Interview with Cindy Beal About Her New Book: Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New

Agency client Cindy Beall is our guest interview on the blog today. Cindy is a writer, speaker and mentor to leaders. She has been married to her husband, Chris, since 1993, and they currently minister at Life.Church in Oklahoma. Cindy also serves on the Leading & Loving It team that ministers to pastors' wives and women in ministry around the world. Her first book, Healing Your Marriage When Trust Is Broken, chronicled the devastating infidelity and subsequent restoration of her marriage over 14 years ago.

Cindy, your second book, Rebuilding A Marriage Better Than New, released today. It’s been more than 14 years since your marriage suffered a devastating blow, which must feel like a lifetime ago, but you still have a heart and passion to minister to others in this area. Tell us a little about why you wanted to write Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New.

For many years, I’ve received emails from couples who are on a healing journey in their marriage. After reading my first book, Healing Your Marriage When Trust Is Broken, they have found hope and healing because of our experience. But a few years into their journey, they are asking me for more guidance and insight about how to stay on the healing path that Chris and I are still on today. That is part of the reason I wrote this book. The other part is to address the condition of many marriages today – often loveless, living like roommates, kind of marriages. My hope is that writing this book will help couples who have not only walked through betrayal, but also those who have just neglected their marriage for way too long.

How is your new book different from your first book, Healing Your Marriage When Trust is Broken, and why would every married couple benefit from reading it?

I describe my first book as more of a trauma situation. A betrayal occurs in your marriage and you are thrown into immediate devastation. You need quick attention to your wounds to stop the bleeding. I believe that Healing Your Marriage When Trust is Broken does just that. It offers hope and help to those who have found themselves in an unlikely and unwanted circumstance. My second book, Rebuilding A Marriage Better Than New, is for a broader marriage audience. Yes, it will help those who have had to rebuild after betrayal, but it will also help all other married couples. Why? Because our marriages can always be improved. My hope is that every married couple, healthy or not–so-healthy, will read Rebuilding A Marriage Better Than New so that they can grow healthier with each year.

In the book you lay out a four-phase process: healing deeply, building wisely, living fully, and investing generously. Can you walk us briefly through what those four phases look like practically in a marriage?

When something devastating happens in our lives, our first thought is often that we want to get back to normal. To go back to the old life before the devastation occurred. Even if that means an unhealthy marriage. Because of that, we often try to skip through the first two phases and go straight to the third which is live fully. However, we must heal deeply and build wisely before we can even think about living fully.

To heal deeply in our lives, we must grieve the pain. This is not fun. Period. But it is necessary. People often try to sidestep their pain and go around it. No matter how hard we try to get around the pain, it will still be there. We must go through the pain and as we do, as we grieve the pain of the loss, we will simultaneously heal deeply. Healing deeply means that we feel the pain, live honestly and learn how to handle the reminders of our devastation. This phase of healing deeply will continue for years to come as God’s Spirit continues to comfort us.

Building wisely happens as we’ve found some deep healing in our lives. To be able to begin to build wisely doesn’t mean we are totally healed. It just means that we have begun to heal in order to start the next phase. Building wisely entails restoring trust when betrayal has occurred. It also means that we learn how to manage our expectations with our spouse as well as learn how to live victoriously instead of having a victim mentality.

Living fully is the part everyone wants to get to. During this phase, we learn and own who we are in Christ. This is so vital in dealing with shame. We also learn that to get what we’ve always wanted, a healthy, strong marriage, we must do things that aren’t always easy. And to finish off this phase, we must learn to connect with each other as a couple or “find our porch.”

The invest generously phase is often never reached by many couples. Scripture teaches us in 2 Corinthian 1:3-4 that we are to comfort others with the comfort we have received from God. This is our spiritual “pay it forward” obligation. When we minister from a place where great pain once resided, a new level of healing occurs in our lives. And by far, this is the most rewarding and redeeming phase to walk through.

You’ve been living out the principles shared in this book for quite a while and you and your husband are enjoying the benefits of a better than new marriage. What words of encouragement would you give to couples that might just be at the beginning of the process of rebuilding or repairing their marriage?  

Stay the course. If you are on the verge of giving up and throwing in the towel, don’t. Commit to make some changes – both of you. Neither of you is perfect or without fault. It takes two to make a marriage work and two to make a marriage fail. Marriage is hard work even when you like each other. Keep pressing on, honoring the covenant you made with God.  It is not always easy to be married and stay married but it is worth it. And it is possible by the power of our great God.

To learn more about Cindy you can visit her website here. Be sure and order your copy of her new book here today.

