David: I have conducted a lot of interviews in my life, but I’ve never interviewed my wife and I. However, with us only having two mics in our office studio, I don’t have a lot of options. June 24th is the date of our 60th wedding anniversary. It’s a great deal of living together. We will never cover all the lessons we’ve learned in the one visit, but we hope to get started on it, okay?

Karen: We have a lot of lessons we’ve learned, but we’ve condensed some of them down to basic ideas.

David: We’re not going to talk about the ones we haven’t learned yet.

Karen: Maybe touch on them a little bit in another podcast.

Speaker 3: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David at Karen Mains.

David: I have four questions, Karen, to ask us this time around. We might get to them all and we might not. Here’s number one, okay? What was the most difficult time in our marriage and what did we learn that we can share with others?

Karen: Well, we’ve had several difficult seasons, ones we really didn’t know if we would get through or not, but without a doubt it was the loss of our son, age 42, I think.

Yes. Seven years, seven and a half years ago from lymphoma. I’m missing him so much this summer because he was the only one in the family who ever said to me, “Oh, let’s see what’s growing in your garden.” Every time he came over, he’d take a little walk with me in the garden, which was frequently because he lived nearby. I miss Jeremy saying, “Oh, let’s see what’s growing in your garden.”

David: He was a remarkable young man. I can think of hard times in our marriage, but nothing ever compared to that.

Karen: Yeah, that’s the ultimate blow, I think.

David: I had done many funerals in my ministry, but I never felt what I felt when Jeremy passed. I remember one day when I went down to Chicago to the hospital where he was.

Karen: He was at Rush St. Luke’s Hospital, just an excellent hospital with a fabulous nursing staff. I mean, it’s a wonderful top-notch hospital.

David: Even at that hospital, it seemed like every day got a little worse than the day before.

Karen: Never better. One day he was never better than the day before. He just was a very slow downhill. It appeared about five months.

David: When it came to the end, and I was wrestling with the fact that it doesn’t appear that he’s going to be healed, I walked into the room where he was and the main doctor was there. He was a very fine woman. She said, “I’m sorry.” I knew then that it was over.

Karen: Well, they fought hard. They fought hard for him. In fact, there was an article I read that said, in cancer ward, the entire staff perks up when someone’s brought in with a lymphoma. That kind of a cancer. I mean, they were determined to pull him over. There were times when they thought they had, but the MRSA, the infection that exists in a hospital, took him down in some ways and he had no immune system to fight it off. So it was rough.

David: I stood there and he couldn’t talk. His mouth was frozen. I don’t know whether he was still there or not, but I wanted to say things. I couldn’t say them. And then I also, I go back and I look at those times and I think, golly, that’s really hard to live through those things. And I’m not proud of how I was. I think I was angry.

Karen: Well, you are human, but David, the truth is that a lot of marriages break up when a child dies like that. It’s just too much stress on a marriage that is fragile to begin with. So one of the things we want to do today is talk about some of those difficult circumstances, but the lessons that we’ve learned in life, a married life together, 60 years of marriage and letting people know that there have been plenty of wretched, you know, valleys of the dark, dark spots.

David: Yeah. I would say looking back on the time with Jeremy, God is forgiving. He’s understanding, patient. I did not act my best during those days. I had to somehow get what was happening out.

Karen: You were human, honey. I mean, you’re just basically human. We have to accept our humanity. You have times you go and close the door and yell and hour and shout and cry and take it out on the people who are around you.

David: Act like a little boy.

Karen: I don’t think you should feel badly about that.

David: The lessons we have learned, that’s kind of a different question. To finish that off about Jeremy, people go through very hard things. I don’t even know how to comfort them sometimes. You just go through them and somehow you make it. I don’t like the idea that you see your child die.

Karen: Well, I think a major lesson we’ve learned as we look over our entire life is that we had the capability to function together as a team. Now, you and I are very different from one another. Our dispositions, the way we approach life, the way we respond to life.

David: You’re just saying the understatement of the year, what you say, we’re quite different.

Karen: Yeah. When we got married, I was 18, you were 24. I was a spontaneous young artist without knowing that I was an artist in certain ways and tried in many ways, but instinctive, impulsive. Yeah, a learner. There’s no doubt that even in a young age, I was a learner. You were a strategist. You were single-minded. You were focused. You could come up with a scheme and fulfill it and carry it out and make all the wheels move to carry that one scheme out.

David: Get people to agree with you.

Karen: Get people to agree with you. Work with you. Yeah, they wanted to agree with you and they wanted to work with you. So that was a natural born quality, but our differences meant that we had to learn to become complimentary rather than contrary.

You know, he’s doing it this way. And there have been plenty of those moments, those kind of very frank discussions. But I think a major lesson that we learned being so different from one another that was there was extraordinary power and energy and ways to do God’s work in the world. And I think that was one of the things that really pulled us together is that we had this common cause.

