As a wife, this is something I really struggled with.

Why would he want me to do such embarrassing things? Does it remind him of sin? I don’t want to be associated with his past.

Also, it’s not my personality.

And in general, I’m not comfortable.

I had SO many more hang-ups around this.

But, one thing kept knawing at me. Why is this all over our society?

Specifically seduction. Yes, the act is in certain movies and x-rated things that I don’t watch. But seduction is almost unavoidable (even in PG-13 movies). Whether it’s a glance, a teasing, and revealing advertisement…it’s everywhere and unavoidable.

It’s in every culture all around the world.

Yesterday, I received an email that Delight Your Marriage is ranked as the #1 Podcast in the categories of Sexuality as well as the category of Health & Wellness in several African countries which (is really cool!) means that culture doesn’t make a difference.

These philosophies go across cultures and all over the globe.

Why does seduction matter?

This podcast is directed at wives, but if you are a husband I think you’ll get a glimpse of what’s holding her back.

Get the Seduction Tips here and a free training on this! www.delightyourmarriage.com/tips

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transcript

0:02
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. This is Bella. And I want to thank you so much for joining me. If you’re a wife listening, let’s just pretend you and I are on a little coffee date. And we’re sharing and we’re friends. And we’re talking about intimacy. And I’m, you know, a bit further along in that journey. I’ve worked with men from all over the world and heard from many, many men. My podcast is reaching almost a million downloads, and I’m so grateful that men have really shared their story. And week after week, of me hearing them in my team coaching and my one on one coaching, I get to really understand their hearts. And they say I understand them. And and so you and I are having coffee. And we’re talking about what what matters in intimacy, why? Why is it such a big deal to your husband’s heart? And then we kind of start talking about what what are you comfortable doing in sex. Now, before I go too much further, I want to share with you that I specifically have a download for you for free, called seduction tips. So these are some of my, my favorite seduction tips. And they just really outline things in a good way for you. So you can get that for free at delight your marriage.com/tip s and I encourage you to do that before you forget. So the fact that I’m talking about it with you right now, I just encourage you to, you know, to click off of whatever you’re listening to, I’m sure the sound continues and just go to delight your marriage calm slash tip s download that. And then you just have it and you can refer to that anytime. So let’s talk about why seduction matters to your husband. Now when I look at some of the statistics in the background of my podcast, which I didn’t use to do, but I really changed my approach on that because I realized, it’s actually very helpful for me to know and it’s helpful for you to know what matters most to, to my listeners here. So some of the biggest are our highest rated podcasts, for example, one of them is the Okay, so the highest rated podcast ever, is 187 get turned on by him. And I almost guarantee you that most of those were listened to by men because they’re like, oh my gosh, how do I let my wife get more turned on by me. So he’s listening to that. The next one that’s the second most popular is episode 199. The three things he wants in sex, which is just one that I hear over and over again from husbands that this is a huge, hugely important episode for them. And then the third highest rated is Episode 234, oral sex, why he cares so much and why she’s not comfortable. So if you want to go back and listen to those, those are important ones, and obviously important to the men that are listening. And the thing is, I hear from men, maybe probably, I don’t know, eight out of 10 times, in terms of people that reach out to me, I hear so much more from men because they’re really suffering in their marriages around intimacy. And it seems strange to say suffering. Because a lot of times women are saying, You know what, we make love on a consistent basis, he should be happy. Or she’s like, you know, I’m not comfortable. I’m not sure if it’s even okay, I feel insecure. That’s not my personality to be out there and you know, excited about sex. So, so let’s talk about what you’re comfortable with as a wife. So I kind of break it down into a few different categories. So let’s say How comfortable are you in the act zero to 10 like during the act, how comfortable are you with you know, making

4:59
so rounds with certain positions with being enthusiastic and passionate and letting them see your body, all those zero to 10. Where are you with that? So that’s the first category. The next category. And one thing I’ll say is, a lot of times women are higher in that. Because when you get turned on, it’s easier to act and do all those things. Because you’re, you’re just less inhibited. That’s just naturally what happens when you’re turned on. It’s not, you’re not as inhibited. Okay, so what about how comfortable are you with activities in sex? So, yes, you know, specifically intercourse, but what about other things, you know, using your hand using your mouth? Being a little creative in other in other ways, you know, even in other types of sex? So my encouragement is to Yeah, to kind of think about zero to 10, How comfortable are you with other activities around sex? The next thing that specifically is this podcast episode about is seduction? How comfortable are you with seduction? So, zero to 10? How comfortable are you with starting things off initiating in a sexy way, dancing for your husband, doing especially fun things that get him excited and get him thinking about sex and, and whispering, whispering certain things in his ear. And those kinds of things? Where are you in your comfort level zero to 10. Now, a lot of times when I work with wives, they’re pretty good with the actual activity within sex, they’re maybe less comfortable with the activities that I kind of talked about. So. So actually, insects, they’re pretty comfortable. The activities, maybe they’re a little less comfortable. But then the seduction one, it’s like boom, that goes down the rung into zero and one degree zone. And that’s very normal. So just recognize your super normal about that. Now, when I hear from husbands, seduction is a big piece for them. I mean, it is a very important part for them. In fact, they’re like, you know, my husband says, or my wife says, you know, we should make love, or what’s your schedule look like should we put was, should we make love tomorrow afternoon, or let’s go have sex, or, you know, these kinds of things. Like, that’s the extent of her initiating. And that’s great, because she initiates. So I’m very proud of you, if that’s the way you initiate great. So be proud of yourself, because there’s plenty of women who don’t initiate it at all. And men are suffering because it’s like, their wife doesn’t even care. So there’s that aspect. But if you’re a woman who just is really at a spot where there’s not a comfort, there’s not a, it’s just very hard to do that. Then I want to just identify with you and say, I’ve been there, I’ve felt extremely stressed and, and uncomfortable and humiliated and feeling like my body’s not good enough and insecure. And all the things. And even like, you know, he seen sin, so I don’t want to look like send to him, I don’t want to be that object that he sinfully desired in the past, I don’t want to remind him of that sin. There’s lots of things that I used to think. And so that’s actually one reason I’ve got this free training coming up. So when you sign on to get those tips to let your marriage.com/tip S, you’re also going to get access to a free training. So I encourage you to sign up as soon as you can. So you can get access to that training but because I don’t want to be super specific on a podcast where anyone and everyone can listen. And I can give you more meat in a in a training there. But anyway, why does this matter to your husband? Why is seduction so important? Well when you think about what’s important to you as a wife, what what what does matter to you.

9:43
When you think about I feel so filled up when he surprises me with with gifts or an outing or a letter or a special experience that he’s thought through and it was it took time and energy and effort Thought for him to put all those pieces together and surprise you, for example, with whatever it was,

10:09
mean, think about how loved you feel, how satisfied you feel in your marriage, how much you feel like, you’re not taken for granted that who you are is

10:21
important to him. So if that’s the way you feel, think about your husband is a different, different being than you. I mean, in every way, he is so different than you. And if you want him to feel loved, then you have to treat him like he’s different. I hear women assume their husbands are the same as them. So they’re like, I’m just gonna, like candles and make this awesome dinner for him and really go all out. And I’m sure he would appreciate it. Yes. But in terms of priority, like really awesome, free, engaged, passionate woman wanting to make love to him and dance in front of him and do all the amazing things for him. I mean, it’s it’s, like out of 10 That’s 100 Like he just craves that. And how do I know this is true? Well, let’s look at our society. Our society is all about the seduction. sinfully right. But I mean, think about music videos, and magazines. And even, you know, as horrible as it is strip clubs. That’s not act. I mean, there’s nothing but seduction happening in those things. And yet, it is an atrocious part of our society. So it really does matter to the male brain. The seduction aspect, it’s the teasing, it’s the excitement, it’s the way that you look into his eyes and know what he wants, and you don’t give it to him immediately. But you tease him visually and in a in a way that that just drives them wild. He requires a lot from you, but it’s a similar way with all the surprises and the romance that you just wish he would do that he would buy you flowers just because he knows that would make you smile that he would buy you a cute little you know thing on Etsy that that you you know or he knows would be your taste, you know, that stuff breeds absolute, you know, swooning for a wife and, man if you want to go to delight your marriage calm and check out the wild romance course you’ll find out exactly what she’s craving, romantically and and how to do that. But, you know, think about that wives like, if you want your husband, to desire you and please you in the ways that make you feel filled up, then you’ve got to do it for him. You’ve got to recognize he’s not like you. He’s not like you and the bare minimum isn’t going to be satisfying. Just like the bare minimum with romance isn’t going to be satisfying. You’re going to rather your chick flicks and romance novels because he doesn’t think it matters. Or he’s too insecure to do it. Really, women the problem with what’s going on now one of the biggest things that men why they don’t do romance for you is they’re insecure. Just like for women the biggest reason she doesn’t do seduction is she’s insecure there’s plenty of other things there’s plenty of other things like I started listing them out there are the blocks basically to seduction, but that’s one of the biggest insecure about many things about the way her body looks about you know what, what she does what she should do what you know, even sinful, is it is it dirty? Is it wrong? Is it bad? Is it is it going to judge her? Is he going to criticize her? Is he gonna respond to her in a in a negative way? Is it just too scary to put herself out? Why does she have to perform for her husband? Like, there’s so many psychological barriers to it. But my dear wife, I invite you to get yourself out of this self centered mindset. And I’m sorry, I was in your shoes, so I get

15:19
it. But it’s not about you. It’s about loving this being. Well, this person who is very different than you, he was designed differently, his brain is created differently. And every single society, sex is a big deal. And seduction is a big deal. And unfortunately, sexual sin is a big deal everywhere. Which means there are some just basic truths. Men are the ones that are are seeking out this sexual satisfaction. Yes, women get addicted to pornography, too. But it’s not to the immense degree that it is for men. I mean, you just don’t have you know, strip clubs, for women. Not even close to the amount as men you don’t have the pornography addiction, like, like women, like, you don’t have the double standard where men almost always are. It’s okay to have sex all the time. Because you’re a man, you know, there’s just we have to as women open our eyes, like that is showing a truth about men. And yes, your husband is a man. He is a man. Yes, he’s pursuing God. Hopefully, he’s pursuing God. He’s seeking to be righteous and keeping his eyes and thoughts pure. But you have an opportunity to love him as a man. That’s your opportunity. So why does seduction matter? Because it’s his heart. He feels loved through sex. You feel loved in other ways through other ways. But he feels loved through sex. So when you reject this part, which is such an important part of sex, it’s rejecting him. It’s rejecting who he is as a man. But instead, if you’re like, Okay, this is my husband, what do I have to do? I’d like not even what do I have to do but what do I get to do? Alright, just the way you would want him to have as in his opinion, for surprises and gifts and dates and time with you and deep conversations. You want him to have a wonderful attitude and excited attitude, a growth mindset of how he can get better at those things. Not to be insecure, and put the focus on Him. Dear husbands, let me tell you, don’t be insecure, don’t put the the focus on you when you’re trying to give your wife something special. And in the same way wives, don’t be insecure and put the focus on you when you’re trying to give your husband something special in seduction. That’s what seduction is, is giving to your husband a gift. He is so different, designed differently and and go ahead and listen to episode 199 The three things he wants in sex, I have heard so many times from husbands how much that hits the nail on the head and how it should be required listening for wives and I mean, get in the mindset of your husband. I can’t count the amount of times men have said I think like a man. I understand them. And you know as much as you know, I’m super grateful for that. But I just want you to know, like I get to be in the room with men, you know the Zoom Room, if you will, when they are sharing an filtered thoughts about sex, unfiltered thoughts. They trust me it’s fully confidential. I don’t judge them. But I want you to know that’s what I’m bringing to this conversation. This is not I’m not feminist enough. I am feminist. I am a feminist I’m so grateful for what are my four mothers have fought so that I can vote and I can be independent and and all these wonderful gifts they have given. But one thing that is is a half truth is that my sexual drive an interest is equal to my husband’s. That’s not the case. I mean, I should be respected, my sexual

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response to him should be respected and honored in the same way that his his, but I should think about his sex drive and his desires as different and unique. And more, let’s say stronger than mine, his drive is and if you’re listening to this and your higher drive wife, okay, there’s, there’s, there’s other stuff I could talk to you about. But for the vast majority of spouses, the husband has higher drive, he’s much more interested in the visuals and the craving and the teasing and all that and. And if you’re a higher drive wife there, there are aspects to things that there may be dynamics that need to be different in your marriage that would cause him to want you sexually. Maybe there’s controlling issues, that you’re controlling him, you’re mothering him, those are not attractive things that make him want to have sex with you. Or, or maybe it’s lights off sheets up, and he doesn’t get to visually enjoy you. And so and so there’s not a whole lot of interest, or, or maybe it’s duty sex, and he, and he’s like, that’s not it’s not an interesting thing. That’s not a you know, appealing proposition because there’s no passion in it. There’s not true deep connection. So all this to say, My dear wife is that your husband craves? passion, enthusiasm, excitement, and for it to start before the activity starts. For it to start before the activity starts. And so you may be asking, Okay, what’s the how? Well, what this has already become a pretty long podcast episode, let’s go ahead and keep the conversation going. Download that delight your marriage.com/tips. Understand that training that I’ve got coming for you. And husbands, if you’re like, yes, Bella, right on, tell me how to get my wife involved. I have advice for you, too. So go to delight your marriage.com get the tips. Select that your husband, I’m going to be sending you some information on how to get your wife involved in in this process. It is a process it’s not. You know, well, for some people, I guess it is flip the switch but for your wife, but assume it’s a process, assume you’re going to be patient assume you’re going to be strategic, assume you’re not going to email her this podcast and say this is going to fix it all. But it but get wise as a husband, get wise yourself, learn yourself so that you can invite your wife in a way that’s going to be effective, strategic, and actually draw her closer to you rather than push her away and make her feel like she’s not good enough. All right, well, let me let me just pray for you. And we’ll wrap this. So Father, I’m just imagining the wife listening to this Lord. And maybe she’s listening because her husband has just pleaded with her. So many times so many ways for her to have this mindset around seduction. And I just pray for her heart if she’s felt like she’s not good enough as a result, or, or she’s resentful, or angry or bitter or really, all underneath is really hurt and disappointed and pained by this topic in general. Father, I asked for her hearts and I asked that you would encourage her. I pray the now to say you know what, this isn’t personal. This is just a skill. This is just growth in a new way of thinking. And in loving her husband, well, he’s different than her and she can accept that and she can play into that and she can love that about him. I pray for new perspective just coming out of this podcast. Lord, I pray that for the woman that’s excited about seduction, that she wants to learn more that you would just bless that and breathe upon that and help her to understand it in the way that that matters. And that’s going to fill up her husband and and help him to have a more pure and lust free mindset as he walks into the world outside of their home God that that he has so many visuals and images and exciting times with his wife. He doesn’t even need to be distracted by someone else’s Something else that he encounters during the day father, I just asked for your grace on this, and

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that this episode would would go to the women that need it. And I pray for men to not be the ones that listen to this to not be in comparison mode, but in seeking growth in themselves and what they can do, to take responsibility and change their marriage in a wise way, but not in a way that’s full of unforgiveness and, and, and instead decide, You know what I’m going to do what I can do, to shift things and take that responsibility on themselves. To make a difference, to make a difference for their marriage. Lord, we love you. We love what you’re doing in in this marriage and in this person’s heart. In Jesus name, Amen. All right, well, thank you for listening to me and for for engaging in this content. We’d love to have you on the training, delight your marriage.com/tip s for seduction tips, and you’ll get all the information about the training in that email that’ll be coming to your inbox already. God bless you and I look forward to speaking to you next week. Thank you so much.

