Tensing up his whole body and shaking and turning red…on purpose

Saying “Chee”

What are you?!

But I guess he fits in with the rest of the family:

Brennan’s body looks enormous here

Ryan with the four disgusting pieces of blanket he has left

Princess Kathryn playing Princess Peach on Mario Kart

Some days it’s a loony bin around here.

But when we get the kids together, they actually sit still and smile for a few seconds:

Then they’re off, scattering in four different directions. And we realize that this is the season of life we’re in – boisterous, loud, clutter-overrun, and full of personalities and life. We’ll miss it when it’s time to let them go.

When I started this blog in 2007, I never imagined that one day it would actually be going here, giving my readers practical tips for sex in marriage! Thank goodness I’m not the one writing this post, because you all know you really don’t want to think about Nate and me having sex. I asked my good friend, Jodi Stilp, to share about this very important topic as a follow-up to Monday’s Forsaking All Others post. Jodi and I are longtime friends from Illinois, and I’ve always admired her. She takes the serious things seriously, the light things lightly, and she lives her life with a purposefulness and fierceness that are an example to many. She’s also hilarious and is one of the most transparent, self-deprecating, and open people I know. In the past couple of years, Jodi has really found her groove as a writer, and she blogs about faith, marriage, parenting, and her crazy life over at Jodi’s Journal. It’s an honor to have her wisdom here today.

God has an uncanny way of using our weaknesses to bring Him glory.  The fact that Faith asked me to write a post on practical tips for a healthy sex life in marriage is testimony to that fact.

When my husband and I got married, I assumed our sexual love would be like what I’d seen in the movies – easy and passionate with no learning curve.  I was completely disillusioned when I realized sexual love is an art.  The more it’s honed and practiced, the more beautiful and intricate it becomes. The problem was I had so many questions and no idea where to go for the answers.  The few people I was brave enough to broach the subject with were so uncomfortable talking about sex, that I incorrectly presumed my problems and questions were exclusive to me.  I lived in this state of uneducated discontentment for way too long.

It wasn’t until I understood God’s heart for sexual love that I found freedom to embrace it.  God used a candid friend, books, and His Word to help me begin to uncover the treasures of sexual love in marriage.  Here are a few things I learned along the way.

1. Do Your Homework.  You wouldn’t go into a drivers’ test without getting the manual and studying.  Don’t go into marriage without doing your homework on sex. To be clear – I believe that sex as God designed it functions beautifully within the boundaries of marriage, so I am NOT advocating “studying” your future spouse through physical touch and sex before marriage. What I am saying is do some research before you get married.  Discover God’s heart for sexual love in marriage.  Embrace realistic expectations for a honeymooning couple embarking on a sexual journey.  Two books that were incredibly helpful in my research are Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage by Kevin Leman and Intimate Issues – 21 Questions Christian Woman Ask About Sex by Lorraine Pintus and Linda Dillow.  I make a habit of giving every new bride a copy of both.

2. Understand God’s Heart.  Your sexual intimacy and your enjoyment of it will grow leaps and bounds when you understand God’s heart for sexual love.  Study the book of Song of Solomon in the Bible.  It’s a detailed how-to guide for married lovers.  Woven through this explicit and romantic story is God’s design for sexual love.  He created man.  He created woman.  He created sex.  He called all these things good.  God says, “Drink, drink deep your fill O lovers.”   (Song of Songs 5:1)  Can you imagine how it breaks His heart when He sees His gift of sexual love in marriage being ignored, wasted, or given to someone else?  Don’t let fear or guilt prevent you from opening this gift.  Tear off the wrapping paper and spend the rest of your married life enjoying the gift inside.

3. Ask For Help.  If studying on your own isn’t providing the answers you need, ask for help.  Talk to a trusted friend or seek professional counseling.  It’s better to get help than to waste years of your life stuck in a rut.

4. Just Do It.  If you’re married, just do it.  Make love to your spouse.  Regularly.  Sex isn’t just fun.  It’s commanded by God.  I Corinthians chapter 7 tells us our bodies belong to our spouses.  The only reason to abstain from sexual love is “by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayer.”  Sex is addictive.  The more you make love, the more you want to make love.  The reverse is true too.  The longer the span between love making sessions, the less you desire it.  So what are you waiting for?  Just do it.

5. Don’t Use Sex to Manipulate.  Ladies – sex is a physical need for your husband.  If he is choosing to honor his marriage vows, the only place he can get that need met is from you.  What an honor that your husband is looking to you to fulfill such an intimate need!  Please don’t withhold sex or use it to manipulate your husband into doing the dishes, helping with the kids, or reading your mind to fulfill some vague, unmet need.  Give to him freely and joyfully.  Receive from him freely and joyfully.   And don’t use sex to manipulate.

