Leap into a New Year

At the beginning of a new year, I’m more about reflection than I am about resolutions.

I’d like to share what I’ve been up to here at The Forgiven Wife over the past year. Then, although I don’t do resolutions, I DO have ideas and plans—and I want to share that with you. I want to challenge you, too, to think about how you can move forward in 2019.

Looking back at 2018

Last year I had three goals for The Forgiven Wife: more transparency and stories, a series on sexual healing and wholeness, and mentoring.

Transparency and stories

I wrote quite a bit about my own journey, often digging into painful memories and wrestling with them along the way. Almost none of this writing made it into the blog. I discovered some areas where I still need to do a little work and where I don’t yet have the perspective I need in order to write something that would be meaningful to you. I did use that material as a springboard for many of my posts, but the stuff where I’m particularly transparent about my own journey hasn’t made it through to the blog yet.

From a blogging point of view, I didn’t achieve this goal—but I hope that writing will turn into something useful for you down the road.

Sexual healing and wholeness series

While the series didn’t go quite as I had anticipated, I was so happy to be able to share other women’s stories with you. Women wrote about healing after betrayal, addiction, body image struggles, premarital sex, and more. I’m so grateful to those women for opening their hearts to share with you all.

My intention all along was to wrap up the series with my own story, which I did throughout December. It was really helpful to me to be able to reflect on my experiences with sexual brokenness and learning to sexually care for my husband and then share how God turned that brokenness into something beautiful.

Mentoring

My ideas about mentoring unfolded in a quite different direction than I’d anticipated—and then at the end of the year, I found myself exactly where I’d expected at the beginning of the year.

God made it clear to me at the end of 2017 that I should be developing small-group and one-on-one connections to support and encourage women. I started out last year trying to put together a mentoring program, and I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. I saw too many hurdles that I couldn’t figure out how to move past.

I set my ideas aside and developed several Facebook groups instead. Along the way, I decided to facilitate a Passion Pursuit study. I ended up running three of those groups in 2018. I thought, Okay, well, this isn’t quite what I had in mind when I thought about mentoring, but I guess it qualifies.

At the end of November, as my last Passion Pursuit study was wrapping up, I found myself reflecting on my original mentoring plans. I sat down to lay it all out on paper, and all those hurdles I’d seen before just disappeared as I developed my new Intimacy Mentoring program.

Beyond goals

In addition to The Forgiven Wife, I’m part of the Sex Chat for Christian Wives podcast. I was thrilled to get to spend time with two of my partners (J and Bonny) at the Declare Conference in Texas in October. (We were sad Gaye wasn’t able to make it.)

Have you ever wondered what sex writers and speakers do when they get together? Within just a couple hours of meeting up, we were in the sexual health section at Walmart checking out artificial lubricants together. Here’s a picture of us in front of the KY Jelly. There was a whole other section with other products as well.

I’ve used a lot of what I learned at the conference in various ways. I developed a new e-book, From My Heart to Yours. It’s a collection of some of my favorite blog posts, and it is a gift for anyone who subscribes to my email list. (Click here to sign up.)

We also hit a pretty cool milestone with our podcast. At the end of the year, we surpassed a quarter of a million downloads. We agreed that was pretty awesome, and we’re so happy to know that women find it helpful to join us at our virtual table.

Looking ahead to 2019

I’m excited to see what God does this year. Here’s some of what I expect to see.

Delight

Some people choose a word for each year—something that represents what they hope God will do in their lives, a concept or goal to focus on, or a source of inspiration and guidance.

I’ve done this only once before, and that was two years ago for my personal spiritual growth and Bible study.

In 2018, although I didn’t have a word in front of me, I landed on the words No More Fear as I emerged from an intense bout of anxiety in the summer. Those words guided me through my personal study for the rest of the year.

I still have a lot of work to do on conquering my fear and anxiety, but these things are about ME. Much of my prayer life was focused on asking God to make changes in me.

Recently I realized that I’m focusing so much on what I’m struggling with that I’m missing out on experiencing God and growing in intimacy with Him.

I was reading in the Psalms and came across this verse:

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4

Delight.

It struck me that my relationship with God needs more delight in it.

So that is my word for 2019: DELIGHT.

The experience of delight is one that encourages us in the marriage bed, too.

As a woman who struggled so much with sex, I know how easy it is to focus either on my own struggles or on my husband’s experience. The thing that made such a difference in our sex life, though, was when I learned to delight in the experience of sex. When I sought and experienced the joy, the intimacy, and the pleasure, our marriage bed became a place I’d never imagined could exist.

I hope to encourage you this year toward delight in your marriage bed. I plan to write more posts about simply enjoying sex.

Studies

The Passion Pursuit study is so good in helping us understand what sex means for our husbands, for ourselves, and for our marriages. It helps us dig into struggles we often face, and it gives us strategies for responding to some of those struggles.

I plan to lead this study twice this year, with one session in the spring and one in the fall. The study itself is pretty robust, but I add to the study with a weekly email, on-going group encouragement, and some individual encouragement as well.

I’ll also lead a shorter study (not marriage-related) over the summer.

I need your help!

I’ve been running the studies primarily through Facebook. For some women, that’s most convenient because they’re already on Facebook for other things. However, not everyone is on Facebook—and not everyone is willing to talk about sexual intimacy without the cloak of anonymity.

If you think you might be interested in participating in one of these studies, would you please take this quick poll for me? If there is enough interest in using something outside Facebook, I will look at other platforms. I am testing one option out now, and I have a couple other ideas in mind that might work as well.

Click here to take the poll.

Intimacy Mentoring

I hope to grow the Intimacy Mentoring program so I can work with even more women one-on-one. If you’ve set yourself the goal of working on sexual intimacy this year, this might be a great option for you.

If you aren’t sure about the time you have to commit to working with me, try out the Intimacy Encouragement subscription for a few months. Maybe that will give you the boost you need.

A book?

I’ve been working on several books for what seems like forever. In addition to getting my small “thanks for signing up for my blog emails” e-book done, I’m thrilled to be making actual progress with one of my more substantial books. I am hopeful that 2019 will be the year!

As you reflect on your marriage bed during the past year, think about what you would like to resolve to change.

What is the first step you need to take as you leap into the new year?

Image credit | mohamed_hassan at pixabay.com