Interview with Christa Black Gifford About Her New Book: Heart Made Whole

Agency client Christa Black Gifford is our guest interview on the blog today. Christa is a dynamic worldwide speaker, author, and bestselling songwriter. She was the keynote for Women of Faith’s Revolve Tour as well as a popular blogger and a writer for The Huffington Post. Her life-goal is to provide resources for those broken by the pain of life, leading them into wholeness of heart and intimacy with Jesus.  She’s married to the love of her life, Lucas Gifford. They live in Nashville, TN with their son, Moses Grae Lionheart, a daughter in heaven, Luca Gold, and their newest addition, daughter, Birdie James.

Christa, your second book, Heart Made Whole released today and I know it’s been quite a transforming journey that has led to this day. A journey you’ve been excited to share with others so they too can experience heart wholeness. Tell us a little about why you wanted to write Heart Made Whole.

I don’t really write books; I kind of drop bombs. I’ve learned the hard way over the years never to let something come out of me that I’m not fully living, so this book begged to be written, pouring out from an overflowing heart that couldn’t stay quiet any longer. 

When my daughter Goldie died on March 5, 2014, I treated my shattered heart very differently than I had in the past when tragedy would crash into my world.  I started treating my bleeding heart like it had been in a bomb blast--because it had. And as I learned to care and tend to my heart with kindness, patience, grace and understanding, the strangest thing happened.

I found God smack dab in the place I had avoided my entire life--He was living in the middle of my broken heart, waiting to nurse me back to life through connection, acceptance, grace, and love.

In the book you write, “If our hearts are not anchored to the goodness of God when tragedy strikes, we lower our theology to match our pain.” Can you walk us through what that means?

For years, horrible things would happen (or persist) in my life, but because I couldn’t find breakthrough, healing, or release, I would alter my theology to match my circumstance. 

Surely, God doesn’t want to heal me of this eating disorder or sexual addiction because I’ve cried out to Him a million times and He hasn’t zapped me into wholeness. 

Surely God wants me to stay single because He hasn’t brought my husband.

Surely it’s God’s will that I can’t find financial breakthrough because it keeps happening. 

Surely God wanted to give me a ministry to the sexually assaulted since He allowed my sexual abuse and rape.

Instead of looking at God’s perfect theology with skin on--the person of Jesus Christ--I would alter my perception of God and His will dependent on my life in a fallen world, instead of continuing to press in and find out why my life wasn’t lining up with His word. 

Most times when we go through trials in a wounding world, we put God on trial. But the more I built my inner case of offense of God, the more I pushed Him away--separating parts of my heart from the solution. It becomes very difficult to experience the love and healing of God when deep down you’re stiff-arming Him away in distrust.

I love the story in Matthew 17:14 of the demon possessed boy. When the disciples couldn’t get the demon out of him, they didn’t lower their theology to form belief systems around how God wants to heal some and not others. They realized there was a disconnect to the will of God and what was happening in the natural, so they brought the boy to Jesus and he was instantly healed.

When my daughter died, I refused to create cheap theology around my experience with lack and loss, especially since I am convinced that if my Savior had been standing in front of me in the flesh, her disease would have been instantly healed (as evidenced in scripture; John 10:8-10).  

When God is discovered to be the good guy, and the adversary is seen as the bad guy, it becomes very easy to move toward intimacy with God--especially when all hell breaks loose in your life. You realize your dependency on heaven’s perspective is critical to surviving hell in a fallen world.

One of the core messages of the book is that pain is not a bad thing. How did you ultimately come to an understanding that pain is something to experience, rather than resist? And how did you invite God into your pain?

Our Western Christian culture is in total denial about internal pain, and as a result, the church has become a bleeding mess of wounded people, hiding their secret shame to preserve their Christian reputations and ministry platforms. We beat ourselves black and blue with scriptures, spouting out how we should have deeper faith, acting as though we should never fear, or how we should put away our tears because God will bring something good out of the current tragedy.

But why would Jesus have given us a Comforter if He never intended us to mourn?

Denial about my childhood sexual abuse wounds left me as a Christian adult working overtime to hide them. But pain never goes away on its own with time, neglect, or shame. Pain must be felt, embraced, and brought into relationship with Perfect Love.

When I stopped denying the mess of my heart--that it was broken in parts, naturally fearful, insecure, diseased with shame and condemnation--that was the point of ultimate breakthrough. I stopped running from the mess, and in turn, realized that the mess was the ENTIRE reason God had chosen to make my heart HIS home.

He wasn’t overwhelmed with my heart like I was. He wasn’t ashamed or disappointed in it. He was patiently waiting, with oceans of grace and love, to start the process of inner restoration and transformation as I learned to stay connected to Him. 

