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From a wife who saw sex as a chore to a woman who feels free and enjoys frequent intimacy in her marriage. How did she get there? Well, it didn’t happen overnight, but Melanie was able to come to place where her past didn’t define her marriage anymore. And she was shocked to find God wanted her to find freedom in a place she had never known. Listen in to discover how God transformed her heart and made her sexually free.

Melanie Lloyd blogs at awaken-love.net

Scripture/Quote:

• “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten– the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm — my great army that I sent among you.” Joel 2:25

You’ll Discover:

• How Melanie came into her marriage with sexual baggage, as we all do, and how that grew into resentment towards her husband
• How she wanted a deeply in love marriage but she felt guilty of her past and how she saw her intimacy
• The journey God led her through to healing
• How a Bible study revealed the lie she had believed that was keeping her from enjoying freedom in sex
• How growing in our relationship with Christ grows us in our marriage too

Books/Resources Mentioned:

• Path To Sexual Healing : Bible study surrounding intimacy in marriage
• Intimacyinmarriage.com
• hotholyhumorous.com
• themarriagebed.com
• Delight Your Husband: The Christian Wife’s Manual to Passion, Confidence & Oral Sex

Tweetables:

• We weren’t feeling known to each other in deep ways and we weren’t connecting to each other in deep ways.
• I really wanted more. I wanted everything in his life to be influenced by our love.
• I struggled with the lies that I couldn’t have freedom because of my baggage.
• We’ve had a 180 degree shift in our marriage bed and in our relationship.
• Any time I go deeper with God it always positively impacts your marriage
• Sex is this marital glue that covers our marriage
• Am I requiring my husband to earn my favor or am I unconditionally loving him?

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.

0:19
Hi there, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining me on the delight your marriage podcast. If this is your first time listening, I want to say, welcome. This is a safe place to talk about sex and intimacy, and the hard stuff and the good stuff in marriage. So, welcome. Today is a wonderful topic, about your sexual journey. We all have one, we all have baggage that we bring into marriage, regardless of what extreme yours might be, whether it’s really conservative or really not. I mean, we all come from a broken world. And so we’ve got baggage that we bring into the marriage. And today I want to share Melanie Lloyd’s story with you. And before I do, I just wanted to give a shout out to someone that is on my Facebook group. If you haven’t heard about the delight your marriage Facebook group, you’re welcome to join. It’s just for wives to talk about intimacy and marriage, and how to make their marriages better. And of course, intimacy Affects Emotions, and mental and it affects everything. So. So that’s what we talked about. But anyway, someone I’m going to keep her name anonymous, but she said, I’ve been married with my husband for 13 years, we were married at 20 and 21. So we’ve grown a lot together over the years, we have three children, and we’re also new foster parents. So life is a little crazy right now. We’ve had our ups and downs in our marriage, but it’s mostly been good. However, since I started listening to the dy M podcast in November, my marriage has been transformed into an amazing marriage, the kind I always dreamed of. In December, I was so amazed by the change in my marriage, I felt God calling me to open up to friends from church. And it was definitely from God, because I tend to be very private person. So we now have open talks about your podcasts, your changing marriages for the kingdom. Thank you, belah for putting it all out there. Well, praise God, I’m so grateful. And this brave woman who gave me the go ahead to share it on the podcast. So that’s why I’m sharing it. But I am just so grateful for you taking the courage to not only implement the things that you listen to, because that takes courage, but also to share it with other wives that may need some help. And we all do we all need inspiration for our marriages. This is not an easy gig. Look at the statistics. You know, we all know that it’s, it’s something we need God’s help on. And we need wisdom and instruction. And that’s and that’s why we do this. So thank you again, for sharing that. Okay, well, let’s dive into Melanie’s story. And again, she gives the very most important first steps and kind of a guide into how to become fully really sexually free in your marriage. It’s a journey, but it’s so worth it. Alright, let’s go ahead and dive in. Alright, welcome back to light your marriage listener. I am thrilled that you’re here. Thank you for joining me. And today I’ve got a special guest, Melanie Lloyd from awaken hyphen, love dotnet. That’s her website. And she’s got some wonderful material there talks a lot about sexual intimacy and marriage. And she’s got wonderful insights she’s going to share with us today. But welcome, Melanie, how are you today?

