Hi, this is Jimmy Evans with Marriage Today. This podcast is dedicated to equipping families with the

teaching and tools they need to succeed. We hope you enjoy this episode and subscribe for more

marriage building content. Welcome to Marriage Today. I'm Jimmy Evans. I want to welcome you to a very

special program because we're talking about our differences in

making our differences dynamic rather than being dangerous. In many marriages, you know, we're

different by God's design. You're just not going to marry a person just like you. If you marry a

normal man, a normal woman, they're just different. You want to be compatible, and that means that

you share the same values and character and be compatible, and that means that you share the

same values and character and beliefs in God and things like that. So compatibility is important,

but even when you're compatible, you're still very different. And early in our marriage, Karen and I,

we just simply did not understand that we were different by God's design. I thought Karen was the most beautiful

woman I'd ever seen and the weirdest woman I'd ever seen. And I told her that. I rejected

her. I shamed her. She rejected me. And we fought like cats and dogs because we simply didn't

understand we both had strengths that we brought into the relationship and that they were different.

Karen's number one strength in marriage is my number 34. We're talking about a strengths-based marriage.

There are 34 strengths possible. We don't have 34 strengths, but there's 34 possible. And what that

means is you marry someone

very different than you. God wired you that way. To marry someone different than you, it means they

have different strengths. And when you bring your strengths together, it makes a strong marriage. But when

you reject each other and judge each other the way that we did early in our marriage, it makes a very

dangerous scenario.

So we want to talk to you in this program today

...