Our Journey to Finding Joy in Marriage (and the things we lost along the way)

August 13, 2015October 13, 2025 / trotters41 / 12 Comments

by Elizabeth

We were in a diner eating pizza. The young couple sitting across the table from us had just asked us how we’ve sustained the joy of our relationship over the years. I wasn’t exactly expecting that question, so my first answer was pretty simple: we spend a lot of time together. Talking, dreaming, laughing, debriefing. Companionship and intimacy require time, and lots of it.

When we were first married, we retreated together to cheap lawn chairs overlooking bushes that barely shielded us from the highway on the other side. We walked all over that university town, in all kinds of weather, for our date nights. We might walk to the library for a free movie and share an order of breadsticks from Papa John’s, where even with the sauces, our meal totaled a mere $3.69.

Later we added children, and enough disposable income for Jonathan to buy me a porch swing. We’d sit in that thing and talk while our children played. At night, we’d tuck them into bed and sneak back out to talk some more, with hot chocolate or bug spray as our companions, depending on the weather.

Even after losing both the yard and the porch swing in our move to Cambodia, we found a way to escape together. We’d head up to our roof and sit in bamboo chairs (with bug spray as our definite companion), watch the city skyline, and share soul secrets. These days you’d be more likely to find us sipping coffee at our kitchen table, the kitchen door conveniently locked behind us.

But the more I pondered this young couple’s question about joy in marriage, and the more I traced our marital history over the years, the more I realized that finding joy was about losing things too. On the journey to find joy in marriage, we’ve shed some surprising baggage.

Who’s in charge here??

I went into marriage spouting ideals of male headship. My husband Jonathan would be in charge and make the final decisions, and I, as the wife, would submit. In any disagreement, his opinion would count for more. We thought we believed that premise, and because we didn’t have a lot of conflict, we thought we were pretty good at following it.

In real life, however, I don’t think we ever actually practiced male headship (or what is sometimes called complementarianism, a term I didn’t know at the time). We thought we did, because we loved God and wanted to obey His Word. And male headship is what the Bible instructs, right??

But Jonathan never pulled the “I’m in charge” card on me. Never. Not even once. Not even when he felt led overseas and I didn’t. I put pressure on myself to submit to his call, but it never came from him.

A little premarital advice from my mom

Growing up, I watched my mom honoring her husband, and she taught me to do the same. When it came to practical advice, though, she focused on “talking things out.” She told me that in her marriage to my dad, if one of them cared about something more — whoever it was — they went with that. The next time it might be different, and that was ok, because nobody was keeping track. She said if they didn’t agree, they just kept talking until they did agree. Practically speaking, my mom and dad were on equal terms in their marriage.

One day my mom told me about a conversation with some other Army wives. One of the women turned to my mom and told her that she must really love her husband. Mom was a bit confused; she hadn’t been raving about how wonderful Dad was or how much she loved him. But something in the way she talked about him (or not talked about him, as the case may have been) spoke her love loud and clear to those fellow Army wives.

Now I know that the type of marriage my mom was describing follows the mutual submission outlined in Ephesians 5:21: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Now I know that people call this type of relationship “egalitarian.” But it’s almost as if back then, we had no vocabulary for the Biblical marriage conversation.

The priesthood of all believers

Even in the early days of our marriage, whenever we needed to make a big decision, Jonathan and I would always pray together. We assumed that God would impress the same thing on our hearts, and that we would be united in both seeking God and obeying Him.

Looking back now, I can see that the path to egalitarianism begins with the priesthood of all believers. We went into marriage saying we believed in male headship, yet in decision-making, we fully expected God to speak to both of us. We believed we could, and would, both hear from God, and that God would say the same thing to both of us. Blame it on the Experiencing God craze of the 1990’s if you want, but this is how we approached God from the very beginning of our marriage.

Love and Respect??