3:37
Thanks for having me. I’m doing great today. I’m really excited to talk with you.

3:41
Yay, me too. I am really excited to hear what’s gonna unfold today. So would you go ahead and introduce yourself share a little bit about your family and what your day to day life is about?

3:54
Sure. Um, so I have been married to my husband Brian for 13 years. And you know, we make a great team. He’s very confident and decisive he, you know, can cut to the core of an issue and make a decision and move on. And he’s kind of the big picture guy and I am the small details, project oriented. One in our relationship, I’m definitely more quiet to the deliberate decision maker where I want to know all my options, do all my research before I push, go on something. And so I think we balance each other out pretty well in, you know, helping each other with our weaknesses and also affirm each other’s strengths. So we my husband, I actually we met at work about 15 years ago, we started working at the same place and I like to tell this funny story that you know, we worked at the same place for three years without ever talking to each other, even though our offices were like two doors away from each other for a while, because I thought he was married because we had a picture on his desk of what I thought was his wedding, um, and it took a long time for me to find out that no, that was actually his brother’s wedding and he’s an identical triplet.

5:11
Oh my gosh, right. So

5:13
are yours. I that hey, this guy, man, I don’t think too highly of him cuz he’s married and doesn’t even wear a wedding ring. Oh, yeah. Turns out he was totally available the whole time. Darn it. No,

5:31
I was totally his fault, though. He could have easily, you know, had a even a sign on there. I’m a triplet. Like, you just can’t lead people to think you’re married when you’re not.

5:42
Right. You just you don’t go there. And you’re like, oh, wait, maybe he has a brother looks exactly like to. But

5:52
this poor mom, that’s unbelievable.

5:54
Oh, and then they have an older brother. So yes, his his his role is She’s a delight. Now, I’m not sure what the early years were like.

6:04
We were talking about parenting before and how it shapes you and changes you into a into a better person. And I think having triplet boys can only changed you into being better somehow through the, through the fires.

6:17
Yes, definitely patient more patients of my husband and I, we have two boys, we have a 10 year old and a seven year old. And you know, they are as opposite as night and day as well. Our oldest is very rational. And he’s very slow to warm up. He enjoys quiet, he wants to know all the rules before he enters the game. And he kind of just has this amazing memory where he category izes all of life. And then my younger son, and he just embraces life, he’s full of joy. He loves everyone. And, you know, he’s like, why do we need rules, let’s just go and have fun. And so I learned a lot from him because he just displays empathy and, and a freedom in his life to you know, to dance and be creative and just embrace what comes to him. And so it’s really fun to see them interacting and challenging each other, to grow in different ways too. So I love I love my boys, they’re such a blessing to me. But like my kids go to a university model school. And so that means that they go to school a couple of days a week, and then they do their work at home the other days a week. And so that certainly impacts what my day to day life looks like. Yeah, so they, they are insanely early risers. And we’ve tried anything to change that, but we can’t. So now we embrace it. So we are family time in the morning, before my husband goes to work, we’ll have a family breakfast and all hang out together. And then on the days that they’re at home, you know, I’m doing schoolwork with them and having fun with them. And then on the days that they go to school, I’m enjoying a more extended quiet time with the Lord and I’m working, you know, on the awaken love ministry, I love to take time to find some refreshment with a girlfriend, whether I’m going for a walk so we can talk or you know, meeting someone for lunch and then just kind of rushing around trying to check off those necessary to do’s that, you know, wife and a mom need to get done when she has time to do those. So that’s kind of what our life looks like. Both of our boys are into fencing. And so the sports not building and I’m shuffling them around me they don’t build fences as a hobby. Not yet. No, but I’m sure soon that’ll be a side job. That’s right. That’s taken into practices and tournaments. And

8:53
yes. Yeah, that’s very cool. My brother did fencing for a while. So I’m a little familiar. And that’s, that’s not easy sport. That’s, um, and it’s also not common. So you can’t just like pick up with any of your buddies and do it. It’s you got to really kind of have practice buddies that you do it with. That’s cool.

