Kevin Thompson [00:00:00]:
Hey, welcome back to Change the Odds, where marriage and family were never meant to be a game of chance. Kevin Thompson here with the president of Homeward, Jim Burns. Jim, thanks so much for joining us.
Jim Burns [00:00:07]:
Great to be here. I love the title.
Kevin Thompson [00:00:09]:
Change the Odds?
Jim Burns [00:00:10]:
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Kevin Thompson [00:00:11]:
Yeah. No, that's the idea. The idea is you can't guarantee perfection, but there are some basic decisions you can make. I always say this, most people think the chance of marital success is 50/50. They think it's a flip of a coin. Thankfully, it's better than that. But I honestly think that with premarital counseling, with support, with training, I think we can get it to about 90/10. Where your chance of success marriage-wise, not just lasting, but flourishing.
Kevin Thompson [00:00:35]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jim Burns [00:00:35]:
I mean, even one of them is just persevere. You know, you've seen the latest studies, 78% of people who have a troubled marriage said that if they persevered for 5 years, the marriage got better. Didn't mean it was perfect, I'm sure, but that's pretty amazing. You know, but yeah, you're right. There's simple things we can do, not easy, but simple things we can do to enhance, you know, the connection in our marriage. And yet, you know, Kathy and I have been married 51 years,, and we still fuss at each other. And people go, oh, it must be perfect with you guys. No, she drives me nuts sometimes, and I know I drive her nuts.
Jim Burns [00:01:06]:
So there you go.
Kevin Thompson [00:01:07]:
I always think, do you know how hard it must be to be married to me? That's what I always think of. I mean, I'm over here, because people, same thing, perception. I play a marriage expert on the internet, not in real life. And yet the perception is, oh man, to be married to an author, you know this, to be married, it's all so many romantic movies. Are that, the guy's the author and the woman falls in love. And I'm like, Jenny just wants me to go weed eat the yard. Like, we don't need another book.
Jim Burns [00:01:33]:
Mow the yard.
Kevin Thompson [00:01:34]:
Exactly.
Jim Burns [00:01:34]:
Our toilet is running and it needs to be fixed. And that's what the deal is. Kathy and I, for years, did a ministry in marriage. So we'd be, as you well know, pastors have sometimes horrendous marriages. And so we would do this ministry in marriage. It was 8 hours. It was in the middle of a conference or at the end or the beginning. Dependent.
Jim Burns [00:01:55]:
And she would get up there and go, to be women, when I was a pastor, you know, women would come and say, it must be great to be married. He's so funny. He's this and that. She goes, oh no, he leaves his dirty underwear there. You should smell his breath when he's stressed. Oh, he's just a punk and all this. And she would say this. And instead of people saying, well, I don't want to go to your marriage conference, they would be drawn to her authenticity.
Jim Burns [00:02:20]:
But the point being is, Yeah, it's easy to say the principles. It's harder to do it. But when you do it, it's like, you know, there's a phrase by John Ortberg, and he says, "Love God and do the right thing." And I told John recently, I said, "So I changed your quote." It's kind of a famous quote. I know you have like, you know, your little posters on it, but it's, "Love God, do the right thing, and get up in the morning and do the same thing again every day." Repeat. But I think that's partly with marriage. You know, you learn it. Who was it? The great theologian, Vince Lombardi, who says, when you strayed away from the basics, you've gone a long ways toward defeat. And I think in marriage, there's some basic things.
Jim Burns [00:02:57]:
And I have some ahas in my life where I went, whoa, I didn't know that. If I would've known that, I would be better off in my marriage because now I'm trying to implement those. And none of them are like these grandiose things. They're kind of basics. But yeah, so I think you're right.
Kevin Thompson [00:03:14]:
I'm a golfer and I read a discussion the other day, Scottie Scheffler, number one player in the world. He said that after he takes some time off at the end of the year, he does exactly what Jack Nicklaus did to start the year, and that is he gets with his swing coach and for a day they work on the grip. Amazing. So the idea is, let's get back to how do I hold this club and go from there. And so I think of just— that's the power to me of going and spending a weekend with you at a retreat. All right, your marriage may not be in trouble. Let's get back to what are the basic things to remind ourselves of what the truth actually is. What would you say are some of the basics that we need to keep on coming back to? To you and saying, these are the things that are gonna make our marriage work?
