Our blog was started a few weeks after we shared our story for the very first time publicly. We did a blog series with the hopes of sharing our journey from brokenness to restoration. We titled the series 8 Things that Destroyed Our Marriage.

In the ebook we candidly talk about the eight most crucial mistakes we made in our first 10 years of marriage. They were:

1. We Rarely Prayed Together

2. We Gave Each Other Left-overs

3. We Lived in the Same House, But Were Not on the Same Team.

4. We Failed to Dream Big Dreams for Our Marriage.

5. We Had Misguided Motives When We Argued.

6.  We Failed to Forgive…Truly Forgive.

7. We Forgot to Focus on Why We Fell in Love.

8. We Thought Withholding Truth Would Save Us from Needless Pain.

Over the past three years, this blog series has been the most viewed series of posts on our site. In our e-book we have taken the blog series and added Scripture to each mistake that will hopefully be a resource for you in your marriage relationship. Special thanks to our friend Ali Newton for designing our ebook for us.

We share our mistakes with you in hopes of helping you avoid them or recover from them. We hope you enjoy this free resource.

After reading the first four mistakes and knowing that there are four more mistakes coming, one might think “Man, your marriage sucked! No wonder you almost got divorced.” The irony is that we had a good marriage. We had the best marriage we could build. God in his grace and his goodness has shown us where we went wrong and we have allowed Him to change us…and that is the journey we are sharing this week.

This mistake wasn’t in my original 8…but it became so relevant to our lives yesterday, that I felt like God prompted me to include this mistake that almost destroyed our marriage…

#5-When we argued with one another, our objective was to be right (Trisha) or to be at peace (me), rather than to grow closer through our conflict.

We got married the summer before my senior year of college. We were young and in love and somewhat took pride in the fact we never really had a major argument through our time dating. But, man do I remember our first argument…I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember how it ended. Trisha looked at me and said, “I hate you.” Argument over! Whatever the issue was, in that moment, she was right and I was wrong. I never wanted her to feel that way again…so I apologized for whatever I did and we moved on.

As kids came into the picture and ministry responsibilities increased and our life got out of balance, I began to measure the success of our marriage by the absence of conflict. So if we didn’t argue more than we argued, then it was a good week. When conflict arose, I knew that Trisha was probably going to be right; I was probably going to be wrong. I knew the easiest way to move on was to identify why she was mad, try not to make her angrier by saying I thought she was wrong, and just apologize. She would feel better because she was right…I would feel better because there wasn’t conflict.

This pattern got so ridiculous in our relationship that it came to a head on a Saturday night about 6 months before we separated. Trisha was leading worship the next morning and I was speaking (probably on conflict resolution or something)…and we get into this huge argument. After a while, I look up and it is 1:00 AM. I am freaking out. Finally, I just said, “Please just tell me what I need to apologize for so we can go to bed. We can’t lead people closer to God tomorrow if we are like this.” My motivation for resolving our conflict had nothing to do with growing closer to her…nothing to do with becoming more of who God had created us to be…it was the fact that I wanted to stand on a stage with a clear conscious and have people be impressed with who I was pretending to be.

What I have realized is that so often God uses Trisha in my life to hold up a mirror to my soul and expose things in my heart that I wouldn’t see otherwise…and he uses me to do the same for her. When I avoid conflict and when Trisha just pushes to be right, we cheat a refining process that God is doing in our life and in our marriage. Don’t get me wrong…I don’t look forward to fighting with my wife…but when we do disagree and argue…most of the time I recognize it as an opportunity to grow closer through the conflict.

This played out in our life yesterday as Trisha and I got into an argument. We just weren’t seeing things the same way. What was so cool and what brought this mistake to my mind is to see how far God has brought us. Our conversation got intense and each of us voiced our opinion…but we were both going to stay with the discussion for the right reasons…she wasn’t demanding she was right and I wasn’t trying to apologize so the conflict would magically go away. We were both committed to allowing God to work in us through what the other person had to say…and by sticking with it we understood each other’s hearts more in the end.