Several years into our marriage I heard about the idea of “Love and Respect,” which claims that a woman’s biggest need is to be loved by her husband and that a man’s biggest need is to be respected by his wife. That seemed like good, solid, Biblical advice. In our marriage I felt loved, my husband felt respected, and we were happy. “Hmm,” I thought, “love and respect must be the key to marital happiness.”

Then I read the book (which is a long one for being built on the foundation of only one verse). About halfway through, I had to put it down. It was so tedious I couldn’t finish it. How many more stories and examples could there be?? The book seemed to be repeating itself.

Besides, I felt like something was missing. I need my thoughts, ideas, and intellect valued: I need respect. Almost as much as love. And my husband needs love, perhaps more than respect. He can’t survive without my compassion, empathy, and listening ears.

(In all fairness to the author of these ideas, he has elsewhere stated that men and women need both love and respect, though in differing amounts. It’s just that I didn’t get that impression from reading his book or from watching his videos.)

Lest you get the wrong idea here, let me make one thing clear: I deeply respect my husband. I value his opinions and consult him on everything. I turn to him for counsel, guidance, and perspective. I trust his advice and regularly defer to him in decision-making. He most certainly has my respect.

But for him, although my respect is nice, if I did not also care about his feelings, his dreams, and his deepest longings, and if I did not tenderly take care of him, he would shrivel up and die (his words, not mine). He needs my open-hearted love. And if he loved and cared for my deepest hurts and feelings, but did not also value my gifts and abilities, I’d be crushed. In fact, if I didn’t have his respect, I wouldn’t actually feel loved by him.

Receiving only love or only respect isn’t good enough for Jonathan and me. We need both love and respect. The teaching of “Love and Respect” was a nice start, but for us, it didn’t go far enough. As a wife, yes, I respect my husband, and as a husband, yes, Jonathan loves his wife. It’s in the Bible; it’s good. But God isn’t going to be offended if wives also love their husbands, and husbands also respect their wives.

In the book of Ephesians, Paul was improving upon the pagan hierarchies of the day. Neither Paul nor Jesus – who demonstrated both love and respect for women repeatedly in the Gospels – is going to be upset if we take these instructions that much further, if we add more love and respect, and more imago dei, to our relationships. On the contrary, I think it pleases Him.

“A marriage where either partner cannot love or respect the other can hardly be agreeable, to either party.” — Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (Sorry, just had to get my Austen on for a minute.)

Encountering Jesus as healer

The more I considered this young couple’s question, the more I kept coming back to the same answer: emotional healing. Emotional healing is what happens when Jesus walks into our pain and binds up the wounds of our hearts. Emotional healing is what draws us closer to each other than ever before.

It’s what enables us to answer Karen Carpenter’s velvet-voiced, pain-tinged question: “Why do we go on hurting each other, making each other cry, hurting each other, without ever knowing why?” Emotional healing shows us both why we hurt each other and also, how to stop hurting each other.

Pursuing emotional wholeness is a journey Jonathan and I have been on for four years now. And though we walk together, our paths look different. The healing Jonathan needed came in the form of expressing long-hidden grief. For me, it meant beginning to feel long-hidden feelings.

For both of us, the path to healing has trodden straight through pain, but it’s been worth it, for the healing we’ve found has deepened our intimacy and intensified our joy.

Celebrating 15 years of marriage

Perhaps the honeymoon should have worn off by now, but it hasn’t. We have more joy and intimacy after 15 years of the “daily grind” than we ever dreamed possible.

Along the way, we’ve shed strict interpretations of gender roles and lost deep emotional wounds. In their place, we’ve welcomed emotional healing and embraced mutual love and respect.

We are co-heirs with Christ and co-leaders in our home. We lead each other closer to Jesus, closer to love, closer to wholeness. We give each other space to grow, and we say the hard truth to each other, too.

This is what our Joy looks like.

