Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (22 page)

There is another option. God offers transformational change. Transformational change is about surrender, vulnerability, and transparency; humility and dependency. Transformational change at its core aims to destroy you, and if you are willing to pay that price, it will totally destroy every part of you. Transformational change is messy and bloody and it hurts deep and it will cost you everything. It is pulling all of your junk out and laying it on the table for all to see no matter what they think about you. Transformational change is committed not just to dealing with the symptoms of your issues but to peeling back layer after painful layer of your past, your dysfunction, and your sin until the core problem is exposed. Transformational change is recognizing that on even your best day, you are a failure and a sinner and your only hope is grace. Transformational change is knowing you can never try hard enough to overcome your desire to drink, cuss, lust, gorge, lie, and cheat. What you
can
do is surrender to the God of resurrection power, allowing him not only to destroy you, but also to bring you back to life. In order to be brought back to life, one has to die.

The problem with transformation is that it usually starts with affliction. Jeremiah says in Lamentations 3:1, “I am the one who has seen the afflictions that come from the rod of the L
ORD
’s anger.” When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and exiled its people to a distant country, they left Jeremiah behind. Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet” for good reason: he saw the destruction of his city, and he mourned what he saw. This is the context of the book of Lamentations, a five-chapter song of sadness over what had happened to Jeremiah’s beloved city. But despite the horrible events that Jeremiah witnessed, he was still able to say, “The faithful love of the L
ORD
never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

And, indeed, it took the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its people to bring them to a place of brokenness. Once they had been in exile for around seventy years, the Lord set in motion a plan to bring them home. Without the brokenness resulting from the pain of exile, the people wouldn’t have experienced the repentance necessary for the joy of return.

Author C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
⁹
Often God’s path to healing and transformation involves pain. The reason we experience little transformation is because we have equated numbness with contentment. But living a numb life and living in a numb marriage only prevent us from becoming the people and the spouses God longs for us to be.

Humans have created incremental change because we don’t like the pain of transformational change. Maybe the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is found in the difference between incremental change and transformational change. Healing—
extraordinary
healing—is found in transformational change.

You don’t need incremental change in your marriage; you need transformational change. You don’t need an improved version of the old you; you need a brand-new you. You don’t need a slight improvement in your marriage; you need a complete transformation. The great news is that God offers to transform you. God offers to give you a new life. God longs to give you an extraordinary marriage.

The bad news is that it will come at a price—a very high price: your complete selves. But your life on the other side of confession and repentance and pain and surrender and forgiveness will be the life you’ve been pretending to have all of the years you’ve tried to change a little at a time.

Surrender will bring about healing, and healing will allow you to experience extraordinary intimacy.

QUESTIONS

1. Read Lamentations 3:16. When was a time God broke your teeth against gravel? What did he teach you during that time?
   
2. Did the description of “the impostor” resonate with you? If so, in what way(s)?
   
3. Why is it important for a person to forgive her- or himself? Why do you imagine self-forgiveness is so hard?
   
4. What is the difference between incremental and transformational change? Why do you think couples settle for incremental instead of transformational change? Have you ever done this? Explain.
   

I (Trisha) am assuming some of you may have opened to this chapter before you even finished chapter one. Justin wanted to put this chapter as our opener to the book, so know you’re not alone.

I think we all want to turn to this chapter if we’re honest. As wives, we are desperate to understand sexual intimacy, and our husbands are desperate for us to figure it out. As Justin and I continued to surrender every page of our story, we knew that going back to understand our sexual brokenness would be part of the process. Our prayer and hope for this chapter is that you will stay open to surrendering the pages of your story in order for you to have the extraordinary sexual intimacy that your husband—I mean, that you
both
—long for.

As we identify and restore sexual brokenness, sexual satisfaction can be restored. Ordinary marriages have ordinary sex lives. Extraordinary marriages work to build intimacy and don’t settle for anything less than being fully known. Anyone can have sex, but intimacy is something worth fighting for. Extraordinary sexual intimacy takes place when we restore oneness by allowing each other the right to be fully known. It transforms our understanding of the Scripture found in 1 Corinthians 7:3-4, which is often presented as saying merely that sex is a mandate for married couples, into a beautiful picture of what it means to be fully known.

Our hope in writing this chapter is that your heart has already been prepared through the first ten chapters of the book to embrace this truth: extraordinary sex starts in our hearts, and as we realign our hearts with God and our spouses’ hearts, a great sex life is a by-product. Justin and I had a lot to overcome in our pur
suit of extraordinary sexual intimacy. We had a lot to learn about ourselves and about one another. More than telling our story, in this chapter we want to walk you through some of the things that have allowed us to heal from our own wounds and the wounds we inflicted on one another to experience the sexual intimacy we believe God had in mind for us when he created marriage.