If you are living your life right now trying to manage your conflict…hoping you don’t argue as much this week as you did last week…I know how miserable that can be. God’s desire is to use the conflict in our marriages to grow us more into the husband and wife he longs for us to be. How do you handle conflict in your marriage? Is there a conversation you could have this week that would allow you to leverage your conflict to become more ONE with your spouse? There is hope…we started with “I hate you.” And look how far we’ve come.

The picture to the right is from 2005. It was our 10th Anniversary. We spent money we didn’t have (see mistake #3) and went on a cruise. Don’t we look happy? Wouldn’t you say from this picture that our marriage was in good shape? Three months later, we imploded. How do you go from a 10 Year anniversary cruise to not sure if there will be an 11th anniversary? A little at a time…and that is what this blog series is about. Identifying little things that put distance between us and our spouse, that over time lead to bigger and more destructive patterns. That cruise in 2005 turned a light onto a mistake that almost destroyed our marriage…

The last day of our cruise, we ended up at a seafood restaurant for lunch before heading to the airport. We sat down to eat, and Trisha started bawling…like someone was hurt bawling. I asked her what was wrong and she just said, “I don’t want to go back. This is the first time since we got married that I have had you to myself. It is first time that our life didn’t revolve around the church.” But we did go back, and we went back to the same patterns and same behavior, that ultimately led to our marriage hitting bottom…3 months later.

Here is the truth…we set goals and we had dreams. We dreamed about launching a new church. We set goals for our weekly attendance and offering. We had dreams about how many people would join a small group. We set goals for how many people we wanted serving in the church. We dreamed about baptisms and child dedications.  We were so busy with life and kids and church and ministry, that we forgot to dream about what our marriage could and should be. We weren’t intentional to dream about who our family could be…didn’t take time to set goals for where we wanted to be in 5 years as individuals or as a couple.

It may seem like a little thing, but this one area has transformed our marriage. We all have dreams…we all have aspirations…we all have a sense of destiny and a God-given desire to make our lives count. When we began to go to counseling, I realized that our entire marriage had centered around me and the call that God had placed in my heart. I knew that God had placed a call and a vision in Trisha’s heart too and I wanted her to share it. So, one night at Red Lobster, I said to Trisha, “What are your dreams?” She didn’t think I was serious…so I said it again. “Our whole marriage has revolved around who I wanted to become…who do you want to become?”  She started to tear up and began to share with me her dreams for our marriage…her dreams for our boys…her heart for our family and goals for her life personally. It was the first time that we had a discussion about her dreams with no strings attached…no wrong answers…no limits.

What we have realized is that we are dreamers. We love to imagine how God could use us and change us and grow us. Part of our role as spouses is to be used by God to draw out and help complete each others dreams. We sit down and set goals for our family…spiritual goals, financial goals, and even ministry goals. Some we hit, others we don’t…but the point is that we know more deeply each others desires, heart and passions.

When is the last time you have had a conversation like that? What if on Saturday, you went out to dinner with your spouse you said “What are your dreams for our marriage? What are your dreams for your life? Who do you hope to be in five years? How can I help you get there?” Your spouse may be desperate to dream again…and to dream again with you. What a gift you could offer with 4 simple words “What are your dreams?”

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a good friend of mine. He and his wife had a major argument the night before and he needed to talk. As he began to share what was going on, it was pretty clear that in almost every single area of their relationship, they weren’t on the same page. He felt like she misunderstood everything he said…she felt like he didn’t listen to her opinion or care about what she thought. They would have a few days of peace, and then something would trigger an argument about the same issue that they had argued about 2 weeks ago, and 2 months ago and 2 years ago. He didn’t like how she spent the money, she didn’t like how much money she was given to spend. He didn’t think she respected how hard he worked, she thought he worked way too much and didn’t put their family first. They are 7+ years into their marriage and they have separate checking accounts, separate bills that they pay, separate goals and aspirations…and they are headed for where we ended up…separation…the mistake that they are making is one that nearly destroyed our marriage…

#3-Our marriage put us in the same house but we were not always on the same team.