6. Help Out.  Men – your wife meets needs ALL.DAY.LONG.  The fastest way to kill your chances of getting lucky is to come home from work, plop down on the couch, turn the TV on, expect a hot meal and ignore your kids.  Super Sexy to your wife is you offering to clean up the dinner dishes and put the kids to bed so she can take a hot bath and unwind.  Do this and I can guarantee you’ll get lucky once your little people are sawing zzz’s.

7. Take Care of Yourself.  Eat healthy.  Exercise.  Get some sleep.  Take care of your body and you just might want to show it off.

8. Re-think Your Definition of Beauty.  Your spouse defines beauty.  If you married a long-haired, skinny man you love long-haired and skinny.  If he’s now bald and chubby, your tastes are changing.  Don’t waste time fantasizing about someone who isn’t your spouse.  Embrace the spouse you have and let him/her define beauty to you.

9. Scrub a Dub Dub.  You can have sex dirty and stinky, but it sure is more enjoyable when you’ve scrubbed and cleaned your bodies beforehand.  And don’t forget your teeth!  Bad breath is a big turnoff.  Why not take a bath together and enjoy intimate conversation?  Before you know it, you’ll be intimately conversing with your newly cleaned bodies.

10. Hurricane or Oasis?  What is the state of your master bedroom?  Does it look like a hurricane ripped through it with piles of dirty clothes, stacks of books, and unfinished projects?  Do your kids and pets crawl in bed with you every night?  If so, reclaim your room and make it an oasis.  Get rid of the clutter, projects, and laundry.  Kick your pets and kids out.  How can you have a thriving sex life with a two-year-old and a cat in your bed?  Paint the walls a soothing color, buy some candles, turn on your iPod and VOILA!  You have yourself a bedroom oasis just waiting to be enjoyed.

11. Schedule It.  We make time for what is important to us.  We schedule play dates, volunteering at school, meetings at work, and coffee with friends.  Why not schedule sex? This is actually a romantic way to show your spouse what a high priority he/she is.  When sex is on the schedule it gives you all day to fantasize and anticipate your time together.  For young moms, scheduling sex allows you to reserve the mental and physical energy for your husband that making love requires. So get out that calendar and start scheduling.

12. Communicate Your Needs.  We all have sexual needs.  Your spouse doesn’t know what yours are unless you tell him/her.  So talk about it. What areas do you love about your sex life?  What don’t you like? Do you have sexual needs that aren’t being met? How frequently do you want to make love?  Is there anything new you want to try?  Once you talk about it, get busy practicing!

13. Enjoy it.  Enjoying sex is not usually an issue most men struggle with.  But we women sometimes have to remind ourselves that sex is not just another need that has to be met.  Sex is fun!  Change the way you think about sex.  Anticipate it. Celebrate that you are the only person in the entire world who can meet this need for your mate.  And then enjoy it.

My prayer for you is that you would be like the wife in Song of Songs (7:13) who says to her husband, “At our door is every delicacy, both new and old, that I have stored up for you my lover.”  I pray that as you explore the delicacies of this beautiful gift of sexual love, you will hear God saying, “It is good.”

Recently I pulled out my diaries from 1993 through 1995 and read through them. My overarching thought was, “Wow, I was such a dork!” During freshman year in college, my friends and I had nicknames for all of the cute boys, and at night we’d go through our day and tell each other which of the boys we saw. And then I’d write it all down in my diary, what boy paid me some attention or made me laugh. I see now that I was a crazy flirt, and seriously just loved me my cute white boys at Wheaton. (If you were one of these cute white boys, I hope I did not alarm you. I alarm myself just reading through my diaries.)

Throughout the rest of college, I mellowed out and started to develop solid friendships with guys. I valued my guy friends, not just as givers of attention, but as true friends, sounding boards, and encouragers in the faith. Nate, of course, I valued and liked, then loved, the most.

When we got married, “forsaking all others” seemed like a no-brainer. Of course I wouldn’t sleep with anyone else, and of course I wouldn’t get emotionally involved with anyone else.

So I didn’t expect to struggle with keeping my thoughts pure toward other guys. Through the years, there were times when I valued and respected one of our friends, and if he was also cute and funny, it was too easy to let my thoughts and actions wander away from Nate, even just a little bit. Mental and emotional energy that should have been directed toward my husband got directed toward other men. This was not a reflection on Nate, of course, it was a reflection of how undisciplined and unwise I could (and can) be in my thoughts.

