Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
Kevin and Beth are hosting a podcast episode from a boutique hotel called The Russell in Nashville. The hotel has a program called Rooms for Rooms where they donate a portion of guests' stays to organizations helping the homeless in Nashville. They discuss their personal stories of pursuing the Lord, with Beth sharing how her parents' backgrounds shaped her faith and Kevin expressing his commitment to pursue God wholeheartedly. They also talk about how they both have connections to the Lowell Lundstrom ministry. Beth talks about her mom's transformation from a partying lifestyle to becoming a missionary after accepting Jesus. She then shares her own journey of seeking a deeper faith and finding it in an Assembly of God church in New Orleans. Hello, my name is Kevin, and I'm with my co-host Beth. Hi. Today's episode is brought to you from The Russell, a historic East Nashville church transformed into a one-of-a-kind boutique hotel. The Russell's mission is to give back to the Nashville community through their Rooms for Rooms program by donating a portion of your stay to local organizations who provide a safe haven for those experiencing homelessness in the Nashville community. Visit russellnashville.com to book your stay today. Today on Faith Moving Forward podcast, I'm excited for this one because I'll be talking with someone super special to me, my wife, Beth. She's got a great story to tell about pursuing the Lord and how it went for her through her childhood and teens and college years, right up until we met. I met Beth in 1989, in the fall, August, I guess, of 1989. One thing that really stood out to me when I met Beth is her heart for the Lord. She really had a heart and a desire to pursue the Lord and not just going to church on Sunday and Wednesday. She always wanted to press in. My testimony is I genuinely got saved or rededicated, however you want to say it, just before then in 1989, after going away from the Lord for a bit. When I came back to God, I told the Lord that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to be all in. I'm going to pursue you with all my heart and with all my mind and whatever you have for me. Like Beth, I just didn't want to just be or lead a good life and just go to church on Sundays, Wednesdays, be involved, go to special things. I wanted this to be a lifestyle for me. Beth had the same heart and that's what just attracted me to her. So I'm excited to talk to her today and let her kind of tell her story and how it went for her. Yeah. I am very grateful. God placed me in a beautiful family of parents who really loved each other. But first and foremost, I love the Lord and my parents kind of will give you a picture of who I am, the way I am. My dad was a car dealership owner. He was like one of the best mechanics in the area and he had gone through the loss of his first wife and was a widower for nine years. My mom was a missionary. She was a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators. He met her when she was home raising support on furlough. She quickly noticed some friends of both of theirs, kind of put them together, but mom thought, nope, this can't work because I'm committed first and foremost to being a missionary in Lima, Peru, translating the Bible into Kokama for the Kokama Indian tribe in the jungle. But she discussed it with the Wycliffe Bible Translator leader. He said, Audrey, don't push away if God's trying to bring you a husband. So that opened up her heart and she prayed about it and she felt the peace. So she and dad were married probably about a year after they met and he actually went through Wycliffe Bible Translators to be a mechanic on the mission field for them in Lima, Peru. But they had gotten pregnant with my oldest sister Cheryl so fast they stayed in the States and they were going to, after Cheryl was born, 18 months later John was born. 18 months later they were pregnant with twins, which they found out two weeks before we were born. But she couldn't seem to deliver us and she longed to be back in the mission field and with that dessert, as she was in the hospital, North Memorial Hospital in Minneapolis for five days, she finally said, Lord, I let go of the mission field in my heart. If I can be your stateside missionary, I will always serve you. Get these babies out of me. And I guess within hardly no time at all, all of a sudden she delivered me and then my twin sister ten minutes later, Becky. That's so interesting. I'm sure that's where you got it from too, because your mom was the same way. She was sold out to the Lord and she was even willing to give up her dream of going back to the mission field to pursue God's dream instead. So that's cool. Yeah. So that's my parents' background. So that kind of