TRISHA:

When Justin sat me down that Monday to confess to being sexually abused as a child and to a ten-year pornography addiction, at the time I was just thankful he was being completely honest with me. I wasn’t thinking through the ramifications of his addiction or abuse. Honestly, there wasn’t much to process because I had no clue what having a pornography addiction meant or how to heal from sexual abuse. As we started to unearth these buried pages of our stories, we realized that the lack of sexual intimacy in our relationship was the physical evidence of emotional and spiritual brokenness in our marriage.

If God was able to make us a new creation, then I had to trust that he could help us kill our old, unhealthy patterns of intimacy and create new, healthy ones to replace them. As we each unpacked the barriers to intimacy in our relationship, our lists looked very different from each other’s. When sexual brokenness first took place in my life, it was under totally different circumstances than when it was broken in Justin’s. We had to confess it, grieve it, and trust that the past is in the past: we can’t change it, we can’t get it back, but Jesus can and will somehow redeem it all.

JUSTIN:

There was no doubt that we had a lot to overcome in the area of sexual intimacy in our marriage. Even before the affair, we struggled in this area. Now the affair and my admission of being
addicted to pornography had complicated an already volatile area of our marriage. We had never been on the same page sexually. How would we ever get on the same page now?

For most of our marriage, Trisha had used sexual intimacy as a weapon to get back at me, to make me pay for mistakes, to remind me that she controlled that aspect of our marriage. Because of the sexual sin in my life that had gone unconfessed and because of the sexual abuse I experienced when I was a kid, I had a very skewed view of sexual intimacy. I looked at it as an escape from reality and stress. I had the attitude that Trisha owed it to me.

What I had thought up to this point in our marriage was that our sexual issues could be solved in the bedroom. What God began to reveal to us is that our sexual brokenness and wounds needed to be healed in the living room first. As we recognized the spiritual battle we faced and as we prayed together, God restored a little more of our hearts. As truth was spoken and the waterlines of our hearts were lowered, our sexual desires and our healing increased. As Trisha and I embraced the Dip in our marriage and allowed ourselves to be more vulnerable with each other than ever before, the intimacy level in our marriage grew. And as the intimacy in our marriage grew, our sexual satisfaction grew as well.

TRISHA:

Although we knew sexual brokenness was one of the barriers to our sexual intimacy, we also knew there was more to unpack. For me, our schedule was one of my top excuses to avoid it. It was difficult to find the time and space to be intimate. I needed to have a good night’s rest and a good day at home with the kids, and the moon had to align with the sun just right in order for me to be “in the mood.” Sexual intimacy was somewhere in the top fifty on my to-do list. I used our schedule as an excuse not to have to be with Justin. Having three small kids and a growing ministry didn’t leave a lot of room for long romantic encounters anyway, and I chose not to make
it a priority. My view of the purpose it had in our relationship was so off that I was not experiencing sexual intimacy in the extraordinary. It was just another selfish “need” that Justin wanted
me
to fill.

Now seven years later, we have two teenagers and a middle schooler in the house. Not only are our schedules crazy, but theirs are too. Did I mention we have
teenagers
who stay up late and know exactly what you mean when you say you’re going upstairs to go to bed? Awkward! But as God shattered our view of intimacy and created it new, we began to see not only that God was teaching us what sexual intimacy was created for, but also that we were given the parental honor to explain it to our boys.

JUSTIN:

I had been sexually abused and had never talked about it. I never dealt with it. God’s intention for me had been broken by someone else, and I hid it and tried to cover it up, not because I had done anything wrong, but because of the shame and guilt that the sin committed against me had caused me to feel.

The sexual abuse I experienced caused me to equate dating and sex with acceptance and love. Because of the wounds of my past, I chose to have sex with two of the girls I dated before I met Trisha. I was trying to fix the broken part of me, and I thought relationships and sexual activity would accomplish that. Those relationships always came up void, but I never took the time to connect the dots from those relationships to a broken part of my heart.

After Trisha and I got married, because I hadn’t found healing from my past, I turned to pornography to fill this void in my heart and life that the sexual brokenness had created. Each time I would engage in that activity, I would say, “I will never do that again,” but it wasn’t possible for me to stop on my own. I had allowed the sexual sins of my past to affect our marriage. I didn’t realize it, but the choices of my past and the decisions in the present were
diluting the sexual intimacy that Trisha and I were designed to experience together.

