The following is an abbreviated transcription from a video Linda and I recorded with Aaron and Jennifer Smith from Marriage After God. Please excuse any typos or errors.
Today, we’re absolutely thrilled to welcome Aaron and Jennifer Smith, the powerhouse couple behind the transformative initiatives Husband Revolution, Unveiled Wife, and the must-listen podcast, Marriage After God.
They’ve just released an awe-inspiring devotional aptly named “The Marriage Gift,” designed to elevate the way you incorporate prayer into your marital journey.
If you haven’t had the chance to connect with Aaron and Jennifer yet, today is your golden opportunity. Get ready for real talk, as they openly share their early financial hurdles and reveal how they successfully navigated them while always keeping God as their anchor.
We’re diving head-first into the life-altering impact of prayer in marriage. Learn why prayer isn’t just a ritual, but the ultimate game-changer that can revolutionize your marriage–starting today–even if the concept feels a bit daunting initially.
Attention newlyweds! Don’t miss out on invaluable insights that can set the foundation for a thriving, God-centered marriage.
And just when you thought this couldn’t get any more exciting, stick around as we delve into the unexpected–how the core principles of Jiu-Jitsu can serve as powerful tools for relationship-building within your marriage.
You can also watch the recording of our discussion on our SeedTime Money Podcast YouTube channel:
But, if you would rather read the full transcription, you can do so here in this article!
Marriage After God Podcast
Bob: We are excited today because we have Aaron and Jennifer Smith. They are authors, founders of Husband Revolution and Unveiled Wife, run a podcast called Marriage After God.
And they just wrote this cool devotional, which we’re excited about, called The Marriage Gift. Which I love because it’s basically a prayer for your marriage every single day. And I know that’s something that, it’s I think we pray for our marriage, but we need to do more of that.
Linda: Yeah, we do need to do more of that.
Bob: This is timely for us, and we’re selfishly very excited to chat with them today. Aaron, Jennifer, thank you for being here. Excited to chat.
Jennifer: Thanks for having us. This is awesome.
Get to know Aaron and Jennifer
Bob: I want to start with your personal story because I remember reading you guys said that at the beginning of your marriage, you had some financial struggles (make sure to ask these questions before getting married!). So can you take us back to that and explain a little bit of what was going on?
Jennifer: Sure. So Aaron and I, we’ve been married 16 and a half years now, so we’re going way back here. Do you want to go back to even when you proposed to me, like things that you said?
Aaron: Sure.
Bob: Yeah.
Setting expectations
Aaron: Essentially when I proposed to her, I said we may not have a lot of money. We may not have everything we ever want. But, what I want to do is I want to do whatever we’re going to do with you. And I want to do for God. And so I said, if you’re willing to do that, will you marry me?
Jennifer: He set up some nice expectations, which is good for me. But, I was really excited to jump in with him and his heart for God was just so attractive to me. And so I knew we were going to be okay. But it wasn’t until we really got into it that I realized I wasn’t okay.
Aaron: Yeah.
Mission work and living with little
Jennifer: Just to be honest I feel like… so Aaron and I got married and then we zoomed off to do mission work and we traveled for the first two years of our marriage working with an organization. We spent time in Africa… spent time in Brazil…
Aaron: …Salvador, Nicaragua.
Jennifer: Yeah. We ended up moving from Southern California where we both grew up to Florida to work with this missions organization. And we didn’t know much. We were young. I was 21. You were 22.
Aaron: And this was a full time volunteer position.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Aaron: Non pay.
Jennifer: So we wanted to offer our services but in order to do that, we reached out to other people that we knew and said, “Hey, if you’d like to support us in this ministry endeavor, you can do that” (here’s how to successfully raise money for a missions trip). We had a little bit.
Aaron: Very little.
Jennifer: But we were so grateful for those people that were willing to do that, thank you. So while we were in Florida, I ended up getting a part time job at a nurse daycare nursery and Aaron worked for the organization, but we just weren’t bringing in a lot of money and we lived with little (35 ways you can earn extra money).