David: Yes, I would agree with that. In fact, that’s probably what I would say. We had this Kingdom of God focus and the Lord allowed us both to be involved in ministry.

Karen: Yes, as a team together. We didn’t always work in the same things together. But the goal, the common cause of being part of that.

David: Really, and you started to write.

Karen: Yeah, I did. I always wanted to write.

David: When I was a spoken ministry, years was a written ministry. You did speak, but basically…

Karen: After I’ve written, I ask authors to come and speak and you speak on the topic in your book. I mean, that happens a lot, which was great because I got exposed to the body of Christ all across the country and, you know, in some places around the world because of those invitations. But my point is that we had dedicated our marriage and our lives to advancing the kingdom of God. So despite all of our differences, the great cause, the common cause of our life was to do that work. And I think that was one of the great lessons we learned was how powerful that is.

David: What’s interesting to me though, Karen, I don’t think that lesson came into focus until more recent years. In God’s providence, a life coach, a Jewish woman from the Pittsburgh area, she became a life coach for us.

Karen: She was taking her credentialing in systems coaching and was actually being coached by her daughter. She had to have a couple or some systems to coach to learn her skills in or practice her skills in. And then Melissa said, “Well, why don’t you take on my mom and my dad?” They need help. Of course, I think she knew that, but I think she thought we would be amenable to that kind of a journey, which we were. I mean, it was an extraordinary process.

David: But this wonderful woman, she would ask us, “How is the we doing?”

Karen: Yeah, we had never been asked that question before.

David: My eyes kind of crossed. We, what do you mean? And then I would start to answer and she said, I didn’t ask you how you are doing. I want to know how the “we” is doing. How is the team doing?

Karen: And so that focused us into really thinking, because we knew every month when we had our call with her, that’s the question she would be asking. And so we would say, “How is the we doing?”

David: You know, and I don’t think we ever purposely thought that way.

Karen: No, not that distinctly.

David: And then she would work with where the rough edges were. And I found myself thinking, “This is very new and different. I’ve never thought about us as we.”

Karen: thought of ourselves as a couple or a team or husband and wife, but never it’s

David: the more we became a we, the better we were as individuals as well, which was very fascinating. And she hammered that thing home so many times that I will never forget that the rest of my life. I think it’s one of the huge lessons. And I’m not sure, apart from her insisting that we respond “we” wise, I don’t think we would ever have gotten there on our own.

Karen: No, no. I heard an interview recently. It was talking. about married women who leave marriages and in this COVID-19 situation there have been a lot of disastrous break-up.

David: Long established marriages.

Karen: Yeah, a lot more battering going on in homes and it’s been really really bad. But I heard this woman say that more women leave marriages because they’re not happy.

They’re just unhappy in their marriages and that’s one of the major causes that they get. When you’re working as a we, one of the things you do in that kind of commitment is you work to create environments and do things that will make one another happy. So I mean that seems to be a natural outgrowth of thinking that way.

David: As a we.

Karen: As a we, yeah.

David: And a we is more than one plus one. Once the one plus one become a we, it’s more than two. It’s like five.

Karen: Thanks a lot for that math. I didn’t quite keep up with it. My math skills are not great but I got the gist..

David: Good. Well anyway, we’re talking about the we and that comment that you made sets up another question that I was wanting to ask. Were there times in our marriage where we weren’t happy with one another? Where we could have gone down.

Karen: Yeah, that rocky road.

David: And there’s no question. And in my mind, you’ll say yes. Right. And in your mind, it might surprise you for me to say.

Karen: I am rather surprised for times you were unhappy. Well, I think the midlife years are really rough. I think partly because there is a personality growth that we either go through or choose not to go through in midlife. We have lived long enough to say, “What is the meaning of who I am and how do I function best in the world and why am I not functioning at my best?”

What’s keeping me from it. It’s often that marital relationship. And so you begin to blame the other party or cast aspersions of one another. So I think there was enough of that in our midlife years. In fact, I wrote a book, Lonely No More That Got Me Into a Hope, A Trouble in the Religious Marketplace. And it was a memoir.

David: Well, it got you into trouble because you were honest in terms of saying, “There were problems in our marriage.” And most of those problems were David’s.

Karen: I’m not sure I framed it quite like that. I was working with you, middle years where you were really addicted to workaholism. It was an addiction.

David: It was an addiction like alcoholism.

Karen: Exactly.

David: I could not stop working.

Karen: But you were in the perfect environment to feed into that because you had a daily radio broadcast. And I think where I failed you was I just assumed that your capacities were such because you were so good at it that you could turn out a daily radio broadcast every day.

David: It was grueling.

