In the sermon featuring an interview with Al and Kim Burke, the couple discusses their nearly 35-year marriage, emphasizing the importance of church life and family traditions. They recount how they met in Atlanta, Georgia, and the role that a shared spiritual foundation played in their relationship. Central to their marriage was the prioritization of family time, which they achieved by centering their lives around church activities and minimizing outside distractions such as television. They maintained strong family bonds through shared traditions, such as celebrating Thanksgiving with unique customs and engaging their children in educational and recreational activities. Al and Kim also navigated challenges, such as early medical advice regarding family planning, by trusting in their faith and allowing their family to grow beyond their initial expectations. They spoke about the importance of maintaining a strong marital relationship through creative dating, communication, and humor, while also discussing the impact of Al's non-Christian upbringing on their early marriage dynamics. The couple shared how they learned to prioritize each other over external influences and how their experiences caring for aging parents were both challenging and rewarding. Their story highlights the significance of faith, family unity, and love as the foundations of a happy and fulfilling life together.

Okay, so Alan Kimber, okay, how many years have you been married? 34.72. Say that again. 34.72, no, it's almost 35 years. Almost 35.

June 15th will be our 35th. How old were you when you married this girl? Was I 26? Mm-hmm. And how old?

23. You were 23. Almost 24. Nice. Where did it happen?

Where did you meet? We met in Atlanta, Georgia. I was going to Georgia Tech and I had a roommate, a guy, I want to clarify that, who had a sister. And she came up to visit and Kim came with her. It was kind of got to know each other there and kindled something that manifested self in marriage a couple of years later.

Two years? OK. Took you two years to finally wake up, is that what it was? It was long distance also. Oh.

So it takes longer. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Great.

Well, so okay. But so Al Burke, he's a deacon in our church and we've been going to church together for almost a decade and a half. We've been through many dangers, toils and snares, but it's been very sweet at the same time as well. This is their oldest daughter right here. This is Maggie.

Married to Adam, yes indeed. And you want to do what Maggie and Adam are doing with their kids. They are teaching their kids to delight in local church life. It's and they take action. They're doing specific things and it it's really neat.

So I see these smiling little faces you know because they they seem to actually like the preaching and sometimes they preach to one another. OK. So you've been married all those years. You know, it's fun to talk to people who've been married a long time. There's sort of a relaxed honesty that they have.

And they're not afraid to say things about their lives. Every family has kind of a glue that holds it together. What was the glue for you guys? I think the glue was we learned early on, well, yeah, we did, I guess, kind of early on, that church life was very important to us. And that progressed through our marriage.

So we've always focused around the church and loving the Lord, but also we've placed a high priority on family relationships, doing things together. We sometimes when we can vacation together we rent a beach house and all go. We've also, I'd say, quite a few, we have quite a few traditions, quite a few traditions. Some of them relate back to things that have happened in generations past, like Kim has a grandmother who was raised during the Depression, her and her three sisters, And those sisters had recorded this Christmas during the Depression when they really had nothing, had no money at all. And the father had drug in a tree, and the mother had somehow sewn these four dolls together.

To them, it was the most beautiful Christmas ever, because it had love. So Kim and her mother some years ago recreated those dolls. And every Christmas, we'll go through that story about what happened back in what year? Was that 1932? It was 1932, I think.

Yeah. That's all they had. They woke up and in this little bush where these little dolls nestled that she had made from scraps. We have, our house has become a little bit famous for Thanksgiving. We've got a lot of Thanksgiving traditions, quite a few traditions, including tomahawk throwing and all kinds of things that go on.

We do reenactment of the Pilgrims and you know their journey to America in 1620 and the Thanksgiving, first Thanksgiving stuff. So it's educational, but it's also family tradition. It's a lot of fun. It's the place to go for Thanksgiving. Well, you're quite a stiff competition with us, Scott.

I want to go to yours every year I think we're gonna crash this. How many kids do you have? We have 11 children. Eleven children. Age range?

32. Sorry to give you your age Megan, that's probably not proper. Down to 11. We have four girls and seven boys. Number eight, grandbaby is due in any time.

OK. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Did you want to add anything to that glue answer? I wrote down something.

Let's see. Now, I do think that the centering our lives around the local church, time around the table together. You guys are going to think we copied what you said. That's good. Guard that dinner table.