The most serious thing happened a while ago. There was a family we spent a lot of time with, and the other dad was cute and smart and he made us laugh a ton. I started thinking about him more, and I looked forward to those times that our family would hang out with his family. And when we did hang out, I found myself directing a lot of my conversation and attention to him. If you had examined my thought life, you would’ve seen that my heart was not pure toward him, that I was allowing myself to grow physically attracted to him, and that my thoughts were headed down a slippery slope.

The Lord gave me a vivid dream one night that confronted me with the dangerous ground I was treading. In this dream, my impure thoughts toward our friend were carried to their logical conclusion. I then dreamed that I had to go to his wife, my good friend, and apologize for sleeping with her husband, knowing that our relationship was ruined and would never be the same. Immediately after that, I dreamed I was walking on a dirt road. It was covered with rocks and there were snakes everywhere, disgusting snakes sliding along over my feet and in front of me as far as I could see. I tried to walk down the path but simply couldn’t; it was a road that led nowhere.

I woke up shaken up, but also praising God that He cared so much that He would send such a vivid dream of warning, that I HAD TO stop these impure thoughts. If I didn’t, I would eventually take action on them and do something that would ruin relationships and destroy my marriage. Even though my actions currently were moderately innocent, the path I was on, in allowing my attraction to this man to grow, was a dangerous path that led nowhere. It was a crazy dream, and served to instruct me how important it was to forsake all others except for Nate, even in my head.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how adultery happens way before the actual factual sexual act occurs, and what it means to honor my husband and forsake all others. I’d like to share the top five things the Lord has been teaching me in this area:

1. Think 50. Nate and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage in 2049, and I think about that day often. The goal is that on that day we can say we’ve been faithful to each other and that we’re more in love than ever. What will it take to make that happen, though? 50 years of strong marriage doesn’t just happen overnight, so I need to remember that it’s the choices I make daily that build up our marriage over time.

2. Say no to bunny trails. There will always be attractive, smart, and funny people around that I value. And that’s OK, I can appreciate and thank God that someone else is pleasant to look at (i.e., Brad Pitt) or that someone else seems like a great guy. There will also be times when our home life seems like drudgery, and it would be easy to fantasize and think that life with one of these other guys might be more exciting. However, I can’t follow these bunny trails. Staying faithful to Nate means that I slam the door on thoughts like I wonder what it would be like to kiss this guy or I wonder what it would be like to be married to so-and-so and not entertain them at all. Potential bunny trails also lose their power when I tell Nate that I think a certain friend is cool or if I’m struggling with impure thoughts. That way I don’t have a secret thought life.

3. Tell yourself, “I’ve made my choice and I’m sticking with it.” Nate summed it up one day by saying these wise words. Basically, he chose to marry me 12 years ago and he’s going to stick with that choice. He added that he’s not settling for me nor resigning himself to be with me the rest of his life, but that “sticking with it” is a joyful thing. Saying no to everyone else and yes to each other, daily, means that over a long period of time we get to know each other completely, learn how to give and accept unconditional love even when we don’t feel like it, experience the lows and highs of parenting together, and grow in sexual intimacy. Our marriage, while sometimes very hard, is a safe and life-giving place because we’re learning what it means to actively stick with it.

4. Invite in a few select friends. The Bible says, “He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20). Marriage is a big and important enterprise, and we’re better off when we invite in a few trusted friends who can share about their own marriage journeys, listen to us, spot red flags a mile away, and challenge us to love our spouses better. Both Nate and I have a few of these wise friends, and our marriage is much stronger for it.

5. Press in. This is a lesson we’re learning every day. When marriage is hard and we’re fighting about something, we still need to “press in” to each other and hang in there while we work things out and regain emotional closeness. When parenting feels tedious and seriously unsexy, we still need to press in to each other and regroup instead of fantasizing about a different life. Our weekly date day has been a great tool: it’s a good time to re-calibrate, re-connect, and keep building memories that involve just the two of us. Knowing that we’ve set aside a couple of hours to give each other our best energy and focus, instead of our emotional leftovers, gives us both something to look forward to each week.

To sum up, marriage calls all of us to higher things – selflessly putting our spouses’ needs and desires above our own, disciplining our thoughts and our actions so that we’re emotionally and sexually faithful, and committing to foster our oneness so that we truly do life together. It’s hard, but it’s an awesome adventure that leaves both husband and wife better than each of us would be alone. Let’s do it. And we’ll be at your 50th anniversary party if you’ll come to ours.

Next up: taking care of your sexual relationship is also a very important way of keeping your marriage strong, and my friend Jodi Stilp will be sharing her “13 Practical Tips for Sexual Love in Marriage.” Can’t wait for you to see it!

