CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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How’s your side of the street?

Psalm 94:19 When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy.

Since COVID-19 took over our lives, I have struggled with worry. No, worry isn’t right. Anxiety is more accurate. It’s weird. I know I have experienced much worse situations. My wife discovering my infidelity. My sons not speaking to me for months after that. Losing my job multiple times. The death of both of my parents within 1 year of each other. Real devastating issues. For some reason, though…my anxiety has been crippling. Which really makes me laugh when I stop and think about how my current situation compares to previous experiences.

I haven’t slept well. For the last few weeks I have probably averaged 4-5 hours a night, tops. My schedule, stability, all are off. I like routine. I didn’t realize how important that was to me until recently. My routine isn’t routine. I can’t get into a groove. Work, life, marriage, my kids, my job, church. All are off. I don’t quite know what to do about it. So far I have just not done anything. Except whine, obviously.

My wife and I take walks every day. It’s part of our routine. A major part of our intimacy building. And something we just both crave. Even when I travel, which I usually do a lot for work, we take a walk together on a video call. It’s our time to catch up, listen, talk about our lives, the future, our boys, our struggles, our hopes, dreams…and then we stop on a bench along the lake and we pray together. This part of my day has been transformational for my marriage…and my own recovery. 

One of my wife’s strengths is that she is a truth teller. I didn’t recognize this until very recently. She has always been a truth teller. I just didn’t realize how important that part of her character was to me. I come from a family of untruth tellers. We hide stuff. We cover up. We don’t talk about things. We try to ignore them so they go away. We don’t want anyone to see under the tent. To know what exactly happens. That is my family of origin. And only later did I realize how shocking my wife had to have been to my family. She certainly was to me. 

So we stopped along the lake the other day, and we did what we always do. We started talking about what was on our minds. What we wanted to pray about. So she asked me,

“You have been really on edge. I am worried about you. What’s going on? Do I need to be worried?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just all this. Everything. My job, you, the boys, our finances. It’s a lot.”

“Is something wrong at work,” she asked? “What happened? I know you are having a hard time with your boss.”

“Yes, it’s just getting to me. I hate working on this project but I don’t want to not be on a project right now. Not a good time.”

“No, it’s not. Do you like the work still. Is it that? Or just your boss on this?”

“I don’t appreciate how this boss treats me. Nothing is ever right.”

“So let me ask you something. What do you tell your guys when you hear them complain that their wife isn’t responding fast enough, isnt recovering quick enough? What do you say?”

“I say to control what they can control. Take care of their side of the street. That’s all they can do. The rest is God’s job.”

“Yes, that is right,” she said. “So why are you spending all your energy freaking out about your boss? Why don’t you just do what you can do…your work. Do it the best way you can.”

That woman pisses me off sometimes. Especially when she is right. I would like to say since that conversation, I have slept well every night. I haven’t. I have stopped when my anxiety is ramped up and remembered step 3…that I committed to turn my life and my will over to the care of God. Including my anxiety. How’s your side of the street? Mine is still messy…but improving.

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Journal Through Recovery – Bonus Podcast #22: God, How Could You?

Bonus Episode 22 – God, How could you?

I didn’t understand how could God let the things happen to me that led me to addiction? How could he let them happen to my wife? God, How could you?

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Does Faith Reduce Divorce Risk?

Originally posted at: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20935/

Religious belief and activity—particularly prayer—matter in important ways. They make a deeply practical difference in how husband and wife interact with each other in daily life.

Many Christians believe that the divorce rate among believers is on a par with that of the unbelieving world. That’s simply not true—particularly for those who take their faith seriously in both belief and practice. The best research from sociology’s leading scholars has established this fact time and again over the last few decades.

Most recently, research conducted at Harvard’s School of Public Health reveals that regularly attending church services together reduces a couple’s risk of divorce by a remarkable 47 percent. Many studies, they report, have similar results ranging from 30 to 50 percent reduction in divorce risk. Happily, this holds largely true for white, black, Asian and Latino couples.

