Open Doors

A marriage is like a room with many mansions. But how many rooms do you live in?

Speak Life

You can have an amazing marriage. An outrageously connected, passionate, caring and fun marriage. The reason we are such proponents of amazing marriage is because ours wasn’t that way for a long time. Now that it is, we live in awe, appreciating every day the beauty of our relationship.

We care how we speak to each other. Whether we are sharing something wonderful and exciting, or scary and overwhelming, we use words that encourage the other to hear us. We understand, now, that our words can shut the other down or stop them from listening. We want to be heard.

We have learned that our words should tell the truth, that they should mean what they say and that we should, and can, say what we mean.

Words are important. They can be used to throw out old pain from inside and fling it on to someone else. They can be used as poorly cloaked daggers to inflict wounds and draw blood. Words can slice and boil and pierce.

Words can also build up. And soothe and comfort and heal.

During this month, we encourage you to love your spouse with your words. Use this month to speak life and vision and future into your partner, personally, and into your relationship. God showed us this in dramatic fashion. He spoke – He used words – to create this world we live in…the sun and stars and seas and mountains. His perfect love spilled out in words to create sunsets and rainforests and all the crazy, diverse animals that cohabitate with us. His words brought us light. His words brought us life.

Your words can do the same. Every day this month, look your spouse in the eye. Speak a dream and a hope into your marriage, into the life of your partner. Try it: I dream we are on the beach and hope we can get there this month, together. Or I dream that it is Saturday and hope we can lay in bed and have a cup of coffee. Or I dream you and I are dancing and hope we can go next week. Speak life, speak love, speak tomorrow into your marriage.

Watch what happens…

Living unboundedlife,

Susan and Jere

Are You Listening?

In 2014 I found out Jere was cheating. I found a letter that explained, in excruciating details, the length, depth and breadth of the affair he was involved in.

There was a line in that letter written by his mistress that is so profound. She writes, “You made me feel beautiful and desirable. I always knew that we could walk into a room full of beautiful women – all tens – and you would make me feel like an eleven.”

You may wonder why I would share these obviously painful words. When I first read this, and probably the second and third and tenth time, the sentences were just a couple of many that devastated and shattered my heart. But Jere and I have healed, and we have the most connected, intimate and beautiful marriage I know, now. A marriage of unity and trust and connection and love.

As we have healed, however, and as we have invested in the lives of other couples in training and coaching, those words continued to haunt me. You see, Jere didn’t make me feel that way for most of our marriage. I had been his wife for 27 years when the words were written…and I felt puny and unloved and undesirable. The majority of couples that we coach don’t feel this way either. They don’t know that they are valued and adored and cherished and beautiful. The words became incredibly insightful not only to our healing, but also in our work with broken couples.

We took note that most of us made sure to help our boy/girlfriends feel that way when we were dating. We were careful to give them kudos for the little and big things. We cheered them on, and we boosted them up. We listened to their fears and let them know how we believed in them. I’ve learned, and Jere admits, that affair partners also take great care to listen, to hear, to utter words and create spaces that they pretend are safe as they live in the fantasy of the illicit world.

Not so much married partners, though. Not so much two people who have pledged to care for each other in all circumstances and to love and honor each other in covenant. Over and over we work with couples who are married, yet hurting and hopeless, and unable to get even basic emotional needs met through the relationship. It seems the only thing rational to do is to part. To divorce.

But God.

But God tells us what is the most important in relationship. In Psalm 139:1-4, He literally writes out what true intimacy looks like: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.”

God lovingly painted the picture for what an intimate relationship, a covenant relationship, looks like with those words. As you read them, doesn’t your heart crave this? Crave to be known in every part? No secrets, no walking on egg-shells or wearing a mask – and still being ADORED? My husband’s lover felt that way – even though it was false and just the fantasy speaking – seeing those words in print was the start of us realizing huge gaps in most marriages that allow for anything BUT intimacy and connection and love to develop.

God didn’t stop with the picture. He gave us clues how to achieve this intimacy. His word tells us that He listens. To us. He demonstrates that love is active, and listening/knowing is key. In James 1:19, God says we “should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” In verse 22, He adds “don’t merely listen to the Word…do it.” In Jeremiah 33:3, God adds “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”

This is the way we should be within our marriages. We should desperately seek to know each other’s innermost parts and to be intimately connected. Intimacy is impossible unless we are revealed, and as spouses, we learn first through listening. Listening to the heart and the countenance and the responses of our spouse. Then, when we have learned through listening, we can act. We can lean into the things that we have uncovered through supportive compassion, engaging responses and actions that demonstrate we have not just listened…but we have heard. And we know how to respond uniquely and specifically to them – the one we know.