How to Communicate So People Will Care {A Life Overseas}

August 7, 2015 / trotters41 / 3 Comments

Jonathan is over at A Life Overseas today, sharing his perspective on what creates effective communication back to senders and supporters.

Newsletters. Prayer updates. Itinerations. Reports. Furloughs. Presentations.

Are you stressed out yet?

For most of us, living and serving abroad means communicating back to senders. A lot. But this isn’t what we went to school for, and besides that, communicating in person or in print is scary. It’s exposing. It’s like learning a new culture and language; sometimes when we mess up it’s funny, sometimes not so much.

We’re all too familiar with the dangers:

Communicate too much and we’ll annoy people or people will say we’re not protecting the privacy of the nationals.

Don’t communicate enough and we’ll get dropped; people or churches will stop supporting us, because “out of sight, out of mind.”

Talk about the right stuff in the right way. One missionary recently told me that you have to appear miserable enough that people will still support you while not appearing so miserable they want you to come home.

To be sure, communicating with senders (via newsletter or a live missions report) is a unique form of communication, blending a bit of travelogue with a side of sales pitch, and then adding a large spoonful of sermon. It’s like a Christmas Letter got married to a Church Bulletin and had an Amway.

Finish reading the post here.

Home School Burnout Part 4: Resources for the New & the Weary

August 6, 2015August 7, 2015 / trotters41 / 2 Comments

by Elizabeth

Here are the links for the previous posts in my Home School Burnout series, in case you missed any of them:

Part 1: Unrealistic Expectations

Part 2: “Mom Fail”

Part 3: The Mean Mommy

And now, on to my 4th and final installment! For me, recovering from home school burnout was about addressing spiritual and emotional issues, as well as practical issues. Here are some resources that helped:

This spring I listened to a lecture from Susan Wise Bauer, my absolute favorite home school writer and speaker. It was called Burning Out: Why It Happens and What to Do About It. Bauer went through two separate home school burnouts and shares the lessons she learned. She’s probably the reason I didn’t feel guilty about my summer “mom fails.” Well worth the $5.

Another good one from Susan Wise Bauer is Homeschooling the Real Child, which I also listened to this spring. Again, you have to pay for it, but again, really valuable information.

The personally-convicting webinar I discussed in Part 3 isn’t available online anymore, but the author put her presentation slides up as a Google document. Might be useful to some, and feel free to ask me questions about specific slides. I can probably remember what the speaker was referring to.

If you related to the tension I felt in Part 2 between work/ministry inside the home and outside the home, you might appreciate this conversation between Rebekah Lyons and Jennie Allen. (I’m now obsessed with Jennie Allen, after discovering IF:Gathering and IF:Equip this year). We can trust God to call us back home, even when He’s called us outside the home, too.

For anyone new to homeschooling, I always recommend reading Susan Wise Bauer’s chaotic days with littles. Guaranteed to make you feel normal and non-failure-y. As Bauer’s children grew older, she stopped sharing details of daily life, a decision I really respect. I’m glad she shared the early years though:

A Day of First Grade and K-4 (with three boys under seven)

A Day with a First and Third grader and a Three-Year-Old

A Day with a Fourth and Second Grader, a Four-Year-Old and a Newborn

For anyone brand new to homeschooling, I always recommend Cathy Duffy’s 102 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum (an update of the original 100 Top Picks and subsequent 101 Top Picks). Don’t buy it just for the curriculum reviews; buy it because she walks you through the various homeschooling approaches and differing learning styles. She helps you identify your home education goals and then find an approach that matches your family’s learning styles. Really valuable resource.

For anyone who needs help with making schedules, the following posts helped me get started several years ago. I still have to make a new one each year as the workloads and number of students increase, and I have to make adjustments in the first couple weeks of school.

