The Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast

Kaley Olson: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast, where we share biblical truth for any girl in any season. I'm your host, Kaley Olson, and I am here with my friend and cohost, Meredith Brock.

Meredith Brock: Well hi, Kaley. I'm excited to be here with you today. For those of you listening, I want to take a second and remind all of our listeners what we're all about here at Proverbs 31. Proverbs 31 Ministries exists to help people all around the globe know the truth and live the truth because we absolutely know that when they do, it will change everything in their lives. We may not have the answer or have the solution to the specific question you're facing today, but one thing is for sure, we love Jesus and His Word and are committed to helping you know that Word better so you can find the solutions that you do need.

We hope by listening to the conversations we have here on this podcast, that it helps you fall more in love with Jesus and His Word.

Kaley Olson: That is so right, Meredith. At the end of the day, if just one more person loves Jesus more by listening to this podcast, then I feel like I've done my job.

Meredith Brock: That's right.

Kaley Olson: I'm so thankful that we can be a source of encouragement and maybe from our own embarrassment sometimes, and help women take one small step in the direction of Jesus.

Meredith Brock: And where do we sometimes need Jesus the very most?

Kaley Olson: I don't know.

Meredith Brock: Well, I'm just going to say it. In our marriages, am I right? Well, here we go, folks. We are going for the jugular today. Let's talk to our married friends today. I'm so excited to bring on our guest, Karen Ehman.

Karen Ehman: Hey, guys. How are you?

Meredith Brock: Doing great, Karen.

Kaley Olson: Doing so well.

Meredith Brock: We're so excited to have you here today.

Kaley Olson: Yes, absolutely.

Karen Ehman: Wow. I'm glad I could be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Kaley Olson: Karen is a dear friend of ours, and y'all, this woman is talented. I think she has more ideas than anyone I've ever met in my entire life. Right, Mer?

Meredith Brock: For sure. Idea slinger like nobody's business.

Kaley Olson: Seriously. She writes more books, articles and blog posts, has super cool friends all over the country, and is just downright fun.

Meredith Brock: That's right.

Kaley Olson: She actually just released a new book called Keep Showing Up: How to Stay Crazy in Love When Your Love Drives You Crazy.

Meredith Brock: I think we could do an entire year's worth of episodes on that topic right there, but we've asked Karen to do just one teaching for us today. So Karen, we're so excited to hear what God has laid in your heart. So take it away.

Karen Ehman: Well, thank you so much for this opportunity. I tell you, as part of what I do being a writer and a speaker and traveling the country, I get to listen to a lot of women ask me a lot of questions, whether it's at an event. Afterwards I'm hanging out with them and talking with them, or maybe I get a private message on social media, or somebody leaves a comment, or sends an email to my website. Over and over again, I tend to hear the same question a lot of times. It's not all the time, but I'd say a good majority of the time, I have women ask me the same thing.

That question is, why is marriage so stinking hard? Why is it so hard if it's God's idea? Why did He make it so difficult? I'm tell you, my husband and I just passed our third decade of marriage. We've been married 32 years. That makes me sound really old, right? We got married in kindergarten, let's just say.

Kaley Olson: I think when you say decades, it sounds old.

Meredith Brock: Kaley's just going to lay it out there.

Kaley Olson: I'm just saying.

Meredith Brock: She's saying it.

Kaley Olson: I love you, Karen.

Karen Ehman: We were a little bit young, not quite kindergarten, when we got married. But I remember sitting down in the pastor's office, who was doing our premarital counseling with us. Of course, I was all starry-eyed thinking, "This is just going to be so wonderful and such a walk in the park because I found my soulmate. We're just going to hold hands and walk off into the sunset." As part of our premarital counseling, we had to do a bunch of testing. Now, there weren't as many tests as there are around today. I didn't know back then that he was an Enneagram Nine, a peacemaker, and I was a Three, an achiever. But some of these other tests that came back, they gave us a profile.

Then they not only told us about ourselves, but they matched us together, how we would be, our personalities blending together in marriage. That pastor/counselor looked me in the eye and looked my husband-to-be in the eye and said, "Hey, I just want to let you guys know, this is real interesting here. Based on my findings, I'd say you guys have, oh I don't know, about a 5% chance of staying married."

Meredith Brock: Wow.