It sounds easy, yet doesn’t come naturally. Listening with no intention to respond is hard work, and goes against our natural human response. Speaking their language, the one they can hear, and to their heart IS the essence of love.

Jere and I demonstrate this to couples, and coach them as they learn how to change the way they communicate. We ask couples to take time, every day,  to practice:  look at each other in the eyes, face-to-face. Touch or hold hands or somehow physically connect if possible, and share. As they do, we help them learn to stop listening with an intent to respond, but rather with a goal to understand. We help them develop a pattern of ensuring they have heard, affirmed, and validated their spouse and are willing and able to demonstrate empathy.

Great and unsearchable things they didn’t know about each other begin to unfold, and the connection they were always meant to have between them is sparked. Couples learn to listen. They experience being heard, and known.

Healing happens, hope abounds, and love? Love wins.

For information on how you can learn to listen, to bring hope to your hurting marriage in a way that fosters intimacy, passion and connection, please reach out to us:
Jere Pitman – jere@unboundedlife.org or Susan Pitman – susan@unboundedlife.org .
We are passionate about living love without limits.
Let everything you do be done in love. 1 Corinthians 16:14

Love.

The theme for February is love.

Really cliché, right? Not so fast. We are going to take a look at love in many ways this month. We are going to consider where love got started. We are going to consider how love is demonstrated. We are going to delve into the science of love. And we are going to see how love is manifested – by the giver, and the receiver.

So how did love get started? The love story that we cling to is so big, so beautiful, so awesome that it transcends time and space and eternity. The human love story started with a Triune God, a three-in-one being that is love. Not that was loving, or loved. God IS love. As humans, we struggle to understand this. We struggle to understand the connected intimate, yet fully separate, relationship of the God-head and the love that is. That love was ever present, ever abundant, and ever-so big that it could not be contained.

It spilled out into the creation of us. Of mankind. Of you, of me.

We are created, literally, as the outpouring of love Himself.

Oh, to know and receive and be present and aware of this love. Most of us aren’t. We can’t see beyond the broken images of love that are all around us from our families of origin to our youth and dating relationships. From our own marriages and those we see around us. But this isn’t the real story, the real picture of love and how we can live.

When the Teacher was asked what the greatest commandment was of all, Jesus replied:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The first and greatest commandment was love.

But He added something else that often gets left off that quote. Jesus also said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

The very Creator of LOVE told us that without love we couldn’t do any other good things. The ability to be able to not get trapped in images lies in love. The ability to honor other people lies in love. The ability to be kind and faithful and honest and caring and compassionate…all lies in love. In resting in being loved, in knowing we are loved, and reflecting that love.

Without love, we are handicapped, and spin our wheels trying to experience the good stuff of life, but never quite getting there. Everything starts with promise, but ends with disappointment. Because love is the core of who we are, the center of our very being.

Welcome to February. Welcome to love. It is who you are, because it is who He is.

Living Unbounded, Susan and Jere

Possible. Courageously.

January’s theme is possible. If you are just now joining us, WELCOME!

It is possible to live a marriage that is passionate, connected and loving. A marriage of unbounded, limitless, devotion. We didn’t say probable, or likely. Reality is, if your marriage ISN’T amazing, and you keep doing things as you have in the past, it isn’t very probable at all.

So how do you move toward a marriage that will astound you in the constancy and depth and breadth of possibility?

It starts with you, and your ability to see yourself differently within your marriage, to see POSSIBLE. We shared in January’s first post (find it here) about changing your vision to the picture you want so you can break free of the way things are. Create your personal vision statement and embed it into the fiber of your being so it becomes part of your DNA.

Then we encouraged you to quit allowing any of the skewed perceptions of love to shape your understanding of love. Rather than looking to our flawed past, cultural pictures or (fleeting) love stories of stars and celebrities, we guided you to read and consider RENEWING YOUR MIND in Truth about love (find that post here).

Last week, we asked you to CHECK OUT (the post is here) real pictures of real love. We provided several more stories on our facebook page (join us here)…so you can soak in the beauty of love-done-well.

