It's Wednesday, the day when we talk marriage! I introduce a topic, and then you follow up either by commenting or by writing your own post and then linking up!
For the last few weeks we've been talking about how to radically transform your marriage by focusing on meeting his needs--rather than waiting for him to meet yours. I issued a challenge to all of you to do these five things for six weeks, and see what happens:
1. Thank your husband once a day for something (try to make it something different each time) 2. Compliment your husband to your mother, your children, your friends, whatever, within earshot of your husband, every chance you get. 3. Do not nag. 4. Do not give the silent treatment. 5. Make love with relative frequency (say at least 2-3 times a week).
Today I want to talk to the women out there who find initiating sex, or even thinking about sex, hard because of guilt from their pasts.
I've been working on "The Good Girl's Guide to Sex" for the last little while, a book that will be out with Zondervan within the next year. I conducted several surveys for the book (if you haven't filled out the initiation one yet, PLEASE do so! It would help so much!)
One thing I've found is that less than half of Christian women are virgins on their wedding night. And more than 1/3 of the women who weren't virgins expressed major regret over that. It's really impacting their relationships now. (You'll have to get the book to get the exact numbers! :) )
I received an email this week from a woman who's living with this guilt right now. Here's a synopsis of her email (which I've edited to take out any identifying details):
I had a great number of sexual partners before I met my husband, starting in my early teens. I had a horrible upbringing. He didn't have as much experience, but he did have some bad habits when we met. Our engagement was short, but filled with pre-marital sex almost from day one. Our entire dating and engagement period, even our wedding feels like one big shame to me. I can't even look at pictures of us when we were dating because I feel so disgusted, knowing what we were doing. I don't like looking at our wedding pictures either. Ever since the honeymoon the sex has been strained, always. I feel that I can't trust him. He was willing to take anything he could before we were married. True, I wasn't stopping him, but that doesn't help now.
He once asked me why was the sex so great before we got married, as if to ask what he was doing right at that time. I told him we shouldn't have been doing that in the first place, and I have no fond memories of our pre-marital sex, although I suppose it was compelling at the time. It just makes me feel like he doesn't understand what happened. Very discouraging.
She goes on to say how she wants to initiate, and she wants to make her husband feel loved, but she just doesn't enjoy sex with him very much because it still feels wrong.
Can you relate at all? Even if you can't, please read on, because some of your friends probably might, and you may be called upon for some advice in this area one day! Most of us, after all, aren't virgins anymore when we marry. And that is really wreaking havoc with our sex lives now.
Here's what I said to this woman, and here's my message of hope for you who are in the same situation:
First, you're right that what you did before your marriage was wrong--both with him and with other guys. God didn't want you to do it, and you did it anyway.
But that is in the past--and when you married, you became one person, not two different people anymore. You are different in God's eyes. And remember that He has already paid for all the things that you did. He has erased it; it's time for you to erase it. Yes, you did something wrong. Yes, people seriously took advantage of you (and sounds like they hurt you in the process). But please do not let that become your identity. You are more than that. You are precious. You were bought at a price.
If you keep feeling shame and keep feeling that anger at yourself, and at your husband, for what you've done before, then you're not really giving that sin over to Jesus to cover. You're saying, "What Jesus did isn't big enough for me." And it is.
You will always have regrets about your wedding night (I do, too, for different reasons.) It is a letdown. It is a disappointment because you had tainted it before. But nonetheless, that is in the past, and you don't want the past to impact your future.
You need a clean break, where you start allowing yourself to associate sex with something completely new. The problem when we give ourselves to people that we're not married to is that sex becomes something which is dirty, shameful, and focused solely on the physical. There's no commitment, and so the only reason to have sex isn't to say "I love you", it's to say "I want to feel good". And yet we know that's not right. So that whole idea of "feeling good" becomes something shameful.
