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Welcome to the delight your marriage podcast. This show where you hear from amazing and inspiring wives sharing their struggles, triumphs and advice for this journey called marriage. Here’s your host, belah. Rose. Hey there, this is Bella. And thank you so much for joining me again for the delight your marriage podcast, where I have the amazing privilege to speak to wives and intimacy experts on what it really takes to have a wonderful fulfilling and lifelong marriage. And before we dive into that, I want to just invite you to consider whether you might be ready to go deeper in intimacy, whether you’re ready to move past your reservations that have been hindering you, or get through barriers that you’re not even sure what they are. But they’re not allowing you to enjoy things, the way that you know, you should be enjoying things. I am opening my coaching program, only up until July 31. Can you have a free 20 minute strategy session with me and we can figure out what your goals are and where you’re wanting to head. And if my coaching program would be a good fit with you, where it would be totally anonymous and you and I just working one on one, I would love to walk this road together with you. If this is something that you are interested in, dear wife, go to your email and just email me at blah at delight your marriage.com Bella at delight your marriage.com now today, I have another amazing wife, her name is Jenna. And she’s a listener, but she’s also a friend of mine. And I’m just so honored to talk to her today about what it has taken to weather the storms of life. And to come out on the other end and say, Wow, God has been good the whole time. And he has kept our marriage strong. And this is what we did to get there. And I just love Jenna’s thought through so much of her story, she wrote most of it down. And so she gives such phenomenal insight into what really kept her marriage going admit some really long and painful years seeing her own son, you know, go through horror and the difficulty that addiction is and I’ve lived through some dearest family members in addiction and it is really, really challenging. So Jenna just shares what it what it has taken to their marriage and what it means to really hold God in first and foremost and hold her husband in the place that God asks us to hold our husbands. So anyway, let’s dive in and hear what Jenna has to say about this.

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Okay, well welcome back delight your marriage listener. This is belah rose, and I am so excited today to have Jenna on. Hi, Jenna, how are you doing today?

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I’m well, thank you. How are you? Good. Good. I’m excited. This is going to be

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a great interview. Jenna and I have actually known each other for a while and she’s just starting her brand new marriage blog. So I’m really excited about that. But Jenna, would you go ahead and introduce yourself and your family and a little bit of what your day to day life looks like?

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I am Jenna. My husband is Bob. We’ve been married for over 30 years. We have two adult sons ages 26 and 29. I fill my days just basically being a home homemaker, for lack of a better term sounds a little outdated nowadays. But I also run my husband’s office from our home. He has his own business. And I just quote retired from innkeeping I ran a bed and breakfast out of our home for eight years and that truly for those eight years, that was my main ministry focus, I had a lot of opportunities to minister to people and some times people ministers me much to my but it works both ways. We have a small farm in rural Southern Maryland, we have chickens, we have little dogs.

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And I love to just kind of feather my nest, home decorating, organizing, entertaining, little bit of baking various things like that all the all the home art.

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I just I’m a little bit on the creative side. So I do love to do that. And I love to write and I’m sort of a graphic arts junkie on the side but I try to

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my husband is all dark and handsome and as gorgeous as the day I met him actually he’s more gorgeous now than he was when I first met him

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when I met him and I with this team. Wow. Oh, really nice book and man.

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He’s very hard working exceedingly attend

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his generous, loving, very romantic, very intelligent. He’s got that little bit of Italian spicy temper in there sometimes, but you know, I kind of toss it right back at him. So that’s okay.

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I tend to be more soft hearted like most moms are. And he’s a very logical thinker and kind of a black and white thinker. And that balances everything out pretty well.

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Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask you a little bit about your different personalities. were you gonna say something more? And no, I was just gonna say that’s kind of sums up me and my life is tans right now. I love that. Well, it’s a really beautiful picture of farm life. And then also I know, well, that’s an entrepreneur of doing the work that you do with a bed and breakfast. So that’s very, very cool. So I’m excited for you to also be moving into more entrepreneurial

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in your next and your next phase of entrepreneurship. Yeah, I find that for whatever reason, God never keeps me in one season of life for any length of time. He called me into something else.