 

If you’re new to Delight Your Marriage, this is the first episode you should listen to.

Many people come to my resources with a question on how to make their marriage better but they really don’t know where to start.

This is a rundown on the most important philosophical underpinnings of Delight Your Marriage.

This gives the best introduction to the foundational principles that I use with people from all over the world–by God’s grace–to transform their marriages and families.

Just a few things included:

Listen in and go to delightyourmarriage.com/resources to find out about all the courses I offer to totally transform your marriage!

There are courses for husbands or wives to receive the love you’re craving in your marriage.

Blessings,

Belah

—

transcript

0:02
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. All right, welcome. Thank you for joining. So, if you’re new to delight your marriage, that’s what this episode is all about. I want to give you really a rundown of my philosophies. And what I’m doing in this project called delight your marriage, it’s a business, some call it a ministry. But the purpose of it is really to help you transform your marriage, make aligned with God’s will, and in that really transforming your whole life. So let’s dive in.

1:07
So first and foremost, when Jesus was asked, What’s the greatest commandment, he said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is like it to love your neighbor as yourself. And so my conviction is that your closest neighbor is your spouse. So that means, you know, they’re on the other side of the bed, hopefully, they are the most important relationships. So when you think about, well, how do I prioritize my life, you’ve got God first, far, far, far above anyone else, including your spouse far above. And then you’ve got your spouse. And then after your spouse, you’ve got your kids. And then after your kids, everyone, everything else. So that includes your ministry, that includes your business that includes whatever you enjoy after that your activities, your hobbies, your income, that all all sorts of things. I mean, that’s the discernment process, but you don’t have to discern your spouse and your kids. They’re your automatic assignment. That’s your first and foremost, God’s will automatically you don’t have to think about it. The rest is a discernment process. And, and it depends on seasons and that kind of thing. Your kids, your spouse, those don’t depend on seasons, they’re always gonna be there. So I think that is a homerun. If you’re married, you committed to this person. They’re your assignments. You’re supposed to love them. Just like you love yourself. Now, what do I mean by loving yourself? What does that mean? Love your neighbor as yourself. What that means is you understand who your spouse is, and how they receive love. So just like if your friends loves cookies, you’re not going to bring them a cake just because you like cake. No, that wouldn’t be loving, that would be selfish. But if you know they love cookies, you’re gonna bring them a cookie, you’re gonna love them the way that you would want to be loved just like you love cake, you would want them to make you a cake. So that’s another huge principle that I teach is love your spouse, the way your spouse receives love. Love your spouse, the way your spouse receives love, and that’s different men and women are different. Even even non Christians, a feminist feminists, people that are completely you know, a gala, terian kind of mindsets. You can’t deny biological differences, not not just genitalia, but voice, the way you think. And even the way the mind is constructed, is different for men and women. Just Scientifically speaking, you look at one piece of the of the brain is a very different shape and size than females from male and females. So. So let’s talk about what those principal differences are. So for women to feel loved, to feel fulfilled in their marriage, I believe they need to have three things to feel fulfilled, they need to be known at her core, who is she her uniqueness and that that’s honored and valued of who she is at her core. who God made her to be her strengths, her passions, her desires, her likes her wishes, all of that who she is. So to be known as the first one, the second one is to be safe. Yes, of course, physical safety, but I’m actually talking emotional safety, that she can come to you with her emotions, her feelings, her cares. Her hurts her woundedness and, and you care. And you want to love her well, and she’s safe with you. And there’s no threat. There’s no pressure. There’s no these high expectations around anything, whether it’s intimacy or anything else, that you accept her for who she is. And you love that about her. You love her deeply. With no strings attached. You

5:45
just love this woman. So that’s number two. That’s to be safe. And then the final one, number three is wholeheartedly cherished. Wholeheartedly cherish now that’s the romance. That’s the stuff that all the chick flicks talk about. That is where she swoons because you’re thinking about her, you want to surprise her. You want to make her feel like she matters to you, you think about her, you wholeheartedly cherish? Why do I say wholeheartedly, you can’t take her to a restaurant and be annoyed the whole time, your attitude matters. If you have the attitude of being wholehearted in the way you think about and care about this woman, that’s what touches her heart. So we’ve got known, safe and cherish. So those are the core principles that I teach of how a woman feels loved and fulfilled in her marriage. So what about for men? What are the three things? Okay, so the first one is respected? What does that even mean? I definitely had a misconception of that for most of my life. But what it means is just the way it was before you were married, before you were dating, even, you would talk to a person that you don’t know, well, with a certain level of respect, you would say things like, Excuse me, or I don’t mean to interrupt, or would you mind if you would regard that person as separate from you, and fully able to have their own identity, their own life, freedom to be who they want to be. That’s called respect. So seeing saying things like we need to, or we have to, or you should, or you have to, or commanding a husband is the absolute opposite of respect. I used to do this, I did. And it was a horrible aspect of our marriage. I didn’t treat him like a man. But I’m not a man. So I don’t need that kind of respect in the same way. So I’m not sensitive to it like he is. But he is I mean, he’s got almost like a antenna a respect to antenna up all the time. And that either puts him in the right direction or the wrong direction, where you know, he his antenna radar goes off at disrespect and boom, he, he responds with anger or responds with apathy, or responds with knee jerk reaction leaving, those are the kinds of things that men respond to disrespect. Alright, so that’s the first one. He needs to be respected. Number Number Two for him is he needs to be admired. Yes, our society says things like the flimsy male ego or, you know, this, this almost like making fun of men’s need for being admired for being someone that that matters for being enough in this world. And as a wife, you have the opportunity to support him in this way to to help him know that he is enough and God did give him these particular strengths. And that’s what you focus on. You focus on the ways God has made him amazing. So you you discover what he’s good at. And, and you think about those things, you focus on the things that he’s awesome at, none of us are going to be 100% of everything. That’s ridiculous. There’s no way all of us are going to have awesome strengths. In all of us, you’re going to have significant weaknesses. And when you acknowledge that that’s not just normal, but this beautiful design God has given us it becomes a totally different way of thinking about your spouse, that you have the opportunity to discover what he is amazing at. And being that cheerleader. Being that cheerleader for him having the understanding. I find that it’s so helpful for wives to think about their husbands as being insecure. That’s just We’re all insecure, I mean, husbands also to be thinking about their wives as insecure is also helpful. We’re all insecure, we all have our insecurity and our spouse is the closest one to us. And so the way we think about our spouse is the way they think about themselves. It’s, it’s impossible not to you, you, it’s almost like your spouse is like holding up a mirror and, and the way your spouse sees you, affects your conception of your spouse, yourself. So my husband has got a high view of me, and I live up to that reputation that he has of me, I feel more empowered, because he sees me as so capable.

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And that’s what I want a wife to do for her husband, is to admire him deeply. Don’t just, you know, consider him like, you’re his mother, you have to teach him all the things you have to correct him in public you have, like these are things that that demean and demoralize and de emasculate a man. But instead, if you admire him, you build him up, you make it known that you think he’s incredible. That’s the stuff that puts his shoulders back where he had has held head held high, he feels like, Man, I’m doing it. I’m living this life. Well. That’s the kind of thing you want to give your husband. That’s what makes him feel fulfilled as a man. And the final piece, wholehearted sexual intimacy. Now I talked about the brain being different for men and women, literally, biologically, the space for sex drive in a man and sex drive for a woman, the man’s space for that in, in where it is in the brain is two to three times larger than a woman’s. I mean, this is biological, he has 10 times more testosterone than she does. And that’s the sex drive hormone. So it’s, it’s biologically normal for the husband to crave sex more than the wife. And what does he craving sex? I talk about this stuff a lot, because I think this is stuff we don’t address Well, in our culture. But when we enter Christian culture to like, especially, I guess, Christian culture, and in a way that’s, that’s holy, and good and practical, and what does that even mean? Like, we can’t just say flour, really flowery language without giving practical how tos because then we’re expecting somebody to go to the dark side to learn and that’s full of sin. But instead, let’s give you practical tools on what to do, and how to do it and that sort of thing. So that’s what a lot of my courses and resources provide, whether it’s my book, delight, your husband, a Christians wife, manual to passion, confidence, and oral sex, or my course, the seduction course, or my video course delight your husband, or my men’s programs, which wild romance rediscover what you had at first, masculinity reclaimed, which is just full of incredible insights on how a man can transform to love his wife well, so I’ve got tons of resources for men and for women, you can go to delight your marriage.com you can click on Resources and really understand and unpack what I’m talking about here. But when we’re discussing sexual intimacy in your marriage, a lot of times people ask, Well, why would a husband have such a strong sex drive and the wife has such a low sex drive? Why would God create it that way? And there are exceptions. Okay, there are exceptions. Sometimes, just as a mentioned, sometimes men have a lower sex drive with their wife, because they’re not receiving respect, and they’re not receiving that admiration. Sometimes men have blocked out their sex drive, because they’ve struggled with sexual sin. And they’ve divorced that from their own desire of sex. And it’s, they need to integrate their desire of sex with their desire for their wife, and it requires a healing process. Those are some reasons and then some reasons. I haven’t worked with every other one in the world, some reasons, it’s just the way people are made and we can accept that that God made all of us different and just like most of us can do certain things. There are some people that have certain things, they’re different and that’s okay, God, God is God and, and he designs people that are different and that’s good. And that’s something we can celebrate and, and love and again, we all have our gifts and and that’s just an additional gift. All right, so but for those that, listen to my podcast, they’re usually in the place of higher sex drive is the husband, lower sex drive is the wife. Or maybe they want to get to that dynamic. And that’s where I’m talking about the integration and the changing the way a wife treats her husband. So why does God make husbands have a higher sex drive than wives? I think one of the main reasons is because a man needs to grow in character. In order to have a wife that wants to be free in intimacy,

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he needs to grow in the way he looks like Jesus, in order for her to want to be free in intimacy, in order for her to want to do anything seductive, or variety or care about his body and how he operates there. He’s got to have the character of Jesus, which is gentle, and patient, and kind, and loving and peaceful, and joyful. Right, it’s the fruits of the Spirit, faithful and self controlled. So when a husband looks a lot more like Jesus, it’s not hard for a wife to want to make love to him. But if she feels like she’s comparing she he that he is comparing her to his past, or to pornography, or to affairs or these kinds of things, of course, she’s not going to feel safe. Of course, she’s not going to be able to trust him. You know, if she feels this pressure or high expectation, she can’t feel safe, she can’t let down her guard in intimacy. And so that’s why it’s so vital for husband to love her in the ways that she receives love known to know that, that he doesn’t want others that she is unique to him, that she is she is the has a uniqueness in her spirit that God designed that that she is the daughter of the Most High and he honors her reveal reveres her like that. And then tip number two, again, to be safe, that she is safe with me accepts her as she is and loves her as she is just like Christ loves the church. Right Christ loves the church, accepting her loving her, having patience with her gentling being gentle with her. That’s how Christ loves the church and wholeheartedly cherishing her. So again, with coming kind of swinging back over to what men crave is to to be respected, to be admired. And number three wholehearted sexual intimacy. So duty sex isn’t isn’t wholehearted, right, it’s the same as the man coming to the dinner and the nice date, whether he’s dressed up or not. And having a bad attitude. It’s not fulfilling. So in the same way for a wife to come to intimacy with excitement, enthusiasm, variety, visuals, and, and loving his body and specifically his member God designed it. God designed it as holy. That’s that’s his design. The enemy tried to steal it and manipulate and make everything feels a sinful around sexual intimacy, but it’s not. It’s God’s design. And lots of activities are specifically even written in the Song of Solomon. very explicitly, you can read it, it’s pretty powerful. The words that are just dramatically oral sex is right on in there. I mean, that’s, that’s the God designed us to be free in sex. To to even in Proverbs five, it talks about being nice created by your wife’s love, inebriated and it’s talking in contrast to adultery. So it’s talking about sex. We are supposed to have a freedom and connection in sexual intimacy that’s unlike anything anywhere else. And so yes, a huge amount of my resources are around sexual intimacy, because that needs to be consistent part of a married couples life. And being that your marriage is your highest human relationship. The husband has to look more like Jesus to fulfill that piece of marriage and a wife has to be disciplined. That sounds strange, but the truth is, if a wife has a lower libido, which Most wives have a lower libido than their husbands. And I’ve already told you scientifically why.

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Myself included, I have to be disciplined, I have to recognize this as God’s will for my life, to make love to my husband on a consistent basis within Hoosiers. And that means I need my food to be in check, I need to have exercise as part of my life, I need to not compare myself to others, I need to reject the enemy’s attacks of me thinking about what my husband saw in the past, in his sexual sin, I need to reject what the enemy wants to lie to me about I’m not good enough, or I don’t know enough, or I don’t have the curves like some women do. I’m not sexy enough. Those are lies from the enemy. So a wife has to reject the lies of the enemy, and commit to loving her husband the way that he receives love, in God’s will, in God’s will. And it also requires her to not get too busy. It requires you to have rest as part of her lifestyle. And again, those are things that are in line with God’s will think about Mary versus Martha. So these, again, are just major principles that I teach with delight your marriage. Another really key thing is having your connection first and foremost with the Lord. Which means that the openness that you have with your spouse is limited. In integrity. That’s very important. Because sometimes we share with our spouse, everything, everything, everything, everything. And a lot of them are hurtful and harmful things. And if you really live according to the principles I just discussed, it’s obvious you cannot share all these negative thoughts that go through your head with your spouse. And a lot of people say, Well, I’m just being honest. I’m just being honest. But I would say no, you’re just being mean, you’re just not living according to the principles of Jesus. Jesus didn’t share everything with everybody. He shared according to what they were ready to hear. And that’s the same with our spouse. Yes, I can share everything with God. I can share my disappointments with my spouse, I can have my spouse, I can share the sadness I have, I can share my grief, I can share the joys I can share it all. But with my spouse, that’s not going to help anything. Me to just be all negative and complaining and all this stuff. No, that’s called lazy. That’s called mean. Let’s call childish and immature. And so my discipline is treating my husband in a way that’s respectful and admiring and honors, his sexual drive and the way God made him. So it’s not to say that, that you need to repress all your feelings and that sort of thing. No, it means honoring your spouse, and figuring out how to strategically change your marriage in a way that honors the ways they receive love. So receiving love is key, or giving them what they need to receive love. And recognizing that you’re actually tearing down that stuff you’re building in your marriage, growing your marriage, by exposing all this negativity to your spouse. Minecraft encouragement in integrity is finding finding help in that whether it’s my work whether it’s working with me specifically I work with one on one coaching I also work in team coaching, and and graduate groups as after doing a course with me. And so that’s very practical, I can help you otherwise, getting some some mentors around you getting some girlfriends or some some gentlemen who can keep you consistent and faithful to the teachings of Jesus and, and help you with the disappointments and the sadness and the things that make you want to lash out at your spouse negatively and help you move your marriage forward.