TRISHA:

It wasn’t until I had to sit down with our then eleven-year-old, soon to be twelve-year-old, son that I realized my lack of sexual understanding. If I was to give a healthy, biblical view of sex to our boys, then I would have to figure it out for myself first. So I started reading. I read books like
Every Man’s Battle,
by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, and articles I found on Focus on the Family’s website and even in medical journals. I was searching the Bible to try to understand the importance of sexual intimacy and not just the need to flee immorality.

If God created my husband and our boys to have wet dreams with the onset of puberty, then there had to be a purpose for those things other than causing a life of struggle with pornography and masturbation. I researched male physical anatomy, and just understanding the male body beyond what I learned in middle school was helpful. For example, wet dreams are just as natural as a girl starting her menstrual cycle. But how do you prepare your sons when the physical changes they experience have spiritual implications?

When I started reading
Every Man’s Battle
, I threw the book across the room. I did
not
like what I was reading, but I forced myself to read it because my relationship with my husband and with my boys and their future wives depended on it. Although I can’t say I agreed with everything in the book or that I didn’t feel frustrated at the unnecessarily detailed descriptions of the authors’ struggles, it did give me great insight that I didn’t have before.

My biggest hurdle was trying to understand the how and why behind Justin’s struggle with porn. How could I, as a woman, not fear lust, pornography, or the reality that my body will never look twenty again? Seriously, after giving birth to three kids and gain
ing and losing thirty pounds three different times, how on earth could I compete with the perfect-looking women on the computer screen or in the movies? How did I know that Justin wouldn’t have an affair with the next best friend God placed in my life?

Then I read a powerful passage of Scripture that I had never connected with sexual struggles before:

Paul knew at least one thing about sexuality to be true: sexual drives are strong. But he says that the marriage bed is stronger. I’m not afraid to use the word
sex
, but this passage is about more than just the physical act of sex; rather, it’s a beautiful definition of what extraordinary physical
intimacy
looks like. Although physical intimacy is not always
mutually desired
, when it is
mutually offered
it goes beyond the obvious physical pleasure and becomes a sacred sharing of knowing and being fully known physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Pornography, lust, and masturbation may meet one of these needs for a short period of time, but they will never fully satisfy what physical intimacy was created for.

As we unpacked these newfound truths about sexual intimacy, God was creating a new vision for Justin and me. He was giving us a pure, God-centered vision to share with our boys. I’ll never forget the day that Justin took our oldest son to breakfast for “the
talk.” When they returned home, I was in the living room. Micah fell flat on the floor and laughed hysterically, pointing at me at the same time. Mine was more of a nervous laugh, having no idea what was so funny. After about two minutes of my asking, “What’s so funny?” Micah looked up at me and said, “Dad—” giggle, giggle—“Dad told me that you guys are
active
!”

I shot Justin a look like, “What does
active
mean?” and with just one facial expression from him, I knew. We laughed until we cried!

I think the most redeeming part of choosing to go on this journey with our boys was how God used the purity with which they received the information to help Justin and me see the purity in it too. Our boys didn’t have the baggage we had. They didn’t squirm when we said “masturbation” because they didn’t associate it as a shameful thing (even though I was
dying
every time I had to say it!). They are also aware that it’s not an
if
they will be tempted sexually but
when
. They now know what to do with those temptations so as not to fall into sin. Even now with our oldest well into his teen years, although he would prefer we didn’t talk about sexual issues at the dinner table, he doesn’t associate embarrassment or guilt with those conversations. Our boys’ vision of sex is a natural and needed part of their future marriage relationships. Physical intimacy is a gift from God.

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

BARRIERS TO INTIMACY

If we’re honest, as married couples we probably had a different vision for our sex life than the reality in which we live. Maybe we thought it would be more romantic or more frequent or less stressful. We have come up against barriers. Some are physical, like weight gain or illness. For others, barriers are emotional, like low self-esteem or depression or anxiety. Sex has become something to work at rather than enjoy.

Most marriages will face barriers to sexual intimacy, which is
why there are so many books and so much misinformation around about this subject. Following are two of the more critical barriers we’ve identified.

Sexual Impurity

One of the greatest causes of an ordinary marriage and an ordinary sex life is a lack of sexual purity. Sexual purity is receiving sexual pleasure and satisfaction only from your spouse, and giving sexual pleasure and satisfaction only to your spouse. In contrast, sexual impurity is sexual intercourse outside of marriage, sensuality, lust, and fantasizing. It is why Jesus says that if we lust in our hearts, we have committed adultery (Matthew 5:28). Sexual purity is as much about our hearts and minds as it is our bodies. Ephesians 5:3 says, “Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people.”

A lack of sexual purity in marriage creates a huge barrier to sexual intimacy. Of course, a lack of sexual purity isn’t always the result of sins that we commit. Sometimes it is the result of sins that have been committed against us.