Research conducted at Bowling Green State University, a major center for ground-breaking family-formation research, affirms this conclusion. A leader in this field, Professor Annette Mahoney of Bowling Green’s Spirituality and Psychology Research Team, reports from her decades-long research that a couple’s spiritual intimacy and church participation is “very, very important and undeniably a construct that matters” greatly in boosting marital happiness and longevity. Additional research conducted by Mahoney and her team demonstrates that marriages are stronger and happier when the husband and wife understand the deeper spiritual significance of marriage. These findings have remained consistent over many decades and across socio-economic differences. The Bowling Green team notes:

Three recent longitudinal studies tied higher religious attendance, particularly by couples who attend the same denomination together, to decreased rates of future divorce. These results imply that great depth of integration in a spiritual community can help prevent divorce.

This is because religious belief and activity matter in important ways, making a deeply practical difference in how husband and wife interact with each other in daily life. It helps them manage their conflicts in kinder, more forgiving, and collaborative ways.

Adding to this research, scholars from the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University found that how often a couple attends church together has a strong impact on marital stability. The more often they attend, the stronger their marriage. The researchers report, “When both spouses attend church regularly, the couple has the lowest risk of divorce.” Moreover, couples holding more conservative Christian beliefs had a markedly lower risk than those with no or more liberal theological beliefs. Couples who marry in a religious service show a modestly lower risk of marital separation or dissolution than those who marry in a non-religious ceremony.

Unequally yoked couples—in which one spouse is a Christian while the other is not—are especially prone to divorce, affirming the biblical charge against it. However, when the husband is the regularly church-attending, strong believer, the marriage is much more durable and happier than when the wife is the sole believer. Similarly, in equally yoked couples, there is a demonstrable marital benefit when the husband is the spiritual leader. This speaks strongly to the importance of the man’s spiritual leadership in the home, as a wife is generally more likely to follow and appreciate the husband’s leadership in religious matters than vice versa.

The faith benefit is strong even for couples facing serious difficulties in their marriage. Mahoney and her team explain, “Couples who belonged to the same denomination at the time of their wedding were twice as likely to reconcile as couples in religiously [different] marriages. Couples where either partner had converted to the partner’s denomination prior to marriage were four times more likely to reconcile” than those with no or dissimilar faith (emphasis added). That is a tremendously powerful marriage-strengthening dynamic for a relatively simple relational component.

Church attendance and shared belief are not the only protective faith factors. A couple’s shared prayer life is extremely powerful. A 2015 study discovered that husbands and wives praying together for each other individually and offering forgiveness for personal offenses has “significant positive” effects on marriage overall. It helps them deal with the troubles that naturally arise in marriage, making them both accountable to God, who tells us not to hang onto past hurts and to sacrificially love and forgive others.

The University of Virginia’s W. Bradford Wilcox boldly explains in his book Soul Mates that “shared prayer completely accounts for the association between church attendance and a happy relationship.” This means that prayer as a regular part of a couple’s relationship, according to this research, is the most important spiritual practice in relational success. This is equally true for Latino, Asian, black, and white couples. Prayer not only invites God into the relationship at times of unhappiness and struggle, but also helps the couple become more intimate and concerned with one another. Regularly sharing one’s thoughts with God in the presence of another is extremely intimate, perhaps rivaled only by physical intimacy. It binds people together. They both require great transparency and trust, enhancing the marital relationship.

Church attendance doesn’t merely increase marital happiness and relational health. It is also associated with the likelihood of being married in the first place; church attenders get married at markedly higher rates. Professor Wilcox explains that “For men and women of all races and ethnicities, attending church regularly increases the odds of marriage by at least two-thirds.” African-American men and women are 46 to 51 percent more likely to be married if they attend church regularly. The same measure for Latino men is 62 percent more likely and 58 percent for white men.

Clearly, it is proven by many measures that marriage and church attendance go together in profoundly important ways. For couples who desire happy, fulfilling and enduring marriages, vibrant faith participation is as positively consequential as nearly all other beneficial factors.

