I’m really excited about our blog posts for this week. Valentine’s week holds a special place in our blog’s heart. We launched RefineUs 3 years ago this week.

This summer, Trisha and I realized that in order for RefineUs to continue to help restore hope and renew relationships like we feel God has called us to do, this ministry had to expand beyond us. Actually, RefineUs was never meant to be about us, it’s always been about the redemption that God can bring to any heart; any relationship; any marriage.

We have asked some friends that we trust and that understand the vision of RefineUs to come along side us and help coach couples. Our marriage coaching program can now serve four times as many couples. We are so thankful for their investment and partnership.

We’ve asked each of our marriage coaches to do a guest post this week. The theme of the posts will be around the topic of expectations. We all had expectations when we got married….we all expected marriage to be ___________ and it ended up being _____________.

Sometimes our expectations were unrealistic, other times they were just unmet. I know the posts this week are going to speak to your heart.

If you would like more information on our four month marriage coaching program, CLICK HERE to find out more and move from the marriage you have to the marriage you desire.

Happy Valentine’s Week and thank yo for being a part of our community.

A few weeks ago, I shared with you a review of the book, Sons of Grace. If you love redemption stories, then the book is an awesome book to read. You get a front row seat with ten different men as they encounter Christ and His grace. As a person that loves second chances, this book reminded me of how thankful I am for grace. I had an opportunity to chat with Mark Hughes, the author of Sons of Grace and we wanted to share that with you today. Enjoy!

We will be giving away 5 copies of the book next week.

What is the last book you’ve read?

One of the most common questions we get when we are speaking with or coaching couples is: “What was the most important thing you did to restore your marriage?”

Most of the time, people don’t agree with Trisha’s answer. Almost all the time they don’t like her answer. She will tell you the most pivotal and most difficult decision she made that lead to our restoration was packing up my things and kicking me out.

There are marriage principles that are true for all marriages; and then there are marriage principles that are different for every couple based on their circumstances, history and situation. While we believe in separation for the purpose of reconciliation, we know it isn’t the right choice for everyone. But here is the principle that applies to every marriage: Trisha couldn’t talk me into choosing her.

This is the most counter-intuitive principle, but it can literally save your marriage if you will absorb it.

• You can’t talk him into telling the truth
• You can’t talk her into not chatting with that guy on Facebook
• You can’t talk him into not watching porn
• You can’t win him back by begging him to come back
• You can’t win her over by walking on egg shells and trying to be perfect
• You can’t talk him into not texting her again
• You can’t talk her into loving you
• You can’t talk him into being committed to you or your marriage

When our marriage is drifting; when our marriage is disconnected; when our marriage is falling apart; when our spouse has had an affair; our natural instinct is to think: If I beg him, he’ll stay. If I’m a perfect husband, she’ll fall back in love with me. If I can convince him how much I love him, then he’ll choose me over pornography.

The problem is we can talk our spouse into a behavioral change, but we can’t talk them into heart transformation. Who wants to be in a marriage that they have been talked into? Who wants to be in a relationship that they’ve manipulated their spouse into staying or loving or being committed to?

Talking them into it:

• Enables them
• Delays the brokenness they need to change their heart
• Allows them to focus on you and not on their choices, dysfunction or sin
• Gives you a false sense of hope that things will be different
• Places you in a parental, supervisor or investigator role that you were never meant to have
• Leads you to the same place in 3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years from now

If you are at a place in your marriage where you are trying to change your spouse’s behavior by talking them into it…my advice is stop. Take a step back and reconnect with God. Begin to pursue the person you know God is calling you to be, and allow God to be God for your spouse. You can’t talk them into repentance. You can’t talk them into commitment. You can’t talk them into integrity.

Only God can do that.

Allow Him to do what only He can.

It will be the most difficult thing you will do. But, it could be the most important thing you will do.

Yesterday was a really fun day for me. I got made fun of a little, but I’m cool with it. Trisha is a part of a movement of pastors’ wives and women in ministry called Leading and Loving It. It is a phenomenal community of women. Thus why I was made fun of…because Trisha spoke at their JustOne Conference yesterday, and I was one of one dude chatting, tweeting and Facebooking the conference.

