Encouragement for Today | Speaker, Author Helps Women Love Their Lives as They Serve God and Others

Ladies, are you seeking engaging and real encouragement from the Bible? Practical ways to warm up the atmosphere of your marriage and home? Purpose and meaning in your life? Look no further than the wisdom from prolific writer Karen Ehman. A Proverbs 31 Ministries speaker since 2006 and New York Times bestselling author, Karen’s passion is to help women love their lives as they serve God and others.

Karen writes Encouragement For Today, an online devotional that reaches more than four million women daily. She also contributes to the First 5 app teaching team. She has authored 18 books and Bible studies. Her most recent devotional, co-authored with Ruth Schwenk of The Better Mom, is entitled Settle My Soul: 100 Quiet Moments to Meet with Jesus and was selected as the 2020 Devotional and Gift Book of the Year.

Writing (and talking) comes naturally to Karen. A lonely teen from a broken home, she patterned her future after the woman who mentored her and led her to Christ at age 16. Her “spiritual mother” welcomed Karen into her home and was always happy to include her in a meal or lend a listening ear. Karen watched as her friend taught Bible studies and discipled other women. The woman’s example became the model for the hospitality and career to which Karen aspired.

Karen’s experience crystallized her life’s theme: finding purpose by helping others. “Go find your ‘old self’ – the person you once were – and do whatever you can to help them,” Karen said. “Were you once a teenager living in a broken home? Did you move to a new town and feel lonely? Find someone with whom you can empathize and extend them the comfort God gave you.”

Karen practices what she preaches, not just through her professional endeavors, but also in her personal life. She was able to support several teens from her own children’s circle of friends as they grappled with their parents’ divorces. “I could truly look them in the eye and say, ‘I know exactly how you feel,’” Karen said. Even now, in the height of her busy career, she takes time to encourage others, mentoring at least one young woman she’s known since those teenage years.

“I was that teenage girl myself,” Karen said. She relates how the young woman, now married with toddlers, told Karen how much the example Karen’s marriage meant to her.  She said Karen had let her into her life, allowing her to see the Ehmans fight but make up and be “flirting like high schoolers.” There was forgiveness instead of tension.

“Your marriage is a message people are watching you preach,” Karen said. “Your marriage is more than just for you. It’s for your kids, your kids’ friends. Do they see love, forgiveness and redemption?” Other feedback from Karen’s young friend, she loved being around the Ehmans’ house because they “always had food and were fun.”

What if you don’t know how to cook/serve food or be fun? Karen can help with that, too. Following the example of her mentor, she shares recipes and hospitality tips on her website, https://karenehman.com/about-karen/, in a section called, “my favorite things,” which takes a practical approach to doing life as a Christian.

“There’s such a correlation between ministry and feeding people,” she said. “It’s all about making people feel welcome in your house. God really taught me the difference between entertaining and hospitality. In entertaining, the emphasis is on yourself, trying to impress others. Hospitality puts emphasis on making the guest feel refreshed and wanted.”

Sharing hospitality as a couple can enhance a relationship. Karen and her college sweetheart husband, Todd, often take turns inviting groups from each of their worlds to their home. She might suggest sharing a meal with a couple with young children from their church. He invites friends from work to roast marshmallows over their fire pit.

“We have learned it doesn’t have to be fancy,” Karen said. “Just being willing to let people join you in your very ordinary life. Let them know they are wanted, and that you truly care about their story.”

Sometimes the idea of hosting guests can be a divisive issue for a couple. The difference between introverts and extroverts is just one area of potential marital friction. Karen’s 2019 book, Keep Showing Up: How to Stay Crazy in Love When Your Love Drives You Crazy, helps people when the opposites that attracted start to attack. Karen based the book on the mismatched traits that have led to the Ehmans’ interesting, yet happy, 35 years of marriage. In fact, the pastor who conducted their pre-marital counseling told them they only had a 5% chance of staying married based on their personality tests.

“If it were not for the Lord, we would so not be together,” Karen laughed. “We do everything opposite, but our differences drive us to our knees instead of driving each other crazy.” She reports that although they fight about everything, they have great senses of humor and have fun together.

Whether you and your spouse disagree about finances, parenting, or how to load the dishwasher, your differences don’t need to divide you. They can actually bring you closer together–and closer to God.

In Keep Showing Up, Karen Ehman shows you . . .