Karen Ehman: And he meant it. He meant it. I thought, "Why did he just say that?" But then he went into talking about obstacles we might have based on our personalities. It's been very true. I mean when I say that we've been married 30 years, it's none of our doing. God gets all the glory because seriously, on paper we should not be matched up. We always tease if we went on an online dating site and just drew the little circle of the radius within five miles of our house to say it would match us up with someone in the immediate area, it would say, "Never, never, never. Do not date this person. You're totally incompatible."

Part of what makes marriage hard is our incompatibility sometimes with our personalities because opposites attract, but then after a while they can tend to attack as well. But I feel like one of the biggest things I want to talk about today in our time together that really trips us up in marriage is that we have the wrong view of its purpose. It comes from staring at all the different screens that we might look at during the course of the day. Maybe it's a TV screen or a movie screen or our phone screens. We see these relationships appear on our screens that seem so easy and so romantic, whether it is a television show or a movie we're watching or maybe it's just a friend on Instagram.

We see her and her husband having a romantic dinner out at an expensive restaurant. Of course she's got her new upgraded wedding ring strategically placed in the picture. We're sitting there at home just eating leftovers and having a domestic dispute. We think, "Why is my marriage so hard? Hers seems so easy." But see, social media has really left us, I like to say, coming apart at the seems. I mean not S-E-A-M-S, but S-E-E-M-S, because it seems like everyone else has it better than us because they only put their “best foot forward” pictures up there. You're not really documenting the spats, although I have seen that a couple times on Facebook, documenting their spats.

For the most part, we're putting out those images that make it look like it's all rosy. And then when we see those images, whatever screen we're staring at, and we compare our reality with the perception that we get from those screens, it leaves us coming apart at the seems, because it seems like everyone has an easier time with marriage and ours is so hard. But when we live with this reality on the other side of the screen, our own reality in our own four walls, what happens often and what makes it so hard is the way we either deal or do not deal with conflict. I have seen this over and over again in my own life and in the lives of people that I have talked with as I've ... whether I've been with a friend or with a stranger that I meet at one of my events.

We all have conflict in marriage. Often we hear people say that the experts assert what they believe is the most common cause of conflict in marriage. Some people might say it's finances. Others might say, "Oh no, no, no. Not finances, it's parenting." Maybe we're arguing about how the kids should be raised. Maybe we have conflict over who does what around the house. A new one I've seen a lot is competing with technology. I have a lot of women tell me that they have conflict over their husbands not putting their phones down and listening to them because they're, I don't know, watching the latest funny cat video. Who knows?

Of course, a lot of times people will say that sex is thrown into the mix when it comes to what's the thing that causes the greatest conflict in marriage. I think most often though, the one I hear, and I feel like it's close but it's still not quite there, is communication. People say communication is what causes the greatest conflict. We just don't communicate well. Well, I feel like that is really close, but what is ever more true and what I've seen in my years of being married and observing not only my own marriage but friends' marriages, is that there are three common threads that kind of tangle up our attempts at communication and they cause us to have these domestic disputes.

Now, I wish I could take credit for these three things, but I actually heard it years and years ago when my husband was a youth pastor and we had a Christian counselor come in to talk to the teenagers about communicating with their parents. She gave these three common threads that trip us up in our communication and cause conflict. I sat there thinking, "Oh my goodness. This so applies to my marriage." I'd only been married about a year at the time. As I listened to her and I took it all in and then ran with it for the past 30 years, I've seen that these things rear their ugly heads over and over again. These things that trip us up in our communication are emotional baggage, unmet expectations, and untrue perceptions.

Now, let me just take those one at a time, this trio of trouble that can trip us up. First we have emotional baggage. Now, you probably have heard that term before when it comes to psychology. It's just a clever way of saying these things in our past, traumas, wrongs that were committed to us, or negative experiences we went through, what we do is we pack all of these in this big suitcase and we drag it into our relationship, these pieces of emotional baggage. When our spouse says something that makes us think about those things, we react to our spouse in a negative way, but really, we're reacting to this emotional baggage.

For example, I have a friend who grew up thinking she was not very bright because a teacher once said that to her. In fact, I think the teacher used the word dumb in front of her when her parents were at a parent-teacher conference and she was present in the room. So whenever her husband in their marriage just jokingly says to her, "Oh, stop playing dumb with me," if he thinks that she really knows something that she doesn't know and she's just kind of pulling his leg, it does something to her when he says that phrase. It really kind of bothers her. He is also, just like that teacher did, saying that she's not very bright.