really shaped me. My dad loved the Lord. When he met my mom after being a widower for nine years, he just fell in love with mom and she with he, and they got married and had us kids. And then she just became sold out to be God's stateside missionary in America. So being raised with that kind of parents, it ingrained in me right off the bat, not just church going, but a love for the living God through Jesus and really learning to love the Bible. I grew up seeing my parents read the Bible, part of prayer meetings and Bible studies at church. Mom led many. She always poured over the Bible a lot. I'd see her in the evenings, especially Saturday nights. Every Saturday night, mom would be pouring over the Bible for an hour and a half getting ready for Sunday school on Sunday mornings. So I always had such a heart to live for the Lord Jesus. I accepted him as my savior at six in 1970. And it bothered me if I saw kids of my generation doing wrong, knowingly doing wrong. And it always made me, I always felt like I could feel the disappointment of the Lord in my heart. And I just hungered to please him. So we were raised going to church Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, and any special, we were there. We were part of the people that helped bring things to pass. And my dad, part of the businessmen in Forest Lake, Minnesota, would bring in every summer an evangelist. He wanted to see the gospel of Jesus brought to our small town, then small town. And he was part of something called Tri-County, and it was in those Tri-County meetings that I heard about Jesus through the Lowell Lundstrom ministry. Yeah, that's another fun point or fun fact between the two of us is you got saved through Lowell Lundstrom. Yes. And I was good friends with the Lundstrom family, especially their son, LJ. And we hung out a lot, and I even traveled with him a little bit. So that was really interesting that we had that in common. And the curious thing there is I had, Kevin and I were in different circles and different, he was Assembly of God church boy, and I was raised in the covenant. And it wasn't until 20 years later did we find out that this we had in common. But we were part of everything that we could be in our community of Forest Lake and Ham Lake to try and share the love of Jesus. My dad had experienced heartache from his past, and mom had been raised in quite a partying household family, and they got miraculously saved. Yeah, you should just real briefly just tell how your mom got saved, what her growing up was like, and how it just radically changed. Yeah. Just tell that story real quick. Her parents were kind of partiers. They loved to go to what mom referred to as the show on Saturday nights. Mom's mom was quite a pretty lady, and men were always hitting on grandma, I guess, so the story goes. And they would go and party, but they didn't ever go to church on Sundays. And little Audrey and Joyce, my mom and her sister, sat on the front steps of their North Minneapolis home on Sundays, and a neighbor would pass by and say, you girls ought to be in church. So she started bringing the girls to church, and her name was Rita, and she invited their mom to Bible study, and unbelievable, that family, God got a hold of their hearts. They accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, and one by one in that fall, they all accepted the Lord. There were four daughters and their mom and dad, and it was a radical change. They went from partying, drinking, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, as I heard about it, and just really living quite a wild life to living for the Lord. So mom then, after that, was so radically changed, that's when she wanted to become a missionary. So now, fast forwarding to when that's how come I had such a hunger for the Lord with parents like that, and I went off to Bible college after I graduated from high school, and I went to Crown College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, and I loved it. It was Bible college raising up pastors and missionaries and those that wanted to do full-time work. I knew that rang true in my heart, but I also knew that I was getting a whole lot of head knowledge, and it was great. I knew I had Jesus living in my heart, but there was something, I knew there was more. I knew that there was more to just living a good life, and I remember going on a walk in 20-below-degree temp in Minnesota in January. With tears streaming down my face, I said, Lord, I want childlike faith. I don't need all this head knowledge, there's got to be more. By August of that year, I was living in New Orleans with my sister who had gotten a nursing job in a children's hospital as a new grad, and we were going to an Assembly of God church. In that Assembly of God church, they spoke in tongues. They