Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 261

Christian Marriage or Christ-Centered Marriage?

This week, in Revive Your Marriage, we’ve been talking about how to revive your attitude! We started with looking at letting things go, moved into why he won’t meet your needs, and then talked about submission.

Today I thought I’d post this great video I found a few months ago, which encapsulates some of these things. Hope you find it encouraging!

Related posts:

Revive Your Marriage: Revive Your Attitude
Wifey Wednesday: What Does Submission in Marriage Mean?
Are Your Ready to…Revive Your Marriage?

Wifey Wednesday: What Does Submission in Marriage Mean?

It’s Wednesday, the day when we talk marriage! I introduce a post, and then you all can link up your own marriage posts, or comment on what I’ve said!

Today I want to talk about a word that drives many of us around the bend: SUBMISSION. I have to admit that I still shudder sometimes when pastors preach on this, or when the word comes up, because it has so often become the source of angst in so many marriages. What does it mean? Does it mean that women are lesser? That we have to let him make all the decisions? That my needs don’t matter? In many sermons, it has almost sounded like that.

In other words, to many of us “submission” has a negative connontation. Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25), and that doesn’t seem to sound negative. But submission, to many women, is a net negative. Part of that is bad teaching we’ve received on it. Part of it is us chafing at it. But part of it may even go further than that, and that’s what I want to explore today.

I’ve talked about what submission does not mean–it doesn’t mean, for instance, that we put up with abuse. But in that post, we had some great comments about submission, and one woman wrote that she felt really confused by the whole thing. She had a friend who warmed up her husband’s car every morning before work. Should she be doing that if she’s going to submit?

And that’s where I think we come to the crux of the problem. I think what many of us would like is a list of things that we should do that comprise submission, so that we can say, “look! I submit!”. But God doesn’t work that way.

The Old Testament was filled with rules that the Israelites had to follow–everything from what they ate to what fabrics they could use in their clothing. Everything was proscribed. And so it was theoretically possible that if you did all of these things, you could feel righteous.

And many people gravitate towards rules. They don’t like living in that no-man’s land where it’s not actually clear what you’re supposed to do. We’d rather have a list.

Jesus, however, doesn’t operate that way. Do you remember when He’s having the conversation with the lawyer about the greatest commandment?

34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Now, if I were listening to that, I don’t know if I would have been happy with that answer. The Law had specific things you do to get right with God, but how do you “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind”? That’s not easily quantifiable!

And that, I think, is the essential struggle of the Christian life. It’s not about rules; it’s about the heart. It’s about a steady growth of submission and love towards God, which then affects how we act towards others. It’s about steadily being transformed to look like Jesus.

Take this passage from Romans 8:

5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. 7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.

9 You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.

That’s the dichotomy: we’re either controlled by the flesh or by the Spirit. And the flesh is the one with rules; the Spirit is the one with grace.

That’s why I can’t tell you what submission means, because it’s not a list of what to do. It doesn’t mean simply letting him make all the decisions. Lots of women do this, and then they reserve the right to say–or think–”I told you so” afterwards. It doesn’t mean that we don’t ever think about what we need, either, because that’s not healthy, and the Spirit does not ask you to do things which are psychologically or emotionally damaging. He wants you to be a full vessel, not an exhausted or trod upon one.

But He also wants us to love fully, and to think of others fully, and to care about what God is doing in others’ lives, rather than on focusing on what we want. And so to me, submission to our husbands as to the Lord is part of doing that. It’s falling into submission to what God wants to do. It’s learning to love our husbands completely. And it’s not a 10-step list. It’s a matter of the heart.

To tell you the honest truth, I have a great marriage, and I very rarely think about the word submission. What I do think about is, “am I working towards Keith’s best? Am I really caring for him in this situation, or am I pushing my own agenda? Am I showing him love? Am I seeking God in this?” And he tends to think the same way about me (for that I am eternally grateful). But it comes down to understanding that God is not as interested in my happiness as He is in my holiness and obedience. And the more I submit to Him, the more I will find happiness in all areas of my life.

I don’t think that’s a satisfactory answer to many of you, but I’m not sure God meant to give us one. The Bible is not full of easy answers; to almost every question, the Bible’s answer is “dig into the well of the Spirit more. Surrender more to God. Give more to God. Struggle in prayer more.” And I think that’s WHY there aren’t easy answers. God isn’t interested in easy answers as much as He is interested in drawing us to Himself. If we had easy answers we wouldn’t need Him.