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Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah, I almost want to just comment on that. If I think sometimes when we wonder what is God’s purpose for me? And we act like it’s one thing? Yeah. But what do you think about that I, I really struggled with that I didn’t become a believer until I was 26. And, you know, you always heard about your life purpose. And I kept thinking, What is my purpose, because I thought all I’m really good at is keeping house and cooking and decorating and entertaining. And to me, in my mind, and my very young Christian mind at that point. I just didn’t really see how God could use that. But then some book one time about hospitality. And I thought, oh, yeah, that’s me, for sure. I could, I can do that. And so welcoming people into our home was something we’d always done anyway, but then it had a new purpose. And I think there’s probably a core purpose in there, but God can use it in many different ways throughout a lifetime. And I heard it once recently said, that you have an avocation. And a vocation, and this particular gentleman was speaking of his avocation, being serving others. But his vocation was medicine. He’s a medical doctor. And I thought, well, that’s something to chew on there. Because we all have certain gifts and talents. And God can use them in a multitude of ways. And, you know, if you read about someone famous, you think, Oh, well, that was their life purpose. And you kind of leave it at that. But you don’t know

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what else was going on in their life, and how how in what other ways God used that person.

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And how I see it, maybe,

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sometimes a lifetime can have many purposes. But, of course, in the end, the purpose is that we are here to glorify God to serve, and to share the love and acceptance of Christ with other people.

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That’s awesome. Well, and now, you know, we’ve already dove in, but I wanted to ask, because this is specifically about marriage and inspiring wives, empowering them to have lifelong intimacy in God’s plan. I’m interested in what your scripture quote that has meant a lot to you over the years, I actually have to, I’ll start with the first one, from Louisiana, the chapter four verses nine through 10, Two are better than one for either of them pull, the one will lift up his companion, but woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. And I think that’s such a picture of God centered, Christ centered marriage is just that idea of helping one another alone. We’re both, you know, as a husband, wife, we’re both broken people, you come into this world as damaged. You know, we all have our flaws. And we make allowances for that. And if, if I’m, you know, we can one area and my husband is strong in that area, we kind of complement each other and we compensate and we make up for the other’s lack. And if one of us is struggling than the other one can come alongside and help him along. And it might be an illness, it might be just a character issue. It’s a personal struggle. It can be a multitude of things. And in the course of a marriage, decades long, you’re going to come across that all the time in various forms. And that whole thought of one being by your side, totally committed to you for your lifetime, is an awesome awesome thing.

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Yeah, so

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That, yes. And you know, in general, you’ve lived it, you’ve lived it. 30 plus years. And that’s incredible. So I’d love for you to share a little bit about a difficult season our struggle, because so often those kinds of stories help us to see okay, in the midst of our struggle right now, we can get through it because this marriage got through it, we can do the same.

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And also, I wanted to just mention a couple things that you already did mentioned. First of all, it’s clear Jenna is head over heels in love with her husband, isn’t it?

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Well, if you ever met him, you’d know why immediately.

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Well, I think if we hadn’t, only because you’re married to him, can you really say the depth of that love, which is really incredible. And and then the other thing I wanted to mention is, you mentioned hospitality as being such a God given like, I think hospitality is just so close to God’s heart. And really, if someone doesn’t feel comfortable in an environment, real life, real heart connects don’t happen. And so I think hospitality is just a huge part of God’s plan and as necessary, and so I, I love that that’s something you’re passionate with as well. But can we go ahead and dive into what your your season struggle was? Yeah, I think my season of struggle is kind of ongoing, because it’s, it’s really a personal struggle. I mean, any any men go through various struggles, some of the struggles, attack you from the outside, and sometimes they come from the inside out.

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My biggest struggle is the same struggle a lot of Christian women have, and that’s wanting to be in charge, even though not called us to be the head of the family. I didn’t meet the Lord until I’d already been married for seven years. And I have to believe that if I had known the Lord from the beginning, then Bob and I could have been fed a whole lot of Krishna.

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He could have been fair to hold on.

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Early on, in our married lives. My parents marriage was, you know, that was the biggest example of marriage that I have in my life, obviously, that was one saw every day. And it really had a negative effect on my own marriage in the beginning, most specifically, is how my mom treated my dad.

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She, I was kind of treating Bob as if he was second in command or second class.