talked about the Holy Spirit, which we as a covenant background, that wasn't part of our upbringing. Their enthusiasm was contagious. You should tell them how you got to New Orleans, just how that went, how you ended up in New Orleans with your sister. Well, I had been two years in Crown College, and after I went on that walk in January of 1984, I said, Lord, I know there's more. Cheryl had just graduated as a nurse from Anoka-Ramsey. Cheryl's your sister. She's an older sister, and she couldn't get a job in the Twin Cities because there was a two-year backlog of nurses. There were too many nurses for the area, so that's how she got a job in a children's hospital in New Orleans. I said, you know what? I'm going to take time off of college. I've got two years under my belt, but I'm not sure if I want a degree in the areas that I was heading for, so I'm going to just take time off. I'm coming with you. I'll keep you company, and I'll just waitress. So I ended up moving with Cheryl. We lived in an apartment, and she worked as a night nurse in New Orleans at the children's hospital down there, and I waitressed at the Catfish Shack, a fun restaurant. Right away when our parents helped us move down there, they found a nice Baptist church and said, okay, you girls, this will be a good church for you. So then they went back up to Minnesota with my twin sister, Becky, and we talked to our manager at our apartment, and she was saying, praise the Lord, and hallelujah, and she was so excited. She said, Jesus, we were like, where do you go to church? And she said, I go to Victory Assembly. So we said, well, we want to go see your church. So when we went there, it was this assembly of God church that was so on fire for Jesus. It was just unbelievable. When they, Sin City, New Orleans' nickname is Sin City, when people live there, they live wholeheartedly out for everything the flesh wants to do, everything. But there's such an empty hollow on the inside, and when they got saved, when they heard about a loving Jesus, when they got saved, they were so radical on fire for the Lord. Just going to visit that church one time, we were like, we don't really know and understand about the Holy Spirit and the tongues thing, but we can't resist this love of Jesus in these people. That's so cool that God brought you down there. There's nothing better to me, and I know to you, Beth, than being around people that are really going after the Lord and not just trying to live a good life. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. Well, that's really neat. Yeah. And they were all about, you know, so grateful for the change that the Lord brought in their life that was that instantly after praying and receiving Jesus and asking and repenting from their sins, how they felt like they were walking on a cloud. I mean, all our friends down there were just like so grateful, and they couldn't fathom how wonderful it would have been had they been raised in a Christian home. So they were asking Cheryl and I all kinds of questions like, what was it like? Because they all came from a lot of hurt and brokenness, and they just were so grateful for all this being lifted off of them and being given a brand new start in life. And my twin sister Becky, she was living in Minnesota at the time, and she heard about all the exciting things God was doing in Cheryl and I, and she was so curious. We had started going to this church in August of 84 and went to a life group on, they call them cell groups back then, on Wednesday nights. And it was a small home group that met in Cindy and Andre Lugo's home, these dear husband and wife that just kind of took Cheryl and I under their wings. And they asked us if we wanted to receive the Holy Spirit, and we're like, we don't know all that you're talking about. We know the Holy Spirit was a deposit when we received Jesus as our Savior, but what are you talking about? So they sent us home with a, like a walk through the Bible, why, and the Holy Spirit, there's more. There's more to the Holy Spirit than just as a deposit that Jesus lives in your heart. So we walked through the book of Acts, and by the time we went back the next Wednesday, we could see very clearly that this is not just for some believers, it is for everybody. And it actually was in answer to the prayer I cried in January at 20 below degrees in Minnesota, saying, God, I know there's more. I had no idea God would orchestrate our steps to New Orleans, Louisiana, and it would be the infilling of the Holy Spirit, and that was the more I had been crying out for him. And so October 4th of 1984, I was filled with the Holy Spirit in that home with our wonderful Bible study leaders, Andre and Cindy Lugo, and so grateful. I see how just hearts yielded to the Lord, how God uses them to absolutely change the trajectory, this big word, absolutely change your direction by just their willingness to be used by the Lord to speak into us. And after that, my brother John came down, Becky came down, and they're like, what's going on? You know, we're all saved, what is this Holy Spirit stuff? And that just lit a fire in them. We got to check it out. Becky, six months later, moved down, and she's like, all right, I'm quitting plural school at North Hennepin Tech, and I'm going down there and joining Sharon Beth. And John came down many times, and pretty soon the whole family was getting filled with the Spirit and on fire for all the things of the Lord. How exciting. Yeah. That God orchestrated your steps to start that spark in your family. Yeah. And mom and dad, at first it was very different, but then it just lit a fire in them. They wanted more. If God had more, they didn't want to be sitting on the sidelines, and they wanted to be all in on what else God had for them. And I love that. My parents always were, I think about even contemporary Christian music was kind of like in the early stages in the late 70s and early 80s, and my mom, a lot of people in the church were like, oh, that's terrible, that rock beat. My mom was like, hey, if it's getting a hold of the hearts of our young people, I'm all for it. If it's bringing them to the things of the Lord, I'm all for that. I mean, I had such, I think, cool parents that way. You really did. I mean, I remember so many times with your mom, she would see things and hear things, and she would say, you know, in different ministries, and she'd say, well, it might not be my style, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. I see all these kids and these young people excited for Jesus, and that's what matters. So I just appreciated that so much about your mom and your dad. Yeah, they both were like, we don't have to like it for God to use it. And they were so, such encouragers of us. And then I have to bring you up to pace with how I met Kevin, because it was in this season, I and Becky used our musical abilities. I played the flute, Becky played the saxophone, and I had worked a fast food job on the side, but our heart wanted to further and be part of the work at our church, Victory Assembly of God. And so I worked and played on the praise and worship band in the church, and then we also helped the worship pastor, Doug Fowler, on weekdays, just bringing, getting, pulling everything together. And with that, our church started not just a Sunday morning service and then cell groups, they also had a Friday night praise, prayer, and healing service. Revival had just really come in a big way. It was in Metairie, Louisiana. And we're like, praise, prayer, and healing, wow, what is that about? We had seen things like the power of God through, I think of one, I have to just share one quick little scene I saw with Lester Sumrall. He came, and we had many special guests come to the church and sing or play or speak, and Lester Sumrall, he had such an anointing on that man. He preached the word, and then anybody that had needs, he would call them forward for healing or deliverance or salvation, and the front of the church was lined up, and he would go down and just pray over them. He didn't touch them, he just put his hand out towards them. And the power of God through that man of God was such that I saw people like fall backwards or catchers back there, but some of them bounced because they were, the power of God came out of Lester Sumrall in such a great way, and they were delivered of everything you can imagine, you know, alcoholism and drug abuse and witchcraft and like dysfunctional family life and things of the past, forgiveness and healing, it was just a beautiful thing. We had, so during this Praise, Prayer, and Healing service on a Friday night, Doug Fowler, we prayed with a worship band before the service began, and he said, now I want each one of you band members to be open to the Holy Spirit, and if he speaks to you to go give a word of the Lord out to somebody in particular, feel free to do that. So this is all new to this covenant girl, I'm like, okay, yes, I will do this, I know the voice of the Lord, I've learned to listen to his voice, and here's a side note on that. I remember I used to say, how do people hear from God? I always hear people say that, and how do you know it's God? Well, then it's like God just showed me how if you ask a father for something, he's not, the Heavenly Father is not any less than your earthly father, and he wants to give you what you need and what you ask for, and if I ask to hear his voice or ask him a question, he's not going to be trying to play games and tricks on me. It's kind of like putting your hand in front of your face, and when you ask him a question or I want to talk to him, it's almost hard not to hear him or see him. You almost have to go out of your way to look around your hand that's very noticeably in front of your face. Yeah, so many times we say we don't hear him, but it's because what we're hearing is maybe not what we want to hear, but he always has the best for us, and I know personally, there's just times when I expected the answer to be this or this, and it was something very different, and so in my mind, I wasn't hearing from God, but actually I was. Right. He is wonderful. I changed what I said. I didn't say, oh, I can't hear God. I now say, I do know the voice of the good shepherd and the voice of another I will not follow. I know his voice. I'm his daughter. I'm his sheep. Yep. He's a good shepherd. He's a good father, and he doesn't withhold from me answers, and not that everything in life gets answered, but he gives me a piece. Sometimes he'll give me specifically what I'm asking an answer for. Sometimes he'll drop a picture and an impression in my heart, and I'm like, okay, I see that. I accept that. Whether it's everything I want to hear or see, I know him. Yeah, or maybe it's delayed. Yeah, and he'll give you a piece. Follow the peace, Colossians 3.15. It's the peace of God that rules. It says, let the peace of God rule and act as umpire, settling with finality the questions that arise in your mind. So you have questions that try and rob your peace, but where's the peace? And that's God's sweet way of leading us. So this girl on our Friday night praise prayer and healing service at church came up to me. I had already actually stepped off the stage, and God had given me a word for a couple different people, and I was back up where I sit to play my flute, and a girl off to the side came up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and she said, you don't know me. I don't know you, but she said, I just feel impressed in my heart that whoever your husband is needs you to pray for him now, and I feel really strongly you need to pray for your husband in the future. That was the date. That was about 1985, and it was right around May. Yeah. See, that makes total sense to me, because end of May, beginning of June is when I graduated that year from high school, and the last thing on my mind was pursuing the Lord or becoming a better Christian or more of a Christian. It was quite the opposite, so the timing is amazing there. That was absolutely the Lord. Yeah. Yeah. God is pretty fun. I mean, there's so many things in life when you follow after him. I always tell the kids, our five kids, life in the Lord is cutting edge. It's an adventure. You can't beat it. You don't always know exactly how it's going to look, but just keep leaning into his heartbeat, listening to him, and pressing into him, and it is by far the most exciting life to be lived is one in him. Yep, absolutely, and if it's not, then that should tell you something. Are you doing your own plan, or are you doing God's plan? Yeah. Calculated. Sometimes it works in the Lord, and a lot of times it doesn't. Rarely. Yeah. So I started praying, pressing in and praying from May of 1985 and there on forward. I was just like, okay, and when you're in a church of about 2,500 members, you're thinking, okay, Lord, who is he? Where is he? I'm looking. I'm praying. I'm looking. I'm praying, and I am not sure I'm looking and praying, but I just didn't let up, you know. We then, about a year and a half later, felt the Lord moving us on, and Cheryl, Becky, and I am like, okay, he didn't seem to appear here, but he's somewhere. So Cheryl got a new job at the City of Faith in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we moved on to there, lived there for like seven months, and Nashville was a couple of times. Yeah, I just want to interject here. There's one thing that I appreciate so much about you and your sisters and John is we all know people that when something comes up, an issue or an obstacle or a problem, the first reaction is to think of why that's not possible or why you can't do that or why you shouldn't do that, and they analyze it and analyze it. Well, your family is very different, and then when these obstacles come up or things that a lot of us wouldn't do, you guys always think, absolutely, we can do that. Let's just go do it. We'll figure it out along the way, and I love that because I'm the same way, so I just appreciate that so much. Yeah, that's neat. Yep, that is exactly how our dad was. As a matter of fact, just for fun, tell the story about you moving, was it from New Orleans to Tulsa by yourself? Yeah, I did. I remember you and the Chevy Love. Okay, well, I had... This is funny. Guys think about this and tell me if you would do this. This is Beth by herself doing this. Okay, we had, Cheryl, Becky and I had moved to Tulsa after New Orleans, and I just felt my heart, oh, I think we moved too soon away from New Orleans, and Cheryl had gotten a job as a nurse at the City of Faith, and Becky and I had gotten jobs waitressing at the Heritage House owned by Christian owners, Dixie and David. We were just working in part of a great church by Bobby Andean, but I had felt like we moved too early. So I said, girls, I think I'm going to go back to New Orleans, and they said, well, we aren't. And I said, okay. I had a little yellow Chevy Love pickup truck, and I said, well, me and my piano, we're going to head back. I talked to Martha Wellman, one of my dear friends down there, and I had them help me load up my Kawhi piano in the back of my Chevy Love pickup truck, put a tarp over it. By the way, I don't know if any of you have seen a Chevy Love. They haven't made them in quite a while, but they are a small little truck, and getting a piano in that thing, I have no idea how that happened. But anyway. So I moved back with my little yellow Chevy Love pickup truck and my piano, my Kawhi in the back of it, and my suitcases. And this is not a small piano. Is the piano we have now is similar? Is that right? Yeah. And I tell you, I've moved that thing a couple times with my boys, and that thing is heavy. Yeah. I don't know how you did that, but anyway. Yeah, I moved it. And then Martha, dear friend, said, yeah, come and stay with me. I have two bedrooms in my rental. So I moved in with Martha. She was at work when I got there, so I backed up my little Chevy Love pickup truck to the front door, and little inch by little inch, I got the piano unloaded, and I scooted it into her townhome, and got all moved in by the time she got home from work. Yeah. Yeah. That's just an amazing story to me, and I just wanted you to tell that real quick, because that's kind of a mind-blower. Well, yeah. There's probably 90% of men would not even do that. But you were how old were you then? About... 22. Yeah, a 22-year-old girl did it by herself, cross-country, secured the piano, drove it all the way, I don't know how many hundred miles, and then unloaded it at the stop, and yeah. That's just wild. I just loved the Lord, and I was determined to go anywhere and do anything, whatever it took. That speaks of your heart, then and now. You're still the same, so I just love that. So anyway, you can go ahead with what you were telling before. Okay. Well, yeah. We lived in Tulsa for like seven months, but then felt drawn to Nashville, Tennessee. And so then Cheryl got a job at Vanderbilt University in the Children's Hospital at the Children's Park. And so Becky and I, and then our cousin Elizabeth joined up with us, and we then lived in Nashville for a time. And after that, now this is like when all's said and done, probably going on eight years at this point since high school graduation, and we were full of God's stories, and that I just wanted God to use us to affect others for His kingdom. Yeah, and that's another thing that's so cool about all these moves and everything and pursuing the Lord is you guys got to meet so many amazing people and make amazing friendships and the experiences and just the way it should be. Yeah. I love that. I think of so many different friendships. It brings Richard Llewellyn to my mind. Richard was a broker from England, from London, England, and he had come to America, lived in Chicago for a time, and then got transferred to New Orleans. So then he was going to that church when Cheryl, Becky, and I came. What a powerful man of God. There was like a Smith Wigglesworth anointing on him, if any of you know who Smith Wigglesworth is. And he had a cell group that everybody wanted to go to, and the Holy Spirit met people like crazy through Richard Llewellyn. He met his now wife, Llewellyn. She was a New Orleans girl, and they married, and then they moved back to London, England after we moved. But dear, dear friends, oh, such richness of the precious people God's used to impact our lives because of stepping out in faith and being willing to believe God is a big God and that he wants to do big things and impact others for his kingdom purposes and that life, there is so much that comes in a person's life, and how are you going to take it? Are you going to become bitter, or are you going to make it become better? Are you going to let it grow you and say, press into the Lord? And I always say, lean in to hear his heartbeat. What is he saying? And he's amazing. God is so loving. It's amazing. And then forward to after Nashville, we moved back to Minnesota, and Cheryl got a job at the Children's Hospital in St. Paul, and Becky and I were working with our dad, who was a senior citizen at the time, and we just wanted to be there to help him. And we got plugged into