So what is submission to your husband, to me? Honestly, I think it’s submission to God. That’s what it all comes down to. As we submit to God and ask Him to make us more like Him, to make us less self-focused, to use as an instrument in our families’ lives, to use us to bless others, we will find ourselves submitting to our husbands more, too. If you aren’t submitting to your husband, then you likely aren’t also submitting to God.

There is no 10-point plan! This will always require wrestling with God, and surrendering more to God. But maybe, after all, that’s the whole point.

Now, what marriage advice do you have for us today? Link up your own marriage post below by putting the URL of the individual post into the linky! Or leave a comment and tell us what you think about submission.

Related posts:

Wifey Wednesday: Submission Doesn’t Mean Lying Over and Taking It
Wifey Wednesday: The Turning Point
Revive Your Marriage: Revive Your Attitude

Why Your Husband Won’t Meet Your Needs

This week at To Love, Honor and Vacuum we’re joining three bloggy friends to talk about how to Revive Your Marriage! And our topic for the week is our attitude.

Yesterday I wrote about how we need to let things go that we can’t change.

But today I want to reprint one of my hardest hitting posts, that I think speaks directly to this. I first wrote this two years ago, but many of you new readers haven’t seen it.

WARNING: It may tick you off.

But please read! Here goes:

About a year or so ago my husband and I were just overwhelmed with busy-ness. I was speaking a lot, and he was working a lot, and we weren’t connecting. Two nights in a row we didn’t make love because I was preoccupied. Then I was away speaking. When I came home it was the middle of the night and we didn’t, either. The next night I was still tired, but neither of us slept well because both of us were feeling that something was wrong in our relationship. The next night we did.

And then he bought me flowers.

Sex flowers.

I got mad. I interpreted it like this: “My husband wants sex too much, so he’ll reward me when we make love, and punish me when we don’t. He’ll be distant when we don’t make love deliberately so that I will start putting out.” And I got really frustrated.

And then it hit me: maybe the reason Keith bought me flowers was simply because he felt closer to me and lovey towards me. I thought what was going through his brain was this:

“I need to manipulate my wife into doing what I want.”

What was really going through his head was this:

“I love my wife. I think I’ll buy her flowers.”

You see, my friends, men are really quite simple. They need two things: respect and sex. Just two things. Respect can be more easily defined as both affirmation and appreciation. When we affirm what they do and show them appreciation, they feel ten feet tall. When we make love to them, we affirm their manhood and they feel loved. And when they feel loved, they tend to feel less antsy, more compassionate, and more eager to keep pleasing us because they feel like the relationship is something they do well. (Now, I know some of you are married to men who don’t WANT to make love, and that’s a different problem. If you’re facing that one, I’d recommend reading this series that I wrote here).

Men tend to want to put in effort in areas they feel they are good at. That’s why if a man feels he’s lousy at marriage he’ll start working more, or playing on the computer more. He retreats to areas of competence. Make your man feel incompetent and irrelevant, and he’ll retreat. It’s as simple as that.

Now, of course, some men are louts, and it doesn’t matter how much we try to please them, they’re going to retreat and be insensitive. Absolutely. But I think the number of honest to goodness natural louts is far fewer than the number of men who currently ACT like louts. I think many men act like louts because that is how they have been treated.

Too many of us have virtually no respect for what a husband really needs, but we have unlimited respect for our own needs. And we’re not only hurting our husbands–we’re hurting ourselves.

Let me talk about another couple that’s been married for 35 years now. I watch them every now and then, and while I know they’re not splitting up, I don’t see a lot of tenderness. She snipes at him and criticizes him every chance she gets, and he bristles and walks out of the room. Every now and then he retaliates, but not often. She isn’t showing him that she appreciates him; she’s showing him that she doesn’t think he’s good enough. He’s always wrong. And it’s no wonder that he doesn’t act tenderly towards her!

If you take that same couple at year one of their marriage instead of year thirty-five, though, and his wife started thanking him for his contribution, and asking about his day, and making love to him with relative frequency, and respecting his opinion, I bet at thirty-five years they’d be a lot more affectionate and a lot more tender.

Men really aren’t complicated. Do those two things: appreciate him and make love frequently, and you’ll likely find that he starts being nicer to the kids. He helps with the dishes. He phones if he’s going to be late. He feels competent and appreciated, and he wants to keep excelling in the family sphere because it’s something he does well. Make him feel like he’s not doing it well, and he will start to wither.