Let me give you an example of how this played out in one area of our marriage…

Like most married couples, Trisha and I have certain roles in our marriage. One of the things I was responsible for was our budget and paying the bills. Trisha knew how much money I made per pay check and she knew when I got paid…beyond that, I didn’t share much about our finances with her. This was a constant stress in our relationship…she never knew where we stood financially and I always got on her for spending money that we didn’t have. Most of the conversations we would have about money were after she came home from Wal-Mart with groceries or with socks and underwear for the boys. I would go off that she spent money that she didn’t get approved with me…she didn’t know what bills were coming out that week and in my mind she was spending money faster that I could make it (as a pastor you don’t make money very fast). The truth was, I was a horrible money manager. I would justify purchases by using credit cards or 90-days same as cash or put off paying a bill for a month so that we could buy something on an impulse. (I called it creative financing…it is really called stupid debt) She saw me as a control freak and a hypocrite because in her mind, I could spend the money how I saw fit, but would always get on her and question every dime she spent…so she resented me. Here was the reality: I was so ashamed of the financial condition I had put us in, I wanted to keep her in the dark…and I was too proud to ask for help. I thought for sure that if she knew how bad I led our finances, she would lose respect for me. The result was that we were never on the same team financially…we were constantly working against each other, rather than being one as God intended.
What you and your spouse need is a rock solid belief that no matter what-”we are in this together.” The absence of that belief erodes our intimacy and trust with one another. Over time you begin to question if this person really has your best intentions at heart…and that is a downward spiral. What comes next is withholding truth, hiddenness and reoccurring fights that you have no idea how they started or why they started…and you rarely resolve them. When you begin to hold your spouse suspect and question their intentions…that is a huge clue that you are not on the same page and you are not on the same team. When people choose divorce this is termed “irreconcilable differences.” But, trust me, your differences can be reconciled…and leveraged to make your relationship even better!

Maybe for you right now, you and your spouse are not a team when it comes to your finances…and there are constant arguments about money. Maybe for you it is your spouse’s career…and they are driven to work longer and earn more, and you feel their decision has caused you to question what is most important to them…and you always argue about it. Maybe you aren’t a team in how you discipline your kids…and you constantly feel like your spouse is undermining your authority or being condescending to you in front of your kids…and you argue in front of your kids about how to parent your kids.

When Trisha and I were separated, she, for the first time saw all of our bills. She realized my lack of leadership in this area…everything was out in the open. When we began to go to counseling, one of the things that we made a commitment to is that in every single thing we are going to assume the best of the other person, and move forward from there. We don’t always get this right…but we are quick to recognize when we are off…and we talk about it and we seek forgiveness and we realign our hearts. This mistake will quickly move you from being married to co-existing in the same house…and you will wake up one day and think, “There has to be more than this.” There is…God calls it ONENESS and it is available. But the price tag is honesty, vulnerability and humility. When you offer those things and assume the best of your spouse, there is a supernatural force working in your relationship to bring about oneness and joy in doses that will blow you away.

Maybe today you and your spouse live in the same house, but you are not on the same team…choose to take some time this weekend and talk about it tell your spouse… “no matter what I am in this with you…we are a team.” It has totally changed our marriage!

Spring break 2007 was the best family vacation we have ever had. We loaded up the mini-van and took off for Destin, Florida. Every time we went somewhere in Destin I said to Trisha, “This looks so familiar.” She kinda laughed it off, which was weird, because I wasn’t joking. We would go eat somewhere, or go to Wal-Mart or go to an outlet mall, and I would say, “Man, I feel like I have been here before.” Finally, I guess I got so annoying, Trisha said to me “Justin, we were on vacation here Spring Break of 2003! Do you not remember?” What she said hit me like a ton of bricks. We were in Destin, Florida for Spring Break, 2003, but I wasn’t on vacation…we were 1 week out from our first Easter Service at the church, and all I did was worry and stress and complain and work. I was there, but I wasn’t there. Maybe you can relate to this mistake that nearly destroyed our marriage…

#2-We consistently gave each other the left-overs from our day and not the best.

