Top 10 Words of Wisdom from YOU!
We’re talking about community this week on To Love, Honor and Vacuum, and yesterday I introduced you to some of the bloggers in my Christian sex blogging community. Today I want to introduce you to ten great ideas from ten different readers who have emailed me over the last little bit!
First, 5 things you must try!
1. Perimenopausal and in pain? Here’s help!
A Christian novelist writes,
Have you ever heard of Vitamin E vaginal suppositories? My doctor recently prescribed Premarin to me for dryness and scar tissue and WITH my co-pay it was going to cost me $250 a month, so I went searching for an alternative. I found Vitamin E suppositories and THEY ARE A MIRACLE for women who are having pain and other intimacy issues. I was having so much pain that I thought I would DIE and that I’d never enjoy sex again. When I found these suppositories on Amazon, there were 235 5-star reviews!!!
Good to know! Check them out here.
2. What if your husband can’t wear a wedding ring at work?
A while ago I wrote a post on why people should WEAR their wedding rings! But I know that sometimes at work people can’t wear metal. So in the comments so many people were recommending silicon rings which are fairly inexpensive. I thought that was a great idea I hadn’t thought of.
So if you’re interested, and your husband works on a line or something where he can’t have metal, here’s an alternative.
3. How can I measure my fertility?
I’ve actually had a lot of people send in recommendations on this one! Here’s one woman who wrote to me after reading The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.
I am in the middle of your book and enjoying it very much! I use the Marquette method of NFP that utilizes the Clearblue fertility monitor along with an algorithm to determine the fertile window. I really love that it simplifies NFP and makes it very objective so I’m not having to diligently chart. It has made NFP a lot easier especially post-partum. I just wanted to let you know about it since so many people equate NFP with the more arduous sympto-thermal and Creighton methods. The website for the method is nfp.marquette.edu.
Thanks for pointing us in that direction! Looks like a great resource.
Other readers have sworn by the LadyComp fertility monitor. It’s pricey (around $450), but what it does is spend a few months getting used to your cycles, and then it gives you “red”, “orange”, and “green” days and tells you whether you’re fertile or not. It won’t work, though, if YOU don’t take your temperature regularly. But it can be downloaded onto your phone, and one woman who commented who is a missionary in Africa loved it because it can run on batteries. When she didn’t have electricity to charge her phone regularly, she could still use the monitor–anywhere.
Finally, other readers recommended Flowers Fertility. Hope something there helps you!
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4. The old staple diaphragm is too easily forgotten!
Remember Hot, Holy & Humorous, whom I introduced you to yesterday? She swears by the diaphragm! So if you just can’t do the fertility monitoring thing, Julie says:
I’ll confirm the efficacy of the diaphragm as a birth control method that doesn’t alter hormones and that he probably can’t feel (at least not much) during intercourse. It’s rather unobtrusive, easy to insert once you get the hang of it, and it’s what we used after a miscarriage and before we were ready to conceive. We didn’t like condoms either, and oral contraceptives become a no-go at some point.
Honestly, probably one of the biggest groups of comments I get in my libido posts is from women saying, “The Pill WRECKED my libido!” The more I read about it, the more uncomfortable I am with it, especially when there are so many more methods that are non-invasive and non-hormonal. So there are two routes to try!
5. You DON’T have to live with pain during sex.
I gave my Girl Talk last week at my home church, and two women came up to me afterwards and whispered some questions about vaginismus, or painful sex. It’s still such a taboo topic! I’ve written about six posts on it, including this series on how to overcome vaginismus (with links to people’s stories). After I wrote that, a woman sent me this website, which is a women’s therapy center in Plainview, New York, specializing in treating pain of different types–even post-cancer. They have two week long sessions that may be worth traveling for if you don’t live near there.
But don’t forget to check out resources closer to home! At a recent conference I gave in rural Kansas, a physiotherapist came up to me afterwards and thanked me for recommending that people with pain look for pelvic floor specialists, because they do exist. And she was one–in rural Kansas! (well, it wasn’t THAT rural. But it was smaller town).
Doctors often don’t know what to do. Let me repeat that, loud and clear, as the wife of a physician: Doctors often don’t know what to do. But physiotherapists often do! So find a physiotherapist who specializes in pelvic floor issues, or, if you’re near New York or able to travel, check out that website. Seriously–pain does not have to be your whole story!
Sometimes people send me things which are just plain really interesting insights, like these:
5. Just a different way of looking at freedom in the bedroom!
I really like this insight from reader Heather from Australia. She writes:
Recently I went to the Scriptures in a totally new way, in particular devouring the Old Testament. In the law I now saw picture after picture of God’s character and of course prophetically of Jesus… but also, restriction after restriction, including restrictions that affected peoples sex lives… often to do with purification times – days of abstinence and waiting. After a couple of years reading the OT almost exclusively, I wandered back into the New Testament and saw something brand new in 1 Corinthians 7:5… something that I’m cautious about expressing in case I’m totally wrong BUUUUT – what if, what IF those words about not withholding ourselves from each other were to do with the putting away of the Law?! What IF they were to grant a brand new FREEDOM?!! What if they were saying – “go for it – there are no more restrictions on the basis of the law”!? What if it was NEVER meant to become the source of misery and condemnation (usually on women) in the form of something VERY LIKE another LAW?! What if those words are meant to be a release to freedom instead of something so often held over as a rule?