Jim Burns [00:03:54]:
Well, you know, it's simple. One is communication. And what I had to learn about communication was I went, what is wrong with Kathy? I mean, I'm communicating to her. I'm a communicator. And she's like, what is wrong with Jim? He doesn't communicate very well. And one of my mentors, and by the way, that's another one, is that if we're gonna improve our marriages, then we need to have mentors. And some of my mentors are paper mentors. They're in books.
Jim Burns [00:04:17]:
I've never even met them, but they're in books. Other mentors are people that I've spent time with. You're actually supposed to hold that. Oh, right there. There it is. Is Neal Clark Morin. You know, he's the founder of eHarmony. But, you know, wonderful guy.
Jim Burns [00:04:29]:
We went to the same seminary. He's a wonderful Christian. He was a professor at Fuller Seminary and just a great guy. One day I was helping him do some stuff with eHarmony, and we were up in his lunchroom, and I was talking about Kathy and me, and he knows our world. And he said, Jim, almost like a coach, Jim, communication is a learned trait. So learn the traits of good communication. And then I took it this way, is that I drift off and I need to make course corrections. So part of it is learning, say, in communication, what are the key ways to communicate the love languages to Kathy? How do I communicate the way that she's gonna understand it? How do I embrace our differences? All those basic things on communication.
Jim Burns [00:05:14]:
But I'm going to drift. But now I know to make a course correction quicker. And so it's part of that is just knowing that. So to me, communication is a learned trait. So communication, I now know, didn't know before. I know now, know that, you know, two of the most important words of communication is positivity and adaptability. So let's take adaptability again. Neil Clark Warren, I said, what would you say would be one of the most important traits of effective marriage? Because being adaptable, being flexible.
Jim Burns [00:05:42]:
And so I created something that just simply says, does it really matter? So Kathy, she's— and I are very different. I'm an extrovert. I have a shallow conversation with everybody. Tonight I'm going to do a workshop, as you are, and I'm going to go do a workshop. I'll have a shallow conversation with everybody. Kathy will have a deep conversation with one person sitting in the corner, and it will change their life. I'll be mad because she didn't go have a shallow conversation with everybody, right? So I had— does that really matter? No, of course Kathy is typically late to church. I think she's made it to the first strum of the guitar 5 times in all of our marriage.
Jim Burns [00:06:16]:
I don't know. I'm not there all the time. But does that really matter? It kind of doesn't. It used to, and it was almost something that would have caused us great strain. But what I found is that I have to embrace some of her differences, like Finances, she's better at finances than me. She does the finances. I wouldn't do it her way. I think it's ridiculous to be all worried for 2 hours on $1.31 that you're missing.
Jim Burns [00:06:42]:
But half the people listening think she's doing it right. And so why am I bugged at that? That's actually a positive thing. I don't have to, I'll round up to the nearest $100. She, on the other hand, you know, is gonna do it right. All those things, those are learned traits. So positivity and adaptability. Positivity, come to find out, the environment and the tone that we set in a relationship is more important than almost anything else we do. So if I come in as Grumpy Jim, or frankly, if Kathy comes in as, you know, Negative Nancy, I'll call her, you know, that's not going to go well.
Jim Burns [00:07:22]:
So if we're always being negative or whatever, but if I actually Show positivity to her. You know, it's, it's, you know, everybody quotes John Gottman, but Gottman says he calls it the magic ratio. For every, uh, 1 negative interaction to 5 positive interactions. So sometimes I just go, how many positive or negative interactions have I done? And I have to review. And that goes back to it.
Kevin Thompson [00:07:46]:
That's good stuff that in terms back to the communication, it might also be the idea of, you know what, I don't really want to say this negative thing right now. 'Cause I don't have the energy to say the 5 positive things. Right, no, exactly. It's actually not worth it at this point.
