Passing On Your Legacy With Dennis and Barbara Rainey

In this episode we have Managing Director and Senior Private Wealth advisor of Ronald Blue Trust, Greg Gilbert. He is joined with the Family Life Founders, Dennis and Barbara Rainey. The Rainey's are known for the legacy of creating Family Life, a non-profit organization that's been helping build godly families for 40 years. They discuss how to pass along values and leaving a legacy to your family.


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Transcript

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(calm music)- [Narrator] Welcome to the Wisdom for Wealth. For Life. Podcast. Let's bridge the gap between your faith and your finances. At Ronald Blue Trust, we apply biblical wisdom and technical expertise to help you make wise financial decisions. Our goal is to help you leave a lasting legacy. In this podcast, you will hear inspiring stories, practical tips, and encouragement from the Ronald Blue Trust family with special guests along the way. Welcome to the Wisdom for Wealth. For Life. Podcast. The information in these podcasts is provided for general educational purposes only. It is not intended as specific individual advice. The client's experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients, and they're also not indicative of future performance or success. Opinions expressed may not be those of Ronald Blue Trust. In this episode, we have managing director and senior private wealth advisor of Ronald Blue Trust, Greg Gilbert. He is joined with the FamilyLife founders, Dennis and Barbara Rainey. The Raineys are known for the legacy of creating FamilyLife, a nonprofit organization that's been strong for 40 years, helping build Godly families. They discuss how to pass along values and leaving a legacy to your family. Let's listen in now.- We're really excited about the topic of what you're gonna share today, and I'm not gonna give it away yet. I'll let y'all unpack it, but can you start off just by telling us how you met and how y'all then were able to start FamilyLife?- Yeah, go ahead.- I'll start with how we met. Well, Dennis and I met in college. We were college students, we were involved in the same organization, which was a Christian group. I was a brand new Christian. He was newly excited about his Christian life. He'd become a believer when he was a child, but had this encounter with Christ as a sophomore, freshman, between sophomore and junior year. And so we met each other in the midst of this, this sort of a groundswell of Christian interest and growth on our campus. And we did all kinds of things together during our college years. We went to conferences, we were involved in bringing speakers to our campus. And the thing that defined both of us in college in those years was that we were really sold out for Jesus Christ was the era of The Late Great Planet Earth, which is a book which took the world by storm. And so we all thought that the world was gonna end in a few years and that we would be raptured. And we never even thought about marriage because we were just sure Jesus was coming back tomorrow. So we were just friends and thought that that was a really great way to spend time together. But after college, a year after college, we began dating long distance. And that dating relationship went really quickly because we'd known each other for three years in school. And we realized that God was calling us to get married and we said yes to that, and we were married in six weeks. We had a really fast dating relationship, and he asked me to marry him in July, and we were married September 2nd. So it was quick, but we knew it was right. We knew God called us, and so we were confident.- That was 50 years ago so it worked.- Apparently, apparently. That kind of makes me think about Dennis. Dennis does like to get things done, so, you know, he's a man of action. So share with us a little bit about the beginnings of family life and the ideas that you were compelled, that really compelled that idea to become an organization and a movement.- Well, as we had a friendship, one of the gentlemen who had a great mentoring relationship with me was a guy by the name of Don Meredith, not the football player from Cowboys, but basically Don sat us down and said, you know, you guys have known each other for a long time. You need to get married. And so he did. He called us to ask the question, is God calling us to get married? We said, yes so we got married, and that marriage preparation that he gave us was really, provided a solid start for us as a young couple beginning our journey together. And so four or five years later, Campus Crusade for Christ came to us as staff members and said, would you be interested in helping co-found a ministry to pre-marriage, pre-married couples that are dating on Campus Crusade for Christ staff. It's now Crew, but back then, it was Campus Crusade for Christ. And we started thinking about it and we thought, you know, there are three relationships in life we're not naturally great at, one is our relationship with God, secondly is our relationship with our spouse, And third is parenting. And so we thought, what better deal. We'll do this for a couple of years and we'll get trained ourselves looking at what the Bible has to say about all three of those relationships and equip other people. Well, in the process, it helped us so well, and we really stepped into what became ground zero of the cultural war, a spiritual battle, I believe, over the generations to come in our country, and in country after country over a hundred of them around the world. And so what started as a pre-marriage conference became a marriage conference that trained anywhere from 75,000 to 95,000 people a year. We had arena events in a number of cities where we trained over 400,000 people doing those. But we were calling people to the biblical blueprints to build their marriage. A lot of people think they've got the biblical blueprints, but they're marrying somebody who may or or may not have the same blueprints that you have. And so what that conference, the Weekend to Remember does, is it gives both couples a biblical set of blueprints from which they can begin building their relationship. And it works, it's all word of mouth. And to me, one of the things I love, this has been around since 1976, people fill ballrooms, hundreds of thousands of people fill ballrooms around the country and they come not knowing who's speaking.