Buried Alive

This Father’s Day on Woman to Woman® you’ll meet Dan Woolley, who was buried alive in the Haitian earthquake, survived extreme injuries, hoped to be rescued, waited 65 hours without food and water, and accepted that he would not to be rescued, only to be lifted out of the rubble just in time to save his life. As Christians, we believe -- theoretically at least -- that God can prove Himself powerful in our impossible situations. But will He? This visit with Dan encourages, in fact urges, us to wait on the Lord, stand firm and sing a new song of praise to God!

The Bible verse Dan repeated while waiting on the Lord came easily to him; his college roommate had written it to music. It is Psalm 40: 1-3: I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.

Millions of viewers saw Dan’s wife, Christy, on the morning talk shows answer how she could endure waiting. After the miraculous rescue, Dan and Christy appeared together on several shows to testify to how the Lord sustained them both in their dilemmas. Now you can hear the details of how Dan had just talked with his wife thousands of miles away on his cell when a 35 second earthquake threw him under concrete boulders. It was lights out for two and a half days for Dan, who’d flown from Colorado Springs to Haiti on a mission trip with Compassion International. While Christy and their two young sons agonized over his fate, Dan was busy surviving the challenge of his life. Hear his amazing story this week and learn how to get your bearings in crisis and why that brings you into the calming Presence of the Living God!

This show is special to me on many levels. First of all, it is an incredible story of the power of God that is available to all who believe in His Son as their Savior from sin. On another level, Dan’s wife is from a family that generations ago used to play pinochle with my grandparents in Decatur, Illinois! I know Christy’s parents well, having summered with them in Michigan for years. In fact, her Aunt Janet was the main guest on the "Grandparents as Parents" program which you can access online. God weaves our lives together, whether we know it or not, to tell His story!

It's Just Entertainment?

When you choose what to watch with your eyes, do you try to be media-wise? With so many film choices just one click away, how can you anticipate the content and the message to protect yourself and your family from the wrong messages? You know what it’s like to sink into the couch with your popcorn and beverage, expecting to relax and be entertained, only to instead be assaulted by words and actions that have you reaching for the remote. I’ll talk about that with Ted Baehr, who has produced hundreds of programs for PBS and won an Emmy® for CBS’s TV version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His influence goes far beyond entertainment to educating audiences on the impact of their media choices.

Even with the best popcorn in the world, the influence of media on ourselves and our kids has us swallowing some toxic ideas, kernels and all. Ted Baehr is the publisher of Movieguide: The Family Guide to Movies and Entertainment and is a noted critic, educator and lecturer. His mission in life is to educate audiences on how to be discerning in selecting their entertainment. His credentials include a Juris Doctorate from NYU School of Law. He graduated in seminary studies from the Institute of Theology at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and earned a Doctorate of Humanities degree from Belhaven University.

All of this to say, Ted’s done his homework. You can trust him to help you with yours on this week's Woman to Woman®!

Girls Gone Wise

In the film Gigi, Maurice Chevalier sang “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.” The lyrics begin:

Thank heaven for little girls,
for little girls get bigger every day!
Thank heaven for little girls,
they grow up in the most delightful way!

I’ve been blessed with three daughters for whom I’ve helped provide a pathway to the confident loveliness of womanhood. Now I pray, watch and “counsel” them in preparing their own daughters to find their highest calling as women some day.

The song line, “They grow up in the most delightful way!” is being changed in our culture, as it encourages promiscuity -- “They grow up into the most frightful way!” The Girls Gone Wild tour is more than a bus tour that makes one videographer rich; it’s an attitude that can detour and devour the lives of those who board this bus with self-defeating choices. Coverage of the spring break bikini contests, where dancing girls "flash" the crowd on video, leave us asking: What is going on? Where are their mothers? Mary Kassian, Professor of Women’s Studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, penned her take on the way it can be for our daughters in her book Girls Gone Wise in a World Gone Wild, to counter the Girls Gone Wild movement.

Kassian encourages women with these words: “I believe the time is now for a new movement—a seismic holy quake of countercultural women who dare take God at his Word, those who have the courage to stand against the popular tide, and believe and delight in God’s plan for male and female.”

Girls Gone Wild goes beyond crazy “fun” on the beach. It's a mindset that promises personal empowerment and sexual liberation, and it's spilling over into other behaviors like "sexting." What are girls thinking when they send naked pictures of themselves via text message? It's about the thrill now and the price later. Join Kassian and me this week on Woman to Woman® to learn how to help our daughters, and even ourselves if we’re stuck in looking forever young or risky behaviors, regain the loveliness and power of true femininity.