9:08
Yeah, yeah, they’re pretty passionate about it.

9:12
You will. So you shared a little bit about you and your husband personalities. So I want to ask you about and of course, you know, this whole podcast is about encouraging and inspiring wives to live in wholehearted intimacy in their marriages. So it’s, it’s kind of that’s the purview of what we do here. And so we kind of put ourselves in the shoes of our guests to try to understand marriage in a different way and understand it by someone who’s done it successfully and figured out tools and keys that we can implement. So I would love for you to share, just to start off that inspirational train, kind of share a scripture or a quote that’s meant a lot to you.

9:50
You know, there’s um, in Joel God talks about the locusts and Joel 225 has been meaningful to me for a number of years. yours, it says that, then I will make up for the years that the swarming locusts has eaten the creeping locusts, the stripping locusts and the non locusts. And that was meaningful to me when I first pursued a relationship with Christ when I was 20. Because I felt like God could redeem my past that all of those years of me not regarding him would not go to waste. But even more recently, that’s gained a new meaning to me, as I, I recently went through a Bible study called Path to sexual healing to kind of work through more of my, my baggage. And that was the first time that I noticed that, you know, in general, when, when he’s talking about these locusts, he’s talking about different one. So you know, he’s talking about the great locusts and what was left than the young locust ate, and then what was left by the young locusts, then, you know, other locusts ate. And I think, it struck me that there was different types of damage from different types of locusts, which made me think about how easy it is for us to just be torn down, you know, and to go into some downward spiral as a result of circumstances or lies, we believe, but how God can redeem all of that, that his redemption is so detailed, that he can redeem all of the different types of, you know, experiences or damage that we have in our past?

11:24
Yeah, that’s a wonderful insight. His redemption is so detailed. That’s beautiful, because it, you know, just just like this verse talks about that you, he’s gonna make up for those years for those different tragedies that you suffered. Yeah, that’s wonderful. I love them. I’m excited to hear more about your story and how this fits into that. So would you share about a difficult season or struggle in your marriage that you know, that affected you all and and how you came through it?

11:56
Yeah, I really wanted to share today about how God transformed me from being a wife, who was disconnected from sex and saw it as a more of a to do a task and obligation to my wife, who is free and finds refreshment in, in sexual intimacy with my husband, and it kind of walk you through what that journey was like? Yeah, that’s awesome. Great. Well, you know, I really been blessed by a great marriage. And despite entering it with a lot of baggage from my youth was, you know, baggage that was consensual, but also some baggage that was non consensual, that kind of tweaked my perspective of, you know, what healthy relationships look like, or what God’s intentions for sex really were. And so, you know, we came into marriage as a team. And really, we could tackle anything together, you know, side by side, we were really strong. We were great friends, but for years, I felt like intimacy was an area of weakness for us. Physically, because of frequency, you know, we weren’t coming together frequently enough for it not to feel like we were starting all over again. Every time there was that Yeah, I hear that awkwardness, you know, that, huh? Oh, can I Is it okay to share myself like this with him. But I think with that comes the emotional and the spiritual weakness where, you know, we weren’t really feeling known by each other in deep ways. And we weren’t connecting with each other in deep ways. And, and I knew a lot of that was due to my baggage that I was in most emotionally disconnected. I had no expectations that sex was a good thing, or anything that had, you know, something that could positively contribute to my life. But looking back now, I can see that, you know, lacking that emotional and spiritual intimacy with Him, made it really easy for me to become resentful toward him, and to assume self question wrong motives about him. And you know, it’s only now that I can see that I was attributing traits and character qualities to him that we’re not him at all, and how fair that was for many years in our marriage, for me to kind of operate through that lens, rather than seeing him as the man that God created him to be.

