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Welcome to the delight your marriage podcast. You’re joining me belah rose as I dive deep into the beauty, power and truth about intimacy, learn not only the practicals, but the heart behind what making love is all about. delight your marriage. Hi there and welcome, I am so grateful that you are joining me. I hope that your afternoon morning, evening, wherever you are listening to my voice is going well. And I am prayerful that tuning in today is going to matter and encourage you and inspire you to live more wholeheartedly in your relationship with Jesus and in your connection to your spouse. So what I want to talk about today is how rest influences everything in your life, from your sex life, to the way that you are as a parent, to the way you are doing God’s will in this world. Before I dive into that, I want to announce that I have another men’s training coming up early October. Now this time, it’s going to be free and live. Now in my trainings that I’ve done in the past, especially this men’s training that happened just a few months ago. Originally, I had people reach out to me after the training because they heard it on the podcast. And they were like is this still available and I had to share with them that it was not because I wasn’t able to continue to offer the men’s training at that time. So my encouragement to you is to mark your calendar, it’s going to be on a weekend, October 9 10th and 11th. The time tentatively is 7pm. Eastern, so mark your calendars. I’ll give you some confirmation. If you’d like to sign up for that. Just go to delight your marriage.com/ Men’s training. That’s it. So I’d love to have you as part of that training. And yeah, get on board as soon as you can make sure you’re there. Because like I said even clients have attended the men’s training in the past. And they told me that there’s even things on there that they weren’t aware of based on the courses that they’re taking with me. So my encouragement to you is definitely beyond there. There’s great content. And like I said, it’ll be live, there’ll be question and answer times. And you know, everything is better live. So my encouragement is to make sure that that’s on your radar and you get some really awesome content. Fantastic. Okay, well, let’s go ahead and dive in to today’s meat. And we’ll get started so if you see my family and I walking around the park on Saturday, morning, afternoon, evening, whenever it is, you will find out that we are walking slowly, relaxing, laughing a lot. I have a habit of there’s this railing at the park that is about two inches thick. It’s a bar it’s um wrought iron material. So it’s super, super strong. And during COVID One of my challenges has been to balance on that thing and walk around on it. And I’m happy to say that I’ve kind of mastered it to an extent I still fall every now and then but it’s pretty fun to do. So those kinds of things that are just playful fun. A lot of times we play games on Saturdays like practical game, what a physical games is what I’m trying to say so a really great game that somebody was giving away in our neighborhood and my husband got the game for free. It’s called Othello th e ll Oh, and it says that it’s for eight like kids eight and up. But my five year old plays it and has a lot of fun with us and it’s it’s kind of like a glorified I don’t know checkers mixed with bad Oh no, it’s fun. It’s really fun, even for adults. So anyway, we do things like that. On our rest day. Sometimes I paint or do charcoal or some kind of delight something I enjoy. Why do we do that? In our culture today, it feels like that’s wasting so much time. It’s a whole 12 hour chunk of time that should be invested productively, I feel like our culture is all about how much you can get done in a day. And that’s equal to righteousness.

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So whether it’s running to take your child to some extracurricular activity, or getting stuff at the grocery store or reading some book or taking some class or, or, or or, you know, working extra hard at some project and you know, putting on final touches or whatever, doing some new renovation to the house, buying that new thing. Keeping up with the shows, posting on social media, making the your account look beautiful, and all these different ways. There’s so much to do. Now, in our culture, it’s overwhelming, really the amount of demands on our time, not to mention we’ve got text messages, pinging in emails pinging in and they are, our concentration is constantly distracted by constant connection. And so many people don’t have any kind of boundaries between work and life, where their boss can call them at any moment or email them at any moment, even in the evening hours, and they take the call or clients. So what does this have to do with rest and stress and sex life? Well, stress is a libido killer for women, for sure. And well, rarely, I would say women actually get relief from sex from stress. So men, though, when they get really stressed, they’re like, oh, my gosh, sex will definitely take care of the stress. A lot of times, that’s how they feel. And the question is, what what? What do you do about it? Can Can you get rid of your stress? Well, you might be thinking, well, you know, somebody’s got to pay the bills, somebody’s got to get a promotion so that we can afford these things. Somebody who’s got to go to school so they can get the right job, the right careers. Somebody had to do these things to take care of the family. And I agree with you, there