The September theme for our social media and blog posts is devotion/faith. Gina Craun and her family experienced the ultimate loss, but through it all maintained their faith and devotion to each other and to God. See where it's brought them in the following blog post by Gina.

This was my 3 year old daughter's bold and unquestioning response when I asked her what she learned in her class while I was in service one Sunday.  I laughed and asked her what she meant and, without even looking up from the sucker she was trying desperately to unwrap, she informed me, “They said that Jesus lives in my heart… so I think right now He’s cookin’ in there.”

And you know what… I can’t disagree.

When our oldest son, Cainan, was 2 years old he was playing on the floor with his cars and seemed a bit sluggish.  When I felt his body burning up again, with yet another fever that month, we took him to our family doctor to get some antibiotics.  Little did we know that within 24 hours we would be packing overnight bags and be admitted to the closest children’s hospital. Within hours, our world was turned upside down and the word “leukemia” entered our daily vocabulary.  Because of the strength his specific type of leukemia possessed, chemo alone was not going to be enough.  We began prepping for a bone marrow transplant.  A transplant that our oldest son at 2 would be receiving and our youngest son, at 11 months old, would be donating bone marrow for.

During this time I began an online journal.  It was my goal to find God’s plan and purpose in each day and each step of our journey and share that hope and light with others.  I found such encouragement in this because… you see what you look for.  And I wanted to see what God was cooking up for our family through this.  ​

The most common answer given to us, to the question "What are you struggling with as a couple?" is COMMUNICATION. This month our posts will feature tips, insights, and research related to improving communication.
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By Lavern Nissley
Encompass Executive Director

The topic of communication is pretty broad, so we'll narrow the scope to the 2 basic elements of interpersonal asserting and listening. BOTH are needed in order for communication to be productive.

ASSERTING is expressing your wishes and interests in a positive way - not being aggressive or demanding. It is the opposite of being silent, of pretending to agree, of passive aggression.

LISTENING is hearing to understand what the other person is saying - not interrupting or planning your own response.

There are six animal types that represent common human responses to stress and that interfere with productive communication. Want to know your type(s)?

By: Joe Kowalski
Owner/CEO Empowered Community Services

Most everyone can remember the panic, sudden jolt, and jarring pain of hitting the ground after their friend jumped off the teeter totter when we were kids.

Or that time when you were in a hurry to get home with the groceries. You’re late, it’s raining, and instead of making three trips into the house with the groceries in the rain, you try to carry all 37 bags at one time, only to slip on the pavement sending a week’s worth of groceries all over the garage floor.

What about this one? You are up against a deadline at work, going on 4 hours of sleep and you get a call at 5:30p from your spouse demanding “where are you?”  With everything going on, you forgot to update your calendar with the kids’ recital that you are now going to miss.  
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These lessons on gravity, imbalance, and regret are hard to forget. Unbalanced objects, whether they be playground equipment, people, or the expectations of others, will always fall.
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My wife and I have four children (3 high schoolers still at home,) a new grandson, 3 dogs, and I run my own small business. The demands on my time are many and balance becomes more and more difficult to maintain. By my own admission, I have a lot of work to do when it comes to balance in my life, but the following are a few pieces of advice I’ve come to cherish on this exceedingly difficult subject.

By Kermit Rowe 
Encompass Relationship Facilitator 

If you are looking for objective, empirical evidence that physical fitness leads to marital happiness and endurance, you’ll be looking long and hard. There just isn’t much out there. 

But observation and personal experience offer plenty of evidence that it does. Focus On The Family, one of the preeminent marriage ministries of the 20th and 21st centuries, offers this in a recent article: “Exercise isn’t the answer to every marriage issue, but it will help you to bond on a new level and establish invaluable disciplines, such as perseverance and goal-setting, that can help combat marital fatigue.” ​

By: Hollie Kowalski, Encompass Outreach Coordinator

​At first, I thought it had to be an error. After triple checking my planner, I happily accepted it as our reality. A whole day off! No events, no appointments, no practices, no rushing! WOOHOO!!  But, THEN my mind immediately goes to my to-do list: order groceries, hand wash the delicates, clean the bathroom, prepare a lesson for my small group, start planning next weeks schedule, shop for Easter baskets… Ugh! (Insert hand over face emoji here.) My brain needs an “off” switch! 

By Kermit Rowe 
Encompass Relationship Facilitator 

As we transition into this new year, a question has been on my mind: Did I make the most of my marriage in 2022? 

It’s not a question for the faint of heart. It’s an examining question, a difficult question, and it leads to another question: Will I be honest enough with myself about this question? 
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By Lavern Nissley
​Encompass Executive Director

If you wanted to improve your golf swing or baking skills, you would likely seek quite a different avenue of professional expertise than if you had just suffered a compound fracture.

Relationships and marriages have these same two dimensions of expertise: one is more focused upon healing and therapy, the other upon learning and implementing skills. Let’s dive in and see how these fit together.

By: Jennifer Michael, Executive Assistant

By Kermit Rowe, Encompass Relationship Facilitator

A recent email blast from Family Life came into my inbox asking a question that immediately caught my attention: “Between you and your spouse, who is the one who typically wins arguments?”

 The go-to gut reaction for many of us tends to be a lengthy (or maybe not so lengthy) review of the scorecard we tend to keep of our most recent series of arguments – at least the ones we remember. Why is it so important that we win? Because we want things to go our way, and we are willing to forfeit temporarily a little bit of peace and harmony to get what we want. Besides. nobody likes to lose. Right?
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That led me to another question: “When we win, do we really win?”