Brennan turns 9 in March, and yesterday he presented me with his birthday wish list:

- Cars 2 Wii Game
- Nintendo 3DS
- Lego Police Station
- Lego Fire Station
- MarioKart for DS
- Interactive Globe
- Lego Airplane
- iPod
- Computer
- Lamp
- Binoculars
- Lego Darth Maul Ship
- 80€ cash
- Lego Death Star
- Star Wars Lego Minifigures

( “Turn page over,” it said here. “You mean there’s MORE?” I said to him.)

- Police and Robbers Lego Minifigures
- Star Wars III DS or Wii Game
- Small Notebook
- New Soccer Ball
- Snorkel
- Barcelona or España Jersey
- Cars 2 Cars
- Cars 2 DVD Movie
- Lego City Legos
- Cars 2 Novella
- Webkinz Pet
- iPhone
- iPad
- Watch
- Camera

Wow. Just….wow. Looks like we need to do a much better job teaching him how to be content. But can we at least be proud that he’s showing such a strong interest in electronics already…?

I am not current enough, or cool enough to choose only from albums released in 2011, but these are the five best albums I discovered last year.

5. Clouds Echo in Blue: Clouds Echo in Blue

Derri Daugherty from The Choir (one of my (many) favorite bands) with a solo project of wonderful and wonderfully relaxing instrumental music.  I gifted this album to my sister, and while she was listening to it one day, my mother apparently asked her when the song would begin.  So, while I recognize that this album may not be for everybody, I love the dreamy music he has created.

4. Stuart Duncan, Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, Yo-Yo Ma: The Goat Rodeo Sessions

A hybrid bluegrass-classical exploration from Stuart Duncan, Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer.  This is simply excellent and beautiful.  I just love hearing gifted musicians making great music.

3. Sleeping at Last: Yearbook – November

This one-man band released a 3-song EP for 12 straight months.  While much of Ryan O’Neal’s music is excellent, this particular EP from November makes the list pretty much based on one song I simply love.  I love the music, the poetry of the lyrics, and the meaning of the song “Emphasis.”  I just can’t get enough.

2. Andrew Peterson: The Far Country

OK – so this one was released in 2005.  I’m not sure why I had to wait until 2011 to discover it, because it is excellent.  I hear echoes of Rich Mullins’ meaningful songwriting in Andrew’s music.  He writes with a combination of faith and wonder that is contagious.  I love great Christian art, and on this album Andrew is creating just that.  His music moves me in ways that most artists don’t.  If you haven’t yet discovered Andrew Peterson, I highly recommend this album as a great place to start.

1. Josh Garrels: Love & War & The Sea In Between

This album is top of the list as one of the best out-of-nowhere completely-blew-me-away-with-how-good-it-is albums I’ve come across for a while.  Within a few days I had seen two people from different walks of life give him high praise on Facebook, and he was featured on www.noisetrade.com (if you haven’t checked out Noisetrade, you need to.  I discovered both Andrew Peterson and Josh Garrels’ albums on Noisetrade, and you can still get both albums there at a price of your choosing – including for free. But I assure you that each album is worth giving the artists a tip for).

This album is so good it’s hard for me to put it into words.  I clearly have a soft spot for Christian artists – 4 out of 5 of the artists on this list might be labeled as Christian.  I find that funny as I would guess that less than 50% of the music I acquire and listen to is classified as ‘Christian’.  But I think that it does show that I form a special connection to music created by Christians who are excellent in both musical skill and artistic expression.  Josh Garrels embodies this.  His musicianship is fantastic – his songs and sounds vary, and don’t get tiring.  His lyrics are artistic and expressive.  And none of it is formulaic.  The album is chock full of great songs, but my clear favorite is “Ulysses.”  And I really, really LOVE it:

“Ulysses” – Josh Garrels 2010 from Josh Garrels on Vimeo.

Do yourself a favor and go find some Josh Garrels to listen to.

Honorable Mentions:

Coldplay – I love me some Coldplay.  Mylo Xyloto may not be groundbreaking, but it’s still really good.  Love the track “Charlie Brown.”

The Hawk in Paris - Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay released a side project with another guy or two.  It’s another 3-song EP, and two of the three songs are fantastically catchy and pleasing.

The Civil Wars – Seemingly everyone loved The Civil Wars in 2011.  And it’s because they are really arresting and engaging.  It’s good music.

UPDATE: Because I didn’t get the digital booklet when I downloaded Josh Garrels’ album off of Noisetrade, I never knew that our friends, Tim and Laurie Thornton of The Blackthorn Project, played strings on it. Tim and Laurie put out great music of their own and are well worth a listen, especially the songs “Reckless” and “Mud Song” on their latest album.