Because you started this road to wholeness a few years ago, you have experienced the benefits of what it’s like to begin living with a whole heart. What words of encouragement can you give readers who are facing what can look like a painful road as they forge ahead?

Inner healing isn’t easy, and most of us stay away from it because we’re afraid of what we’re going to find inside. But living every breath to ignore, hide, or deny the reality of your old broken heart is FAR more exhausting than surrendering your inner land to perfect love. 

And I know this from decades of experience.

When you realize that God made YOU the landlord of your heart, and that YOU choose what stays inside or what has to go, you instantly remove your "victim role" and become the most powerful person in your world. Every day, I have the power and choice to either default to the Love who lives inside, or choose to guard my pain and fear, cutting myself off from the healing I desperately desire and deserve. When I finally realized that I hold the keys to my heart, I also realized that I was far more in charge of my life and its outcome than I once believed. 

You see, old Christa believed she was a victim of God and life--living every day in fear of what was lurking in the unknown future. But once I took the keys to my heart and said NO MORE, I choose whether or not bitterness, self-hatred, self-loathing, disgust, fear, and pain get to stay inside, or I choose whether or not to roll into the pain and connect with God who lives inside … that was the moment my life changed. I am a co-creator with God, and He isn’t at all insecure when I choose to stand up and be like Him. 

My job each day is very different than it used to be.

My job in each moment is to make sure I choose to keep my heart consciously connected to the Trinity who lives inside, defaulting to their wisdom, expertise, and ways. Denying love each day becomes my only problem, and embracing it is my only answer. 

When you learn to embrace love in every moment--even in the painful moments--I promise you, you’ve discovered the secret of life.

You’ve discovered how to live from a Heart Made Whole.

Order your copy here today!

Available Now: The More of Less by Joshua Becker

Most of us know we own too much stuff. We feel the burden of our clutter. We tire of cleaning and managing and organizing. Our toy rooms are messy, our drawers won’t close, our closets are filled, and we can’t fit our cars in our garages. The evidence of clutter is all around us. Meanwhile, this constant accumulation of stuff slowly begins robbing us of life. It redirects our God-given passions. It steals our greatest potential. It consumes our limited resources. And it distracts us from the very life we wish we were living.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In The More of Less, Joshua Becker, popular blogger at becomingminimalist.com helps you …

•          recognize the life-giving benefits of owning less

•          realize how all the stuff you own is keeping you from pursuing your dreams

•          craft a personal, practical approach to decluttering your home and life

•          discover greater contentment, less envy, and more joy

•          recognize why you buy more than you need

•          experience the joys of generosity

•          learn why the best part of minimalism isn’t a clean house, it’s a full life

It’s time to own your possessions instead of letting them own you. After all, the beauty of minimalism isn’t in what it takes away. It’s in what it gives. You won't want to miss this must read resource from Joshua.

Available Now: Brazen by Leeana Tankersley

Leeana Tankersley’s new book, Brazen, officially launched this week and we couldn’t be prouder of her!

In her trademark lyrical style, Leeana asks the question: What if we trusted what God put within us on the day of creation? What if we lived from the idea that who we really are is enough? Wouldn't that be brazen? 

Brazen means without shame, and Leeana encourages us to live our lives based on love and belonging and the feeling of being comfortable in our own skin. We don't have to live from guilt or shame--and it's such a freeing concept!

And it goes without saying, but isn’t her book cover brazen? 

Also, we recommend checking out her guest post on Ann Voskamp’s blog this week.

Available Now: Colors of Goodbye by September Vaudrey

We all suffer pain and loss in different ways, but I've yet to meet a mother whose greatest fear isn't losing a child. On May 31, 2008, September Vaudrey had to face that fear head on. When her daughter Katie was just 19, September and her family had to say goodbye all too soon.

But while the loss of Katie is the springboard and backdrop for September's memoir, her book is so much more. It starts off right in the middle of the terrible drama that unfolded for the Vaudrey family, but then deftly leads the reader on a journey from pain to healing, from loss to hope, all the while providing a true and gritty look at a faith journey strong enough to withstand the hardest thing a mother can imagine.

Colors of Goodbye is simply beautiful, and that isn't just true of the writing. September's publisher, Tyndale Momentum, did a fantastic job of weaving Katie's art as well as pictures of Katie and the family throughout the book in a truly honoring way. We hope you'll check out this fantastic debut memoir. As Publisher's Weekly said in its starred review, "Exquisitely balanced between sadness and joy, this sensitive account of a mother's loss will leave ripples."