We tend to have a few core beliefs that guide our life. Hopefully, among them are the beliefs that God loves you, that Jesus died for you, and that trusting in Him is the way to a better life, even if that better life isn’t always clear in the moment. I certainly believe all that, but I also believe that life is hard. That is, we live in a broken world, so you can’t expect unicorns and rainbows all the time. (Actually, you can’t expect unicorns any time.)
That brokenness is why so many struggle with discovering and maintaining true sexual intimacy in marriage, and why I have for 12 years written and spoken about those challenges. And yet, one of the problems is that we often complicate the answers.
What if having mutually satisfying sexual intimacy is simpler than we think?
What if having mutually satisfying sexual intimacy is simpler than we think? via @hotholyhumorous
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An Example from My Own Life
Last fall, my husband and I sold the house where we raised our kids from elementary age to adulthood. We immediately ordered a house to be built (downsized, but new) and were told that would involve 12–14 months of waiting. We used that time to live near a sibling of mine, to visit France and England this summer, and to stay with my gracious son and daughter-in-law. But while we should be moving in about now, we were recently informed that we won’t be in our house before Christmas. To say that I’m struggling with how long we’ve been displaced would be an understatement.
But of course, this is the sort of scenario that falls into the first line of the Serenity Prayer:
Despite citing that prayer to myself plenty, having written about stress quite a few times (like here, here, and here), and repeatedly discussing the importance of self-care on our podcast for wives, I didn’t do what I needed to deal with the stressors in my life. Not merely being displaced, but work challenges, health concerns, and relationship tensions. It all came to a head with a bout of heart palpitations that made me check my blood pressure and see a number I hadn’t seen before.
I’m okay, but it was a wakeup call. Though, to be fair, it was more like an alarm I had kept snoozing—not really addressing what I needed to address. EVEN THOUGH I KNEW BETTER!
It wasn’t that I don’t know how to manage my time, health, and stress better. I just didn’t do it because…it’s not easy.
Revisiting the Serenity Prayer, I had neglected the parts about having courage and wisdom.
Two Kinds of Difficulty
You see, there are two kinds of difficulty:
- Difficult to understand
- Difficult to do
Sometimes we confuse difficult to do with difficult to understand. For instance, we know that we will lose weight if we burn more calories than we consume. Easy, right? Easy to understand, but much, much harder to do.
Another example is understanding that one shouldn’t always go for the sexual innuendo joke, but it’s hard. It’s so hard. (Sorry, not sorry.)
The way to a better sex life is really not that difficult to understand. But it’s quite difficult to do. Because it’s one thing to mentally grasp what a good sex life should look like and another thing altogether to put forth the committed effort to reach that goal. And then, to sustain that effort over the long course of a marriage.
Is Mutually Satisfying Sexual Intimacy Simple or Difficult? "The way to a better sex life is really not that difficult to understand. But it's quite difficult to do." via @hotholyhumorous
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None of us will get it right all the time! Not one. And this broken world is often pushing back against our best efforts. Which is why we need (1) a Savior, and (2) reminders, encouragement, accountability, courage, and wisdom.
Getting Back to Basics
A student once asked theologian Karl Barth if he could sum up his whole life’s work in a sentence, and Barth presumably answered, “Yes, I can. ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'” That’s getting back to basics.
But Jesus got there first by saying:
Wait, that’s it? That sums it up? Why, then, are there over 31,000 other verses in the Bible?!
Because while the tenets of our faith are fairly simple to understand, they are much more difficult to apply and consistently do. We live in a broken world, and so much pushes back against doing the right and righteous thing.
What are the basics of having a great sex life? How could that be summed up? Well, probably with the same verse, but here are a few key tenets:
- Embrace that God designed sex to be a blessing in marriage
- Address history, teachings, and health challenges that keep you from having good sex
- Pursue healthy personal behaviors that honor your own body and your spouse
- Practice all four Greek loves in your marital intimacy: friendship, familial, erotic, and agape (self-sacrificial, other’s wellbeing love)
If you both do all that consistently, you’ll never need to hear from me again.
It’s Not That Simple
But it’s not that simple. Understanding the basics doesn’t mean you know how to apply them in all circumstances. Moreover, these tenets are very difficult to live out day after day, year after year, challenge after challenge. We need reminders, encouragement, accountability, courage, and wisdom.
I pray that whatever wisdom I provide is God working through me, but I can’t give you the wherewithal to make it happen. That’s entirely up to you and God’s power, the same power that resurrected Christ from the dead (see Ephesians 1:18-21). It’s difficult to do, but “with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37).
We can start, though, with what we do know, with inviting God to exert that power and authority in our life, with returning again and again to what love demands. Even that is simple to understand, difficult to do.
The post Is Mutually Satisfying Sexual Intimacy Simple or Difficult? appeared first on Hot, Holy & Humorous.
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