Jim Burns [00:07:57]:
No, no, exactly. And sometimes we have to, you know, I have a friend that says, "Don't say everything you think." You know, at a marriage conference, she'll always say, "Don't say everything you think." Sometimes I just have to go, "That's not gonna go well right now." That doesn't mean that I'm hiding it. It just means that I, the other thing I have to do is learn how to do conflict. 'Cause Kathy and I had no idea how to do conflict. She likes conflict and I don't. So I'm a conflict avoider. And she goes, let's, let's duke it out and then we'll be fine. And I had to learn that what I was doing was being defensive.
Jim Burns [00:08:27]:
Defensiveness never works. We had to move to what— again, I'm just talking about things we've learned— is to a we. What can we do about whatever this problem is? Because most of the arguments are over and over again the same argument. Oh yeah. And some of them do it for all the years. So if you're going to make that change, but there's so many things we can do with Like, I mean, we're still talking about the communication. It's a learned trait. Learn that trade.
Jim Burns [00:08:51]:
So who knows how to do that? Well, you find, you find books, you listen, you go to a conference. We tell people go to one conference a year at least. And then also, if you need to get counseling, get counseling, because the Bible says where there's no counsel, the people fall. In the multitude of counselors, there is safety. Sometimes a counselor can give you one shred of advice that just kills it for you and you start, you start doing it. When somebody said to me, early in our marriage. I'm so grateful. They said it would be really good for you guys to have a date night.
Jim Burns [00:09:18]:
It doesn't look like you guys date. And I go, well, we go to stuff all the time. They go, I was youth pastor with kids. I go, well, that's not a date. No, it's not. And that's not going to fill Kathy's love tank. That was so good. Now I'm telling people, give your spouse— are you willing to give your spouse 1% of your week, which is 90 minutes, and go on a date and connect and don't Talk about the, even the kids sometimes, but talk, just connect on that.
Jim Burns [00:09:46]:
Well, that's a learned trait.
Kevin Thompson [00:09:49]:
Yeah. We talk about it within the idea of, I think about marriage like a two-story house, and the bottom story is connection and the top story is skills. And so often where we tend to run to are skills. And we think, if I need to learn this, learn, and it's great. It could be so impactful as long as that's built on the foundation of connection. But if you don't have connection, I can teach you how to communicate better, but if you don't have connection, it just means the divorce is going to be more peaceful.
Jim Burns [00:10:16]:
Great line.
Kevin Thompson [00:10:18]:
So true. So let's focus in on, I think, two of the basics are, one, how can we better connect? Let's look at those things. And a retreat, a weekend away, just that alone many times can create that. And then what is marriage? Marriage is a series of skills. What are the skills that we now need to develop? It's amazing how if you can teach a couple how to handle their money better, how much stress that begins to take off, how conflict is a learned trait, how intimacy is actually a skill. We think it just comes naturally, but it's a skill that kicks in. What would you look at within— for you and Kathy, what's a skill that you're learning now at this stage in your life, 51 years in, that you weren't learning at year 5?
Jim Burns [00:11:02]:
I'll tell you a quick story. Our daughter Heidi was babysitting at the time. It's been a little while. And she comes home and she says, Scott and Anita are so great. They said that you and Mom are fun and funny. You were their youth pastors. What happened? You did. Yes, you have no— I wanted to say that so bad.
Jim Burns [00:11:22]:
So funny that you said that. You and I think the same way, but What I realized was, you know, we're not that fun and funny as parents anymore. And, you know, you can't be always fun and funny, but I thought, you know what, Kathy and I don't, my mind went to, I don't have as much fun with Kathy, and that means I don't have as much connection. So what I think part of connection is, connection isn't sitting knee to knee and duking it out. You gotta learn how to fight fair, and sometimes you do that, but connection is having serious fun with your spouse. So I've had to learn, and I'm learning this still, What does Kathy like to do? And there's some things Kathy likes to do. I'll just be honest with you, Kevin. I'd rather vomit than go do what she wants me to do.
