Jeff and I dropped the kids off with their grandparents, my parents, and flew to Fresno, California in the middle of a heat wave. Fresno is in the desert in northern California and when we got off the plane, it was 111 degrees Fahrenheit! We went to this absolutely fabulous church called ‘The Well’ to do a relationship conference together.
The thing that was so cool about this Church is that the average age in this Church of over a thousand people is 25, which is so exciting to us because even though we are a few years older than that - Aha - actually more than a few years older than that, we hear all the time from people who hear the findings about how men are wired or about how the women are wired and they say “How we wish we had been able to hear this before we got married” or “I wish I’d learned this when I was dating.”
We have felt the same way. And we hear so many stories about how people are so much better prepared for marriage when they can truly understand what was going on inside the other persons head. And so this is a delight to be able to speak to a group of people where many of them had been married for one or two years at the most. Many of them were dating as well, and so to be able to get to them early was great. It was so fun also to hear the kind of questions that they asked and to see that they have this real sense of eagerness and freshness. They just wanted to understand what was going on and they didn’t come with a whole lot of baggage, with preconceived notions. That was so refreshing for us, because so often we are used to speaking to people in their forties and fifties who have undergone a lot of heartache because they have been doing it wrong for 15, 20 or 30 years.
And here we are with these younger couples, before the heartache happens, just giving information, knowledge and tools so hopefully some of that heartache never happens at all!
The other thing that was interesting was that the Church had just bought a whole new building three months before. Get this: The Well is growing so fast they needed a real building of their own, not a rental space. But I’m sure in a church where the average age is 25, they probably don’t have a ton of money in tithes! And in April another church was closing down and asked them if they’d be willing to buy their $6 million dollar building for just $1 million dollars. Wow, what a deal. but where was the church supposed to get even $1 million dollars? Well that same day a business-man - not knowing anything about the building offer - came to the pastor and said he was going to donate $1 million to the church. What a God thing!
But the funny part was that they were scrambling to get the church built out and ready for them to move in, and they were already a few months behind, so in the weeks before our conference - and in the weeks after! — all the Pastors and many of the people in the congregation were staying up until 2 o’clock in the morning stripping out drywall and painting and pulling up floors. And arranging a marriage conference at the same time - good grief! I guess you have a lot of energy and enthusiasm to draw on when the average age in your church is 25!