Making it a priority. I would say even now, so it's easier when the kids are little and they're all there. We didn't have a lot of outside things stealing our time. So we were there for dinner. Well, now we have one is a full-time student and one is engaged and one is studying to be a pilot and all in between but we still it's this is a priority and so I think that has cultivated not only is that our time to study the word, is at the dinner table is what we do, but also it's where we talk about current events and is this, how do we look at this through a biblical lens?

And So I would say that's also just been foundational in. Yeah, we try and gather the whole family every least once a week. Every Sunday, all our married kids come over. And that's 23 of us, plus whoever else we might have over. So it's great.

These guys never miss church. If Al Burke is if Al is not at church, either his whole family is on vacation. He never gets. Have you ever missed a day of work? I don't think so.

Not that I ever. I don't think so. We're talking about robotic consistency, which is really good for a family actually. Blessing of the Lord, I guess, to have you do it. It is, you know.

And then Kim had a season where she was in and out of church on Sunday morning, taking care of her ailing and then finally dying and mother and that was really remarkable and mother and mother and a lot after that yes yeah that was a really tremendous blessing to have both of them in our homes over here to time I think yeah they would love on them and demonstrate for our children you know how to live out the fifth commandment is what we're trying to do. Yeah and I'd hear these stories about even you know women from our church would go over to your house and crawl into bed with your mom and just comfort her and it was so beautiful. Yeah, it really was. So, you know, marriages, you know, can, you know, be harmed by various, I'm just gonna call them unbiblical priorities. What were some of the things that you prioritized in your family life?

Well, you've already kind of said it. It's church life and then gathering the family together. Do you want to say any more about that? Because when you do that, there are a lot of things that you don't do. We've tried to, you know, we've never really, we never had a TV for many, many years.

I mean, we have one upstairs now that we can, you know, have moving out or whatever with appropriate content. But you know, we didn't have a lot of outside influence raising the kids. They didn't have a lot of outside desires in that way. We did a lot of recreation. We had lots of ball games and stuff like that at our house and sometimes invited a lot of other folks from church over and You know just tried to center stuff around the home just tried to have a lot of fun like I said the vacations where we All shared stuff.

Do you have any other thoughts on this one? I do think one thing that not that any of these things are bad in and of themselves, but for us, we didn't pursue individual hobbies. So our time was so precious between raising the family and work that what we had left, we wanted to do something as a family. So even, and really just by nature of the way our family was designed, we just kept having children. We really didn't pursue even outside sports and things that would just, I remember our neighbor in Ohio common and they had two sons, wow you all must be so busy and I thought actually watching her car constantly going, They never had a night they were home together, both sons in all different things, running, running.

We just thought we can't do that just because of the sheer number of us. But the benefit was what we did, we did together. So it cultivated, you know, it used to be ultimate frisbee and then it was, oh it was not baseball where you throw the ball at each other, oh dodgeball. Just over, you know, and it became volleyball as a good fit for our family right now. But in the things that we did, hiking, going places, I think that it freed up our time to where everybody wasn't divided.

And those are time killers to have. Even if I had decided, well, I'm gonna have this hobby and go such and such a time, or Al has really just hasn't pursued those things. We've pursued time together. Which now we taught the kids to kind of think big too. Like at one point, I forget how I get this idea but I bought a house that was dilapidated, you know.

$30, 000. Yes, a 1965 house and it had been lit in for years. And the family fixed it up, mainly my two boys who were pretty young at the time. One was 18, and one was 14, I think. But a lot of the kids.

Yeah, they spent a year. And they learned how to put a roof on they learned how to rewire the place because it was fuses Had no air conditioning learned how to put that in and we still have it to this day. It's a little rental It's not but two or three miles from here actually Yeah, you know so that was pretty fun and they That was inspiring. Yeah, they learned a lot that they use in their lives now. How old was Samuel when he did the HVAC?

14 or 15. This 14-year-old kid is doing his own research to install the HVAC. He figured it out, pulled all the pieces together. I assigned that to him, and he said, Daddy, I don't think I know how to do that. I'm like, well, I don't either, so one of us has to figure it out.

So two weeks later, I get this email from him. It's titled Bill of Materials, AHVAC. I'm thinking, is this for real? So I started quizzing him on it. I said, what about electric heat strips?