absolutely is time in place for work. I love my goals. I love ambition. I love business books and academic research. I love that kind of stuff. I love focused work, I love it. The problem is when we are so focused on being productive, that we lose sight of what really matters in life. Because we’re pinging from one thing to the next to the next to the next and it’s less focused work than it is distracted work. And there’s lots of studies to talk about this idea that if you are pinging back and forth, distracted, too distracted, too distracted, whether someone’s I am in you even at work, you get much less done. And you can read a couple books one of my favorite books about this is called deep work. I read it in the last year and my productivity has skyrocketed since I implemented some of the techniques he suggests also another book is called in distractible, which is also extremely practical. I would say deep work is much more philosophical of like why we’re doing this and it’s just brilliant. And then it’s in distractible is a lot more like here’s how to do it. Here are the tools to use here’s what not to do. Here’s what to do. Here’s how to shift this here’s how to change that. So it’s very, very much I would prefer you do deep work, read it and then in distractible, those are my recommendations. Okay, so anyway, um, why, why rest though? What does rest have to do with anything? Well, Jesus came out of a culture of a Sabbath. It’s really the only 10 commandment that we don’t follow as Christians is keep the Sabbath holy. And Jesus even talks about the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What that means is that the Sabbath is a gift to man that you labor and work six days but the seventh day you rest and you keep it holy. So I’m of the mind and several Christian thought leaders are as well that Sabbath is an absolutely Christian discipline, just like prayer and really fasting which I need to do more of Really,

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but just like, the different Christian disciplines of reading the Bible, Sabbath is, is important. And I want to go through a list of why it’s so important, why a rest day, what we call it in our family is so important is because a rest day gives us rejuvenation. It really fuels the rest of your week. Because you have one day, every week, that’s a built in vacation. In Mind, Spirit, body, soul, every part of you gets to rejuvenate, gets to relax. It also gives you perspective, it helps you to see man, all those little annoyances are just not that important. They’re just not that important. And I mean, the annoyances at work, the annoyances with your kids, the annoyances with your spouse, they just aren’t that important. The other thing that I think rest gives is this idea of abundant life. That’s a very important message of the gospel when Jesus says, The devil comes to kill, kill, steal, and destroy, but I have come to give life and life abundantly. My question to you is, are you living an abundant life? Are you living the life that Jesus intended for you to live? abundantly? See, when you have a rest day, you’re, you’re relaxing into God’s peace. You’re relaxing into enjoyment, you’re relaxing into the fact that God is God. And you don’t have to hold the whole world on your shoulders on this day, you get to trust that God’s going to take care of it. You get to trust that, you know, you can’t do everything. Yeah, just can’t. Because this is a boundary that the Sabbath is for rest. For years, my family didn’t have financial means to take any kind of a vacation. And the funny thing is, I never felt a lack. Because I felt like I had a vacation every single week. Like when people would say, how was your summer? Did you guys get out any? The answer would be no. But I never felt depleted. Or like that wasn’t a good thing. I was like, No, we, we didn’t we made a great summer. We know we didn’t travel, we didn’t go on vacation. There’s just we just didn’t have the funds for that. And even now, it’s not a high priority on our list. I mean, traveling to visit family and those sorts of things are, but I mean, I feel rejuvenated every single week. The other piece is it’s deeply and truly a connection with Jesus, a friendship with Jesus, holding hands walking life together with Jesus when you’re hurrying. And when you’re stressed out, you just can’t do that just doesn’t happen. When you’re just distracted and frustrated. And in a rush, we just can’t. We can’t have a slow paced connection with Jesus. Another book to recommend is called the ruthless elimination of hurry. And I recently read that and listen to that I’m a listener. You might be do an audiobook listener. But he really just nails this stuff down. It is really a good read. But the point of the matter is that Jesus was a very different pace of life. He was not rushed. Even when people had crises around him. He did not rush. There were times that somebody was sick and he stopped. Because along the way along the path somebody needed him, even when Lazarus was sick and going to die. And they were pleading with him to come. He waited two more days. And then he came after Lazarus died. And he was sad about it. He wasn’t happy the Lazarus died. So how could this be that Jesus takes his time

