The Marriage To The Max Podcast

EPISODE 20 – CONFLICT 201

We appreciate your ongoing listening to “Marriage to the Max”, the weekly marriage podcast hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. This week, we revisit the topic of managing conflict within marriage. As always, it’s important for us to emphasize that EVERY married couple will encounter the challenges of disagreement—it’s a very normal situation in marriage. Conflict is simply a difference of perspective, and no two people see things exactly the same way. If they did, they would be clones of each other!

We hope to give you further practical insights this week to make typical conflict challenges more navigable. And, by the way, if you have additional insights that have been effective for you and your spouse, we would love to hear about them! Please feel free to contact us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org and let us know what has worked well for you in your marriage. After all, we’re all part of a growing healthy marriage community!

Thanks again to Grant Peterson of Southhill Communications and to our very talented engineer/funky musical interlude composer Zach Alkire. Each week, they help us bring “Marriage to the Max” to you and, hopefully, make it a much more pleasant experience—in spite of us! Also, you should know that this episode concludes the trilogy of Brett-as-a-sick-as-a-dog-co-host. Whew! Thanks for the prayers. Feeling much better now!

EPISODE 19 – YOUR COMMUNICATION IQ

Welcome back to “Marriage to the Max”, the marriage podcast hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. In this week’s episode, we discuss “Your Communication IQ“. As a married couple, how do you currently communicate together? This is an important topic that needs constant unpacking within married couples. In marriage (or in any other personal relationship), you can’t take effective communication for granted. Honest conversation and frank self-evaluation can be quite beneficial for improving intimacy between husband and wife.

Again, Brett was sick during the recording of this episode. Apologies! Hope you enjoy it anyway. And if you’d like to contact us, please feel free to do so at thehursts@homeencouragement.org. We’d love to hear from you!

EPISODE 18 – REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS IN MARRIAGE

Thanks for listening to “Marriage to the Max”, a weekly podcast about marriage hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. This week, our topic is “Realistic Expectations in Marriage”. Now, of course, we believe with God at the center of your marriage relationship, that all things are possible—we believe that marriage offers a couple one joyful opportunity after another! Yet, many folks head into marriage with skewed expectations about what is truly satisfying within a marriage relationship. We hope that this episode is helpful to encourage couples to set their sights high, but to also extend grace to one another whenever we have days that are not our best.

Full disclosure: Brett was quite sick with flu-like symptoms during the recording of this episode. Hopefully, it won’t be too distracting!

Thanks again to Grant Peterson of South Hill Communications for helping us go “live” each week. We’re also grateful to our fantastic engineer, Zach Alkire, for providing funky incidental music to each episode. Opening and closing theme by Loopsound.

EPISODE 17 – INTERVIEW WITH JAMES AND RACHEL POYSKY

This week on “Marriage to the Max”, we bring you a rich marriage conversation with our good friends, James and Rachel Poysky. James earned an MA in Psychology, an MA in Christian Leadership, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. James is a Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy board member and Clinical Assistant Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and is in private practice. Rachel is an ordained pastor and earned her Masters degree in Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary. She currently serves at Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston as Children’s Ministries Director.

The Poyskys have two beautiful children, Joel and Hallie. In November 2005, Joel was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). Since their family received this diagnosis, the Poyskys have been on the frontlines of the fight against Muscular Dystrophy and have helped and encourage people literally around the world. In this podcast episode, they shared solid insights with us about marriage health. We knew that this conversation would benefit not only married couples with special needs children, but also all married couples.

You may now subscribe to “Marriage to the Max” on iTunes for free. Thank you so much for listening and for being students of healthy marriages!

EPISODE 16 – RETURN OF THE MARRIAGE QUOTES

Welcome back to “Marriage to the Max”, a podcast hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. This week, we return to an experiment we tried a few episodes ago. We are bringing you again some hand-selected quotes about marriage from famous people and some not-so-famous people—and then we are subjecting you to our comments about those quotes! When we tried this format a few weeks ago, we got some positive feedback from some listeners who said they enjoyed this approach, so we thought we would try it again. If you find this interesting at all, we will continue to have periodic conversations like this one again in the future. If you DON’T like this particular format, it will be banished permanently! So please let us know what you think.