Karen: It was grueling. And instead of saying things like, “Why don’t you repeat a series? It’s good to hear something again. Why are we assuming that everyone listens to us every day?” Any suggestions like that, I just sort of went along with it. But I did feel very alone because your concentration was on getting that broadcast. I mean, it was nothing to be invited out to a dinner party or a social event. And on the way there, you would say, “We have to leave at nine o’clock.” Well, who leaves at dinner at nine o’clock? It’s because you had to get back and get your broadcast ready for the next day. So you could be in the studio at eight o’clock usually every morning.

David: Six days a week.

Karen: So I was taken with kids in my own writing and I had friends you had never met, you know, very close friends of mine because of your schedule. I was taken up with that life and discontent with the workaholism part of all of that because you could not stop.

David: In fact, I would say… I kept adding things all the time.

Karen: Yeah, right.

David: I would say that that really upset you. And if there hadn’t been changes, it would cause real problems. At the same time that that was happening, I was thinking you were not the supportive person you should be. And other people were more supportive, whether they were on the staff or whatever. It was a very big problem.

Karen: Yeah, it could have been very treacherous. So I do believe because we had this common cause that you and I were very careful during those years of not becoming attracted to other people or having inappropriate affections or those sorts of things that do often happen during those passages in a marriage. So God protected us from that sort of thing because of our major goal. But those were the lessons that we had to learn. That was a rough patch.

David: If you could do anything differently, what would you do? I would say, and it doesn’t have to be something I think about all that much because it comes to me immediately, I would say we should have gone for help. For some reason, I think I was too insecure, too embarrassed.

Karen: Well, I think we handled most of our problems well. I mean, we had a capacity, but I wouldn’t say help as much as I think we should have found an older mentoring couple. A spiritual mentor.

David: That’s what I’m talking about.

Karen: But they’re the ones who sort of walk beside you in the normal aspects of life. And when I was chair of the board of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, we had a whole executive staff who were in midlife. And so one of the edicts I insisted on was that each as ministering couples had to find one older ministering couple who then would be the couple that walked along beside them like a mentoring couple. And I think that came out of the fact that we had never put that into place in our lives.

David: You made all of the top executives at Intervarsity do that, but you didn’t make us do that.

Karen: No.

David: That’s funny. Now, why did that happen?

Karen: Yeah, I should have done that too. But it was, I think that there were several rocky marriages that were beautifully walked through some of the tough stuff they had to face by those mentoring couples who had faced their own stuff and were ready to, from a spiritual base and a psychological base and an emotional base, be there for those couples as they went through that midlife passage. I feel good about that decision and the fact I feel really good that they all did it. I just think that was great.

David: Well, you gave the edict.

Karen: I did.

David: Do it or otherwise, three years in the electric chair.

Karen: Or my disapproval. The power of positional authority. But I think that’s the thing I would have definitely done differently. We would have chosen a mentoring couple, not necessarily when things were bad, but just for all of the life passages.

David: I feel like the woman who was life coach for us, that went on for a long time. She was very, very helpful. And I think we need to call her again, not because necessarily things are bad, but if nothing else is to say, thank you.

Karen: Thank you. It was wonderful.

David: The good thing about that, it allowed me to talk with someone else with you. We did it by phone. So you were in one bedroom. I was in my study and we were both on the phone.

Karen: Well, because of audio interruptions, you can’t have both people on a different phone in the same room. That was nice because you couldn’t get the scowls and the dirty looks.

David: After a while, you begin to talk quite frankly about how you’re doing. Good not to have to see you. How you’re saying some of your feelings.

Karen: Anyway, these are some of the lessons we have learned.

David: I would say that these last years have been the best years that we have ever known.

Karen: I agree with that. We often say these are the best years. Now, we’re in the last part of our life and every day, well, of course, every day is a possibility of losing one another. But you know it more at this time of life. One of us could go in our sleep or there will be sudden physical crisis and then we’re dealing with truly end of life scenario. So we are grateful for every single day we have, but it’s a joyful time. We spend a lot of time laughing.

I have a little thing I say is, “The bed still rocks, but it’s because we’re laughing in the middle of the night.” You’ll say to me, “You awake. You awake. Yeah, we’re both awake.” Then there’ll be some funny thing that we’ll talk about that happened that day and just lying bed, hollering the bed shaking.

David: I think we feel good about our lives.

Karen: Yeah, we do. Feel good about our marriage. Not feeling good in terms of the conversation because it went so fast we need to stop, but it does mean that we have a year, if we want to think about it that way, the 60th anniversary or whenever we would like, we can come back and visit more questions. Hopefully, as we talk, it’s not just reminiscing, but it’s beneficial to our listeners as well. Thank you for being part of us as we just kind of talk about things before we go.

Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all lowercase letters, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2021 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.