How to play to each other’s strengths as you work on your own weaknesses

The difference between having a soul mate and having a sole mate

How to become a faithful forgiver who also forgets

Strategies for avoiding the social media comparison trap

Why it’s dangerous to mimic a friend’s marriage

How to unearth the magic in the mundane

Why a spouse who drives you crazy can drive you straight to Jesus

Throughout Keep Showing Up, Karen also includes ideas to implement in your marriage right now, such as powerful statements to speak to your spouse, date-night-on-a-shoestring suggestions, and discussion starters.

Any strength carried to an extreme is a weakness, or, as the Ehmans prefer, “non-strength.” Viewing each other through the lens of Christ helps couples see how differences balance them and make them a good team.

“Instead of looking at each other’s different way of doing things as ‘wrong,’ we have to remember that the other person’s strength can be wonderful. There are a lot of ways to get to four… it doesn’t have to be 2+2,” Karen said. “If we thought exactly the same or approached things identically in every area, one of us would be unnecessary. We need each other.”

While some may consider money or sex as the greatest source of marital discord, Karen has found three more emotional factors to be culprits. She gleaned this insight not from a marriage expert, but from a counselor speaking to parents and teens at the church where her husband served as youth pastor.

1. Emotional Baggage. Each spouse brings wounds to the marriage – things that happened in past, hurtful words that were said, old thinking patterns. “I don’t know what’s in his suitcase, and he doesn’t know what’s in mine,” Karen said. Words that seem innocuous to one can be perceived as hurtful by the other. Sometimes either spouse can say something they have no idea will be a trigger.

2. Untrue Perceptions. We’ve all heard the saying, “Perception is reality.” But it’s a saying because it rings true. It’s easy for a spouse to assign a motive to the other’s words or actions that is not true, and then react to it as if it were. “We think we know their heart, but we are way off base,” Karen said. For example, Todd brought home some coffee creamer from the store as Karen asked him, but it was a fat-free variety. She immediately jumped to the conclusion he was hinting she was overweight. Upon deeper discussion, she realized he hadn’t noticed the creamer type at all – he had just grabbed the first carton he saw.

3. Unmet Expectations. “We marry this character we’ve drawn of our spouse,” Karen said, a character that may bear no resemblance to reality. She reminds people to consider the unmet expectations that may be the root cause of an argument. If your family always saved money for vacations while the other spouse’s family did not, the difference might cause conflict. Money is not the cause of the fight – it’s the expectation about how to save or spend it.

Keep Showing Up offers hopeful possibilities to meet these challenges. Karen suggests lead-in phrases like, “What I’m hearing you say is… Is that what you mean?” and, “So, help me understand.” These words, especially when used with a pause to regain control, help diffuse hurt feelings and clarify a situation. A pause is key, a theme of Karen’s New York Times bestseller Keep It Shut: What to Say, How to Say It and When to Say Nothing at All. Karen, a self-confessed talker, admits the book was written out of her greatest weakness.

“I started to realize I could tether every fractured friendship or tension in relationship to either something I said to them or about them,” she said. “God began teaching me I had a problem.” She dove deep into the Bible, cataloging thousands of verses about speech or silence. “So many times the Bible mentions gossip, lying, angry words, flattery,” Karen said. She began applying the lessons and was gratified, yet slightly embarrassed, when her friends commented upon her change.

“The topic that was the greatest point of pain in myself is the book that has done the best,” she said. Keep it Shut has inspired a Bible study and DVD that address unsolicited opinion-slinging, speaking the truth in love, not saying words just to people-please, and dealing with verbal anger.

Visit her website, https://www.karenehman.com, for a 40-day Zip it Challenge and several 5-day challenges complete with study guides. Titles include Pause before you Pounce and 5 Days to Sweet and Salty Speech.

A lesson Karen learned to prevent saying words she’ll later regret: believe the best of your spouse rather than assuming the worst. “It’s so easy to jump to conclusions to assign a motive that isn’t even there,” she said. “The one-sentence sermon I preach to myself when I need to snap back my attitude is to tell myself in the heat of the moment, ‘Don’t say something permanently painful just because you are temporarily ticked off.’”

Wise words to live by, founded on the greatest wisdom of all: “Sin is not ended by multiplying words, but the prudent hold their tongues.” Proverbs 10:19.