You Were Made for This

Relationships during Christmas can be challenging. Your Christmas gift of silence may be the best gift you give this year to people. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 80. It's the first of our December episodes about what we can learn from the relationships we see in the Christmas story that can help us in our own relationships this Christmas. And please be sure to stick around to the end for...

Be thankful for the simple gifts found in relationships. They show us how to relate to God, ourselves, and others. They are a great gift. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 79, our Thanksgiving episode. Imagine for a minute it's Thanksgiving Day here in the US, and you are sitting around the table with your family eating your Thanksgiving dinner, and you ask everyone around the table what they...

Welcome to episode 78, where today we explore an important element of a fulfilling relationship. If you're a new listener to this podcast, you will soon realize that we're all about relationships here. We're all about finding the joy God intends for us in our relationships because that is what He made us for. Our relationship with people, with the world around us, with ourselves, and most importan...

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 77. Before we begin, I need to let you know of 2 computer glitches affecting the podcast, both of which have been fixed. 1.) Prior episodes were only playing the most current episode. 2) You couldn't leave a comment in the "Leave a Reply" box at the bottom of the show notes. Thanks to listeners who pointed out these two problems, which have now been corrected!...

We can participate in All Saints Day by remembering the wise people who've gone before you. Follow their example and become a role model for others. Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode, number 76. It's our annual All Saints Day episode, which we're starting for the first time here at our studios at One Podcast Plaza in New Berlin, Wisconsin. Each year All Saints Day falls on November 1st...

Getting a letter helps people who are feeling isolated & lonely. Composing and mailing our thoughts to someone connects us with them. That's the topic of today's episode. Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today we consider a simple thing we can do to nurture our relationship with people. Some of us are doing better than others in coping with the pandemic we're living through here...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today we talk about relationships during elections, and how we can better care for each other during them. We're doing so at the suggestion of a listener from Pennsylvania. There's something about elections that stirs up emotion in people. And it's not just in Pennsylvania. It's the rest of the world, too. A recent election in Kyrgyzstan, for exa...

Curiosity about others minimizes racism as we minimize our pride. Humility seeks to understand difficulties others experience that we haven't. Hello everyone and welcome to today's show where today we consider several interesting responses from our listeners to a recent episode. The first is an email in reaction to episode 70, Building Relationships Eases Racial Tension . It's from Thomas, a liste...

Death teaches us how to live when we join someone in going through their grief. What I learned from a grieving friend can benefit all of us. Welcome to today's episode, no. 72, where today we consider what we can learn from a grieving friend. In last week's episode, number 71, How to Help a Grieving Friend, I talked about the shocking news Janet and I received from our missionary friend, Martin, c...

To help a grieving friend starts with being present and joining God in comforting those going through difficult times. Hello everyone and welcome to episode no. 71, where today we discuss how to help a grieving friend. Before we get into that, I have some listener feedback to share with you from episode 69, When our Kids Go Off to School for the First Time. Hey John, I have enjoyed the past two we...

Building relationships eases racial tension. A solution to racism is to be more like Jesus and build relationships with people not like us. That's what today's episode is all about. I sometimes wish we could speed up the calendar this year, turn a few more pages at a time to bring 2020 to a close. With all the turmoil over Covid-19, the presidential election, and heightened racial tension in the U...

A key marker in any parent's life is when their child goes off to school for the first time. Whether it's to kindergarten, or when our kids leave home for college, it stirs up emotions within us. For some, it's relief that their kid is finally out of the house because they are so ready for him or her to be gone. For others, it's a bit of grief because WE'RE not quite ready when our kids go off to...

Our job is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. It's an important relationship principle that makes celebrating Labor Day meaningful. Hello everyone and welcome back to You Were Made for This . It's so good to be back here behind the microphone with the start of Season Four. We begin with episode 68, just 2 days after Labor Day here in 2020 During my years in teaching and the business world,...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode, no. 67, the last one for Season Three. I'll say more about Season Four later at the end of the show. For today, we're here to demonstrate how better listening creates deeper relationships. We'll see how monitoring ourselves in how we listen helps transform our relationships into the best they can be. In prior episodes I talked about listening and the...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode, no. 66, where as always I'm here to help us consider ways we can find more joy in our relationships. Because after all, we were made for this. In the past few episodes ( episode 65    episode 64    episode 63   episode 62 )we've been considering the only two questions you need to remember in getting to know someone better. Just two questions to ask th...

Asking follow-up questions is a key part of one of the greatest gifts we give someone. The gift of listening. Learn how in today's episode. In recent episodes we've considered how our lack of curiosity about people keeps our relationships at a surface level. To go deeper in our relationships our curiosity deficiency can be cured with a simple vaccine: Ask - people - questions. We talked in the las...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today we pick up from last week's episode, no. 63 If you didn't catch last week's show, the problem we discussed is that we may want to engage with someone, but we don't know what questions to ask to get things started. It's easy to say "ask more questions" to cure our CD-20, curiosity deficiency, but many times we can't think of questions to ask...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode, where as always, I'm here to help you find more joy in your relationships, because that's what you were made for. In episode 62 last week, "Vaccine Now Available for this Relational Virus," We talked about CD-20, the curiosity deficiency virus that keeps us from deeper relationship with people. I mentioned there's a vaccine now available - developed b...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode, where as always, I'm here to help us all find more joy in our relationships. Before we get into today's topic I want to share several responses from listeners to recent prior episodes Two responses from Episode 59, "The Last Place You Would Ever Think to Find Joy" Duane, a missionary in Japan Health care worker in an assisted living facility A respons...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today we talk about how changing the way we think changes the way we relate to others. But before we get into this, I have two responses from listeners about prior episodes I want to share with you. [Darlene's text about people looking at their cell phones] Randy from Pittsburgh who texted  "I can't wait to get into my car to listen to this week'...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today, as always, I'm here to help us consider how we can experience more joy in our relationships. Are you tired of all the coronavirus news? Almost all of which is depressing and negative. Some of which is conflicting information. One week it's the average person on the street should not be wearing masks when they're out and about, and then two...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today, as always, we're here together to consider how we can experience more joy in our relationships. I had another episode all ready to go for today, but I'll save it for next week because something came up the other night that I want to share with you because of it's timeliness, and because it illustrates an important relationship principle. I...

Welcome to today's episode where today we look at several examples of how people are reaching out and caring for each other during our present day global health crisis. Hopefully these stories will inspire you to do the same. I mentioned in last week's episode , no.57, that a crisis like we are experiencing now in the spring of 2020 creates opportunities for us to find goodness in our relationship...

Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode where today we reflect on the impact the coronavirus is having on our relationships. There's no shortage of information about the virus itself. How it's affecting our physical health, advice how to take care of our self, the impact on the economy, and the disruption in our normal daily life. I don't want to talk about any of that. Instead, I want to ta...

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 56, where today we consider one relationship that affects all others. Our relationship with our self, and how we think. In the last few episodes, 54, The Greatest Obstacle to Relationships and 55, How to Overcome our Greatest Relationship Obstacle , we talked about the relational disease of self-centeredness, and how we can be cured of it by letting God transf...