“Marriage to the Max” is now available on iTunes, thanks to the efforts of Grant Peterson of Southhill Communications and our engineer Zach Alkire. You may now subscribe to “Marriage to the Max” for free and receive new episodes each week directly to your electronic device of choice. And you can continue to find all the existing individual episodes here at www.marriagetothemax.org . Also, if you are an iTunes customer, please do us a favor and rate the broadcast on iTunes which will help us get the podcast out to a wider audience.

Also, if you would like to contact us for any reason, feel free to do so at thehursts@homeencouragement.org. We would love to encourage you and your family in any way we can. Opening and closing themes provided by Loopsound.

EPISODE 15 – INTROVERTS VS. EXTROVERTS

This week’s episode is entitled “Introverts vs. Extroverts” and deals with the challenges and opportunities of marriages and households that incorporate the strengths and growth opportunities of both general types of temperaments. There’s a lot of truth to the old phrase “opposites attract”. It is definitely the rule, rather than the exception. And one of the most blatant examples of this is in the world of having different temperamental approaches to life. These differences are often what attract us to someone who views life through different lenses than we do. In those early years, these opposite qualities seem to add more depth and richness to the relationship. But as we begin to be married longer, if we’re not extending grace to one another, these differences can also cause quarrelsome conflict.

As the old saying goes, “If the two of you were created exactly alike, one of you would be unnecessary.” In most situations, God intended us to be very different from one another so that we would add more to the collective whole of the marriage. Through tremendous understanding of our spouse’s temperament (as well as understanding our own) we can begin to embrace one another again, much like we did in our dating years. Therefore, we encourage you to become students of temperaments, how they work and how they can help you understand better to live in harmony with your spouse.

Once again, thanks for listening. And we’d love your feedback! You can leave your comments here or contact us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org

EPISODE 14 – SETTING GOALS WITH YOUR SPOUSE

Happy New Year to you and your family! And thanks for listening to “Marriage to the Max”, hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. We are so grateful for all the new listeners to our marriage podcast since we launched back in October 2012. We’re even more surprised that most of you tell us you can’t wait to hear the next one! Thanks for your feedback–it really helps us!

In this MTTM episode, appropriately enough, we talk about setting new goals with your spouse. What better time to do that than at the beginning of a brand new year? People often complain a lot about New Year’s resolutions, but by merely setting some long-term targets for your marriage, you’ll be quite surprised what God can do within the course of a year. So, with that in mind, what kinds of things would you like to see improved in your marriage? What would you like to see change possibly within a year’s time? Anything could happen! More importantly, what are YOU willing to do to see that change take place in your marriage? Are you willing to even do something drastic… like pray for the strength to change yourself?

Our suggestion would be to go grab a Starbucks together, or just take some quality time today if you can, and dream again as a couple. Or at least, begin to talk honestly once again. If you’ve been struggling recently in your marriage, you could begin again by having an honest conversation about some new ideas that together you might want to commit to prayer. And then get started. Pray each day for the ability to make even those small degree changes so that you can re-kindle the love you once had in your marriage. We would be very interested in hearing what ideas you might be considering together to take your marriage to the next level. Feel free to share with us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org.

We’re ready for much more fun in 2013 with “Marriage to the Max”. As always, we are so grateful to our engineer Zach Alkire. Zach has been a real cheerleader to us and has also supplied us with little music snippets for the middle breaks of the podcasts. We never know what he’s going to come up with–but we do know he’s very talented, brilliant, and a total joy to be around. We’re also thankful always for Grant Peterson of South Hill Communications. Grant built Home Encouragement’s website, is an incredible friend and encourager, and is a dedicated board member. We wouldn’t have had the nerve to launch this podcast series this past year without their help. Looking to more excitement in 2013!

EPISODE 13 – INTERVIEW WITH DEBORAH KRISTEN

Merry Christmas and welcome back to “Marriage to the Max”, a marriage podcast, hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. We hope you and your family are celebrating this very important day together in peace and with great thanksgiving!

Our podcast today is an interview taped earlier this year with our very good friend, Deborah Kristen. Deborah is the Program Director of The Clearing, a retreat experience for married couples that is among the most powerful of its kind in the country. Deborah is the person to whom potential participants turn as they explore the idea of coming to a Marriage Intensive at The Clearing. She has answers to the many questions that couples have about marriage intensives and she is quite gifted at making folks feel comfortable! She brings to her role a heart for counseling as well as a Masters degree in Biblical Counseling from the Luther Rice University and Seminary. She is also a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin (Go Horns!). The Hursts have worked with Deborah Kristen on many joint citywide projects in Houston for the purpose of raising awareness of the priority of healthy marriage for married couples. We are true partners with Deborah in ministry and it is quite an honor to bring you this conversation on “Marriage to the Max”.

