Join us on Family Talk as we delve into the transformative journey of Mark and Jan Yokers, a couple who have faced their fair share of marital challenges only to emerge stronger than ever. Through their commitment to each other and their faith, the Yokers have sought out resources and wisdom that have fundamentally changed their relationship. In this conversation, led by Gary Bauer, we explore the principles and insights that have guided Mark and Jan from turmoil to a thriving partnership, offering hope and practical advice to couples everywhere.
Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. Today we are joined once again by Mark and Jan Yokers, two everyday heroes who are helping couples take their marriages to new heights. You know, like many of us, the Yokers faced their share of challenges through the years, but rather than settling for an ordinary marriage, Mark and Jan actively sought out resources to help them. attended seminars, and discovered principles that transformed their relationship in profound ways. And of course, one of the men who had a huge impact on their marriage was our own Dr. James Dobson. What makes their insights so especially compelling is their practical and down-to-earth approach. So let’s join our own Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the James Dobson Family Institute. and host of the Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom podcast for this inspiring conversation with Mark and Jan Yokers on today’s edition of Family Talk.
SPEAKER 04 :
We’re pleased today on Family Talk to have another show with our everyday heroes, Mark and Jan Yokers, who have been talking to us about their own marriage, but also about all the resources out there and all the things they’ve learned over the years to So that your marriage can thrive and grow just as their marriage has over the decades. Let’s get right into it, Mark and Jan. Absolutely. That would be awesome.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. We’d love to share what God has done because it’s been remarkable. Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
After struggling with scriptures, pro and con, I was thinking, and the heartache of everything going on around us, the Lord came to me and totally broke me down with his truth and his love. And he told me three things, Gary. He said, number one, go back to your family. Because it was just crazy. The love between people, the adults across marriage lines had become an important factor. And the kids were left behind. Number two, he told me, he said, get out of the ministry. And so I left the ministry and haven’t been back then, although we minister a lot. We just, I left the ministry. And number three, he said, I’m going to grind this system to powder and scatter the people to other churches to get healed. And to give you an idea of how screwed up I was in my own mind at that point, when he said that, I thought, but wait a minute, we’re the best church. And I thought, oh, God, am I ever messed up. Help me. Help me. And it has happened. People that have gone to other churches have found great healing. And that’s what happened to us. So we were asked to leave because I was exposing what was happening as a great deception from Satan. And these wonderful people that were being hurt and destroyed trying to help. And so we left and we lost our church. I lost my job. I was a teacher. We lost friends. Lost Sunday school. Lost our Christian school. So we were for about a year or two just crying every Sunday. And I couldn’t hardly read my Bible because I thought I can’t trust myself. We couldn’t go to other churches because we just kind of shattered and didn’t know what to do. And we ended up going to a lot of different churches and enjoying them all. But I have to tell you that a foundation for us at this time was Dr. Dobson, because he brought us in touch with the body of Christ. And there’s a humility in his life and ministry that fed us so deeply. So we are lovers and appreciative followers and supporters of Dr. James Dobson, everything he does. He’s such a unique man. With such great love and humility, we are so grateful. We have fed from his fountain for these many decades. When I was teaching, I was part-time window cleaner. And when we left the church, that was 1988, I wondered, what am I going to do? And so I’d thought about selling insurance. I thought about selling, you know, maybe automobiles. I’d wondered what other— Financial manager or, you know— Yeah, financial management or something, getting into something like that. And I looked a little bit into it, and it just wasn’t a good fit. And just being before the Lord, it’s kind of reminded me of what the Lord said to Moses. He said, Moses said, well, how are they going to know that you sent me? And he said, well, what’s in your hand? And he said, you know, a staff. And so God used that staff as a sign. Well, he was asking me, what’s in your hand? Well, it was a squeegee. So I went full time there. Window cleaning, I just hit the streets. I went out to buildings downtown. I love being on ropes. I love heights. I love the challenge of it. It’s very physical. God blessed me with so many buildings at that point. And many of them I still do today. We still clean them. So that’s back in 1988. All these years later. That’s amazing. When you do a good job and you give them a good price and you’re always there and dependable, I mean, why leave, right? So we’ve got a lot of accounts that we’ve had for many, many decades. And so I just started that. I never planned on having employees. And our kids were starting to go to college, so paying for college. And I was able to do that. And I just worked by myself. I did a little bit of work for others, but soon I had all the work I could do myself. And then after a while, I started hiring subcontractors to help me out. And, uh, during that time, the kids went to college, paid for that. And finally I felt like, you know, I really need to get an employee, but that wasn’t until 2001. And, um, so 2001, 2002, we, uh, hired one guy and he was with me for 14 years. Wonderful brother. And he left after 14 years because he wanted to help his wife homeschool their kids. And he wanted to be at home with them, you know. Wonderful brother.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s a pretty good reason.