Jim Burns [00:12:02]:
She didn't want me to do it, but I'll go and I get all kinds of points for doing it. So I think we have to, you know, have fun together. So we're fortunate. We, we do things that we like the same stuff. We live in Southern California. We, you know, paddleboard. We do these different things together and we have fun, but The fun brings us together and brings us to connect time. It's not, what's wrong with our marriage? And we've had those, and we've had those late at night, and I'm like, oh man, can't we just roll over and go to sleep? So I think we have to be proactive about having those fun times.
Jim Burns [00:12:39]:
And that sounds so simple, but why aren't we doing it then?
Kevin Thompson [00:12:42]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm sure you see this as well. I know I see it. My greatest frustration is that people put no work into their marriage and man, just a little bit of work can go so far. But there is this small collection of people on the other side that they feel like they're in this endless kind of revamp of their relationship. And I just look at that, I'm like, that's exhausting. I mean, I love that you buy my books and read them, but I would stop listening to me at some point. I don't like to hear myself talk at this point.
Kevin Thompson [00:13:09]:
But this happy medium in there of, there are times that we're doing serious work. We do classes here, and sometimes I'll tell them from the get-go, look, for these next 7 weeks, I want this to be work. I don't want you to think, 'cause sometimes couples can come in, oh, we gotta have fun. Yes, you need fun, but there's a time to work. But there is a time to play.
Jim Burns [00:13:26]:
No, it's both. You know, a philosopher one time said, you know, for some of us, we need to not work at our marriage, we need to play at our marriage. But like he then said, he said, but sometimes even the play is work. So yeah, you do both. That's how you do it. But you have to do it regularly. It's not that you just go to the 7-week marriage course, or it's not just that you go to that conference. I'll speak at a conference, it's called WinShape.
Jim Burns [00:13:52]:
It's over in Georgia, and it's the Chick-fil-A thing. Great food.
Kevin Thompson [00:13:55]:
I'm sure there's great food there.
Jim Burns [00:13:56]:
Yeah, and it's funny, there's no Chick-fil-A food. It's like way better. And Chick-fil-A food, the Christian chicken is fine, but you don't see that there. I see that and these people go, yeah, we come here yearly to refresh our marriage. Cool, I'm happy about that. What are you doing between that? It's kind of like church. I mean, you can go on Sunday, but there's some other things about discipleship that have to take place. So it's never just one thing.
Jim Burns [00:14:22]:
And then I've found in my own marriage, because we've been married so long, is that there are seasons where we need a lot. Like right now we're in a fun season. Okay, we need to do fun. But there's also seasons where we've had to work it out and it wasn't necessarily fun. So sometimes we have to look at the marriage relationship like anything else. It's a season, but it's still the regular stuff. So, you know, I'm back in— I had knee surgery and now I'm kind of back working out. I'm all sore.
Jim Burns [00:14:47]:
That's the pain of discipline. The pain of regret says that I wasn't working out and I gained some weight and my tummy doesn't look like it used to. Well, I don't remember when there was a six-pack, but, you know, but Again, with marriage, sometimes it's the day-to-day stuff, making it work. Intimacy, same way.
Kevin Thompson [00:15:05]:
Oh, absolutely. So 51 years in, Jenny and I have been married 25 years. Speak life into me. I mean, this is, I would say, as sweet of a season as we've ever had. And we're just very fortunate for where we've navigated and where we are, all those kind of things. But at the same time, I'm keenly aware that there's a transition happening. Ella's, I don't know, with Ella having Down syndrome, she might end up back in the house. She might be on her own.
Kevin Thompson [00:15:29]:
Our 17-year-old obviously will launch within the next few years. What are some things that Jenny and I need to be thinking about that maybe aren't even on our radar right now of how life is about to change and how can we best navigate our marriage in that season?
Jim Burns [00:15:41]:
That's a great question. I can think of a couple things. One is when your kids get older, and even with Ella, that's going to happen a bit. When your kids get older and they have fresh experiences, follow their lead and you have fresh experiences. So now is the time to plan for the empty nest. And again, in your situation and many people, they may not have the empty nest the way they thought it was going to be, but, but plan for it. Plan for it by saying, what are some of those new and fresh experiences? So Kathy and I made a dream list and it wasn't just— it's funny, one of them was to go to Italy and we did. It was awesome.