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As if you were less important than I was. I didn’t mean to treat him that way. But because I grew up in a home where mom usurped that authority and treated them like the proverbial redheaded stepchild, I grew up with the idea that the husband’s not very valuable to the family.

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I think she, in her mind did that by default. Because dad and a lot of ways was emotionally absent. He had a very, very difficult

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childhood in that his father abandoned the family, five children in the family, and this happened during the Great Depression. So his mother was forced to go out and work two, three jobs at a time. And so he was just no parent in the home. He never saw marriage, he never saw Father. And I think in a lot of ways, you use that as an excuse to just emotionally disconnect. So my mom decided that she would just pick up the reins and run with it and tell what.

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So in my own married life, our first child was born 11 months after we got married. So that, of course made my husband third on the list. I figured I came first and the baby and then and that’s, I observed growing up in in my home growing up my childhood home. Mom was first the children were second, and dad was last.

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And

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even though we were not founding Christians at that time, God’s been his graciousness. soffit, to bless me with a remarkable nurse. In the hospital when our firstborn was born. She was at that time a middle aged woman who had had two sets of twins born 10 months apart, and then another baby a year later, back in

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there, she knew about marriage and family. She said to me, it’s your instinct to make your baby your first priority, but you must make your husband your first priority. That baby will grow up much sooner than you think. And he’ll go off and have his own life. And then one day, you’ll be sitting across from the breakfast table from this man. And it’s up to you whether this man is your best friend or total stranger. Now, at that precise moment when she told me this as my newborn, I’m thinking, No way lady, you’re crazy. This baby comes first. But even though I was not a believer at the time, the Holy Spirit really did work in my heart. And I realized as I thought about what she said,

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She was right, I looked at my parent’s disaster of a marriage. And it wasn’t rocket science to figure out that a lot of the problem was a husband who didn’t love his wife above all else, and a wife who in her mind, by default, took over as a leader. And

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I knew that if I didn’t make some changes pretty daggone, fast, I was gonna end up divorced, I had married a man, and he deserved all my love, and not just part of it. And I realized that really what I was doing was withholding My love, I was giving him portions of it, as I felt maybe he had deserved it, you know. And that’s, that’s just totally wrong, that’s totally unbiblical.

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In there to practice putting my husband first. And it took lots of practice, lots and lots of practice. And for me, I’m still practicing.

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For me, and for many other wives, it’s an ongoing struggle. There have been times in our married lives, that we’ve had, you know, differences of opinion on various subjects. And one in particular being our approach to training and disciplining our children. There were times I had to really force myself to just back off, and allow my husband to have the final say, I know that appoint him as the head of the family, not me. I know that the family through the husband, and by you surfing, bond authority on basically acting in direct disobedience to God, I still struggle with it, even after more than 30 years. And I think it’s just kind of ingrained in humans, but for some reason seems to be a particular fault for women. And you so back to the Garden of Eden, and take a look at that, you know,

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one of the most difficult child related struggles we live through Islam, we discovered that our oldest son was drug and alcohol addicted. When we were under the false sense of security, we thought we were in the clear, so to speak, because he made it all the way through high school without ever smoking or drinking or trying drugs or getting into any kind of trouble. He moved out, he was 18. But by the time we learned about the addiction, he was 28 years old, and he’d been living on his own for 10 years. I prayed every day, not just for him to be free from addiction. But that thought and I would remain unified through the whole ordeal. And it was just a horrible, horrible existence for all the time just never knowing, you know, when the shoe would drop again, and never knowing if he was gonna end up dead one day. And there were just times as a mom that I kind of wanted to rescue our son and help him, quote, help more than I should translation him.

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And nothing breaks a mother’s heart more than seeing her child hurting in any way, shape, or form, even if it’s self imposed her. But again, I had to trust God to work through us, even in this. And this was a biggie as hard as that situation was. And as hard as all the struggles were that we’ve been through together as a married couples we really held tight to one another. We just extended an extra measure of grace and forgiveness to one another. We realize we’re both imperfect people and and that’s love. Love is the holding tight. When your gut tells you to run.

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It’s pressing in when you feel like pulling away. It’s laying aside your own desires and submitting the God’s authority is not easy, but it is so so worth it.