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So that’s key. Another principle of mine is taking the long view is doing work, a lot of work in the short term, so that the long term is better than the long term is better. So I’m not really of the mind that marriage is hard forever. I think that if you really do wise work in the short term, which is hard. In the long term, you’ve you’ve already built the house now it’s just maintaining it. It’s you know, getting the you know, the extra I don’t know how you maintain a house. I live in New York City. All right. I’m in an apartment I don’t mean 18 hours. But that’s another principle of dy m is, you don’t need a lot to be happy, you don’t need a lot to be happy. My encouragement is to have a daily practice of gratitude for me. And my students, I say, write out your gratitudes 10 Every single day, and include several of them to be about your spouse, you don’t need a lot to be happy. And you have to make yourself happy in many different ways, to be able to show up, filled up for your spouse, your faith, your connection with Jesus has to be strong. Your joy, taking taking joy in the small things. You know, for men, sex can’t be the only thing that makes you feel like a man. You can’t be waiting around for your wife and say, you know, my life is miserable, because my wife doesn’t make love to me, I that that’s not an acceptable response when you get to Jesus. Like, I wish I had started the ministries that you called me to, but my wife wouldn’t have wouldn’t have sex with me consistently and joyfully and freely, so I didn’t do it. Like, that’s just not an excuse that I think Jesus is going to be okay with. So my invitation is to do do the things that you need to do in the short term, to transform things in the long term. And get your marriage in place, get your marriage fixed. So you can focus again, on the things that God wants you to be focused on. Another key principle that I teach is about consistent habits. So I’m very much a checklist person, I am very much a, how do we turn a principle into practical applications, which is why I have courses, which is why I work with people so closely because I want people to have that very specific how tos. And that I mean, that’s men’s my men’s program are shockingly different than my women’s program, I mean, dramatically different. And that’s, that is part of the reason I think some people wonder why I’m not more specific in my podcast. And some of it is that if I tell a husband, the same thing that I tell a wife, a husband, expectations will go up. They’ll, they’ll see their wife in a negative way. Because they’ll say, Oh, they’re not doing enough for me or that kind of thing. And that’s just icky and wrong, and not the way God wants us to see our spouse. There’s too much in the Bible about thankfulness and gratefulness for us to have that perspective of your spouse. It’s just not, it’s not godly, it’s not right. But at the same time, if I said all the things that I say to men, in my work, men, women also would have this perspective of my husband not doing enough, you know, why doesn’t he just listen to Bella, and all these sorts of things. And, again, it’s not going to help anything, it’s not going to make you feel more empowered on what to do to help your side of the equation. And that’s really what my invitation is that you clean up your side of the street, you do what you can do for your marriage, you that’s the only thing you have jurisdiction over, you can only change yourself. And you can change yourself in dramatic ways. But when I’m talking about habits, I do mean, specific practices that you do every single day, every single day, because you as a husband, or you as a wife are wired so differently than your spouse. These are disciplines. They are disciplines, when I talk about how I have to be confident in my body to seduce him in a really exciting way. Those are disciplines. That is not a natural thing that just happens in a long term marriage. They are disciplines. It is a way of living. That’s required. I think the same thing for men, being patient and kind and gentle, and a good listener and holding her when she cries. I mean, those are disciplines. It’s a discipline to become more present. It’s a discipline to learn how to affect her heart well,

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but it’s worth it. And these are habits that become who you are. So I really love this quote. I tweaked it a little bit, but it’s pretty much Aristotle’s quote it says, You are what you continually do. Character then is not an act, but a habit. You are what you continually do. Character then is not an act, but a habit. So that’s my invitation to you is to love your spouse the way they receive love. And I think the last principle that I’m going to share. And obviously, this is a short podcast, I’ve got tons of episodes to go into each of these things way, way, way more. But the final piece I want to give you is the insight around strategy, the insight around strategy. So if you’re a two out of 10, you should not treat your spouse like you guys are at an eight out of 10. So when I talked about how much you’re sharing, and how much you’re open with your spouse, yes, be honest. But be wisely open, be wisely open based on where you are right now. Again, if you’re at a two at a 10, you’re not going to share all this negative stuff that’s going through your head, and all the loneliness and sadness and all the things because that’s going to move you guys backwards to be a one out of 10. Instead, you’re going to share the good, you’re going to share the tiny little things that you can appreciate about your spouse, you’re going to be really intentional to make yourself happy in other ways. And slowly the things will move up to a three out of 10. And again, you’re going to apply a bit of a different strategy when you’re three out of 10. And then you’re going to get to a four out of 10. And it’s just going to be extremely strategic. And you can see this in lots of biblical characters. But I’ll just give you an example. Like Esther, this was an evil, evil king, such an evil king that he allowed hate to be within his kingdom in such a degree that he allowed for genocide, genocide in his own kingdom, that he’s going to allow people to kill others. Now, Esther was not a lazy girl. I mean, this man was so evil, that he raped young girls, he captured them first raped them all, and then picked Esther to be his wife. And that was after he had murdered the last wife he had like he was evil. And yet, Esther was able to change his heart by employing the principles strategically, she gave first, she was extremely careful about how she implemented these principles. She, she served him, she, she respected him, she admired him, she even honored him in front of his friend, all of these sorts of things, she made love to him more than once, she did this very strategically, and then she was more open, she shared again, strategically, carefully with respect. So she was strategic, that’s my encouragement to you is be strategic in your marriage. And again, you know, I’ve got so many resources for you, whatever that means, whether it means working with me very closely in a in a, in a team coaching environment, a one on one coaching environment, you can learn more about that on my website, delight your marriage.com/resources. Or it might mean a course it might mean self directed online course or it might mean my book. But you have to be strategic, you have to learn, you have to grow. You have to be the one that says I’m going to change this, I can’t change my spouse, I’m going to change I’m going to be different. I’m going to do the hard work. Whenever there is a problem between myself and my own husband when there ever there’s a tense moment and argument. I think about

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I you know, I have got it. I’ve got a part to play in this. Had I done something different things would have gone differently. It’s lazy thinking to say it’s all my spouse’s fault that’s lazy. It’s not it’s not okay. It’s it’s not a cop. I mean, it is a cop out. So that’s my encouragement for for all of us is to look at ourselves to look at the beam in our own eye rather than trying to focus on the splinter and our spouses I think about what could I do differently? How could I be the person of peace and love and goodness to my spouse to attract them to Jesus not to push them towards what I think they need to become but attract them towards Jesus in the way that I love them well, alright, so I have given you tons of like drinking from a fire hydrant principles here I totally get it if you need to listen to the several times or go into other podcasts and and, you know, other episodes of mine and really dive into some of these principles that you know, I just went through so quickly so it makes sense that you know, you need to dig in more but let me pray for you as your as your moment All of this over Father, I pray for the person listening. If this is their first time, God, to my work, I pray, Lord, that there will be an openness and their heart to what you might want to speak to them. A lot of my stuff is different than what a lot of people say, even therapists, even common knowledge or common wisdom, Father, I pray that if there is a point of insight that you want them to have, even if it was just one little piece of this podcast episode, I pray that you would make it really clear to them that this is what I needed to hear today. And Father, I pray Father, that You would give them the wisdom to know the difference. The resources they need to move forward with if there was a particular resource that I mentioned that they need, I pray that you give them the the gumption to go do it, to give them the motivation to go do it to change, to change themselves, to transform their marriage, for the for the results of their their kids and the rest of their lives, Lord, every person they interact with God, let them love their spouse after you, but before anyone else, are we thank you, we love you. And I bless you, in Jesus name, Amen. I did forget to mention my credentials here. And I’ll go ahead and do it just to give you insights on on why I think my my opinion is helpful for you. But at this point in my career, I’ve had the the grace to work with therapists who work with, you know, marriage counselors who work with others, some of the biggest names in the the marriage field that you would know, if I told you, I’ve worked with them on their own marriages, people who’ve been married just a handful of years to 4549 years, even 55 years, I haven’t been married 55 years, I’ll tell you that. But by God’s grace, these principles work and my work with them has transformed. So many, my podcast has been awarded in the top 30 relationship podcasts in 2018 2019 2020. So very thrilled with that from a company that that reviews, different different websites in different categories. And so I’m honored there. And then another piece is that we’re closing in on a million downloads. And I think by the end of 2020, we’ll be at a million we’re at like 950,000. Last time I checked, and it’s just growing each time. And then the next piece I wanted to mention is 100 and 155 countries worldwide, which is insane. It’s just amazing that people tune in, and I get to see marriages transformed from people who are divorced, who were separated, talking to lawyers and husband, you know, attracts his wife back, or a wife, who her husband’s having an affair, she’s able to attract him back to her. And he even left the job he was in with this other woman and they moved towns based on him what he did. And so it’s just amazing that God can transform people in the worst brink of divorces, a brink brinks of divorce, all right, you get it, the brink of divorce, and bring them to a place of intimacy where later they they’ve shared things like I feel like I’m the man of her dreams, or his love just oozes out of him. And these are people that were just about to get divorced. They’re in the midst of affairs. And so yeah, or people that have had pretty solid marriages, but intimacy was just a problem. And it wasn’t until they got these other principles, right, that they were able to completely shift things.

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So I hope that today’s podcast has been very value oriented for you. And again, there’s so much more in my episodes in my resources, I’d love to invite you to learn more. Go to delight your marriage.com you can really find out so much you can search. You can find out by topics you can learn so much. And check out the resources. I’d love to have you in a program. I’d love to work with you. In a closer degree. I’d love to give you tailored advice. There’s so much more here. And I really look forward to having you sign up for my newsletter and you’re going to get insights in your inbox each week and I’d love to have you there. Go to the light your marriage.com to sign up. Alrighty, God bless you and we’ll talk more soon

 

So, today’s a pretty important day. And you may listen to this in the future which will be relevant.

More than ever, our land is divided and we have strong convictions on right and wrong. In Jesus’ day political issues based on power, oppression, greed, and con… plagued everyone he interacted with. They were impacted at a personal level.

Jesus’ sights were different than those experiencing political suffering. He taught us how to love from our hearts. He brought enemies together to pursue God’s kingdom over an earthly kingdom.

I don’t know what is going to happen in this election. I know I voted according to my convictions.

More importantly, I know that if the other side wins, God is still my King. He is bigger than me. His timeline is far bigger than the number of years I am on this earth.

So, if the next 4 years needs to look different than I hoped, I will not take that out on God.

Because He knows better than I do. Instead, I will pray for those who I might consider enemies right now. I will also live in thanksgiving. It is a command far too often in the Bible for me to ignore.

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tanscript

0:02
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. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me, this is Bella. And I am releasing this on election day 2020 In the US, so I want to talk about Thanksgiving. Because the day of the US Thanksgiving is coming up soon. But I actually see Thanksgiving, all the time in the Bible. And depending on what happens this election, I think, you know, 50% of the country is going to have a challenge. And maybe maybe more than that even even those that got what they wanted. It’s it’s challenging, nonetheless. So I want to talk about that. And what this all has to do with your marriage and with your intimacy. So let’s go ahead and pray. Father, I just thank You, Lord, that you are a big God, there’s so much bigger than us. Father, I pray that wherever this person is, that you would be present with them, you would remind them that you have the world under control that you are not worried. You are not anxious, you are not concerned. Lord, I pray for our ability to trust you. Even right now, even in this time, in Jesus name, Amen.

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All right, well, let’s just first talk about the election. As I’m recording this, before, I know what happened, I’m very excited to share the journey I’ve gone through around it. Number one is, I have strong opinions around who I have prayed for and voted for, and donated money to, I really have felt a strong conviction around it. I’m not going to share who I voted for because that won’t help our conversation. But where I’ve come to have peace is that Jesus walked the earth in an extremely politically volatile time. In fact, there were absolute enemies in that time period, because the Jewish people were the oppressed people. And the those that, that, you know, the Roman Empire was the power that required money, the the taxpayers were taking more than what they even should have. And the other thing that we have to remember is this power. This Roman Empire was doing horrific things. Even when Jesus was born, remember, King Herod wanted to kill the potential King of the Jews. And so he killed all of the baby boys, hoping that he would get Jesus. And that’s when Jesus became a refugee in Egypt, with his parents and imagine the life he grew up in, in Egypt. But Herod was horrible. And if he was willing to do something as absolutely grotesque as murder all these infant boys, I mean, imagine what else he was willing to do in his kingdom. So imagine if you were in that time, I mean, where would you fall on the spectrum? I mean, for me, I’d be wanting to fight for good and, and topple the government and all these sorts of things. And it’s interesting because Jesus hung out with the, quote, enemy. He went and spent time at Zacchaeus his house in the midst of like Wyatt that Zacchaeus is stealing money from poor people. I can imagine the poor people don’t even have a lot of money to begin with. Right. And this horrific government Zacchaeus is defending and in fighting for And yet Jesus is acting like it’s okay. Just by associating with these people, it seems like a tacit approval of what they’re doing. But then the interesting thing is when Jesus actually, as another example, when he decided who his 12 disciples were going to be, he actually called the enemies to spend time together. Matthew was a tax collector, Matthew is actually one of my favorite books in the Bible, at least my favorite gospel, I can dive into Matthew just about anywhere and feel refreshed. So if you need a gospel to start diving into Matthew, it’s amazing. But he was a tax collector, he supported this, this horrible empire. And then Simon was a zealot where he wanted to overthrow the government with violent violence. Take it back from the tax collectors, these were enemies, and yet Jesus brought them together to be His disciples. It’s absolutely incredible. Now, at that time, my assumption would be that Jesus would make things right through political means. I mean, the amount of suffering people were going through, because of the Romans was drastic, like, the people that are walking around, probably lost their sons to the genocide of little baby boys, they, they lost their nephews, they like this is their generation, their brothers were murdered.

6:48
They remember the atrocities, there are probably atrocities happening, even at this at that time. There were so many reasons to be against the political party, you know, or for it, you know, if they were the ones that were in power than they wanted the status quo, I mean, enemies, talk about enemies, or my pastor actually preached on this yesterday. So that’s one of the reasons I, I’ve really been processing this is I feel like the United States and even the world, depending on what side of the, of the spectrum there on either either your, for us or against us. It is it is enemy upon enemy. And Jesus just didn’t he, he just didn’t say that was okay. In fact, he said, Do good to those who persecute you. Pray for your enemies. I mean, that’s an incredible plan. And so whatever happens in this election, you know, I’m speaking to my own heart here. I want to pray. For the other side. I want to pray for them in, in the good things that God wants to do in their life and in their heart. I want to love them, well, I don’t want to speak ill of them. I don’t want my own fruits of the Spirit to be off kilter because of others, and their choice of who to vote for and what happened. Because God is still God, regardless of politics. Regardless of our leader, God is truly our leader, Jesus is our king. And we are really not of this earth. See, Jesus could have toppled the government. And that’s what the Jewish people wanted. And when Jesus didn’t do that, they were so disappointed that they turned on him and crucified Him who did nothing wrong. So my encouragement is whatever happens in this election, and in your life in general, when you feel disappointed by God. He has a bigger plan. See Jesus if he had succumbed to political issues, that would have been his legacy is just the political issues of the time. And yet, because he didn’t, we are now still talking about him to 2000 years later. And, I mean, that’s because he did not bow his knee to politics of the time, he instead knew that God had something far bigger, far more important for him to focus on the eternal things. So my infantry to use Yes, I hope you voted the way you needed to vote, I hope that you prayed, I hope that you fasted, I hope that you encouraged others in the ways that you felt God wanted you to. And now, God has a bigger plan. For whatever reason the Roman Empire stood, and it continues continued to martyr Christians. It continued to do horrific things to Christians, even though it had the God of the universe on its side, why? Why would God allow such suffering? Why? I don’t know. But I do know the truth that the God of the universe is still on the side of the believer. And I still know that even when we don’t understand why sometimes the bad guy wins. Sometimes the good guy wins, but sometimes it feels like the bad guys are winning. At the same moment, God’s plan is so much bigger than ours, even though it feels like we’re the center of the universe. And if God doesn’t move in our life right now, then he is not God. And we have to have a big question in our mind of faith. And it’s just like, God is just so much bigger than that. He is the generations of the beginning to the end, he’s the Alpha and the Omega, he didn’t start when you were born, he doesn’t end when you die, he is so much bigger than our little vapor of life, which is, you know, 80 or 100 years, at the most.

