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Hi there! Belah here. Today, I have with me Tony Ingrassia of powerofpurity.org. Tony is incredibly brave to share his story. He describes the importance of understanding your sexual journey and how it affects who you are today. He happened upon his father’s pornography as a kid, was abused as a young man which led into adulterous affairs when he was unhappily married. Tony shares the hope found in our saviour and how God can take the horrible parts of our lives and resurrect into new life.

Scripture/Quote:

• It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God;  and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister.[b] The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before.  For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. 1 Thess 4:3-7

You’ll Discover:

• How Tony’s wife Sherry had been abused as a young girl and how that affected her marriage from the very first night.
• How Tony had discovered his father’s porn stash and became hooked as a young man.
• How our stories affect our present and how important it is to honestly and bravely understand what has happened to us.
• How God uses our spouse to mold us into the person He wants us to be.
• How God takes the dead and terrible places of our lives and brings new life, just like the resurrection of Christ.

Tweetables:

• God doesn’t waste our pain.
• Our greatest opportunity for ministry is where the deepest brokenness of our life intersect with the grace and the mercy of God.
• God may use your spouse to mold you into the person with the character He wants for you to be.
• I think it’s incredibly important to understand our story and we let God into our story to bring our healing.

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

Love,

Belah

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Transcript

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

0:18
Hello, hello and welcome. This is the delight your marriage podcast. And I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This is about you and your marriage and your intimacy and having a wholehearted life in your marriage. And today we’re going to be talking about stories each of us brings baggage into our marriage, each one of us none of us is exempt from this and and we also have baggage from being in our marriage and having bad habits or having things that we just need to work through with God. And so today we’re talking to Tony and he is going to be talking about his story which is just incredible. You won’t well I’ll let you listen to it but it but there’s plenty of abuse and, and sad things that have happened and he talks about how his story has needed God’s redemption in every corner and, and how he’s worked through that. Before we dive in. I want to share with you an iTunes review. It says thank you belah rose for having the courage and tenacity to bring an often taboo subject to the forefront and for approaching it with scripture purity and wisdom. Husbands and wives desperately need godly guidance in the area of sexuality, especially what God Almighty created to set us apart as a married couple. Satan has perverted with his deception. Our culture is sex saturated lust saturated and falling fast from what God intended to be sacred. Thank you for your honesty. So I just so appreciate that review. And anyone that has given an iTunes review for the delight your marriage podcast you are, well I’m so grateful for you because you were helping spread the word of dy M it actually makes dy m more findable and searchable in iTunes. So thank you so much for that and also it just very much encourages me so um, but I am excited. Let’s go ahead and dive into today’s topic with Tony.

2:12
Okay, well welcome back delight your marriage listener. I am really excited to have you with us today I

2:29
have a wonderful guest. His name is Tony Ingrassia. And he has a website called The Power of purity or sorry, power of purity.org. And he runs a ministry called The Power of purity, and welcomes Tony, how are you today?

2:44
I’m fantastic. And thank you belah for the opportunity to share. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

2:49
Oh, I so appreciate it. Well, I think this is going to be an awesome conversation. And I think you have so much to share. Now I’d love for you to introduce yourself and a little about your family and your day to day life if you would.

