Forever Beloved

Faith, Love & Truth

Ignite Intimacy | How I Started To Embrace My Sexuality – Guest Post

{It is with such pleasure that I introduce Kami Crawford.  Kami and her husband Ben have a YouTube channel called Fight For Together where they post videos on fighting for the togetherness of their family.  They feel family is so incredibly valuable, it’s worth fighting for!  The realness, vulnerability and transparency they show is so refreshing.  So many times while watching one of their videos I’ve thought “me too”!  They have a real heart for Jesus that shines through their videos.  I had the pleasure of meeting their family for lunch a few months ago and found their vlogs are such an accurate depiction of who they are in real life.  Please give a warm Forever Beloved welcome to Kami!  Show her how much you appreciate her by sharing and commenting on her story!}

ignite intimacy couple sex

How I started to embrace my sexuality:

I grew up in a religious household where we didn’t talk about much of anything, let alone sex.  My parents gave me some cassette tapes when I was hitting puberty that talked about sex, I guess.  I don’t remember.  I was mostly left to figure out my sexuality on my own.  Because it wasn’t talked about growing up I naturally thought it was a bad or gross thing.  Something that needs to be hidden away and not talked about.  I was not a curious person by nature so I didn’t really know what a grown man’s penis looked like till I got married.  I also didn’t know where to put my tampon in.  My husband had to help me figure that out.  These parts of my story used to embarrass me but I don’t feel that way anymore.  I mostly feel sad and a little angry that I was so ill-informed about an important part of me.

My first memories of sexual feelings were when I was ten and I liked to touch myself. I remember feeling like I needed to hide it. By the time I was twelve something would happen to me that would take me decades to recover from.  I became involved in an abusive relationship with my junior high youth pastor.  We never had sex, in fact, things were never overtly physical but this relationship was extremely confusing because the youth pastor would treat me like his daughter and also like his girlfriend.  He was a twenty-six-year-old married man.  My first sexual feelings for another man were riddled with shame and secrecy.  I felt like an adulteress.

When I got married, I believed that sexuality was bad.  Especially my sexuality.  I heard it said in Bible studies that it was good, but never could believe it for myself.  This made it so that on my honeymoon the last thing I wanted to do with my husband was to have sex and be sexual with him.  This was one of the only things he wanted on our honeymoon.  So you can imagine the heartbreak.  I even went so far as to tell him that maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married.  For the next 10 years, we fought about sex 2-3 times a week.  And when we didn’t fight I would give it to him because I felt like I had to to keep the peace in our marriage.  This was the number one source of pain in my life.  At one point I even believed I was asexual.

A few things came into my life that started to turn this around for me.  I started attending a 12 step group.  I realized that I had issues that I needed to start to address.  I realized I could change.  My beliefs could change.  I began to acknowledge that what I believed about my sexuality was damaging to me.  I wanted more truth and freedom.  I began to get counseling for what happened to me with the youth pastor.  I began to piece together why I have such a wrong view of my sexuality: I didn’t feel valued as a woman.  So how could I value my sexuality, which is apart of my womanhood?  I began to reject the value was put on me, that I was less valued because I was a woman, and began to embrace the truth that I had incredible value as a woman.  I am beautifully made, every part of me.  My sexuality is good.  My orgasms are not something just to endure but they’re amazing and something to go after.  I began to take back my sexuality that I didn’t even know I had surrendered.  This process took many years.  Many years of not seeing any change.  For us, it took having six children.  And then something broke.

After years of work this past year I finally started to feel something that looked like change.  I had a sexual awakening.  I started to see parts of myself as good that I always wanted to hide.  I cut my shorts shorter.  I posted naked pictures of me on Instagram.  I began to see my body as good.  I began to see my sexuality not as a liability but as a wonderful thing.  Not just for my husband but for myself.  I no longer dread my husband asking for sex.  In fact, sometimes I initiate.  That never used to happen.  I always had some kind of excuse to not have sex like “I’m too tired” or “we had sex on Tuesday”.  I no longer feel shame about my sexual fantasies because they’re only apart of my story.  They tell me something about where I came from.  I see my sexual pleasure as something that God gave me not something that needs to be despised and hidden.  I began to accept parts of me that I had rejected.  Parts of me that I thought were disgusting.  I began to accept all of me.  I don’t know if you’ve been sexually abused.  I don’t know if you were never taught to see your sexuality as good.  But I hope through reading a part of my story maybe you’ll believe that change is possible.  Maybe you’ll get angry at what’s happened to you.  Maybe you will be able to embrace your sexuality a little more, or at least see that it’s possible.  Maybe you’ll start to believe that you are beautifully made, every part of you.