Jim Burns [00:16:15]:
But other ones were, what do we want to do in our relationship? What do we want to have? And it's crazy because we started talking about things We wanted to do a Bible study together because that just was not us. I did my thing. She does her thing. She's taught a Bible study for 15 years. I'm not going to take that from her. But, you know, there were certain things we wanted to do together and, and we put that down. It was on the dream list. That doesn't mean we had to do it that day.
Jim Burns [00:16:40]:
She had a dream list for me, which was, you know, clean the clutter of the garage and do, you know, do all this. I'm like, oh gee, that's not— that's— there's nothing dreamy or fun about that. But again, you create this, you start dreaming now that we're in the second half of life, now that we're in the second half of our marriage. I mean, you guys at 25, you were way past the second half. Games are won in the second half, not in the first half. So, you know, in doing that, what does it mean to finish well in your marriage? It's a great question. So Kathy and I didn't ask that question at 25. I wish we would have, 'cause every anniversary we go away, we talk, We do the questions, you know, what do we want to do? What do we want to see? All that.
Jim Burns [00:17:20]:
I mean, we're totally proactive that way. I mean, some people would think that's boring. I love it. But we didn't ask that question. What do we want to finish? So we're catching up. What does finishing well for us look like? And in fact, one of them was to be really good grandparents together, to grandparent together. And we were watching the 2-year-old and the 5-year-old from one family We had them for like 5 days. Kids were skiing and we were so exhausted.
Jim Burns [00:17:51]:
And I go, and I'm trying to work and I'm doing things and I'm getting ready to go on a trip right after this. And then I go, well, we're just living our dream. And she's like, yeah, I'm exhausted living our dream. So the dream isn't always going to be good. But what is it that— what does solid look like? You know, I'm here in Sacramento with you. And Kathy's with me. She doesn't a lot of times travel with me, but she's here not to see me or even to hear me. She's here because her aunt and uncle live here.
Jim Burns [00:18:19]:
And so we had dinner with them last night and they're coming tonight. And so she's saying, I need to invest in some of, some of the family things, but I want you a part of that. Okay, we'll do it. So we had a blast last night. We had a blast, went to a neat restaurant right here in Roseville, and it was fun and I could have come up today and it would have saved me a day of not driving up or flying up here. But you know what? I loved it because Kathy was so happy when she got out of the dinner to be with aunt and uncle.
Kevin Thompson [00:18:51]:
Oh, that's cool. Yeah. We feel it. So, I mean, when kids were little, I just didn't travel. I just wanted to be there with them. And then they started getting to a point where they didn't care. So I started traveling, but Jenny had to be home. We were gone this weekend.
Kevin Thompson [00:19:05]:
We're just now getting this taste of what it's like to go together. Right. How much fun that is.
Jim Burns [00:19:09]:
No, it's cool. No, it's really cool. And yet for us, everybody's different. Now I thought we were going to have more of that. And then grandkids came and Kathy's like, wait, no, I need— I'm watching the— she watches the grandkids Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. She goes, I can't be gone on another Thursday. So you're going to have to do this one on your own. But I love that.
Jim Burns [00:19:30]:
But having times to do that, that we talked about it early on. Will there be a time when we start doing that? We did a— I speak in Guatemala quite a bit, and we, we did a thing where she came with me and she said, this was awesome. Well, that was part of our dream list, was for Kathy to go and experience some of the cultures that I speak in, in the Spanish world. And she had such a great time. But that meant if she had a great time, I was having a great time.
Kevin Thompson [00:19:56]:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think it's so important within that to recognize the season you're in and not rush it. You can grieve. Man, I wish we could travel, but we can't. We're not quite there yet, but we're close. And so we say, look, that day's likely coming. And whenever we get there, we get there.
Jim Burns [00:20:13]:
And even at 25 years, I think people have to start, and even maybe even younger for some of the other listeners, but I think at 25 years, you even start saying, what is intimacy going to look like? Physical intimacy going to look like? What is What is your new romance going to look like? Because it's going to be different. Your libido's changed, life changes. But what do you want to see out of it? Because again, those are topics we don't— we're not willing to talk about sometimes. So when you're forced to talk about it because it's on the list, it's a lot easier if you just have kind of your list and you kind of go through that as opposed to, you know, I don't— you don't touch me anymore or I don't get enough from you or whatever it might be to literally just what is it going to look like in the second half?