How does it happen in a marriage that over time, we stop giving our spouse the best of who we are and we give them what ever is left at the end of the day? Your boss gets your best or your clients get your best, or your customers get your best, your laundry gets your time and attention, and your Facebook gets its time, your to-do list gets priority…but at the end of the day, we settle for giving our spouse less than our best. Here is what is toxic…this becomes a vicious cycle that is hard to break.

I come home from the office and Trisha has the laundry done and the kitchen cleaned and the kids bathed, and dinner ready…and I walk in exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated…whatever…and all I say is “We’re having pasta again? Really?” With that one statement, with that one act of withholding my best, I have destroyed the effort that she has given to offer her best. You know what she is thinking in that moment “My best isn’t good enough.”

On the other hand, I leave work early, go buy flowers, find a babysitter, make dinner reservations and plan a perfect evening without the kids, only to come home and hear “You must be trying really hard to make up for something. If you think that this means you’re getting lucky tonight, think again!” That statement totally defeats a husband who has done what he can to offer his best. You know what I am thinking in that moment “Why should I even try, my best obviously isn’t good enough.” And so the cycle goes…

When Trisha and I were separated, I worked at P.F. Chang’s as a server. I went from speaking to 500 people each weekend, to “Would you like white or brown rice?” One night as I was closing my section, I had a table of several high school students that had come in for dinner after their school dance. They were loud and rude and made a huge mess and hung out so long that I was one of the last servers to leave. After they left, I was on my hands and knees under their table sweeping up rice and crushed up fortune cookies with my hands into a dust pan…I stood up and looked on the table, and they had left me a $5 tip! I thought I am busting my butt cleaning up after these kids who could care less about me…when is the last time I have done this at home? When is the last time I have given to Trisha like I am giving at P.F. Chang’s for a flimsy $5 tip?

What about you in your marriage right now? Who is getting your best? Maybe you are so concerned about a clean house you forget about the husband who lives there? Maybe you are so tracked on “providing” for your family, you fail to prioritize the family you are providing for. This is so subtle and it happens little by little…and it takes a conscious effort to battle this fatal mistake. Greatness doesn’t just happen…it is achieved by consistently giving your best…and that is true in your marriage. I say a prayer every single night on my way home and it goes something like this “God, I have given my best effort today at work. I have given my best to my boss, I have given my best to my clients, I have given my best to people I will never meet, and only care about me to the extent that it benefits them…help me give 110% to 4 people who love me unconditionally and deserve so much more than what I have given to others today.”

What are some areas that you know your spouse isn’t getting your best?

How does a husband of 10 years, a father of 3 awesome boys and a pastor of a young and growing church choose to walk in one Sunday afternoon and tell his wife he wants to end it all? How do you get there? What are some of the ingredients to a marriage that hits rock bottom like that? Most of the mistakes we are going to share are in no particular order…but this first one is THE most important thing you can do to protect your marriage. It is simple, but hard. It seems churchy…and cheesy…but is so powerful. It is the most talked about thing, but the most overlooked thing in a “Christian” marriage. I believe if you never read another thing that I write, but correct this one thing, your marriage will change. This was our biggest mistake and this nearly destroyed our marriage…

#1- We rarely prayed together, and the way we prayed for each other was selfish.

How ridiculous is that? Trisha and I are leading a church, helping people find their way back to God, praying for people after the service, praying for people in our small group, praying for marriages of people we are counseling…and yet there was a barrier in our marriage when it came to praying for each other. It is totally embarrassing…but we just didn’t do it. When I did pray for Trisha I would pray in a selfish way that God would change her because she was driving me nuts or making me angry or nagging at me about something.

