Loving Marriage

When Doc and I married, we were babes. He was 19 the day he awaited me at the front of the church. I’d just turned 21. On that beautiful spring day I knew he was my knight in shining armor, and I was excited to spend my life in his arms! That is the fairy tale right? Most of us know that when we walk down the aisle to say “I do”, the person we wed is the one we are meant to be with for life. Then, life happens. The trials we walk through will either make or break us, and I think a lot of it has to do with how well we receive and obey the commandment in Genesis 2:24, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become ONE FLESH.”

I don’t know if I had even read that Scripture prior to marriage, even if I did, I didn’t have a clue what it meant on a personal level. I knew that I didn’t believe in divorce, and I knew that I adored Matthew Ford. As young people often do, I think we knew we would figure out the rest as we went along. We made a commitment to one another to be good at marriage, that looked like registering regularly for Christian marriage conferences. We filled our toolbox full of tried and true tools to help us be pros at this thing we call marriage. We practiced (and occasionally succeeded!) the tools we received at these conferences, but still the ONE FLESH concept was foreign in so many ways. I think I was only considering Father God to mean that we were to physically become ONE FLESH, I didn’t really understand there are multiple areas where we can be one flesh with our spouse. The areas we excelled at were physical ONE FLESH and intellectual ONE FLESH. Those were our connecting points and gratefully sustained us through the worst years in our marriage. We struggle the most with emotional ONE FLESH and a little with Spiritual ONE FLESH though that’s grown with reading the Word together. I didn’t really even know what they were as a young bride, so how were we to work on them?

Through the years and through many trials, God has revealed Himself in our marriage in many different ways and invited us to find ONE FLESH, but we are still growing. Intimacy is what we crave as humans, but it is so hard to find a mate who wants more than physical intimacy in a relationship in the 2020’s. A friend of mine, who loves the Lord, has been fooled by her flesh and the enemy to believe that if she dates a man and doesn’t sleep with him before marriage, she may make a mistake. From personal experience and many stories with friends, I can say that the opposite is probably true. There is no guilt or shame when you become ONE FLESH within the confines of marriage. That kind of freedom, the freedom to enjoy a gift God gave for married couples is amazing. My hope and prayer is that she will be able to believe the truth and realize that God loves her, and that is why He has drawn boundaries around our sexual lives. The world has sex so tainted, all you have to do is look around you to see how ugly it’s become. And yet, it is a commandment from God that we practice it regularly within marriage.

Hubby and I have spent years exploring ONE FLESH, we are growing in every area of intimacy, and we invite you along on our journey into the depths of true intimacy within marriage. Our hearts are for all couples to find true intimacy in the midst of this battle we call life. It took me a lot of years to “leave my father and my mother”, I had to learn to trust. Hubby gave me a safe space in many areas to be myself and to grow with him. We have been through many refining fires, but God has always had us because our hearts became ONE FLESH the day we said “I do.”