SPEAKER 03 :
And we’re still close friends today. I mean, when you work together in high-rise window cleaning on the ropes, you get attached to each other. So we built, and today I guess we have around a dozen homes. And I’m not the CEO anymore. My daughter is. So she’s the one that keeps it going. I keep trying to retire, Gary. It just doesn’t work. So I actually was doing some work yesterday. And I’m not so much in front of the windows, but I still get on the ropes and fix things or whatever. And I love it. It’s really fun.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’m in an office building on the ninth floor, and periodically, of course, I look out the window and I see the Washington, D.C. equivalent of you, Mark, cleaning the window. And I’m like in great admiration as they’re hanging there. You really do have to have an affinity for it, right? I mean, to be willing to do that. Yeah. So you built a great business out of it. One of the things that Dr. Dobson has advised everybody that cares about marriage and family, we tend to work on our relationships when we’re dating. We want to impress each other and – And then ultimately we get married, and people get so busy, and they’re doing so many things, they stop working on their relationship. And I remember finding out that you all did this unique thing where you decided that every year— You would go to some sort of marriage-strengthening event because you wanted to make sustaining your marriage as important as—one of the most important things in your lives. Talk to us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I remember after things imploded and we left that church, I said what the goal of the enemy was was to destroy marriages. Mm-hmm. And so Mark and I were committed. We weren’t going to get a divorce like so many others, but we had struggles. And so I said, let’s do something important for our marriage every year. And so we did. We found seminars, and we got such wonderful nuggets. Like Mark mentioned before, the teaching on marriage and family wasn’t –
SPEAKER 03 :
It wasn’t healthy.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so we got a lot of good nuggets from all these. We went to 18 different seminars through the years. And so obviously we went more than once a year and grew. We grew tremendously. We felt like we were mentored by these different people, these different seminars that we went to. Always came away with great good. But there was one area in our marriage that how to resolve conflict. We didn’t do that very well. We didn’t learn in our families of origin. And so we would go around and around and we’d have a rupture, but we wouldn’t know how to repair it. And we’d have a situation and we didn’t know how to come to a conclusion. Mark is the sweetest guy and he would make me feel really good when we’d talk and then nothing would happen. Nothing would get solved. We talked over and over again about the same thing. And I thought, oh, we were in such a rut.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, the tendency for me would be kind of run and hide. And the tendency for Jan would be to pursue and get this thing resolved and It usually wouldn’t happen unless she got angry, right? And so I grew up without anger. There was no anger in our household. I did not know what to do with anger. And so I just figured it’s because she’s carnal, right? She’s fleshly, right? And so I knew her and I knew she wasn’t, but then she’d fall to this. And so I’d usually give a little sermonette or, you know, give some guidance or whatever, or try to listen, but I didn’t know how to listen. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit here, but we’d kind of limp along, I’ll say. Committed, loving each other, had a lot of good times together, but not able to resolve conflict. And so it kind of get pushed under the rug. And we got a lot of help from John and Henry, their household names, you know, just like Dr. Dobson, household name, John Townsend and Henry Cloud, and several of their books, particularly one that Jan found. Do you want to tell them about that?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, right after we left the church, I was in the library with the girls. That was our habit to go to the library, get some books to read. And I found a book on the shelf, and I looked at the title. It said, When Your World Doesn’t Make Sense. And I thought, oh my goodness, my world doesn’t make sense right now. I’m reading that book. So I pulled it off the shelf. It’s been retitled now, Changes That Heal by John Townsend and Henry Cloud.
SPEAKER 03 :
That was life changing for us.
SPEAKER 02 :
That began to turn us around. I didn’t grow up with boundaries and I didn’t know you could have them. My mom and dad had them on me, but I just obeyed them.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I didn’t know how to bond. Okay. And I also had trouble with boundaries. And the four areas in that book, changes that heal, there’s also how you deal with authority. And I was really cloudy on that one. And then the other is how you deal with good and bad. And, you know, I mean, when you serve Jesus, everything is good, right? Well, so anyway, that book really kind of put us on a road. We got into some good counseling programs.
SPEAKER 02 :
And Mark wasn’t drawn to counseling like I was. And we took a two and a half month trip around the United States and we camped almost the whole way. And it was so stressful. I felt like I couldn’t even walk into the hotel at South Dakota somewhere. And so I felt like I was just practically crawling. I was so exhausted. And that night I told him, I said, I don’t know how we’re going to make it through the years if we don’t get some counseling. And he thought about it as we drove the miles and he thought, yeah, let’s do it. So we got some counseling, although that wasn’t easy to find a counselor because we went through three of them before we found one that we thought he gets it. One was more abusive than the church that we were in. And one, they gave some good advice, but it wasn’t hitting the spot that we needed. And when we went to Dan Hartman, we thought, oh, he gets it. And he really brought us out of it. I couldn’t speak for myself very easily. And so he taught me that my needs were good and I could ask for my needs to be met. And not always that Mark would meet them, but he would listen.
SPEAKER 04 :
Now, this is the second time this word listen has come up. And, Mark, I know that every woman listening to this conversation is saying to themselves, get back to that listen point because this is probably one of the biggest complaints I hear from their wives and their daughters or the women in their lives that we somehow give the impression that we’re not listening, Mark. I don’t know why that comes out sometimes, but it does, doesn’t it?
SPEAKER 03 :
They’ve got it all wrong, right? Honestly, learning how to listen. And because I started to listen, it brought transformation. And we’ll get into what has helped us do that. That’s how we love is a curriculum that was developed by Mylon and Kay Yurkovich. and was transformative to us. But to be able to sit down and actually listen to Jan, and it took time to develop, but the initial impact totally transformed us.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, you know, my three words would be with my relationship with Mark before we started to learn how to communicate in a healthy way where Mark would listen and I could talk in a normal tone. not be upset. I felt invisible and unimportant and unheard. And that would be, I mean, Mark has said that he felt like he never listened to me. And that was really true.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep, at the 42-year marriage line. And we’d already done Love After Marriage. We’d done Love and Respect with Egrich’s.
SPEAKER 02 :
Love for a Lifetime. In fact, when Egrich’s were on Dr. Dobson’s show, I listened to him three times that day. I listened in the morning. I called Mark, said, listen to this. I listened in the afternoon. I listened at night. And then we went on the cruise with them, with Dr. Dobson’s cruise.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, our only two cruises were with Dr. Dobson.
SPEAKER 02 :
That so impacted me, that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And, you know, many others, Gary Smalley and, you know, the love languages, Laugh Your Way to a Good Marriage, the Weekend to Remember, you know, by Family Life and all of those. I mean, we’ve been feeding from all of these ministries and going to all these events.
SPEAKER 02 :
Got wonderful things from them.
SPEAKER 04 :
And over the years, guys, Dr. Dobson has not only, of course, done his own work on family and strengthening families, but He regularly highlights many of these family ministries and counseling ministries, which is one of the reasons that there are so many couples in America that can point back to Dr. Dobson and his work as being one of the things that kept their marriage together. Guys, this story is a wonderful story, and I think it’s so timely today, right? You know, we have a marriage crisis in America. You know, marriages still break up too often. And today there’s the additional problem, which we could probably spend hours talking about that we don’t have, that so many young people can’t find the strength and faith to take that leap of faith and tell that person that they’ve fallen in love with, let’s get married. And If more families don’t form, it’s not going to matter who’s president or who’s on the Supreme Court. America will be in deep trouble if we don’t have God’s institution of marriage and family at the center of our country.
SPEAKER 03 :
And one part, a real practical part of this that happened to us, is after 42 years of marriage, we were invited to a Bible study. Actually, it was a class, and it was taking the book How We Love by Mylon K. Yerkovich and taking couples through it and giving them tools in order to resolve conflict. A big part of it that has been so revolutionary for us is that they have studied and know, and it’s in psychology literature about attachment theory, that what you grew up with is what you tend to use in responding to conflict. So whatever you grew up with. And so the pain of your childhood, you try to find relief. And so whatever you do to find relief, you tend to do that when there’s pain and conflict in your marriage. Why? In order to learn how to love. Mm-hmm. in order to learn how to give understanding and patience and love to somebody who’s so different from you and looks at things differently than you. But how are you going to know what’s going on inside of them unless you can really listen and understand their past? And so Mylon and Kay have said that you want to get a Ph.D. in your spouse’s childhood. And that’s to find out what they grew up in and what types of responses that they have to conflict, to pain. Because that’s what will happen in your marriage. They say that your marriage problems didn’t start in your marriage. And this is so true. So that first class, actually, we went through that and I found a memory of when I was a child that was really painful. And it caused me to kind of withdraw and kind of be a little bit hopeless, right? And so that’s the reason why I would withdraw and feel a little hopeless with Jan. And we asked the Lord to come into that memory, and he came in and he healed me in such a way. All of a sudden, a passive kind of a pleaser mentality that I had was getting healed to where I could have boundaries and I could move forward in bonding. And then that is one major issue, learning about your past and how you respond in conflict. And you too, right, Jan?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, yes. Totally changed our lives.