– Kami

You can find Kami here:

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The Key To A Fulfilling Life | Guest Post

{It is with such pleasure that I introduce Patricia.  She reached out to me recently and was interested in being a guest blogger, I jumped at the opportunity!  Her heart for Jesus is evident as you read her blog.  Please give a warm Forever Beloved welcome to Patricia!  Show her how much you appreciate her by sharing and commenting on her post!}

There are so many self-help books in the 21st century that promise to give us the key to a fulfilling life. But the majority of them are missing the one important thing: a healthy, thriving relationship with Jesus Christ. The Bible is full of information on how to achieve that. Let’s dive in…

Read Psalm 37:1-7

King David lived a life similar to us. Yes, he was a great leader, but he also had his ups and downs. He also experienced the valleys and the mountains of his relationship with the Almighty. The Scripture we are reading today is the result of his constant communion with the Lord.

Mind Your Own Business

The first two verses are very clear. God doesn’t want us to worry about what the world is doing. He wants you to focus on what YOU need to be doing.

Trust In The Lord…Do Good

One vital step to a fulfilling life as a Christian is to trust God. But we shouldn’t sit around and twiddle our thumbs. Trusting God is not a passive task, it’s active. It says to “do good”. That means we need to be doing something.

Delight…In The Lord

One of the most exciting things about the Christian life is that God wants us to delight in Him. We should set aside time every day just to be with Him. He wants us to put Him first, even if it means waking up an hour earlier to get that devotional in. Put God first and He might just surprise you.

Commit Thy Way Unto The Lord

Commitment is also vital. How many times has someone told you they were going to do something and then they don’t? We do that to God too. Christianity is not a part-time job; it’s a full-time commitment. We’ve got to be able to, again, put God first and everything else will fall into place.

Rest In Him

In a world where everything seems so rushed, we need to take time to rest. God gave us the Sabbath for a reason.  How can we do our best for Him if we’re burnt out from church work? How can we put our best foot forward when we’ve worn ourselves weary with chores and kids? God commands us to rest, and to take a break.

Wait Patiently

This is a very unpopular term right now. “Wait” and “patiently” should not even be in the same sentence, but God wanted it to be that way. The world says it’s impossible. For proof, just take a trip to your local grocery store and watch how people are so antsy to get out of the check-out line. But if our motives are in the right place, patiently waiting on God to answer us will be second nature to us.

To tie this up, I challenge you this week to take one of the above applications and incorporate it into your daily living.

Until next time, God bless.

Patricia

My name is Patricia, and I am a 25 year old aspiring blogger, musician, and beautician.

I graduated from an online Christian high school program in the year 2010. I went to a local community college from 2013-2014 and received a Certificate in Esthetics Technology, and I am a state-licensed esthetician in North Carolina.

My hobbies include playing music on piano, organ, and guitar. I also enjoy drawing, writing, and collecting makeup and beauty products. I love all things Tolkien and I have a passion to know God more.

I can be found at my blog Southern Grace and Beauty and my Facebook page.

Remixed: When God Blends Your Family | Guest Post

{It is with such pleasure that I introduce Becky Luzier.  We’ve shared laughter and a few tears during conversations over coffee.  Every time, never running out of subjects to talk about.  Her heart for Jesus shines as does her magnetic personality!  Please give a warm Forever Beloved welcome to Becky!  Show her how much you appreciate her by sharing and commenting on her story!}

Have you ever heard a mainstream Christian worship song remixed? They can be pretty weird sounding. One example, “Oceans” by Hillsong United, is a song that’s very dear to my heart for a multitude of reasons. The Christian rapper KB remixed it, and the new song title is “Crowns & Thorns”. I had heard it for the first time not long ago when my 11 year old son was jamming out, and I thought, “That’s really strange sounding, but I kind of like it”. It sort of rubbed me the wrong way at first, but the longer I listened to it, the more I found myself actually enjoying this new, but not really new, favorite song. Things I didn’t like about it at first, were KB’s added effects, which I perceived as interruptions. The nice, slow chorus that I love singing along to, was now abruptly being distorted by some different rhyme and rhythm. Yet the longer I listened, I enjoyed the beat and even seemed to be gaining a new perspective on the original lyrics. Now I like this remix a lot and listen to it often. Not every remix is like that, though. I believe some songs should not ever be tampered with, because their original state is best. Some worship songs are simply bad as a remix in my opinion, but to someone else, it may be seen as an improvement. 