When we were separated I realized that I was the one that needed to change…even if Trisha never changed, I was desperate for God to change me. What we have learned is that yes our marriage is emotional…yes, our marriage is physical…but more than anything our marriage is a SPIRITUAL relationship and if we don’t take that seriously, the very foundation of our relationship will be eroded little by little.

I want to encourage you to not make the same mistake we made. You can improve the quality and depth of your marriage beginning today!

How does a husband of 10 years, a father of 3 awesome boys and a pastor of a young and growing church choose to walk in one Sunday afternoon and tell his wife he wants to end it all? How do you get there? What are some of the ingredients to a marriage that hits rock bottom like that? Most of the mistakes we are going to share are in no particular order…but this first one is THE most important thing you can do to protect your marriage. It is simple, but hard. It seems churchy…and cheesy…but is so powerful. It is the most talked about thing, but the most overlooked thing in a “Christian” marriage. I believe if you never read another thing that I write, but correct this one thing, your marriage will change. This was our biggest mistake and this nearly destroyed our marriage…

#1- We rarely prayed together, and the way we prayed for each other was selfish.

How ridiculous is that? Trisha and I are leading a church, helping people find their way back to God, praying for people after the service, praying for people in our small group, praying for marriages of people we are counseling…and yet there was a barrier in our marriage when it came to praying for each other. It is totally embarrassing…but we just didn’t do it. When I did pray for Trisha I would pray in a selfish way that God would change her because she was driving me nuts or making me angry or nagging at me about something.

When we were separated I realized that I was the one that needed to change…even if Trisha never changed, I was desperate for God to change me. What we have learned is that yes our marriage is emotional…yes, our marriage is physical…but more than anything our marriage is a SPIRITUAL relationship and if we don’t take that seriously, the very foundation of our relationship will be eroded little by little.

Last week was our kids’ Spring Break. We got a chance to go to Nashville, Tennessee and spend some time with two of our best friends Pete and Brandi Wilson. When Trisha and I were still separated in 2005, we spent fall break with Pete and Brandi. We showed up broken and battered and somewhat hopeless. God used them in so many ways to help in our healing and restoration. They are the type of friends that everyone knows they need, but are so difficult to find…they and their kids hold a special place in our heart. During our visit last week, we attended the church Pete and Brandi started, Crosspoint Church. Along with their regular service, we also attended the Kidstuff service where each week a virtue is given and explained, and last week’s virtue was HOPE: Believing something good can come out of something bad.

There are a number of things that Trisha and I could write about in our last post on the principles that restored our marriage, but this concept of hope is probably the most important. So we are going to each take a few minutes to talk about how Restoration principle #8 played out for each of us as God lead us through the restoring process.

Restoration Principle #8: Whom or what you put your hope in will determine the depth and health of your restoration.

Trisha and I were separated for two weeks before we started going to counseling together. About a month after we started counseling, our counselor advised us that we were approaching a critical point in our journey. Trust was beginning to be rebuilt. Intimacy was starting to return. There was a hope that each of us had for our marriage at this point. He told us that if there was anything left un-confessed, that I needed to come back the next day and confess it. So Trisha and I went to our separate homes, and the next day came back to the counselor and I confessed more details that I had omitted for the previous month. Trisha was devastated (as she should have been). She got up and left me at the counselor’s office. Later that night, I got a call from a lady in our church stating that Trisha was going to file for divorce on Monday…she was done.

Here is the truth…up until this point, the hope that I had in restoring my marriage and healing my relationship with Trisha was in MY ability to make things right. I was hopeful that we would be able to stay married if I went to counseling, if I was remorseful, if I did all the right things. The next day Trisha called me and told me that she didn’t want to be married to a liar and a person that withheld truth. I hit bottom. I was hopeless. I realized there was nothing I could do to convince her to stay married to me. It was at that moment that the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart. He revealed to me that it was time to come clean…once and for all. The sexual abuse I had never talked about…the pornography I had denied struggling with…the lying and stretching of truth that had become a way of life…it was time to confess it all. So I went to a friend’s house that night and told him everything. I was pretty sure that my marriage was over, but for the first time in my life, I had a hope that I could be who God envisioned me to be through Christ. Not because I was good enough, not because I had it all together, not even because I could convince Trisha to take me back…simply because of His unfailing love.

