Title Tuesday: The Great Sex Rescue... sort of

I am currently reading The Great Sex Rescue by @sheilagregoire.

I was on the launch team and read the PDF. I have read the paperback twice now and I am round the corner on number three and this book only came out this month.

I wanted to read, reread, mark, and lookup portions of this book because it is so controversial.

Sheila and her team tackle the issue of problematic teaching in the modern-day church and how they negatively impact marriages, demean women, and infantilize men within the church.

While I am not ready to write a full review yet, I can say if you are a Christian and you have ever bought (or been given) a marriage book, you need Sheila’s book to hold it up against. Want to take a look? You can find it here. 

Hey Y'all

Welcome back to my little corner of the internet. 

Thank you for your patience, emails, and check-ins on social media. It really did my heart good. 

I took about nine months off of writing anything at all and almost two years off of writing anything of real substance beside book reviews. A lot has happened for our family in the last 18 months so let me give you the cliff-notes version:  

• we PCSed (moved for all you non-military) from San Diego to Philadelphia, 
• my husband started a masters degree & sports medicine residency, 
• I had a miscarriage, 
• 2019 ended,
• we fostered a working dog, 
• I found out I was expecting again, 
• the pandemic started, 
• my husband started K9 Farr Fitness,
• the world seemed to shut down, 
• our daughter Emily was born,
• we got our new dog MJ,
• 2020 ended,
• my husband started studying for board exams,
• today we hit the one year mark of choosing to staying-at-home because of the virus

Of course any one of those things is challenging but to have all of them happen in 18 months? 

It has been a bit of a whirlwind. 

We have had marriage struggles, health scares, political unrest, social unrest, but most of all? 

Most of all we have had Jesus and I am so incredibly grateful. The last two years forced growth from me as a child of God, mother and wife that wouldn't have happened otherwise. 

Some of you may have noticed that things look a little bit different around my blog and social media lately. I have dropped the Forgiven Former Feminist moniker. 

I realized that while the name was catchy, it wasn't Christ-like and it didn't give me the scope to write about all the things I want to. I felt like everything had to be geared towards feminism and that left out things that I am really passionate about like: 

• homeschooling
• books
• time management
• pornography and sexual integrity
• Army life
• body image
• fitness
• home management 

...and frankly anything else that comes to mind. So, I have essentially re-branded to just my name across social media and here on the blog. I plan to write about anything and everything that I am thinking. Some things may really resonate with you while other things don't. That is totally fine, part of being an adult is learning how to get along with people you disagree with.  

So on that note, I am going to sign off for today. 

I can't wait to share more with y'all soon!

Title Tuesday: Dare to Respect

Welcome to  Title Tuesday, my favorite day of the week! This day is dedicated to book suggestions and reviews. I write this portion of my blog because I am a big believer in the motivational speaker Charlie Jones' quote which says, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” I try to meet as many new people as possible and to read everything I can. This is my way of sharing that information with you. If you are interested in understanding my rating system for books you can read my Book Review Explanation here and What I Believe here. If you want to check out what I am currently reading or what I want to read next, friend me on Goodreads! With all that being said, lets jump in!

Last week I wrote about  The Respect Dare by Nina Roesner. The book for this week is based off that book! This week we are going to talk about Dare to Respect by Tammy Oberg De La Garza. 

This book is actually a work of fiction about women that took The Respect Dare, and how it changed their lives. The book follows the story of six different women and how the Respect Dare impacted their marriages. 

Dare to Respect gives some real, practical things that could be done to help wives show respect to their husbands. The characters stories are well developed and very intricate. The story line is rich and captures the imagination.

The only downside to this book is the handling of the topic of pornography. The author hints that pornography makes men violent, wife-beaters. I think that this misconstruction could lead a lot of women down an ugly path if they ever found out their husbands were using pornography. While I absolutely agree that pornography is 100% wrong, not all men that view pornography are going to be as aggressive as one of the husbands in the novel. 

Overall I give this book a B+. While there is nothing wrong with the book I generally don't read fiction, so I am going to review it as a tool. This book can be used to help you better accomplish marriage improvements. It would be a good tool for a women's group to talk over if they were looking for a fictional alternative for book club. If used as a tool, I would explain carefully to the group that the depiction of pornography use and the subsequent actions taken are not necessarily right or biblical, which is why this book received only a B+. 

Title Tuesday: The Respect Dare

Welcome to  Title Tuesday, my favorite day of the week! This day is dedicated to book suggestions and reviews. I write this portion of my blog because I am a big believer in the motivational speaker Charlie Jones' quote which says, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” I try to meet as many new people as possible and to read everything I can. This is my way of sharing that information with you. If you are interested in understanding my rating system for books you can read my Book Review Explanation here and What I Believe here. If you want to check out what I am currently reading or what I want to read next, friend me on Goodreads! With all that being said, lets jump in!