3:01
Sure. Yeah, I’m my name is Tony. I’m 58 years old, and I’m married to my wonderful wife, Sherry, we’ve been married for 32 years. And it’s it’s really a miracle. Our marriage is a miracle. Because we’ve really experienced the grace and the mercy of God, we went to hell and back in the context of our marriage. So the fact the fact that we’re still together is truly a miracle of God. We have three sons and three granddaughters, and I’m in the ministry full time. Basically, my time in ministry is divided into three sections. I pastor, a small church in St. Charles, Missouri, called the outpost church. And I’m also a licensed professional counselor in the state of Missouri. So I do some professional counseling. And then I’m the director of a ministry called The Power of purity. And we have a website, power purity.org. And the essence of this, essentially, this ministry was born out of the deepest brokenness of my life and my my wife’s life, really, because we were to deeply profoundly broken people in the sexual area of our lives. And there were a lot of implications to that, throughout our marriage and things that we had to come to learn and understand. But anyway, the power of purity was born out of that. And essentially, we try to share with people what it means to bring your sexual gift under the authority of God, and to do sex God’s way. Because we found out that, you know, I did set Tony’s way for a long, long time, my wife was doing sex Sherry’s way, and it leads to hurt and destruction and pain and confusion and disorientation. And God’s way of doing sex is way, way better than our way. So as we, as we learn to bring our sexual gift under the authority of God, we find hope we find healing, we find redemption. And it’s just been an awesome journey, what the Lord has done in our hearts and our lives.

5:19
That’s really exciting. I’m so excited to, to dive into your story more. And before we do that, would you mind sharing a little bit about you and Sherry’s personalities?

5:31
I’m, I’m kind of an extrovert. I’m more outgoing. I’m more verbal and expressive. And I communicate, I’m more outward, essentially, in my wife, Sherry is more of an inward person, more shy, more quiet. She needs to simmer sometimes to figure out what she’s thinking what she’s feeling. So that that’s been something we’ve had to learn about and has been a source of tension over the years in our marriage. And we had to learn to understand each other, and how how we work as individuals, and then the implications of that, on who we are together as a couple.

6:15
Huh, right. Yeah. And then, you know, this, this podcast is really all about inspiring and empowering wives to live wholehearted intimacy in their marriages. And I’d love for you to share a scripture or a quote that’s meant a lot to you over the years if you could.

6:32
That’s kind of a hard one. Because I could I can probably pick so many. I think I know where I’m going to go here. I’m turning in my Bible. Well, let me go here to First Thessalonians chapter four. It says it is God’s will that you should be sanctified, that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust, like the heathen who do not know God, and that in this matter, no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish man for all such sins, as we have already told you and warn you, For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. And I love that scripture. Because it conveys to me the very real possibility that we can learn to manage our body in a way that is holy and honorable to God.

7:32
Hmm. Yeah, that’s good. Well, would you be willing to dive into the story, then have a difficult season and struggle with your marriage? Yes,

7:44
very much. So. I, my wife isn’t here, of course, the interviews with me. But I just want everybody to know, as I talk about our story, I do so with my wife’s permission, we believe very much that, that, that God wants us to share our story with others, to try to help and encourage other people. And we’ve learned we’ve learned that kind of a principle of God’s Kingdom is God doesn’t waste our pain, you know. And I’ve heard it said that our greatest opportunity for ministry is where the deepest brokenness of our life intersects with the grace and the mercy of God. And so, in an ironic way, this this whole thing about sex represents not only the deepest pain and hurt and confusion, and disorientation and sin and brokenness of our lives, but it also represents the greatest expression and experience of God’s love and mercy and Power and Light and healing, and redemption, and forgiveness and salvation. So, you know, out of the deepest brokenness of our lives, comes comes the life of God. And so, so I think that our greatest message comes from our deepest brokenness, and that’s why we want we want to share our story. And by the way, it occurs to me and in these comments that I just shared, what we’re really talking about is the gospel of Christ. Because if you think about it, the gospel is the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. And most of us would say, I’m very interested in that resurrection part. Like I’m raising my hand sign me up. Yeah, I want the life of God, the power of God, the healing of God. But But the interesting part in the template of the Gospel is that the death comes before the resurrection, that death, burial and resurrection. So Sometimes God allows a kind of death, a dying in our lives, a dying of self, a dying of our own independence and autonomy, and rebellion against God and Death to what I reflected on earlier a Tony’s going to do sex Tony’s way and manage my life my way. And so anyway, we certainly had our time of dying and God, and that, that qualifies us for the gospel because God then can come in and do his thing. Which is bring that so witches bring dead things back to life. And that’s what he’s done in my heart, in my sexual self, and in my marriage, and what he’s done in my wife as well. But anyway, did you want to ask some questions? Or do you want me to just kind of share a little bit of the story or?