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We did get clean and now he is living life without drugs and alcohol. And he was yeah, he was recently rebaptized rededicated his life just as a public testimony of his return to Christ. He was he was saved and baptized as a young child, but he did goes on way for a period of 10 more. That’s I think

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that’s powerful. I mean, that must have been so so difficult. You said so if it was for 10 years that he was in, in the drug addiction, yeah. Drug and alcohol. Oh,

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wow. And I just I wonder Jenna, if there’s any other you know, wives listening, or mothers listening, what’s something you could kind of share with them? In the midst of seeing their wonderful baby, your wonderful baby boy, baby girl that’s living living that kind of lifestyle? What I mean what can you encourage them if you can, um,

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the hardest thing is letting them go completely their own way.

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removing yourself from their lives in the sense that you are not helping them. Not financially, either.

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Basically, you still want to let them know that you love them. Your concern you care about them, you can offer suggestions as far as rehab, for instance. But as far as coming to the rescue, don’t do it. We did that so many times over the course of 10 years. And all it did was make it easier for him to remain addicted. And it drained us mentally and emotionally.

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If we had taken our hands off earlier, maybe he would have hit bottom earlier, I don’t know that he didn’t come to the end of himself until he was sitting in a jail cell. And it killed me. It just killed me that that was when he finally realized, what am I doing, I have got to get myself straightened up. And through that experience, that he finally did start back down the right road, but

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it’s the big temptation to step in and rescue them. And especially for a mom, you know, for mom, always think of them as your children. But my gosh, you know, this last year, when when everything came to a head, you got you got to stand back. And I think husbands have a better way of doing this husband slash father they haven’t, it comes easier for them to stand back and say this is a 28 year old man, you can’t keep thinking of them as this helpless little innocent child, they are neither helpless nor innocent. One thing about addicts is they become very adept at manipulation, and very, very good at it. Very, very good at it. And they use that to support their habits. And you just get to a point where you know, you can’t trust them. And you really have to come to a place where you say, God, you know what, it’s all yours, because I can’t do this anymore. And Emotionally, I couldn’t do it anymore. I reached my breaking point. And when you get to that point, it’s as if God is rolling up his sleeves and saying, finally, you’re getting out of my way. So I think

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you know, we, we just as parents, we want to make life a little easier. And we want to be the ones that come to the rescue sometimes. And sometimes the best thing we can do is to let them fall and fall hard. Truly, I mean, when you think about the story of the prodigal son,

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the father stood out on the porch every day, looking off at the horizon and just longing for his son to return to Him. But if you’ll notice, he never went out and rescued him and brought him home. He allowed to go completely headlong into his depraved lifestyle. And he let him hit rock bottom in the pigpen. Ready, listen, he let him come back of his of his own desire, you know,

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Oh, he didn’t go out and get him and drag him back. He let him come in. But when he came home, it was with complete forgiveness. And it was basically okay, it happened, it’s over, you’ve repented, we will talk about it no more, we’re gonna move forward.

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It’s a very, very hard road to track.

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And it can be a very lonely road, because there’s a lot of misunderstanding. And of course, a lot of people assume that if your child becomes addicted, that either something horrible happened to them in their childhood, or through a terrible parents. I mean, there’s a lot that people assume. And for our son, he has said repeatedly, it was nothing my parents did. It was nothing that happened to me. It was just something I tried. And he has said flatly, I simply liked being high. And the problem was, you do it a couple of times. And you do it because you want to do it and you like to do it. But then eventually you have to do it, it becomes a need. And that change in your entire chemical functioning in your brain. And all of a sudden, you’re an addict and you’re trapped. It’s very difficult to come out. And without the help of God, he would not have come out.

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And I want to just pull out a couple of things that you said, you know, sometimes the best thing we can do is let our son or daughter fall and fall hard. And I just thought that was pretty powerful. And the other thing you mentioned is you talked about how your husband, how you kind of needed to get out of the way and stop kind of saving your son and your husband had maybe a better perspective on no we need to give him the

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space, we need to let him fall was that what Bob kind of did? Yeah, more or less. He came to that, before I did. I still wanted to kind of come to the rescue. But he, he was a lot more black and white about this is a grown man. He is capable of being independent. He has skills he has, he is very, very intelligent. He’s always very intelligent. So it wasn’t like he was some helpless foal out there. And, you know, we were being horrible people.