So emotional baggage can be something that causes our conflict to escalate because it's something going on internally in our head that our spouse doesn't know that it really bothers us what they just said because we have grabbed the suitcase, we've opened it up, and we've pulled out a piece of some kind of article that's emotional baggage from our past. That's the first thing.

Then the second thing that can happen when we are dealing with communication in marriage is we can have a little tangling up when it comes to unmet expectations. I'll give you an example from my own marriage. I grew up with a father who was extremely handy. He could fix anything around the house. I had one brother, who's my only sibling, who could do the same thing. I mean even when my brother was a teenager he could take apart an entire dishwasher and put it back together almost blindfolded. I mean he was so handy. So I grew up just thinking, "Well, that's how it goes with men. They're handy." Well, my husband did not grow up in a home like that. And when we lived in our first apartment, the faucet started dripping, and he looked at me one day and said, "Oh no. The faucet's dripping. Who do I call?"

I thought, "What do you mean, who do you call? You go down to the hardware store and get a washer. Here, just let me do it. I'll fix it. I'll replace the washer." I had this expectation that my husband would be handy, and it was unmet. So sometimes it caused friction and conflict to escalate in our marriage. Emotional baggage, unmet expectations, and then the third one, this happens so often, is untrue perceptions. It can be something big that we perceive is going on and it's not true. It's not grounded in reality. But our mind concocts this scenario and thinks this perception is really true, or it can be something very simple.

For example, when I tell my husband, "Hey, do you mind picking up some creamer, some half-and-half creamer for me on the way home from work?" And he says, "Sure. No problem." He shows up with creamer and I look at the container and it's fat-free half-and-half. So my untrue perception is that my husband also wishes I were a little more fat-free because that's the kind of creamer that he got.

Meredith Brock: Oh boy.

Karen Ehman: Yeah. Yeah. So you have this perception. That's a little silly example, but it's so true. We sometimes have this trio of trouble happen all at once. We've got our baggage we're dragging in. We have an expectation that doesn't get met, and so we're disappointed. And then we have a perception that's all askew. It causes havoc in our communication.

I wish I could say I had just a really easy, quick, three-step process to prevent all of this from happening, but I just have to be honest and say that I don't. I don't. It's going to happen over and over and over again. I hope that's not discouraging to people. I feel like it's one of those things where it gets easier, but it doesn't get easier. You do get better at dealing with these things, but they never go away. But what the solution is is to have in your mind this hard, hard truth that marriage is not about you. It's not about you. It's not about getting your way. It's not about having smooth sailing in your communication. The real purpose of marriage isn't all the roses and the butterflies and the rainbows. It's about the gospel.

When we know that the purpose of marriage is about the gospel, we can handle the conflict that comes our way in a healthy manner because really the husband and wife relationship is supposed to illustrate the relationship between Jesus and the church, pointing others to its importance. In Scripture, the body of believers here on earth, well, it's often referred to as the bride of Christ. The husband and wife relationship mentioned in Scripture, it's meant to be a picture of Christ and the church. We find this in Ephesians 5. The sacred truth that is shown in this metaphor of marriage, it's really that God designed marriage to be an enduring union between Jesus and all those who place their trust in Him, and that likewise, our earthly marriage as Christians should paint a vibrant portrait to the people watching of this divine design.

It's God's blueprint for Christ and the church to be one, just like it's a blueprint for husbands and wives to be one. There's a time-worn saying that sometimes can seem overused, but I think it's so true. And it's this, that more is caught than is taught. God, in His divine wisdom, He desires that people on earth catch spouses living out this redemptive plan. They're watching our marriage. It's not just pastors who deliver a sermon. Your marriage, it's a message, and people are watching you preach. I like to think, "Am I reflecting the gospel when I interact with my husband, especially during those times of conflict, especially if there's kids in the house and they're watching our interactions?"

Am I extending grace even when my spouse doesn't deserve it? Because let's face it, there are a lot of times, your spouse does not deserve in your mind and likewise, the same is true when he thinks of you. Are we offering forgiveness? Are we refusing to dredge up the past, getting historical? Now, I didn't say hysterical. Sometimes we get hysterical. But more often, I get historical and I dredge up the past. Christ doesn't do that with us. When we behave in a manner that reflects the gospel, we are preaching a very powerful sermon to all those who are watching. When you hear the word, gospel, maybe you think, "Well, what does it really mean?" That's a term that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?

