Marriage Links Podcast #3 - Conflict

Another Podcast - Episode 2

Here is episode 2. An interview with Tom and Debbie Holley. They have an amazing story of struggle and healing in their marriage. Their love for each other is so evident. What and awesome example of lasting love.

http://www.marriagelinks.org/MarriageLinks%20Podcast002.mp3

Barry's New Job

Sue and I have been loving working together in ministry. We look forward to Marriage Links growing and expanding its reach and impact. We have been blessed to have so many people supporting us and we are thankful to the churches who have invited us to be a part of their ministry.

We are in our third church and are hoping to start an extended relationship with another church here in Kirkwood. Our first podcast was a blast and we've gotten a ton of great feedback. We look forward to doing that once a month.

All this has been great but in this economy we have learned that money is tight for everyone (I know you're not surprised). As a ministry that relies heavily on donations we have come to the realization that I'll need to take a job with a consistent pay check. It is our hope that people will still see the benefit in supporting us in ministry as we continue.

The job - I'm going to be working for a local company here in Kirkwood that handles credit card processing for small/medium sized businesses. I'll be doing sales for them. It is a great opportunity to work for someone who understands my heart for ministry. The company is small with a ton of potential for growth. I'm excited about it. The job starts May 18th. (Do you know anyone in retail? ;) )

Thanks for your prayers.
Barry

MarriageLinks Episode 1

This is our first ever Marriage Links Podcast. We had a great group of folks come out and join us for lunch at Mike Duffy's here in beautiful Kirkwood, MO while we recorded it. We hope many more will enjoy it online.
This episode is just us but usually we'll be interviewing couples and marriage "experts" and get their take on marriage.
Each month, we'll also be answering questions from you. Send your questions to barry@marriagelinks.org.

Much Love,
Barry and Sue

What needs to change?

As marriages are failing and couples are just surviving, I often wonder, "what needs to change?" I continue to encounter couples who are struggling. I just can't help but think the one thing that is missing for these couples is preparation. Sue and I have met with a government funded program that seems great but (sorry to say) it isn't reaching couples. When you accept government funding, you accept their restrictions as well (that's a entirely different blog).

What we feel like we need to do is have an impact in one community and for that impact to spread from that community into its city and then beyond. We want to work with couples and remind them of their commitment to one another and help them discover (rediscover) the joy of marriage. We want to train couples before they are married and continue working with them for years to come.

As Sue and I work in the "real world" our heart remains bonded to our dream of doing full-time ministry. We are blessed with flexibility but we long to focus more on Marriage Links. Funding is tough to come by these days. Please pray for God to help provide a way for us to focus.

Stay close!
Barry

Teaching at St Pauls

Sue and I just completed week three of teaching at St Paul's e-free church here in St Louis. We have three more weeks to go. There are between 65-70 people coming each week and we have really been impressed with their participation. We taught on the importance of being a good listener last week.

Good communication is linked to every aspect of your marriage. Money issues, intimacy issues, you name it, it is rarely really about that. It is really about the fact that you aren't clearly communicating with each other what your feelings are. Before you blame it on your spouse look at yourself and think about what you're communicating to him/her on a daily basis. Is listening to you a chore or a treat? Are you just unloading information and feelings or are you entering into a conversation? Are you asking good questions and providing a good vibe with your body language?

Find time to sit down and talk with each other this week. Dream about future plans together. Talk about when you felt most loved last week.

Hope you have a great week.

Barry and Sue

Ozarks Retreat

We just returned from our first Marriage Links retreat. The group included couples who have been married between 18 - 38 years. Sue and I were impressed with their willingness to learn and share. In every teaching situation we expect to learn ourselves, but I am so thankful for how much learned with this very special group of people.

We covered active listening, personality types & love languages, and intimacy in three 1.5 hour sessions. It may sound much like a fictional movie, but it is true that we experienced tears of laughter and tears of pain. A retreat creates the perfect atmosphere for breaking down barriers and making us comfortable. It was great to see couples grow closer and learn new things about each other. I look forward to keeping in touch with these couples for years and years to come.

A special thanks goes out to the Christie and Larry Tietjen for opening up their home. What an amazing setting for a retreat! And thanks to Bette & Christi for helping with preparation work and cooking & serving the meals. It was a tremendous group effort. Sue & I are so grateful for the many ways you served us this weekend.

