Genevieve’s voice poured through the phone to me. She’s a former pastor’s wife still wading through court proceedings following a horrific, jarring divorce. That’s not to mention the affair, the pregnant mistress, the mental disorders and gaslighting. Her descriptions called to mind a life upturned, shaken violently, spilled. How do you help a friend grieving after divorce?
Some pieces of her former life had temporarily skittered beyond vision: Her ally in the world’s onslaught. Financial security. A co-parent and advocate for their boys. Her helper to pick up the kids or fix the washing machine. A calm presence after a nightmare. Someone to process the day with. A lover of her body.read more
Before my husband’s last (pre-COVID) international trip, I realized one of the things I miss most about him.
As he was packing–so methodical, everything in precisely-sized containers, shirts carefully folded over a packing template–I told him quietly, “See, you humanize me.” read more
So speaking of awkward conversations: Asking for ideas to honor your husband might float over some girlfriends like a lead balloon.
Given male-female relations in the headlines, looking to honor your husband might arch some eyebrows. It’s far more acceptable for men to be pro-women—or women to be pro-women!—than sticking in his corner.
Won’t that promote toxic masculinity or something? Shouldn’t we be knocking men down a peg?
But honor is a marital jetpack for both spouses.
Serving Each Other: Not a New Thing
In Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Want Made Women Miserable, columnist and political analyst Andrea Tantaros argues,
There is a common thread between the genders: it’s kindness, respect, and mutual admiration.
.…Women are implicitly being told not to be kind, thoughtful, and nice to the men they love because doing so is supposedly just one step away from being barefoot and pregnant and watching Leave It to Beaver.
.…Acts of service has been a love language—a way to express affection—since time immemorial.
….If everybody is self-involved in their own happiness, then everyone is going to be unhappy because no one is going to be doing nice things for anyone.
In my own marriage, honor creates a biosphere where mutual care and consideration thrive. My husband just walked downstairs and thanked me for making the bed this morning; often he does it, or we do it together.
But before the verse commanding us to “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10), there’s a short, killer phrase: “Let love be genuine” (verse 9).
So honor isn’t a way to manipulate him. Or pacify him. Or subtly slot myself above him in spiritual superiority.
It’s a way to put the Gospel on repeat between us: that Jesus honored us to the point of washing his Bride’s feet and giving his life for her when she didn’t deserve it.
(I’m not advocating the kind of blind submission that leads to an abusive relationship. Wondering if that’s you? See Are You In an Abusive Relationship?)
I had a million reasons. But as the sun sank on Sunday, it was obvious I was falling into classic unhealthy patterns of my personality type.
I’m a prototypical enneagram 2 (with a big, flapping 3-wing and a 1-wing not far behind).*
As in, look in the dictionary, and you might find my picture. As in, friends are like, “When I read the description of a 2, I was like, ‘This is you!'”
Enneagram Compatibility: From a Couple that Doesn’t Technically Have It
But my husband vacillates between a 5-wing-4 or a 4-wing-5.
And unless we work intentionally, when one of us leans toward a lack of health? Old, well-worn cycles suck us in like an overactive Kirby.
It used to look something like
wife is over-sensitive; husband is raw, even critical, and wants space
wife would like demands affirmation/appreciation; husband resists emotional demands and manipulation
wife is exhausted and resentful (known as “tired-mad” in our house); wife feels like people don’t see her apart from what she does for them (sniff)
husband is caving and becomes engulfed in his inner world. Wife is like, This is like wearing camouflage. He doesn’t even know I’m here. Wife helps and helps to make things easier (and let’s be honest, to be seen), to the point of overfunctioning and exhaustion. Husband responds by caving more.
Recently I read with curiosity lately the enneagram compatibility of twos and fives. Apparently, it’s not a very common match.
My mom pointed out once, “You know, you and [your husband] are more different from any of your sisters and their husbands.”
(This is like saying, “Steve Jobs was good at computers.”)