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in life? When Martha and Mary we’re together hosting not only Jesus, but his disciples and probably a lot of other guests. And if you think about the amount of work that had to be done to Most people back then. I mean, my goodness, it wasn’t even just baking bread, which, you know, I am no Baker. In fact, I don’t like cooking, I’m not good at it, because I’m not patient enough to do all that stuff, which is a funny, funny thing, since I’m talking about this, but back then they would have to, I don’t know, kill the animal to get the meat, they would have to grind up the wheat, they’d have to. I mean, there were so much work to do, honestly, I don’t even know the half of it. And Martha was doing all the work. While Jesus is teaching, while the men are sitting, listening, learning and Mary, the other hostess, who apparently should have been running around with just as much vigor and enthusiasm and diligence as Martha, Mary was sitting at Jesus’s feet, learning, she decided, You know what, it’s more important that I’m here with Jesus. And she could trust that the stuff that needed to get done would get done in the time that it needed to be done. And when Martha approached Jesus about it, when Mary probably I’m just imagining the situation that that Martha had reproach, reproached Mary and tried to get her to come and she wouldn’t come and you know, all this back and forth, and back and forth. And then finally, Martha goes to Jesus, Jesus, get Mary, to come with me, and do the work she’s supposed to do. And Jesus tells Martha, I can’t imagine he’s so gentle, and careful, but firm. And he looks at Martha and he says, Martha, you are distracted by many things. But Mary has chosen the good part. And it will not be taken from her. And I can imagine, you know, the punch to the gut of Martha’s like, Whoa, where my priorities that far out of line. And sometimes I think about, you know, the more perspective I have on my life, the more I think, when I get to Jesus, is he gonna say, Yeah, your priorities were right on? Or is it going to be like, Bella, you’re we’re distracted. You were distracted by things that didn’t matter. Are you kidding me? curling your hair? Getting the wrinkles out of that dress? You know, the things that made you rush your kids so that they were leaving the house crying? Did that really matter? Did that attract them towards Jesus? Did it matter more that I check an email and get distracted right before dinner, so I can’t even listen to what my children are trying to share with me. So then they grew up thinking that mom cares more about her work than she does about us. So what’s the point of following in her footsteps with faith, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good parent, that they love me more than they do their work. So just saying this out loud. I mean, COVID convicts me. So if nothing else, this is for me, and my heart. But the thing that I noticed is, the more I lean into rest my rest day, and truly make it a day about presence. And usually what I do I have a whiteboard in my room. And usually what I do is I pick a couple of words, that I want to be my focus on the rest day. And usually, it’s usually just a couple of words. One is peace. When is presence and something about the family or I don’t know making love something, something that I needed to just remember that that’s what today is a marker for it’s a special thing to set aside for. And, yes, making love is a big part of a rest day because it’s rejuvenating for both of us. When women get stressed, sex does help them by the end of it. But usually, there’s not this

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motivation to make love because of stress, whereas men are motivated to make love because of stress. Women in retrospect after sex might be like, oh, yeah, that is what would help. Yeah, okay. I don’t know why it is. It’s just the way it is. We can just trust that that’s the way it is. Alright guys, I don’t understand it. But that’s how I am doing that’s how a lot of women are. So my encouragement meant to you whether your husband or wife is to start to work rest days into your lives. And if ideally, I would love your goal to be a rest day, every single week, that may feel overwhelming right now. But my invitation to you then is to work in at least one every single month. And then slowly get to a place where every single week it is possible. But once a month, make it the same day every month. So maybe it’s going to be the first Saturday of the month. I don’t encourage Sundays to be the day assuming that you go to church or have a church meeting on Sundays, because the truth of the matter is, that’s a scheduled activity. That means you’re not resting. There’s things that need to be done, like getting everyone dressed, getting outside, getting in the car, going someplace greeting people. I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff that has to be get done and accomplished in order to make you know, your church service work, especially if you’re in any kind of ministry. And it really does need to be a full day. For us, we we try to clean our apartment ahead of the day, we try to get things kind of whether it’s tidy or kind of prepped, whether it’s kind of food, we understand what we’re going to be eating the next day. And we just really focus on it. One thing also that’s very helpful for us is since we have a five year old and a seven year old, they like to be very rambunctious, but I like my rest day to be very peaceful and quiet, especially in the mornings. So I spend my quiet time with Jesus every morning anyway. But at rest days, I want to spend quiet time with my family, but I still want it to be kind of quiet. So what we do now is we try to plan out a project for them to do in the mornings. So we may have extra cardboard boxes that we’ll have