What people are saying about the HIM

Engagement Matters weekend

Thank you so much for all of your selfless efforts regarding the EM [Engagement Matters] last month. You did a truly excellent job of conceiving, preparing, and delivering the material. It was intelligent, to the point, and sensitively presented. These matters of our hearts are of great importance to us. So your ministry was an invaluable blessing to us. Thank you for caring. Thank you for your sacrifice and hard work. May the Lord bless and keep you always.

The weekend was wonderful.  Thank you, Thank you!  Please keep sharing the hope of the Gospel for those of us with a less than “God-honoring” past. 

[Engagement Matters] gave us a better understanding of the Biblical view of marriage and tools to strengthen our relationship.

[Engagement Matters] helped us have conversations on topics we don’t normally discuss

The weekend was awesome.  It gave us material to work with now and refer to after marriage.

We are motivated even more to stay pure and grow in our relationship with God as well as each other.

The weekend gave us a better perspective on areas we need to consider and work on before we get married.

We are truly thankful to have been given the opportunity to participate in Engagement Matters.  What an amazing weekend it was! We will forever be grateful and know our marriage is stronger for attending.

THANK YOU for such an encouraging, instructive, and uplifting time! We have been talking nonstop about how great of an experience it was—so much so that we've been passing along notes and tidbits to some of our friends in relationships. We are so glad we made the decision to attend.

We strongly recommend Engagement Matters to others, even if they’re pursuing marriage counseling with other pastors and/or counselors!  We participated in Engagement Matters a few months before we were engaged, about 6 years ago, and we felt that the material, personal testimonies, and discussion segments were truly valuable.

I would like to take a moment to thank you both for the invaluable experience of the Engagement Matters weekend.  It was a real eye opener and I would definitely recommend it to any of our friends considering marriage.  We were able to learn more about ourselves, each other, and God's role in our relationship.

Thank you VERY much for the wonderful seminar this weekend!  We had a wonderful time! Your stories and advice were full of grace and humor while at the same time being direct, uncompromising, and grounded in real-life experience and built on the authority of Scripture (and thought-out, consistent interpretations, at that!). We both came away refreshed, renewed, and challenged, and we've decided to do a few things differently in our relationship as a result of what we learned.

The Friesens are great!  Many of the pastors from our church spoke very highly of them, which was a great incentive for us to attend. They're fun, they love God and each other a lot—and that's very apparent, and they share many years of ministry together working with couples and families.

We found this conference to be full of valuable, biblically-based information, and it was an encouragement and affirmation in our relationship with one another, too.

Engagement Matters was a huge blessing for us! Thank you for your insights and passion for helping couples have better relationships!

We couldn't have loved our Engagement Matters experience any more. It continuously guides our conversation and how we carry ourselves in a healthy and communicative marriage, and we're thankful that we got to experience such a transformative weekend. 

Our biggest takeaway in Engagement Matters was the segment regarding husband and wife roles in a marriage, and had the most profound impact on our relationship. Previously, I was hesitant to define myself as a person who was submissive in a relationship, or to define myself as a helper, like God created Eve to be to Adam, but I truly feel like once the definition was explained of how God intends the husband and wife roles to be in a marriage, it transformed my idea of what being a Godly wife was. I ended up following up Engagement Matters by watching a video segment in the Story of Marriage series, and sharing it with my fiancé, where the couple describes a husband and a wife like the verse in 1 Peter, "Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered." They made a point to emphasize that 'weaker vessel' does not mean smaller, of less volume or less value, just more fragile and more delicate. It perfectly complimented Paul and Virginia's emphasis on the husband's role as a leader, and the wife's role as a supporter, with the man being called to love, and the woman being called to respect, as perfectly summed up in Ephesians 5. We willingly and gladly now seek to fulfill these roles in our relationship with one another.

As a primarily long-distance relationship couple, I think before Engagement Matters, we may have struggled on the communication front. If an issue arose while we were together, or apart, we may have just swept it under the rug for fear of ruining a treat of a time we got to see each other, but definitely some tension lingered. I think Engagement Matters stressed to us the idea of transparency and working through issues together. As a self-admitted stubborn-as-an-ox person, I have difficulty letting things go and moving past an argument when it's over. After our Engagement Matters, I really have made more of a conscious effort to view conflict as less of “me vs. you” and more “us vs. a problem.” Also, Engagement Matters prepared us for situations we didn't expect to find ourselves in so soon, like a deployment. The stress of transparency and communication and working through issues together helps us immensely during our separation, as we use most of our catch-up time (when we get the chance to speak) as an opportunity to be emotionally vulnerable and talk about our issues.

Probably one of our favorite parts of Engagement Matters was the talk by Kelly and Ryan. It gave us a very raw, real, and funny view inside a marriage that we often don't get to see. Now we regularly ask "What's your beef?" at the beginning of a conversation, to get out what we need out of each other in a relationship, without letting it boil into an argument or letting it come up when we're heated. By giving an open opportunity to air a grievance in a conversation, it's more practical and logical and open, as opposed to being emotional and argumentative.