All the best,
Barry and Sue

Sue is Awesome

Sue had a job interview yesterday with Westminster Christian Academy here in St Louis.  They are in need of a permanent sub for the remainder of the year for two English teachers.   They called her today to offer her the job and she starts tomorrow.  Nothing like jumping right into the fire.  Gives her less time to worry about it. : )  

My wife is amazing.  Hasn't been in a classroom for almost 10 years and I can say without a doubt she'll be back in Mrs. Kraft mode in no time.  She is an amazing teacher and the school and kids are going to love her.  Well.... the students will love her as long as they stay on her good side.   Trust me...I know.

You can send Sue good wishes and congratulations at sue@marriagelinks.org

Update on the Krafts:  We are sleeping in our new home tonight!  First night in the new place.  The kids are actually sleeping in their bunk bed as I type.  Ahhhhh  As much as people joke about mother-in-laws, Sue's mom has been the BEST!  We are forever thankful to MaMa for putting up with us for so long.

Update on Marriage Links:  We met with the Bridget from St Louis Healthy Marriages yesterday.   They are a federally funded marriage education organization.  Bridget wants us to consider being trainers for their marriage prep program.  It sounds like an awesome opportunity and we look forward to talking with her more.  

Update on Cedar Tree Bible Church : What is that? Some of you might be asking.  We are going to start gathering  a group of folks on Feb 8th here in Kirkwood.   We'll talk about that more soon.

Thanks for your prayers.  God is good!

Christmas Time

I hope you had a great Christmas. We had a blast. Will and Luke were "doing" advent every night building anticipation towards the arrival of Baby Jesus and Santa. Two of their favorite people arriving on the same day. ROCK ON!
We baked cookies during the day on Christmas Eve and surprised some friends and neighbors with cookies and Christmas caroling later that evening. We even made all of the firemen at the firehouse come out and listen to Luke and Will's version of Jingle Bells. It was a lot of fun and a tradition we look forward to building on every year.
Gifts were simple this year and nobody cared. Will figures the reason Santa didn't need to bring him a Wii was because Grandpa and Grandma already had one that he could play with. What a cool kid.
We went to Iowa after Christmas and got to enjoy some snow and time with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandpa and grandma.

update - - We are hoping to find a place of our own very soon. Looking at a lot of homes as we decide between renting and buying. Yikes.

Fight to save marriage

There is such a call right now to "save marriage". Prop 8 in California was a fight to keep the definition of marriage as that between a husband and a wife. While I agree with that definition completely I think this "fight" is taking our eyes off where we should be focusing.

We are fighting to save the definition of marriage but we aren't fighting to save marriages. As we are so willing to take up the torch to fight against men marrying men and women marrying women, our marriages in our churches are failing more than they are succeeding. Some couples are just going through the motions of marriage while others are just giving up all together.

Maybe we should be focusing on providing society with a good model of what marriage is. If I was on the outside looking in right now why would I want to be married? Here we (Christians) are telling the world what marriage is supposed to be but we aren't living out what we are talking about.

It just isn't right. I think Satan is having a ball with this and laughing as the Christians end up looking like hypocrites again as we tell the world what marriage is supposed to be.

Ministry Pains

Sue and I made a decision to follow our passion and make a run at starting our own ministry. It has been a journey and a huge learning experience. It has taken way longer than we thought it would take and has been way harder than we thought it would be. Aren't there a lot of things in life that seem to go that way?

We just want to have an impact in people's lives and can't believe how much front end work there is to do. Meeting with pastors, meeting with other ministry leaders, talking with couples, putting together boards, sitting with accountants, going back and forth with attorneys, on and on.

Then just as we start a ministry that counts on people donating money, the economy crumbles and people tighten their purse-strings. It makes it all very interesting.

There are great things happening in the midst of all the questions and tough times though. We have one church that has invited us to come in and do a 6-week marriage focus in February. We have a retreat in the works. We'll be starting a pre-marriage group in January. We have another church hoping to do an extended focus on marriage. We have some great meetings scheduled in the next couple of months. So we are thankful as we move ahead.

Thanks for reading. We covet your prayers and ask for God's provision.

Pray for Aidyn

Matt and Kristin Wooley are close friends of ours from Colorado. They taught our MarriagePlus course. We got some horrible news yesterday that Aidyn, their oldest daughter, has a tumor at at the base of her brain. The doctors believe it is cancerous. She is in surgery as I write this. They are the greatest family and I just can't imagine what they are going through.


Please stop and say a little prayer for them.

Also, hug those around you that you love a little harder today.


I wish you a blessed Thanksgiving.