Thank you again for listening! May your family be blessed tremendously as we honor the birth of our blessed Savior Jesus Christ. We pray for God’s grace and mercies to you and your loved ones during this holiday season.

EPISODE 12 – A MARRIAGE OF GRACE

We’re so glad for your continued listening of our marriage podcast, “Marriage to the Max”, hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. And we greatly appreciate your ongoing feedback and comments!

We have entitled this week’s conversation, “A Marriage of Grace”. When we are in ongoing dialogue with struggling couples, or even couples in critical crisis, we very frequently hear the desire from so many of these couples to have more peace in their relationship. These spouses want to be free of the escalation of tension in their everyday experience. We hear these couples desperately crying out for more grace in their marriage. Fortunately, we believe that also God wants married couples to enjoy grace within marriage and that He can tremendously assist in that process.

The word “grace” is a beautiful word with many historical definitions. Our favorite definition of grace is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification”. In other words, grace is a holy word, a holy concept. Without divine assistance with God, none of us could even know Him, let alone enjoy the blessings that He offers us. Receiving God’s blessings of love is truly the most important definition of grace. However, grace can also be defined as having a charming or attractive trait or characteristic. Going even further, grace could also be defined as having “a disposition toward an act of kindness or courtesy.” In marriage, dispositions toward acts of kindness can go a long way! But how does one get a disposition or attitude toward kindness?

We believe one of the greatest roadblocks to the way of marital health and strength is our own selfishness. Right behind that reality would be our own blindness regarding that selfishness. It’s truly remarkable how we can forget how strong our wills can be. When we are reading Scripture, it doesn’t take long for us to be reminded of how quickly we can drift each day toward rationalizing our own designs, our own ways of behaving or looking at life. This wayward “drift” causes us to miss out the fullness of life that God intended and desires for us to experience….in all of our relationships. We do know that a better plan is available to couples, if they’re both willing. We hope that today’s episode will encourage each of us to look to the Lord, our Creator, for our ultimate satisfaction. This will allow us to extend grace, understanding and forgiveness to our spouses when they don’t live up to our own expectations or standards.

Thank you for listening so far. We greatly appreciate it. Feel free to contact us anytime at thehursts@homeencouragement.org if we can be of assistance to your family in any way. And we are also grateful to Grant Peterson of South Hill Communications as well as our engineer Zach Alkire for their invaluable assistance in getting this podcast to you. Opening and closing theme songs by Loopsound.

EPISODE 11 – PROTECTING AGAINST AFFAIRS

Welcome back to “Marriage to the Max”, a marriage podcast hosted by Brett & Kellie Hurst of Home Encouragement. We’re always grateful that you join us for these podcast episodes. We hope you’ll continue to make it part of your weekly routine. We will continue to shoot for releasing a new episode every Tuesday.

This week’s topic is “Affair Proofing Your Marriage”. Actually, we had some debate about this title after we recorded this conversation. To be technically accurate, there is no surefire way to affair-proof your marriage. Affairs can happen to the best of couples and families can get quickly blindsided when they least expect it. Fortunately, we at Home Encouragement have seen miraculous marriage healings in many, many of these hurting situations. Because of the tendencies that all human beings have toward brokenness, weakness, and even self-centeredness, no one is completely immune from the things that might sneak in and compromise a marriage relationship. However, we believe there are practical steps that can be put in place that will greatly minimize the chances of an affair destroying a marriage. We hope to be able to provide some of those tips in this week’s episode.

Make no mistake about it, an affair is usually devastating to a marriage and the recovery process is quite difficult and takes time. But there is great hope available for couples. If you are struggling in any way with an affair-related issue in your marriage, we advocate that you seek out prayer and professional help. One good recommendation is to contact The Affair Recovery Center in Austin, Texas at www.affairrecovery.com. The folks there are world-renowned in this field and may possibly have the best tools and resources available for recovering from affairs and other forms of infidelity.

As always, props to Zach Alkire (engineer) and Grant Peterson of South Hill Communications for helping us get this week’s MTTM episode up and running. Week in and week out, we couldn’t do it without you!
And thanks to our listeners (you know who you are)! We’d love to hear from you. Either comment here or email us at thehursts@homeencouragement.org.

God bless you through the Christmas season.