14:25
And I want to ask you just so two things, I want to point out one thing you said basically, when there wasn’t frequency, it feels like you’re starting over each time you do make love and I think that’s so true when we kind of get in this rut of it not happening very often than it is that it’s just really difficult to bridge that gap again of like, okay, let’s, let’s get into this again, let’s, you know, strip our clothes and ourselves and who we are and joined together but when you’re in kind of a, a run of frequent sex you it’s so much easier you’re just like in it. It’s it’s you know, you’re right Ready to go? It’s so much easier. So I love that insight. And the other thing I wanted you to expound about is, you know, you were attributing certain characteristics to your husband that weren’t necessarily true. But that’s how it felt in the moment. Could you just share a little bit more? Because I think a lot of women can relate to that?

15:16
Yeah, I think I definitely was quick to assume that he wasn’t prioritizing me. Even in the little things, right? If like, hey, on the way home, could you stop and get some milk, and if he forgot to get the milk, while instead of seeing that really as, like, Hey, he’s, he’s a busy guy. And he sincerely forgot in he, you know, he’s upset with himself that he forgot, because he wants to take care of our family. It was, well, you know, I’m sure you didn’t think about it, because you’re not thinking about me during the day, don’t care, you’re not here to help me. And not that our conversations were necessarily that direct. But it was, those were the tapes that I was playing in my head of, well, I guess I can’t trust him, because I can’t trust him with even these small things. You know, I guess I can’t open up and share who I really am with him. Because I can’t even trust them to do a chore that I asked him to do. Or so I think that as women, it’s so easy for us to, to start scaling things up in our minds, and just going through instead of capturing our thoughts, and really, you know, determining what is true and what is not. And, um, I mean, I don’t think at the time at all, I realized that I had this underlying distrust or resentment toward him. And I think it took many years to where, you know, our, our connectedness and our intimacy grew to where I saw that be released and go away, and then I recognize its absence and the impact.

16:57
So when you talk about this, being absent, is that because your intimacy grew stronger?

17:05
Absolutely. You know, I, I was definitely at a place where I wanted more connection with him. Because I had no question that he loved me, I no question that he’d be faithful to me that he would take care of me. And I knew he was a man of integrity and a gentleman, he’s very steady. And I don’t take that for granted. But I really want to know more. You know, I wanted like in Song of Solomon and chapter eight, verse six, it says, place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm, like I wanted everything in his life, to be influenced by our relationship and everything in my life to be influenced by our love. Like I wanted everyone to know that I was his, I wanted our love to be that mighty flame. And, and I felt like instead that we had this very reliable and civilized love, here, but I wanted to know that he couldn’t get enough of me, and that we could be just crazy with abandon in our time together. And so I really felt torn, because I knew that I desired these things. But at the same time, I felt like that deeper connection, and that, that really having intimacy in marriage, the way that God intended it to be that that wasn’t allowed for us because I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t. I didn’t deserve God’s full blessing because of my past. And I felt guilty that my husband suffered the consequences of my sin like sin that I committed, even before he came into my life. And I was very hesitant to even ask him if he knew that, like, I didn’t want to talk to him and ask if he knew that there could be more because I knew the blame would be placed on me, at least in my mind. That, you know, I don’t think he actually would have blamed me at all. That’s not who he is. Because he’s accepted me wholeheartedly. But I struggled with those lies of, you know, I can’t, I can’t have freedom, because of my past. And so God took me with my baggage, and helped me work through to get into a different place, where I mean, we’ve had a total 180 shift in our relationship, you know, in our marriage and but also just in our marriage, where now I’m able to see that sex and intimacy and that deep connection goes way beyond physical aspects, that goes toward my thought life and my ambitions and my spiritual life. And you know, that God really did design sex for husbands and wives to enjoy. It’s not just something for me to do for him.