Today we talk about COURAGE. Without courage, it is so hard to dream. To vision a different life and marriage filled with intimacy and passion, fueled by transparency and vulnerability and undergirded with devotion and commitment. Without courage, it becomes almost impossible to walk out of the fog of lies about love and marriage, and to embrace new understanding of love. Courage is needed to see between-the-lines of stories of real love, love that acts and is kind and is others centered and is present and never fails. This week is about COURAGE to vision, to renew, to check-out.

We can learn courage, and here are some tips:

1. Nelson Mandela says it so eloquently: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” If you have fear, that doesn’t mean you don’t have courage. Change your thinking and believe that it is only in fear that you can demonstrate courage.
2. Embrace that courage can be learned. It isn’t just something you are born with and if not, you lose.
3. Courage can become a habit, your habit. But that comes with practice, and courage can, and should, be practiced. Begin today to identify small ways you can act in courage – and then do them.
4. Focus on why you are being courageous. Our why? Astounding marriage, freedom of our souls. But that required new ways of thinking, listening, and responding. It helped us not lose courage in the battle toward amazing marriage to always keep a focus on where we wanted to be.
5. Take note of how you feel you begin to move into courage; your body may be screaming to run the other direction. See that battle, and win it.
6. Bolster your courage in numbers: find other people committed to astounding relationships and speak your hopes, share your fears and encourage possible. Stand together against negative forces.
7. Actively turn away the negative thoughts that creep in, and lean in to the positive realities that are present, even if they are very small.
8. Find role models of courageous people and listen to their stories. Those role models can become the YES in the midst of a sea of no.

When I learned of Jere’s serial infidelity woven in throughout our marriage, I was devastated. At first, it took courage for me to get out of bed. It took courage to go out in public where I now felt like such a fool. It took courage for me to consider myself and to be kind to myself…to allow myself to consider what was best for me. It took courage for me to tell our therapists the truth, and eventually, our children. It took courage for me to take next steps, and most of all, it took courage for me to forgive.

It took courage for Jere to strip away the years and years of lies and deception. It took courage for him to choose to radically change. Every day, this new man calls on his courage to think and hear and be different. It took courage for him to share his story, to change, and to lead others.

It took courage for us to look deep inside ourselves and to dare be vulnerable when we decided to work on our marriage and not just end it. It took courage to walk together through the path of healing that often meant tears and shame and rage and fear. It took courage to heal. It took courage to love.

We beg you become a person with the habit of courage. Passionate, connected, loving marriage is possible. With vision, renewed mind, focusing on evidence of love and engaging courage, the possible becomes probable. Have a courageous week.

Living Unbounded, Susan and Jere

 

 

Possible. Check In and Check Out.

We are half-way through the month of January, so we want you to Check In, and then stay tuned this week and Check Out.

Check in with your heart and mind and soul.

First : Are you any closer to seeing POSSIBLE? Possible for you to be waking up with a heart of hope? Are you able to see, literally see, a different relationship, a different you? The wise author of Psalms 29:18 tells us “that where there is no vision, the people perish.” If we cannot tangibly understand and see what it is we want and our place in that picture, we will have -0- chance of getting “there.” So our first step is seeing POSSIBLE…which you can find here if you missed it.

Next: RENEWAL. The encouragement is to make sure you are getting your vision from a place of life, of health, of hope and future. There are some skewed messages of love and marriage all around us, and it takes work to pro-actively choose to move away from the influences that surround and deceive. Renewing your mind means seeking Truth about love from the Author of love and quieting those influences that damage what love really is. You can read more about it here.

Now: Check Out. This week we will share some astonishing examples of love done Right. Love that is rooted so beautifully in Truth, and is lived out in ways that don’t look much like Hollywood shows, or the marriages that surround us. Savor these…let them permeate your heart and rewrite the Truth of love in your soul. Be sure to check out these stories…you will find them on our FB group every couple days. If you aren’t already a member, click here so we can add you.