11:44
So he has a bigger plan. He has a much, much bigger plan, but we can be faithful now. We can be trusting him now. And it’s interesting, the reason I wanted to talk about Thanksgiving so much is because and you know, Philippians and in fact, a lot of the time that Paul was writing his he was in jail. The man was in jail, doing the work of the gospel. I mean, right. So so he could have been very cross with the political leaders, right, because he himself is suffering up their hands, physically suffering, and jail was not as nice as jail is here in the United States. Jail is not nice here. Absolutely not. You know, in dramatically huge terms, but I also know that back then there was a lot of physical beatings, you know, what, and jail does that now too, so I really don’t know. I’ve never actually been to jail. But the stories I’ve heard of jailer are horrific, too. So the point is, jail is bad. And Paul was in jail, and get this in Philippians. Four, he says, for four, he says, Rejoice in the Lord always again, I will say rejoice. And then let your reasonable Ness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything. Anything, Paul is in jail. I mean, come on, he must be concerned about other people’s suffering, he must be concerned about. I mean, I feel like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He’s the one that’s trying to get the church right before from before God. He was the one there’s trying to, you know, hold the line and, and encourage people who were discouraged. And man could he had lots of reasons to be anxious, and yet, he says, Be anxious about nothing. But in everything, by prayer, and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. I’m just gonna skip down and every time I see that kind of thing, just, I’ll read it out. Now in verse eight, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there’s any excellence. If there’s anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Another one, whatever situation that sorry, this is verse 11. In what, now that I’m speaking of being a need, for I have learned in whatever situation, I am content. I know how to be brought low. I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty, and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. So you know, he’s talking about in the terrible times. He can be content. I’m gonna Keep going in the Bible. Verse 19, and my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus. Keep in mind the context of when Paul’s saying that Colossians one it talks about and we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you. Then, verse 24, now I rejoice in my sufferings. Then verse chapter two, verse two, that their hearts may be encouraged. And then verse two, verse seven, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, a bounding in thanksgiving. Then it says in chapter three, verse two, Set your minds on things that are above not on things that are on the earth. Then it says, verse 12, put on then, as God’s Chosen Ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Now, can you imagine if our country, all the Christians in our country, committed to that one, that would be amazing, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive?

16:43
Above all, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony, and then skipping down a bit, and be thankful. Then it says, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Then it continues to say, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Then chapter four, verse two, this is kulshan skin, continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. And then for verse eight, that he may encourage your hearts. So it just I mean, I could go on and on and on. But clearly God cares about us being thankful, in the midst of terrible circumstances, and potentially terrible politics. And, and just suffering. I mean, just flat out suffering physically, emotionally, absolute reality in our lives suffering. He says, Be thankful, be encouraged, still live, like Jesus still take on the character of Jesus, the fruits of the Spirit, of love and joy, and peace, and patience, and goodness and kindness, and gentleness and faithfulness, and self control. And so if you are suffering in your marriage, Thanksgiving is required to get better, that is exerting your faith. Thanksgiving is focusing on the good, focusing on what God has given you, in your spouse, that if you wanted to look at her, in the way of I am so lucky to have this woman, you could, if you decided in your heart to say, I am so lucky to have this man, you could. That is a choice in your heart rejoicing in the Lord, regardless of what the circumstance is. That is his that is His will for your life. I mean, it says the joy of the Lord is our strength. If we are not focused on joy, and the good things we will be, we will be ineffective in the kingdom. Because we’re just feel like my mom used to call it navel gazing. We’re just, I don’t know if that’s the right phrase or not. But you’re just looking at your belly button. You’re just thinking about what’s going on right now in your life, and it’s making you sad. And so you’re staying in that sadness, and you’re not. You don’t have energy to do anything. But if you bind and cast down those thoughts, and instead decide, I’m going to be thankful, because God I know you’re bigger. I know you’re bigger. I’m going to be thankful. I’m going to take it to you in prayer. I’m not going to be anxious. I’m not going to take it personally. I still say that you are God regardless of these particular things in my life, that you are God And the amazing thing about it is, the amazing thing about it is, is you start to see more good show up in your life. I don’t know why or how God does it. But when you are focused on the good, when you notice on the good, the good grows, that’s just what happens, your contentment grows, and your wife starts to smile more, and your husband starts to care more about your feelings, because you’re not this grouchy, complainy critical person anymore. You start to being a person of joy, and faith and peace, and free of anxiety, I I don’t think that’s an easy task. But I do know that is what God asks of us. Paul says, Do not be anxious. So somehow, some way it is a choice to be anxious or not. And so we get to decide, Do not be anxious, you know, something I’m been doing in my home is purging. I have a small home. And I love that it’s small. By the way, if I ever talk about how our one bedroom apartment in New York City is I want you to know I love it, I am content, I do not want a large space. I love the space I have. But I’ve been getting rid of things because clutter is just debilitating for lots of reasons, I think. And one thing I realized is one of these pictures that I bought on the street that I really love,

21:45
I loved. Let’s see, I loved the picture until the gentleman who had drawn it said that it was like worship of, you know, earthly, whatever. Some, like all the earth worship, I can’t even remember. But like, when I initially saw it, I saw this spiritual like, oh my gosh, they’re all worshipping Jesus, like this is amazing. And then he gave his take on it, and a little, no big deal. But I still bought it because I love the image. And so I had it up in my apartment. But every time I saw the image, I remember I was reminded of how I didn’t like what that guy said. And I was just like this, the connotation of this thing in my apartment is negative. And so I just decided I’m going to cover it up with paper, and a and then I put on that just a phrase, of I refuse, and I choose, I refuse and I choose, which is just helping me to say you know what, I refuse the negativity, I refuse the worry, and the the sadness and depression and the things that want to crouch into my mind. And, and cause me to not be able to do the work God wants me to do because I can’t change the world. I can’t change most people, but there are humans that I am assigned to. And if I am negative and sad and dejected and disappointed, I cannot impact them in the way God wants me to. I can’t do my little piece. Because I’m so sad about the hugeness of the problem. So then I can’t do my little piece to contribute to the work God wants me to do. And so then I choose is the part about I’m choosing in this moment, while I’m walking by that, you know, piece of paper hung up in my apartment, I’m choosing to focus on what God does want me to do whatever that is, whether it’s cleaning up the dishes, or whether it’s being present with my kids, or whether it’s making love to my husband, or whether it’s getting on a coaching call or doing a podcast or, or just superduper, mundane things, sweeping the kitchen or wiping the whatever stuff off of the refrigerator, like things that are super mundane. That is what I choose to do. And do it with contentment. And with Thanksgiving that I get to live this, that this is a gift that I am just a vapor in this life here today gone tomorrow, gone in a blink of an eye. So my invitation to you is whatever you’re going through whatever challenge you’re having in your marriage, whatever challenge you’re having in how things are going politically. Do do your part. But God is bigger. He is so much bigger and he knows why things are happening and we can trust him in the midst. His timeline is so much bigger than ours. And we can trust him for our little 80 years of life. That he knows what he’s doing. And Jesus didn’t mind to have enemies sit next to each other, love each other well. And I just encourage us to be like Jesus, in this time in this season. So Father, I just pray for the person listening, Lord, that they would be able to choose to be faithful to you, to love you Well, in this time, to love others well to love their enemies Well, and what that means to do good to others. Jesus in your time, it seems like it was so clear who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. And yet you hung out with both, you served both you loved both. And you ultimately sacrificed your life for both. There wasn’t a there in your book, the good guys and the bad guys. They needed your love. They needed your sacrifice. And it and it’s the same today. Give me the grace to see who I think are wrong. Give me the grace to be open to praying for them and seeking their good and wanting God to move on their lives and wanting them to become closer to Jesus. Just like I want myself to come closer to Jesus. Help us Lord in this time. Help them in their marriage in these particular ways as well to be thankful and grateful and not choose anxiety and negativity but gratefulness and thankfulness in Jesus

26:42
name. Amen. Thank you so much for listening. God bless you. I look forward to speaking with you next week. One quick takeaway here is if dy M has been a support to you I would so appreciate a review. Wherever you listen to the podcast, whether it’s on iTunes or another app, if you put in a review, it helps people find the podcast and it would mean so much to me. If you take a screenshot you send it to my email belah at delight your marriage.com I would happily send you back a training for you. This is specifically for gents but it’s also encouraging for women and you can share it with your husband’s possibly already God bless you. And yeah, I’m just praying that God would really give you peace today. All right. Love you. God bless.

27:34
Bye

 

I hope things are going well for you. I have an inspirational story to share with you today. It’s a story of challenge and ultimately hope and healing.

Alexis and Justin (re-definingnormal.com) grew up in homes that had significant abuses, including sexual and drug abuse. By societal expectations, they wouldn’t have gotten through that pain.

But God intervened. Both went through the foster care system and by God’s grace, amazing things have changed for them. AND they’re now founders of organizations that help others who have gone through similar challenges.

They’ve written a book about their story and today, we focus on how Justin helped his wife heal from her trauma by his reliance on the Lord.

My encouragement is to listen in and be encouraged and inspired to continue your journey. And I think it will encourage you that people like Justin and Alexis are doing amazing things for people—Jesus’ hands in the earth.

Check out the Black’s various businesses here:

• The Scholarship Expert at thescholarshipexpert.com
• ROSE (Rising Above Societal Expectations) Empowerment Group at roseempowermentgroup.com
• Redefining Normal at re-definingnormal.com  (The book will be available on Amazon on November 9th!)

Blessings,

Belah

PS I have some resources for women coming (I know I focused on the men for a while) so I encourage you to get the 6 Tips for Seduction here: delightyourmarriage.com/tips

—

transcript

0:02
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. Hey there and welcome, I am so grateful you’re joining. So today, oh my goodness, we have a super inspirational conversation with Alexis and her husband, Justin. And they’ve got just an incredible story of starting out from from foster care and various abuses, and including sexual abuse and just some of the toughest stuff you can experience in life. And then God has just incredibly transformed them to an incredible other side. And we talk about how a husband can help his wife heal from things like abuse and how a husband can feel healed from his wife in different ways as well. So that’s this awesome conversation, I’m excited to share it with you before we dive in. If you’re a wife listening, I’ve done a lot of materials for men recently. But if you’re a wife listening, I have something really exciting coming up. So my encouragement to you is, first of all get the freebie, which is the seduction tips. And it’s really helping you have kind of my favorite advices around seduction. And the truth of the matter is I think women really benefit from having other women kind of running alongside them in this journey to love our husbands well with excitement and passion. So when you do get that download, go to delight your marriage.com/tip s and then you’ll be on my email list and I’ll be able to share with you some exciting, free trainings that will be coming here in the coming weeks. And yeah, I think it’s going to be amazing for you. Alright, let’s go ahead and dive into Alexis and Justin

2:14
I have got some special guests on actually husband, wife newly married Alexis and Justin blacker on and I’m so grateful to have you all you’ve got an absolutely incredible story and, and also a huge amount of not just inspiration, but healing and possibility that others can get to the other side of their their pain and woundedness. So anyway, welcome. I’d love to invite you both to kind of introduce yourself.

2:46
Yeah, of course. First and foremost, we’re thankful and happy to be on here. And it’s you know, five years. Super excited about that. My name is Justin black. I’m from Detroit. And I grew up in Detroit from pretty much up until the age of 17, or 18. And I hear because with my wife, we co authored a book called redefining normal, partly about our experiences in the foster care system before meeting each other, how to individuals are able to kind of like figure out their trauma together, but also separately how we support each other. So I took the foster care system at the age of nine years old, my mom did with substance abuse, my dad was often selling drugs, and we grew up in an environment just filled with poverty, and neighborhood full of drug abuse. And it got to a point where we were on the run from Child Protective Services. And we live in an abandoned home for a couple months and live throughout the winter, where things are really bad. Me and my siblings got sick, and my mom released into the foster care system. So going from there, and entering the foster care system with one of my brothers. I’m the youngest of five, and me and him who was the fourth youngest. We have traveled through the foster care system together and deal with a lot of emotional abusive things, and just trying to grow and process of life without parents and they didn’t live too far away from me during my time and care and trying to understand how do I adjust the life without parents who seemingly didn’t love me or didn’t want me but I’m trying to develop identity of my own and another traumatic experience at 13 just losing my teeth in an assault. walk home from school, losing about four my teeth we hit with a brick ranch. And yes, so that happened when I was 13 years old on a random Friday catching the bus home from school. And that just send me into depression and a so many mental health issues of just loneliness and emptiness and dealing with that burden throughout like high school or middle school and high school. and not being able to make friends because you know, kids can be cruel, and making jokes about it and not being able to be myself. And trying to keep this a secret for as long as I could once I did actually get partials or fake teeth, and dealing with that, luckily, as an adult, you know, we talked about in the book, I was able to get surgery done to fix my teeth, and organization was willing to donate 1000s of dollars, more than like, 20,000 to fix my teeth. And this actually happened this past December. But, um, there’s ups and downs of mental health and so many things throughout the foster care system, and trying to be as vulnerable as possible my partner, and I put my trauma on her. Hmm,

5:45
yeah. Fun fact, this, Alexis has life. And when we first started dating, he actually thought I was gonna leave him because he didn’t have his two front teeth. He still were a flipper. And so um, you know, it’s just being in learning to be incredibly vulnerable with each other through our through different traumas, because we’re still healing, you know, healing is a lifetime journey. So, but a little bit about me. Yeah, so I’m, I’m Alexis black, newly elected black, I was less than Slenderman. Up until August, oh, we got married and, and I entered foster care at 13. But before that, my biological mother died from suicide. And I didn’t find out until high school that she did. And then I found out only like, two years ago that my grandma also died from suicide. So it runs my family. And when I was actually in high school, I was very suicidal, I was hospitalized, I was on medications and, and different things. So I also had to go through that. But my dad was a, sexually physically and emotionally abusive towards me until I was about 13. So I started when I was about six, until about 13, and then moved in with family members who were mentally and emotionally abusive, so I couldn’t really heal from that. And then, you know, it’s never a dull moment. So add on to that. I was actually in a an abusive relationship for about eight years from 18 to 20, or no, sorry, 13 to 22. And so those are such formative years of your identity and who you are, and so much of my existence belong to that individual. And so he would break up with me pretty much daily, and torture me in a lot of ways. And part of my being on suicide, watching other things was because of him. And just their relationship was just so awful. But it wasn’t until I was about 22 and 2016. I went to South Africa for about five months. And I really, like had come to Jesus moment where I, I because up until that point, I just hated myself so intensely, like so intensely. And, but I had to learn to like myself, I was all the way across the world from any and everybody that I know, and I love and I learned those doing little things together, like going out to lunch together, being alone in a room together, like all these things that I hated until that point, and then just started trying to make amends and do other things during that time, um, and then came back from South Africa, broke up with that person, one week later met Justin, on the first day of our scholarship program, so it’s kind of crazy how things come together. And now we’re years later married. Yeah, four years later, we’re married. We own three companies writing a book together. So it’s really insane how life kind of turns around. Yes. That’s incredible. And, yeah, and I know, I asked you before and Jesus did all of these things like he has been so powerful in your in your life. That’s just this is huge. So, um, so the, just the intense amount of challenge, you know, something, Alexis, that a lot of people I think don’t realize is how traumatic a mental hospital is and how like, yes, going into and through that. That is that is seriously palpable that definitely added some extra trauma and I said any and everything I could get out of there early rights, right. I’ve i Yes, I know a bit about that. And that’s just awful. So you guys are young. How old? Are you? 26

9:28
I’m 23

9:29
Amazing, like, seemed like what you guys have been through and the way you have completely shifted your lives. Like, tell me the process like how did this happen?