Why can’t we just give to our men this way? Because we don’t work that way. Remember the book “Sex Begins in the Kitchen” by Kevin Leman? I know it was written by a man, because only a man would think the sexual relationship was that straightforward. He’s thinking the way men do, and then reversing the equation. When a man gets his primary needs met, he tends to reach out and start meeting a woman’s needs. So Leman assumes that women act the same way: when we get our need for affection met, and when he starts helping around the house and caring about us, we’ll start to make love more.

It’s not true.

I’ve known many men who are saints at home and their wives aren’t helping at all, because we tend to question men’s motivations. We think either that they’re trying to manipulate us, or we come up with other things they’re doing wrong. Or, perhaps even more likely, we think to ourselves: “I’m glad he cares about me, because I work really hard. I need to take a break now so he can carry more of the load”, and we don’t think of returning the favour much at all.

We women are far too focused on what is “right” and what is “fair“. We’re asking ourselves, how much did he care for the kids today? How much housework did he do? Did he let me talk? Did he care? And if the answer is no in any of these areas, we tend to hold it as our right to pull back from him until he improves.

We don’t tend to feel all lovey dovey towards him when he does something right. We don’t feel ten feet tall when he does the dishes or takes care of the kids. We simply think, “that’s what he should have been doing anyway”.

So the adage, “meet your spouse’s needs, and they’ll meet yours” has much more of a chance of working for women than it does for men. If you put yourself out and really show him appreciation and make love, he will, more than likely, become a different person over time. On the other hand, if he does the same thing, there is no guarantee that you will change, because we don’t work the same way. What he needs is the affirmation that he receives through sex, and so many of us are so focused on being exhausted and not having time that we don’t think that maybe, just maybe, we should consider his needs for a second. In our way of thinking, our husbands often impede on our ability to enjoy our life, what with all their demands, and frankly, they’re far too much like animals, anyway.

And then women wonder why, fifteen years into marriage, their husband seems so distant and so insensitive.

Is it women’s fault if men don’t care about our feelings? If they don’t help with the kids? No, it’s not, because men are morally obligated to do these things anyway, whether or not we return the favour. But here’s the thing: just because you can’t be morally blamed for it does not mean that you could not have taken steps to make your marriage better.

Women, we have it so easy. We honestly have an easier deal with marriage than men do because men are so relatively simple (and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way; we’re just made differently). Give them appreciation and make love, and they will feel tenderly towards us. We, on the other hand, are far more complex, and we’re not easy to figure out. Men actually have it harder.

I know this isn’t popular to say. I know a lot of you are mad at me right now, and thinking what an idiot your husband is, and how I’m blaming you for not having sex with an idiot. I don’t walk in your shoes, and it could be that your husband really is that horrible. But then, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you marry him?

When you were dating, he probably was nice to you, and that was probably because he did feel ten feet tall. You appreciated him. You affirmed him. You “made out” with him and seemed so hot for him! Then you got married and he didn’t feel like he had to woo you, but you also stopped with your affection, too. The difference is that you justify your behaviour; he often doesn’t notice his. And as the months and years pass, your relationship takes on a different dynamic. Maybe the problem is not your husband, but the dynamic of your relationship.

You saw something nice in your husband once. I believe those attractive qualities can come out again. So, please, ladies, even if you don’t believe what I’m saying, can I ask you to suspend your disbelief and try an experiment?

Instead of thinking about how your husband wants sex too much, commit for six weeks (it has to be a long enough period of time) to do the following things:

1. Thank your husband once a day for something (try to make it something different each time)

2. Compliment your husband to your mother, your children, your friends, whatever, within earshot of your husband, every chance you get.

3. Do not nag.

4. Do not give the silent treatment.

5. Make love with relative frequency (say at least 2-3 times a week).

Good Girls Have More Fun!

At the end of six weeks, see if you feel differently towards your husband, and if he is acting differently towards you. I bet you will! Just the act of being nice to him will make you start thinking more nicely about him.

And as you make love more frequently, you will feel closer to him and you’ll feel more goodwill, too. Maybe that’s hard for you because you honestly don’t enjoy sex. If that’s the case, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex has great info in a fun way that can help you turn it around! If you don’t like sex, it’s really worth trying to tackle the problem, because it will help your marriage so much!

I know you may not believe me, but so many marriages would be saved if we women would just learn how to love our men.

Will you try?