- [Greg] Wow. Yeah.- That's amazing. And what they're coming to hear are these blueprints that are put together in an entertaining way, but in a practical way that help couples know how to build their marriage and how to make Jesus Christ the center of their relationship.- You know, and the couple things that you made me think of is number one, some of the ideas that y'all had early on in terms of what God was going to do or what your plans were, and that old quote that's, if you wanna make God laugh, tell him what your plans are, right? We thought we were gonna do FamilyLife for a couple of years and we weren't sure if we were gonna get married 'cause, but, you know, and then but just His moving in that, and you're trusting Him as kind of the path developed. Also, the connection that we have, you know, Ronald Blue, we were started in the late seventies as well. I think there were a lot of great organizations that were started during that time. And so what a powerful, powerful time for God to be at work. And many, you know, kind of decades later, some of these organizations, like your own, that has gone on to do a lot of amazing work at that time. And also Howard Hendricks, you know, speaking into to our firm and really having the vision for Ron to say, hey, people need help with how to handle their money and there's all this money in the hands of Christians in North America, and all this need for the Gospel and for charity worldwide. Ron, go work on this. So the connection to Dallas Theological and Howard Hendricks, just a lot of similarities there that are powerful.- Prof was very influential in the starting of FamilyLife. And for decades, he came to our speakers retreat. We have over 50 couples who speak for the weekend, remember? And Gene would come every year not asking to do anything, just come to encourage our ministry. And he had a great impact in my life. One of the great statements he made was he said, in the city of Dallas, Texas, it takes three weeks of intensive training to become a garbage collector, but all you have to do to get married is stand before the justice of the peace or the pastor and grunt a yes out, and you're in. That's all it takes. And he said the great lead in in the church today is to start a pre-marriage ministry to a young couple who's starting out their marriage. That's what we did. And we're more amazed than anyone at what happened. We didn't have a vision for this at all, initially, but, you know, you kinda show up where God is and He kind of takes over from there. Not kind of, He does.- I love it. I love Prof's impact. Our large conference room here is the Howard Hendricks conference room in his honor. And you know, his legacy, your legacy, you've captured it. And so that's one of the main things we wanna talk about today is the way that you've captured this, and I'm gonna try to hold up the book here. And like you say, it's called "Our Story". And, you know, without me kind of giving a lot of it away, why don't we just hear from you? Talk to us about why you created this book, what's the purpose and thinking behind it that led to its creation?- Want me to start?- Yeah.- Well last, about a year ago, we started thinking about our 50th, which was coming up in September of 2022. And we were living busy lives and doing lots of things, but sort of in the back of our brains, we kept thinking the 50th is coming and we need to do something to commemorate it because it's a really big deal to hit 50 years of marriage in this generation. And we also wanted to make a mark on our kids' and grandkids' lives in some ways so it wasn't really, for our perspective, the celebration or the idea, whatever it became, we really wanted it to be more than just about us, we really wanted it to be about imparting something of value to our kids. And so we worked out what we wanted to do, and our kids started, our six kids started getting involved. But as we got a little bit closer, I started telling Dennis, I want to come up with something that we can give our children and grandchildren, something that they can walk away from this weekend with other than just memories or maybe some photos here and there, but something tangible that they can take with them that can remind them not just of the weekend, but remind them of the story that God has worked in our lives. And I realized as we thought about it, that even though our kids think they know our story because they've heard pieces here, really don't know our story. And if our kids, our six children, who live so much of their lives with us, don't really know our story, then our grandkids for sure don't know our story. And so we decided that we wanted to put in writing the story of what God did in our lives, how He brought us together, how, well first of all, how we came to know Him, secondly, how he brought us together, and then third, how he worked through our lives in the years that followed so that they all knew this story. because we looked at our kids. We have, our youngest grandchild is now three months old. And who knows what God has in mind? We may or may not see her grow up to become an adult, and if we don't, she's not gonna know us. And we sure aren't gonna know our great-grandkids well enough that we can impart this story to them. And so we wanted to put it in writing. And so that's how we ended up writing a book. And half of the book is our story of how we met and married and what God did in our lives. And the second half is 50 lessons that we've learned in 50 years of marriage. Because we not only wanted to tell our story to our kids and grandkids, we wanted to impart to them the lessons that God had taught us in hopes that it might encourage them in their marriages and their families someday to go, oh, yeah, mimi and papa struggled with this, this is something they learned and maybe we can, maybe this will help us.