9:42
Well, first is is never just like, Okay, tomorrow my whole life. Yeah, you know, it’s the process. And even though we we’ve we’ve wrote a whole book about our lives and our experiences and how we start the process of overcoming and our turning point of her Her foster parents who are truly godly people who are true examples of what God is, and she was talking a little bit about her Turning Point and her process. But even though we have this whole book, we there’s still the process of growing and it never ends. You know, she talked about how there’s like two generations of suicide, her family. And on my side, on my dad’s side of the family, there’s two generations of domestic violence. And on my mom’s side, there’s two generations of drug abuse. So we’re always in the process of figuring things out, I have, we have to be intentional about every single thought and every single thing we do have, when I’m stressed, I’m not turning to certain things that have to do with my stress, I’m turning to God for my stress, and I’m talking to my wife in a healthy way, with my stress and not doing having a knee jerk reaction of my emotions when we butt heads, or we get into arguments. And being intentional about the things that I say, and the things that I do. And I still made, I still need to get better with the words that I use and how I treat lectures. And even though I feel like I’m doing a good job, I can always get better and always have moments where I reflect on it and say I could have done better. So this process of growing and turning and changing our lives, from different from what we’ve known growing up in our family history and our family culture. It’s an ongoing process, and also ongoing thing that we need to learn and kind of redefine our way of thinking. So even though our lives have changed, and for me, specifically, my life has changed when people have spoken life into me, and spoken good things into me and believed in me to where it’s like, I they believe in me more than I believed in myself. And it was at 17 years old when I’m moving to a group home, right outside the city of Detroit. And I separated from my family, even though it was like a 20 minute drive. But that’s all I really needed just to be separated from my family, my family for a little bit. And I had successful black men who were pastors, businessman, and engineers, and successful who spoke life into me and told me that I can see you going to college, I can see you being a great writer, I see you doing so many great things. And I didn’t believe that about myself at the time. But they believe they believe that and they spoke that into me. So it got to a point where I’m working hard. And I’m getting good grades, not for myself, but for them. Because they have that expectation for me. And they believe in me. So that was the big turning point in my life.

12:32
I love that Justin and I love the the importance of role models, the importance of black men that are showing you this is possible we can do this, you can do this, I believe this for you a good writer of you know, businessman like, and you are those things like you, you have your own into the man they saw in you ahead of time.

12:53
Yeah, they spoke that into me before I believe it myself. So it is crazy how just coming full circle.

13:00
Yeah, I think part of that though, is even though like for me, people speaking certain things into me, I had to be able to receive those things. And I think that as as a Christian, we’re always taught to give and be generous, but we’re not really taught how to receive. And in order for you to receive even blessings, you have to be receptive of that. And so that was always difficult to me for growing up in survival and growing up where I had to be super independent and figure everything out for myself, that the only way 100% The only way I will be successful is if I learn to be independent or interdependent with other people. And I learned to have those relationships and rely on other people. And that’s so hard when your entire life you’re let down you’re like stabbed in the back my family, everybody only wants things from you. It’s just, that’s extremely difficult. But also that’s your reliance on faith in God to get you through it and the importance of those relationships. And that’s why I always tell people that you have to stop trying to be so independent and learn to be interdependent on people around you. And you’ll be surprised at how many more people there are in the world that are willing to be in your corner and fight for you than people that are willing to stab you in the back and harm you. So it was really learning those boundaries of who is part of my family and who is in my community. And one of the greatest things for me for being in foster care as well was learning that I get to choose my family that is the power that I have. Just because your blood does mean it means nothing. Like I can I can choose that. And it’s a blood doesn’t mean loyalty to me at all. And so and so like even at our wedding, over half of the people there were from our college we graduated from and it’s like that just shows how much we’ve poured into our community and it because that just that just fits who we are. And so I always just try to encourage people to create your own family and community of people that that love you and surround you with the things that you need to succeed and move forward. Because that’s really what I needed. And I think it was trying to seek out different things that I needed from different people. And that’s how I naturally built my community. But I don’t think I was purposely doing that in the beginning. But then after I started viewing role models and mentors in the way that they do it, then are just kind of naturally picked up on it. I think, I love that. I love that. And I love what you talked about with the bringing others in. It’s it’s this idea of, and it takes courage, it takes courage to trust and believe that you’re not going to be stabbed in the back again, and especially with both of your histories. I mean, of people just walking out of your life and people abusing and you know, how, how have you been able to trust each other when you have had such pain from trusting others that were not trustworthy? You know, you got Oh, I don’t I think it really started from the beginning from us, because, um, so going back, um, I just left an eight year abusive relationship. And I told myself that I’m not going to date anybody for a long time. And I was okay with that. I was like, I can spare who Alexis is who I am, what I stand for my diving back into my faith. And then I also promised my foster parents at the time that, that I’m not going to date for a year. And so I promised them that and I was perfectly okay with that, and then just walks in. Yeah, mess it all up, just man Oh, man. Whatever.

16:34
But, um, just one of the most beautiful things that really happened, a relationship was, um, when we during the first week that we met, uh, I really, I told myself that if he’s going to leave, I want him to leave now. And I had this mentality that I’m, I’m too broken, to be loved. And so much of that came from my past, and what other men have told me that, you know, the typical abusive lines of like, nobody else will love you, you’re too broken to be loved all these things, you know, that that partners may say, and I internalize that, and I took that to this relationship, and I are beginning of this relationship. And I and I basically said to myself, you know, what, if he’s gonna go, he’s gonna go now. And so we just got done playing like game of football with our scholarship program, or volleyball was our scholarship program. And then we went and sat down in the grass together. And he was like, tell me about yourself. And I can promise you what I said, wasn’t what he meant when he said, Tell me about yourself. But I just kind of laid it all out and just said, like, this is me, let’s take it or leave it. And he grabbed my hand and said, You’re beautiful, and I just can’t wait to get to know you more. And to me, that was just like, one of the most validating things that a human could have done for me. And, and I just start crying, I want to cry, I’m crying. I was just like, this baby. And it was just like, holy crap. Like, I can be love, like, I’m not too broken. And I mean, obviously, you know, we both have our brokenness. And, um, and then also for, for Justin have, maybe even I think was like, a month and a half or two months later, when he said, I have something to tell you. And I’m like, Oh, God, he’s got kids, like, I don’t have a whole bunch of stuff, you know, like anything. And, and then he’s like, I don’t have my two front teeth. And I’m like, okay, and he’s like, Well, I This happened when I was a teenager, and I were a flipper, whatever. And he was expecting me to say, Oh, I can’t do this, like, this is me. And, you know, just telling him, like, you’re still like, the most beautiful man ever. Really, it’s okay. And, you know, and then the, the first night that we stayed together, and he said, You know, I can sleep with my flipper, and tonight, but tomorrow, or next time, I’m gonna have to take it out. And I’m like, take out now, like, I want to see you without it. And so he took it out. And, you know, as humans, we look for validation from others and from our partner. And so when he took out the teeth, and he looked at me, and he, you know, don’t didn’t have a seat, and I’m not gonna lie, I was shocked, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody without their front teeth. But at the same time, I looked at him, I said, you’re still beautiful to me, like, you’re still amazing. And, like, I still love you. And just that moment, I’m sure build his confidence as much as it like, you know, built mine and each other. And then you want to tell Tom about the time that you know, you go first all that? Okay, wait, we do Oh, we do. I do want to mention, I love. I love Justin’s response to your vulnerability. Right? Because that is that for men that are listening, a lot of men listen, when your wife is so vulnerable, to share her heart to share her feelings to share her emotions. The validation of that to grab your hand and say you’re beautiful like that. You’re not too much like I feel like that’s a big thing for women is like, my feelings are too much. It’s gonna scare him away and he’s not gonna be able to take all the emotions of the woman and because of the pain of the past, right, yeah, you have a lot of pain. A lot of women have a lot of pain, I have a lot of pain in our past. And for a man to be able to hold her and say, You’re too much, you’re beautiful, I accept you as you are like, that is the healing balm for a woman’s heart. So I think I speak for the, the wrong man, and maybe too much before for a mature man, you know, he was 19. But he was mature enough to say those things into, you know, like, own up and say, like, it may be a lot, but I’m here for you in this process, and so support you. And I think it just takes maturity and compassion from that individual to be able to be with somebody like that. Um, but

20:43
I think you guys first you guys give me a lot of credit, oh, my God. So we talked about this in our book, and it goes into like the first part of how we met. And, you know, we we met during a Senior Scholars Program. And this for this is a program for foster youth to higher education, transition into college and transition into adulthood. And she was a junior, she just entered the program, but I was incoming freshmen. And to be honest with you my mindset as a freshman coming in with like, I first I wanted to hide the fact that I had fake teeth. And that was something that, you know, kept me from making true friendships, and in high school and in middle school, because eventually everyone will be like, hey, put a T file, let me see, you know, the kid with no teeth. And even me playing on the football team. You know, those are when you make your closest friends and everything but out, I had to take my teeth out when I play football. So that’s what I was known for. And I never really made any true friends. So my mindset coming into college was, you know what, nobody will know about my teeth. I’m not playing football in college. So I’m going to do everything I can to fit in and do everything I can to make these friendships. And even though I had a sense of God, who God was, and I was trying to be a man of God, more importantly, I wanted to fit in with the crowd. So my motivation coming into college or sleeping with as many women as possible, you know, go to college stuff, drink and all this other stuff. But because that wasn’t who I was, it went away so fast. And during it went away. And during set week when we met each other, which is a week where the Senior Scholars meet with your cohort and you walk around campus, see where your classes are, and meet your campus coach and everything. During that week. You know, I tried to talk to a bunch of girls and get a bunch of girls numbers and everything. But we had an activity where we kind of had to write on a note card, and it was anonymous, of something that you over overcome, that people wouldn’t know by looking at you. And I’ve heard so many stories of sexual assault, and sexual abuse. And it was anonymous, so we wouldn’t know who it was. But I feel it’s like three fourths of the room experienced sexual assault or sexual abuse. And of course, a lot of those could have been men. And I’m sure a lot of those were women. And that kind of switch by idea, especially as a senior scholar of I need to enter a situation and with my cohorts and everybody with more compassion, and a more loving spirit. And and I kind of felt a shame that I went into the situation thinking I want to see women, especially you seen that, knowing that a lot of these women are broken, and have been through so much. So many traumatizing experiences. Right after that activity. We had our moment where we were like sitting in the grass and everything. And I asked, you know, tell me about yourself. And that really brought me back to God, just knowing the truth of the situation, and how I need to be more compassionate, and be more vulnerable. Because during that experience during that activity, writing on a note card, I didn’t say anything about myself, I didn’t say anything my past I didn’t I wasn’t ready to deal with my trauma. So I barely said anything. I said that. I was the first to go to college and my family. I didn’t say anything about the drug abuse or my family or domestic violence or my teeth or anything I just said, go to college, my family knows it and hear her story. And meeting her. She’s such a strong and passionate person, like the smartest person that I know now and sparse, smart person, and more so mature and everything and to see what she has overcome. It just made me know that so many men have taken advantage of her in her life and tried to read. So so many men have taken advantage of her her life that I know I didn’t want to be added to that list and I wanted to be vulnerable as well and take that first step and being vulnerable so she can open up. I wanted to be open as well even though it took me a while to get to talk about my teeth and everything. I wanted to be open and vulnerable to her so she can feel safe and maybe something that she’d never felt before being safe with the with the man seeing So many men have taken advantage of her. I wanted to be someone who she could be open and honest and vulnerable with his love.

25:08
Incredible, absolutely incredible. That’s awesome. I love, I love the perspective of becoming aware of the amount of pain women have experienced and responding to that with grace, and with wanting to help heal. And I think for the men that are listening, how powerful that can be for your wife with you know, I think what happens a lot of times is men have, you know, they really feel like they’ve been cheated because they’re, maybe their wife has experienced sexual trauma. And so she brings that into the marriage. And so she’s not free sexually. And he feels like it’s not fair, he should have a healed up woman that can be free sexually can, you know, enjoy frequent intimacy, can love all those things? But I mean, how is that something for you, Alexis, because you have experienced sexual trauma? Like how have you learned to be free in intimacy? And that’s, again, if you’re willing to go there. Yeah. But how has that been something you feel you’ve gotten to a place where, where you can be, you know, have a healthy sex life with your husband? Yeah, and it wasn’t it, I guess my sexual trauma didn’t just come from my dad, it also came from, like sexual sex, several sexual partners that I’ve had. And specifically with that, that boyfriend that I had for eight years, because, like, for example, I was on birth control, and I had a negative reaction to it. And so that made me not want to be intimate at all. And the amount of abuse that I received for not wanting to be intimate and just the extreme tearing down of my character of, of my looks of I mean, everything about my identity, and as a woman torn down, and she tried to strip away, I don’t really know, the purpose was other than to Him always have power over me. And I got so bad one time outside of his grandma’s house that actually threw up because I, I just, it was so bad, how bad it was. And then, like another time, he asked me specifically about something that my dad made me do to him. And, um, I was like, You know what, I’m not gonna lie, because it happened, I can’t take it back. And he asked me to do this happen. And I said, Yes. And, um, he didn’t come to Thanksgiving the next day. But when he did show up, it was outside of my family’s house. And he was screaming at me in front of my entire family calling you dirty and nasty, and literally anything mean thing that you could say to another human, and telling me that I need to take a shower and bleach like all these things, just how horrible like I am as a person, going from that to a man that is led by God and believes in healing, and I’m just his extreme faith. And that, to me, has restored so much of my faith. But I think also because I’m very aware of what triggers me. And it’s my job as a survivor to say to my partner, that these certain things trigger me and I need you to be aware of that. It’s not his job to know all of my triggers, but it’s his job, to be compassionate, and to listen. And so I’m being the one to being able to, like I had to communicate that with him, of certain things that were that were hard for me, and just him respecting that. And then also 100% of the time, when we’re intimate, it’s consensual, and he asked me, and I think that is one of the biggest things too, is that he respects me enough to ask me. And I know that for a lot of men, that can be really hard, because you want the spontaneity you don’t want to ask every time like, this is your wife here, you’re kind of entitled to her and her body, which I would never do that. Because no matter if I’m married, you’re not entitled to me, I’m sorry. But, um, but at the same time, it’s like, it is not my job, but like, I’m his wife, and I want to make sure that I that please Him and his partner. Um, but sometimes that can be difficult if I’m struggling with something but him just not making me feel bad for it and him saying, you know, it’s okay. Let’s watch a movie. Let’s just talk, let’s hang out, like, you know, our relationship isn’t based on that and that’s okay. And so it’s having a partner that just is willing to listen and love you through, you know, all the processing. Yes, I love it. I love it. And Justin, can you share a little bit of your heart around helping her heal sexually and like from sexual abuse? Because a lot of men are trying to grapple with that and know what to do how to how to help. Do you have any thoughts you want to share?