Every once in a while I review a book that I have been putting off for any number of reasons. Today I am going to share with you just such a book... The Respect Dare by Nina Roesner. 

Let me start by saying that I think this books is very good and incredibly challenging which is why I put it off for so long. I have had this book sitting on my "to review" shelf for almost two years. The reason for my hesitancy with this book is because like many Christian women, I shy away from the word respect. I waited to read this book until I was ready to give it a real try and complete all the dares with the goal of showing my husband the love RESPECT that he needs. 

WAIT. WHAT? 

This is the part where women tend to nod off or just flat out ignore what the Bible teaches. But the fact of the matter is that husbands need respect. Period, end of story. We as wives have the incredibly ability and opportunity to help them with that just as they are called to love us. So, if you have a fundamental problem with the idea that wives should respect their husbands, you should probably stop reading here. 

Ok, now that we have covered that, lets get back to my journey through The Respect Dare by Nina Roesner. I have just completed the respect dare and I have to say that it was a real learning experience for me. My husband and I have often had the respect argument of "But what does it LOOK like to respect you". I needed more than just a list of don'ts to be able to do a good job. I needed to know what I could do positively to impact his heart with the respect that he needs. 

Nina Roesner does a great job of doing just that. She breaks each topic down in a way that is clear and concise. The chapters and topics are varied cover everything from introspection, to frying pans, to sex. 
Each chapter contains a scripture reference, a little vignette that explains the dare, a bottom line that is the actual dare, and a list of questions. I strongly recommend keeping a notebook for working through this book. It is helpful to write out the answers to the questions. As for how this book impacted my marriage? I didn't realize how many things that I said and did on a daily basis communicated disrespect to my husband. I didn't realize the ways in which my means of communication or getting things done left him out of the equation all together. This book gave me practical and real life steps I could take to better my h=understanding of his need for respect and also the best ways to do it. 

Overall, I give the book an A+ and I want to tell every wife I know about it. I will caution that I do NOT think that this is one of those marriage books that should be used by couples before marriage. I think this book is just too in-depth for that and it could cause unnecessary heartache if the couple does not remain together. However, I will recommend The Respect Dare by Nina Roesner to all newly married couples, couples that have been married for some time, and couples that just need a jump start in their marriage. It could be a tool to improve your own marriage as well as a tool to help other struggling in their marriages. This was a great book and an easy read, 100% worth your time. 

Wife to Wife Wednesday: Jokes and Respect

Good morning! Welcome to Wife to Wife Wednesday, the day that we discuss any and all issues relating to marriage. 

Today I want to talk about something that may be a bit divisive in the Christian community. I wrote last week about husband bashing and why it is a bad idea. Today I want to expand on that topic a bit. I want to talk to you (a.k.a Christian wives) about making jokes at your husbands expense. 

If you watch television or movies you are probably familiar with the overused trope of the bumbling idiot dad and the mom who sighs as she cleans up his messes.  Don't believe me? Check out: Everybody Loves Raymond, The George Lopez Show, and Family Matters. (I know most of these shows are out of date, but we don't own a television, so go with me.) Each of these shows depict the husband as this big goofy kid that the wife has to keep in place. She is the head of the family and he just sort of trips and falls through life. 

This idea that husbands are bumbling fools seems to have completely infiltrated society, even Christian society. You see them on social media, in memes, on television, on the radio... the list goes on and on. As I mentioned in my article last week about husband bashing, this is usually where people start shrieking about how it is just a joke. But here is the thing, if you are a Bible believing Christian, then you have to take what the Bible says seriously. Lets take a look at what the Bible says about these "jokes" and use that to help us decide if you should or should not re-post a "joke" on social media.

Lets start wit the most obvious thing, should you be posting these jokes at all? Ephesians 4:29 says, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." Ok, so maybe these aren't dirty jokes, so the qualify as wholesome. But what about that second part? Is it helpful? Does it build people (your husband) up? Is it a benefit to those who listen?  If the answer is NO to any of those questions, don't re-post. 

Ok, so now lets check out Proverbs 16:28 which says, "A perverse person stirs up conflict, and a gossip separates close friends." Are these "jokes" stirring up conflict? If you make these jokes about your husband to a friend, are you not gossiping? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, don't re-post. 

Finally, lets check out Ephesians 5:33 which says, "However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband." This is a passage of scripture that not many preachers are willing to tackle because it angers feminists greatly. However, if you believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, breathed by God (2 Timothy 3:16) then you have to take this portion of the Bible just as seriously as you would any other part of the Bible. 

So ladies, before you re-post that "hilarious" meme from your favorite mommy blog. Stop, think. Run it through your checklist. If it doesn't meet the standards the Christ set for us, don't post it. Honor and respect your husband, as you were commanded to.