Aaron: I eventually did get a job at a church doing graphic design and web development. That was later, but because we couldn’t afford to do it.
Minimalistic living
Jennifer: We just lived very minimally (life changing benefits of minimalism). Like we hardly ever even drove. We bought two bikes at a garage sale and we rode those things to the ground.
Aaron: Yeah. We had one car. It was a Volkswagen Jetta. It was your car (see how cars affect your financial freedom).
Jennifer: Yeah.
Aaron: Cause we sold mine before we went to Africa and we had that car. I feel like for five, six years straight, only one car for us and all everything we own fit in that Jetta for a long time.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Facing debt
Aaron: But transitioning from that, I had school loans cause I got my bachelor’s degree before going to Africa and they were deferred.
Jennifer: But we weren’t paying on them… we were postponing the eventual.
Aaron: Yeah, we figured eventually get to, but I had to start paying on them while we were over in Florida and we were like, okay, how are we going to do this? Cause we have to pay this payment now, which we didn’t have any payments before other than gas and food.
And so we’re like and in the midst of that. We were also having a lot of turmoil in our marriage. So on the outside it looked like we’re doing all this mission work, all this great stuff.
Jennifer: Traveling…
Aaron: Yes, traveling (find out how to travel for free in the U.S.). And we were having fun. It was a really exciting time. It was really neat.
Distractions and God’s direction
Jennifer: I’ll say this, we, everything else distracted us from just the hardship of marriage. And when you get into those initial first years of getting to know each other and what is it that we’re doing. All those hard conversations, like we were just…
Aaron: Everything else was a distraction for that.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Aaron: But God wasn’t distracted. He knew what was going on. And we believe that those school loans and the timing of all of that, and also us not having any money and needing money. God was like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start something that I want to finish in you guys. And we decided to go back home. We went back to California.
Jennifer: We moved in with my parents for quite a while.
Aaron: That was a little hard too.
Jennifer: It was right during the ’08 recession (tips on how to handle a recession). And so finding jobs during that time, it was just everything about that time was really hard,
Aaron: which is so funny because back then I don’t even think we even knew we were in a recession.
Jennifer: We weren’t paying attention to any of that.
Working together as a couple
Aaron: And looking back, it’s wait a minute. We got jobs, but our main goal going back was to get out of debt. And God used that season of us trying to get out of debt for several things. He used it to show us how we can work together because we started a photography business to help get out of debt (how you can finally get started with your business idea).
So I worked on the whole time job. You had a full time job, we worked on the weekends and we did that nonstop, which drew out of us a lot of things. Like, why can’t we have, go do things like our other friends are doing things? Why can’t we have things like other people have?
Jennifer: This time period for our marriage to was prior to having kids. So we just spent every waking moment we had to work and to get out from under that.
Aaron: And in the midst of all that, God’s drawing out of us our own selfishness and our own bitterness and our own anger and all the things that we were trying to avoid and hide from that were happening in between us. And just bringing us to before Him to our knees and saying, I want to do something. I want to change something. I want to renew this whole thing that you call marriage to make it look more like what I call marriage.
And so we’re getting out of debt and we’re also getting out of spiritual debt, within our relationship and finding healing in that area. We get out of debt fully, we pay off my school and…
Bob: Yep.
Aaron: But it wasn’t just that. God was also healing our marriage at the same time (check out the unlikely money change that helped our marriage!). So there was a lot of stuff that He was doing in the midst of that season. So a big part of our story over the last, 12, 13 years of doing this ministry has been sharing how God uses our marriage and uses the hardships and uses our struggles to glorify Himself and to transform us and genius, but then also to be used for other people.
Jennifer: So if we let Him…
Aaron: If we let Him, yeah.
Linda: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah, that’s so true. I feel like our financial journey has been the same way, like at a mess, at a place of needing God to come through and watching Him use that to draw out all these things and to develop so much character in us and and really just get us to a place where we’re longing after Him more, not dependent on ourselves.
