The Absence of Questions

This past weekend, Trisha and I had the honor of leading about 70 couples through our Refine Our Marriage seminar. It was an honor to share our journey and what God has taught us over the past six years. Looking back on the weekend, I really feel like God showed up in some incredible ways.

At the end of each of our seminars, we like to leave some time for Q&A. We hand out index cards before the last session and allow people to anonymously ask questions that they have about the content or about anything that they may be struggling with. There were about 30 questions that were asked…here are a few of them.

• How did you overcome your pornography addiction? What advice would you give to someone that struggles with pornography?
• If avoiding conflict is a part of your personality, is it possible to change who you are so you can handle conflict better?
• How do you change behavior patterns that you learned as a child so you don’t repeat those same destructive patterns with your own family?
• How do you handle the rejection you experience when you want to have sex, but your spouse doesn’t?
• What do you do when you have a higher sexual desire than your spouse does, and they seem disinterested and even offended that you desire sex?
• What do you do when sexual intimacy seems disgusting, unenjoyable and is the last thing you want to experience?
• How do you teach your kids about sexual temptation, lust, pornography and protect them from experiencing the same thing I experienced as a kid?
• My husband and I have been married 5 years and I want to start having children and he has no desire to have kids…what do we do?
• What do you do when the person you know you are supposed to forgive keeps hurting you over and over again?

I could go on and on with some very deep, heart-felt and heart-breaking questions. We did our best to answer these questions and point people to professional counselors that could more adequately unpack the root of the issues behind these questions.

All day yesterday this thought kept coming to my mind: Why don’t we have a place for people to ask these questions more often? What have we done in our culture and in our churches where men and women live alone with question after question and feel like they have no one they can feel safe enough to share their confusion or frustrations with?

It makes me sad that we don’t talk about these things in our homes; we don’t offer deep level conversations in our churches; we aren’t talking about these things with our friends. There is an absence of questions that continue to plague men and women that desire to have a great marriage, but don’t feel comfortable enough in any environment to be real and honest. It makes me sad. It make me mad. It confuses me.

It makes me realize that while the American church has done a great job in branding itself as a place of authenticity, we still have a long way to go in living authentically.

I’d love to hear from you today.

Do you think The Church has a role in helping people ask these difficult questions?