When Trisha and I separated six years ago, I sat in a counseling session alone. I don’t remember how the session started, but I remember how it ended. My counselor asked me to do an inventory of the times I felt supported by Trisha. I don’t have the list I made that day, but it took me about 20 seconds to come up with this list…

• When I wanted to move to Sandusky, OH and serve as a 100 year old church’s first youth pastor, Trish moved with me
• When I had no one to direct the Christmas musical, Trisha supported me and did it
• When I wasn’t happy in this traditional small church, and wanted to move to a bigger church, Trisha cheered me on and moved
• When I needed someone to build a student worship band, Trisha supported my ministry and built three separate teams
• When that church got too small for my dreams, Trisha said goodbye to friends and family and moved again to support my dreams
• When I had a vision to sell everything we owned and start a church in a place we knew 4 people, Trisha was my biggest cheer leader
• When I came home after attendance sucked; my message bombed; an elder’s meeting was rough; I had a conflict with a staff member; or got an nasty email from someone in the church, Trisha cheered me on.
• When I broke our vows; lost our house; took Trish from the church we started and the friends we had and asked her to start all over with me…she supported me and cheered on my restoration.

I want to be her biggest cheerleader. God is opening doors for her to speak and write and bring hope to others and I want to cheer her on. I want to be the first one to brag on her; I want to be the loudest voice saying, “Way to go.” I want to fuel the dreams that God has placed in her heart, like she has selflessly done for me for the past 18 years.

What about you? Are you the champion of your spouse’s dreams? It is so easy to just expect them to help us achieve all that we have in our heart, while forgetting God has placed us in their lives to be their biggest cheerleader. What is one dream your wife has? What is one thing you could help your husband accomplish?

Knowing the answer to those questions are the first step in cheering them on.

We want to pray for you this weekend. As a couple…as a community, let’s come around one another and encourage one another in prayer. So often I think we try to fix our issues, we try to pretend our problems away. But I love this passage in James:

Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other, that you might be healed.     James 5:16

Healing comes as we share our burdens with one another and pray for one another. So we invite you to leave a comment. You don’t have to leave your full name or even a real email address. Leave your prayer request and we will be praying for you. God knows your heart. Mighty things can happen this weekend as we pray and encourage one another.

How can we pray for you?

In December we launched a new resource at RefineUs called MentorUs.

MentorUs is a monthly subscription program designed to help couples be intentional in their pursuit of God and their pursuit of their spouse. Each Friday we send an email with a marriage principle, a few Scriptures to read and four or five discussion questions to talk through. Then, once per month, we send a video recapping the entire month with more practical application.

For the month of December we allowed people register for $10 per month or pay for an entire year for $59. We had a tremendous response. In January, the yearly subscription price went to $79. As we have gotten feedback on MentorUs and heard such encouraging stories over the past month, we wanted even more couples to benefit from this weekly marriage resource.

Then we realized this month is February, the month of love! This month has 29 days in it and it’s Leap Year. This is also an election year. Those things have nothing to do with one another, but they are all great excuses to drop the yearly subscription price for MentorUs to $59! That is $.16 per day. That is $1.12 per week!

If you don’t want to commit to an entire year, then you can click here to pay $10 for a month. You can cancel at any time.

But if you want to save BIG time and get a marriage resource emailed to you each week. Then you can register below.

P.S. This resource should not be a substitute for roses, chocolate or a nice dinner for Valentine’s Day. That marriage advice was free.

We’ve had several people send us this video.

This is Jeff Bethke. His spoken word videos have blown up on YouTube. He makes some statements in this video that are so powerful and so thought provoking:

• Marriage will make you better or bitter
• What we’re doing isn’t working, just look at the rate of our divorces
• Marriage is prison more than the paradise we were promised
• Dating feels like a vacation, while marriage feels like a job
• We might share a checkbook and a house, but are we actually friends
• It’s not love that sustains the promise, but the promise that sustains the love
• We don’t fall out of love as much as we fall out of repentance

A place where marriages are not just happy but holy….that is our dream for RefineUs.

What are your thoughts on the video?

This week at Leading and Loving It we’ve had the awesome opportunity to hear from some amazing women at the JustONE Virtual Conference about expectations we as pastors wives place on ourselves. Not only did I learn a lot, I felt challenged to ask myself several hard questions. But one question in particular kept coming to mind:

What expectations do I place on myself?