No related posts.

How to Keep a Healthy Sex Life with Teens in the House

The problem with teenagers is that they go to bed really late.

And as parents, once you hit that almost-middle-age phase, you start to decide between two possible activities based on which one will get you to sleep the fastest. We like hitting the sack early.

This poses a rather tricky problem when teens naturally stay up until midnight and you want to be in bed by 10. How do you keep love with your husband alive when your kids are night owls?

1. Encourage Regular Activities

When my oldest daughter got her driver’s license, we rejoiced, and not just because now she could be the one running out to get that last minute quart of milk. We rejoiced because now she could be the one to drive her and her sister to youth group. That gave us four hours straight with both kids out of the house every week! It became our date night. We’d go out for dinner–or else cook something simple. We’d watch a movie. And then we’d have time to get affectionate before the kids were home. And we could be as loud as we wanted!

If you have younger children as well as teens, let those younger ones use “youth group night” as their evening a week to watch a special DVD. But snatch that time you do have together, without teens!

2. Enforce the “Be In Your Room” Rule

We have always told our children that they have to be in their rooms by 10:00. They don’t have to sleep, but they do need to be settling in for the night. They need the downtime, and we need the alone time.

3. Turn up the Radio

The teenage years are perfect years for developing a taste for jazz. Or for R&B. Or basically anything that can set a mood but still give you some background noise. If you’re nervous about what they’ll hear, then just make a habit of playing music whenever you’re in your bedroom. If you play it at different times of day, too, they won’t always suspect what you’re doing.



4. Realize that Discovery is Not the Worst Thing in the World

Here’s the hardest step: accept that one day you may “get caught”. My husband remembers his parents retreating to their bedroom in the early evening and locking the door at times. He knew what was going on, and in retrospect he says it made him feel safe. He liked the fact that his parents still wanted each other.

Your kids likely don’t want to be told what you’re doing. But if they happen to suspect it, it really isn’t that bad. It’s only mortifying if you let it be mortifying.

So don’t worry too much about being silent as mice. If they find out what you’re doing, what they’re really discovering is that God created sex to be a beautiful thing in marriage. And given our culture’s negative messages about sex, that’s actually an important lesson to learn.

If your problem is more “getting in the mood” then discovering a good time to have sex, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex can help!

Related posts:

Teaching Your Kids Appropriate/Healthy Relationships with the Opposite Sex
Wifey Wednesday: Married with Teens
The Curse of Low Expectations for Teens

Revive Your Marriage: Revive Your Attitude

Revive Your Marriage Series

It’s time to…Revive Your Marriage! This month I’m joining three bloggy friends, and every Monday we’ll all write our own posts on how you can Revive Your Marriage!

Today our topic is Revive Your Marriage through Reviving Your Attitude!

I have a friend that we’ll call Laura. Laura married her husband Jeff right out of university. Jeff came from a blue collar family, and was the first to pursue higher education among his immediate relatives. He was a hard worker, and Laura loved that about him. He was focused. He was responsible.

When they had children, Laura stopped working to stay at home, because Jeff was now a corporate exec in a multinational company. And Jeff worked. A lot. In fact, he worked at least six days a week, and of those six days, was only home two or three when the children were still awake. Fourteen hour days were par for the course.

Laura spoke with him about this at length when the kids were young, and his response was that he knew the kids were safe with her and thriving, but he needed to put in these hours so that they could reach their dreams, and be able to retire early and give their kids so many great experiences and opportunities. Laura told him that she thought the kids wanted more of him. He replied that this would mean having to leave his job, and there’s no way he’d find another one that would let him be home more at even half the income, so it wasn’t an option.

And this is where Laura made a decision that likely many people would find difficult, if not wrong.

She let it go.

Did she think it was good for the family if Jeff missed out on most of the children’s lives? No. Did she think it hurt the kids? Yes. Would she have been happy at half the salary? Yes. Did she think  his priorities were messed up? Yes.

But she also knew that she wasn’t going to change him, and that she had two choices:

I can be bitter about this and make everyone’s life miserable over it
Or I can accept it and try to give all of us the best life I can within these confines

She chose the latter. She gave her husband over to God, and she started to live her life with gratitude. Instead of resenting the fact that Jeff wasn’t there, she made sure she and the kids had fun. She occasionally even planned vacations without Jeff. And whenever Jeff was home, she made the time fun for him and the kids. And she made sure he knew that she appreciated him for being there. She even vowed to make their sex life great again.