How our incompatibility made us a great couple
But here’s the thing. Subtracting those differences would completely flatten all the parts I love about our relationship. Our meandering, adventurous path together. My own character.
I shudder to think of the insecure, clutching ways in which I sought to “help” people. The thoughtless ways I steamrolled others. The timid lack of creativity characterized my work and my life…and each of these that would have stayed that way without the bold, colorful, refining strokes that God has painted in my life through this man.
Working to love someone well whose personality poses such a striking contrast widens my perspective, my capability to love, my graciousness and understanding.
Loving people unlike ourselves–when we can patiently wait for the dissonance like a junior-high band to pass–produces the swelling, overwhelming harmonies of a full orchestra.
It’s another step to remind me that my relationships aren’t subjects in my kingdom. Relationships are opportunities to serve and change. My conflicts are often assignments from him.
And when we conflict, it’s really the desires within the two of us that are waging war (see James 4:1). We’re fighting for what’s precious to us…and has often become too precious, our core loves disordered.
The funny thing? I find I’m now drawn to others like my husband. I love that so many 5’s tell the truth, to the point of being unflinching; it’s like they can’t not be themselves. It makes them trustworthy. I love their 360-degree approach to thoughtful, contemplative wisdom.
The 4 part of him helps us dream creatively, finding the perfect gray for the walls, or deciding on an out-of-the-box solution to a problem. And his authentic touch with emotion is invaluable to us. To me.
Enneagram compatibility, learned
The enneagram extends us a tool not to pigeon-hole each other, but to kickstart understanding–and ask the right questions.
At the point a personality test or label becomes a way to get someone pegged (“he’s a man. Men don’t…” “She’s an extrovert. I doubt she even noticed that”), it moves out of “help me know you” to “Understanding or asking is unnecessary. I already know.” This is also known as assumicide.
Both of us had to laugh months ago while riding in the car. We were feeling secure in our relationship (which thankfully, is the norm). I asked him, “What quality in another person would be tempting because I don’t have it?”
Him: “Being understated.” This was the hilarious part. I really am anything but that, people. I am exuberant and full-throttle and what you would either call sparkling or annoying, depending on your enneagram number.
Me: “Affirmation.”
I told him that sometimes, my occasionally-critical husband needs to just slather on the affirmation. Like pumping lotion from a bottle.
So we now have a mimed symbol, when he is being his uber-direct, enneagram-5 self. With an overeager smile, I pump an imaginary bottle of affirmation-lotion into my hands, and smear it over my shoulders.
Though in some ways we represent different extremes, each of us critically needs the other.
“Aha” moments–about the ones we love
Knowing our tendencies via personality profiles like the enneagram helps us toward some of those “aha” moments of understanding our spouse not as foreigner, but as one flesh (Genesis 2:25). It helps us ask good questions of each other, and better comprehend each other’s unique pain and deeply-felt needs.
(As a two, it’s flayed open some of my less-than-pure motivations, and patterns that sabotage my marriage.)
Less-than-ideal enneagram compatibility has shown us we may need to work harder than some couples at seeing eye-to-eye. And honestly? Sometimes we don’t.
But that’s also what makes us a powerful team.
Enneagram compatibility can’t be a deal-maker or deal-breaker for me. Because God has a long, illustrious history of pairing people together in marriage or on a team who are straight-up different, for God’s honor and a more holistic representation of who he is (think Paul and Silas, Ruth and Naomi, Mary and Martha).
Even for people outside my marriage with whom I normally clash, I can’t biblically say, “I don’t need you” (1 Corinthians 12:23). They’re a chance not for me to say, “Sorry, we’re just not compatible!”–but instead, “You make me more holy. Let’s talk.”
(But maybe bring your bottle of affirmation-lotion. Just sayin’.)
According to the article, 31% admitted quarantine caused “irreparable damage” to their relationships.
Chances are decent you know a friend whose marriage is straining right now: Their reality is one of slammed doors. Words they never thought they’d say. Tears dripping in the dark.
They’re also grappling with bewilderment, shame, searing hurt.