19:50
Mm hmm. So yeah, I love that you said it goes way beyond your, you know, your physical self. It goes into your spirit and your heart and your emotion. and your thought.

20:01
So I feel like when it for God to move me to this place of new understanding, it was a fairly long journey, it didn’t happen overnight. And I know God’s healing can come in an instant, or it can come over a span of years. And he’s been working on me for a really long time. But have now in hindsight, on the other side, when I look back, I see that he really started working on me, by working on my relationship with him that he drew me in closer to him, before he ever started talking to me about my relationship with my husband. And, and the thing that I noticed first was that he sort of creating a meat a heart of appreciation. In Texas, the legislative session meets every other year. So for six months, it’s really intense. And then you have 18 months of a lighter load and my husband’s involved in the legislative session for his job. And so that was always a cycle for us in our marriage, where, you know, just for six months, we know that we’re going to grow distance, and then we’ll just repair it at the end of that six months. And after several years, we decided like, there has to be a better way than that, right? Like, you don’t just intentionally say it’s fine for us to grow apart from each other. And we’ll just fix it later. And so during one legislative session, and God put it on my heart to choose appreciation, and to keep a list of all the things that I was thankful for. And I mean, it was it became a very long list over the course of that six months from, you know, the elderly man who saw me at the grocery store with a toddler and a baby strapped to my chest, who says, I’ll take your cart for you, oh, thank you, or, you know, at a time when I really couldn’t get out of the house very easily, because I had two littles and my husband was really busy at work. Now I had a friend who cleaned out her closet and brought me a bag of hand me down clothes. And as I just got a whole bunch of new clothes, and I didn’t even have to go to the store. So I think that that led me to deeper intimacy with God, because I saw how he was caring for me in very detailed and specific ways. Yeah, and so that deeper intimacy, and gave me the security to go deeper with my husband. And, and I’ve seen God do that multiple times over the course of my relationship with my husband, even when we were dating, you know, we had gone on just a few dates. And in my quiet time, I specifically heard God saying to me, you can trust him. And that was so important to me. And I think I went back to that many times as we were dating of No, no, I need to keep investing, I need to keep revealing more of who I am. And you know, and taking those scary steps in, in becoming closer to someone because God told me that I can trust him. And so, you know, anytime I go deeper with God, it always positively impacts my marriage. Hmm, yeah. Okay, the next step that I now can see God, working in big ways in my life is I went through a Bible study on forgiveness. And I had no intentions of this addressing, you know, my sexual past at all. But it it did in a very big way, where I was able through the course of that study, and what I learned to acknowledge the lie that was really holding me back from experiencing everything God intended with my husband. And I had felt that I was marked by my past and, and I found that his truth is that I’ve been washed clean. And if he had washed me clean when I had repented for my sins in the past, and it was really me that was holding me back because I needed to let go of that, that I needed to embrace his forgiveness and walk in the freedom that Christ had offered me, as I was experiencing the completeness of God’s forgiveness. That strengthened me to move on to the next step in the journey.

24:13
Yeah, that’s awesome. So if I’m understanding the story, so far, it’s started out as really a chore to have sex and it wasn’t a connecting thing for both of you. You didn’t necessarily feel fully connected, you didn’t feel fully embraced and cherished as a wife, and you desired this fiery intimacy, this passion, this love and so there was times where you would get super separate distance because of his job and these requirements and some things that really were vital to this transformation was growing in your relationship with the Lord him drawing you closer to him, allowing you to see that he’s taking care of you through everything that you’re going through in your life. And yeah, how did things shift from there?

24:54
You know, once I got to a place where I realized that I was forgiven and set free That really gave me a desire to explore God’s design for sex. Because I had to replace all the lies. In my head, I used to replace all of those old tapes, with his truth and with a newness of what it is that I’m really supposed to be walking in. And so, um, where do you go to find good information about cars designed for sex? There’s not a lot of places and it’s scary to Google that.