for them and a glue gun and scissors and all that my husband, I will just sit on the couch watching them do their projects. So then they painted and then by the end of it, they let’s say they’ve done crocodiles, they’ve done trains, they’ve done dragons, they’ve done elephants, they just make these giant, cool things. Just from, you know, glue gun glue stick, and cardboard boxes and some paint. Or another thing we do a lot which is awesome is we get let them pretend to be engineers. And so if we have some old machine, like this past, I think it was this past dress day or the time before that. We had an old broken air purifier that we gave them and we gave them screw screw drivers. And I don’t even know what else clipper like a wire clippers and those kinds of things. And we just, you know, we’re, we’re monitoring making sure they’re safe, but they love it. They love it. It’s a great project, they get to discover all these cool things about machines. And my husband and I are just sitting there kind of cuddling, watching all the fun things, talking about how grateful we are. That’s another thing on our rest day is we are very intentional to talk about how grateful we are about life, we’ll even ask each other questions. You know, Honey, what are you grateful for? Three things you’re grateful for. And we’ll just ping that back and forth. And we’ll even ask the kids, because we want this to be a time of really enjoying, I mean slurping out the joy of our life. Because what rest day do is it, it really helps you to get off the rat race of needing more, more, more not being satisfied without this and that and this and that an arrestee that you truly you you decide that you are going to have plenty that what you have is enough for joy for choosing joy. I mean, Jesus talks about joy. He was a joyful man. People wouldn’t want it to be around him children who wanted to be around him. Children don’t want to be around the the depressed, sad, mad people.

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I mean, Jesus was an encouraging guy. Yes, he spoke truth but he was a lot of fun to be around. In fact, he was even called drunkards, he was called a drunkard and a glutton because he would go to parties he would be at weddings he would. He would go to people’s houses for dinner and have his friends along with him. This was not uncommon. Even His disciples didn’t fast. Whereas the Pharisees and John’s disciples all fasted, but Jesus disciples didn’t. And he said, you know, the bridegroom is with them. Now, why would they be fasting? So Jesus was very, okay with them with people enjoying their lives. And so my encouragement to you is, you know, Jesus had a very strong and healthy balance of enjoying life, and working. I mean, my goodness, this, this, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew how to study, he knew how to suffer, he knew the work that had to be done, but he balanced it with rest, with Sabbath, with enjoyment. So my encouragement to you is to enjoy your life. To really let the abundant life that God has given you take hold, and that you don’t have to need need need. Why are our dream and vision boards? Why do they have giant pools and giant houses and these kinds of things that just is like, really, I’m looking forward to heaven for that right now. I just, I just want to time and peace and pleasure with my family, I just want to be in in the midst of God’s will, I don’t want to be distracted by a bunch of shiny objects. I don’t want the responsibility that a big house requires, I don’t want any of that. I don’t want the space. You know, one thing, this is a side. But I have a hunch that since houses have gotten bigger, I noticed that families have gotten more distant from each other. And I don’t know if this is true, but this is my hunch is that children’s rooms are more separated from each other. Parents rooms are more separated from their kids, kids can kind of escape and slam doors and get away from each other. And there’s not even this physical space requirement for them to be near enough to each other to talk. Because they have a lot of space. So I say that, you know, from a New York City apartment that is is small. And and and lovely. I absolutely love it. Alright, let me get back to rest days. We are intentional about not talking about stressful things. I mentioned we don’t schedule things. We, we both are connected, committed to this conversation, to not to not pick, bring up stressful things. So if if he starts talking about something that stresses me out, or vice versa, I’ll just be like, Honey, can we can we talk about something else today, I’m happy to talk about that tomorrow, no problem. And we just shift because we have one day, that’s meant to rejuvenate us. And we have to protect that day because otherwise we won’t have another one for a whole nother week. And we need that to fuel us for a week of hard work. It’s kind of like a sprinter. The Olympians, right. You can’t run, run, run, run, run and then not sleep at night. That’s insane. You have to rest you have to rejuvenate for you to be as effective and attentive and focused and impactful and influential that God wants you to be. You have to rest. You have to wrestle. I’m a huge fan of reading and writing and being productive. But on that day, I don’t listen to business books for the most part. I mean, unless I can tell it’s rejuvenating. But if it starts making me think about work, or if it starts making me think about productivity in a work related situation, I just decide, You know what, I can listen to something else that’s really going to fill me during this time. Another piece, and I mentioned this a little bit but friendship with God, feeling his delight in me. I know I miss that in our fast paced life so often is I’m working for God, but do I realize that he looks at me and he smiles and he’s happy about who I am. And he just loves me because that’s what’s really supposed to keep us centered. Is that God’s love but if I don’t make time to meditate on that, on who he is as a father, as a lover as a as a kind friend as a generous Savior