FamilyLife, my largest client, asked me to compile some ideas so you could help a friend–and even some hope for the friend themselves.
For what it’s worth, if you’re this kind of friend, with the long phone calls, the prayers, the embraces where your shoulder gets wet? I’m imagining your the Jesus-in-Levis your friend desparately needs right now. I love, love that you’re going the distance for your friend, doing the hard work no one else might be able to do right now.
Please. Keep pressing on.
Looking for more help for someone thinking about divorce? Try
Rachel Hollis carries that mysterious polarizing power. People tend to either love her or…not love her.
Let’s pretend you don’t know who she is, m’kay? Hollis’ resume boasts what most of ours never will. She’s a #1 New York Times Bestselling author whose nonfiction (Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing) has sold over 3 million copies. Once crowned among Inc. magazine’s “Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30,” she owns The Hollis Group, which encourages people toward “positive and lasting change.”
More relevantly (as of late), Rachel Hollis and husband Dave hosted their own Rise Together marriage podcast, frequently administered marriage advice via YouTube and social media, and held a marriage weekend for couples in their hometown of Austin in 2018 for a top-shelf price tag.
Read: We’re taking in the marital demise of one of the most globally influential self-help couples.
And this is why I bring this to the table, and stewed over to even write on this. Personally, I prefer to avoid even supermarket tabloid headlines (why hello, invasive gossip that’s none of my beeswax).
Because if you’re reading this, perhaps Rachel Hollis has affected you.
If Rachel Hollis couldn’t do it, can I do it?
“Yes, I do feel duped–in that if I have had all this transparency, how come along the way you haven’t said, ‘This has been really hard’?” asks a commentator in The Growth Marriage YouTube channel. Their episode explains followers are asking, in essence,
Well, if [the Hollises] couldn’t do it, can I do it?
If these amazing people…who are successful and have the money, and they have access to…the best therapists and the best coaches…and they can’t make it, what is the likelihood I can make it?
Tens of thousands of social media reactions to Rachel Hollis’ divorce range from the broken, to the enraged, to the curious, to the downright hopeless.
Wherever you fall in that spectrum–how do we respond?
1. Thou shalt not be a hater when someone is down, Rachel Hollis included.
Rachel Hollis may carry that persona of that girl or celebrity people love to watch fall–perhaps in light of her sheer, enviable (or questionable) confidence.
The fragility of ego in all of us, tended to like a newly-hatched chick, knows too well a sense of worth grounded in something other than what God says we are. Than what Christ has done for us. It’s that same impulse that births lovely statements like “told you so” or “knew it all along.” The hater within rises for the sake of ego-inflation.
Alternatively, maybe you’re feeling sold a bill of goods, footing the bill for someone’s ambition or personal empire.
“If it were me”
This remains a time to hold fiercely to that gilded principle of loving one’s neighbor. It’s loving the person in proximity, even through the click of a mouse–the way you’d want to be loved.
How you’d want your kids to be loved if your divorce and personal failure were splashed to two million.
Or you’d hope someone would tweet if they knew your heart was flattened.
How you’d want people to respond to your mistakes, flea-sized or more like the pachyderm in the room.
First Peter 3:9 speaks of returning a blessing for an insult–a reiteration of the life of Jesus. Maybe you feel like this is a special case, considering the lofty, self-made position from which Rachel Hollis broadcast marriage advice.
But let’s let the one of us without weakness, sin, or nary a dysfunctional relationship or false statement lob the first stone.
In the Instagram post announcing the end of her marriage, Hollis requests a reprieve from the “open book” of her social media life. She writes, “We hope that you can allow us a human moment.”
She is saving her strength, boldness, and optimism, she explains, for their four children. (Let’s hurt for them together, shall we?)
2. Thou shalt recall the difference between thine own Insta feed and real life.
In Dave Hollis’ recently published book, Get Out of Your Own Way: A Skeptic’s Guide to Growth and Fulfillment, he observes about those who’ve advised his marriage in the past,
If those voices come from people who are killing it in their own relationship, their thoughts are welcome….If the feedback you’re getting is coming from someone who can’t keep a steady relationship, you best filter out their feedback as it does not come from a credible source.