You need to rediscover what making love really is. When we give our bodies away as teenagers, we teach our bodies that sex is solely physical, and that it's something cheap, that we give to try to get something in return (a boy to love us; someone to tell us we're beautiful). It's a commodity, not an expression of love.
So how do we make it an expression of love? We need to make it about the connection far more than it is about the physical rush. That doesn't mean you don't experience the physical rush; indeed, most people find that when sex becomes about that connection, the physical rush is deeper. But work on the connection first.
Try to make sex into something that is new and beautiful. Take baths together and just touch each other. Lie naked together and talk and explore, just with your fingers. Cuddle naked and talk--about memories, about dreams. You can even read a psalm together! Make nakedness and intimacy something that is beautiful, rather than dirty.
Try to spend some time, in bed, just kissing, rather than "getting to the main event". You take the initiative rather than him, and focus on trying to kiss him to show him that you love him, rather than just to get him aroused (you'll likely find this gets you far more in the mood, too). Practice touching him to say, "I love you".
And tell him what you're doing. Pray about it. Go before God and tell God that you're sorry for what you did before your marriage, but you want a new start. And ask God to help you get that new start.
Then walk in it. Think everyday, how can I tell him "I love him" in a new way? Challenge yourself like this. Do it inside the bedroom and outside the bedroom. As you start focusing on your connection, you'll find that sex life takes on a new turn. It's not just about that physical rush; it's about cementing a bond. Don't focus so much on "I have to have sex with my husband" as much as you're focusing on, "I have to find new ways to feel love for him and show him love!"
This change won't happen overnight. It takes work to retrain your brain to think of sex in a new way, especially when you have a lot of scars. But Jesus is big enough for your scars. And He wants you to enjoy your husband. Don't let sin which has already been forgiven rob you of a great marriage now. Commit yourself to moving forward, and ask your husband to commit, too, and then make it into a game to find new ways to express how much you love him. Kiss him a bunch of different ways and ask him which one makes him feel the most loved. Ask him to do the same to you. Make it fun! And you just may find that your body reawakens!
Now, what advice do you have for us today? Have you ever had to confront your fantasies and throw them aside? How did you do it? Or do you have something else to tell us? Write your own Wifey Wednesday post that links back to here, and then leave the link of THAT POST in the Mcklinky below. Thanks!
In Philippians 3, Paul tells us to "forget what lies behind" as we strain forward and run the race.
It's a great slogan, isn't it? Forget what lies behind? Don't we all want to do that? Forget about the boyfriend who left us, or be healed from the multiple miscarriages, or our dad's cruelty, or our mother's neglect? Of course we do!
But is Paul being realistic? Can we really get over the hurts in our pasts?
I think the answer in today's eyes is "no". We live in a victim era, where everybody is defined by our hurts. But that's not the way God sees us.
So how do we develop His eyes? How can we see ourselves the way God sees us? Listen in on this ten minute clip from a conference I recently gave, looking at the book of Ruth. Now there's a woman who had a bad past! But she made a complete U-turn.
Today in my podcast I talk about the nature of healing. It's only ten minutes long, so it's not exactly an exegesis on the subject. But I hope I get you thinking about things just a little bit differently! Listen in here.
It's really easy. To listen in, you can just download it and it will play right on your computer. Or you can go to iTunes, search for To Love, Honor and Vacuum in their podcasts, and subscribe. Then you can download it to your iPod, too.
Do you have a major problem in your life? Something that you just can't seem to shake?
Maybe it's somebody you need to forgive. Maybe it's dealing with stuff from your childhood. Maybe it's adjusting to marriage and the seflishness that you're both showing! Maybe it's dealing with difficult in-laws.
We all have rough stuff in our lives. The question is what we do with it.
When I was a teenager my big struggle was with forgiving my father for leaving us. I prayed over that a lot, and read tons of books on healing. Some told me to write a letter and burn it. So I did. Others told me to write a letter and bury it. So I did. Others said I should send it. So I did.
