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Hi there! Belah here. Today, I have with me Dr. Sandra Glahn, the author of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage. On this episode, she dives into the most difficult struggle she had to face in her life and in her marriage: infertility. It’s amazing how she has thought through and processed this struggle, and I want you all to listen in so that you too can understand that life doesn’t stop at the road block. This interview is very inspiring, uplifting, and spiritually fulfilling. Listen in!

Scripture/Quote:

  • Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Amen. Matthew 28:20

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You’ll Discover:

  • How they struggled in the face of infertility
  • How she compares the candle and the brick to us and the problems life throws at us
  • How to accept the things that cannot be changed, such as how our husbands are not perfect
  • How God decides on what we are accountable for

Books & Resources Mentioned:

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Tweetables:

  • One can be a gentle and quiet spirit, but not a gentle and quiet person.
  • The candle and the brick: Both of them are subjected to heat; the other gets softer, the other gets harder.
  • It’s not personality that causes marital difficulty; it’s not trials. It’s how we handle those difficulties.
  • We have to use our own spiritual gifts, as well as and others’, to process our needs.
  • Your character can change in terms of becoming more ethical; your personality does not.

Thanks for listening! I hope you are encouraged to live in wholehearted intimacy!

Love,

Belah

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Transcript

0:02
Welcome to the delight your marriage podcast. This show where you hear from amazing and inspiring wives sharing their struggles, triumphs and advice for this journey called marriage. Here’s your host belah. Rose.

0:17
Hello there. This is belah rose. And I want to thank you so much for spending your time with me today, at the delight your marriage podcast where Tuesdays and Thursdays we are listening in on conversations with wives, longtime wives and intimacy experts on what it means to have a fulfilling marriage. So thank you for being here today. I don’t know if you heard the train in the background, but I guess, the trains going by. So today I have Dr. Sandra Golan. And she actually is not only a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, but she also is doing quite a lot of work. She’s done, written a book on sexual intimacy. And she just really is thinking through the hard questions in the Bible that are, you know, specifically to the man should do this, the woman should do this. And she really gives a lot of great insight. And today especially she dives into her most difficult struggle in of her life and of her marriage. It’s really impressive, the way that she thinks through and has thought through and processed this entire struggle I want you to listen in. But before I mentioned that I do talk about a webinar that I recently recorded, go to delight your marriage comm slash webinar and there’s a link there where you can have access to the recording before it is no longer free. So definitely go there as soon as you can, and, and be able to get that. So let’s go ahead and dive into Dr. Blondes. message for us today.

2:00
Okay, well welcome back delight your marriage listener. I’m really thrilled to have Dr. Sandra Golan. With me today. Hi, Sandra. Welcome. Hi. And now would you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your day to day life? And yeah, what your family looks like if you could

2:16
add to I’ve been married to my husband since 1979, which is probably before most of your listeners were born. And we I am associate professor of Media and worship at Dallas Theological Seminary. I teach mostly the creative writing, writing for publication. But I also teach the course in New Testament backgrounds as they relate to the women questions, all those hard scriptures that are, you know, make us scratch our heads about women. That area of academic study is studying the inscriptions and the worlds and to find out what were head coverings and all that stuff. So that’s, that’s more of a hobby that I do teach a course on that. And then we have one daughter who is 20, she has Asperger’s. So that is always a quirky, fun sort of challenge that makes your family unique. My husband worked in the legal, he was a legal administrator for a couple of decades. And in 2008 made a career change to be a sort of a new wave of missionary, which he’s over East Africa for East West missions. He’s a field director for East Africa. And that basically involves living in the United States, because the pastors on the ground are doing a really great job. But it requires about three or four or five site visits a year, whenever enough things happen that you need FaceTime, he goes over. And so he uses Skype a lot uses. We try to provide them with iPhones so that they all have the same technology. And if we need a receipt, they just take a photo of it and they’ll email it to us. Oh, wow. So it’s it’s really a great time for letting the Nationals do their work, but serving them in a capacity that, you know, sometimes running spreadsheets or things that they haven’t been trained to do.

4:04
Wow, that’s really cool.

4:07
It’s it’s a very interesting life. We’ve gone from both of us working in full time businesses where we were, you know, eight to five, to both of us being home quite a bit working, working from the house a lot I had, I had a student over last night till midnight. I prefer to meet in coffee shops over my office over tables. And so it just means that we don’t have you set office hours but we do try to really also have some margins as well.

