to make it through a heart attack or a pulmonary embolism, and I believe that those are the things that carried us through. And without that faith and without that belief and without that relationship, it scares me to think of where we could be right now if that wasn't the foundation, if it wasn't the center of our entire existence. And so, again, I know that this is probably very foreign to a lot of people and maybe for a handful of listeners. You do have a relationship with Jesus, but you have let it become very much a secondary thing in your life. It's a I'm going to just go to church on Sundays and I'm going to do my thing, and you know I'll come back here when I can. I'm really busy.

Speaker 1:

I challenge you make it a priority, make it a non-negotiable in your day to spend five minutes five minutes in the word, five minutes praying. Pull out these books praying scripture for my marriage, my kids, my children, my adult children, and just see what starts to happen in your own heart. It's not about praying magic prayers over everybody else to do what we want them to do or how we want them to turn out, but it's praying through my own heart. Lord, help me to be an example. Help me to demonstrate what it looks like to operate with a peace that passes all understanding. Help me to put a guard around my tongue. Help me to be still and trust.

Speaker 1:

And when we start to do that and when it becomes real to us, the ripple effect that that has on our spouse and on our children is pretty amazing, and it goes both ways. It goes from a husband to a wife and down. I mean, you can learn so much from your kids, too, who prioritize and who really work on their relationship with the Lord and who make it theirs and make it personal. And so I could go on and on about this and I'm not going to, but if this is something that is completely foreign to you, that you don't even know where to start, I would ask that you please reach even know where to start. I would ask that you please reach out to me. My Instagram is on the show notes and you can private message me. There is nothing that I would find more joy in than being able to walk with you, to give you some resources, to pray with you and to help you maybe just start to understand what it could look like for your family to have Jesus as king overall, because I promise you it is the number one lesson that I have learned in my 25 years of marriage.

Speaker 1:

So, you guys, with that we are going to wrap up this series.

Speaker 1:

It has been so fun to navigate through.

Speaker 1:

I know that the next 25 years, lord willing, is gonna teach us so much more, and it's gonna be something that I'm sure we look back on in 25 years and say, well, if only we knew then what we know now, because it definitely is a growing process in life and new challenges bring new growth, and that's what's so great about just being able to walk through the highs and the lows with a partner, with the best friend, and to just have a marriage to do that in, and so I pray that this series has encouraged you, I pray that you were able to take something from it, and we will be back next week with a new topic, moving away from marriage here for a little bit and changing gears. So again, friends, thanks so much for being here. If you have a friend that you think would benefit from this episode, or maybe this entire series, feel free to do a quick share, either through text or on your social media platforms, and share these episodes with them. So until next week, friends, take care.