February Prayer Letter...

February 25, 2008

Dear Friends,

February is always an exciting month at our house. Since we work at a marriage ministry it’s fitting that Valentines would be one of our favorite holidays. Of course Valentines Day is just one day, but at our house we call the entire month of February “Love Month.” We get excited to give each other little gifts and cards, and it’s always fun to reminisce about how God brought the two of us together and how He continues to write our love story.

However our enthusiasm doesn’t end there, because it seems like these past two months have given us so much more to be excited about. As we turned the calendar to the New Year and began planning out our year of ministry we felt a new surge of excitement for what lies ahead. God worked in mighty ways last year and He’s already laid out some amazing opportunities for ministry this year.

FamilyLife has been “buzzing” with activity! We’ve completed a successful launch of the all new FamilyLife.com website, finished training 65 Weekend to Remember® speaker teams, completed a week of training for over 500 volunteers, and prepared equipment and teams for 24 Weekend to Remember® events over the next three weeks! Whew!

The revised Weekend to Remember® is more powerful than ever. The messages have been sharpened and made more culturally relevant, there is more time for projects, and the conference ends at noon on Sunday with a tremendous challenge for couples to leave a legacy of godliness through their marriage.

Our family with a couple of our volunteer “Champions” who made a huge impact in the Philadelphia area this year Whether a marriage needs practical skills and a solid foundation for everyday living, a simple time of refreshment, or hope for the future… a Weekend to Remember® can provide what’s needed! We enclosed a flyer that lists upcoming spring conferences and we are so excited to be hosting the two events in Bellevue, WA this April 18-20 & April 25-27. We would love to see you there!


While the Weekend to Remember® is often a catalyst for major change in couples who attend, another tool that provides great long-term impact is the HomeBuilders® Couples Series. HomeBuilders® is the all-time bestselling Bible study curriculum on marriage and family, with over 20 different titles and topics ranging from resolving conflict to building teamwork, improving communication, and parenting. Each lesson allows couples to continue the conference experience in their own home where “life” really happens. It seems like so much of what is offered for marriage is “reactive” (DivorceCare, Celebrate Recovery, etc.). Although these programs are helpful, they are only available when trauma happens. That’s why we love HomeBuilders®. It takes a “proactive” approach to building your marriage and growing in your walk with God.

At each conference, Ross leads a couple of sessions on how couples can take these tools to not only strengthen their own marriage, but also to reach out to the marriages & families around them. Ross challenges them to step out in faith by inviting their friends & neighbors to attend a study, or to come alongside their church to develop a marriage ministry as an outreach to the community.

It’s always a highlight for us to spend time with couples who are eager to take what they are learning back to their communities. At our most recent conferences in Philadelphia, we had the opportunity to train 49 couples to be HomeBuilders® champions. If each of them would start a group, it would have an impact on over 500 people! That’s the kind of residual ministry that gets us excited. We met one sweet couple who thoroughly enjoyed the conference and they couldn’t wait to go home and start a HomeBuilders study. They said: “We felt like our marriage was in pretty good shape and were thinking we would just need an “oil-change”, but we ended up getting a “major overhaul.” We’ve both been convicted of some very important issues this weekend and we’re excited to go home and start a HomeBuilders group for our friends & we want to bring this to our church as well. Thank You!” ~Safety Manager, married 5 years


God also directed us to give away several free resources to couples who had been asking questions about HomeBuilders®. One of the ladies started crying and said “we had just been praying and telling God that we would love to start a HomeBuilders® group, but we just couldn’t afford to purchase the books, so He was going to have to provide in another way…” They immediately started making plans to host a small group study on an Air Force base. They want to strengthen the families who have been deployed in Iraq and are now returning home.

Join is in Praising God for: *Generous partners who gave extra financial gifts in December and January. Those gifts paid for our unexpected medical expenses and made up for our shortfall in monthly support. God provided all that we needed! **The opportunity to do head back “home” for two conferences in Bellevue, WA this April. We’re so thankful we’ve been give the opportunity to not only bring hope to the hopeless, but to also equip others to reach out in their community. It’s such a blessing to be doing this work and we know that we couldn’t do it without the support of our friends and family who faithfully support us through prayer and finances. Thank You!

“Changing the world…One Home at a Time.”