4:36
Wow. I love that. Yeah, I love that. So would you tell us a little bit about what you and your husband’s personalities are kind of like

4:44
where he is introvert on the extrovert. Okay, I would say his love languages gifts of service, whereas my language is words. And you know, for example, when when we had the student over last night she and I were watching a movie and you Streaming just kept not working in the middle of the movie. And we have to start over. So finally, he just said, I’ll just go to red box and get you the box movie. Leaving, she’s like, he doesn’t mind. This isn’t Oh, no, no, he’s happy to be useful. Like, that’s what makes it built it. To know that I’m grateful that, you know, I have this movie that actually works. Yes. So I’ll tell you, it was interesting. In in our early years of marriage, there were people who, especially those with very traditional views of marriage, were very concerned about us, because their view was the man should be up front and the woman should be sort of quiet announced the behind the scenes brand, versus like a gentle, quiet spirit, they took a gentle, quiet personality. And, and so fortunately, my husband is the most secure man I’ve ever met. And really, it helped. Because if I was pursuing a PhD, and I was up front, and I was teaching, and I was writing books, and in on radio shows, or whatever, and he was just very happy for me to use my gifts. And again, meanwhile, he’s an administrator for a law firm. And he’s doing, you know, half million dollar photocopy contracts, which would just be the death of me. And he, he loves details. And so it’s been a really, it’s been a really great synergy of opposites attract, but it also required some transition in our marriage to appreciate we are different, and that brings something beautiful rather than we are different, therefore, something is wrong with you.

6:34
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I Gosh, this is so good. I want to just point out a couple things that you’ve already said. But one is that when you talked about you and your husband’s personalities, you first talked about each of your, whether extrovert or introvert. And then you also talked about each of your love languages. So I just want to encourage the listener, if you don’t yet know what your love languages and what your husband’s is, and or the introvert extrovert, I just so encourage you to take some personality tests, I’ll have them linked up at delight your marriage calm for you, but take some personality tests. So you can kind of get a sense of where your strengths are, where your husband’s strengths are, because that that’s integral I love that. Dr. Sandra knows that. First off, and then the other thing you mentioned, is that a gentle and quiet spirit, not a gentle and quiet personality, could you dive into that a little bit more Syndra

7:24
score, I’d be happy to, there’s a big difference between sort of having an inner peace, knowing who you are not striving for your identity and all sorts of stupid things that don’t fulfill you. And, and having so that’s where the gentle quiet spirit comes in having, having just that subtle piece of who you are and who your God is, and and sort of what sort of direction not, you don’t necessarily know what direction your specific career is going to be. But for example, I knew that I needed a career that was extroverted rather than Yeah, like my husband. So just sort of know those, those things about you. But But it’s, it’s primarily a spiritual walk on the inner life, which is different from, you know, getting onto an elevator and sort of having a friendly personality and not knowing any strangers, you know, everybody’s friend, which is more me and my husband like, I can’t believe you’re talking to that person. Well, and and there just have been a lot of people through the years that confuse the two and thought that if I was an extrovert, that if I was more seen, and not heard, yeah, that that meant that I was competing with my husband, or in some way, lacked an appropriate respect for him. And unfortunately, for me, I had clarity about it. Or fortunately for me, he had clarity about it, that we both knew what our strengths were and our weaknesses. And for some things that aren’t going to change. Your character can always change in terms of becoming more ethical, but your personality is not. Unless you have a massive brain injury or something, you’re if you’re an extrovert, you’re an extrovert. Now, I will say that I become more of an introvert through time. So my so little softening of edges, I guess, I would say, for both of us, and we’ve molded and change each other kind of like people become to look like their dogs or look like each other. I don’t know. I’ve been a softening effect. I think the both of us have had on the edges of each other’s extremes and personality. But again, not to not to mistake that that inner peace, that inner subtleness with the having a sort of comfortable in the crowd being energized by crowds versus energized by tasks. Personality.