Hmm.
Yes, many followers feel the gravity of that sense of defrauding, even betrayal.
It’s a cautionary tale to any of us vaulting forward on advice like the Hollises’, constructing a personal platform nail by nail–whether cinching that next promotion, as a mom-blogger, or looking toward church leadership.
Fake it till you make it?
Paul defines his ministry this way: “We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one” (2 Corinthians 7:2).
And David says of God, “you delight in truth in the inward being” (Psalm 51:6). This is a decidedly different model than “fake it till you make it.”
Further, God sets the bar high in our work for others: “Let love be genuine” (Romans 12:9). Paul elaborates in Philippians, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (2:3-4).
No, we might not be portrayed as marriage gurus. But which of us can say we’re 100% who we purport to be? That, like God, there is total unity, no divided desires or interest, throughout us?
In truth, the line between truth and falsehood falls like a ribbon down the middle of each human heart. May this tragedy shove each of us closer to an authenticity denuded of social-media sparkle and personal ambition. May we ask instead, “What does it look like to love and serve those in front of me? What am I taking from them for my own gain?”
3. Thou shalt remember the fissures caused by personal ambition in any relationship.
Based on the Hollises’ own messages, self-reliance, ambition, and wealth stand as key values for both of them. It stands to reason this might also articulate their marriage partnership and culture.
“You are the hero of your own story….You should be the very first of your priorities,” reads the first chapter of Girl, Wash Your Face.
To put it baldly, these run contrary to a marriage defined by the culture of the Kingdom of God.
Do they sprout in every marriage to some extent? Ain’t no doubt.
Now, there is One who knows the story behind the Hollis calamity. Hint: It’s none of us.
But wherever we find these values in our relationships, they run contrary to marriage’s structure as per its Designer. And to the extent they exist in your marriage, their force corrupts.
This is what love is
Diametrically opposed is the biblical definition: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives” (1 John 3:16).
It’s the kind of love manifested by the kind of Jesus “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6).
By no means does this mean a marriage unfueled by desire, by a passion to create change and achieve. Rather, God washes our ambition for purposes and Kingdom ever-larger than Self. It’s a culture of each for the other, and Christ as hero.
Made for more
A Christian man once rather boldly commented to me that Rachel Hollis exists because godly Christian husbands who advocate for their wives don’t.
Like a beast with four stomachs, I’ve chewed on this. I’ve written about the allure of Rachel Hollis, the God-hewn need in Christian women for more purpose than can be found in a crockpot and a Swiffer under each arm, or even in our kids.
So many women long to hear someone say, Crush it. Kill your lies and get out there.
And yes. Yes. God made you for more: As a person. As a team.
And to be clear, contrary to the Instagram announcement of Dave Hollis, it’s not a setup where marriage “run[s] its course”. Because love doesn’t really do that, with a few key exceptions (check out Mark 10:7-9, and maybe this one about when the Bible allows for divorce).
Self will assassinate your relationship, whether anyone recognizes your name or not.
The kind of life and marriage worth living, the kind of purpose worth real sacrifice, are so much more vast than a Louis Vuitton bag and a posse of people who think you’re all that and a bag of Doritos.
Respond to Rachel Hollis’ divorce with compassion, increased personal authenticity, and ruthlessness not in your careerism, but in extracting the selfish ambition from your relationship, for a Kingdom greater than your own. That’s a hope-filled relationship.
This week it passed rather quietly, thanks to quarantine: our 20th anniversary. Holy moly, it’s weird to be this old. (Though yeah, marrying at 19 and 20 years old–that happens.)
But this is what I loved, guys. Even as I typed away at work, as you woke up and poured cereal and forgot to put bowls in the dishwasher, my insides felt like I was bubbling over with liquid gratitude.