Well, the gospel is the good news, the good news that Jesus laid down His life for those who would follow Him, who would place their trust in Him. He offers us forgiveness, grace, mercies that are new every single morning, the Scripture tells us. He's patient. He's relentless in His love. Are we reflecting that in our marriages? Now, we're not going to be perfect because, hello, we're not Jesus, right? But I think of this passage of Scripture when I think of this concept of marriage. Jesus said in John 15, verses 12 and 13 this: "This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this that someone lay down his life for his friends." And of course our spouses should be our friends, so this verse is talking about marriage too. It applies to marriage.

Christ says He wants us to love another as He has loved us. I used to think of this concept of laying down your life for somebody else, and I would think of all the dramatic ways that might happen. A soldier might give up their life willingly on the battlefield, or I don't know, if you and I, Kaley let's say, were out to coffee and we were leaving the coffeehouse and I saw a car coming around the corner and it was going to hit you. I might push you out of the way and lay down my life. These dramatic ways that we hear of someone laying down their life for someone else. But what if we learned to look at that in a little bit different manner, especially when it comes to our marriage, that we lay down our life in the daily little things, especially when it comes to conflict and our longing to be right.

I just love to be right. I'm sure there are people out there that-

Meredith Brock: Me too.

Karen Ehman: Please tell me I'm not alone.

Kaley Olson: No. It's one of my favorite things to be is right.

Karen Ehman: I know. Yes. I love to be right, but you know what? I bet you're right a lot of the time too, right?

Kaley Olson: Of course I am.

Karen Ehman: Of course. But you know what? Just because we feel that we have the right to prove that we're right, it doesn't give us the right to behave wrongly. We need to learn. Yeah, we need to learn to pick love when we'd rather pick a fight, when we'd rather pick a fight and prove that we're right. I know that can sound like a real lofty pursuit. "I'm just going to live in a way that lays down my life and shows this love of Jesus that reflects the gospel." It can seem kind of pie in the sky. But let's just really bring it down and make it practical.

There is a chapter in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, pretty popular, it's known as the love chapter. I just want to read four verses of that right now here and give a little practical challenge to our listeners today. This passage, 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4 through 8, says this. I'm reading from the Christian Standard Bible. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It is not boastful. It is not arrogant. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not irritable. It does not keep a record of wrongs." There's that getting historical again, okay? It doesn't do that. "Love finds no joy in unrighteousness." Some versions say an evil or a wrongdoing. "But rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Loves never ends." Some versions say, "Love never fails."

Now, that is a long list of how love behaves. It's a very important list. It can seem like it could take a lifetime to be able to master all these. It will. Even at the end of it, we won't have mastered it all. But hopefully we are growing to be more and more like this list as we flesh out our relationship with our spouse here on earth, trying to reflect the gospel as we do. So here's a real practical thing that you can do with this passage of Scripture. I did this probably 15 years ago for the first time. I took this passage of Scripture from my Bible. I went to my computer. I typed it all out. Now, today you could probably just go to biblegateway.com or some place and copy and paste it.

And then every place where you see the word love, take it out, and put in a blank. So it will read, "Blank is patient. Blank is kind. Blank does not envy." And so on and so forth. Then you can use this one of two ways. You can either just use it with yourself and make it your goal to be able to put your name in that blank, especially when it's been a little troublesome in your communication in your marriage. Maybe you're having a heated discussion with your spouse about something or you're hitting up against the same wall again. You're just losing your patience with an issue that keeps rearing its ugly head in your marriage. Maybe if you just really make it your aim to behave this way, you'll be able to put in that blank, "Meredith is patient."

Because guess what? You wanted to lose your patience with Mack, but you didn't. You said, "Help me Jesus. Help me Jesus. I want to reflect the gospel." And you were patient. Another way you can use this too, I actually do this with my kids. You can do it with a spouse, but I did it with my kids one year. We put it on the refrigerator, and when we caught someone else in the family or when you catch your spouse in your marriage behaving in a way that's portrayed in the Scripture, you can put their name in. Maybe you catch your husband being very kind to, I don't know, that driver that cut them off in traffic. He doesn't cut him off again when he gets further down the road, or maybe an irritable cashier at the grocery store.