Yes, sir, have those on our 5KW. And he went, OK, all right. So we ordered it, and it shows up at the garage. And they spent a while putting it in. And at the very end they did hire a professional HVAC guy to pressurize the line and do a couple of the more complicated things.

But it actually worked, it cooled the house, it's still running to this day. And they were pretty impressed that it actually did work and so was I, so that was a lot of fun. Yeah, throw hard projects at your kids. Yes. Yeah and let them roll.

Our son that's about to get married here in May is going to live in that house by the way. Yeah this is a girl that grew up in Jason's church. Yeah. And of course he grew up here. It's really a joy.

That's going to be a fun wedding because I've been watching those kids for a long time. I really appreciate them. You know sometimes they're bumpy roads in a marriage. Did you have any of those was there was there a difficulty that you had to work through or anything like that Probably well early in our marriage. Well, we had a plan, you know we were gonna get married and we weren't gonna have kids for five years.

And then. Two and a half kids. Yeah. What? Premarital counseling pastor asked us, how many kids do you wanna have?

And I said two. And she said four. And I said, well, maybe compromise with three. Okay, I'm probably. But, you know, a couple years into the marriage we had some medical issues.

And the doctor said, hey, you guys, if you wanna have kids, you may wanna try now, because you may not be able to have any. So we're like, oh, okay, well, yeah, so we prayed and we were in a church at the time down in South Carolina and you know they prayed for us and the Lord blessed us with Maggie baby girl and after we had her you know we were talking about what we want to do now well it doesn't seem right for us to say we want to hold off on any kids now because we prayed so hard for this like Thanks for this gift, but I don't want any more so we said we'll just see what the Lord does and then we had a son and and then That's about when people started to say things like, oh, you have the perfect family, boy and a girl. You know, and then we had another son. And that's when my parents started to ask, well, what are you guys doing? We had another son, another son, a daughter.

Anyway, we ended up having 11 kids over this 21 year period, 21 years. So that wasn't our plan, but I guess to answer the question, what was the stress? The beginning, we were kind of shocked into that, and we had to realize that Even the original question's not really a biblical view. I know this may not be a popular view these days, but how many kids can have presupposes that you're in charge of that, or that if God wants to give you a child, you say no, that's probably not good. So I think that was a challenging time, but it blessed the way God led us through that.

Do you have any other examples of that? Yeah, I would say we have not really had any horrible, terrible crisis moments. They've never been into the counseling office. The biggest stress probably when I look back, we married. I came from a believing home, and he did not, and his was some in-law stress.

And but even as, and it was pretty severe, but even when I look back now, I realize it caused us to grow together And it caused him to learn to stand up and protect, to be respectful and honor his parents, but to protect our new little entity of our home. So finding our way in that was somewhat stressful, but still lots of growth. And then little things along the way, I still like, we've miscarried some babies and probably the first one, just I wasn't raised thinking doctrinally. And so I had all these thoughts of, I've got to know where this baby is. We've got to dig through.

You've got to tell me where this is. And it was a huge growing moment for us because we dug through the scriptures and he was able to comfort me in that we can rest in God's wisdom and what he does, because he does all things well. Also probably caring for our aging parents was, I wouldn't say a difficulty, but it was a huge sanctification time. My mom had Alzheimer's, so that was a really big load. So remember, this is the in-law problems.

And now we're caring for her. And I think God just did a lot of work in my heart to be able to love her even deeper than I thought you know that I could so that was difficult but a blessing. Al Kim talks about how you protected her and the family from some of the turbulence, the analog turbulence. Could you share how you thought through that, how you did that? Yeah, and it was, you know, I didn't come from a Christian home and I'll admit in my early days I was a little bit weak in this area, you know, the parents are pretty influential in your life and they have certain opinions on things, but you really have to understand the man leaves his father and mother's home and takes a wife.

That's his new home. Still honor your parents through the Fifth Commandment, absolutely. But if you have to make a decision between the two, you have to prefer your wife and family. And That took a little while for me to sink in. And she felt a little unprotected at times, I think.

You know, my parents would have an opinion. I was like, well, honey, my parents think this, I think maybe we should do that. So it was a growing period. And you know, I'm sure it's easier for some guys, probably. That was a challenge area for us.