- One minor detail we left out is we have several grandkids, 27 of them, several, just a few. And I like to say there's more than one way to take over the world, do it through grandkids. But what we wanted them to have in this book is the story of how we met Christ and how we became followers of Christ. And Barbara's an artist. And we used a lot of her artistic ability as well as her writing ability as we crafted this together to communicate how both of us met the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And yeah, as she said, our kids think they know our story, but we got a chance to give them more of a context of how we came to know Christ, how we came to follow Him as college students at the University of Arkansas. And what our lives have been about, surrender to Him, yield to Him. When we first married, the first Christmas we were together, we wrote out a title deed to our lives. Barbara on one table, I think we had a small table in the kitchen, and I was in the living room. We didn't have any furniture hardly at all, but we wrote out on a sheet of paper her contract with God, her title deed with God. And I signed over the title deed of my life to Him as well. And we gave Him not only what we had then, but we gave Him what we hoped for. We hoped for two kids, three kids maybe. We hoped we'd have some nice things. And it was interesting to go back and read what we gave Him because our values were not very good, frankly. We were like a lot of couples.- We were young.- A lot of young couple, we were young.- You were young, and like you said before, You've learned a lot since then, right? but I think what you're talking about is critical. I know as a family, we're trying to figure out how to be more open and share our stories, the stories of our lives with our kids, and that's powerful, and I think a lot of people struggle with how to do that naturally along the way. Plus then, you know, what you've done is made it more concrete as well. And like you said, a lot of times we may think the next generation kids and grandkids know things that frankly they probably only know a little sliver or a little slice of. So I think what you've done is, number one, highlighted the power of us being better at telling our story and sharing our story. And especially on the back as it says,"We will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and His might and the wonders that he has done." from Psalm 78:4. So we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of what God has done. And so our story, God's story through us, and then also capturing it the way that you've done with seven chapters of your story and then the 50 lessons learned in 50 years of marriage. So I love that you did it, I love that you've created it, I know it's not easy to take an idea and make it actionable, and this is a beautiful book and it's really well told. Share a little bit about how you kind of delivered this or any kind of family meetings that you've had, which is another way that we like to talk to clients about passing along the values, passing along understanding and stories, God stories, work stories, marriage stories through family meetings. Can you share a little bit about how you've done that?- Yeah, we've been doing it before we celebrated our 50th. We took some of our grandkids to the Creation Museum and they got a chance to see where the ark was gonna be built. It wasn't built back then, but they so loved it that their parents heard about its impact on their lives. They said, next time you take them, we want to go. So we didn't get all of our grandkids, nor did we get all the parents to go with us, but a bunch came and we went to the ark and the Creation Museum again. And that gave us a chance as a family to talk about a biblical worldview. Because how you see this book starting is He created marriage and family at the very start. And we wanted our children to have a sacred view of the marriage covenant so that they would go the distance in their marriage, imperfect as a marriage is it still is God's best model for showing Him off to the world. And so we did that through family get togethers at Thanksgiving. You might tell about how we celebrated Thanksgiving as a family.