You catch yourself being kind. You go and you write their name where it says, "Blank is kind." This is a simple checklist. We're never going to master it, but it's something to aim for, something to make your goal, to behave like Jesus because when He tells us in John 15 that we're to love one another as He loved us, this is the epitome of how He's loved us. He's patient with us. He's kind. He doesn't seek His own way. He doesn't get irritable. He doesn't keep a record of our wrongs. Oh my goodness. Scripture tells us that as far as the east is from the west, that's how far God casts our sins from us when we're forgiven of them.

Again, I know it can sound like this lofty pursuit that just sounds so noble. But when we bring it down and make it practical and just maybe work on one of these qualities at a time and continuing to show and try to reflect that gospel to those people that are watching, especially just our spouse is watching us behave, I feel it can help us to have our marriage be that message where we are preaching by our “never gives up,” keeps showing love and patience even in the times we blow it, keeps forgiving, keeps asking for forgiveness in a quest to make our marriages better.

Meredith Brock: So good, Karen.

Kaley Olson: Well, I want to take a second and make this real practical for people who maybe have been married for five years or less like me. I've been married for three and a half years now to a wonderful man. But one of the things that they do in marriage counseling with you is they have you ... not marriage counseling, premarital counseling because you're not married yet. They have you go in and list out the things that your mom and dad did, and then they have the fiancé, or the soon-to-be husband, go in and list the things out that his mom and dad did. That's all really great whenever it's in theory and you can look at it and see, "My mom did this," or, "Your mom did that."

But then whenever you actually get in marriage, sometimes-

Meredith Brock: Where you're living in the same house.

Kaley Olson: Yes. Based on these expectations that you have on what your parents were like or what his parents were like, we're bringing those two things into marriage. But there can only be one end product. Only one thing can win. In our marriage specifically, we both work full-time. We both have very different strengths. We're not living on a farm like I was whenever I was little, growing up, where my dad was the handyman and my mom did the laundry and the cleaning. She cooked fabulous meals. That's not what our marriage looks like.

I think for a while as I still guess I'm somewhat a newlywed. Maybe I've graduated from being a newlywed. One of the things that was this constant tension in mine and Jared's relationship was I was better at spreadsheets and the money, which seems like the silliest little thing, but I had always seen my dad do it. Jared never said that he wanted to do it. But there was just this expectation that I had in my head of-

Meredith Brock: Of an untrue perception.

Kaley Olson: Yeah, of untrue perception. "Shouldn't you do this? You're the husband." We talked about it, and I've had a lot of wise counsel since then just saying, "Kaley, marriage is a both-and. One way that you can serve your husband or serve your marriage is taking on the things that you're good at." There's no shame in being a girl and doing the money.

Meredith Brock: Spreadsheets and handling the money.

Kaley Olson: There's nothing wrong with that. But this untrue perception or this unmet expectation based on what my parents did, I was trying to mimic in our marriage, which is different. I don't know. Maybe if you're newlywed and you're trying to figure out what this looks like, just know there's freedom in operating in your own strengths. I just want to keep in that practical advice vein, Karen, that you were going in and do the 1 Corinthians 13 thing-

Meredith Brock: Freak somebody out. Say, "Love them spreadsheets, girl.”

Kaley Olson: Make a list at what you're really good at and the husband make a list of what he's good at. If he loves to clean the kitchen after you cook dinner, let him clean.

Meredith Brock: That's awesome.

Kaley Olson: It doesn't have to be something that you do. But I think that's the beauty of marriage is you can make it what works for you guys.

Meredith Brock: Right. I can totally see in that scenario, Kaley. I've been married for 12 years. It'll be 13 this upcoming May, which seems crazy. But I could see in that moment because Mack and I do a lot of traditional role reversal, if you will. I'm very handy. I like being handy. I enjoy fixing things around the house. That is the last thing he would like to do with his time. It's an easy place for conflict, such an easy place for conflict. Dare I say, this could be a touchy subject. It's fertile ground to tell your husband that he's not good enough or he's less than you thought a husband should be.

I think for Mac and I, we really had to learn how to ... We did it wrong for a really long time. I would give off the vibe, if you will, of, "What? You don't know how to fix the dishwasher? What's wrong with you?" I wouldn't outright say it, but I would somehow make him feel that way. Now, I probably still couldn't tell you to this day what I was doing to make him feel that way, but it was some way in the way that I was communicating. We bumped into this quite a few times, where he would be like, "Man, you make me feel terrible." So one of the things, I think, and Karen, you were talking about this, I think as Mack and I have gone through 12 years of marriage and two kids and moves and all the stuff, job changes and all that kind of stuff, I think one of the biggest things I've learned is exactly what you said, is that you can focus on the symptom or the conflict that you're having.