25:27
Oh, my gosh, yes. But

25:30
But I ended up you know, finding no J. Parker’s blog. Yeah, holy and humorous. And Julie Siebert of intimacy and marriage and the fire lease of a marriage bed. And I just read and I read, and I read, and I would, I would follow the links to the other articles. And one of the articles that I read actually linked me to Ruth fuses, who had, you know, who’s who created the awakened love ministry, who I’m now partner with. And so most of my reading, like the biggest, the start of the reading, I guess, the biggest indulgence in the reading was when my my two boys and my dad and I went on a road trip. And I had a lot of time to read, you know, I read on the phone in my car, while my dad was driving, I read at night after my kids went to sleep. And I really grew and in my understanding of what God wanted for my marriage, you know, from from seeing broader information about what, what are God’s boundaries, what is God’s design, and then praying about, you know, what does that look like, in my specific marriage. And as my understanding grew, my confidence grew. And as my confidence grew, my desire grew. And I feel like that’s really when I did have an awakening. And everything changed. And when I came home, there was a new wife, you know, there, my husband met a new Melanie and, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that while we were on that trip, my husband was at home, remodeling our bedroom, or, you know, he was redecorating it, he painted it, he built us a headboard. And so I came home to this new bedroom, and, and he came or when I came home, he received this new wife, and it just, it just all fits together, right? Because our room is our oasis. It’s our in Getty to get away and be refreshed with our spouse. So yeah, I think it’s easy to think that, you know, I came home and told my husband like, hey, like, we should have sex a lot more. You know, let’s, let’s get on that. But right, it wasn’t necessarily that smooth of a transition, you know, my husband was really confused. And I think it took time for him to trust that this wasn’t a fleeting, you know, a fleeting thought that was I really, what I really available, and did I really want to grow with him. And it was a time that required a lot of communication, and grace and patience with each other. Because it I wonder like, why isn’t he ravaging me like, it’s I said, 24/7 Anytime, you know, but even it started some really great conversations, because you have to have tough conversations sometimes to get through to the other side, and just understood having a better understanding of what did each of us desire. And what did we think this was supposed to look like? And how are we going to invite God into this aspect of our marriage, but through working together, sex really became holy and emotional and enjoyable and refreshing. And, and I found that it became something that I craved, that when I, you know, I noticed the distance when there was an emotional distance between my husband and I noticed it so much quicker. Or when I had a really tough day, I wanted to turn to Him for refreshment and comfort. And I think that truly is God’s design for marriage.

29:08
Yes, yes. And I love that you said, your understanding. So you grew in your understanding, and that grew your confidence. And I think about confidence in bed because it’s all so often it relies on what we understand either about ourselves about our spouse about the sex act in general, it’s not. It’s not something that we can just flip on and flip off. That’s, that’s a process. That’s a journey that God wants you to go on, because he has this for you. He has amazing intimacy in your marriage that he wants you to enjoy because it’s that’s part of this whole process of becoming one becoming unified, becoming the marriage that He desires for you. And I love that and I love that you also shared that, you know, through this process. And as you talked about earlier that you had to do some scary things and some things that weren’t comfortable and I would love for you to expound on that a little bit for for wives that are out there and like this, that’s just not me. I mean, how did you kind of move past that? You know, I’m this, you know, very, you know, holy wife, I don’t do that sort of thing. Like, how did you move past that?