Routines, Schedules, and Hooks: Getting It All Done

The Schedule

Build a Better Schedule

Lastly, I’ve found that the main key to making the home school schedule work is monitoring my schedule. I have to keep tabs on my own time. I have to go to bed on time and get up early enough. I have to discipline myself to go straight from one kid’s lesson to another to another, etc., no breaks or wasting time. I have to stay off the computer till my scheduled writing time and close it when that time ends.

My schedule is working really well right now, but I have to be pretty strict about keeping it, or I don’t end up getting everything done that needs to get done. I still have to be careful about over-socializing, which uses me up until there’s nothing left for husband and children. In short, I can’t just make a schedule. I have to stay alert and stick to it.

Home School Burnout Part 3: The Mean Mommy

August 5, 2015August 7, 2015 / trotters41 / 2 Comments

by Elizabeth

There’s more to the story than Part 1: Unrealistic Expectations and Part 2: “Mom Fail.” Much more went on in my heart the last couple weeks of summer break, and I really wrestled with whether to share what I’m about to share. I’m fiercely protective of my children’s privacy, and I don’t share much about them online (more on why I’ve chosen to do that in a couple weeks at Velvet Ashes).

I was afraid that talking about my homeschooling struggles might reveal that gasp! I’ve ever had parenting issues at all (as though both my children and I are perfect). While I never want to share my children’s stories or betray their confidences, this story wasn’t actually about them. It was about me and my own sin, and that’s something I do feel (timidly) comfortable sharing. I also felt it would be disingenuous to leave the story at “God turned my heart towards my children that week and POOF! Everything was fixed.” It wasn’t that simple or straightforward.

God softened my heart that third week of summer, it’s true. But something else happened after that: I listened to a free, one-time webinar called “Teaching Ramona Quimby: Homeschooling Your Intense Child.” I signed up for this webinar because, um, FREE. (I also listened to a free one about teaching math conceptually, but that doesn’t have much to do with this part of the story.)

The speaker listed some of the characteristics of what she calls the “intense child.” As I listened I recognized myself in her description. I was an intense child, all grown up. I have big internal reactions to stuff, I’m sensitive to external stimuli, I don’t like my routine altered, I want to blame other people for my upsets, and I don’t always know what to do with my emotions.

I began to see that I was aggravating the homeschool stress through my reactions and attitudes. Busted! God was convicting me big time. You mean this all came back to me? You mean I’m the problem here? I didn’t want to admit that. I would rather blame my issues on something outside me. I really couldn’t though.

I started having some conversations with my husband about this stuff, and we talked more in-depth about “boundaries.” He’d been telling me for a while that I didn’t have good boundaries, though at the time I’d been so overwhelmed I didn’t really know what he meant or how to implement his advice. As I became convicted that my own behavior was causing my frustrations, I could now look inside and see he was right.

Here is what I found inside myself: a deep fear of being a Mean Mommy. There’s a voice in my head that tells me I have to be available to my children at all hours. I can never tell them no. So I would let little people climb on me all the time. I couldn’t give myself permission to take a break or to tell them no. In my mind that would be withholding love, and I wasn’t supposed to do that.

I didn’t want to be mean. I didn’t want to reject anybody. But when my patience had worn thin and I was tired of being climbed on, I did reject. I snapped and spoke unkindly, or I went away and hid. Or both. Result: I was becoming the Mean Mommy I was trying so hard to avoid. Ouch! That realization hurt.

So I started seeing myself as culpable. I needed to take responsibility for my behavior and my reactions. I needed to institute some better boundaries, and I needed to do it calmly. I found that when I did, peace returned to my home. I fell in love with my children again. I was able to see and care for their little hearts again. I even delighted in them again.

The Mommy I was meant to be was coming back from the grave.

Part 1: Unrealistic Expectations

Part 2: “Mom Fail”

Part 4: Resources for the New & the Weary

Home School Burnout Part 2: “Mom Fail”

August 4, 2015September 1, 2015 / trotters41 / 2 Comments

by Elizabeth

Our January discussion helped a lot, but then I just charged ahead into spring and overcommitted myself to the blogging world. It feels awkward to admit that, but it’s true. I severely underestimated my time and energy commitments — though in my defense, I didn’t realize I was overcommitting myself at the time.