The crazy thing is the more I thought about this question the more I kept thinking of my husband, Justin. Holly Furtick spoke on “not ridding your husbands spiritual coattails” so maybe that’s why Justin keeps coming to mind. This conference after all is about me… right? So why do I keep coming back to him? But that’s just it; my first thought was of Justin because often times I expect things from him in ways God never designed him to give. This is the gray area of being led spiritually by our husbands and not living vicariously through them.

I’m writing at Leading and Loving It today. Click here to read the rest of the post:

This weekend was insane.

I had to be in Atlanta on Friday at 8:00 am for a meeting. Trish spent the day working on a chapter of our book. We met at 8:30 PM Friday night at Micah’s school, after I drove for 4 hours back from Atlanta. I moved my suitcase from my car to our van and we left for Indianapolis. We decided to drive 5 hours to Indy to spend 8 hours experiencing Superbowl XLVI and then drive 5 hours back to Nashville.

This was not a rational thought. There was nothing rational about driving 10 hours to spend 8 hours in Indianapolis.

It was nuts and that was the point.

I want to do things with my kids that are irrational at times.

We bought tickets to the NFL Experience and cheered each other on as we tried to kick a field goal. We went out for a pass. We did the 40 yard dash. We saw the city that has been home to us for most of my kids life transformed into the epicenter of awesome for the stinking Superbowl! It was amazing!!

As a parent, I say, “no” more than I say, “yes”. It is my responsibility to be rational.

Memories aren’t usually made by being rational.

It’s why this summer when Micah and I were in Florida and he said to me, “I really wish we could be with mom in Michigan tomorrow for my birthday, we drove 17 hours through the night to surprise Trisha at church camp. Not because it made sense, but because we made a memory.

Sometimes the best thing you can do as a parent is say, “Yes.” Yes to something crazy. Yes to something impractical. Yes to a road trip. Yes to building a fort in the living room. Yes to sleeping outside. Yes to something that seems irrational and doesn’t make sense.

We won’t be remembered for how much we made sense, but how often we made memories.

Here is the video of us juking Troy Polamalu:

Superbowl in Indy from RefineUs Ministries on Vimeo.

In 1998 Trisha and I moved from Saint Charles, Illinois to Kokomo, Indiana. This move, in my mind would be the move that made everything better. Our son Micah was two years old, Trisha was pregnant with Elijah, and our marriage of three years wasn’t going how either of us envisioned it would go. This move was going to be special because we were going to be moving from a $800 per month, 800 sq. ft apartment to a $525 per month, 1200 sq. ft house that we were buying! We were buying our first house.

In my mind, this would solve everything. Our house had a yard, it had neighbors, it had privacy, it had sidewalks, it had space. We were going to own it. I was convinced that this house would fix Trish. This house would solve our problems; this would would reduce the frequency of our arguments. This house would cover all of the things we disagreed about.

I soon came to realize that our first house didn’t fix it.

The truth is that we can never expect an external thing to fix internal problems. That just won’t happen.

So often when people are having marriage problems, they have this belief that if we just had this or if we just accomplished that or if we just got this or just moved there, then the problems in our relationship will go away or be solved. Our marriage will be better when:

• I get that promotion
• We get out of debt
• We move to a bigger house
• I finish my degree
• We make more money
• We move closer to “home”
• We have a baby

Babies are great. But a baby won’t fix it. A baby won’t fix the distance you feel. A baby won’t restore trust when trust has been broken. A baby won’t help you be more honest with each other. A baby won’t bring you closer spiritually. A baby won’t help you forgive. A baby won’t cause him to pursue you more. A baby won’t fix it.

We can’t count on something external, whatever that something is, to fix an internal problem.

There are two things that will fix what is wrong with your marriage.

• Pursuing God
• Pursuing your spouse

When you do those two things, you allow what is broken in your heart, in your relationship, in your soul to begin to find healing. You begin to move closer to God and closer to your spouse and in that process you begin to address the issues that you have rather than counting on a new house or a job promotion to cover those issues up.

A baby won’t fix it. But your pursuit of God and your spouse can.