9:43
Yeah, well, and we’re, we’re just getting started on this, this whole topic about marriage and I’m really thrilled now, would you this is a podcast that’s all about inspiring and empowering wives to live wholehearted in their marriage and would you share a scripture or quote That’s meant a lot to you over the years or even recently,

10:03
I will I the words, I will be with you. And that promise has been particularly meaningful. I teach I teach at a seminary. And sometimes people will say they didn’t teach me that in seminary. And I want to say, we taught you, I will be with you, we taught you how to handle the Scripture. So we taught you how to feed yourself, we’re not going to teach you every single thing, how to baptize in 14 different denominations, but hopefully, actually given you the skills that you need to feed yourself at some point. And I will be with you has been particularly meaningful as we have tried to work through what, for a long time we didn’t have a diagnosis for our daughter. And a very manifestation of her Asperger’s is that she her disability is that she doesn’t do empathy. She has feelings, but can’t imagine what it’s like to be in somebody else’s thread. So everything gets scraped through the grid of how does it feel to her. And so example, if we’re on our way out the door somewhere, and I stub my toe, and I’m bent over in pain, you know, most people would say, Oh, are you okay? She say she’s kind of tapping her foot saying, Are we leaving yet? And just that, so that is a long exercise and unconditional love. And know that promise, I will be with you. I haven’t given you anything more than you and I can’t do together has been a reminder over and over and over that. I’m not walking alone. He’s carrying me when I can’t walk anymore. And this spirit will give me the grace to pretty much go through whatever comes my way, because I’m not alone.

11:40
Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, and that I’m sure is also going to probably tie in to what we’re talking about the next portion is to talk about a season of struggle that you’ve had in your marriage. Because the thing is, we learned so so much during our struggles, you know,

11:57
unfortunately, that’s about the only way.

12:00
Yeah, right. Yep. Yep. So, so I’d love for you to dive in.

12:06
We had 10 years of infertility and pregnancy loss, which is sort of how a writer and so it’s even a backup for them that on the fourth of five children, and I were in a Protestant home, but I grew up hearing Are you Catholic? Do you know, prevent that, I mean, pretty much anybody who heard that, assume that I was a mistake, that nobody wanted that many children. So I grew up with a thinking that if anything, I’m gonna have more kids, then I want. And so when my husband and I hit infertility, it was a huge, it was a crisis in a lot of areas. It was a marital crisis, because that was the plan we had, it was an emotional crisis, because it was very difficult to go through. It was a spiritual crisis, because I had too narrow of a view of womanhood and, and God’s plan for womanhood, which is part of eventually teaching this class because my colleagues knew that that had been a huge study of mine, versus like, she will be saved through childbearing. You know, I’m like, what does that mean? I gotta know what that mean. And so that it had driven a lot of my scripture, and frankly, I had to go back to Genesis and relook at what have I picked up here, that’s Christian cultural baggage. That’s not actually scripture. Because I also had, we did some traveling internationally to do short term mission trips. And I came to the conclusion that if, if it’s not feminine in the United States, but it’s feminine in Kenya, like scratching a roof, for example, you know, being a river in America is not considered very feminine work. But it is women’s work in Kenya. So I had to sort through what’s biblical and what’s cultural, and shop teaching was cultural as with biblical. So it was a crisis of identity. It was a crisis of womanhood, it was a spiritual crisis. And all of that can put a lot of stress on a marriage. And unfortunately, my husband is very steady. I call him adorable husband. He’s not a drama guy. And that was really a great thing for us. At that time, we had a very stabilizing effect, but at times, it could feel isolating to me, because I was processing verbally, and he was processing internally. And I could feel very alone in the pain that I was going through. So that you know, a couple a couple of things that we’ve learned early on was that people who say that your marriage should meet all your needs are absolutely wrong. God made a covenant as for community, and we need the community as part of our marriage. But I needed the community for processing my pain. It was too much to dump all on one per person. So I found support groups. I found friends on mine. I found other people that were actually Interested in my FSH levels that you know, all the technical Garbo jumbo Garbo language that you learn, wasn’t that interesting to my husband. But it was interesting to other fertility patients, they were pretty much, you know, as focused as I was on reading the medical journals and trying to do whatever I could to help our odds. The other thing, what so, so recognizing that I needed another place for my word count, but but that that whole community thing and recognizing that it’s not a weakness in my marriage, to recognize that my husband doesn’t meet all my need, it’s actually going to give strength to my marriage, if if I have a community around me and us. So that that was 10 years that we had three years of no success, followed by separately pregnancy losses, oh, my goodness, followed by three adoptions that fell through and, and that spanned a decade. So then we didn’t have a successful adoption of our daughter, but fairly, fairly, immediately, we, we felt like we have a really angry baby. You know, now we know she, she had some developmental issues. So but it took a very, very long time to get those diagnosed and know what we were dealing with. And one of the challenges was that people immediately assumed we didn’t adopt her till she was eight months old, he immediately assumed it was a bonding and attachment issue. It fights for that as the exact opposite of what you want to do with somebody on the autism spectrum. It with balding an attachment, you want to almost smother them to convince them that you’re good that you love them and, and you know, we’d like press them to you, a child with Asperger’s usually doesn’t really like touch. So all the advice is do the exact opposite of what my child actually needed.

16:54
Oh, my goodness. So

16:57
fortunately, you know, God has also given us this sort of intuition where you’re, there’s just this gut level, we reached the point where this isn’t working this, this can’t be what it is. Because it’s just, we know our kid well enough to know, this is not what she needs from us. So it took a while to find a therapist who would believe us and then pursue other testing. So all of that, you know, it’s a really long journey. We, we it’s been a 30 year journey I just described. But everybody has their stuff. You know, everybody’s got their hard journey, the things that force you to either what is it? They say like, wax and bricks, you know, some things go harder in the sunlight and some things in the harsh heat and other things? No, that was a challenge. Have a soft heart instead of becoming more hardened?

17:48
Hmm, I love that. Well, a couple of things I wanted to pull out of what you shared in that. First of all, that’s just, it’s funny. I was talking to a woman who’s been through so much difficulty, she was telling me all these difficulties. And I just was like, yeah, those are difficulties. But just like you’re saying, Sandra, is that that that can make us say that one more time? You said a candle versus the bricks? Yeah, go ahead,

18:14
ask an umbrella. Yeah, a candle and a brick, both of them are, are subjected to heat. And in one case, it gets harder. And the other case it gets softer. So not and there are lots of studies, as I’m sure you know, I’d say it’s not this specific personalities that cause marital difficulty, it is not even a specific trial. It is how we handle those difficulties. And that is something that for the most part you can choose to do. Now there, there are things that we don’t choose, for example, if you have a serotonin imbalance in your brain, or if you have, my dad had a stroke, and his personality has changed significantly. There are some My daughter has Asperger’s, there’s some things I think that make us accountable in different ways for our behaviors. So my daughter is less accountable for for not showing empathy than I would be, for example. And that it’s up to the mystery of God to sort all that through, you know, in His justice system. But for the most part, we we can we can make a lot of choices in our marriages and in our relationships for how we handle the stress.

19:21
Wow. Wow, I love that. Well.

19:24
And one thing that you also mentioned prior is that it’s a strength to realize that your husband won’t meet all of your needs. I’m interested in hearing what you mean by that more so well, so you could probably already tell I you know, I have a verbal person. And he’s not then he could be he’s not energized by people upon he’s energized by tax. So when I sit down and process verbally with him, I go away feeling more energetic, he goes away feeling drained. That is not to say he doesn’t, doesn’t enjoy or appreciate time together. But it means he then needs some space. And I don’t. So yeah. So recognizing that with infertility, I had an even higher word count, because I was processing so much, whether it was the medical treatment we’re going through whether it was a violation of our privacy and our love life, whether it was the things people assumed about me, as I was pursuing my career that if they didn’t know, I was going through infertility thought I was just too into my career to have a family, I mean, just all the things that, that that, you know, from every side, the financial strain, all that, if I had needed a conversation with my husband, about every one of those, the poor man, you know, wouldn’t just tell them and to recognize in him that that was not a weakness in him, that God, you know, opposites attract, because we need, we had synergy, it’s good for us, right, diversity is built into the way God has created this. And so just to recognize that some of my girlfriends who are going through infertility, were actually interested in knowing my cycle. And you know, what the details were and what the doctor had said, and what questions I was wrestling with. And that’s not to say we didn’t have many conversations in our marriage about those things. But there’s a little there’s sort of a little rule of thumb among infertility patients to limit that to about 15 minutes a day, where the the less verbal spouse commits to undivided attention and interest, no checking email, no reading online and no doing something else, complete undivided attention. But knowing this is going to end up at 10 minutes, I don’t have to endure this for four hours. And the person who is more verbal, knowing I got a 15 minute shot, so I gotta boil this down to what’s most important to me. And anything that boils over that go find your support group, go find your friends. Yeah, but to it otherwise, it’s just overwhelming for both but the more verbal person and it is sometimes the male, or the more verbal person feels, can feel really isolated. If it’s all the expectation is my marriage is going to be the place where this it’s like all this stuff that’s welling up that needs processing, and there’s nowhere for it to go. But the other is completely overwhelmed by the firehose of word count. And so just to recognize God made us differently, God never said our marriages were supposed to meet all of our needs. If that were true, there wouldn’t be the need for the body of Christ, there wouldn’t be statements like the I shouldn’t say to the hand, I don’t need you. We are totally made for community and the community was a big part of our healing through infertility, the the recognition that one person just cannot meet all your emotional needs and should not. That’s why we have to rely on other people’s spiritual gifts, and also use our own gifts. In some of the conversations I was having, where I was processing, it was actually ministering to other people going through the same thing because it was a shared a shared journey.