Our first story is about a young woman named Mookie. Her growing up years looked perfect until everything was shattered with devastating illness in her family, and overwhelming betrayal. As a bystander close to her family, I watched Mookie press into hope, and find a future despite some pretty big challenges. But Mookie didn’t just make it out of tough situations. She has found life and love in abundance. The story of Mookie and her farmer, in Laos where they live, is nothing short of astounding. Mostly what is astounding is their love – of and for each other, and of and for their Savior who has urged them and taught them about real love. Mookie describes:

“I just had one of those moments with My Farmer…he is really affectionate, always desiring to be near me. But that is SO unlike his people…all of them. They reside together but function just fine without each other, they don’t encourage or compliment each other, you never see them touching or spending time together…ever. So I asked him “how are you this way? If you had married a Lao woman would you be like this” he answered to the first “I’m like this because I NEED it, I need this kind of love. And I would not be this way if i married a girl here.” I was quiet but so confused. Those statements seemed contradictory. He continued. “My people are poor in heart. And this is the way we do. Nobody has shown us any different. Everybody wants great love, but they’ve never been offered it. It’s like a child wanting to eat with their mouth open searching, but since birth they have not been given it, so they close their mouth and never expect food again. Their hearts harden, and I think pieces of it die. I’m like this because you gave me food, and now my mouth is always open.”
I cried. I see what he said every day, but hearing him say it, broke me. He said this to me after I was having a meltdown about wifi and not getting laundry done. It’s like he had to re-channel me to why I’m here. If anything my husband gives me hope that people can change with great love. And we dream of his people’s mouths being full of Holy love and life.”

The farmer.

The farmer, and his wife.

This beautiful young couple has found what we all want so desperately. Through needing and offering. Please read more about Mookie Sayaiphone and her farmer where you can be inspired by love: Life In The Branches.

Do you want a love story? A real love story?

Living Unbounded, Jere and Susan

Possible: Renew Your Mind

January’s theme is Possible. It’s an odd dichotomy…to believe something is possible when it has never been present in your own life is hard. Yet, YET if you don’t believe it is possible, it reduces the probability that it can be possible.

You get it, or we think you do. Last week, we encouraged you to think of possible for your life – how did that go?

So to make an amazing marriage and an unbounded life probable for you, it starts with possible. But how can we even see possible, much less believe it, when all the evidence in our lives and marriages at this point screams otherwise…how do we get there? First…read your vision statement again and again. That’s a good step. But it’s not enough.

God tells us this: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Two steps our wise Creator lays out for us:

• (Don’t) Conform to the pattern on this world
• (D0) Be transformed by the renewing of your mind

We delved deeply into the work of radically changing our broken marriage. But the first step was to realize that our expectations of what marriage was – and fundamentally what LOVE is – had been driven by so many cultural influences. Our families of origin. Books. Movies. Songs. What other people told us, or what we thought we could see as we looked at other people.

Those are patterns of the world. The DON’T be conformed to patterns.

The patterns of our parents. Patterns so ingrained that it was tough to see. All bad? Of course not, but deeply connected and filled with passion and joy marriage? Not even close. With a committed eye and open heart, we were able to see distortions and manipulation and sarcasm and passive-aggressive behavior and self-protection. These things weren’t just present in our parent’s lives and marriages and loves…they were folded into our marriage.

The patterns of books and movies and songs. The chase is awesome, the protagonists have challenges to overcome and “love wins” when they come together to live happily ever after.  Except the story always stops there, at happily ever after which we then assume is how the rest of their lives look. So the shock of real-life after the belief that happily ever after is what love and marriage looked like?

The patterns of what other people told us about love and marriage and commitment…often celebrities and other folks in the limelight. The great love stories of Bennifer: Jennifer Lopez/Ben Affleck. That fell apart and became: Jennifer Lopez/Marc Anthony and Ben Affleck/Jennifer Garner. That have also now fallen apart.

Or maybe you are from the era of Arnold Schwarzenegger/Maria Shriver that are no longer married after a dual life with the nanny unfolded.

How about Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt…that started out as Jennifer Anniston/Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie/Billy Bob Thornton but even before that started out as Angelina Jolie/Johnny Lee Miller?

Who can forget Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes? His love for her was so overwhelming he jumped off Oprah’s couch. Except that was after he was overwhelmed in love as Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman. Which was after he was overwhelmed in love as Tom Cruise/Mimi Rogers. Yea…hard to even explain how these and the hundreds and thousands of other couples in their exuberant-love-that-turned-sour did to our impression and thinking about marriage. About love. Subtly, without us even realizing…we were conforming to what our culture told us.

What God is telling us? Looking at this world and allowing it to impact our mind and thinking about marriage, about love…we can do better than that. He has better things in mind, and in store, for our lives and our hearts and our souls. Love God’s way looks nothing like what we see around us, everywhere.