Kevin Thompson [00:20:52]:
There was a great article in The New York Times probably about a year ago. Of romance in your 90s. And it took this couple that had been married 70 years. Wow. And they talked about what does intimacy look like and how literally it was every Sunday he would shower and she would shower. And there were certain abilities he no longer had. And yet what it meant for them to be together. And it was this beautiful picture of how this idea, you know, you know me, friend, partner, and lover.
Kevin Thompson [00:21:17]:
Yeah. How the lover part does not go away. It might change what it looks like. But it's just as integral in every season of life.
Jim Burns [00:21:24]:
It's so key. And that's why you have to talk, 'cause it sounds so unromantic to have conversations about it. But how cool that they do it every Sunday.
Kevin Thompson [00:21:33]:
And how funny is that, the idea of if I talk about it, it will kill the romance, when in reality, not talking about it kills the romance.
Jim Burns [00:21:41]:
No, exactly. No, and I would talk about initiation. If a woman would say to a man at any stage, You know, you got— let's— maybe tonight's the night. What's that guy going to think about all day? That's talking about it. But that— she's not going to keep thinking about it because she's got way too many things going on.
Kevin Thompson [00:21:57]:
She might have to remind herself. Exactly right.
Jim Burns [00:22:00]:
She's exhausted, but he's thinking about it. So that's what we need to do. We need to talk.
Kevin Thompson [00:22:05]:
Yeah.
Jim Burns [00:22:05]:
You know, one of the big killers a lot of times in, like, just say intimacy or connection is that we don't talk.
Kevin Thompson [00:22:13]:
Yeah.
Jim Burns [00:22:13]:
Should be a continuing conversation.
Kevin Thompson [00:22:15]:
Yeah, no question. So I mean, you've written so much. We all have our things though. I mean, basically I can package Friends, Partners, and Lovers in a million ways, but in the end, I'm going to come back to that. If you had to summarize your basic, what you think is your contribution to marriage and the marriage world, and literally, I mean, one of the preeminent voices on that in the Christian world specifically, how would you basically narrow down marriage? It's basically these few things.
Jim Burns [00:22:41]:
Yeah, well, I would go back to intimacy because again, us guys, we think about intimacy and we think about physical intimacy. But I think one of the least developed areas of intimacy is spiritual intimacy. And so years ago, Kathy and I introduced to people what we called the Closer concept, and it was spend 20 minutes a week in spiritual compatibility, spiritual intimacy. And we laughed because we never thought we'd write a book on it. We ended up— and it was the best-selling devotional for years out called Closer. And we challenged people to spend 20 minutes a week, and it had a scripture, and it had kind of conversations, and then you pray. It sounds pretty unromantic and unfulfilling in some ways, but people didn't write us— like with Doing Life with Your Adult Children, people write me and they go, "In content, how do you—" They don't write us and say, "Your book was the greatest content we've ever seen." What they said was, "The 20 minutes changed our life." To me, one of the contributions that we made accidentally was that we stumbled upon spending 20 minutes. And I know this sounds so spiritually wimpy because the guy who taught me this, that he did it, I was like, wait, you're, you're a Christian leader.
Jim Burns [00:23:49]:
You only spend 20 minutes? The bubble in my head goes, I'm not even sure we do that. We prayed together. You know, we weren't anti. But when we started spending more time really working on the compatible spiritual compatibility together, sometimes it looks boring.. And sometimes it feels boring, I'll be honest with you, but doing it day in and day out regularly. So I think the spiritual intimacy, people never would think this, but because there's other things that I've done. But the other thing would be, for me, it's more of the book. There's a book that we wrote, that I wrote with a friend of mine on the first few years of marriage, 'cause I think that's so critical because You know, they always talk about the 7-year itch.