30:15
You know, I think that it took me understanding that, um, you know, sex is this marital glue that God gave us to connect with each other, and that he wants, like, he desires it, you know, we can go to Song of Songs and ethey, you know, on their wedding day, and God standing there encouraging them to be intoxicated with each other’s love. And so, we so often think of it how powerful sex is outside of marriage, like powerfully bad, how damaging the outside of marriage. And so it really took learning about and embracing how powerful powerful sex is within marriage, that it’s not just God’s boundaries of saying, Don’t do it, outside of marriage, that God has boundaries for us within marriage, and to keep us safe, but also to give us freedom. Like, if we know where those boundaries are, then we can run around that huge playground within that fence, and experience all sorts of creative things with our husbands that God is not limiting our pleasure that he actually intends for us to experience pleasure. And so I think it was really learning more and more about his design. And I did that by going through the awaken love. The Bible study that we offer a six week study for women. And I actually, I went through it twice, because I felt like I had so much to learn. But that was super helpful to me to figure out, you know, what are, you know, what are his boundaries? What are the reasons that he even created sex? Like, why? Why does he want us to do this? You know, how is it that my baggage is holding me back, and creating, you know, this lack of freedom in my marriage bed, and then giving me an understanding of, you know, how does my body work and giving me an appreciation for how amazing God created my body and our husband’s body and how they seem so different, but yet, they complement each other, if we’re willing to go on that journey, of figuring things out together. So if we, it took a lot of challenging conversations, no doubt, to get to that place. But I know whenever I stretch myself to go deeper with God, or to reveal something new about myself, and with God, I mean, he already knows it. But when I’m willing to go there with him, it always it always is fruitful, it always pays off in a positive way. And I was able to see so many parallels between my relationship with God, in my relationship with my husband, that I was, I got the courage to say, you know, what, if this, if me revealing myself to God makes that intimacy so much better than I need to reveal myself to my husband? And yes, it’s scary, but his enthusiasm, or his, you know, acceptance, or the love that he expresses, whenever I did open up and talk to him, that ohms spurred me on to go deeper that yes, he is a safe place for me to get to.

33:36
Yeah, that’s so true. And I, I think that, you know, a lot of times when you, as a wife understand well, when you understand your husband, and what his desires are, and how his body works, and what and fulfilling those desires, then he is freed up more and more to fulfill your desires, because he feels so fulfilled himself. And it’s kind of this wonderful exchange back and forth, that you both are learning to meet each other’s strongest needs, in marriage. And so And the coolest thing about that, I think, is that God teaches us through that, that he teaches us to be more like himself, because he made us in Him to image both male and female that both the maleness and femaleness is a reflection of God’s self. So we learn more about God when we learn more about our spouses and that intimacy in it. And I love the comparison you’re making also about trusting God and giving him more of who you are revealing yourself and sharing yourself with him. And also how that’s that’s exactly what you should be doing in your marriage as well. Yeah, so I want to dive into that just a bit more of when someone’s thinking about how do they grow in their relationship with Jesus in intimacy and knowledge and understanding. I was listening to a sermon recently and he made basically said, you know, intimacy with Jesus, when you when the word intimacy, if you look it up in the dictionary, you know, it’s like 10 down. And then it says sexual intimacy, the most of it is talking about knowledge and understanding in this knowingness. And so I think that’s like a good way of understanding intimacy that Jesus is talking about, knowing him understanding him having a, having a relationship, knowledge of each other. And, anyway, if you could give people, you know, practical steps on how to move that way,

35:30
I think it’s easier to think about how to grow in intimacy when we compare our marriage to our relationship with God, because in Ephesians, we hear that, you know, marriage really is this picture of what Christ wants with his Bride, His Church, right. And so that’s really the the measure that I use is I go back to my relationship with God of, hey, you know, when I was an immature Christian, or just a new Christian, you know, I had to write down on my to do list like, read the Bible today. Pray to you, okay. And as my relationship with God has grown, that has moved into me wanting to, you know, me not even having to remind myself like, I naturally I crave that intimacy with God, I need that quiet time. And, and I found that same in my relationship with my husband, and when we really became more emotionally in tune with each other that, you know, I do, I crave that intimacy with Him that I need to be just as connected to him, or, you know, thinking through with God, you know, God doesn’t barter with me, I don’t have to earn his affections and his love. And so how am I interacting with my husband? Am I having, you know, my requiring him to earn my favor? Am I requiring him to do something to unlock that door for me to say, okay, tonight, I’m available, or am I unconditionally loving him, but even in the midst of a conflict, you know, we could be physically intimate together. And through that, we could be comforted reminded that we’re a team and being refreshed to, you know, continue that discussion, and find a resolution in that. And so I think it’s, it’s always going back to those things of, you know, where, how does this relate to my intimacy with God, that God really wants me to be completely vulnerable with him that his design, and marriage originally was to be naked and unashamed. And so he wants me to have that same level of vulnerability with my husband, because I mean, sex does give us the gift of knowledge, we get to know our spouse in a way that no one else does. And that, I mean, that is a gift. And I think that it takes a complete perspective shift to see it that way.

37:58
Yeah, yeah, it’s a gift to intimately know your spouse. I love that. And I love also considering your relationship with your spouse as being the one that loves your spouse deeper than anyone else, just as Jesus loves your spouse. So you’re the I mean, you’re you’re Jesus to your spouse, you’re giving him the love that he so deeply needs. And so, so yeah, so thinking about do you have can I like how you said, Do you have conditions on that love? You know, well, if you do this and this and this for me, why then I’ll respond and do what you need. And then that’s not the way Jesus is with us. He’s, he’s for us. He’s, he’s gentle, he’s kind he’s unconditionally available, and, and willing to meet us where we are. And you know, your husband’s not perfect, you know, your husband is not going to be perfect, and neither are you. But you have that opportunity to bless him in ways that only you can

38:53
write. Well, I think that it’s that’s why it’s so important for us to go deeper in our relationship with God because it’s through that security that we have with him the trust that we have in God that we can unconditionally love our husbands, you know, are going to fail us from time to time. But yet we can get back up and continue to extend grace and patience and gentleness to them without harboring you know, bitterness or resentment toward them.

39:25
I think Melanie has just brought up time and time again, how important our relationship with God is to our marriage, intimacy to sex, it’s vital that we have this understanding that we are washed, clean. And I’m talking to you, dear wife, you by the blood of Jesus don’t deserve it. No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about God’s grace, that he loves you so much, that he didn’t want this to separate you from him any longer. You are washed clean. That is what’s most important, that’s the very most important step to sexual freedom is for you to have that grace and receive it from Christ. Because he gave it to you freely when he went to the cross. So thank you for spending the time to meditate on that, to accept that to recognize that as truth in your own heart, pray about that. I want to invite you on the rest of the journey to understand what God really thinks about sex and what is really happening in your body, in your husband’s body and in your body. And it’s truly a journey, it truly is to sexual freedom. And Melanie has got some great resources that she shared already. But one I want to share with you is a book that I wrote, because I’ve been through so much pain, in sexual in the sexual arena, that I really couldn’t help but share my story and what I’ve learned. And so I wrote a book called delight your husband, a Christian wife’s manual to passion, confidence, and oral sex. And I decided that this topic was so important to share is because oral sex is a very important way that your husband feels intimacy and feels loved by you. It’s very important to marriage. And I just didn’t find anything practical on the subject. And at the same time, I didn’t, I never found anything, especially in the Christian world, and most importantly, in the Christian world that was practical in a way that helped women feel free to explore truly what their husbands truly desire. And that’s what I wanted soups to nuts, how to get your heart from a place of timidness maybe reserved sadness from your past of the way you grew up and into a place of freedom. And truly taking those risks that are scary, but walking you into it step by step. And that’s what I do very practically, through that book. So I’d love for you to check it out delight your husband can go to delight your marriage.com to find it there. I think it’s just an amazing opportunity for you to engage in that journey for your sexual freedom. I think it’s important and I think God wants that for you. All right. Well, Melanie’s got a great episode at next week. Come back on Tuesday, and I will talk to you more then God bless you. I love you. I’m praying for you and your marriage.

42:16
Thanks for listening. If you’ve been blessed by this, why not share it? Until next time, live with love, wisdom and passion.