29:56
Yeah, because six can be elective physical act. A lot of times for men, we can let our flesh our body kind of just say I want it. And yeah, if there is another reason why, you know, my wife can’t do it or doesn’t want to, then she’s the problem and everything and you know, it kind of just get upset and think and speak out of your body and your flesh without being intentional, it your mind and your spirit saying that, Oh, she, the problem is she’s been, you know, she’s experienced sexual abuse and all this other stuff. And she’s a problem, or why me? Why do I have to, and being honest that those ideas can start to come to my mind, but I have to be intentional. In my spirit, and in my mental that, okay, there is a there’s a reason, there’s a purpose and us being together. And your purpose and as a relationship as a couple will carry you. And knowing that me respect to her wishes will go a lot further than me getting what I want in that moment. Is is huge. And I’m saying if if I’m saying it’s not that as the person has mastered his ideas, you know, this is a kid, again, everything we talked about is a continuous struggle, you know, not I won’t lie and say that those thoughts of oh, why me glad to deal with this will never come up in my head again. But I have to be intentional about those ideas of okay, me respect to her is the foundation of our relationship and we listening to her is the foundation of our relationship. So even if I need to take a breath, go pray or do whatever I need to do, or just stay there and lay with her, and be there for that’s what I need to do. And again, I’m not saying this as like, I know how it’s easier, you know, you know, it’s hard, it’s definitely, with the hard things that are difficult things will be the things that will sustain your relationship, the things that will carry you and push you forward. And it really takes a lot of spiritual maturity for you to get there. You can’t come into a relationship with lust with lust and a heart full of lust and sexual desires, fueling you and filling your heart because those things will show and getting married won’t fix that, you know, you need to be spiritually and mentally mature enough, especially when you’re dealing with someone with trauma to overcome that.

32:19
Right. Which is amazing. That is amazing. And I I love also that you mentioned, you know three fourths of the room of the women that you were, you know, the the situation you just described have had sexual trauma and just a stylistically speaking, one in four women have experienced sexual trauma. And personally, I identify a lot with what you mentioned, Alexis, and needing a lot of healing from my husband from the patience and the gentleness and the consistently being there. Regardless of what I can do physically. Those are the things that gave me the healing that I have now that now we’re in a very different place. But to recognize that, for those men that may be listening that are like, Yeah, I wish that we weren’t in whatever we’re in because of whatever she’s gone through. It’s like, it really doesn’t. Like every woman, this is the journey like we all need patient men that treat us well that are like Jesus, you know, that’s the process of the beauty of marriage. So awesome. So um, guys, you you were just incredible. Can you share a little bit about the I know, you’ve got a couple of businesses and ministries and all that and about your book, if you don’t mind? Yeah, so one of our businesses is the scholarship expert, where we help students find and apply for scholarships. And because both of us graduated with over $340,000 in scholarships, we we have three degrees between the two of us certification who graduated debt free, and we studied abroad 13 times so I mean, we’ve been able to do so much. God countries. Yeah, man. So over 30 countries so yeah, so God is so good. We definitely talked about that in the book as well. Just how he got is just so good. And me. So we really wanted to pour back into other people all the things that we learn so that’s the scholarship expert. So it’s the scholarship expert calm. And the other one is a rising over societal expectations, or rose empowerment group. And that one is the rose empowerment group calm, and we was mainly Justin, trying to close the information gap for black and brown youth. And then the other one is redefining normal and that’s our book. Yeah, our

34:39
book redefining normal how to foster kids beat the odds and discover getting happiness and love. This has been a thing this has been a project we’ve been working on all year during quarantine. Funny story. I was actually preparing a study abroad in South Africa. Alexis came along to volunteer and we’re going to scholarship expert, and the trip started in February. This February we were emergency evacuated in March on March 26, I believe, we came back and returning to living with her parents. And during quarantine, when we came back into the country, we were in her parents RV right outside of the house. And we needed to stay there for like two weeks. And so we’ve kind of like worked on the book. That’s when the idea and our, you know, ideas for the book started to roll even more. And we started to actually dig into the content of the book and everything. And that two weeks of being in the RV, it was rough. But we were able to express so many good ideas for this book. And we completed it from March to June. And of course, the editing process takes probably forever, probably the longest. So we just finished the editing process, I would say maybe September. But now we have it is ready to go. This is our baby, our first baby. Our first baby is her cat. But yeah, so this is our second baby, the something that is is just changed, gonna change our lives. And God has really had his hand all over this project. And we’re just blessed to be able to share our lives. And also one thing I love the book about the book is that we lay the foundation with our lives, and everything with the book. But on the second half of the book, we kind of switch roles as like a teacher of how we were able to overcome and communication within a relationship, patients within a relationship, and so many different aspects of seeking God for mental health issues. And, you know, going blind to God with your issues where certain issues and not your partner, because you don’t want to put those traumatic experiences and that trauma on your partner want to go to God and figure things out within yourself. So there’s so many key things and amazing things within this book. And we’re just challenging people. Everybody’s really redefining normal and things that they were raised on their family culture.

36:58
Amazing, guys, congratulations. That is huge. And I’ve got to say, I mean, both of those other businesses that you just mentioned are like, so much my heart the scholarship piece, but also rose, like all about empowering black and brown young men is it from young men are both

37:17
in a young men and women, I will kind of create something section off for young men because I’m a young black man. So I want to be intentional about that. But it is for black men and women.

37:29
That is so amazing.

37:31
Oh my god, everybody, anybody in general, who needs services. But my intention with creating the business was to close information gap for black and brown people. But I feel like the information and the resources we have to offer is for people of any gender, any race.

37:46
Yes. But I appreciate that focus on black and brown men and women because that is I mean, there is so much need there. And that is just so powerful that you are meeting that and focusing on that. And yeah, so much of my heart is right there. That’s awesome. Well, guys, let me, let me pray for you. And let’s wrap up sound good. All right. Well, Father, I just want to thank you so much for this couple. Thank you for the way that you have led them and grown them and taught them and protected them in so many ways and healed them in so many ways. Father, thank You for their willingness to be used by you, thank you for the many experiences that have shaped them and allowed them to get to where they are right now to help their generation to help people that identify with them, whether it’s people who have experienced trauma, whether it’s people who have come out of the foster care system, whether it’s people who are experiencing racism in our culture, in our society, Father, I just pray in Jesus name, that you would use their ministries in huge ways, Father God, that you would use this book that you would use their different aspects and avenues, Lord, their platform, God give them the grace to be humble and wise in all of this. Give them the grace to be strong in their marriage. And we just ask for your hand on them. Lord, we are so honored and grateful for what you’ve already done and what you’re going to continue to do through them. In Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Thank you.

39:23
Thank you so much.

39:25
Thank you. And if anybody wants to contact us, you can email us at info at REI dash defining are more calm. And our book does come out on November 6 on Amazon, but it’s available for pre order now.

39:36
readers to find it no more calm. Yeah, but

39:39
we’re always available for any questions or anything. I know that people reading this book will have things that they want to process or things that they want to maybe just tell me like, I’ve had several people who’ve already read it and reach out to me and say, Hey, I realized through reading your book of how much I need to heal, but then also so many things that I didn’t even tell my husband And so that’s, that’s why we wrote it. Um, for people to use this as an opportunity to heal from what they’ve done. That’s the only way that we’re going to heal generational patterns and curses and all the things that are being passed down for kids to kids. I wanted to, I didn’t want to be another adult healing from my childhood for the rest of my life. So that’s why we wrote this. Amazing guys. Amazing. Okay, well, God bless you. And thanks for coming on. Thank you. You’re amazing. Thank

40:27
you, we were so grateful to be on.

40:37
Amazing, thank you so much, Justin, and Alexis, just incredible, to be inspired by their story and the work they’re doing. I think sometimes life makes us feel jaded about what is possible for us to serve and love and do the important work to help others heal from the very same things that we have experienced. And I think they are such a great example of seeing the pain they’ve gone through and seeking to help others through it. So that’s my encouragement to you is, is the very thing that has pains you the most in your life may be the thing that God wants to help others through your story through your compassion because you understand their pain. Let me pray for you. Father, the person that’s listening, Lord, whatever you wanted them to hear is what would stay with them, God, the inspiration, the possibility of healing if they’ve experienced sexual abuse, or if their spouse has, I pray God, that you would heal them. And I pray for the spouse that he would be patient, and that he would be guided by your Spirit. And I asked for wholeness for both of them in their marriage. Lord, we love you and thank you. Amen. Thank you again for tuning in. If you’re a wife, again, I’d love to invite you to get this advice. It’s the seduction tips. And you can go to delight your marriage.com Tip s. And yeah, there’ll be some really exciting free trainings coming up. Alrighty, God bless you and I look forward to speaking with you next week. Thanks so much. Bye

 

Hi there,

If you’re going through hard times, this is particularly applicable because we need a lot of love right now. The right kind of compassion and care from our spouse and those around us.

Jesus dealt with people differently based on where they were spiritually. When someone was demon possessed he healed them and didn’t rebuke them for dabbling in  whatever caused the possession. However, when the rich young ruler who practiced righteousness–and clearly was at a different place spiritually–came and asked about eternal life, Jesus let him know he needed to give all he had to the poor.

Jesus calls us higher, based on where we are right now. And it’s unique to each individual. If he spoke to the demon-possessed man like he did the rich young ruler, the demon-possessed man wouldn’t have been attracted to him. Instead, he loved that man the way he needed to be loved in that moment. And the man then followed Jesus and became an incredible evangelist of the gospel.

My invitation is to attract your spouse not to force or push them the way you think will help them get to Jesus.

When Jesus said the golden rule “so whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” I think he means love them in what they need right now. In who they are. In the way they receive love.

It was my birthday and I shared with my closest friends that I wouldn’t appreciate gifts, but I would love letters and donations to World Vision. If a friend likes to get gifts on their birthday and decided to give me a gift, I wouldn’t feel loved. I would feel like they didn’t really care about me.

So, I encourage you to love your spouse the way THEY receive love. What do they like?

It’s different for men and women. I share what specific differences between men and women in particular. Treat your partner the way they want to be loved. Because you would want them to do that for you, right?

Love and blessings,

Belah

PS I’d love to invite you to join me at a Men’s Masterclass at October 9 – 11, 2020 www.delightyourmarriage.com/menstraining

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transcript

0:02
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. Thank you so much for joining me on the delight your marriage Podcast. I’m so excited to speak with you about attracting your spouse towards you every day. So before we dive in, if your husband listening, I would love to share with you about a men’s masterclass, it’s going to be live free. And it’s coming up very soon, October 9 10th and 11th at 7pm. Eastern, be sure to sign up. If you are not able to make it live, there will be a replay at a limited time. But I will say as you may know, anything that happens online is so much better live. And this is the same type deal. I’m going to try to make it really interactive. And you’ll be able to ask your questions and all sorts of things. But I’ve had people comment on my webinars in the past, like Where were you 25 years ago, even clients have attended and said that there was things that they hadn’t learned even through my program. So there’s going to be a ton of material there that’s going to help you through really getting your marriage on track, and especially your intimacy. By God’s grace, I’ve been able to work with people who haven’t made love in years, or even just a couple of times a year and then suddenly, in the programs, they’re, they’re making love frequently. So I’d love to have you and I’d love for this to really be a turning point in your marriage. So be sure to sign up, you can go to delight your marriage.com/ Men’s training. So do it now. So you don’t forget. And then I’ll be able to send you all the details around it. delight your marriage.com/ Men’s training. All right, one last comment is thank you to those who have prayed for dy M delight your marriage, I’m so grateful. Because I get to see miracles every day, in in this in this work over and over and over again, miracles really miracles. And you know, God’s power is so huge in this work. And I know it’s because so many of you pray, so many of you pray, you know, this is life changing material and you pray for it. And I want to really thank you. And I also want to ask you, I’m doing a conference in Chile here very soon. And it’s going to be in Spanish. So I would love your prayers. Because yeah, because I need I need prayers on that that’s not going to be the easiest thing. But I know God will help me with it. Alright, well, let’s go ahead and dive in. This is going to be a great conversation.

3:28
So if I were to ask you, what is your purpose as a husband? Or what is your purpose as a wife? What is the purpose in your marriage? Well, what I think the answer is, is to attract your spouse towards Jesus, and empower them to do God’s will in the earth. Attract Your spouse towards Jesus and empower them to do God’s will in the earth. I think the word attract is so important. Because really, the truth of the matter is, we are not going to force people into a heart change. We we just aren’t that’s not the way it’s just not the way it works. You know, it’s interesting, Jesus performed so many miracles when he was on the earth, and that attracted people to him. So when he rebuked them when he was strong with them, like they were already at a spot where they were fully attracted to him. And the interesting thing is when you look at Jesus, people, like even children wanted to be around him. He was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton. He would have dinner with his friends, he would go to weddings, he would go to the his lavish parties. He wasn’t one that was, you know, a constant killjoy. Yes, he spoke truth but who he was was attractive. It made people want to follow him around and hear what he had to say. And the interesting thing is, when I read the Bible, I’m attracted to Jesus, I’ve want to hear what he has to say, to me in my life. I’m reading this book or listening to this book called The Kingdom of Jesus. And it’s really powerful, because he’s arguing that the gospel is actually Jesus’s life. The gospel is the accounts of Jesus, that that’s the gospel, it’s more than just the fact that he saved us from our sins. It’s more than that. It’s who Jesus was, what he taught, what he said what he did, day in and day out, I think that’s so powerful, because for me, that’s so much more invigorating, than just a get out of free. You know, get out of jail free card. Instead, it’s like, this is a glorious assignment that I get to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That’s my invitation. That is the gospel. So I am hungry, to hear what Jesus wants me to do. I am hungry to understand how I am to live this life. It’s it’s an incredible, extremely attractive thing for me to look like Jesus. And I think that’s so much more motivating for Christians, to say, Oh, the gospel is looking like Jesus. That’s what it means. To be a person of the gospel is to be a person that looks like Jesus. So that’s powerful. It’s a powerful book so far. And I recommended it seems really edifying for me really elucidating of a lot of really cool things. But why is this idea of attracting your spouse, so important now, if I want to encourage my husband, to be the man God wants him to be? The best tool in my toolbox is to attract him is to attract him not to push them not to confront him, not to argue eloquently with him, the best thing I can do is attract him. And speaking of Jesus, I was reading this morning in Matthew 712, the golden rule. So whatever you wish that others would do to you do also to them for this as the law and the prophets. Whatever you wish that others would do to you do also to them for this is the law and the prophets. So it was just my birthday a few days ago. So thank you for your birthday thoughts.