And lo and behold, as the years went by, he started to take a little more initiative to seek out the older kids to do things with them. And the family has fared quite well–so far.

Here’s the thing: many of us in our marriages have one or two things that our husbands do that we find it very difficult to live with. Maybe he works too much. Maybe he’s just really lazy and doesn’t work enough. Maybe he doesn’t help with the kids. Maybe he spends too much time with his mother. Maybe he doesn’t talk to you enough.

I don’t know what it is, but I do know this: If this is not something that you would divorce him over, you need to give it to God and stop letting it make you bitter.

Men thrive on appreciation and respect; when we show that we appreciate them, we empower them, and quite often they want to do more. They tend to thrive in areas of their lives where they get the most positive feedback, which is one reason so many men spend so much time at work.

Appreciation is hard when you can see all the bad choices that he has making that are harming not just him, but also you and the kids. And you know one day he’ll regret it. But you can’t change him. Only God can. And the more bitter you become, the bigger wedge you will build in your marriage.

Some things are so big that we have to take action, like if he’s using porn, or if he never ever makes love to you, or if he’s violent. But other things, even if they really hurt is, we have to let go, because hanging on to them will ultimately more painful and more dangerous than letting go.

God is big enough to hold you, to do battle for you, to change your husband’s heart (and yours). You don’t have to do that. Will you hand over the one or two things that are keeping you from totally loving your husband today? If it’s not something that you would leave over (like adultery, or addiction, or abuse), then you shouldn’t leave him emotionally now, either.

I know this isn’t popular to say. I know a lot of you are mad at me right now, and thinking what an idiot your husband is. I don’t walk in your shoes, and it could be that your husband really is that horrible. But then, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you marry him?

You saw something nice in your husband once. I believe those attractive qualities can come out again if you start accepting him and even pursuing him. So, please, ladies, even if you don’t believe what I’m saying, can I ask you to try today’s challenge?

 

 

Instead of focusing on how he has failed you, commit to just loving and accepting him. Even commit to making love more frequently! As you make love more, you will feel closer to him and you’ll feel more goodwill, too. Maybe that’s hard for you because you honestly don’t enjoy sex. If that’s the case, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex has great info in a fun way that can help you turn it around! If you feel really distant from your husband, sometimes getting a new perspective on sex can start the process of bringing you together again.

Throughout this week I’ll be writing more about how to change our attitude–and on Wednesday I’ll finally write my big post on what I think submission means (since a number of you have been asking lately!) So tune in this week, too!

My three blogging friends have also written on this today, and you can see what they have to say, too!

Courtney from WomenLivingWell, Darlene from TimeWarpWife.com, and Jennifer from UnveiledWife.com have all written awesome posts on prayer! Click on through to see what they have to say.

 

 

 

 

 

And you can have your say, too! Just leave a comment to tell us the struggles you’ve had with prayer, the solutions you’ve found, or how you remind yourself to pray for your husband and encourage him through prayer. And if you blog, you can write a Revive Your Marriage post and link up using the linky below! The same linky appears on all four blogs, so you’ll get even more coverage for your post!

Join us next Monday when we talk about how to “Revive Your Attitude”!

Related posts:

Revive Your Marriage: Revive Your Prayers!
Are Your Ready to…Revive Your Marriage?
The Right Attitude for Improving a Marriage

Reader Question of the Week: Keeping a Schedule

Every weekend I like to throw up a question someone sends in and let you readers have a go at it. This week a reader asks about different schedules and trying to get in sync with her spouse.

The primary purpose of my email is to ask you about making and keeping a schedule.  We’ve been married a little over two years (we’re waiting a few more years before we think about kids) and my husband and I have always been on opposite schedules.  Either I was working evenings and he worked days, or I worked days and he worked overnight, or now he works late evenings and I work early mornings (about 6am to around noon or sometimes later).  Right now, I have to go to bed halfway through his dinner break and I go to work and get back, usually, before he’s awake.  This only gives us a few hours a day together.  I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression and am no longer on medication (for which I am VERY thankful), but one of the things I need to stay level is a schedule.  I’m wondering what advice you could give me about have some sort of schedule so my husband and I can feel more in sync.

What advice would you give to help this couple?

Don’t forget: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex makes a great gift for any woman!