While it is not fully understood why faith practice affects marriage so positively, the author of the Harvard study offers a nice round-up of some of the most widely held possibilities. Namely, regular church attendance and religious practice can:

– Reinforce a couple’s understanding that marriage is a sacred thing, larger than the couple and must ideally last for a lifetime.

– Reinforce biblical teachings against divorce, pornography, and marital infidelity.

– Reinforce the nature and importance of marital love, sacrifice, and attending to your spouse’s needs.

– Put couples in contact with numerous resources – encouraging friends/peers and marital education – that help them prepare for and strengthen marriage as well as resolve inevitable conflict. (Wilcox found that encouragement and advice from church friends accounts for more than half of the marital benefit of church attendance.)

– Increase many other important measures of personal health and well-being as well as a deeper sense of meaning in life, all things generally associated with greater marital happiness and protection against divorce.

Faith does matter. It makes a difference in all areas of life, including marriage. It is important that leaders and members of every church know this, as well as all marriage counselors. It’s one of the most powerful secret weapons in marital happiness and longevity—and this should no longer be a secret to anyone.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of eight books on various aspects of the family, including The Ring Makes All the Difference: The Hidden Consequences of Cohabitation and the Strong Benefits of Marriage and Loving My LGBT Neighbor: Being Friends in Grace and Truth.

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Studies Referenced

  • Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Religion and Health: A Synthesis,” concluding chapter in Michael Balboni and John Peteet, (eds.) Spirituality and Religion With the Culture of Medicine: From Evidence to Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • Mohammed K. Fard, et al., “Religiosity and Marital Satisfaction,” Social and Behavioral Sciences 82 (2013): 307-311.
  • Vaugh R. A. Call and Tim B. Heaton, “Religious Influence on Marital Stability,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36 (1997): 382-392.
  • Jonathan R. Olson, et al., “Shared Religious Beliefs, Prayer, and Forgiveness as Predictors of Marital Satisfaction,” Family Relations 64 (2015): 519-533.
  • Annette Mahoney, et al., “Religion in the Home in the 1980s and 1990s: A Meta-Analytic Review and Conceptual Analysis of Links Between Religion, Marriage and Parenting,” Journal of Family Psychology 15 (2001): 559-596.
  • Prabu David and Laura Stafford, “A Relational Approach to Religion and Spirituality in Marriage: The Role of Couple’s Religious Communication in Marital Satisfaction,” Journal of Family Issues 36 (2013): 232-249.
  • Barbara H. Fiese and Thomas J. Tomcho, “Finding Meaning in Religious Practices: The Relation between Religious Holiday Rituals and Marital Satisfaction,” Journal of Family Psychology 15 (2001): 597-609.
  • Joe D. Wilmoth, et al., “Marital Satisfaction, Negative Interaction, and Religiosity: A Comparison of Three Age Groups,” Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging 27 (2015): 222-240.
  • Evelyn L. Lehrer and Carmel U. Chiswick, “Religion as a Determinant of Marital Stability,” Demography 30 (1993): 385-404.
  • Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Setting Boundaries On Marital Submission

Ephesians 5:21 – ““Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.””

Whenever I (Dr. Townsend) talk about a wife setting boundaries in marriage, someone asks about the biblical idea of submission. What follows is not a full treatise on submission, but some general issues you should keep in mind.

First, both husbands and wives are supposed to practice submission, not just wives. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (see Ephesians 5:21). Submission is always the free choice of one party to another. Wives choose to submit to their husbands, and husbands choose to submit to their wives.

Christ’s relationship with the church is a picture of how a husband and wife should relate: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (see Ephesians 5:24–27).

Whenever submission issues are raised, the first question that needs to be asked is: what is the nature of the marital relationship? Is the husband’s relationship with his wife similar to Christ’s relationship with the church? Does she have free choice, or is she a slave “under the law”? Many marital problems arise when a husband tries to keep his wife “under the law,” and she feels all the emotions the Bible promises the law will bring: wrath, guilt, insecurity, and alienation (see Romans 4:15; Galatians 5:4).