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But there were a few ladies that I invited to a zoom call and actually a few ladies that I invited to a Zumba dance party out in the park. And that was fun, but way more advanced that I’m good at. I told you that I, if you’ve listened to me before I do like dancing, but I don’t like the skill of dancing. So yes, I was not following the teacher very well. But anyway, I did ask these dear friends of mine, that gifts aren’t encouraged. But I do love letters. And I also gave my address for people to send me letters and donations to Worldvision. That’s also what I would like. And the thing is, I think we sometimes misinterpret this scripture about the golden rule, to mean that we love others the way we receive love. But that’s so untrue. Because if I receive love by letters and gifts to World Vision, then why in the world would I feel loved if someone gave me a birthday present? The truth is, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t feel loved that way. So why do we attempt to love our spouse the way that our that we receive love? So my invitation to you is to really be conscious and present and thoughtful about who you’re spouses, and how do you love them the way they receive love because of my job is to attract my spouse towards Jesus, the fact that I follow Jesus should be the best thing that ever happened to them. The fact that I am a Christian should be an amazing, amazing thing. Because that’s attractive, because I am loving my spouse the way he receives love. And that empowers me through my discipleship of Jesus. I mean, this is this is who he wants me to be is to love others. The way that you wish they would love you, right? You wish they would think about you, and you wish they would think about your preferences, and you wish they would love you according to who you are, not according to who they are. So when I speak about this, it’s really important that I’m very clear on what does it mean to love your wife? Well, well, a wife, to be fulfilled in her marriage. She needs to feel known. She needs to feel safe, and wholeheartedly cherished those three things known, safe and wholeheartedly cherished? What do I mean by known I mean that, you know, understand, appreciate her uniquenesses the ways God made her her passions, her interests, her thoughts, her desires, you know her, you know her, you make it clear that you know her, you make it clear that you appreciate those things about her. That who she is very uniquely from every other woman out there matters to you and is special to you. And there’s many ways to make that clear. The second piece is safety. So the pressuring the high expectations, the making her feel bad about herself, especially around sex, or any of those things that makes her feel unsafe. If you are not trustworthy, if you don’t keep your word. If you have poor coping mechanisms, when you get angry, you do things that are something that makes her feel scared. That’s the opposite of making her feel safe. But making her feel safe is helping her to feel secure, helping her to feel like she can trust you, who you are. That you care about. That piece of her. That part of her and the final pieces, wholeheartedly cherished. She wants the romance she wants that you’re thinking about her and that you you honor her and respect her and, and just find her to be amazing. And think about her you give her flowers, I mean all the surprises. She loves that. That’s those that’s what makes a woman swoon. Those are the things

13:13
so then for a husband, what is it that makes him feel loved? Well, the first one is respected. Number two admired and number three wholehearted sexual intimacy. wholehearted sexual intimacy. So number one respected that means no control, it means that there’s not words like, we are going to do this or you need to do this or you should do this. I’m all that stuff is. It’s very disrespectful. That’s not stuff you would ever say to someone you respect. You would never say it. Like to a boss or a, I don’t know a grandparent, someone that you respect, you wouldn’t tell them what to do. And the thing is, that doesn’t mean that as a woman, you are less than your husband, when you respect him, it just means he’s got different needs than you. As a woman, it’s just not the same kind of thing. It doesn’t it doesn’t rub us the wrong way in such a dramatic way. When we’re disrespected, it’s just not. I mean, it doesn’t doesn’t feel good, but it’s, it’s not as dramatic. It’s, it’s, it’s like this is a tenderness on a man. And it’s our wisdom to to be careful around that and to care about that. So that’s respect the second one is admired. So it’s this additional piece where sometimes women don’t realize it but they’re there they mother, their husbands, and whatever that means mothering. They tell them what to eat or they just all sorts of things. It’s disrespectful, but it’s also she doesn’t kind of trust him to be who he wants to be in this world like you admire? What about admiring his strengths? What about noticing? Wow, he’s really good at this. This is an area that he excels in, I trust him to take care of our family. I admire the man he is. If you have that perspective of your husband, he will turn into that man. He will we respond to the way others see us. It makes us a better man. All right, let me clarify that it makes men better men, when they have a woman that trust them. That admires them that appreciates who they are. It makes him decide to be better. It makes him stand up a little taller, put his shoulders back a little more that. Yeah, I am one of the good guys, I can do this. But if a wife confronts and criticizes and makes him feel like dirt, well, he’s gonna keep acting like dirt. Because clearly whatever he does is not going to be good enough, it doesn’t really matter. My invitation to your wife is to admire him at your core, at a heart level. Look for the things that you could admire about him. Look for them, seek them out. In what way did God design your husband special in a very special careful way. And then the final piece is wholehearted sexual intimacy. It’s not just doing your duty, it’s being present and caring about the sexual union between you two, it matters so deeply to his heart. It matters so deeply that she is free and enjoys herself and relaxes. It engages and cares about his member, and wants to be present wants to be there with him. That’s what matters to the man. So as Jesus talks about, so whatever you wish that others would do to you do also to them. To underscore what that means is love others the way they receive love. Love others the way they receive love. This is an opportunity you have as a wife or as a husband, to attract your spouse, towards yourself. But most importantly towards Jesus. Every day, you are either pointing them towards Jesus or away. And let me also read first Corinthians seven. I think we miss understand, so often what being married is all about.

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It says if any brother has a wife, who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. Verse 13. If any woman has a husband, who is an unbeliever, and he concerns of sorry, consents to live with her, she should not divorce him for the unbelieving husband is made wholly because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made wholly because of her husband, otherwise your children would be unclean. But as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so in such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace, for how do you know wife? Whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know husband, whether you will save your wife, only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. What that says to me is even if you’re married to an unbeliever, which many, many of us are, were which my husband and I when we met, he was not a believing Christian. But if you consider your appointment is to this person, to attract them towards Jesus. You know, the very end here it says, Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called him. So in your marriage, you should be able to do what God’s calling you to do. And it also says in the midst of all that God has called you to peace and he peace. We as Christians should not have have the same level of divorce as non Christians. It’s a bizarre statistic. God has called us to peace. We’re not supposed to be pushing and pulling and criticizing and convicting the Holy Spirit can do that. Only let each do the work that God is assigned for that person. You’re not supposed to be looking at your spouse and comparing your commitment to the Lord and your prayer and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it’ll shake out in the end, God knows. It doesn’t, it doesn’t help your cause to do that. What does help your cause is do your stuff yourself, stay in your lane, pray for your spouse, love your spouse, the way they receive love. attract them to Jesus by you just being you and letting them be the best version of them. They can be. Man, is that a good feeling? I am more myself than I have ever been in my life. Because of my spouse, I don’t feel like oh around my spouse, I’ve got to, I’ve got to be someone I’m not. I get to be me. I get to do what I think God wants me to do. And I get to let him do the same thing. I’m, I’m constantly wanting him to do God’s God’s work, whatever he senses that is. And it doesn’t mean we have to be doing the same thing. It’s very clear. Only let each of you do the work that God has assigned. To Him and to which God has called him. Yeah, sometimes God calls people together to do the same thing. Yeah, sometimes he does. But sometimes he doesn’t. Maybe it’s completely different. And that’s okay. That’s okay. God has called us to peace. How do you know husband? Whether you’re going to save your your spouse? How do you know wife whether you’re going to save your husband? So when when I say attracting them, yes, it’s attracting them to yourself. To to you but but automatically that’s attracting them Jesus, because you’re so tied up with, with who God wants you to be that of course, who you are, the closer they get to you is is easily getting closer to Jesus. One thing I want to mention is when we are in crisis situations, our true character comes out. It just does. And it’s hard to admit that’s the case. But it’s true. The waivers respond in crises

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shows us who we are. And it also you know, in the fire, the dross comes up to the top like all the shakiness. We start to see in ourselves. And a lot of people are really going through the fire right now. And it’s not easy, it it’s, it’s sad and terrible for so many reasons. But my encouragement to you is don’t let this crises get away from you don’t let this crises make you feel like. Like there’s no purpose to it. There is a purpose here. There is a purpose here for you to display God’s character Jesus character in this moment. There was a heck of a lot of problems going on when when Jesus was around from political issues to martyring. I mean, my goodness, just the fact that crucifying people was the norm is just awful. Like, whipping was a norm like, yeah, there was some pretty awful things going on in Jesus day. And yet, he still said Be anxious for nothing. And yet he still said things around joy and, and peace. And I mean, so my encouragement is that it’s not to downplay the crises, that you are more than likely going through. But there is purpose to it. God hasn’t left you in this time. It’s an opportunity to grow and mature and it doesn’t mean that those who are not going through crisis somehow earned a better life. They didn’t. They didn’t. We don’t know why things happen the way they do. But we do know there’s purpose to it. I do know that that you Jesus went through suffering in his life to be the man who he became, at 30 years of age to be able to take the sin of the world on his shoulders, because he did some hard work during the time that we don’t even know about. So I hope you’ll use this season of your life, assuming it’s a hard season for many different reasons, in a way that causes you to be more of Jesus’s character, to love others the way you would want them to love you, to care about others to be people of compassion. Sometimes the only way we learn compassion is if we go through suffering ourselves. As painful as that is that we wanted someone to care about us during that time, and no one did. And so years later, when you’re in a different spot, you’ll know what it feels like for somebody to care. Personally, we’re going through something with some some close people to us. And, you know, I’ve been in, I’ve been in that spot, I know what it’s like to not have the support of people you love. And so it’s very easy for me to jump in and love them that way. Whereas it’s very hard for other people, because they don’t know what it’s like to not have support in that particular spot. I’ve been exactly where they are. And it’s it’s not, it’s not easy to not have that support. So I hope that’s an encouragement to you, that you would hold faster, Jesus in this moment. Or you will do his will in this moment, that you would love your spouse well in this moment, during crises, love your spouse, well make it easy, make your marriage just a soft landing between the two of you that you can always argue about something later. You can always deal with some difficulty later, just let right now be a place of peace. You know, can always fix that thing later. It doesn’t have to be right now. All right, let me pray for you Father. Lord High pray God that we would be attracted to you. Lord, give us the grace, to walk nearer to you. To want to understand you to read your word. To read your word, I think so many Christians don’t read your word. And it’s heartbreaking that that so many martyrs have died because of the Bible. And here, so many of us are spoiled that we get to read it in a zillion different apps, in different translations, all, all sorts of things. And yet we don’t give us the grace to read your gospel, to know who you are, and who you were inviting us to be. That the gospel can’t be summed up in a sentence, but it is an entirely.

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I mean, it’s the person of Jesus. It’s who he was. That’s the gospel, to understand and walk in that. Give us the grace to know what that looks like in our life today. And right now, in our marriages, and in our sex life. How do we love our partner, the way they receive it. Lord, thank you for your hand on each of these families, that you were with them and crises. You tell us not to be anxious. You tell us not to be anxious for tomorrow because God knows what they need. Give them what they need God. Give them the assurance that comfort, the confidence, and even the practical things that they need. And give others compassion and generosity to look for those that are suffering. To give to those that need it. Lord, we love you. We bless you and praise you. In Jesus name, amen. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your life, even in a small way. I’d love to have you gentlemen on the training you can go to light your marriage.com/ Men’s training and sign up as soon as you can see, don’t forget and I look forward to speaking to you again next week. God bless. Love you, praying for you.

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Bye

 

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transcript

0:02
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.

5:12
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,

10:02
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

14:43
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

19:32
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.

24:34
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

29:55
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?

34:36
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

 

• Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure
• The China Study, Colin Campbell
• How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease 
• Answers to Life’s Most Difficult Questions by Billy Graham
• Game Changers Documentary and Forks over Knives Documentary (can be found on Netflix)
• Article about the P shot for men
• Article about the O shot for women
• BioTE Pellets: Hormone therapy
• The Penis Book

I’m excited to bring you an interview with a former student, Ben. His upbringing was tense and he tried to stay away from home. His parents’ relationship left a lot to be desired. His wife didn’t have a man in the home to understand what marriage could look like.

Outwardly their marriage was very successful–their kids grew up to be great adults. But Ben knew that if he wanted his marriage to be passionate he was going to have to change. Which is what he did when he worked with me in my men’s coaching program.

He made drastic changes to himself and it impacted his wife’s response to him.

Both in their 70’s is it really possible for them to have passionate intimacy — physically speaking? As a doctor of orthodontics, he knows the rigor of academic research. He has done quite a lot in this area and not only has implemented medical interventions but also natural lifestyle remedies that help both he and his postmenopausal wife.

This is part 1 of our interview where he shares his suggestions for passion even after 45 years of marriage!

—

transcript

0:02
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. Oh, right, welcome. This is Bella, thank you for joining. I’m so excited because today I actually have a former student on then, and he’s been married 45 years. So he knows a thing or two about how to have a very long marriage and how to actually have health sexually in the length of time for a marriage. So this is broken into two parts. The first part, we’re focusing on his journey in marriage, as well as some really key changes that he made to impact his health, sexually speaking. And then the second half is also the trajectory of how things changed in his marriage. And He even talks about some things that changed as a result of he and I working together. And it’s just a fantastic conversation, I think he’s just a very special soul that you’ll learn a lot just through the different stories that he shares. And he’s well well researched. And I think you’re going to pick up a lot, even scientific and medical things you can do, even right now to impact and enhance your sex life. So really excited about what this means for you and your marriage. Let’s go ahead and dive in.

1:51
I would love to Thanks for having me on. I just learned so much from you. And I appreciate you so much. And I’m honored that you gave me this opportunity to talk and I hope that whoever listens to this will something good will come out of it. Every time I attend a course I always come away with at least one thing that that’ll be the same for the people that listen to us. Sometimes I learned what I don’t want to do. But hopefully they’ll find something that will happen in their lives. Yeah, so I grew up in a little small town, the atmosphere at our house when I was growing up as tents. And just discord, a lot of lot of fighting between the kids. So I escaped as much as I could sustain when I was older when I would stay with friends on the weekends and just kind of stay away as much as possible. So that was it was tough. So when I was done, probably about 12 I went to a Baptist encampment and became a Christian. And I started praying that God would send me a wonderful wife. And we could have a great family, but it wouldn’t be like the family that I grew up with. And so God has has been really good to answer that prayer. And, you know, we we have, we have an amazing family. I was president of my high school, and I’ve been President of about every organization that I’ve ever been.

3:33
I do not doubt that.

3:37
And my wife, you know, she’s an amazing girl. And we are from the same town. She’s a year older than I am. But I’ve known her for a long time. And you know, God did blessed me with an absolutely fabulous person. And so we got married, we got married really early. So I was 2621 We’ve been married 45 years.

4:06
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s so great.

4:09
One of the things that I encourage my kids to do is look for a potential spouse, you know, in a church setting. And so they did that they were involved in church, singles groups, and they got out of college and that’s how they met their spouses. So we’re just really, really blessed. Blessed.

4:31
That’s amazing. Wonderful. Okay, so you started out, you know, praying that God would give you a marriage that didn’t really resemble the family that you started in that you saw modeled for you. So can you tell me when you got married, you know, your first years what was if you don’t mind sharing kind of what was the nature of intimacy like between the two of you

5:00
I would describe our early years of marriage if ignorance is bliss, or as I would describe as delayed gratification. Because when I got into dental school, I wanted to go to I want to go to graduate school. And in order to go to graduate school, you really had to make all lay eggs. So my wife was a teacher, she just graduated from school. So we both roll in about six in the evening, her from work and me from school and, and she’d make dinner. And then I just, we had a, we had a little two bedroom, a terrible apartment, but the second bedroom, we converted it into a study, and I was probably sitting down and studying by set and then about nine o’clock, she’d come in and give me a little peck on the cheek and say, I love you. And then she’d got a bad notice that I would be up to midnight. On some weeks, where there was testing, I’d be up to two, three in the morning, studying and so we pretty much didn’t see each other, you know, during the week other than have dinner together. And then, you know, on the weekends, but by the time that week is rolled around, you know, we were just, we were just, you know, Brian did. And so I was in a fraternity, again with, you know, party guys. And so we would usually go to like, they call them relaxers. So it five o’clock on Friday afternoons, we go to a bar, just hanging out with dental students and the wives and nursing students and hygiene. Just drink beer and talk about how hard the week was. My wife also had another job because we were pro, he would work retail on the weekends. We’re really in survival mode. So you know, we really didn’t have you wouldn’t call it a very intimate lifestyle. I think my wife’s father died when she was nine. Her mother remarried, but he was an alcoholic, the second husband was an alcoholic. And so really, my wife really didn’t have a relationship with a man. And they didn’t really model, you know, what you teach? And so, I mean, I hate to say that, but that might have worked in our favor, sadly, because I don’t think she I didn’t know what to give, and she didn’t know what she was missing. Because I think if you asked her about our early on years, she’d say, well, everything was fine. And it was it was it was all we knew. But in our defense, you know, we didn’t know anybody that had the kind of lifestyle, the intimacy lifestyle you teach, and 45 years ago, there were really no resources that I know of. No, they were out there. So I think, unfortunately, most of the world, I guess they operated like we did. So I’m not sure you you’re the expert in that area, but I didn’t see it around, you know?

