Building "Fit" Families
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[0 Comment]What to do when the nest is finally empty?
Pack away all that marriage and parenting experience, never to be accessed again?
Or try something brand new? A ministry that imparts that knowledge and relates those experiences—good and bad—to the next generation of couples?
For Robb and Ruth Brandt, retiring from their medical careers certainly didn't mean retiring from active ministry. In fact, over the past dozen years they've thrown life into overdrive with a simple ministry idea: bring younger, Christian couples into their home for a weekend and mentor them. Help them refocus their marriages and parenting. Feed them. House them for two nights.
It all adds up to something the Brandts call Family Fitness Retreats. They say the idea has worked wonders in families while being intensely fulfilling for the two of them as leaders.
"After the children grow up, there's a diversity of attitudes—'I'm going to go play golf,' or just, 'I'm glad that's over,'" Robb says. "But in the context of the kingdom, it's such a waste to have made all those mistakes raising children and then not pass on what you've learned."
A perfect match
Robb and Ruth were born on the same day: September 16, 1935 (Robb delights in pointing out that he is two hours older). They met in seventh grade and have been "madly in love" ever since. Robb was a surgeon, retiring early because of lingering knee injuries from a car accident. He still does medical consulting for hospitals around the United States. Ruth was a registered nurse. They have four adult children and 10 grandchildren. And they've also experienced a parent's worst nightmare, having lost an 8-year-old son in an accident in 1969.
The idea for Family Fitness Retreats germinated in 1994, Robb remembers. He and Ruth were recent empty nesters. On the couple's 154-acre Christmas tree farm near Pittsburgh, Robb climbed a hill one morning as he was praying for several young couples in their church.
"It occurred to me that there was a coincidence here: us having had a fairly intensive parenting experience, and these young couples having needs," he says. "Many of them grew up in families where they didn't have Christian parents. I looked down on our house with its four empty bedrooms, and there seemed to be a natural match. We had the time and the space and the experience, and they had the needs. So that was the beginning of the idea."
As he and Ruth talked and prayed about it, they also knew what they didn't want to develop.
"We'd been to a lot of marriage seminars," Ruth says. "One of the things that we thought was frustrating was the lack of communication between spouses. It is so necessary to include time for that. Robb always says when we go to some of these other seminars that it's like drinking from a fire hydrant. And then you go home, you put it on the shelf, and you don't do anything with it."
Originally published in: Today's Christian, 2008, July/August, Page 26
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