Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for the ‘Marital Intimacy’ Category

There’s no argument about the foulness of some web content.  It seems as though temptation can always be just a click away.

I cherish my marriage, my Dana as well as the One who gave us marriage.  That’s why I use an internet accountability software called Covenant Eyes.

Dana and I have tried a different setup by xxxchurch.com but it wasn’t a thorough as CE is.  But, xxx is free and CE is currently going for $84.95/year.

You choose your accountability partners and they log in to the covenanteyes.com to select how often they’d like to receive your internet usage log (every single URL with date and time) in their e-mail inbox.  But, even with an accountability program, the ultimate decision is whether you want to be held accountable or not.

It is worth every penny to protect our family.

The truth is that we really don’t have a church right now. The closest one to us is a 40-minute walk away in a nearby village. The ferocity of the sun rules it out as a possibility because it is too harsh for my baby’s mama. So, we lean mostly on downloaded sermons and personal time to nourish our spirits.

Today, we listened to Take It to the Limit, Part 5: A Time to Run from Andy Stanley’s podcasts. This is a series about setting up margin in your life and this particular sermon was on sexual morality. I decided to note some great boundaries (we call them hedges, too) that he shared. Dana and I have discovered the need and benefit of having boundaries and the margins they create. These are the ones Andy shared:

1. Do not chat online with someone of the opposite sex.
2. Do not eat alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Do not ride in the car alone with someone of the opposite sex.
4. Men let your wife choose your assistant if that person is a female.
5. Where there is a debatable relationship, decide up front to talk about it and expose it to your wife.
6. Pornography and clubs are not neutral forms of entertainment. They are paths to destruction.
7. Don’t confide in a member of the opposite sex or allow them to confide in you. It is better to hurt their feelings than to hurt your/their marriage.
   

Others Dana and I have implemented are:

1. Go to bed at the same time. If that is not possible, I will not be online while she is asleep.
2. Do not be in a private room alone with someone of the opposite sex.
3. Covenant Eyes, an online accountability program that logs everywhere I go online, is installed on my computer.
4. We are
   

A great summary question he said toward the end of the sermon is this…

How far would I want my spouse to go to protect himself/herself from unnecessary sexual temptation?

I pray all of us, men and women, can understand the severity of these standards and the consequences of the lack of them.

Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 1 Corinthians 6:18

Poor Dana had another bad vomit day today.  Unfortunately her morning sickness has allowed me to put different plastic shopping bags to the test. Food Lion, Eckerd, Harris Teeter have all had contestants but one has outperformed them all.  The Target shopping bag.  The return of Dana’s early morning waffle showed me the Target bag was here to help.
Next time you shop at Target, be sure to save those bags for when you need to contain… um……. things. 

   
Being called Daddy is a consideration that is by far the furthest thing from my mind as Dana and I count down the days to leave for Africa. Or at least it was the furthest thing.  Dana woke up on July 1 not feeling so well. To motivate curiosity was the fact that she was also late on her cycle. To Walgreen’s I went. Did you know there are digital pregnancy tests?! Cool.

   By the end of the day our lives had changed, once again. Dana is (by our guesstimate) about 5 weeks pregnant. According to two online calculators, this puts her due date at February 29, 2008. Missionary. Moving to Africa. Daddy. I am really looking forward to taking care of my Dana and my baby. It is of GREAT relief to have the One who made life itself to be my strength. Wow, what a life I tell ya…

Dana and I have a commitment to always go to bed together no matter how tired (or not) the other is. But, we can always expect to not actually get to sleep until 30-minutes to one hour after we climb in bed. The reason is that we have a nightly debrief where we recount the day to each other. We tell the other what we did that day, where we went, who we saw, etc., and more importantly what we felt about all those things. Most of the activities we already know about for each other since we are literally together 24/7. But it is the valuable emotions and thoughts about things that help keep us close.

I hate to open up. Absolutely detest it. I’d just rather be about my own business. Not good when you’re as one with an emotional being. (For the single lads out there, that would be woman just in case you didn’t pick that up.) Over time, I have found that not only do I start pouring out thoughts and feelings once I begin telling Dana about my day but there have actually been nights here recently when I sought to tell her and hear her response to my feelings and enjoyed the fact that time was definitely going to be there. Guys – call me a wuss and I’ve got a big back yard where we can discuss that in further detail.

Just wanted to let you all know how important a committed-to, daily, husband-wife debrief time has become to us. If you’re married, try it.