Trisha and I have been traveling a lot the past two months speaking at marriage events. We’ve been honored to see God work powerfully in the lives of so many couples. One thing has been consistent at every event we’ve been: a lot of marriages are struggling. I know there have been times, sometimes s...

I learned a lot about this community yesterday.  Here is what I learned: A lot of us guys really want to lead our family spiritually, we just have no clue how to do it. I also realized that I am not alone and I’m not crazy. Spiritual leadership is hard.

I want to say upfront that I don’t have all t...

I’ve always wanted to be a leader. From the time I was a kid I admired leadership. I wanted to be a leader at school. I wanted to be a leader on my teams. When I went to college, I learned that God placed a call in my life to be a leader in the Church. All of those leadership roles felt natural. All...

Just a few weeks before the affair began, I found myself with a way out. I had a chance to extinguish the forest fire before it ever started. This choice would have saved my marriage. This would have allowed me to continue being the pastor of our church. I could have saved so many relationships from...

On Tuesday, Justin wrote about the art of pursuing your wife so today I thought I’d tackle the art of pursuing your husband. So often after we get married we lose our tenacity to pursue one another like we did when we were dating. What once was a blissful opportunity to show how much we love our hus...

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.” -Pliny the Elder

One of the biggest changes we have made in our marriage over the past 6 years in our pursuit of one another. It isn’t that we intentionally stopped pursuing each other…it just kinda stopped. The thri...

There are very few words that transcend circumstances. There are very few words that go beyond social, economic and marital status. There are very few words that hit all of us in the same way, at the same time and with the same potential for impact and change. But these 4 words do:

“I am with you.”...

Six years ago this week, I was anything but a church leader. I was a church wounder. I was just a few days removed from telling my wife of 10 years that I no longer wanted to be married to her. I admitted to an affair that devastated every person that I loved and that loved me. I was living four mil...

Last week, I was on the phone with a pastor friend of mine and we were talking about the challenge we are facing and the goal that we have and he said something that a lot of people think, but very few say. He said, “If you don’t raise all of the money will you feel like a failure.” The honesty and ...

I had the honor of performing a wedding on Saturday. I love being able to share in a couple’s special day. As I was giving the message during the ceremony, I spoke about 3 things that have helped Trisha and I  journey together and love each other more today than we did the day we got married. We obv...

Signs Your Marriage is Drifting

1. You think that the absence of conflict equals the presence of intimacy.

2. You find yourself keeping certain details of conversations or events from your spouse.

3. You say you forgive but you are really resentful.

4. You care more about being right than being ...

About three months before the affair started, Trisha and I got into one of, if not the biggest arguments we’d ever had. Our disagreement started out small but continued to escalate and get louder and more mean as the night went on. I inherited a pretty volatile temper from my dad, so even though I d...

I (Justin) want to disclaim this post by saying that I am not a counselor or a therapist by training. I don’t have credentials behind my name, so this post may be contrary to what they teach in text books. I also want to say that the heart of this post is not to give people permission to leave their...

It is Tuesday! Tuesday in our house is Biggest Loser Night. The Biggest Loser is one of my all time favorite shows. I am a sucker for The Biggest Loser. I love the stories of the people that are on the show. I love watching them succeed in something that they have failed at most of their lives. I lo...

We haven’t bought new furniture in 6 years. In fact, the very first room you enter in our house is our living room. There has been no furniture in that room for the entire year that we’ve lived here. We called it the “rug room”, because we have an area rug in the middle of it. About 7 months ago, we...

Yesterday, I did a post on two questions to ask yourself when life gets busy. So often in my life I think my schedule is the issue. If I just didn’t have as much going on, then I would be less busy. The questions we asked yesterday dig below the surface and allows us to see the condition of our hear...