On May 27, 2020, I woke up yet again next to my best friend in the whole world.
In the next 16 hours, you’d find me like any other day: squealing in the kitchen because your dad’s making me laugh out loud again. Sighing because we were annoyed with each other. Sneaking a kiss in his office, his beard lunging at my chin (not my favorite, but he likes it, so, cool). Enforcing discipline for sassy kids (you’re taking turns). Chatting about the now and the future. Me snapping from exhaustion. Resting silently, comfortably beside each other before bed.
I think of the smooth-cheeked kids we were, grabbing hands as we loped through a hail of rose petals. As we jumped into the unknown in its pain and ecstasy.
Truth: Real love holds a lot more buzzing clothes dryers than flower petals; a lot more checkbook-balancing and carpool lines than dancing in the half-dark.
But I’ve found holiness in both kinds of moments. It’s kind of like Jesus passing out crusty loaves and grilled fish for an eye-popping miracle.
Sometimes the miraculous nestles right up to the mundane.
When Different is Good on Your Anniversary
We’re both such different people now.
We’ve been changed: By years in Africa. Grandma dying. That accident that left me stricken. By years smothered in apple juice and wet wipes, then the creativity and plodding of homeschooling overseas.
But also by unloading the dishwasher and getting handsy in the kitchen. Of mowing the lawn and decorating the tree. Of changing diapers and playing board games. Of arguing and going on long walks where yet again, your dad saw me like no one else.
To walk with God for twenty years together will leave you indelibly different. In many ways, this is an anniversary for three (I know, I know, that sounds weird). God loved us both just as we were, and still enough not to leave us there.
I thought I’d be this single missionary somewhere, feeding refugees. Your dad thought no one would want to follow him to seminary (which he hasn’t done yet).
But marriage has left us both barefoot on holy ground.
Finding Your Way Home
Being married is a different kind of love than lust or that giddy, fairy-lights feeling.
No, my heart doesn’t beat faster when Dad walks in the room. I just feel safe, like I hope you always feel coming home.
C.S. Lewis wrote,
People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on “being in love” forever.
As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change–not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one.
In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.
The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there.*
Scientifically, the first flush of love can last at the most two years.** (That’s about 48 years less than one would hope.) There’s a lot of great brain chemistry God brewed up to get us on our feet in marriage.
The Velveteen Marriage
But it’s real love–each of you cheering and sacrificing for, being changed by each other, each of you tuning in more to the Holy Spirit than feelings. He’s what changed your dad to be this kind of humble and gentle, to be a strong leader and a truly good friend.
God’s changed the fabric of who I am, to be a better partner than just the “yes” (wo)man I thought your dad would want. To be a strong, more secure, more authentic woman than the passive, fearful, pretentious one I was.
When your love story becomes a real one–a little like the Velveteen Rabbit–it is sacred ground. And an anniversary makes you remember that all over again.
I’m praying that someday, each anniversary of yours is a gift like this.
Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story.
This week, my family and I shoved in the car ski boots and a sled and carefully calculated food to feed a family with three teenagers. In the 2-hour drive through the mountains, cell service dropped abruptly about twenty minutes in. Our friend’s cabin, swaddled in 3 feet of snow, has no internet (brilliant!), no reception, and is primarily heated with a potbelly stove.
(Please remind me next time I write a book that my family and I should not get the flu, celebrate the holidays, or have anyone around us encounter the end of life.)
My first “maybe I do need a vacation” moment literally came the next morning after turning in my manuscript, while making the bed and speaking with a colleague on the phone who I don’t talk to very often. “Where are you based again? Arizona?”
We must spend our energy rhythmically. Sustainably.
But at least last year, it hardly seemed like there was time to sit down, metaphorically or physically.
This probably explains why I felt disproportionately angry when I came down with the diagnosed-with-a-letter flu over the personal retreat my husband got me for my birthday. I may have thought something like, Lord, really?