She was writing after a controversy a while ago in my posts on how sex was supposed to be mutual, and how many men especially were saying that a woman never had a right to refuse. I think her take is interesting and worth pondering!
6. How can we confront sin without judging?
Here’s a woman writing after she read 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage–and it confirmed what God was telling her already.
I really enjoyed your new book and I wrote a review on amazon…so I wanted to share something with you. It fits right in there with the ‘your husband is your neighbor, so just be kind’ and also about confronting sin in the marriage. A while ago I was pondering about the whole issue of ‘you shall not judge’ and often we treat this saying of Jesus as if we’re not allowed to confront any sin, out of fear that we are judging. So I thought about what does a judge do? He is basically weighing the evidence in order to determine what kind of outcome or treatment the accused person deserves. If the judge finds the person not guilty, he releases him. If he finds him guilty, the measure of punishment is determined by the judge within the guidelines of the law. And here is where I was convicted.
How often did I treat my husband the way I thought he deserved? How often I didn’t actually address the issue, but based on my clouded judgment, I inflicted on my husband some sort of emotional punishment (silence, cold shoulder, withholding love and sex and whatever else we women do). The problem here is, that we are not objective or righteous. We act out of hurt.
But does that mean we are not supposed to confront sin? No way. The bible is so clear about it. ‘if your brother (or husband) sins against you go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone….Matt. 18:15)or ‘if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a SPIRIT OF GENTLENESS.’ Galatians 6:1.
So here it is, we are supposed to confront sin, yet we are not supposed to inflict punishment on a person. we are to treat him with kindness and love. That does not mean that I let others treat me the way they want and use me as their rag for their sinful behavior. But my responsibility is to show them kindness and love, and confront sin in truth and love with a gentle spirit who seeks to restore the other person. I am however not responsible for their actions, to absorb them or cover up their sin, by acting like all is ok. I really took this conviction to heart and try to change my ways in my marriage, my parenting and all relationships. All I am called to do, is to show kindness and love to all the people in my life and to point them to the cross when they need a savior. And that is some awesome calling!
It is indeed. Thank you.
7. Did God make a mistake with where He put the clitoris?
So we were having an interesting debate in the comments last week about how women can feel aroused during intercourse, and I made some fly-by comment without thinking that it can seem like God made a mistake putting all the nerve endings on the OUTside.
But then we had several comments with people (including me) saying that perhaps it was that way because then we’d have to work on affection and communication and true intimacy rather than just “doing the deed”.
I’m going to give this commenter the final word, though, because this is very wise:
I don’t think it’s in the wrong place at all. Imagine what giving birth would be like if the clitoris was where it would get stimulated by intercourse.
Indeed!
9. One of the best descriptions of grief I’ve ever read
I wrote a post a while ago on how we don’t understand grief or talk about it properly. It’s not that grief disappears. It’s just that it comes upon you less frequently. When it does hit, though, it’s still really intense. I shared a chart that I hope people will keep pinning, because it’s so important!
In that post, one commenter shared this word picture which has stuck with me, and which I thought you may appreciate, too:
My sister lost her son just before his 23rd birthday – after years of his struggling with Schizophrenia. She described her grief like this: “It’s like having a hole in the floor of your living room. At first, you step into it all the time, but eventually, you know it’s there, but you don’t want to have to show it to everyone to come by. So you put a throw rug over it. It’s there, just not the first thing that you see. And because you know it’s there – you walk around the edge of it. Somedays, you forget or choose not to be careful, and you step right into the hole. But because of the rug, you don’t fall as deeply as you did without it. You are still in the hole, but getting out is much easier.”
I think there is a lot of wisdom in that, and after mom’s sudden death last year – I now know it to be true. I never know when I’ll step into the hole again, or what will trigger it. But most days, despite my missing her desperately, no one would know what my “hole in the room” is…
Grief never goes away – it just changes.
10. God really does feel our pain
To tie in with that, I thought I’d share this one last. Alchemist, one of the commenters you’ll hear more about in Thursday’s post, left this comment once talking about pain. She quotes C.S. Lewis’ words, so I guess it’s really Lewis’ wisdom. But it’s timeless. And it brings tears to my eyes every time:
Well, this quote I think illustrates beautifully what God thinks of our pain. This is from the chronicles of Narnia. Digory’s mother is on her death bed. Aslan (the Lion) represents Jesus.
“But please, please – won’t you- can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. “My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.” – The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis
God cares enough that he got right into a body like our own and took the pain on himself. All of it. The loneliness and grief and pain of betrayal and rejection as well as all the ordinary kinds of sorrow a man of 33 years on earth would have.
Indeed. “Let us be good to one another.”
And let’s leave it at that. Thank you all for the words of wisdom! I think that last bit sums it up perfectly.
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