Who's going to do the money? Me or you? Who's going to fix this? Me or you? Why did you parent that way? You can focus on that, and that's a real thing that has to be dealt with. But for me, I had to learn to zoom out a little bit more and really look at the purpose of my marriage. Is it that everything should run smoothly all the time? Is that there should be birds arrive in the morning and whistle sweet love tunes to me? No. That is not the purpose of my marriage. The purpose of marriage is to make me more like Christ. I remember specifically Mack and I were in a really hard season of our marriage. I remember just really pleading with the Lord, "Lord, how do I do this? This is really, really hard. He makes me so mad. He makes me so mad, and he's so selfish."

Those were the things that were going through my mind. I remember the Lord really speaking to my heart, is that, "Meredith, your love for him should be a picture of My love for you. When you do something selfish, Meredith, what do I do? When you do something that is short-sighted, what do I do?" He extends grace to me every single time. He extends grace. Jesus extends grace to me, and in place of the accusation sometimes I would want to heap on my husband, Jesus extends hope and a future to me as His beloved. So I had to learn in those moments where maybe Mack was acting crazy and doing something super selfish. I had to learn to set my emotions kind of on a shelf and say, "Okay, Meredith. Cool your jets."

Because y'all, there's a general rule of anyone who does life with me that I'm 100% a fighter, I'm not a flighter. I get mad, and I want to swing punches. I've had to tell myself, "24 hours. Don't deal with it so your emotions can calm down." Then I would be able to come back to Mack, whatever it was. It could be any random thing. I'd wait 24 hours at least, so that my emotions could calm down and I could come back to him and say, "Hey. I know the man that I married is one of the most thoughtful ... You are one of the most thoughtful people I know." Part of it was, one, to remind myself that that's who I married, but also to remind him, "I believe that you really are an incredible man of God. You are. I've seen you do that. I've seen you care for other people. I've seen you shepherd and love other people in incredible ways."

I think in his heart that says, "She believes in me and she's calling out the best in me." I actually heard a pastor a few years ago say, "Speak to the prince, not the punk, because whichever one you speak to is who is going to arise." I was like, oh man, I'm going to speak to my prince in that moment of conflict rather than heaping accusations on him that will only make him want to stop trying even more. Little practical things, I guess, that I've learned over the years in trying to love my husband the way Jesus has loved me in my moments of failure because we're all going to fail. The more I love him like Christ loves me, I think, I hope through the power of the Holy Spirit and His Word, I become more like Christ at those moments.

Kaley Olson: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it takes failure to learn too.

Meredith Brock: Right, right.

Kaley Olson: Which is the hard part — no one wants to fail, but it's in those moments where you realize that you are less than what you should be.

Meredith Brock: That's why we need Jesus.

Kaley Olson: Yes. That's where you learn and that's what-

Karen Ehman: Exactly, exactly.

Kaley Olson: Well, based on your teaching today, Karen, I know for sure I'm going to be purchasing this book. What a huge help. I love how you helped me take one practical step today with that 1 Corinthians 13 deal and putting my name in the line there.

If you're a married gal, then we would love for you to have access to Karen's book too. You can actually purchase it today at p31bookstore.com.

Meredith Brock: And another really cool announcement that we have about Karen's book is it's going to be our next Online Bible Study we're doing at Proverbs 31 Ministries.

Kaley Olson: Yay.

Meredith Brock: We're so excited to dive into this book with our OBS community. Every OBS we do at Proverbs 31 is absolutely free to register for. All you need to do is get the book. You really have no excuses to not do this. If you're married, come join us. Let's learn how to be more like Christ in our marriage and do this the way He designed it.

Kaley Olson: Absolutely. The study starts April 1st. That's not an April Fool's joke. It really starts April 1st. I'm here all day, people. All you need to do to sign up for free is go to proverbs31.org, click Study, and then Online Bible Studies, and it's easy from there. We can't wait for you to join us.

Thanks so much for listening today, everyone. We pray that you are more equipped to live the truth of God's Word today because we know it changes everything when you do. See you next time.

Meredith Brock: Bye bye.