Here is a link to Aidyn's blog http://www.prayforaidyn.blogspot.com/

Will turns 6!

Our family celebrated Will's 6th birthday at the St. Louis zoo Build A Bear workshop. It was a chilly day, but the cold couldn't dampen our son's enthusiasm for exploring the zoo and visiting all his favorite animals. The memories made that day will surely stay vivid in our minds for some time. Typically on Will's birthday, Barry and I reflect on God's goodness for changing our lives and making us parents. Parenthood has stretched me and challenged me in ways I never thought possible. I often reflect on what God teaches us about His character through the journey of parenting.
Ephesians 3:18-19 says "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God."

Isn't it true that we as parents can't quite understand the depth of our love for our children? God's love for us is perfect and the model we are to take in loving and raising our boys. What a gift! What a privelege!

Trick or Treat

I hope you all had fun trick or treating. Our boys are at a perfect age. They still think it is cool to hang out with mom and dad and I can still convince them to give me half of their candy. We had a blast going from house to house. Our boys practiced their "trick" all week to get ready for Friday night. Will pulled his thumb off about 50 times and Luke perfected the amazing talent of hopping on one foot. Pretty awesome stuff.

For the parents out there, cherish "big moments" with your kids. Even though our kids are only 6 and 4, I can see how fast our kids grow up. I figure we only have about 6 more Halloweens with our kids. I hope they never forget these times. I hope we are doing the right things to make their childhood something they can look back on and remember all the laughter.

update - An amazing encounter on Sunday. We visited a church in St Charles for the first time. I overheard the pastor talking to another new couple that said they just moved from Parker, CO (same place we lived). I introduced myself and we ended up sitting next to them. After several questions we realized we went to the same church and after more questions realized we had several mutual friends and finally realized they had been through Marriage Plus. About 100 people in the entire country have been through Marriage Plus. I imagine there are only two couples in all of St Louis and we just happened to walk into the same church for the first time on the same Sunday and run into each other. Pretty amazing "coincidence". We look forward to following up with them.

Marriage Links is Officially Incorporated

Fed-ex delivered all of our paperwork today. We are official with the state of Missouri and completely filed on the federal side (that portion will take up to 3 months).

It may not seem like a big deal but it feels official now. We have a legit non-profit ministry. We are talking to several people about starting a pre-marriage class.

Just wanted to post a quick update.

I'm off to the Acts 29 bootcamp and assessment this week. I'm excited about this conference as we continue to seek God's direction.

MarriageLinks

MarriageLinks.org is a work in progress. It is up and running and we hope to add content to the site often. We will use this blog to keep you up to date about what's going on with us and what's the status of the ministry. We've been in St Louis for about 4 months and are realizing that things never seem to go as planned, but that is okay.
We have talked with a ton of people and our hope in impacting marriages hasn't changed. The way we will be doing it has never been certain and that is a good thing because it has changed several times.
All our paperwork has been filed with the state and federal offices and MarriageLinks will be its own 501-C-3 soon. This step will hopefully allow us to go out and secure some funding to help us make this dream a reality.
Thanks for reading. We'll be writing again soon.
Barry and Sue

Settling in St Louis

We are settling into our new location and so far, so good. We are living with Sue's mom (Thanks MaMa) and having a blast with the tennis courts and pool right across the street.

I've been getting a few projects and I'll start building my first table here this afternoon.

On the ministry front, we continue to be excited as we meet with folks and talk through our future. The idea of working with couples in the area is more exciting than ever. The need is evident and the support seems to keep building.

We hope to use the next few months to meet with pastors from the area and continue to develop the program. We really feel like pre-marital classes will be our niche as we get our ministry started.

I'd love your feedback and we really need a name. Send us your ideas by either adding a comment here or emailing us at sckraft@gmail.com.

Thanks for your prayers.

Go Cardinals!

Making a Move

So we have finally done it. We are making the move. After much prayer and talking and soul searching and tears and laughter and on and on we have decided to make the move back to St Louis. Sue and I have moved a lot (that's an understatement) in our almost 12 years of marriage.

Just for fun, let's retrace our steps. Prior to marriage Sue was in Houston teaching and I went there for student teaching. After graduating, we lived in Story City, Iowa. We moved from there to Nashville, TN. We then went to Cedar Rapids, IA. Parker, CO was our next stop. From Parker to St Louis, MO. On to Charlotte, NC and now we are loading up for a trip back to St Louis.