SPEAKER 03 :
So we started communicating after that. And instead of trying to fix Jan, because obviously she didn’t see it right, right? Because I see it right, right? Instead of trying to fix her, I began to listen to her. And the tools in How We Love are awesome because you have questions to ask that take you right back into what’s really fueling the heat in the conflict. What is really going on inside? So instead of me trying to fix her, I started to listen to understand her. And it was absolutely amazing. In fact, I remember one time early on, remember that one time? And I said, oh, well, tell me more. Remember how you felt?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, yeah. He said that in the middle of a conflict. I almost fell over. I could not believe he was asking me that question.
SPEAKER 03 :
I wanted to understand what was going on inside of her. It felt so good. Yep. And then the pain that she was experiencing went right back to her childhood. And because I was listening to her, it was bringing healing to her from that pain. I say a spouse really is kind of like a good massage therapist, a really good one. And I’ve had a couple of really good ones and I’ll get knots, you know, on my muscles and they hurt and the tension. And if it’s a good one for me, what do they do? They find the knot and they go for it. And it’s painful, right? But it relieves the tension and it brings me relief. And a good marriage is like that. We got these knots. We got these problems. And your spouse, God has made them kind of like the canary in the mine, right? my selfishness and my inability to love, who’s it going to affect the most? It’s my wife. It’s Jan. And so I see in her face the results of my inabilities, right? And so she’s my canary. And so I can find out when I’m being selfish and all of that by the look in her face or what’s going on inside of her life. So to understand what’s going on inside has been life-changing for her and for me.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
Jan had mentioned how I would listen to Dr. Dobson. And I’ll say that I don’t know how many times, but it was often. I’d be listening to Dr. Dobson while I was washing windows. And so here I am in front of this window and tears are streaming down my face because it’s really impacting me, trying to act like I’m not crying, but I’m crying. And that happens so many times, window cleaning. But he was my constant companion, along with hundreds of tapes that I listened to from different ministries, many of them that he himself had endorsed and encouraged and different pastors, different ministries. It was just awesome. And of course, many of the Dr. Dobson’s tapes also. Window washing for me was an avenue of learning in the midst of it all. And it was such a blessing I’ll never forget.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, the two of you, with your story of challenges, overcoming these difficulties and the various bumps in the road that you had to endure, anybody that hears this, particularly any young man and woman out there that’s wondering whether they have what it takes to get married and what if it doesn’t work, you really have a message that if you Build your marriage on God’s principles and on Jesus Christ. If you listen to each other, if you remember that we’re all made in the image of God, He loves us all, and He calls us to love each other faithfully in a marriage. You can’t do much better than that. So this has been a wonderful conversation. We could go on, I think, for weeks, but I just want to commend you both and Thank you for being with us on Family Talk. And all of you listening to the show, please be back with us again.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, it’s truly remarkable how marriages can be transformed when we simply learn to listen. You’ve been listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and part two of an eye-opening conversation featuring our own Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the JDFI, and his guests, Mark and Jan Yokers, discussing taking marriages to new heights. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you know someone you’d like to share this broadcast with, go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. Follow the prompts. You can share the program right from there. You know, in a world that’s determined to redefine marriage and undermine traditional family values, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute is committed to standing firm on biblical truth. We believe that God’s design for marriage isn’t outdated and It’s actually timeless. And when couples embrace his plan, they discover the joy and fulfillment he intended from the beginning. Right now, there is truly something special happening here for the JDFI. Recently, a group of dear friends have established an historic matching grant for the JDFI ministry. the Dr. James Dobson Memorial Matching Grant. It provides matching funds now through December 31st, 2025 for up to $6 million. This gift is an incredible memorial and a statement of confidence for the only organization entrusted by Dr. Dobson to carry out his legacy and expand his work to new generations and geographies. So thanks to this incredible opportunity, Every donation you make between now and the end of the year will be matched and doubled and therefore double in impact. You can make a secure donation over the phone when you call a member of our constituent care team. That number is 877-732-6825 or to make a secure donation online, go to drjamesdobson.org. Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