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as someone who wants to spend time with me, if I don’t If I don’t prioritize that time it, it’s so far away from my mindset that what does it even mean to be a Christian if I don’t have a relationship with Jesus so making love is important to resting gets you into your body and out of your head. As a woman, that’s a hard thing to do. And it takes emotional energy, to stop thinking about all the things you got to do. And instead just dropping into senses, what is your body feeling from from your outer skin to the inside of your ReSSA and rest says, receiving Him into her essence. So all the beauty between her legs, that’s her ReSSA. But does she even if she attentive to that, if she doesn’t have rest in her life built in, she’s not attentive to her feelings, she really needs, the space and the opportunity to rest. So as a husband, if you’re listening to this, you get to be a protector of the time of your family, you are the protector of your family. If your family doesn’t have space to rest, it’s your responsibility to help you guys get there. What in the 60s has to get done. So rest is a part of your lifestyle. What can you d commit to because in the realm of what’s most important in life, it’s not that important. I would say put a rest day on the calendar today, right now, stick it on the calendar today. Invite your wife, or if it’s a wife listening, invite your husband, I’d like to have this as our rest day. Just do start with one, just start and start to value. The gift that God has given you a rest, it is a it is a trusting God, that He is going to provide for your family, that he wants you to enjoy this gift, that he has a big enough God to deal with all the things that you can’t deal with. Because rest matters, it’s kind of like trusting that you can sleep at night, that everything’s gonna be okay when you wake up when you open your eyes. Because you know, sleep is required for you to have any kind of life. I think rest is the same way. I was such a productivity nuts that I in fact, I even used to, if I was enjoying myself for two hours, whether it was with friends at a party at a social gathering something if it was two hours, literally on the dot, well, pretty darn close to on the.of. Two hours, I would leave so I could go do something productive, whether it was read something productive, do something productive, write something, pray productively, something very important. And it’s funny when my husband and I started dating. We, I didn’t even realize it. I didn’t know this about myself. But he started to notice that I couldn’t I couldn’t enjoy myself for more than two hours at a time. It wasn’t. I just couldn’t I, I felt guilty. I felt ashamed. I felt like I wasn’t doing God’s work. And it wasn’t until we started practicing the spiritual discipline of rest of a Sabbath that my whole life perspective changed. And it was a trust that I’m like, Yeah, God has me God has this life and I get to walk with Him in it. So that’s my encouragement to you. Let’s let’s pray. Now, Father, I believe that the person listening to this needs to listen to it, that there was a reason they clicked on this, that there was a reason they listened all the way through Father, I pray God that you would give them an insight into why it matters to them. How you set this world up is better than our own conceptions of the rat race that the world tells us is good. Get the most money get the biggest houses get the most stuff. I mean, what what kind of, what kind of way did you live Jesus?

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You had a balanced life. You enjoyed the good but you also did the work on the side. I mean, both of those had to happen for you to be effective. And I asked God for effective in God’s will and I asked God that you would give this person clarity on what it means to rest and enjoy and and and decide that what they have is enough that what they have done in the last six days is enough. And then it would fuel and transform their lives more in accordance with your will. And I pray even for their spouse, if they’re concerned that yeah, they are on board, but maybe their spouse isn’t. God given them the wisdom and the grace to know how to approach it. And how to align their lives with this important piece of your well, in Jesus name, amen. Wonderful. Well, thank you for listening. Again, the men’s training is coming right up. So definitely mark your calendar, October 9 through 11th. This is all about teaching you how to get your wife to make love, enjoy sex with you. Some of the people that have worked with me, even if their wife didn’t know they were working with me, their intimate life completely transformed from maybe a couple times a year to a few times a month. So God is good. And I believe this is going to be really important training for all the gentlemen out there to to join. So October 9 through 11th. Hope to see you. God bless you and we’ll talk soon go to delight your marriage.com/ Men’s training to sign up. God bless. Bye