And all the while, I was asking, "Have I forgiven him?". And everytime there was an altar call I came forward out of conviction that I hadn't forgiven him yet. I would think I had, and then it would come back!
It got really bad when my children were born, because it brought up a lot of resentment and hurt. And whenever Dad would visit (which was extremely rarely) I would have stomachaches for weeks before. It was not a pretty picture.
And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed.
Then a few years went by when I didn't see him. We moved to another town and I was busy setting up my house. I went to a women's Bible study and I delved into studying the Bible. I started teaching. I started writing.
And one day Dad called to say he was dropping in for a few hours. And he did. And he left. And my stomach didn't hurt.
And I thought, how could that be? I wasn't praying about forgiving him at all! How could I be healed?
And then I realized, maybe that's why I'm not hurting anymore. Because I hadn't been praying about it. I had simply been praying. I had been focusing on God, not on my problems, and in the process God changed me on the inside. He became bigger; my problems became smaller.
I truly believe that is a spiritual truth: Whatever you focus on expands. So are you focusing on God, or on your hurts and problems?
Here's a video clip of me talking about this:
(It's part of the Extreme Makeover DVD I sell, which is also a component in my Retreat To Go package. The Retreat to Go has all the stuff you need to plan a great women's retreat, even if you can't afford to hire a speaker! Everything is already done for you, and you just watch the DVDs! You can find out more here.)
Over at Joy Unexpected there's a debate going on about what to do if someone tells you that God told them that you would be healed. In other words, what if someone pronounces healing over you? Do you believe it? Do you question it? And should we pronounce healing over others?
Here's my take.
When I was pregnant with our second child we found out that he had a serious heart defect that would eventually likely kill him.
I was devastated. How are you supposed to watch your only son die?
Then one day, about three weeks before he was born, I was at a March for Jesus rally in downtown Toronto. A woman I didn't know asked me about the baby, and I spilled everything. She looked at me and said, "God has told me this baby will be healed." And she prayed on the spot. And she said to me, "If you have faith he will be."
I think that is a very mean thing to do, although I'm sure the woman meant no harm. I've written books about this since, and I speak at women's conferences about it.
But here's the thing: I did have faith that God could heal Christopher. But did I have faith even if God didn't? That's the more relevant question. And this woman, who did not know me and who would never see me again, could feel great about herself because she pronounced healing on me, though she bears no responsibility should my son not be healed.
And she so much as told me that if he weren't healed it would be my fault. I think God does work healing through people, but on the whole, I think we should make sure that we have something invested in the person's life before we pronounce such things. Make sure you're there to stick it out if the healing doesn't occur. We'd be far less likely to be cavalier about hearing God's voice if we had to stick around and see if God did actually intervene in the way we wanted Him to (God did intervene in my case, though my son did die. But we had a peace about it, and God has used my story to touch many. And He let me write a book about it. It was not what I would have planned, but I'm grateful for it). And that's why I don't think we should be so certain that we hear exactly what God is saying. Let's leave room for God's will, because His will is not always what we would like it to be.
God does heal, but it's rare. On the whole we have to walk through difficulties, but Jesus did, too. Suffering is not something He is indifferent to, or unfamiliar with. He watched his own earthly father die. He watched John the Baptist die. He saw people he loved die. He cried with us. He knew that life was not supposed to be this way, and He probably felt the injustice of death and injury far more than any of us do because He lived in a time when such things did not exist. He hurts, too. But that suffering is part of who He is, and it's part of our life on earth.
So yes, we need faith that God can heal. But we also need faith even if he doesn't. Our faith should be based on who God is, not what He will do for us. And that, I think, is ultimately more important.
If you want to listen to a talk I gave on this subject, here's one called "Do You Believe God Loves You?". I also have a full conference that deals with a lot of these themes called Extreme Makeover: Heart Edition. You can download them right to your computer and listen in!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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