What advice would you give her just as a way to best prepare for marriage one day, knowing sometime in your future that might be something you want?

Yeah.

So what I always tell young women who ask me this question is acquire skills.

Like spend all this excess energy that you have that is I want to be married energy and and use that energy to acquire all of the skills that you possibly can and become a person who knows how to grab life and take ownership of your faith.

and repent to people that you know you're already in relationship with.

There are already people that you can practice good relationship with by learning to confess into them, to have conversation with them and not just live here.

There are so many things that you can do to become... a more alive person and none of that stuff is ever going to go to waste in your life it's not going to stop when you get married that suddenly you don't have to grow anymore so start now and and every skill that you acquire is going to bless your future life whether you're married or single I also think that a lot of women, single and married, are passive about their faith in a really weird way.

Only if we're

And I would just love to hear kind of the backstory of wife school and what you've noticed as you've been teaching this.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, um, I've been, I've been thinking and podcasting a little bit about marriage stuff for maybe a year and a year and several months.

I think me and Abigail were talking about it on home fire some last spring, I remember.

And I was reading some books that were really helpful to me.

Some, a secular book, a few secular books actually that I really liked and, um, and some just Christian classics.

caring right right because that's the only definition of patriarchy that they will allow it's right yeah and so and you know it is just to I mean, to feed that, that scare tactic.

awesome.

Yeah, but with the wife and the mom thing, I think as soon as I got married and as soon as, you know, the first child or two came along, I just realized I'm actually not great at this job, first of all, at managing my home or my, you know, training my children.

This is not an automatic skill that I have just because I've wanted to do this my whole life or was even raised homeschooled.

But I also realized... pretty soon, like, contentment and joy in your life is not the automatic result of getting what you want.

And that was a misunderstanding that I had apparently had, that as soon as you get what you want, you will be happy.

You will know how to love your life.

You will know, you know, how to find purpose and meaning in the work that you're doing.

Of how women have respected or disrespected their husbands.

[laughs]

But, but that, that is, essentially it's like learning a, a type of passivity that is needed, but it's not...

That's just step one.

Like, that's just the very first thing.

And there's a very active, um, and creative part of all this, learning to be a happy wife.

One of the things is learning to be this detective who goes hunting for good things to think and say about your husband.

It's, it's, it's like a gratitude, a gratitude journey, a lot of this, and it's, it applies to not just your husband, but all of life, which has been kind of one of my big, big lessons, big soapboxes from the past like three years probably, is just r- realizing that, um, gra- gratitude and, and just being a grumbler and a complainer is you choosing to look at life a certain way, and that you have that choice every day, that every day of your life you have the choice in how to, how you look at, at each, each thing that God sends your way.

Yeah.

Yeah

...

the, the whole point of these, these things that we're looking at all day, um, is to, to open up an opportunity for someone to sell us something, um, or for someone to purchase some of our time and attention.

Um, and so g- given that so many of the women our age are spending many hours on there, I, it, it doesn't surprise me that contentment is a, is I think a, a bigger issue than it's been in the past.

Um, I just think-Every single, every single image and message that we, that we see, especially on our phones, is designed to make us feel there's a lack because the person who's showing it to us is about to tell us what that lack is and how they're gonna help us fill that lack.

Does that make sense? Like, that is what, that's what sales is.

Sales is you making someone feel the, the pain of what they, what they, they need, and then saying, "And I have that thing that I'm gonna give you that's gonna, gonna fill that need." Does that make sense? So I d- I guess just, um, we do live in an era where we're, we are navigating more hours of our day are spent looking at that kind of an, of a message and being given that kind of a message.

Mm-hmm

How did you meet your husband? How did you find yourself in Christianity? What does your journey look like?

Well, I was raised in a Christian home, um, and I was- I was one of seven siblings, so it was a- it was a really sweet, conservative family that I was raised in.

Um, but I- I left the faith as a young adult, just walked completely away, and, um, was struggling with a lot of things.

In fact, the first chapter of Hemlock, um, is pretty autobiographical.

The patient becomes a Christian after she has kinda walked the wild side for a while, and I came out to this little tiny church out here in Middle, Tennessee, to get some counseling for just depression and other things, and ended up being converted in- under that biblical counseling, um, with the man who's now co-pastored with my husband.

So my husband was actually a- a, um, pastoral trainee at the time in the church, so it was- it took a year or two of me being out here before, you know, we became friends and eventually-... you know, he asked me out, but-

Mm-hmm.

And people counsel us all the time 'cause you're always giving advice.