Related posts:

Reader Question of the Week: What About Menopause?
Reader Question of the Week: Is it Trust or Accountability?
Reader Question of the Week: Hygiene Helps

Reader Question of the Week:

Every weekend I like to throw up a question someone sends in and let you readers have a go at it. This week a reader asks about different schedules and trying to get in sync with her spouse.

The primary purpose of my email is to ask you about making and keeping a schedule.  We’ve been married a little over two years (we’re waiting a few more years before we think about kids) and my husband and I have always been on opposite schedules.  Either I was working evenings and he worked days, or I worked days and he worked overnight, or now he works late evenings and I work early mornings (about 6am to around noon or sometimes later).  Right now, I have to go to bed halfway through his dinner break and I go to work and get back, usually, before he’s awake.  This only gives us a few hours a day together.  I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression and am no longer on medication (for which I am VERY thankful), but one of the things I need to stay level is a schedule.  I’m wondering what advice you could give me about have some sort of schedule so my husband and I can feel more in sync.

What advice would you give to help this couple?

Don’t forget: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex makes a great gift for any woman!

Related posts:

Reader Question of the Week: What About Menopause?
Reader Question of the Week: Is it Trust or Accountability?
Reader Question of the Week: Hygiene Helps

One Size Will Never Fit All Students

Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. This week’s column is about how we do school and opportunities that abound in our age.

When I was young I used a rotary dial phone. I had rabbit ears on my TV and bellbottoms on my jeans. And I went to a neighbourhood school from 9:00 until 3:15 everyday, sharing my teacher with dozens of other kids. Some things have changed, but others have stayed exactly the same.

When it comes to school, is this really the best we can do? We are living through an internet revolution, taking the world by storm—but leaving schools virtually untouched.

Yet there are pockets of change. Take the Virtual Learning Centre, administered by the Trillium Lakelands school board for the Ministry of Education. They offer online high school courses for any Ontario students. My two daughters, whom we have homeschooled since grade one, took several VLC courses. In grade 9 and 10 Science they had two hours of lectures every week, assignments to do on their own, and online drop ins with their teacher if they were having trouble. No more sitting through 90 minutes a day of Science class when the same material can be learned much more quickly.

This year, the Ministry of Education has also launched “Open School”, where students can start a credit at any time and work at their own pace. Work really fast, and you can earn a full credit in just a few weeks. Sure beats a semester of high school English classes listening to your fellow students butcher Shakespeare as they read Romeo and Juliet out loud.

Then there’s Athabasca University. Run out of Alberta, it’s an open university admitting anyone who is at least sixteen, regardless of educational background. My girls will both start university at sixteen, complete their first year online, and then transfer to a “regular” university for second year. For students who are bored or bullied in traditional schools, but who are independent learners, this is an awesome escape hatch.

But online resources can also benefit traditional schools, if schools are open to using it. After all, school teachers do not have a monopoly on the gift of teaching, and often the best teachers are found outside of the traditional classroom. Take the Khan Academy, an online video sensation launched by a young man who just wanted to help his relatives in India with their math homework. He started recording 15-minute videos of himself explaining a Calculus concept, and the videos went viral. Now he has thousands of videos covering everything from Economics to Biology. And they’re free.

Some enterprising American schools are tapping in to this. Instead of teaching kids at school, and assigning homework to complete at home, they “flip” school, assigning videos to watch at home, and then assignments to complete during class time, so the teacher can help students one-on-one with problems. A child can progress through multiple grade levels in one year using this method, if they’re fast learners. And the pace can be slowed for those who need to solidify the information.

Not everybody appreciates Khan’s teaching, but that’s okay. What Khan showed is that you can take the best teachers, record them teaching, and then use that to teach kids. Brilliant teachers are difficult to find; let’s expose our kids to the best, and then use teachers as facilitators, tailoring their approaches to what individual students actually need.

Unfortunately, as wonderful as these innovations are, they’re not very widespread. Too many people have a vested interest in keeping schools exactly as they are: expensive, inflexible, one-size-fits-all entitites. Thus, most of the students benefiting from the technological revolution are those, like my children, who have the luxury of parents who can supervise during the day. What about everyone else?

One size does not fit all, and now, with the internet, it doesn’t have to. It’s time for some radical rethinking about how we do school. Some students will always need the structured, four walls approach. But not everybody does. And surely, with all the technology we have available, we don’t need to be doing school the same way they did when my parents were children. Do we?

Don’t miss a Reality Check! Sign up to receive it FREE in your inbox every week! Subscribers, sign up HERE.