Home Again After Deployment

Not a day goes by without word in the news about our military forces and their efforts to defend human rights and freedom around the world. The debate continues about how many will serve where and when. Thousands of military personnel will be coming home, with many more in the months ahead. In next week’s show we talk about the tough transition these families face when they’re between serving our country and returning home to family routines. Jeanneane Musegades survived her husband’s seven deployments in ten years during his twenty-four years of service. Elaine Dumler wrote the playbook The Road Home to help service members -- both men and women -- who come back home, regain the joy and commitment they shared before their separation from their families. Both women share what works to stay connected during deployment and afterwards. I hope this Woman to Woman® show inspires you -- as it does me -- to take to heart the tremendous sacrifice military families make for our sake and to pray for them every single day!

She's Somebody's Daughter

Of all the topics that break my heart, the one coming up next week is in the top three. It’s about recovery from the horrific crime of child sexual abuse. You wish you didn’t have to even consider such things. But to ignore them is to neglect the secret pain that threatens the body, mind, and soul of its victim long after the crime. You’ll hear, with our first guest, how porn was the driving force behind the abuse of her granddaughters. Then, author Nancy Flowers tells how she survived and overcame her childhood abuse. Nancy now helps others stand up to this “silent epidemic,” as it’s called. In my work as a family counselor, years ago, and now with women wherever I speak, I identify with their anguish and rejoice in their victory. “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” brings us hope for children victimized by sexual abuse and for adults who did not deal with their own abuse in the past. There’s good news, however. Recovery is possible by taking the ugliness and the shame and bewilderment to Jesus Christ. He lovingly leads us to healing and wholeness, as only He can! Find out more, and tell your friends. This is a huge dilemma for women, and we must help each other through to the other side of sexual abuse. While it is an abhorrent subject, if we don’t band together on this one, who will stand up for the children? In the Old Testament of the Bible we read in Ps 94:16: “Who will rise up for me against the wicked? Who will take a stand for me against evildoers?” That’s a call to us! Get started answering that call this week on Woman to Woman®!

Hooking Up Hazards

My parents and little sister dropped me off at the university, helped clean up my side of the dorm room, took me out to lunch, and then drove off after a few words of wisdom and lots of hugs. I was excited to take on this challenge, thrilled that high school was behind me, and scared to death -- all at the same time! Looking back, I wonder how my parents felt. I know my sister was hit by the emptying nest, for sure. I was volunteering to learn about risk and standing firm on what I knew to be right, yet open to new ideas and behaviors. They came too, sometimes faster than I could handle them. Remember those years in your life? Some of the pressures made us cave and compromise who we were. But we learned from weakness where the real muscle was and used it to recover -- or not. In the end, I emerged stronger, wiser, more educated, and grateful my folks lived three hours away.

Flash forward a generation. When we send our kids off to college these days, it’s still with pride, hope, and a depleted bank account! We worry about their roommates, their studies, their friends, and their career choices. But former campus psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman says we better also worry about them being “unprotected,” and how that is influenced by the campus “political correctness” that endangers every student with its attitude toward “hooking up.” Dr. Grossman is a board certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist, and is concerned about the effect of political correctness in the lives of our youth. She was first a guest on Woman to Woman® for her book, You're Teaching My Child What? Check out my interview with her on the May 15th program. Her latest book is Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. She is joined by Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician and adolescent specialist, who has authored Boys Should Be Boys -- a previous Woman to Woman show. Let their counsel protect your child against the "Hooking Up Hazards" on next week’s show. As always, program schedules and a host of other useful materials can be found on our Web site.

A Daughter's Journey Home

My oldest daughter finished college and lived with us the next two years during graduate school. By then, her younger brother was in college and her sisters were in their freshman and sophomore years of high school. Talk about a whole new hormonal chapter in our lives! We quickly noticed the need for additional mother-daughter relationship skills.

One of the memories I cherish about Jennifer’s grad school days is that, even though she was in school and working, she’d walk with me around town several evenings a week. It kept me in shape and gave us time to connect. I have to admit, it was great to run ideas past her and grab a little counsel from her wisdom!

Now all three of my daughters are moms and the rough edges we experienced are pretty much smoothed out. It was so worth the struggle and work and prayer. We are bonded now, and while there are always bumps whenever people love one another, our mother-daughter relationships are fiercely loyal and nurture all of us in unique ways.

I know not everyone has experienced this kind of healthy give and take in their mother-daughter relationships. Some of you were treated poorly, or even terribly. Dr. Linda Mintle, a licensed clinical therapist who is a mom and has a mom, knows that, too. It’s why she wrote the book, A Daughter's Journey Home. This week on Woman to Woman®, Dr. Mintle will share insights to help us love, honor, and improve our mother-daughter connections. She’ll even help us realize it’s normal and okay to feel like saying, “I love my mom, but sometimes she drives me crazy!”