Jim Burns [00:24:33]:
That was a movie by Marilyn Monroe. There's no research that, you know, you have an itch in 7 years. You actually have the itch at 4 years. And that's research. So what do the young people do between the first time— well, not just young people, people even in their second or third marriage, but what do they do in those first few years of marriage? What are the habits they create? What are the good things that they do that makes a difference. And so I loved that book because the principles were kind of the conversation that what we started with. I mean, you know, it's kind of the basic principles. But if you do these principles, you're going to make it through those first few years.
Jim Burns [00:25:12]:
And when the baby comes along, because 69% of men say that their marital satisfaction went down, 48% of women say that their marital satisfaction— nobody wants to— well, let's don't have babies then. But you gotta work through that. Well, you're gonna work through that by having certain principles. So the first few years of marriage principles were, you know, we wrote it a long time ago, I'd say 12, 13 years ago, but really key to that. I have a book called Creating an Intimate Marriage that is kind of my basic book, like yours. But I don't have a, you know, Five Languages of Love that had sold 20 million copies.
Kevin Thompson [00:25:48]:
Neither of us have that.
Jim Burns [00:25:49]:
No, no, no. So the point being is that—
Kevin Thompson [00:25:53]:
If you did, you wouldn't be sitting here with me.
Jim Burns [00:25:55]:
I would be. Gary is my mentor. He's written 3 forewords for books. He writes every endorsement. He does this stuff. And I'll think a lot of times, like I just had a book request to write a foreword, and I was like, oh man, that takes a lot of time. And I went, what would Gary do? I wasn't even at what would Jesus do? What would Gary do? So no, that is it. So for me, it's always around the intimacy issue.
Jim Burns [00:26:18]:
And to me, intimacy is connection. And maybe that's because growing up, I was in a dysfunctional family. Dad was an alcoholic. And when I became a Christian, I read that scripture that you inherit the sins of a previous generation to the third and fourth generation, put a stake in the ground one year into our marriage and said, because our marriage wasn't going well, that first two dysfunctional kids who loved God and thought it would be easy and it wasn't. And, and we said, we're going to change the trajectory of our family for generation to generation. And I think that's happened. Yeah. So I want to give people hope that they can do the same thing.
Jim Burns [00:26:56]:
It's— but it's not going to look perfect. To quote Lilo and Stitch, this is my family. It may be small, it may be broken, but it's still good. Yeah, it's still good. That's more what I want. I want to create family relationships and give people positive hope that they can work through this. And yeah, it's not going to be perfect, but it can be good.
Kevin Thompson [00:27:15]:
Yeah. And what I love about the early years of marriage, and here's the thing, let's face it, if you're listening and you're like, man, we didn't do that work early in our marriage. Well, if you stay married, this is the early years of your marriage. But what I love about that is several things. One, couples are learning how to grow. And if you can learn how to grow, you can overcome anything. And then you have the idea of skill stacking, which is you learn one skill, suddenly that opens the door to new skills that you can learn. And then finally, it's that idea of compounding.
Kevin Thompson [00:27:43]:
And that is the earlier you can learn something, that will compound over time as compared to if you don't know how to communicate and you go decades that way, then you're gonna have more fights than are necessary. And so I just, we spend so much time here at Bayside fixated on really that first decade because of that very thing. And you can just, I always say it this way, it's a whole lot easier to stay out of trouble than get out of trouble.
Jim Burns [00:28:11]:
Right? And so that's my— That's a great Southern term. No, no, I don't know if it's Southern, but it sounds Southern.
Kevin Thompson [00:28:15]:
It's my golf philosophy. It's a whole lot easier to hit it away from the hazard than to have to get up and down from the hazard. Exactly. And so the same thing is true with marriage.
Jim Burns [00:28:23]:
That's mine for miniature golf too. Okay. Because that's where I'm at right now. Miniature golf. I stay away from the hazard.
Kevin Thompson [00:28:29]:
What do you think, Jim, what do you think is something that is grossly overlooked in this generation of marriage that really is having a negative impact and people probably don't even recognize?