Renewing our minds is getting into right thinking. That is where the world of possibility lies.

If you want to restore a broken relationship or, as we did, create an entirely new and beautiful and amazing marriage, STOP going to the same sources. Instead, seek counsel and insight that demonstrates what you are looking for. Seek out couples that have an intimacy and consistent care and joy for each other. Couples that demonstrate trust and trust-worthiness. Couples that grieve with authenticity and laugh from their guts…together. Couples that face adversity without destroying each other, rather moving in to their relationship for the strength to get through. The very best place to start is with the Author of love, Himself.

Before we renewed our minds, our sources convinced us that love was about me, not us. We believed love was fleeting, and could end. We perceived that love just plopped down on us, or we would “fall into it.” We understood that love didn’t require anything – it just WAS and when it wasn’t anymore, oh well.

But thing is, none of that is really love.

But oh, what the Creator has to say about love. The story is so much greater. You can renew your mind so your understanding of love isn’t shaped by a crazy world that does anything but love. Instead, read some of the Truth about love. As we have become devoted to renewing our minds and learning about love from the very Source of love, Himself, here are some things we have learned:

• Love is humble and gentle
• Love is sacrificial
• Love covers a multitude of wrongs
• There is no fear in love
• Love binds all together
• Love acts
• Love is brave and strong
• Love is the greatest
• Love cannot be contained
• Love is focused
• Love never gives up

Do you believe it is possible? Possible that you can really experience a heart so knit together with your spouse that you are not sure where you stop and they start? That you honestly feel each other’s joy and pain and anxiety and hopes? That love is so different than the junk you have allowed your mind to perceive, and that through the renewing of your mind and learning about real love, it becomes PROBABLE that you can have an unbounded life? An amazing marriage?

We don’t just believe it’s possible anymore. We know Love, and now, we love.

Living Unbounded, Susan and Jere

2017: It Starts with Possible

It is January 1. 2017. The first day of a new year. Somehow, no matter where we are on the continuum of change: wanting to change, believing things need to change or wishing someone else would change, most of us have that sliver of belief on this day, each year, that it can happen.

We make resolutions and promises in our heads, and if we are bold enough, out loud. Or in our journal. Or, if we are really some kind of glutton, on our social media.

Yet quickly…sometimes within a matter of hours or days…we have forgotten those optimistic moments and beliefs that we can do or be or find or act differently. We give up, give in, and continue to live lives of quiet desperation.

Or maybe we don’t do that, collectively as a people. Maybe it is just us. Susan and Jere.

Either way, we have spent some time considering our vision for this year. Our vision for us, and our vision for those who want to join us on the journey. The journey we are on fire for, the journey that wakes us up in the middle of the night, and causes us to become giddy when we see it embraced in our own lives, and in others.

The vision: Marriages are loving. They are connected. They are passionate. All those things people read about in books and see splashed on the big screen and that we deeply desire yet rarely achieve. Marriage…is amazing.

Each month, we will have a theme. Weekly we will provide insight and ideas for you either as an individual, within your relationship, your spiritual being along with your health and your nutrition (and we will even provide some recipes).

We really are mind, body and spirit. When any of those malfunction, all of it gets a little off-kilter. So this year is going to be about attending to yourself, and investing in your relationship: Mind. Body. Spirit.

January, 2017’s theme is possible. Possible can be an adjective:

• able to be done; within the power or capacity of someone

or noun:

• a thing or a person that has the potential to become or do something

We want to challenge you to spend January believing there is possible. It is possible that your emotional response to stressful situations can be different. It is a possibility that you can identify your needs, and learn to share them with your partner. A possibility that you can experience emotional intimacy on a new level. A possibility that you can rethink how and what you eat and find joy in the process. You know what you are doing? You are

Rather than creating resolutions, we want you to dream. We want you to dare to dream and write it down. Today, January 1, 2017 (or if you read this over the next couple weeks), we challenge you to take ten minutes…ten minutes toward an entirely different life moving toward passion and connectedness and love…and here is how you get started.