- Well, that just was an easy holiday for us to gather. We have so many kids and so many grandkids. Our house is way too small. We could never fit even half of them in our house. So for years, we made Thanksgiving the holiday that we get together because it's just easier for everybody. And we've just tried to build memories together with our kids over Thanksgiving. One of the things that we do as a Thanksgiving tradition is we share, we have everybody write five things that they're grateful for for the year. And then we go around the table with whoever's there and we share what those five things are. So that builds just a common memory together of Thanksgiving and of focusing our gratitude where it belongs, on God as the author of all the good things. And so we've been doing that, gosh, since our kids were little. So that's been in place for probably 30 years or more. So we've had a few of those things throughout the years where we've really tried to intentionally impart what we believe in a specific setting, in a specific situation. What we did for this book is we got all of our kids together. We told them that the only thing we wanted for our 50th was for all of them to come. We didn't want any gifts, we just wanted all of them to be together for a weekend. And we said we want everybody to get along. Those were our two requirements because there's always something going on. And we just said, we want everyone to come and be together and have fun and enjoy each other and get along. And they did, and it was amazing. We had the best weekend, but we also told them that we wanted to make a presentation of sorts with this book. And we gathered everybody in the living room and everybody was sitting all over. It's a small little place where we were, and they were all sitting all over the floor and on tables and everything. But we just told them a little bit about why we did this and why this was important to us. And then we, I think we went outside and handed the book to the grandkids.- We did, we had the grandkids line up.- From oldest to youngest.- The oldest, who was 22, I believe, to the youngest, which was, that one was still in the hangar. She was due in, I think three months.- Two months.- Two months.- I think in the book where you list out all of the grandkids, we have baby down here, we don't have the name, we don't have the name yet.- She hadn't been born at that point, but they all had a number. And so we started with one, two, three, four, and we just went down the line and gave them this book. And the interesting thing is this idea came from a preacher in the 1600s. Obadiah Holmes was his name. How about that for a name, huh?- [Greg] Obadiah Holmes.- Obadiah Holmes.- It's biblical.- He wrote a letter to his children and grandchildren and to the generations that followed not knowing that that letter that was handwritten would now be passed down, I believe this is accurate, to, Barbara and I differ on this, she says eight generations, I think there's actually been 11 or 12 generations that have now read that letter. In fact, one of our devotionals that we wrote, the last three days of the year reproduce that letter to show what Obadiah charged his children and grandchildren to follow Christ. And don't compromise and get in the Scriptures, and make the Scriptures your compass, your blueprints. And so what we were trying to do was really imitate what he'd done in a more permanent way. And I would have to say this about the book, we have written a lot of books, this is the most expensive of any of them. And it was because we only printed 3 or 400. And so when you have really nice paper, really nice graphics, it's very expensive, but you know what?- Well, it was worth it because this is a one-time, this is a one-time event. You only have a 50th once. We may never get all of our kids together in the same place again, We do hope we do, but may not. And we wanted it to be something that was so nice they wouldn't wanna throw it away.- Although, after they all got theirs and they all went back in the house or went around to Frisbee golfs and stuff, I turned around and the farmhouse that's in Barbara's family where we met has a gravel driveway. And this wasn't in the mud hole, but it was on the edge of the mud hole where one of our grandchildren had just pitched it over there, you know?- Yeah, we have a couple of two year olds and yeah.- I don't think it was the 22 year old. He'd be in big trouble.- Actually, he took his back to college with him. I was real impressed. We weren't sure that any of the kids would hang onto it. Right now, we were thinking more long-term, but the 22 year old, and then one of the, we've got two that are freshmen in college and one of those freshmen took theirs back to college with them, which I was really impressed that they would actually do so I thought that was a big win.- Yeah, so, you know, on the family meetings, I mean, what y'all have lived out is exactly what we love seeing in clients' lives. Sometimes we'll help clients with it. We've been a part of them before, but it's, a lot of times we'll say it's sharing your spiritual history, sharing your relationship history, your work history, and then also the financial, so they can learn how to handle the finances. Sometimes we'll give the analogy that it's kinda like you're passing along a house to your kids and you want the, you know, and so you want them to have a really strong spiritual foundation on that house. And then you have the walls that are their work ethic, their character, the life skills that they're gonna have. And then the roof is whatever financial that you may leave them. And so for some of our clients, when they have the opportunity to pass along a big roof, you know, to the next generation, but do the kids have the walls? Do they have the work ethic? Do they have the skills for life? Do they know how to handle money? And do they have that spiritual foundation, right? Because without that, you know, the roof kind of can destroy everyone in the house. And so y'all have been living this out, you've been investing in your family. What about someone that is younger in life? You alluded to a couple things you were doing, but let's say it's a young couple. They've been married two years, five years, and they have a vision for this and they're capturing a vision for where their marriage can go, what their family can look like down the road, and this really connects with them, but they're involved in the day to day, they're involved in everything that's physically exhausting and not feeling like they're able to be living life out too intentionally, is probably how it can feel. So what would your counsel and your guidance be to someone in that stage?