Jim Burns [00:28:39]:
Media, you know, our phone, you know, I mean, I have a friend that says treat your spouse like you treat your cell phone and, you know, you'll be good. And then he, you know, kind of talks about it. But I think some of the media, I think we're way too tied into our phones. I think we're way too— we spend so much time on that kind of thing. The other side that I would say we may not talk enough about, and I get this because I'm in some of the trauma fields, but is the amount of people who are connected to porn. Because what porn does is porn, it's the red flag. It's the red flag for getting ready for marriage, but it's the red flag in a marriage that you're not— you're going to have to get rid of that addiction. You can, but it's so shameful that sometimes people go, I don't want to talk to anybody about it.
Jim Burns [00:29:22]:
And really, there is help and there's a process and there's a process to work through that. But if a person thinks that they can have a good marriage and be involved in porn— so I moved from phone to porn. I'm not putting both together.
Kevin Thompson [00:29:34]:
Well, you could, but they're connected, no doubt.
Jim Burns [00:29:35]:
But I think that's one of the bigger issues that are kind of the silence. You know, if we were at— if we were here at church on a Saturday or Sunday, we're looking out at the people, the amount of people that are struggling with that issue, and they're running through their relationship with God through that issue. They're running through their relationships with that issue, their kids. And so there's so much pain and shame with that. So I think that's one of the things that's overlooked instead of just facing it.
Kevin Thompson [00:30:01]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had— I don't know if you know Jay Stringer, but, you know, a great expert within this field. He's been on the podcast. God and Shame is the podcast. We had him here for a marriage night and I didn't tell anybody what his expertise was. I just said, hey, it's going to really impact your intimacy. So all these people showed up and then of course Jay gets up and talks for 2 hours about pornography. And some people wanted to shoot me afterwards, but I knew if I said it, the very people that needed it might not show up.
Kevin Thompson [00:30:27]:
But it's such an issue.
Jim Burns [00:30:28]:
And the people who didn't need it would go, they all needed that. But the people who didn't would go, well, that's not our issue.
Kevin Thompson [00:30:34]:
What a problem could be. No, that's exactly right. But it is an issue where there's answers that are out there. Let's conclude this way. I'm so grateful for your time. You've been doing this now 40 years. What is it that today in this culture where marriage can come across as so broken, so difficult, what is it that gives you hope within the field of marriage today? And what is it that causes you to get up every morning and keep on doing this with the joy that you do?
Jim Burns [00:31:00]:
Well, I mentioned that millennials kind of meander toward marriage, they meander toward responsibility, things like that. But the number one thing that millennials— all studies show this— that the number one thing they want once they get married, which is probably in their 30s, most of them, but once they get married, they want a good marriage and they want to be good parents. That's amazing. So where I have a lot of hope right now is that in a generation that we've kind of poo-pooed them because they're not coming to church as much and other things— wait, they want to be— they want a good marriage and they want to have good— be good parents. I'm not sure That was maybe innately a part of Kathy's and mine, but we weren't verbalizing it like, you know, in our generation, like this generation. So that absolutely excites me that this next generation of people are that focused on marriage. Now, again, they're not getting their content the same. They're not going to the big-time marriage conferences and things.
Jim Burns [00:31:52]:
I mean, some will, but what they're doing is they're working on their marriage on a regular basis. Yay for them. And I think, you know, We talked about men earlier in terms of like a Promise Keepers thing. I think men are stepping up, they just don't know how. So every man needs their mentors to, and there are mentors out there, they've gotta find mentors who can help them. But that's a pretty exciting thing, Kevin.
Kevin Thompson [00:32:15]:
Yeah, no, that's pretty cool. Homeward.com. Homeward.com. Is the place to find you, obviously all over Amazon. Jim, thank you so much for who you are, for what you do. Here's what I love, this is what heaven's gonna be like to an extent. That we don't know each other well, we're getting to know each other. My life is better because of the work that you've been doing, because you've impacted people who are around me and their love has now loved me.
Kevin Thompson [00:32:34]:
So thank you for your work and keep on doing it.
Jim Burns [00:32:36]:
Thank you. And in heaven, we can play golf together. I played golf in college and then had no money, so I had to give it up and I never got back to it. And I love golf, but I just don't play. And so in heaven, we can play.
Kevin Thompson [00:32:50]:
We'll do it. Sounds good. We'll see you next time.