Freedom is one issue that needs to be examined; grace is another. Is the husband’s relationship with his wife full of grace and unconditional love? Is she in a position of “no condemnation” as the church is (see Romans 8:1), or does her husband fail to “wash her” of all guilt? Usually husbands who quote Ephesians 5 turn their wives into slaves and condemn them for not submitting. If she incurs wrath or condemnation for not submitting, she and her husband do not have a grace-filled Christian marriage; they have a marriage “under the law.”

Often, the husband is trying to get his wife to do something that either is hurtful or takes away her will. Both of these actions are sins against himself. “Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church” (see Ephesians 5:28–29).

Given this, the idea of slave-like submission is impossible to hold. Christ never takes away our will or asks us to do something hurtful. He never pushes us past our limits. He never uses us as objects. Christ “gave himself up” for us. He takes care of us as he would his own body.

I have never seen a “submission problem” that did not have a controlling husband at its root. When the wife begins to set clear boundaries in marriage, the lack of Christlikeness in a controlling husband becomes evident because the wife is no longer enabling his immature behavior. She is confronting the truth and setting biblical limits on hurtful behavior. Often, when the wife sets boundaries, the husband begins to grow up.

This devotional is drawn from Boundaries in Marriage, by John Townsend and Henry Cloud.

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The Relationship Law of Sowing and Reaping

2 Corinthians 9:6 – “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.”

Amy and Randall had been married for eight years, and they loved each other. However, when he was angry or upset, Randall became moody and would withdraw from Amy and the kids, except for occasional outbursts of anger. When his manufacturing business was struggling, he would sit silently through dinner. Once, during this period, the children were arguing at the dinner table. Out of the blue, Randall said, “Amy, can’t you keep these children in line? I can’t even have a moment’s peace in my own home!” And with that, he stormed out of the kitchen into his home office, turned on the computer, and stayed there until the kids went to bed.

Amy was hurt and confused. But she had a pattern of “handling” Randall’s moods. She would try to cheer him up by being positive, encouraging, and compliant. “He has a hard job,” Amy would think. “Nurturance is what he needs.” And for the next few hours, and sometimes days, she would center the family’s existence around Dad’s mood. Everyone would walk on eggshells around him. No one was to complain or be negative about any subject, for fear of setting him off again. And Amy would constantly try to draw him out, affirm him, and make him happy. All her emotional energy went into helping Randall feel better.

Amy and Randall’s struggle illustrates the importance of the first law of boundaries: “The Law of Sowing and Reaping.” Simply put, this principle means that our actions have consequences. When we do loving, responsible things, people draw close to us. When we are unloving or irresponsible, people withdraw from us by emotionally shutting down, or avoiding us, or eventually leaving the relationship.

In their marriage, Randall was sowing anger, selfishness, and withdrawal of love. These hurt Amy’s feelings and disrupted the family. Yet Randall was not paying any consequences for what he was sowing. He could have his tantrum, get over it, and go about his business as if nothing had happened. Amy, however, had a problem. She was bearing the entire burden of his moodiness. She stopped what she was doing to take on the project of changing her moody husband into a happy man. Randall was “playing,” and Amy was “paying.” And because of this, he was not changing his ways. Randall had no incentive to change, as Amy, not he, was dealing with his problem.

What consequence should Randall have been experiencing? Amy could have said to him, “Honey, I know you’re under stress, and I want to support any way I can. But your withdrawal and rage hurt me and the children. They are unacceptable. I want you to talk more respectfully to us when you’re in a bad mood. The next time you yell at us like that, we’ll need some emotional distance from you for a while. We may leave the house and go to a movie or see some friends.”

Sowing and reaping has to do with how spouses affect and impact each other’s heart. Amy and Randall had a problem in relational sowing and reaping. He was being hurtful and difficult, yet Amy took the consequences of his behavior for him. In their relationship, the one who has the problem isn’t facing the effects of the problem. And things don’t change in a marriage until the spouse who is taking responsibility for a problem that is not hers decides to say or do something about it. This can range from mentioning how her spouse’s behavior hurts her feelings, all the way to setting a limit on the behavior. This helps place both the sowing and the reaping with the same person and begins to solve the boundary violation.

This devotional is drawn from Boundaries in Marriage, by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend.