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Christian Marriage Uncensored:
Where We Learn to Think Strategically, Work with God, and Transform our Marriages
I am SO excited to launch this podcast and offer it to you. We will think together, learn together, live in accountability together, pray together, confess and repent together—walking together wherever God leads. If you’re looking for help and solutions that are nitty-gritty and packed with biblical truth, yet free of surface platitudes or cliches, you’ve come to the right place.
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Today, we continue the series about lies I brought with me to marriage. These lies affected the foundation of my marriage and determined much of the trajectory of our early years. Recognizing these lies was only the beginning of ending their influence.
This second lie pertains to my expectations and priorities for my marriage. I brought many hopes, dreams, and positive expectations to marriage. Really good and wonderful expectations, I assumed were practically guaranteed. Surely these fabulous ideas came from God, so, they must be on His priority list and plan for my marriage.
When reality fell short, inwardly, I blamed my husband. And I expected God to change him. After all, Stephen was the main problem, right?
In His grace, God confronted me with truth about myself and His real priorities and plans for me. And the new perspective He offered is one I find myself leaning on over and over and over again.
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Today, we begin a series about lies I brought with me to marriage. These lies affected the foundation of my marriage and determined much of the trajectory of our early years. Recognizing these lies was only the beginning of ending their influence.
This first lie has to do with fear disguised as wisdom. We all come to marriage with baggage. Habits and thought patterns we learned prior to marriage without realizing we learned them. When these are fundamentally opposed to God’s truth, our relationship suffers.
As a child, I learned to be afraid. However, I didn’t realize unhealthy fear was an integral part of many of my thought processes and motivations. As a result, I tried to be so prepared for marriage, I’d (hopefully) avoid problems, or at least be able to fix them quickly on my own.
But God won’t let us be our own savior. Instead, He shows us how to be transformed into Christ’s image. He leads us to think strategically, work with Him, and reap a transformation in our marriages.
Today, I get to introduce myself to you and share my personal history of being a kid from a broken home, who was petrified of marriage. So petrified, at age thirteen, I decided I never wanted to marry.
Later when God called me to marriage, I felt He’d called me to the most emotionally dangerous place I could think of. I knew He’d brought Stephen into my life. And we had similar history—we’re both sexual abuse survivors, we’re both from dysfunctional homes, we both loved God, and we both grappled with the effects of childhood trauma. But I had no idea all we were up against.
From even before my mother left my father, I’ve wanted to know how marriage could actually work. After I married, that want became a need, to keep my own marriage together. I’ve been married almost thirty-eight years, and as recently as three years ago I thought our marriage was dead. I was no longer in love with my husband.
But God.
I’m passionate about helping marriages. I hope and pray this podcast helps yours, as I share everything I’ve learned the hard way and everything I continue to learn, by God’s grace.