Kind of like when I had young kids and read commands about the Sabbath. (Should we just put a little P.S. in there for moms of toddlers? “We know if you rested, your kids might starve or burn something down. We know if you don’t load the dishwasher, all Monday will be spent catching up. Hope it works out! Work enough overtime so you can get a nap, okay?”)
But once you start observing Sabbath, prying open space to make it work, asking for the help you need to make it happen?
You might just not ever go back.
Are Real Christians Burned Out?
I had to ask myself, Do I really think it’s God’s will for me to be constantly burned out, even for all these things I think he wants me to do? Do I really think Jesus was the most burned-out guy on the planet?
No. No I don’t.
Which tells me I probably have a discernment problem. (I’ll probably write more on that later.)
So this week, I read books. I experimented with oil painting alongside my kids, which is to say I created one that embarrasses me, and one I kind of like, though I’ll remain in the fruit-painting stage for awhile. We bought cheap plastic sleds at a grocery store and raced down a deserted road for an hour, my kids shouting lines from Cool Runnings (“Kiss the lucky egg!” “You dead, mon?”). In the snow, we shoveled out sledding luges and snow caves. We played board games, popped corn, watched a few old movies, slept, stoked the fire. I walked.
This is Your Soul on Rest
So I decided to write down observations of what I look like rested.
Because a lot of times, I consider it pretty optional. It would be better, I tell myself, to have a cleaned-out closet or muffins for breakfast, to get ahead on work, to not have to tackle dishes or laundry in the morning.
Which brings me to my first observation.
1. Each day has enough trouble of its own. – Jesus (Matthew 6:34 )
I think I’m getting ahead on work, but so often, I’m just making space for more work.
Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor observes professional women’s leisure time has declined by as much as one-third since the early 70’s.[1] All of our getting more done through tech? It’s raised, not lowered, our expectations of efficiency and productivity.
2. I don’t always need to be relentlessly available.
Sometimes my inclination to jump up like a Pop Tart for my kids or anyone else doesn’t actually train my kids to be non-entitled, independent problem-solvers.
3. When I rest, I feel less like a slave, more like a daughter.
Y’know what operates around the clock? Things like my fridge. My heater. Toilets. My washing machine after our vacation.
Machines. Not people.
In the story of the prodigal son, the elder son was gut-level, long-term enraged because he didn’t see his father giving him any ingredients for a party with his friends. He saw himself as just doing his father’s work, unappreciated, in the field.
But note the father’s (aka God’s) response: Son, all that I have is yours (Luke 15:31).
Can I really complain God isn’t giving me rest if he leads me beside quiet waters and green pastures, but I decide, “No thanks”?
4. God didn’t rest because he needed or deserved it.
‘Nuff said. Sabbath is a rhythm that declares our freedom from slavery.
5. When I’m rested, I play with my kids more. I love my husband more.
I am a more fun mom, laughing as my husband and I clatter up a hill with plastic sleds, and his disheveled curls remind me of how he looked in college. Later, I ask if he’d like a backrub.
I have nowhere to go, nothing I have to do, so we try to hook to each others’ sleds with our feet, which ends, as it must, in a family pileup.
I normally can’t summon the energy for board games. Something in me doesn’t find strategy and competition replenishing. But when I’m rested, I succumb to the kids, who methodically, joyfully cream me.
6. With rest, I’m more resilient and patient.
I should have been hormonal, which let’s just say usually requires extra prayer. But rest increases my graciousness.
Prayer can spread out on the couch of free time, where I can pray, then think, then pray some more. Turns out God is less of a faucet I can turn off and on.
My relationship there requires presence to flourish, too.
I can finally hear what he says about my identity, which allows me to turn on the volume on lies about what makes me worth something (what I do, what other people think, what I have). I didn’t touch my makeup bag, and wore my hair slung up in a messy bun. Aaah.
Bonus: My friends are prayed for more when I have the capacity to sit, think, be.
8. I am more present.
I listen better when I have nowhere to go, and the capacity to receive the person across from me.
So when my daughter tells me why she’s excited about her upcoming tournament, I’m not just nodding and making the right sounds. I can engage with what engages her.