23:03
And it sounds like to find people that would be happy to process with you, it sounds like you were really proactive to find these groups, or how would you say you went about finding this community?

23:13
Initially, I asked my doctor who was a believer, and he ended up being my co author on seven books. Wow, called a doctor, patient, male, female, sane, insane. And we we left it up to the jury, which one of us was insane. But he initially I asked him, you have a group of your patients that, you know, you get to get together informally, I don’t really feel like I need a therapist, I just need people to understand. He said, I don’t have a group like that. But I have a patient who is part of a consumer group like that. And he gave us contact numbers. And the first time we got together at a restaurant, we sat and laughed and cried for three hours. It’s so wonderful to have somebody who understood and actually somebody had the same doctor. That was that was help. She connected me to there all sorts of informal online and, and in person support groups. Sometimes their therapist led but not usually we were just looking for a gathering of people who understood. Yeah, so in some cases, like I started, one at my church just gathered the different people who had come to me and, you know, shared their similar struggle. And so in some cases, you know, I I joined a group that existed already and another cases I created, we’re talking 10 years, right. So yeah, I wasn’t in three groups at a time, which is like over the span of time, as people would get pregnant and move on and have their, you know, or adopt or whatever, the groups would disappear. And you’d have to find or formulate sort of a new group.

24:42
Yeah. Well, I love that you were saying, also, one piece that I pulled out from what you were talking about is there are things that make us more accountable, and things that make us less accountable, and it’s the beauty of God’s kind of design. He knows how much each month and should be accountable for certain things. It sounds like what you have really learned, almost like, and what you really grasped is understanding that we all have our cross to bear. And, and this has been yours in a huge sense. Is that kind of what you would?

25:20
Yeah, I would love this as a big part of it, I would also say that I saw in the church a need for a more robust Theology of the Body, if you will. In other words, you know, somebody shares, I’m struggling with depression and the knee jerk reaction in a study or something would be Have you tried essential oils that you, you know, not that those aren’t legit, but like, the first go to thing is try this, try that, try this, try that. And, and, in, in many cases, there was a physical, whether it was thyroid, whether it was serotonin, you know, we the last place we go is maybe there’s a physical problem that’s causing this. And my infertility was caused by an anti anti cardio with an antibody issue, which basically my body was allergic to embryos, in addition to the fact issue, but for years, it went unexplained. And so when you have unexplained infertility, people assume you need to relax. And it’s, it’s just you we beat up the patient with these statements of Have you tried this? Have you tried that, instead of instead of weaving with people and letting them tell you if they want, and if they don’t, they don’t. But I feel like we need to fix that or give advice. And so that’s, that’s a big part of my journey too.

26:50
Wow, such powerful stuff. And I want to just encourage you to keep all these things in perspective, that eventually whatever struggle, you’re going through, my by God’s grace, you’ll be looking back and you’ll be able to say, Wow, God had a purpose in it, whatever the struggle is that God is making you more like himself, you know, gold is only refined by the fire. So sometimes we have to go through these challenges. And and God gets the glory over the long term. We might never see it even this side of eternity, but with slate eventually, by God’s grace, okay, well, we’ll talk again Thursday. Thank you. God bless you. I love you.

27:31
Bye, bye. Thanks for listening. If you’ve been blessed by this, why not share it? Until next time, live with love, wisdom and passion.

 

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