Related posts:

I Have an Idea–Let’s Do What Works!
Problem Kids, Problem Schools
What Makes a Kid Terrific

Top Ten Posts for August

I so appreciate all my faithful readers! It’s been fun getting to know many of you through the comments and the Facebook Page. But I’d also like to welcome my new readers, and point out some posts that you may not have seen yet. July and August were my biggest months yet, with 300,000 visitors each month! That’s awesome! So if you’re relatively new, take a look and see if you’ve read these posts. And if you’re a regular, but you were on vacation in August like I was, you may have missed some of these.

Now, often my top posts are older ones that get “pinned” a lot. So I’ll do the top 5 posts by traffic last month, regardless of when they were written, and the top 5 posts that were actually written in August. Make sure you didn’t miss any of these good ones!

First, the new ones:

Top 5 Posts Written in August

1. Wifey Wednesday: Stop the Urge to Correct Him! A great guest post that made many women say, “Ouch!”

2. Sex Should be Mutual. A rather controversial post about how sex should have give and take–and thus a husband should recognize and be okay with occasional times when a woman just can’t.

3. Submission Doesn’t Mean Lying Over and Taking It. My post about submission, abuse, and Debi Pearl’s book. I’m actually surprised this one didn’t rank higher, but I think it’s because the post was right at the end of the month, and so the traffic from the few days after doesn’t count because it was in September!

4. Reader Question: Can You Get Over Adultery? Great thoughts from you great readers!

5. Is Honesty Always the Best Policy? Great comments on this one, too, concerning whether it’s good to confess absolutely everything to your husband.

Now, the overall top 5:

Top 5 Posts from August

1. 16 Ways to Flirt with Your Husband. I do love this post, and apparently other people do, too!

2. The 50 Most Important Bible Verses to Memorize. If you’ve always wanted to memorize Scripture, here’s a great place to start. And now that the new school year has started, why don’t you try to begin a new habit now?

3. 29 Days to Great Sex: The Act of Marriage. It’s Day One of the 29 Days to Great Sex! If you haven’t worked through it with your husband, why not start now? And great news for those of you who already worked through 29 Days to Great Sex: I’m launching an ebook version of it at the end of September, with more challenges, and more for HIM, too!

4. How to Have an Orgasm. Okay, this one isn’t pinned as much (people don’t like to share it), but it’s still really popular!

5. 14 Ways to Play as a Couple. Lots of fun ideas here to add laughter into your marriage!

There you go! My top 10 posts from last month. If you particularly like any of these, share one on Facebook or Pinterest for me? Thanks!

Related posts:

Top Ten Posts for July
Top Ten Posts for June
Top Posts for October

Wifey Wednesday: Getting Over Your Husband’s Sexual Past

It’s Wednesday, the day when we talk marriage! I introduce a topic, and then you can all comment on it, or link up a post of your own that talks about marriage to encourage the rest of us!

Today I want to talk about something I get asked quite a bit: how do you stop doubting yourself when your husband has had quite the sexual past? Do you feel jealous of your husband’s former lovers?

Now, it used to be that this wasn’t the topic for polite conversation in Christian circles, but I think that’s changed. When I was researching my new book, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I surveyed 2000 women and about 400 men. And what I found was that of Christians, only 40% reported being virgins on their wedding night. So that’s a lot of people, even in the church, who are dealing with sexual baggage. And some sexual baggage is really hard to dump.

So I want to talk about this, even if it makes some uncomfortable, because I know many women are really struggling with this and want a safe place to talk about it and to go for answers.

So let’s look at a very common scenario: a guy has several sexual partners before he’s married. Maybe he even lived with someone before. He hasn’t talked about it much, but you know that he was quite adventurous, or that he likely he tried a whole lot of stuff. Then you got married. And you? You were a virgin when you were married, or perhaps you had sex a few times but it was awkward and certainly not something to remember fondly.

And now when you’re making love, you feel like you have to live up to this image that YOU’VE created in your mind about what your husband experienced with other women. If he ever asks to try something new, you always wonder, “did SHE do this with him?” If you have a hard time achieving orgasm, you wonder, “am I a disappointment to him because he could satisfy another woman more? Am I frigid? Does he wish he was back with her?”

This can be even more difficult for women who marry a divorced man, or even a widower. “Does he miss her?”

A lot of women are plagued by questions like this–even women who are married to guys who swear up and down that they don’t want these other women and that they wish they hadn’t even had those relationships. This is one of the reasons, incidentally, that it’s so important to wait for marriage. These comparisons are very deadly.