10:39
Yeah, I would love for you to actually, if you could kind of bring us there to what happened and how it happened. And give us a full view of that. And I’ll ask some questions as we kind of get started that way. Okay.

10:50
Wow. So I’m just gonna share her and you just jump in and interrupt me if there’s a question or comment or observation, or if I’m not being clear about something. But anyway, as I said, my wife and I have been married for 32 years. We got married on September 17 1983. And we’re very convinced that, that when most people get married, when we say I do to each other, most of us have no idea what we’re getting into. I don’t think that most people really truly know who they’re marrying. I think that’s a reality. Because most of us maybe don’t even know ourselves that well, let alone the other person, you know. So married marriage has a way of revealing things, revealing who you really are, and who you’re who you married. And so often, the person you marry turns out to be very different than the person you thought you were married, you know. So I’m convinced that God uses marriage as a primary tool and anvil in human lives, you know, and one time in fact, I’ll throw this in for free. I know I’m not getting to my story yet. But the Lord gave me a metaphor one time. And in this metaphor, God is the blacksmith. And well, you know, a blacksmith needs to shape things. So he puts it in the fire and heats it up an old twisted piece of metal that he wants to seep into something. And then he puts it against an anvil, and he takes his hammer and he begins to beat it and pound on it, you know, if the blacksmith took the metal and just hit it with a hammer buying, buying, it would shake and rattle and he can leverage. So he realizes I have this tool, it’s called an anvil. It’s this gigantic, heavy piece of steel that I can put the metal against, and now I can pound the heck out of it. Bang, bang, bang, against the anvil. So in this metaphor, God showed me that God is the blacksmith, and my wife, Sherry, was God’s anvil in my life, and I’m a twisted messed up piece of metal that God’s trying to shape so God needed something that he could put Tony against, and then pound on my life. And without a doubt, God has used my beautiful wife Sherry, as as the most significant instrument of sanctification of God working in my heart and life, to reveal things about me to expose things to pound things out of me that needed to be pound out. And it’s, it’s a, it’s a wonderful process, and a terrible process, in the, in the way of the things of God and something that makes me sad as a pastor, and as a professional counselor, you know, I’m working with people frequently in deeply troubled marital situations and relationships, and, and I just see that people, in my opinion, and people often give up way too easy, you know, in them is this process is unfolding and God’s trying to do something, and the goings getting tough, and God has you against the anvil of your spouse, and he’s any starting to pound away. And it’s uncomfortable, you know, if that piece of metal had feelings or emotions, it would say, hey, this hurts God Quit hitting me what’s going on? I don’t like this. I didn’t sign up for this, you know, and that there would be and people give up, they hit the retail he jacked button, and people escaped their marriages. And I think it’s a shame because God often uses these things toward his redemptive purposes in our lives. But anyway, enough of that, I’m kind of I’m given a sermon that and I didn’t mean to do that. You actually me to share my story. Yeah, so I’m going to get to the story. Anyway, we got married. I was 26, my wife was 22. And suffice to say that our marriage was an instant disaster, and instant disaster, a total mess. And I mean, on our very wedding night, my wife did not want to make love. She very, very uncomfortable, something was wrong. Now the event did happen. But I could tell something was wrong. It was not at all what, you know, the romantic stereotype of what your wedding night should be, I could tell that my wife was.