Remix is a fun term in my opinion; It makes me think of fun, dancing, energy, and flashing lights. I have only recently thought of it as a relational word. I have heard it used this way in a teaching about relationships not long ago. The word stuck with me. I realized that my blended family is a remix. We are awkward at first, our current story is not the way it was originally written, and we grow on you if you hang around long enough! We ARE fun, energetic, loud, and chaotic too! We have also realized that it’s not always fun and games. There are a lot of, what would seem to be, interruptions. Many days are what seem like the opposite of a remix, if there ever was one. They are slow, tiring, dim, but always with the disarray. It can feel like the original song was slowed down and it sounds all distorted now—Jesus meets us there.

I have four beautiful children to my first husband, and I am remarried to a wonderful godly man who doesn’t have any children of his own. God allowed me a new beginning, with a new husband who chooses Jesus before everything, who loves my children like his own, and loves me fiercely. He is not perfect, he is not a knight in shining armor, he is not my savior, and he is a flawed man who messes up at times. We are completely opposite in our personalities. I am extroverted, he is introverted; I am pretty lax when it comes to a lot of things, he is very organized and precise; I am loud and crazy, he is quiet and reserved. But we both choose Jesus—every single time.

I would like to back up just little bit before I keep going forward through the breakdown of our song. My second husband and I were married on August 13, 2016. We began courting in December of 2015. We didn’t waste much time! I met him at our local youth center when I began serving there shortly after my divorce. He was so intriguing to me, and there was something about him that made my heart leap and long to know more. I wanted to know his story, where he came from and how he got here. He had a way of talking with the kids that got them to open up to a depth that others couldn’t seem to reach as easily (if at all). He didn’t do surface level conversations. I knew that he had depth and I had pined for that for so long! We talked off and on for several months. There were times where the Lord would back us away from one another, walk us through some things on our own, and then allow us to pick back up again. We began getting to know one another and he seemed to really be fascinated by me! Me? I didn’t understand! How could I be desirable? I have FOUR children! Did he not realize that? Is he crazy? Is he just stupid? Well, it turned out he was seeking the Lord’s guidance, and he knew it was me. He fell in love with me, as I did him, and he fell in love with my kids.

We were so cute. We thought we had it figured out. We looked forward to married life, which we thought might look a little more settled than anything we both knew at the time. We expected hard things, but we believed that we had this in the bag. We both knew some stuff, we had grown tremendously in the Lord over time, and we prayed a lot. What could go wrong? HA! We had an absolutely beautiful wedding and a really fun and adventurous honeymoon. We confirmed the house we were going to be renting on the morning of our wedding and planned to be moved in after returning from our honeymoon.

Then the honeymoon was over. The day we got back, we picked up the kids from their dad, and ended up having to camp out with sleeping bags and blankets at my new father-in-law’s apartment for the night because of unexpected setbacks with our home. It was nuts! It was a small apartment, there were no activities for the kids (aside from the Wii), and my new father-in-law was sleeping in the next room…fabulous! Why not?! We were disappointed to say the least, but Jesus met us there. The kids had fun playing video games and crashing wherever they could fit, and I think we ended up laughing about the crazy of it all at one point (laugh, cry, whatever). So, while the honeymoon didn’t last long, Jesus never changed.

We moved into our new rental house the second day back from our honeymoon. It was cozy and felt like home. Jesus brought us peace. Jesus continues to bring us peace. Even still, this remix is always changing. Every time we think we have figured out the rhythm, it switches up the beat. Even though we are both choosing Jesus, we are both still only people. I have a supportive husband who loves my children and me intensely, but they still disobey and I still get crabby. They are still disrespectful and a handful. He and I don’t always like each other. We all still get lonely sometimes. Crazy right? In a house with 6 people and 4 of them being under 12, we can still experience feeling lonely. But through chaos, through, through heartache, through loneliness, through weariness, through disappointment, through worship, through praise, through His Word—Jesus meets us here. Every. Single. Day. Jesus meets us here.

Our remix is weird at first. It doesn’t seem to belong in a Christian community. I am a divorced woman with 4 kids who remarried a man who was never married and has zero children. We are wonky and strange in our own ways and we are definitely a spicy family. We love, we yell, we talk, we laugh, we cry, we laugh until we cry, we get angry and we get sad, we get lonely and we get tired. We don’t know what we are doing. My husband loves my kids as if they were his own blood, while still having full respect for their father’s place in their heart and life. He chooses Jesus first and so do I. We are a hot, stinking mess, and we are always looking to the Lord, and it’s because of choosing Jesus first, that this remix rocks!

Psalm 40:3 NLT He has given me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see what He has done and be amazed. They will put their trust in the LORD.
I absolutely love keeping my home for my husband and kids. I enjoy being creative at my out of the home job as a stylist. I love to write. Many times my writing is in the form of journaling and prayers written out to the Lord. It’s where the raw relationship stuff is between my Jesus and me. It’s an honor and privilege when He leads me to share prices of that to encourage other women!