Psalm 147:11 says this: “The Lord delights in those who fear Him, those who put their hope in His unfailing love.” That was the beginning of true restoration for me and for my marriage…realizing that the only hope I had was found in Jesus…and His unfailing love.

Trisha and I renewing our vows December 2005

In all honesty I (Trish) am grateful to be writing on a day where my hope meter is tipping towards low. Weird I know, but its times like today when life isn’t unfolding as quickly as I would like or on my time table that hope seems to drift from my heart. I tend to make decisions and fight emotions of hopelessness when life doesn’t always make sense. It is on days like today or weeks or sometimes even months, when my disposition is camped in this place of despair, that HOPE has the power to invade me and renew every part of me.

Hebrews 10:23 (NLT) “Without wavering, let us hold tightly to the hope we say we have, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.”

Hebrews 13:5b (NLT) “I will never fail you. I will never forsake you.”

In our previous postings we have shared the journey of our marriage going from destruction to restoration. As Justin shared, there were many dark days we had to wade through in which the future of our marriage was uncertain. Through it all and even up to this very moment that I write I have to remember this about hope: you have to choose it! Look again at Hebrews 10:23… we can’t waver on holding tightly to hope. When you encounter tough times you will not drift towards feelings of hope. When your spouse comes home and tells you they are leaving you… your heart will not drift towards hope. You have to choose it and hold tightly to it!

I have come to learn that no matter what happens in life choosing hope is first an act of obedience. Whatever life circumstances have caused you to loose hope you have to first make the choice to be hopeful. Why? In doing so you are saying to your heavenly father “yes I will hold tightly to the hope I have in You and I trust You to keep Your promise. The promise that no matter what You will not fail me!” By first choosing hope even if you don’t “feel” it, I believe with all my heart that God eventually bridges the gap of your heart feeling despair to a confident place of hope.

Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT) “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

Micah and Elijah after the ceremony...realize that we are staying together.

It is in the waiting that it is so hard… will my marriage work? Will my children ever respect their father again? Will I be able to survive if he walks away? Those were my questions. What are your questions in the waiting? What life circumstance has a hold on you stealing your sense of hope? We have seen just this week alone stories of horrific acts of violence from people who have lost hope throughout our nation. This is why this principle of fighting for hope is so important. God doesn’t need you, but he desires you with all his heart enough to send his Son to die on the cross to bare your sins so that you may have a hope of eternity with Him. Yes life may suck here in waiting until he finally calls us home, but he promises to give us a sustaining hope in the waiting and that he will be with us always every step of the way.

As we close this post and our series on restoration…the truth remains. Your bank account can’t restore your marriage. Your career success can’t restore your marriage. Your clean house, your PTA office, your keen ability to hide your sin, your leadership ability, your outstanding ministry skill set, your capacity to pretend like everything is okay (even when it isn’t) will not have the power to restore you, or your marriage. What you are desperate for is what we found when we were in our most hopeless place…HOPE in the power of Jesus Christ. Our prayer is that you will find that HOPE in Him in this moment.

When Trisha and I were first separated in October of 2005, I was the first to start counseling. I went to counseling 4 days a week for two weeks before Trisha and I started going together. Attending counseling was something that I had never done. I recommended counseling to others. We had Christian counselors that went to our church. I had pastor friends that told me of their great experience in counseling. My pride and my fear kept me from counseling. I thought that I was too strong for counseling; I could handle my junk on my own. Weak people go to counseling. At the same time, I was scared that if I went, the counselor would see right through me and I would be found out as the shallow poser that I truly was. (I told you I was messed up!) I resisted Christian counseling like the plague…until I was desperate to save my marriage.