15:46
She was there physically. But it’s as if she wasn’t there. You understand what I mean? He wasn’t really present and connect. And I could tell something was very, very wrong. And I thought, Well, maybe it’s the helter skelter of our wedding day, people in from out of town and months and months of planning and being nervous and weddings, like a giant puzzle, all the pieces coming together, maybe tomorrow will be better maybe the next day. But but but it went from bad to worse. And and it was a very, very difficult situation. Well, let me go backwards for just a minute. And as you understand a little bit of our stories, it’ll make perfect sense to you why our wedding night was such a total disaster. I’ll start I’ll start with my wife just to share a little bit of her story. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home. By the way, it by insane that I don’t mean anything derogatory or against her family. I happen to believe that we all grow up in very functional homes, because basically, because the Bible says we’re every person is a sinner. So, you know, every home is dysfunctional in its own way. But Sherry’s mom and dad slept in separate beds, her entire life, separate separate bedrooms, so that that’s what was modeled for her as what how a husband and a wife lived together. Then at the age of 13, Sherry had intercourse for the first time, and which is way, way too young, as far as I’m concerned. And but to make matters worse, she was raped, she was essentially raped at the age of 13. And if I told you nothing more of her story, nothing more. Can you imagine how devastating an event like that would be any young lady’s heart and alive, right, right. So you would think that being raped at the age of 13, would lead to a posture of kind of resistance or an aversion to sex. But in her situation, it had the very opposite effect. And it basically invited her into a world of prompt a world of promiscuity. And she became rather promiscuous, ages 1314 1516. Then at the age of 17, she got pregnant and had an abortion. And this is all before she became a Christian. By the way, what was happening when she was 13 years old. Sherry was in with a group of gals. In her neighborhood, there was five or six girlfriends, and two of them were 16, so they could drive. And this there was a 15 year old a 14 And Sherry was the youngest at 13. So they would hang out. And one of these 16 year old girls had a boyfriend that lived in Illinois, and we live in Missouri in a St. Louis area. So all the girls would get in the car and go over to Illinois that this girl wanted to go see your boyfriend. Can you imagine a little 13 year old going to another state and her mother doesn’t even know that she’s doing this welding, they get to this house. And the Carlota girls goes in the house and there’s a bunch of guys in this house. Mom and Dad aren’t home. And in a short matter of time, an 18 year old guy got a hold of Cherie and basically pulled her in a back bedroom. And he did this thing to her now it wasn’t a it wasn’t a forcible rape in the sense that he punched her and kicked her and she was screaming No, no, it wasn’t like that. Basically, he perpetrated sex sexual intercourse upon her. She didn’t even really quite understand what was happening. Of course back to two illustrate the level of her naivete. She asked one of the older girls later. What is a virgin? Mean? Was he asked her during the event? Are you a virgin? And you know why he did that? Bella? No, I don’t know for sure. But I have a suspicion. And if I was a betting man, I’d bet a nickel. But he did that because I can only imagine it heightened his sense of conquest. Knowing that he was. Yeah, I’m sorry. I feel so sorry, emotional about that. That he was taking her virginity.

20:45
It heightened his sense of conquests to know that what he was doing to this little girl, you know. So she went through this promiscuity she had this abortion at the age of 18 and 19. Sherry then tried to commit suicide two different times. And the way that she tells the story is that she doesn’t even know why she wanted to die. All she knows is that she hated herself. He felt deep shame. And she intuitively knew that these boys didn’t love her didn’t really love her and want her for her. They wanted her for what they could get from her. Right and she she’s a young girl in the verbage of the the song looking for love in all the wrong places looking for love in too many faces. And so she wants a boyfriend like like any true blue red blooded American girl she wants to boyfriend to you know, will the boy think I’m pretty? Will a boy think I’m special? Will the boy want to kiss me will will avoid want to be my boyfriend. So she wants a boyfriend and what do all the guys want? They want to they want to get in her pants, you know. So she’s a very confused, young lady. Fortunately, both attempts were unsuccessful, unsuccessful. And so fast forward just two years at the I meet her at the age of 21. And almost instantly fall in love with her. If you saw, if you saw her picture, you’d know why. She’s a beautiful, gorgeous woman. And so I’m just looking at this person, and she’s a wonderful person and a beautiful person. And so we fall in love and decide that we’re going to get married. I didn’t understand Sherry story, that that’s what I meant when I said earlier that I think when when most of us get married, we don’t really understand each other’s story. We don’t necessarily understand who we’re marrying. And, of course, I didn’t understand any of sherry story. I didn’t even understand my own story at that point. Yeah. So so we got married. And that’s just a little bit of Shiri story. Now I’ll talk just a little bit of my story. I also grew up in a very dysfunctional home. My I had a very difficult relationship with my dad, my dad was, of course, you know, CS Lewis says that every person is that humanity is a glorious ruin. Every person has dignity and depravity, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. So my dad, of course, was a wonderful, beautiful person is an image bearer of God, many wonderful qualities, but also, he had his depravity and he was a very, very angry man. So I basically grew up under a pavilion of fear. I was very, very afraid of my dad, you know, and my dad, although I didn’t understand, and at the time, I later came to understand that he was a very sexualized man, and he has a ton of pornography, stacks of pornographic magazines and X rated books and I discovered my dad’s porn, I think I was 10 years old. And so looking back, I’m kind of amazed at the power that pornography has in a young a young boy’s heart and soul. And I I embraced this experience when I found it, I was very drawn to the pornography. I became very involved in it, I indulged in it and I, I would seek it out, you know, after I found it now later when I was in my own therapeutic process, I came to understand some things about that event that that helped me understand why it was so powerful. I think for me, the pornography that I discovered as a young boy, I filled a kind of emotional neediness that I had, that I didn’t understand. The fact is in my family of origin, I already mentioned that I was I was afraid of my dad. And there just was no demonstrative

25:36
expression of love in my family. There was no touching, hugging, nobody said, I love you. I have no memory when I was a kid of sitting on a parent’s lap of being tucked in bed, of having my hair caressed. Having a book read to me, have ever been touched of other than an anger, you know? And I think there was kind of an emotional neediness in this little boy as if I was like, crying out Will someone please touch me? Will someone please love me. There was a kind of aloneness in my, in my young heart. And when I found the pornography, I think in a, in a odd way, the pornography was not just a physical or sexual event for me, but it was an emotional event because I saw in the pornography, something that I was longing for that I didn’t even understand people, people touching each other people expressing love, affection enjoying each other. So I think in an odd way, it affected me on a deep, profound emotional level. And the pornography was unbelievably powerful. And believe it or not, I really believe that my sexual addiction began probably at age 10, or 11. While then fast forward at the age of 13. Through 15, I was sexually abused by two older women. Oh, my goodness, I just want to mention one thing, and that is that I think it’s very sad that for, for a young boy that his very first sexual experiences are with these older women. And what I want to say is that these experiences affirm to me the very lessons that I was learning in the pornography that this is what women are like, this is what women do. This is what women want. This is, this is how you what sex is, this is how people treat each other. I was learning lessons about fidelity, I knew this woman was married, but but she was doing these things with me. So So faithfulness isn’t all that important. And it’s okay to play around in which the people in the pornography do and so, so the whole birth and orientation of my sexual self was just so twisted. It was so unholy. It was so ungodly, it was so the foundation, the sexual foundation that was being put in my heart and life was just, it was so disoriented, you know,

28:54
and I’m so grateful that you’re sharing and so openly and vulnerably, I thank you so much. Because I think that there are so many that are listening, that also have had such horrible things happen as children. That’s so many bad sexual experiences happen as children, and it does inform so much of what we come into marriage with so thank you.