And by the way, I think we should mention that if things smoothed out, my parents later, they loved her dearly. It was a little frictional in the beginning. My parents had this view, oh, he's going to marry a career woman. They're both going to pull their load kind of thing. And she has a college degree, but, you know, our choice was we're going to have her in the home, raising the kids.

That's the higher calling. So that was a little bit of stress there in the beginning. How did that dawn on you? Because you probably didn't have that right at the beginning, right? I think it was the Lord revealing it to me through his Holy Spirit and his word, of course.

You know, that it's biblical. It's biblical. And I got older and more mature, too. Early, you know, I was young when I got married. I know some people have gotten married younger, but some guys it just takes time to sink into their way of proper way of thinking, or should I say better way of thinking.

And to add, you know, this guy is Mr. Logic, Mr. Planner, get the budget out. So when he's- But he's also a comedian. When he's- He is a comedian.

He hasn't come out yet. When he says something like, at all cost, we're keeping you at home. And bring on the kids, Lord. This is when you know that the Lord is working. And he's provided every step of the way.

I remember we were pregnant with our second child. And I was vividly in the McDonald's drive-through in Chicago getting an Egg McMuffin, I think, for breakfast. And my dad called or something. Maybe my mom was on the phone, and they're like, how are you gonna afford a second baby? I'm like, God's gonna provide.

So I didn't quite know to what extent at that point. But he has, every step of the way. We've never wanted for anything really. We've been blessed tremendously in many fronts. So you're still raising some of your kids.

We are. We're still in the family. The legendary story of a wife with a whole bunch of kids is that it's exhausting and sometimes it's exasperating. So how did how did you guys work through How did you work through that Al with Kim, bearing that load at home, probably doing the hardest job in the world actually? A lot easier than our jobs, for sure.

I was a bit, I don't know if I want to say unfair, but I had a full-time job. I was going to school at night and I was flying around the country doing business travel and we were located in a city where we didn't have any relatives, Chicago. That was really hard on me. For a little season there, yes. Yeah, for a short season.

I forget the question, Scott, sorry. No, yeah, how did you work through just the exhausting difficulties of your wife? So as the kids got older, I think it's very important to stretch them a little bit and delegate things that they can do. I remember at one point, I forget how old the kids were, 13, 14, 15, Maggie may remember, we would drop three of them, two or three of them off at Walmart, and we'd say, shop this list. And it wasn't a small list.

It was like multiple carts. They became famous with the meat cutting guy. He would see them coming, and he would hide, because he knew he was going to have to cut, you know, slice x-am-or-pounds of turkey and roast beef and stuff. But we'd go out and run some other ends and we'd swing by and pick them up, you know, like an hour later. So that was pretty fun.

Can you think of some other ways we handle the load? So Are you talking about when the kids are little? Yeah. Because there is a big difference. Yeah, just the hard times of raising kids.

Talking about how we preserved our relationship. Yeah, yeah. They said right. Yeah. It's an interesting season.

And I will say that we were having children and we were never in the same state as family. And so we, and we weren't really big on babysitters. At the time when all the kids were little, we lived far from our church. So it's not like we just had anyone to really come. So we did have to get creative.

I do feel like that one thing is that I would just say as the wife that is prioritizing there's got to be something left of you for your husband in the evening. And I would find myself sometimes, you know, like oh it would be so nice to have homemade bread and I'm teaching math and oh he's, I'll clean up the house and have everything look really nice. Now, I will say, find out what's important to your husband, because maybe some of those are. But he would say, I don't really care about those things. I want you to leave something at the end of the day, like some energy for us.

So, you know, if you're beating yourself up, you're trying to get all this done, it's like, oh, fall in bed, and this is like not the priority, and things are gonna fall apart. So when the kids were little, we would do creative dating. He would bring food in and we'd have a date in our room. I think you thought the other day about the sleep thing. I thought that was really well.

I remember what you were saying that by God's grace kids... Oh yeah, kids require more sleep than adults. When they're little. So you can put them to bed. Put them to bed.

Yeah, that is good. But we would make time to get on the same page, to spend that time together. There's a lot of things you can do. Sit on the front porch together and swing and read. It doesn't require leaving the home.

We'd get a visit once in a while from her parents or somebody and we'd take advantage of that, go on a date. I don't know, Maggie, if you remember, she turned 13, I think it was, and we said, okay, we're going out. Punishments are doubled while we're gone. We don't want to see any red or blue lights flashing at the house when we get back. We're going just a couple miles down here.