At the end of my first week of counseling, I told the counselor to be honest with me. I said something like “Now that you have an idea of just how messed up I am, how much I have jacked up my life and marriage, I need to know, are we going to make it? Can you fix me? Can you fix my marriage?” He simply said that he didn’t know. He had no idea if what I had destroyed could be restored…but he did have hope that I could be restored. So, I said to him, “I’ll do anything…just tell me what to do.” He said to me “If I can recommend one thing for you to find healing it would be for you to buy and read “The Power of a Praying Husband.”

Let me just say that this wasn’t the first time I had heard of this book. I can remember several people emailing me about this book. One word came to mind when I thought of this book “CHEESY”! I read a summary of the book at one point and I thought only weak and incompetent guys would read this book. Turns out, that is exactly what I was…weak in character and incompetent as a husband and father. So I bought this book.

As Trisha and I talk to couples, often we are asked by them for one tip, one suggestion, one thing that they can do that will have immediate results on their marriage. This is that one thing…read this book. This book reveals the truth of Restoration Principle #7:

Principle #7: Our willingness to pray for our spouse is instrumental in God recreating who He wants us to be as husbands and wives.

There are two major reasons that I resisted not only reading this book but praying for my wife.

-Pride: The same pride that kept me from seeking help from a Christian counselor kept me from praying for my wife and marriage. If I prayed for my marriage, if I prayed to be a better husband, then I was admitting that I didn’t have it all together. I wasn’t the model husband, I struggled to be who God called me to be, I couldn’t provide the leadership and direction that my wife and kids were relying on me to provide.

-Priorities: I knew in my heart that if I prayed for Trisha and if I consistently prayed for my marriage that God would bring things to my mind that I needed to deal with. He would allow me to see changes that needed to be made and work that needed to be done to have a healthy and growing marriage…and I had a church to build. I didn’t have time to be sidetracked by issues that if I could ignore, would go away for fix themselves.

I began to read this book and God began to do something that I never expected. He began to change me. He began to allow me to see needs in Trisha that I never saw before. He gave me a heart for her desires that I never had before. He gave me an understanding of her world that I never comprehended. Through the prayers that were in this book, God unlocked a supernatural power in our marriage to bring about the changes in us that we knew were necessary, but was powerless to make happen.

I bought this book 3 ½ years ago. I have read it about 25 times. I still read it and pray through at least every other week. It is a vital part of my relationship with God and my wife. It gave me words to pray when I didn’t know how. It gave me verses of Scripture to read that applied specifically to something Trisha and I were going through.

God is passionate about your marriage. God longs to see your marriage thrive…even more than you do. When we submit to praying for our spouse, we acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers and we need supernatural help in becoming all that God has called us to be. It is through that process that God does something in us that we could never do for ourselves. I have come to realize that I can’t change my wife. As much as I want to, often times, I can’t change me. But as I pray and humble myself before God and submit to His desires for my marriage, He changes my wife and me in more complete ways than we could have ever done.

Trisha purchased “The Power of a Praying Wife” and consistently reads the prayers in that book for me. It has transformed who she is as a wife. These books were the single greatest resource for us finding hope, restoration and change that allowed us to move from destruction to restoration. I know it could do the same for you.

One of the things that was so frustrating to me in my walk with God until Trisha and I separated was the fact that I struggled with the same sins over and over and over. I made repeated promises to God that I wouldn’t commit a particular sin ever again. I asked for forgiveness and would do great for a while in not committing that sin…then even though I had the best intentions to move past that sin and find freedom…it seemed find me in my weakest moment. The question I continually asked myself was “How, after all these years,  can I struggle with the same thing? If I were a better Christian, I wouldn’t struggle with ________ anymore.”

The same pattern was true in our marriage. Maybe you can relate to this…Trisha and I didn’t argue about new issues. Our arguments were very uncreative…they were always about church, sex, or money…usually in that order. There were certain variations of these arguments, but when it came right down to it, we always argued about these things. The question that we asked ourselves as a married couple was “How can we, after all of these years, still argue and fight over the same things? If we had a stronger marriage, we wouldn’t argue about these things anymore.”

When we began to go to counseling, something in me changed. I no longer wanted to know “how” I could struggle with the same sins in my life, I wanted to know “why?” When you begin to ask the question “why” in your marriage, it unlocks this restoration principle we discovered that has helped us move from destruction to restoration:

Restoration Principle #6: Your willingness to deal with and understand the destruction of your past will determine the depth of restoration in your future.

This is how this played out in my life and how it completely transformed our marriage. It would have been easy for us to take a few months, go to counseling to deal with the breach of trust that the affair caused in our marriage. But so often we repeat sins and behavior patterns in our life and in our marriage because we fail to understand when the destruction began in our life. We spend so much time trying to pretend that we are not broken, not messed up and not hurting. We fail to grasp how our past decisions, our past sins and our past mistakes, if not understood, acknowledged, confessed and redeemed can affect every aspect of our life.

For me, this meant going way back in my life and identifying when sexuality was first broken. I was sexually abused as a child, when I was in first grade. I didn’t tell anyone about it because the person that did this told me that no one would believe me and I would get in trouble for lying if I told. Finally, when I was a freshmen in high school, the AIDS virus came on the scene and I became nervous that this encounter I had 8 years before would cause me to have AIDS…so I told someone. It wasn’t received with much seriousness and was dismissed. That was a defining moment for me. Yes, I had choices that I made from that point on…choices to have sex before I was married, choices to give into lustful thoughts, choices to indulge in pornography, and a choice to have an extramarital affair…but those choices were driven by a brokenness that I never identified and never dealt with or understood.

I have typed this and retyped this over and over trying to make sense-I hope I am making sense!!!

The truth is that both you and your spouse bring a past into your marriage. You bring sins and hurts and disappointments. Maybe you were raped in high school. Maybe you had a one night stand in college. Maybe you were physically or sexually abused as a kid. Maybe you started watching porno movies when you were in 8th grade. Maybe you cheated on a test when you were a freshmen. Maybe your dad left you when you were a kid. Maybe your mom never told you she loved you. What we have come to understand in our marriage is that the depth of restoration and intimacy we experience in our marriage today is in direct proportion to our willingness to understand our past and allow our past to be redeemed.

The truth about God is that he will never force Himself on any of us. If we are unwilling to bring part of our heart to Him, he will not redeem and heal that specific part of our heart. Somehow, we sentence ourselves to struggle with the same sin and the same temptations because we are not willing to go back to that dark place in our past and bring it into the light. We hope that by ignoring it or pretending that it didn’t happen that it will magically go away. The opposite is actually true. The longer we ignore hurts and brokenness from our past, the more it robs us of the person that God has created us to be.

This principle is painful…but it is powerful. I struggled with lying…so we went back and talked about when and why I first started lying. Trisha struggled with feeling validated and valued…so we talked about when she first felt devalued and taken advantage of.

Here is the cool part. When you get serious about this, you begin to identify the areas of your life that bring you the most pain and you deal with it…those pains, hurts and sins loosen their grip on your heart. When you are willing to go back to that dark place and figure out when you were first broken in that area, the stronghold that had in your life is crushed!

Life and marriage is “easier” if we don’t go this route. It will cost you something to choose this principle. But you begin to wake up to the person you always wanted to be and you begin to have the marriage that you always wanted to have. No longer do past hurts, mistakes and disappointments have a hold on your heart. If you want to take a giant step away from destruction and toward restoration, look back at your past. What areas of your past are still following you around today? What issues have you wished would just go away, but still creep back into your heart and soul? What arguments are you having today that you had five years ago? Ten years ago? Are you willing to go there and release the past from having control of your future?