29:15
Yes, I appreciate your kind words. And I just want to affirm what you’re saying, Bella. You know, there, there’s an adage that I like that the concept of fruit comes from roots. In fact, I’ve written several books on the topic of sexual purity on on the cover of two of my books, I have an image of a tree and it shows the canopy of the tree in this beautiful tree, but then it shows underground, and it shows the root system of the tree. And the idea is that the fruit that is produced on a tree ultimately comes from the roots fruit comes from roots, and apple trees. makes a apples and an orange tree makes oranges. But ultimately the fruit that comes out on a tree is from the roots. And later in my life, I became a Christian when I was 16 years old, and I love God and I wanted to serve God. And I wanted my life to count for God. But I had this horrible duplicity in my life because I had this problem with sex. And it seems like I could not manage my sexual self in a healthy way i i was acting now and doing things that I knew were dishonouring to God with my sexual self, but I was compelled i It’s like sex have this power over me, it control me, instead of me controlling it. And that’s part of the reason I shared the scripture I did earlier. It is God’s will that you be sanctified that you avoid sexual immorality that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable and not in passionate lust like the heathen. So I couldn’t control my body, you know? And, yeah, I had this, I had this problem. And I came to understand later that it was the issue of roots. You see the roots of the sexual roots that had been put in my life. These things were like seeds. You see. My dad’s pornography and sexual abuse and different things that happen are like seeds being sown in a boy’s heart. Well, there’s a there’s a problem with seeds belly, you know what it is? They sprout, say, and they take root and they begin to grow. Yeah, so yeah, yes, absolutely. On Holi roots, these ungodly roots that were sown, began to grow and put their tentacles into my heart. And now the trees, the sexual self of Tony is beginning to grow, and it’s producing the fruit of sexual sin. And I’m like, why? I don’t want this fruit on my tree anymore. Why does it keep coming out. And I basically learned that if you don’t deal with the ungodly roots, then the ungodly fruit is going to keep coming out. But But to your point in my power, my power purity.org. But I have 23 sessions there on the topic of sexual purity. And my my, the ACE session is called Understanding your story. And I think it’s incredibly important that people understand the story of their life. I can talk about this more in a little bit. But you see, to fast forward into my marriage, Sherry and I were a disaster, we didn’t know how to function in a healthy way sexually. And the reason for that is it had much to do with our story. In other words, the deepest pain and hurt and brokenness and sin of our lives was unattended. Sherry had never ever dealt with her family of origin. She never dealt with her rape, she never dealt with her promiscuity or her abortion. I had never dealt with my broken relationship with my dad, and they finding my dad’s pornography, I had never dealt with the sexual abuse that been perpetrated. So these are my gaping wounds and people symbols, and then you you get married, and without realizing it, your story. And these painful, hurtful things from your past, are still following you like your shadow, you cannot escape it. And until we understand our story, and face our story, and enter our story, and begin to deal with some of these hurtful, painful, wounded events and things that happen to us and process them in the light of God, the power of God under the blood of Jesus, the grace and mercy of God, that brings his healing to these most wounded places of our hearts and lives. And then then these things are going to hold power in our soul, you see. So I think it’s incredibly important that we understand our story, and we let God into our story to bring us healing.

34:15
Basically, what we’ve heard so far from your marriage is, is that you both came in with a really difficult past for not only Sherry, your wife, but also you who happened upon pornography at an early age and was abused and then came into marriage with this really difficult past. So I’m wondering, How did things move into healing for you both?

34:36
Well, that’s a great question. And thank God that there’s the second half of the story. You know, there’s the there’s the bad news, but then there’s the good news. It reminds me of the template of the gospel of the Gospels, the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. We kind of talked about the death part, you know, everything that was wrong, but There’s something awesome about God. And that is that death is not even an obstacle for God that God can bring back to life, something that was dead. And then that’s what he did it the resurrection of Christ. And I believe that’s what the Lord wants to do in our lives. And the gospel isn’t intended to be something that we just believe in our head. I believe the gospel is a template that God wants us to live he He invites us into the gospel to live the gospel. And so God allows this kind of dying process where everything goes wrong, and there’s brokenness and darkness and pain and confusion and bondage and everything wrong and defined in one word, the word death, but but God has the ability to bring back to life. And that’s exactly what God has done in our hearts and lives. So we were married. As I said, Our marriage was an instant disaster. Essentially, I was a young man with a sexual addiction, and my wife was a young lady with a sexual aversion. And so we do, we’re often running and we were just not able to connect on an emotional, intimate level at all, my wife was completely shut down against me. She reported later that when we would attempt to be sexual, she she literally felt like she was being raped, and wanted to scream, and it just was torment for her. And so she wasn’t able to respond. And so we, we would go for prolonged periods of time without any physical or sexual intimacy, for months and months at a time. One time, we went nine months between physical intimacy then it might have been then might be four months, seven months. So so this was a disaster. And it really, really messed me up. I did not handle it. Well, I felt deeply hurt and rejected by my wife, I didn’t understand. Here, I am a Christian. You’re not supposed to have sex before you get married, and I had a lot of sex before I got married. So I felt guilty. Now I finally have a wife so I can have sex and it’s illegal to God, I won’t even get in trouble. And wouldn’t know what the woman that I that I marry, doesn’t want to have sex or can’t sex. So I began to act out and over over the years that followed, I became involved in several different adulterous affairs in the context of marriage. And of course, that made what was already a terrible situation that much worse. And, you know, John 1010, Jesus said, The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. And without a doubt, the devil was just trying to literally close the deal on our lives and just bring destruction upon us, you know. And what happened is, I eventually became involved in an adulterous affair with my wife’s best friend, which is profoundly terrible, and horrible and shameful. It’s one of the most shameful heinous things of my life. I you know, how you reflect back Bella on things you did? And you think, yes. Oh, my God, who was that? How, right? What was I thinking? How could I ever allow such a thing to happen? You know? Well,

38:47
I know you mean, absolutely. What we all have those things.

38:51
Thank God for His mercy. Why, yes, why we need a savior. But anyway, after this affair had gone on for some time, I never did get caught. But I actually ended up confessing to my wife, because of an odd Ministry of God that I call the heavy hand of God. I was just under such conviction, Bella, I felt so terrible about myself. And let me tell you, it is not a good day, when you look at yourself in the mirror, and you don’t like yourself anymore. And you you find yourself acting out in your life in violation of your own conscience. You understand what I’m saying? Like this is not who I am. This is not who I want to be. It’s not who I How did I ever get in this place? You know, so I just didn’t want to be this person and and I was just under such conviction from God, such heaviness from God that I literally physically would gas to Breathe. Sometimes I had trouble breathing. And I just knew I, something has to change. And so this particular night through a series of events, I went to my wife and I just confessed to her, I said, I’ve been having an affair with your best friend. And it’s terribly wrong, and I don’t want to do it anymore. And if you want to divorce me, we can get divorced but but protest the divorce, I do not want to get divorced. I want to fight for a marriage. But all I know is we can’t, we can’t stay the way that we’ve been. We are so messed up, we’ve got to try to work on this. And we cried together that night, my wife told me that she didn’t want to give up. And so within days, we went to a Christian counselor, and we we began going to counseling. And in the end, Bella, that process was profound, it took much longer than we expected, we ended up going to counseling for six and a half years. It was much longer than we expected. And the process with Mike went much deeper than we expected. And one time I figured it up afterwards, we easily spent $50,000 on our professional counseling process, which by the way, I think is a tremendous value. Because for several reasons. One is because divorces are very expensive. Yeah, but the second reason is because we were fighting for the highest values of our life, our family, our marriage, our rights, our ministry, our future. So it was worth the fight. And it was worth it was worth the money. You

41:47
know? Yeah. That’s great. I think anyone listening can keep that in mind that when you’re thinking about coaching, thinking about cancelling, I mean, this is really important stuff. You’re not just talking about one person’s life, you’re, you’re talking about a whole generation, potentially. Absolutely.