our church Living Word Christian Center, and that's where Kevin comes in the picture. Now mind you, all this time, since 85, May of 85, pray for your husband, pray for your husband. Now forward to 1989, and we're going to Living Word Christian Center, and Becky and I plugged in. We became a part of the youth department in the Rockatorium, and we are collecting tickets for a Christian rock band that's coming to play for the youth for a concert on a Friday night. I think their name was Baron Cross. And as we're collecting tickets, here comes this guy with his cousin, or I realized later, it was Kevin. And he just looks like he's quite a rock and roller himself. But he stood out to me. His cousin was so friendly, and they talked to me, and Becky and I were collecting tickets. So he went in, and I'm like, wow, he's a neat guy. So he just kind of stood out to me, but I thought, very cool, because here he could be anywhere in any club, and here he's at church to hear this Christian rock band. So that kind of stood out to me. That would have been in the summer of 85, like at the end of the summer. And then a few weeks later, Jerry Savelle meetings were at Living Word Christian Center, and here's that guy again. But we didn't know it was Kevin. So Becky and I went up behind him. We thought it was another friend named Tim Gray, and we kind of shake his shoulders. We're like, Tim! He turns around, and it's this guy, Kevin. And I'm like, oops, sorry, and he's like, no, no. So we got to meet him and talk to him some more. And then in September of 89, here he is in membership class. And I knew that the man of God for me had to love the Lord more than anything else in the whole world. I would definitely want him to love me, but I knew first and foremost he had to have a heart for the things of the Lord. Otherwise, it's hard to respect one man of God if he is not really pursuing things of the Lord. If he's pursuing money and possessions, all that comes and goes. It rots. It rusts. It deteriorates. You've got to pour money into it to keep it up. And I just thought, I want a heart for the Lord in the man of God you have for me. So when I saw Kevin at membership class at Living Word, I'm like, are you kidding? This really stood out to me. And so then in membership class, Becky and I were like, we need to go out to eat with this guy. So we went up and said, hey, do you want to go out to Perkins? And so that's how we really struck up a friendship with Kevin. And that was our beginning is when we met. Yeah, that was an amazing time. I was just all in with the Lord. In my mind, I thought, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. I'm not going to half-heartedly do it or just punch in every Sunday. Can I say one more thing about that? I knew. Kevin hadn't come back to the Lord until the middle of that summer of 89. And the Lord is so good that he never had us cross paths until he came to church. It's a good thing because there's a lot of nice-looking guys, but if they don't have a heart for the Lord, for me, I wouldn't give them the time of day. And had I met Kevin before he really committed to the Lord, I wouldn't have given him the time of day. Sorry, Kevin. No, I love that. That's awesome. I know it's true, too. Yeah. I admired so much how zealous he was for Jesus and pursuing his plan for his life. I'm like, that's what I've always wanted in a husband. Mind you, I graduated in 82 and this was 89, seven years, and then in 91 we were married. So it's worth waiting for. Girls out there, if you are wanting a godly husband, don't sell yourself short. God's got a man of God for you. Just press into the Lord, seek him, pour out your energies, your heart, everything to the Lord, and be patient, because he has a man of God for you. Yeah, that's cool, and it's vice versa, too. I'm so lucky to have Beth and how the Lord brought her into my life, and we've just had so much fun all these years. We have. All the stories. And the stories that Beth told, that's only a small percentage. She has so many stories of all the adventures they had on the road and everything. This was a lot of fun, and I appreciate you telling some of this, and maybe we can tell other stories down the road. I just have to add one more thing. God's blessed us with five amazing kids. We are very blessed parents and a beautiful daughter-in-law who we're so grateful for, and grandkids. They're awesome. Amazing. So appreciative. Gifts from the Lord. Right. Treasures, each one of them. Thanks again, Beth. Yeah, my pleasure. We're running out of time here, but this has been a lot of fun, and maybe we can do this again. Thanks so much for listening to the Faith Moving Forward podcast. Please consider subscribing to our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you're currently listening to.
