Emotional Connection Matters

Jere is calm. He is even-keeled. I had an ongoing theory about him, me and most other couples I knew: the idea that there is a mean-line of emotional…and some people travel along that line barely going over or under – demonstrated by not getting overly excited about good things, or overly bothered by challenges. Then there are the people, like me, that felt highs very high…and lows very, very low. Both were okay, just different.

We have come to call this our emotional amplitude, with ranges that can vary greatly:

It explained a lot, and I even valued it – Jere was the ying to my yang, the calm to my excitement. But deep in my soul there were times I felt so disconnected, like we really didn’t even speak the same language. We have come to find out we didn’t.

Today, Jere is a far more demonstrably emotional man. He feels deeply, and isn’t ashamed to let me, and other people, know. Conversely, I have learned to feel the real emotion of the moment, rather than allow a secondary emotion (like anger) cloud my ability to share my soul. Now, we can make the crazy-amazing connection of the soul that marriage is meant to be.

This month, we are going to post a few ideas about why disconnection, and how to find it, authentically, in your relationship. The process takes courage – vulnerability and transparency are not for the weak. But the payoff…wow. Deep, heart-to-heart connection that creates an environment for both partners to individually flourish, and your relationship to be more than you ever dared dream.

We invite you to join us and work toward finding love without limit.

Living unboundedlife,

Susan and Jere

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. 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

 

Is Conflict Inevitable?

The answer is: Yes.

Conflict is not inherently a sign that a relationship is flawed, or doomed, or not-meant-to-be. It is, however, a place in which the relationship can be strengthened, or harmed. Conflict will happen in marriage…not may happen…will happen. And if it isn’t, then likely one of you is not being honest with yourself.

I (Susan) grew up in a house with no obvious conflict. Later in life, my parents shared that they had made a pact early on that they would never fight. That resulted in two people who did not fight on the outside, rather shoved all their real feelings deep inside. It resulted in kids who had no idea how to navigate difference of opinions, hear another perspective and ultimately negotiate a solution. Instead, my sister and I headed into adulthood handicapped of these skills and with a solid belief that conflict meant death. Death of the relationship. You can read a little about how it impacted me here: They Didn’t Ever Fight

Back to the inevitability of conflict: it isn’t whether you disagree, but how you disagree that determines if conflict is a help or a harm to your marriage. Here are the measures that we use to check our conflict for its healthy/harm impact on our us:

• Have we each been heard, really heard? Did my partner really understand what I was trying to say, and do I know that?
  
• Do I know my viewpoint has value, even if my partner disagrees? Does he/she appreciate my perspective?
• Have we confirmed our understanding of how we each feel in this conflict? Do I feel validated? Even if we haven’t come to a solution?
• Do we both have an understanding of the others perspective? Even if I don’t agree, can I empathize with my partner?
• Am I safe? Is he safe? In and during and after the conflict, are we both safe to share our viewpoints, opinions and feelings without retribution, sarcasm or mocking?

This wasn’t the story of our conflicts and disagreements for the first 27 years of our marriage. But it is now. And it can be for you, too.

 

 

Attitude Matters

Over, and over, and over scientific studies support the anecdotal stories we all see. Things like kids think they are invincible. Science now shows us that they actually do…because the connection between their frontal lobes (where they weigh risk/benefit and make “executive decisions”) are woefully underdeveloped in adolescence even though their bodies look fully grown-up.

Studies are showing us over and again that attitude matters. It matters in our mental health, our physical health and our marriage health. People who are intentionally grateful are exponentially more equipped to handle the bumps of life, report more marital satisfaction and have less disease or fight it more effectively.

We challenge you to adopt an attitude of gratefulness. Being grateful, specifically, is highly correlated to the positive mental and physical outcomes, and is one way to see your spouse in a new light. Here is what we do…and it only takes one minute a day:

Rapid-Fire Gratefulness: Each morning, we sit together and look each other in the eye. For one (short) minute, we exchange things we are grateful for. These can be small things like “the cat used the litter box instead of the floor” or “it rained and we don’t have to water.” It can be emotional things like “our son’s sweet text thanking us for our help” or “your gentle response when I was frustrated yesterday.” It can be important things like “we were able to pay all the bills this month” or “my dad’s good response to his chemo.” And it can be intimate things like “your touch” or “your willingness to share gratefulness with me.”

One minute. One minute that can change your life. GO!