- Yeah. Go.- Well, one of the things that I have been telling people as we've talked about this and shared this idea with others is I think it's great to start now because every couple is learning something at every season in marriage. We learned so much in our early years of marriage and there were a lot of lessons that we thought we would never forget, but we have forgotten them. And so I think that my challenge is start writing now. It doesn't have to be beautiful, it doesn't have to be complete sentences, but it's so easy with computers and pads, iPads, things like that, to create a document and just start writing. Start writing what God is doing. Write the lessons that you are learning, the ways that you're seeing God working your life, the things that He's leading you to do because you think you won't ever forget them, but you do. And if you start writing now, when you get to 50 years, or you might wanna do this at 30 or 40 years or 25 years, when you get to that point, a lot of the work has already done because you've started making deposits, so to speak of memories that you can then take and draw from and collect them into a story that you might want to give to your kids and grandkids. You know, younger couples could start doing this and they could give it to their children when their children get married. You don't have to wait until you're married 50 years. So I think it's an idea that is practical enough that people can start actually taking notes, writing things down as it happens, and then they'll have something ready to give, ready to work from.- One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 106. And in it, the author really challenges the leaders of the nation of Israel to not forget the works of God. When you forget God's works, you forget who God is, you forget how God provided, you forget how He provided something spectacular at a moment. Those stories had to be passed down. So one of the ways I'd suggest doing it is writing, as Barbara said, these stories down maybe in a journal, but begin to capture them now. I call these these stories spiritual milestones. So start a rock collection, maybe not a physical rock collection in your backyard, but collect these stones because Psalm 78 points out, when you forget what God's done, you'll ultimately forget who He is, You will forget God, and you'll fail to trust Him today. And that's what we're trying to challenge our children and grandchildren to do, is don't give up on God'cause He's been faithful to you in so many different ways, but we do suffer from spiritual amnesia. We forget the goodness of God and how He's made a difference in our lives. And I just encourage all your clients to take a look at Psalm 78, maybe read it together and just see how God showed up in the nation of Israel and in ways that He commanded them to tell those stories to their children's children's children, four generations, if God gave you the length of days.- That's beautiful. And I know something that reminds me also, Dennis, is something you were sharing about recently when we were talking, and that was, you know, sharing about the idea of leaving a legacy, leaving a legacy but then taking it a step further into living a legacy and, you know, can you share a little bit more on that?- Yeah, I was giving a series of bible studies to a group of men on a pheasant hunt, and I decided to talk about legacy. And I thought I would title my messages and my Bible study Leaving a Legacy. Well, near the beginning of my study in the Scripture, it hit me that leaving a legacy is not the way to go about it. The way to go about it is to live your legacy. You're living out your values now. You're living out your legacy. And I would just say, you know, we captured 50 lessons from 50 years'cause that's been the center point of our life as we followed Christ, their values that your clients have, that they could begin to write those down and say, here's these core values of our lives.- And our family and our marriage.- Yes. And maybe even when they're young, we actually had our kids go write out what our core values were, our mission statement. But begin now, as Barbara said, to collect those stories, and then tell the stories to your grandkids. We just recently babysat some of our grandkids and it was interesting. I stayed up late a couple three nights actually, with the twins that our daughter, Rebecca, has. And we were talking about what it's like to be a teenager. And so I started telling the story of the sixth grade Sunday school class that Barbara and I had led for 11 years. And they just were on the edges of their bed. They wanted to hear it. Tell us more, tell us more. And, you know, story is how we communicate values, how we communicate love to people, and you don't have to be an author of a book to do this. You've lived a life, you're living out your legacy, begin sharing that legacy. One other thought, real quickly. The number of young people who are leaving the church after they graduate from high school and leave home and go to college Just completely skyrocketed. I have a theory about this. What the Scriptures command us to do is to tell about God's work in our lives. Because if they hear us teach the truth about the book, but don't hear us talking about the God of the book at work in our lives, wouldn't that cause them to doubt what we're trying to teach them? And so I think this is at the core of how you live out your legacy as you share the stories of how God showed up in your marriage as you started, as you had kids, everybody's got 'em. Everybody's gone through deep valleys of suffering. How did God show up, mimi, papa? And share with us what's going on there? Sometimes you'll have to initiate it. They're not gonna ask you. They don't know enough to ask. They're of a young enough age. So share those stories. And just one of the phrases I like out of the Psalms is make much of God. Make much of God. Show Him off to them and to the world.