Jeff and I flew to South Dakota on Friday and when we landed, it was about five degrees below zero. What did we get ourselves into?! We also were several hours late and by the time we got in, we basically had to run to dinner.
We were delighted to spend time with the senior Pastor Tim and his wife Dawn of Brookings Wesleyan Church. They were the real duo and we thoroughly enjoyed the entire weekend with them. This was a marriage conference and it was very interesting because South Dakota is not heavily populated; and Brookings is a college town that has 20,000 residents, most of which are the college. The church has 900 people, which probably means it’s somewhat a mega church for the area. This particular marriage conference in which they were hoping to get 100 couples ended up being about 130 couples or more.
Over dinner, Pastor Tim and Dawn told us that there were couples in all stages of marriage; from a few engaged couples, to people who had terrific relationships and had been married for years all the way to couples who were having some serious problems. He said there was one husband and wife that were coming that were actually separated. Jeff and I were spending a lot of time praying that God would be able to use us in all of their lives. It was interesting because two years before there was a conference with Emerson Eggerich’s Love and Respect ministry on video, and about half of the people who were at the marriage conference had been to Emerson’s video conferences. They already had a fantastic foundation laid and I was struck by how complementary the work that Emerson Eggerich had done with Love and Respect was to what we had done and how indeed it is that God has us cross-pathed like this. We would be able to share and cooperate instead of being competitive.
One thing as we have done before in marriage conferences that we found very helpful and interesting was that we had a long interactive session. In the session we put case studies upon the board using the old Harvard method and discuss, for example, what two people were doing and how the first would have taken what the second said, and those sorts of real life type case studies were very helpful.
We really enjoyed seeing everybody respond to that. They also gave us a prayer quilt when we were leaving that had been fixed and prayed over for us and we were very touched. However, we were most touched at the very end of the conference after everybody was saying goodbye, a man came up to us in tears and said that he and his wife are the ones who had been separated and that he was going home that night and moving back home with his wife. Jeff and I just could not stop crying. We both burst into tears and I gave him a huge hug and we prayed for him and his wife there and then that their hearts will be turned towards each other and would be knit together again. I was so encouraged to see how the Lord had touched them through such weak and feeble people as us. Thank you Lord.