You may think we are crazy (and you'd be right) but I stand here today and say I wouldn't trade it for anything. The most important thing we have in this world is relationships. Sue and I have friends all over the country. We look back on our moves and in every city we've lived in we have memories of close friendships. We are blessed with the chance to look at each move and see an impact that God allowed us to have in someone's life.

As great as it has been though, we are ready to settle. We are ready to settle for our kid's sake (Will starts Kindergarten) and for our sake. Sue and I look forward to forging strong friendships. We look forward to investing in an area and having an impact.

St Louis has it good and bad aspects (every place does). Those good aspects though are really really good. We love being close to family. We love the fact that Grandma is right there and Uncle Greg and Aunt Kerry (and of course Thomas and Colin) are close. Iowa is less than a days' drive away for all of my family.

We have close friends in St Louis. Sue's friends from years ago (KHS days). Sue's aunts, uncles and cousins. Our friends from Trinity. Our fellow dog lovers.

We Love the Cardinals, the zoo, the spring, summer and fall (winter stinks). We love the friendliness of people.

Overall it is just a great place and we are excited to be moving there (again).

As we pack up and leave Charlotte, we are sad too. We were here a little over two years and we will miss our friendships. We'll miss our small group that has met nearly every week for the past 14+ months. We have gained friends for life and for that we are so grateful.

To those of you who think we are crazy for moving so much, most likely you are a friend because of our willingness to move. We wouldn't trade our friendship with you for one less stressful move.

Thanks for loving us. Thanks for your prayers.

Barry, Sue and the Boys

God is Providing

Sue and I are still searching for the next step. We have had times of stress and questioning but God has come through in a big way by providing for us. I have been able to get a couple construction jobs through Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/). What an awesome web service. I've heard that the guy who started it has been offered millions to sell it and refuses. He wants to keep it free. Thanks you Mr. Craigslist! I built a table for a couple here in Huntersville. It was a fun project. I have about 3 other jobs lined up right now. I enjoy doing the jobs and it is good $.

My neighbor has his own Marketing/Communications Company and has asked if I'd be willing to seek out some new clients. He and his business partner have a great business plan. They work sort of like General Contractors. They have a pretty large pool of marketing and web folks and they put together a custom team to work with each client. I'm enjoying it and hope to help him for awhile.

So if you know anyone who needs a table or a $25,000+ marketing campaign or website, let me know. I know many of you are always kidding me about having my hand in about 10 different things at a time. You are exactly right. It keeps me on my toes.

A Short Rant

I wrote most of this in an email to a close friend of ours and wanted to share some of these thoughts here. (Thanks for the inspiration Bette!)
I think the church and the world of counseling just have it wrong. Sure marriages need repair at times but why aren't we preparing couples for marriage? Why aren't we giving couples the tools they need to do life together, to serve together to love each other? It is the most important earthly bond and how much do you see churches focusing on it. You see churches once in awhile promote a marriage retreat. Or you see churches have divorce care. I've never met a person who gets married and says, "Man I hope I have an unhappy life now" or I've never seen a instance where the husband or wife get married expecting to fail. Yet with that being the case, half of the marriages end in divorce. The statistics are the same for Christian marriages. Many more aren't fulfilled in their marriage. The sad truth is the majority of marriages simply aren't happy relationships. They are ending in divorce or the couples stick together because of the shame involved in divorce or they stay together for the kids. So if all the couples getting married in our churches want to succeed in their marriage, why aren't they? I believe it is because we aren't preparing them. We aren't giving them the tools to be successful in a marriage relationship.
So what can we do? The issue is obvious. The circumstances are evident. I believe we need to hold churches to a higher expectation. We need churches to demand that couples do more than just get together a few times with the pastor to talk through logistics. We need to do more for these couples during their first few years of marriage.
This issue has captured our hearts more than any other. Trained and devoted couples serve better together, they are better parents, they are more effective in ministry, they are able to work through hard times, on and on.
Marriage Plus is an amazing ministry. We spent a couple days with Gary and Ann Wooley who started Marriage plus in the early 90's. Their couples "training" is effective and the fruit is evident. Teaching couples to become disciples and showing them the importance of community and relationship simply works. 160 couples have completed the 13-15 month marriage plus course in Denver alone over the past 15 years or so. I believe all but 3 are together today. They are active in leadership in churches. They are serving together. They have learned to marry their giftedness and personalities. They know the importance of the listening aspect of communication. They have talked through the tough issues of intimacy.
We would love to help Marriage Plus have a broader impact. We pray that doors open up to allow us to do it. Thanks for your continued prayers.