- I love that, and I also like, I think you mentioned this a little bit while you were talking about the values. It could be an interesting question depending upon the ages of your children to ask them, what would you think or what would you say our family values are based on what we do? And it would be maybe humbling feedback to receive from the kids, but it would be interesting and I think it'd be clarifying and then maybe lead into a broader conversation if the values have not been already written down and established, which I think for most people, they probably haven't taken that step, but what a powerful idea to go ahead and do that. And then there's another I idea too of as our kids are struggling, I think one of the things we've been wrestling with is how quickly we are to tell them, or to give advice, or to give counsel and just what we've been wrestling with more recently is a challenge of pointing them more quickly back to Scripture and back to God in their prayer life and have them wrestling with God on things more than telling them, you know, really kind of taking that dependency that they have from us and trying to connect them to Christ in that relationship more directly and just having him wrestle with God and take things to God more directly than just, oh, I already know what you need to do, you know, here's the answer. And a couple of ideas there, I don't know if those resonate with you at all.- Well, they do.- Yeah. Absolutely.- One of the things that as your kids get older, you really have to measure out how much teaching you continue. One of our children was so bold that he said, dad, we've heard your stuff. Why don't you retire the teaching, daddy? Now that came at a point in time, we got a great relationship and there is all kinds of back and forth, but I'd look for ways to spend some time with them to go on a road trip together. Vacations are great. We rented, I think it was 10 bedroom, 12 bedrooms, 12 baths and condos down on the Gulf Coast.- I don't remember.- Just to be able to get our kids in there and we just had a great time on the beach because just hanging out. And there are times that will come up when you may have a chance to share a story and to impart some wisdom, and maybe even ask them some questions what's going on in their lives spiritually.- The challenge can be is, I mean I find this in the teenage years, when there's, maybe they're on the go, they've got school, if they have a job, if they have other activities, the amount of time they're passing through the kitchen is so little. And if you're giving out an instruction, take out the trash, hey, have you done that? You get your schoolwork done? Then even though it's not much communication, for them, if that's most of the interaction, it can seem like all you're ever do is this. Whereas when you go on that trip, when you're able to spend more time, maybe when they get older and you're able to kind of enjoy more life together or even if it's on a trip, then you have a lot more interaction and a little bit of opportunities to speak into the life or to add some wisdom. It's just a small part of the conversation. Whereas, you know, when they're teenagers, there's so much you want to pour into them and there's so little time often to be able to speak in there and they can just feel like everything you're doing is instruction, when it's really not, there's just not a whole lot of interaction going on.- One of the things we are doing here in the coming months is we made the offer to all of our adult children, we'll pay your way for a trip to Israel and we won't pay for the grandkids, that could be, we'd have to sell our house to be able to do that. And we didn't get a hundred percent participation, but there's gonna be 17 of us, about half of all of our kids are joining with us just to go, and Barbara came up with the idea of having them share a devotional, as we go along the trip and in advance, develop a devotional that they'll share with the rest of the group. Not a big devotional, five to seven minutes, 10 minutes max, but get them in the Scriptures, because going to Israel brings a context to the Bible, and to the God of the Bible, and how that's where He showed up, Where He walked, and where He died, and where He was buried. It is a great privilege to be able to do that. So we're looking forward to that later on this year and hopefully, that'll be a be a great trip.