September Letter

When was the last time you changed the oil in your car?

When was the last time you did something to maintain your marriage?

How long would your car last without any maintenance?

Why do we expect our marriages to last without maintenance?

Great marriages don’t just happen! Great marriages are developed by couples who are proactive at the beginning of their marriages and every year throughout their marriage.

When a couple in a crisis comes to us, we ask them what kind of premarital preparation they had and what they have done since the wedding to strengthen their marriage. Our hearts break when couples who have only been married two or three years are already considering divorce.

Rarely, has a couple in crisis done anything to prepare for marriage or anything to ensure the longevity of their marriage after the wedding. Don’t wait for a crisis, do something now to assure an increasing joy in your marriage - we have a class starting September 21st !

In Oklahoma, 75% of couples get married in a church, but only 25% take advantage of the $45 discount for having premarital preparation. What a great opportunity we have to get a couple started in the right direction! One out of five of these couples will divorce in the first five years of marriage. Wow! In five years, we have barely started learning about the weaving together of our two lives. We begin a Preparing for Marriage class on September 13th to help couples get a strong, healthy start to their marriages.

If you could go back and change one thing in the past about your marriage, what would it be? We have testified many times that we would have started using a spending plan (budget) much earlier in our marriage. Living according to a spending plan is the one choice that would have made a world of difference in our marriage at a much earlier age. The spending plan brought about a contentment in knowing where we were financially, a security in knowing how to plan for the future, a peace in agreeing on how to spend our income, and a freedom in knowing how to get out of debt and stay out.

The issue is not how much money I have, but what am I doing with it? And where is God in my spending and planning? Change your sense of contentment and peace, whether you are single or married! God gives an abundance of direction on the subject. Take our class on Managing Money, beginning September 15th, and find out how to live in that peace and contentment. Also, read our enclosed teaching on the benefits of a budget.

You are our strongest supporters and best advertising media! If you have never taken one of our marriage or money classes, we invite you to participate. Please pass the enclosed card along to someone who may benefit if you are unable to attend.


Thank you for your prayer support. We have received enough designated donations to cover the costs of the chairs for our classroom. We are so thankful for a nice, fully-furnished room for our classes. And God also supplied our need for a new computer - it is on the way to us!

We encourage to look at the archives in our blog to see a myriad of pictures and details about our mission trip. If you type Morogoro into the search box on this page, a list of all the entries will come up.

Thank you for your love, support, and prayers. Our love in Christ.

Donna and Ed Edwards

P.S. Please pray that the people who would benefit from our classes will find out about them and attend.

LIVING WELL Monthly Letter, March, 2010

February was a whirlwind. Thank you for your prayers for us. Our marriage conference in Ponca City went well. The people there were very attentive and appreciative of the material that we presented. We have a good class of young married couples taking our marriage class on Sunday nights. Ed’s talk on “guarding your heart” went well with the men’s group. We have battled the weather with our Monday night “Preparing for Marriage” class and are having to double up to catch up on it. We were encouraged with numerous marriage events across our state this month. A video simulcast from Focus on the Family is still coming up on the last weekend of February.

As we teach and speak on marriage, the topic of communication comes up over and over. Communication is a common catch-all for what goes wrong in a marriage. Interestingly enough, when we meet with couples preparing for marriage, we have never heard one of them say “We just can’t communicate.” In fact, quite the opposite is true. They most often say “We can talk about anything.... When we have a problem, we talk it out.” What happens between those courting days and the days that follow a wedding?

In today’s world, communication takes place in a myriad of avenues. When we were kids, we could talk to someone in person, write them a letter, or call them on the telephone. Now, we have the ubiquitous cell phones with text messages ... or we can email or instant message or chat online. According to statistics from a year ago, Americans send 2.5 billion text messages/day. Many people are having personal conversations electronically; some are with a person they have never seen face-to-face.

Oh, but text messages are so 2008; it’s 2010! A new avenue is permeating all sectors of our culture - social networking. Facebook has 400 million active users who post 60 million status updates each day. New numbers released by Nielsen recently confirm: Facebook is the web’s number-one time sink. More interesting, though, is how much more time is spent on the world’s largest social network today than six months ago. Back in June 2009, Nielsen estimated that the average U.S. user spent four hours and 39 minutes on Facebook per month. In January 2010, though, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook jumped to more than seven hours per month or 14 minutes per day.

We are now facing all kinds of new marriage and communication challenges as the text-message generation gets married and older adults populate facebook. ( a new book has just come out, Facebook and Your Marriage, which deals with this topic) We see dating couples breaking up by text message. People are having affairs with a “virtual person” in an online game - a person they have never seen in the flesh. High school chums,10-20 years later, re-connect on facebook. Our social networks are expanding but our personal social interactions are becoming more difficult.

On the internet, you can search the word “communication” and get 306,000,000 results in .45 seconds. Sound overwhelming? We have put down a few main ideas to give you some insights on communication.(at this link) We hope to give you some encouragement in connecting with others; we all seem to struggle to communicate effectively, especially with our spouse.

We hope to have an announcement soon on our next trip to east Africa. Stay posted!

We ask you to join us in a concerted, sincere prayer to our Father to provide for our budget, so that we may meet all of our financial obligations.

Thank you for your love, support, and prayers. Our love in Christ,
Donna and Ed Edwards

P.S. If you are your church are interested in having us speak or teach in your church, please let us know. We would love to talk with you about it.

The Getting of Givng

To love as God loves takes a sacrificial attitude. We sacrifice our own desires for the sake of others.

Jesus said the attitude of giving brings the real blessings in life. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35)
We do not need scientific research to validate what God says in His Word, but it is great fun to watch the rest of the world discover what we already know.

Scott Stanley and others have researched the topic of sacrifice in relationships. Some of what they have found:

"When defined in healthy ways, there are a number of studies that show that sacrifice for one’s partner and relationship is associated with all sorts of good things in a relationship—especially in marriage."

“Giving is a good sign in a potential partner because it is connected to things that build a strong foundation in relationships. Our take on some of the findings in our research and that of others is that sacrifice is one of the ways that partners send signals to each other about the nature of the commitment between the partners.”

Jesus said that it is better to give than to get because we derive greater joy from it .... one of those great paradoxes of life! We spend most of our life trying to get satisfaction, fulfillment, fun, and materials "things," so that we can be happy. But the feeling never lasts. But when we spend our time giving from what God has given us, we have a joy that will last.

John Piper says, "The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse."

LIVING WELL - Monthly Quote and Prayer Requests, February 2010

The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life. 
William Wordsworth

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.

Love doesn't strut,

Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn't revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always,

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (Message)

Praises: 
Marriage retreat in Chickasha

Prayer Requests for February, 2010:

1. Donations to fill the gap of our budget shortfall, so Ed and Donna will be able to continue Living Well ministry activities
2. Donna’s stamina
3. Preparing for Marriage class, Mondays, 7-8:30.
4. Living Well in Marriage class, Sundays, 6-7:30, starting February 14
5. Marriage conference in Ponca City, February 20-22
6. Marriage Week, February 7-14, that marriage will be honored
7. Wisdom in marriage and financial guidance appointments
8. Good health and protection for our family.