But we still need to move on, so here are some thoughts:

1. You are Both New Creations

The most important thing you both need to do is to commit to living and believing 2 Corinthians 5:17: if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. And not just that, but at your wedding “the two became one” in every sense of the word. You have something with your husband that is truly new.

In fact, I’d even have a ceremony–maybe a special dinner, or think up something symbolic you can do, like buying a butterfly necklace or something–where you agree that you are both new creations, and what you have is new and beautiful, and the old doesn’t matter anymore. And then you need to ask forgiveness from him for doubting him because of his past, and you need to commit to loving him here and now and not second guessing him. You need to promise that you will only see him through the prism of your own marriage, and not everything that you’re afraid went on before.

And then ask him to do the same thing. Ask him to think only of you, and not to worry or obsess over anything that happened in the past. You’re new! And make a commitment that from now on you both want to jump in and learn how both of you work together.

2. Take Every Thought Captive

We don’t have to entertain every thought that comes into our heads. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says, “and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” In other words, when you have a thought, take it out, examine it, and then dismiss it if it doesn’t line up with what God says. And God says you are new creations!

So you need to stop entertaining those thoughts. One way to do this is to truly understand the difference between sex within God’s plan and outside of God’s plan. So when those thoughts hit you, say this to yourself:

I am going to stop assuming that he knows more about sex than I do because he had more sex than I did. Having sex is not the same as making love, and we are making love with each other. And to have a great sex life, we don’t need to understand “how to have sex”; we need to commit to learning how each of us individually works and what each of us individually needs. We’re both learning, because we both became truly and wonderfully sexual on the same date: your wedding night. Nothing else matters.

Did your husband sin? Yes. But don’t allow that sin to wreck your sex life now. Jesus paid the price; don’t keep punishing each other for it.

If it’s not a question of sin, though–if, for instance, you married a divorced man or a widower, you may have to tell yourself something slightly different, like this:

Making love is not a matter of understanding everything about sex; it’s understanding everything about each other. And it’s about how two people work together. We will make love differently than he did with his first wife, because we are different together than they were. And different is not worse! It’s us together that is beautiful, and we’re going to find our own equilibrium. If I keep worrying about his previous wife, then I’m robbing myself and my husband of being able to enjoy making love now.

3. Don’t Grill Him

If you’re already worried that he enjoyed sex more with someone else, grilling him on what he did with a past girlfriend/wife, or what he enjoyed most, or how she responded, is not going to help. It’s only going to give you images to fuel your anxiety.

Instead, be honest of your need for affirmation that you’re doing okay in the bedroom, but also, and perhaps this is the most important one:

4. Commit Yourself to Making Sex Great!

Then make it into a fun research project you do together. Tell him: I want to get to know all about you, and how you work, and what you like. And I want you to get to know me, too. I want you to figure out how to make me explode, because I’m not even sure I know. So let’s figure it all out together! If you do that, and move forward, then it’s unlikely either of you will be stuck in the past.

And try to have a new start. If you haven’t worked through the 29 Days to Great Sex, that’s a good place to start. And special announcement: I’m working on an ebook of the 29 Days to Great Sex, with more challenges, expanded entries, and special guy/girl challenges, too! I’m hoping to have it ready to launch October 1. You can sign up to be notified when it’s ready (it will be really cheap! ) here.

Finally, just make it a habit to show him what you like, and to give him lots of great feedback when it feels good! Guys like knowing that they can make their wives feel great.

It’s natural to wonder if you live up to his past, but chances are your worrying is making it into a bigger problem than it needs to be. Your husband chose you. He wants to enjoy making love to you. Don’t let your insecurities rob you both of the intimacy God wants for you. God wants you to feel amazing, and to feel close, and to love each other. If you nurse jealousies, then you’re stopping something that God wants in your life. Who wants to do that?

Now, what advice do you have for us today? Have you ever needed to get over a jealousy? Or do you have other thoughts to share? Leave a comment, or link up your own marriage post in the linky! Just leave the URL of your individual post below, and then remember to link back here so other people can read this great marriage encouragement!

Related posts:

Wifey Wednesday: Recovery from the Guilt of Your Sexual Past
Wifey Wednesday: Reconciling Your Sexual Past with your Marriage
Wifey Wednesday: Should We Be Upset when Our Husbands Are Tempted?