- It will be a great trip, and for y'all to experience that together is gonna be powerful. I love that idea. And I think there's a lot of ideas that can spur others on as they're watching to, you know, maybe this idea or maybe something similar to it. Something we did, have done last few years with our family around generosity is we have a family giving fund, a donor advised fund, a family giving fund. And we told each of the kids and my daughter's fiance that, hey, here's a certain amount of money. Select a charity that you want to give your share to, explain to us what it is that they do, share with us what they do, and share with us why that matters to you. And I think it was powerful for them to go and select something more specifically, not that they're not, may not be doing other giving, but just to do it as a family for them to share their ideas. But then I think it was super powerful for each of the other siblings to hear from them.'Cause it's one thing for them to hear for us about giving, something else for them to hear from their brother or their sister about what they gave to and why. And that was, you know, that could be done at any point during the year. But I love these ideas that just help share these values, that point them to God in all these different ways. So thanks for putting this book together. Thank you for this. And I think Barbara, I'll give you credit either completely or however, but the fact that you wanted to make it significant, you wanted to spend more money on what it looked like and what it felt like because you want, you're like this is a big deal, this matters, and y'all have lived out what it means to have a long-term perspective, right? The eternal perspective is the longest perspective we can have, right? And then therefore, how's that influencing our marriages? How's that influencing our finances? How's that influencing how we parent? And so I know that, again, some people may look at this and go, well, what is there for me to grab'cause maybe I'm not in that stage of life. Maybe I'm a long way off from that. Maybe I'm not married. But I think the bigger idea is capturing a story, our story and how God's been moving in our story and what that can look like to share with others. I think about my uncle who passed away a few years ago, and man, what I would give to have his story written out. He wasn't married and didn't have any children, but I would love to have his story and how God intertwined and moved in his story. So I think it's such a great example for all of us, regardless of our stage of life. But I do think it paints a picture in like the horizon for some people who are younger to go, that's what I want to aim at. That's what I want to go for. I wanna live intentionally, I wanna live purposefully, and I want to think intentionally about the story that I'm living out and how God's intertwined with that, and what you said before about we forget, right? I think that's why scriptures is like, don't forget because we forget, you know, keep going to God because we drift so quickly and, you know, you have your time with God in the morning and, you know, right after breakfast, it's things are hitting you, you know? Sometimes we'll say that the greatest clarity clients have about their financial life is when they walk out of a meeting with us until they hit the elevator, right? It's like then life starts showing up. And I'm sure y'all would agree with a lot of that.- For sure.- Yeah. One of the things we really sought to do in this book, and I forget the exact quote, I'm gonna butcher it, but I believe this gentleman was an Englishman, I'm gonna say James Stewart, but I've gotta look it up. But he basically said, if we could just show the world that following Jesus Christ is no boring humdrum life, but instead is an exhilarating, exciting adventure and the very finest investment you can make in your life, then perhaps the whole world would come to see that Jesus is who He claimed to be and that they would be willing to lay down their lives to follow Him as well. And I think that's what we're all about. It's a generational relay race. And the greatest gift you can give the next generation is that of them knowing the savior that you know, and know they're forgiven, and that someday, quote, someday, we'll be in heaven together as a family again, maybe not in the same way we are here, but nonetheless, He uses families to get His plan accomplished, His purposes done. And frankly, that's a life that's well lived.- And if your children or grandchildren are watching this, I know that you would agree with this, that you don't want this, you know, some people may look at your story and go, wow, they may hold it up, right? Which is not what you necessarily want. You want them to hold God up, but you also don't want to be a cap on their lives, like you want them to go beyond with their life of Christ. You want to go beyond in their marriage and beyond in their parenting. And in some of the things you've learned in 50 years, you're trying to say, hey, you know, here's some of the things we were thinking back then and some of it was really on point, some of it we had a lot to learn, you know, and so let us pass along that learning so that they can go beyond on standing on your shoulders. I am learning a lot from you, so it's been a pleasure. I was just telling Dennis, every time we get together, I feel like I'm, I had on my desk yesterday, I had our story and then I had a Psalm, a Book on Psalms that Dennis gave me, I think y'all have been going through. And I was like just thinking about how impactful y'all have been in my life and I know many others as well. So thanks again.- Thank you for the professional job you guys do. You're a trusted advisor and one that, I believe, is having a great ministry back to our lives as well as undoubtedly hundreds, if not thousands, of clients as well. Thank you.(lively music)- [Narrator] Thank you so much for listening to the Wisdom for Wealth. For Life. Podcast. If you're looking for financial advice, please contact us. Please visit ronblue.com. That's ronblue.com. Thank you for listening and please subscribe to wherever you listen to your podcasts. Trusted investment management accounts and services offered by Ronald Blue Trust Inc. are not insured by the FDIC or any other federal government agency, are not deposits or other obligations of, nor guaranteed by any bank or bank affiliate and are subject to investment risk, including possible loss of the principal amount invested.