That was a huge breakthrough. It is. Now it's easy to get a date, but when they were little, that was a lot more difficult. I think that one thing also we've done, he's done really well throughout the years, is flirting with your spouse. So that doesn't, I know that's not with your question of how do you not so tired, But I think with keeping the spark alive, we have continued to prioritize our marriage, spending time together, laughing.

Trying to keep humor in the home. Element of surprise. Flirting throughout the day. I would joke. It took her 10 years to laugh at my humor.

But after that, she started to appreciate it. I think it was happy moment. OK, so you've appeared to me just to have had a really balanced, happy, steady marriage, you know, and the government of your home. And it's really been a joy to watch. So tell these people.

You may have already said this, so you might want to repeat it. It's OK. Tell these people how to have a happy marriage. You want to go first on this one? Yeah, let's see.

I had a couple quotes that have been really special to me that I've tried to live by. One is the Martin Luther quote that says, let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave. I think the wife has a lot to say about the aroma of the home. And so he works from home a lot, but times when he would leave or if he comes downstairs, What am I like when he walks in the door? Am I, what a day, you know, I'm ready to dump on you, or am I running to greet him?

And so just thinking of what atmosphere am I creating, what is the aroma, What am I setting as an example? And the other one, let me see my little thing right here, is actually from Ed Wheat's book, Intended for Pleasure, which is really good if you haven't read it. He says, so live and so love your spouse as though it were your last day to enjoy the gift of time together. And I think if you can keep that in perspective of which I was sharing with someone just the other day, my mom passing away in our home, really gave me a new perspective. I would, when she was really sick, I would wake up and run in her room, you're still here, I'm still here.

Let's rejoice, let's celebrate, let's say all our words. And really, I want to have that outlook even without the sentence of cancer If I would look at our marriage like I don't know if we have tomorrow would I act differently? I think that Has been a big influence Yeah, just add so some of the things I'd recommend is have a good library in your home read to your kids. There's a lot of good materials to center around there. We did that.

We went through multiple books at different times with the family. Do a lot of outside stuff. We did camping and volleyball, hiking. Encourage fitness with your kids. At one point we had the penny push-up challenge, remember that, for a week.

Every kid got a penny for every push-up. They were doing that all the time and several of them have continued with fitness. Lots of working out, you got to take care of your body. Always teach them. Even in the, you know, I shared with someone here earlier, we'd be on a family vacation and I would quiz the kids, okay, we have 25 gallons fuel remaining, we're burning 12 gallons per mile, we're doing 40 miles an hour, how long till we run out of fuel, you know?

And they love this stuff. Yeah, and they're calculating. And I remember one time, I think we were in the middle of Montana. Have you been out there on I-90? It's desolate, Montana.

And you go many, many miles without seeing a building. So we were calculating where we needed to see a gas station before we ran out. So things like that, take common vacations if you can. I know that's not always possible. Establish traditions.

Teach your kids to think big. I had, for a while there, my kids were really interested in financials and they had all these simulators, you know, on the stock market stuff. I'm like, okay, let's try it with some real money. So I gave them some real cash and They traded options for a while and they learned a lot. To this day, some of them still, not so much options, that takes a lot of time, but a lot of them have investments in different companies and portfolios and that was pretty fun to go through that.

So those are some of the things just come to mind. Oh, and this book by J.C. Riles, Secrets of a Happy Home-Live. JR Miller. Sorry, JR Miller.

Not to contradict you. It's by JR Miller. This is like our favorite. If you don't have this, it's like a quick read. It's a gem.

Yeah, I don't know why I said Jason Robbins. But anyway, as Scott knows, I read this little paragraph at every one of my kids' weddings. And it says, what are some of the secrets of a happy home life? The answer might be given in one word, Christ. Christ at the marriage altar, Christ on the bridal journey, Christ when the new home is set up, Christ when the baby is born, Christ when a child dies, Christ in the pinching times, Christ in the days of plenty, Christ in the nursery, in the kitchen, in the parlor, Christ in the toil and in the rest, Christ along all the years, Christ when the wedded pair walked toward the sunset gates, Christ in the sad hour, when farewells are spoken, and one goes on before the other and the other stays, bearing the unshared grief, Christ is the secret of a happy home life.

So that kind of sums up, I think, most of what we've been saying. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you.