I had wanted to write about the Parsonage Heresies for about a year, and in January I finally decided to do it on A Life Overseas. I didn’t realize that series was going to be such an emotional, intellectual, and time drain. Committing myself to a specific subject and needing to write an in-depth post about it every month really wore me out. Don’t get me wrong, I am so glad I wrote this series! It was just draining.

I also committed to write two Velvet Ashes posts for the spring. These weren’t ordinary posts though. They were related to the heavy themes in the book Expectations and Burnout and were also an emotional and time drain. Again, I’m so glad I wrote these! Especially Jesus Loves Me This I Sometimes Know — that story simply burned in my heart to be told.

By the time I got to early May, however, I was exhausted. I had spent myself in writing. In order to meet all the deadlines, I had directed attention away from my children. Somewhere in the process of writing and reaching out to the women who connected with my stories, I had inadvertently turned my heart away from my children, and now I didn’t particularly feel like turning back. Noise was still a stressor during school days, and I had a hard time fitting everyone’s lessons around my grueling blogging schedule, so I felt really behind again. I know six articles in four months doesn’t seem like it warrants the description “grueling,” but these posts took a lot from me.

I was poured out and empty. I took time off from blogging at other sites and condensed a couple weeks of school into one week in order to finish the school year a bit earlier. I thought I was going to lose my mind, and I needed a break. I was so tired. I told my husband I wanted to go away for a year; he told me that was an unreasonable solution. I knew he was right. I also knew I needed some way to refresh and refuel, and I didn’t know how long would be enough.

So when the first Monday of summer break came around, I took a break from parenting — almost literally. I let myself be a “bad” mom: I locked myself in my bedroom and let my children watch movies. All.day.long. I didn’t talk to them, I didn’t read to them, I didn’t play with them. It was a total “mom fail.”

I knew I only had four weeks of summer break because of our upcoming stateside service, and I wanted squeeze every last second out of it. I watched movies. I played Freecell. I read books. I wasted time on Facebook. I didn’t blog. I wasn’t productive. I was in a very fragile state and needed to be alone.

By the end of that first week I discovered, to my surprise, that perhaps I didn’t need an entire year away. Perhaps these few weeks would be enough of a break. Already I felt like coming out of my bedroom and interacting with my family again. Not all the time, mind you, just some of the time. I still hung out in my bedroom a lot.

During the third week God did something in my heart. It began with a prayer session at church where I started asking the question, “Why don’t I want to give my children my time?” That week as I started seeking answers to that question, another home school mom asked how she could pray for me. I didn’t share all the details, but I confided that I needed help balancing teaching and writing. (This was true, but rather general.)

It felt good to know someone was praying about this issue for me, because up to that point I hadn’t done much of that. Her prayers must have been working because the very next day I tuned in to a Sonlight webinar, and it reminded me why I love teaching my children and why I decided to do it in the first place. Those three events were pivotal in renewing my desire to home school.

So as summer drew to a close, I started recovering my heart for homeschooling. I started recovering my heart for my children. I started reorienting my heart toward my children, turning toward them instead of away. And by the time school started four weeks ago, I was ready to teach again. I was ready to spend time together again. I was ready to love again.

I still had to figure out the practicalities of fitting four students’ lessons into each day. (Eek! My long-time fears actually started materializing this school year!) I still had to figure out how to get all my writing and editing jobs done on time. But God had addressed my heart problem. He had given me the rest and recuperation I needed. He had supernaturally given me the ability to look at my summer “mom fails” not as a failure but as a necessity. In short, He had allowed my non-productive summer to be really productive.

Part 1: Unrealistic Expectations

Part 3: The Mean Mommy

Part 4: Resources for the New & the Weary