42:03
That is correct. And so the process, in part took a law that long, I think, because we were coming to understand our stories, as we were talking about earlier. You see, when we went into counseling, Bella, the problem wasn’t just who we were together in the context of our marriage. See, I was naive enough and shallow enough. When we started the process, I thought, and I positioned myself to the counselor, my problem is I’m married to a woman who won’t have sex with me. And I don’t know how to deal with that. So yeah, fix her. She’s the problem. And I thought the problem was in the context of our marriage, but see, we didn’t understand our stories yet. And so what’s very interesting about this process is that I like to say the unexpected thing about our therapeutic process is the God invited us into the stories of our life. As a professional counselor, now belah, I’ve come to believe, I do not think that most people understand the story of their own life. We might understand historical data, information and facts. Like my mom and dad got divorced, when I was nine, my sister was killed in a car accident when I was 12. I smoke pot for the first time when I was 13. I saw porn when I was 10 years old. I was molested, you know, at this age. So we know facts, but we don’t necessarily understand how all those things have worked together to impact us and shape our hearts and souls into the person that we become and how those things still hold power in our lives. So as I mentioned earlier, Sherry had never dealt with her rape, she had never dealt with her promiscuity, her abortion, there were all these things I had never dealt with. So it’s almost as if God was saying, I’m going to take you guys back into your stories, and we’re going to go back to the most wounded and broken and painful places of your journey in life. And that’s where God wanted to bring his light and his life and his healing in the blood of Jesus. And so we each had work to do as individuals, you see, and as as we NERT as God nurtured us through this process, and my wife was slowly dealing with these things in her heart and like she was slowly becoming a healthier woman, because she was dealing with these things she had never dealt with. And I was slowly becoming a healthier man because we were dealing with this poison that had been in our souls. And as we were slowly becoming healthier, guess what that creates the possibility that we could be healthier together, and we could begin to relate to gather in in healthier ways and new ways. And so it was a slow process. But God began to redeem our stories, the brokenness of our stories.

45:16
Wow, isn’t that powerful. Thank you so much, Tony. And you’ve got so many more insights to share on the second half of this interview, which is going live next Tuesday. But I think one of the reasons Tony can be so vulnerable and so open with his story is because he knows that he is not unique. He knows that there are so many others that have had such difficulty in so many sexual issues and pain and experiences. And he wants to help them and he knows that he can only help them if he shares his story and his his perspective openly and honestly. So thank you so much for that Tony. And I want to share also, if you have not yet had a safe place to share your story and, and get the godly perspective on it, and really hear where God’s coming from and how God loves you. Even if this difficult, terrible thing happened to you. I just want to encourage you to do that to get with a counselor or coach or someone who can share these things with you and men be wise counsel, to let you know that you are not marred by this any longer, you don’t have to be marred by this any longer. If you are interested in coaching with me, I do have a program for one month long program to talk about and process the pain and get God’s perspective on it. Because you shouldn’t have the identity of your past and your pain and your sexual sin. It’s it’s time to move forward, it’s time to get past this. So if you are interested in that you can go to delight your marriage.com click on contact and you can just type it in there. Let me just pray really quick right now. Father, you know who’s listening on the other line, and you love them. And you care so deeply about them used to care so deeply about their pain, and brokenness and, and hurt and God I just ask in Jesus name that you would begin to heal. Father put the people in place that they need to be talking to, to heal from what they’ve experienced the Lord God, you know them and you care about them. You love them. I pray that you make that so evident to them right now. Right where they are. Let them know how much you truly love them and heal their pain in Jesus name. Amen. Okay, well, thank you so much for tuning in today. I know. Next week is going to be awesome. So I hope that you’ll listen in to that. God bless you. Talk to you soon. Bye.

47:54
Thanks for listening. If you’ve been blessed by this, why not share it? Until next time, live with love, wisdom and passion.