9. I am more observant.
My non-racing brain has the capacity to appreciate the rainbow of prisms in the snow at my feet. It wonders what paint colors I would mix to make the exact blue of the sky. It connects the dots on what my kids might be going through.
10. I am more creative and visionary.
It never fails: When I get away for a few days, I know now to pack art supplies, as well as get ready to write.
Because it turns out my creativity is a finite quantity, not a limitless one. It needs oxygen, space to knock around in my brain, time outdoors to stimulate ideas, time in prayer to actually listen to the thoughts of God.
11. I have more capacity for what lies around the corner.
Last year, a Saturday sticks out in my mind: I rested, even though Sunday was coming the next day. I remember thinking it was a bit of a waste of my productivity—until the next day, my husband needed something last-minute.
In my usual M.O.—living up to my margins, and maybe snipping off a bit beyond that—I might have helped but felt anxious (“I don’t have the capacity!”) or (um, yes) resentful. Instead, even my heart was like, “Sure!”
That’s not to say “the point of rest is to be able to help others more/better”.
But you’re probably sensing a theme: When I rest—which a lot of times means saying no to something else, being unavailable somewhere else—I love better. I enjoy God more.
Sometimes when my husband or my daughter encourage me to rest, I give them a Look. The Look says something like, “Really? Do I look like I have time for that?” Or, “Sorry, that didn’t make the 10.7-foot list of things to do today.”
But sometimes that resistance looks like me doing things without love—which is pretty counterproductive.
The next time your brain tells you that you can’t rest, consider with me what could happen, who you could be, if you did.
How do you create space to slow down? Who do you become when you rest? Comment below.
So I wrote you recently how a podcast had opened my eyes to all those Hollywood writers (whose techniques, as a writer, I thought I was studying, but who suck me in just the same).
If there’s any possible time when my husband doesn’t respond to me like a guy in the movies, I’m pretty sure it’s me, and my subpar level of attractiveness.
Because all those hours at work, the commute, the game of catch with the kids in the yard, the bills he paid after they hit the sack, and that argument with a surly teenager didn’t drain this (fictional) version of a husband one bit. Um. Not to mention one leeeetle sarcastic comment from his undoubtedly surpassingly-attractive wife.
No libido-suckers there.
Let’s get it on.
But in response to a recent post on FamilyLife’s Facebook page, FamilyLife requested an article from me for wives in the other 20%–that is, the 1 in 5 women who have a higher libido than their husbands. (True story.)
Today I’m writing over at FamilyLife.com for those of you occasionally encountering painful questions when your husband doesn’t respond sexually–and perhaps are dealing with some sexual frustration.
My husband–I unearthed this a few years into our marriage, when we finally had the fortitude to be more vulnerable with each other–thought he’d marry someone more athletic. (I am laughing out loud as I type. Poor guy.) To his credit, when he met me, I was running every morning, performing pushups and situps at night. We played intermural sports and pickup games of soccer together. We hiked together. And to my own credit, I still live an active lifestyle. But none of these has approved the actual coordination factor.
(My parents laugh about me as a child falling repeatedly into the same hole in the yard on my way over to the bus each morning. I do not share these memories. And one has to ask, if it were true: Why did no one ever fill in said hole?)
I'm totally #thatmom--the one diving into all the weirdness with my kids, sidestepping a few eyerolls.
Pull up a chair for practical ideas and discussions on the parenting, relationships, and spirituality we're all army-crawling through every day. After five and a half years in Uganda, my family and I returned to the U.S., where I write and speak professionally, and we continue to work on behalf of the poor. My first solo book, Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids' Hearts (Harvest House), released October 2021.
We’ve been changed: By years in Africa. Grandma dying. That accident that left me stricken. By years smothered in apple juice and wet wipes, then the creativity and plodding of homeschooling overseas.
Being married is a different kind of love than lust or that giddy, fairy-lights feeling.
Who did you think you’d marry?
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