8:30
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So if you would be able to go back to some of those seasons. So if I were to break up some of the seasons that you mentioned, you’ve got that time that you were in dental school, the time that maybe you were building your business, the time that you were raising young kids, the times that you were raising teenagers now the time you’re entering empty nesters, that time you’re, you know enjoying grandkids if we were to break it up, I’m sure there’s other seasons you could probably define in there. But if we were to think about maybe even going back to some of those seasons, now what you know about intimacy and that kind of thing, what would you suggest would have been a better way of living? Do you think?

9:18
Well, what, there’s one thing I did want to share with you. She we started going to church. So while we were dating, you know, I told her I said, Well, if we’re going to date, you know, I want us to go to church. And so we started going to church, and then we found a church when we were in dental school, and the second year that we were married, she accepted Christ and baptized. So, you know, that was awesome. Yeah. And then another thing that was I think a really significant occurrence is that our last year that I was in graduate school I got into graduate school. And so she decided to go back to school and she went to graduate school. So I got a part time job after school, and would work till midnight, but she had to drive a car to go to college. So both would wrote that about, you know, minutes, not nothing had really, you know, changed. But we saw in that this has to be a God thing, we saw that there was going to be a Bible Conference in our, in the city where my school was, and for some reason, we decided to go and the man is passed away. But the man that held the Bible conference was major Ian Thomas, and he was an amazing man. And what he taught was that Christianity was really about turning your life over to the holy the leadership of the Holy Spirit. And up until that point, we never had heard that concept. And so, you know, Christianity for us was more like, go to church those Sunday and ask God to forgive you for what you did, you know, during the week. So we had a lot, we had a lot to probably offer. But, you know, that really, that blew our minds, I’ll never forget the last night of the conference, I was in tears, because I really don’t think I understood what it meant. So be fully turned over to God. And so that was a, a huge change for us and an eye opening experience. And, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to us. And one of the things I wanted to share with you, because I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this before. And the group, some of the some of the people are listening this, they’ll say, well, but some others may not know, one of the things that major Thomas taught was that animals birds and and insects in the animal world are he gives them an instinct. And that instinct protects them. And a couple of examples of use was that if you, if you put a bottle of alcohol in front of the dog, of course, they wouldn’t drink that. Because their instinct would say, hey, no, that’s, that’s not good for you. But man will drink, too. They, you know, they can’t walk. And another example used were birds as they migrate from north to south, you know, how do they know to go 1000s and 1000s of miles and but they end up back to the same home or destination every time or salmon and they, you know, when they migrate. And so he said that we are born with an instinct. And, and so if you had the Holy Spirit, and you’ve got an instinct, it’ll teach you right from wrong. You see, you know, if you’re going down the wrong path, and that really has to be able to say, you know, when I look around the world, and don’t tell him television in some of the wickedness. And I want to shake my head and say, you know, I can’t believe this is this is what’s going on, or a marriage. It’s the, and it’s just we don’t, you know, we don’t have that Holy Spirit within us. And we don’t have God, you know, showing us the way. So that was probably one of the most significant things that ever happened to me. In that first, the first five years of our marriage was was meeting him and reading some of his books, and I actually became friends with him. So it was Oh, wow. Yeah, he was he was an amazing, amazing person. Wow. Back to your question. You know, what would I do with, you know, our marriage is I would change the priorities.

14:12
Because my wife is very ambitious. And I am too. And so pretty much until maybe 10 years ago, marriage intimacies, then not that high of a priority. So I’ve changed your priorities, I would have hired you and I would have just cherished or more like you t helped her out more. We had a consultant early on there was Christian and you know, one of his favorite mottos was, only do things that you enjoy to do. And the rest farm it out. We had hired a lady that had a degree in early childhood growth and development that came into our house. And she helped out with the kids. And then, you know, we had a maid and so we we farmed out, things that we didn’t enjoy doing. But I wouldn’t do that if I had to do over again, I would have more time at home, I would have been out to help with the dishes and, you know, help with the homework and not focus so much on my career. So, yeah, I’m not we accomplished a lot, but I’m not particularly proud. You know, what, how we did it, or what we did. We, you know, we spent a lot of time teaching Sunday school. And we taught Bible Study Fellowship. So we were really involved in church, you know, teaching, and tithing and taking the kids to school, we picked out a church that had a really strong youth group, and got our kids plugged in there. And we got that idea from listening to Billy Graham, he had a book on answers, the last most difficult questions, and one of them was working to save your kids to school. I mean, he, he felt like he says, sit in the public school. And then help them you know, finding a church that they could make friends with, and then find those friends and hang out those friends in school. And then when they were challenged growing up, then they’d have their parents, you know, to help them understand what was going on into the world. And drop them off into college. And they said, Oh, my God, no, where’s this world? existed? You know, and if you look at the statistics, 70% of the kids that are Christians, when I get into college, they turn away from the Lord. So, you know, I don’t know, things have changed a lot since our kids were young. And you look at what’s going on in the public school and think, Wow, no, would I? You know, especially what the curriculum, the curriculums are in school. No, I don’t know what I would do. We used to just say we’re going to take school one year at a time. Now, what are the things I thought was interesting, in this public school in the high school is they had a program that’s called peer assistantship leading, and they call it pals, and student body. And the teachers would vote on kids that they thought were exemplary, and they were good leaders. They were good kids. And they could talk to other kids that were having problems, you know, in the school. And it was interesting that I would say 95%, at least the kids that were in that peer group, the leadership group, were they went to church. I mean, they were. Yeah, you can see, you can see a difference. No, in those kids.

18:10
Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, so it’s interesting, I think, what I’d love to ask you about is, because a lot of the people that are going to watch this are very goal oriented, ambitious, you know, achievement oriented people like yourself. And it’s interesting to hear you, which are pretty close to retirement age, I think, right? You’re, you’re thinking about doing that in a couple months? Probably not? Unofficially, because officially, you’re going to be doing a ton of different things. But in that zone, and you know, you’ve gotten from a place if you don’t mind me saying you came from a place where you call your use that you guys were broke, right, but now you guys are absolutely, you know, wonderfully able to give to others and in those financial ways. And I think that a lot of times, people at where they are now let’s say they’ve got children at home, let’s say they’re about, you know, between their 40s and 50s, or something. And what I often see is this, like pressurized sense of they need to achieve and achieve and achieve and achieve at the expense of loving their spouse while loving their kids. Well, these kinds of things. And I don’t know, how would you maybe talk to somebody in that spot?

19:33
Well, there’s a really famous dentist, he’s passed away. His name is Dr. panky. He’s from Florida, and he used to teach the cross of life. And I think to do things well, you can’t do a lot of things. Amen. Think you have to sit down with your spouse and say, Hey, okay, and I think you should do that before you get married. Honestly. If you’re thinking about marrying, inside, hey, what, you know what’s important to you, in your life where you, you know, because time goes by so fast, at the end of four years, like we are, what do you want to have accomplished, you know, 40 years. And one of the things that I told my kids early on is that the most important thing that you can do is, you know, find Christ in a relationship with Christ. The second most important thing is who you choose to marry. And that can be a blessing, or it can be a curse. And so accidentally, I would prioritize, with my spouse. So, you know, we, we decided that we wanted to be physically fit. So we’ve always carved out, you know, an hour a day, our seasons of life have changed over the time. But we want to work out in our day if we can, and the right. And then to, you know, pray every day and study the Bible and try to find out what God wants us to do serve others in church. And then we want to read some every day and you know, grow. But, you know, by the time you spend time with your family, and you exercise, and you do some Bible study, and you do work, there’s a lot, a lot of time left. And so I think I tried a bit off too much. I was out of balance as far as my career. So I built one of the most successful practices in the country. So I had other specialists that worked for me, and employees. And so I was all just hung around with some very successful. Other specialists, we had a study club, and it was, it was my invitation only, and we were just, we were super high achievers. So I think I got that cross out of balance. So I think you have to decide, hey, how much is enough? And, you know, you can overdo anything. You can overdo your exercise, or you can overdo, you know, monks spend all their time, right. So it’s just, you know, keeping things, it’s keeping things healthy, you know, a healthy balance. And like my dad told me a long time ago, my father in law was very successful. Why? All he did was work. So I was bragging to my dad one day about this deal that he had done, where he made millions of dollars on this deal. And my dad, he’s very wise, you know, you can only wear one Rolex at a time, or drive one Cadillac at a time and eat one steak at a time. So he said, you know, how much do you really need? And, you know, I he just sent me on my heels. Because I had a Rolex I didn’t like it, and I sold it. You know, I’m a vegan now. So I don’t eat steak anymore. And you can’t you know, how many horses do you see? You know, behind, you know, a funerals? You know, you don’t you’re not going to take anything to heaven with you. So, how much really, you know, is enough?

23:43
Uh huh. Yeah, that’s beautiful. So I want to ask about some things around intimacy. And as you all grew older, how did menopause affect you are all well in

23:57
menopause was a tough time for us. Yeah. Because, you know, my, my wife lost most of her desire really to be intimate and know she lost third royalty to become moist. Sex and see, it’s really kind of interesting. She’s gonna kill me when she hears this recording. But her complexion is really seem to change. And she would just it was almost like she was in constant PMS. I mean, she just was angry. A lot. She of course, she had the hot flashes. He didn’t sleep well. No, and not at all. So seems, you know, she’s pretty miserable. And you want to know there’s so many things that I’ve learned working with you and you know, one of the things that we discovered with one of the tests that we took, was that I’m a learner. I think this was number one. For me. Yes. I’ve always been a good student, I’ve always loved to read. And so I thought, Okay, I need to read about menopause. So most of my resources when it comes to intimacy, and lifestyle, I try to find Christian resources. And so I read a Christian book about what happens to women’s brains, their menopause. And so gave me some grace, when I realized that she was just losing some hormones affecting the wife, you know, she was thinking, and then I started reading some other books or books just on relationship and intimacy. So one of the groups that gave a credit to Paul bar. And so I started following him, and he gave credit to you. I mentioned you in one of his blogs. And so I thought, well, this lady I found, you know, found Bella, which is another one of the greatest things, you know, that ever happened. And then I was at my physician, who’s a, he’s a close friend of mine. He’s an internal medicine doctor, he scored number one in the national on the national boards in internal medicine, and he’s very conservative. And so I trust him. He’s brilliant. And so I was in for a checkup. And he started asking me some questions about my more fatigued, no, Ms. asleep, how am I sleeping at night? And what’s my mood, my energy level? So when I answered him, he said, You know, I think we should test your hormone level. Because he said, he says, It sounds like you’re low testosterone. And so sure enough, I was completely out of gas. Wow. Yeah. So testosterone level was about as low as you can, can get. And so he said, I think, you know, you need to start taking testosterone. And so I started taking these tests, testosterone pellets, in their bio identical testosterone pellets, they’re not synthetic. And I could not believe the difference that it made as far as sleeping at night, and I started putting on more muscle mass when working out, started getting stronger and better erections. It so you know, I said, you know, to the internal medicine doctor, I said, I think, maybe at a gas too, and he said, well bring her in. So he tested her shirt. She was low on estrogen and testosterone. And so he started giving her the pellets. And it was like 25 Again, really, wow, it was amazing. sleep all night, or sex drive, probably higher than it’s ever been. Wow. And

28:28
it was like, we were alive again. And it’s been pretty amazing. The benefits that we’ve received from this academy is called bow TT. I would encourage anybody that is starting to have some of those symptoms, know that they look into it, you can go to the bowtie website, and you can do a doctor locator in your area. Okay. That might be a really good resource for somebody that wants to be, you know, check, I would try to find a doctor that specializes in long liberty and does Bau T with prevention, you know, as well as my wife had to have a stent. And that really scared us because we thought we had been eating properly. And turns out, she had a 95% blockage in her main career. So I went to work again, it started reading and I found a book called prevent and reverse heart disease by Paulo. And then I found a couple other books one is called How Not to Die. Dr. Greger while your last?

29:50
How Not to Die. Sounds great.

29:52
So Dr. Greger is reviewed he is he’s got tin physicians that work for him. It’s a nonprofit network. Over a million articles in the last 10 years, and they’re called out the biased articles, or they’re all unbiased articles, and he’s boiled down the results into these into chapters. And the chapters are on different the different diseases that kill people that live and they live off in the West states in Europe. And so it’s basically 15 chapters, and each chapter relatively short. But it involves, you know, heart disease, or breast cancer or prostate cancer addresses each one of them. And now what he’s found is a plant based diet will pretty well protect you from the top 15 killers. Wow. And cardiovascular disease is the number one killer. And the number one symptom, you know what the number one symptom of cardiovascular diseases

31:00
is that your clogged

31:02
arteries? Sudden Death? Oh, which is pretty scary, because that would have that’s what happened to my wife. So she developed chest pain. And I remember from my dental studies that we need to do give her some adult aspirin. So I gave her one and she continued to have pain. And then, you know, an hour later I gave her another ended up giving her five. But we got her to the emergency room. And the doctor said that probably saved her life. Whoa, yeah. So she had to have an emergency stent placed. And so we went to work, and started trying to figure out, you know, what our problem was in both our cholesterol score, within with the American cardiology Association says is normal, which is under 200. But it turns out the research shows it needs to be below 150. Really. My wife’s taking her cholesterol down from I think it was around 207. And the last time she got it measured, it was 114. Wow. Yeah. And her LD Gail, the bad cholesterol. She has it down around 50. I think you don’t want it to be over 70 If you’ve had a cardiovascular event. So if you haven’t had a cardiovascular event, you don’t want your LDL to be over 100 is around 70. Now, wow. You know, they’re finding that erectile dysfunction is also a symptom of cardiovascular disease. Because those penal arteries are, they’re really tiny, they’re about 1/5 the diameter of a coronary artery. And so those arteries start filling up with little plaques. And so you can’t get as much blood to your penis. And that’s why the penis is unable to become fully erect or erect. Is because of their, again, the plaques in

33:11
wow, I didn’t know that. That’s right. Why fit the size? Wow. Um, so and Dr. Esselstyn I’m familiar with, and I’ve I’ve read some of his stuff as well, the China Study, did he do it? Or was it another?

33:25
Colin Campbell, wrote The China Study. And that was the third book I read in that book a blow your mind. It’s a little scientific. But it’s an amazing read. And there’s a direct correlation to prostate cancer and lung cancer and breast cancer to diet. And I would really encourage people to grab those books and read because they’re, there’s a lot of rumors out there. There’s a lot of people that are selling diets. And a lot of those diets are going to give you heart problems. And erectile dysfunction. Yeah, and keto is one of them. So I would really urge people to do your homework and go do it. You know, when your buddies tell us.

34:27
Okay, so Ben, and I just kind of started talking about the health, things that impact intimacy, but I will tell you on our next show coming out next week, we talked so much more in depth, and he is so well researched, but he’s also lived in he’s, he’s in a you know, in his 46 year of marriage, so he really understands, and there’s some medical interventions as well as health practices that he and his wife do that really impact things in their age. Now where most couples are really challenged in this way. So I want to encourage you and give you those tools. So I’m very much looking forward to having him again next week. And in the meantime, I’d love to offer you a free resource. It’s my framework that actually gives you the insights on how to love your spouse the way that they receive love. So if you’re a husband, how does your wife actually want to be loved what is most important to her, so that when you love her and fill her up in those ways, she will naturally respond to fill you up in the ways that you receive love. So this framework is for husbands and for wives, and it’s to really understand your spouse. So go to delight your marriage.com/framework delight your marriage.com/framework and you can get that download. Alright, God bless you and I look forward to next week. Take care