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He was capable, he had just chosen this lifestyle. And when his world came crashing in around him, he wanted someone to come to his rescue again. And really, after 10 years of being rescued, you expect that someone’s going to come to your rescue. And when they don’t, initially, you get pretty angry. And he was pretty angry at us for a little while there. But

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he got from the drugs and the alcohol. And once he got back to God,

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his vision cleared. And he saw what it was. And he realized Good grief. You know, here I’m at that time he was 28. I’m 28 years old. And where am I in my life? I have nothing. I have no home, I have no car, I have job. I have nothing.

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So I think that

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Hale logical way of being able to not eat no, not emotionally disconnect, because it was very, very difficult for Bob emotionally to, but to be able to

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take the emotional equation, or the emotional side of it out of the equation, so to speak, to kind of put that aside and get it black and white. See what it really is and deal with it accordingly. For a mom, it’s all about feelings. In

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Yeah, yeah. Well, I just I just love thank you so much for sharing that story. Because that’s really, so incredible, especially how you were talking about with the prodigal son, I loved how you made that connection, because that’s exactly right. God never ran out. To get the guy out of the mess he was in. He waited until that person came to the Lord Himself. You know, came to the father that’s kind of you know, the it’s a parable about us coming back to the Lord but

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but it’s but it’s also very practically in your, in your experience. That’s praise God for that. You know, one other thing that you said that I really love? I wonder if you have it written down. You said Love is a new, you had some did you have that written down? You were like it was earlier on you were saying? Love is the holding tight when your gut tells you to run away. It’s pressing in when you feel like pulling away. If laying aside your own desires and submitting to God’s authority, it’s not easy, but it is so so worth it. Oh, that’s so beautiful. I just love that. Thank you for sharing that again. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s great stuff. So Jenna, is there some online resources that maybe we could point listeners to people that are that have children in addictions right now? Yeah, there is a really, really good question. online support group for family and friends addicts is daily strength.org. They have a number of different support groups within daily strength. The one that I am a part of is families and friends of addicts. So if you go to daily strength up or you can search families and friends of addicts, support groups, and join, it’s very confidential, you can use in a different name. But you can just post questions, you can share your story, there’s an option that you can keep a journal and just add thoughts to your journal, share your struggles, you can be very, very, very honest and open. And I have found this to be a very valuable tool through the entire process. And I have a great deal of encouragement. They kind of have a rule about when you post and basically the rule is be nice, you know, just be nice to one another, be kind to one another. People are really struggling. And I found that a lot of parents of adult addicts on this support group were very, very helpful and very supportive and encouraging. And sometimes,

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sometimes when you get a post that just says everything’s gonna be okay. Or someone send you a hug, you know, that can make all the difference in the world when your heart is breaking. It’s just a resource. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you so much for that Jenna.

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Wow, Jenna, what a story and praise God for what happened through

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out is that after 10 long years, and then here your son decides to not only go and get clean, but also come back to the Lord. And that’s just an amazing testimony. And I just want to speak to anyone who’s listening that has a loved one that is in an addiction, you know, abusing some kind of substance, or, you know, you know how painful it is and how difficult it is to see hope. But Jenna is saying, on the other side, yes, keep pushing on, keep having hope. And you know, I believe that God wants us to have hope. In Romans 1513, it says, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit. So I just believe right now, whoever you are, whatever difficulty is happening, that God wants you to be filled with hope,

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as you trust in Him. So let’s pray right now, Father, God, whoever is listening on the other side, you know, their difficulty, you know, their loved one that’s struggling in addiction, Father God, I ask in the name of Jesus, that you would give them the grace to trust you, so that they could be filled with all joy and peace, Lord God by the power of your Holy Spirit, that they may overflow with hope, Father, whatever difficulty that they trust, the God of hope, and they don’t have to be despairing. They don’t have to be dismayed. Lord, You are the God of hope and would you fill them in Jesus name, amen.

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Okay, well, Jenna has so much more insight and advice and I just love talking to her and she the second half is coming up. So make sure you come back and listen to it then. God bless you. I love you and I’ll talk to you soon.

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