Leave your cell phone in another room on silent. Ask your spouse to take care of the kids, or go to a coffee shop or library or sit in your car alone. Then look with honesty at your day-to-day life, right now. We encourage you to write a few paragraphs about any personal emotional changes you want to achieve,and relationship changes. Differences in your spiritual life, and your health and physical being. Don’t allow yourself to think about how or why you can’t do these things…or what it will take. Not yet. Then write a couple sentences about why these changes would matter – what differences they would make in your life.  Just dream, think about what it would be like for you if they happen – what your life will be like…and then write in bold letters at the end:

THIS IS POSSIBLE

You have just written a personal vision statement. It is a HUGE start. Next? Read it. Again. And again. And again and again and again. Every single day. When you get up, and before you go to bed. Don’t worry about your spouse’s vision yet. Just yours. Read it and let it become part of your DNA. Don’t forget, every day, to read the last line: This Is Possible.

Because it is.

Welcome, 2017. Welcome, possibility.

Living Unbounded, Susan and Jere

 

Good is the Enemy of Great

It is true. In my life as a parent. In my life as an employee. In my life as a Christian and a friend and community member.

And it is utterly evident that good is the enemy of great in my marriage.

Jim Collins wasn’t talking about marriage when he coined this compelling truth, rather he was speaking to a business audience in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. I read the book many years ago, years when I thought I had a good marriage. Years when having a good marriage was okay by me, and I passed over any chance to work on great because there were lots of other things in my life to attend to…like kids…and current happenings…and laundry…and what was for dinner that night.

I didn’t even have eyes to see that my marriage wasn’t really even good.

It was good enough for the moment to hang on. It was good enough to make it through that next period of time when I vaguely, in the back of my mind, thought I’d pay it some attention. It was good enough to get through the next holiday or birthday or graduation.

But it wasn’t really even that good.

Now that I have great…and I mean really, really, great…in marriage, I can remember and see and feel from my gut how a not-great marriage is not good, and mine was not good. I can see now that when two are meant to become one they either are that. Or they are not. And if they are not, it certainly isn’t great, and we may tell ourselves it is good, but it falls well short of even good. We spend time jockeying for okay, and filling spaces that shouldn’t be, and convincing ourselves that the alone feeling we know is deep in our soul isn’t really there. That days or weeks or months of no sex are just because we are busy with the children and that snappy discussions in the kitchen over who forgot to make the coffee are just because we are tired. That long stretches of silence in the car or at the table at a restaurant are just  because we are preoccupied and not sharing our fears of finances or illness or growing older are because that is really love, right? Not burdening our partner.

No, that isn’t good, but it is how so many of us live day-in, day-out, in our marriages. Telling ourselves we don’t need, or want, gentle touches and soft words and intimate glances across the room and feet entwined under the sheets.

We found great in our marriage. It is indescribable. It launches both of us every day to do our best. To be our best and to care for others. To lead well from a place of servanthood. It compels us to kindness and generosity. Great marriage lived out has resulted in a relentless pursuit of intimacy and passion. Of joy. Every day.

Great doesn’t just happen, and now that we have learned the path…we are dedicated to it, together. One step and then the next and so on…

Susan

Really really thankful

We are so thankful.

We are thankful for our marriage. Our tattered and weathered and amazing marriage that is more beautiful today than we could have ever dreamed.

We are thankful that we wake up every morning more intimately connected than the day before. That we understand now how to navigate the tricky waters of conflict in a way that not only solves the problem, but results in our individual growth. We are thankful that we have learned an incredibly complex dance and we practice it together, getting it mostly right but even when we step on the other’s toes, the new language of our marriage brings determination and laughter rather than disdain and hurt.

We are thankful that we hear each other from the very core of our hearts, and that our souls are bared completely…and they are safe…completely. We are thankful that we have a place where we can do more than dream together, we can urge each other to new heights and hold each other in authentic and open despair if we fall.

We are thankful that we have the chance to walk alongside couples who have gotten out of step, who are drawn to the hearts of others or who have grown cold to their partner…and often even to themselves. We are thankful that we have seen brokenness turn into beauty and sadness turn into sweet love, and that we will continue to take opportunities to speak hope into desolation.

We are thankful for the God that is limitless in His love for us, and in his vision for our US. We are thankful that He showed us the way to freedom is not through avoiding our pain but rather by taking it on directly and fully and that it is in that very journey that we find our own holiness…so much more than what we hoped or dreamed for. We are thankful that He is faithful and long suffering and compassionate, and brings us new mercies every day. No. Matter. What.

We are thankful…like never, ever before.

Susan and Jere