Praying together in marriage
Bob: So I love that. I’d love to talk a little bit about praying together in marriage and kind of go down a couple different rabbit holes with this. But it’s been something that I think you and I have done from the beginning.
It was just our church upbringing. We just always grew up praying together. And it was never, it was just normal for me, because it’s that’s what we did before we were married, when we were dating, we were praying together.
Linda: Yeah.
Bob: Going to prayer meetings together and whatever, just praying together. But I’ve come to find out that’s not that common. And there’s a lot of Christian couples who just don’t pray together.
And anyway, so I’m curious have you identified that as have you seen that same thing?
Prayer is a essential
Jennifer: Yeah. When we started our ministry over a decade ago, we knew that prayer was going to be an essential part of what we do because it was something that it was like an anchor that we both clung to in our marriage.
Aaron: It was essential for us.
Jennifer: Yeah. It was important for us and it was something that was foundational to building up our marriage and And it encouraged us a lot.
And so we wanted to share that same message with other couples. We started, asking people like, if you sign up for the prayer email, we’ll give you a daily prayer prompt and things like that.
Aaron: We’ve been doing forever and we’ve been sending those for almost 10 years.
Jennifer: Yeah. Because then we started self publishing these 31 prayer books. And I think because so much of our ministry revolved around prayer, we did get a lot of feedback and people would share with us like, I want to pray with myself, but I don’t know how to, or I feel embarrassed to, or it’s uncomfortable. All these different things. And we know that prayer is a very spiritually intimate thing.
It’s not easy but it’s beautiful
Jennifer: And so we get it. Like we’re not over here saying it should be easy. It’s not. It’s not an easy thing because what happens is, which I think is a really cool and beautiful part of.
Praying in marriage together is you’re revealing your heart to the Lord and to your spouse at the same time When you’re doing it together, so I think that’s really cool. And just to be able to hear if Aaron’s praying out loud for us, or just about his own heart to the Lord.
I get to peek into that I get a glimpse of what he’s going through without him looking at me and telling me you know? And so I just love that, but we wanted to encourage other couples like you can do this and even if it feels hard or if it feels scary, we want to be the ones to encourage you to go for it anyways and to take that risk and to jump in.
And so our heart behind the resources that we provide is just to share a prompt that would be a catalyst for people to maybe get those first words of, okay, I know we need to be praying for this aspect of our marriage. So, we’re going to pray this. But then eventually turn it into something. It’s so much more personal.
Linda: Yeah.
Prayer prompts
Aaron: Yeah. We’ve seen with our other books, which kind of led us not in a major, we led us to making this book is people saying things like, you’re helping me have words that I couldn’t find before, or you’re causing me to pray for things that I didn’t even think about praying for.
And so this 365 prayers for your marriage (The Marriage Gift devotional), we wanted to bring up topics of every aspect of marriage. Not that this is comprehensive by any means, because marriage is so dynamic and so robust. Especially when you’ve been married a long time, those topics tend to transform and change.
And but we want to have such a breadth of topics that they would recognize and grow and learn in this area of prayer of wow, look at all the areas that I didn’t even think to be talking to God about and asking God for his will on and strength in and being reminded of. And the secondary part of that is we hope that it turns into conversations and discussions because they may pray this together. Then afterwards be like, we’ve never talked about this before.
And when our, our prayers that they begin to talk about aspects of their marriage from a heavenly perspective that they’ve never even thought of before. So that just that intimacy together and that conversation just goes so much deeper.
Prompt examples
Jennifer: Like just for example, there’s a few prayers in here that cover finances in different ways. Which is an important thing. I think if you had the list of the top for marriage: sex, finance and communication. But even more specifically, there’s one about leaving a legacy.
And I know that’s not specific to finances, but in a way we hope that it would get them to think and consider what it is, what we do, the choices that we make today. How we invest. How does everything that we have affect our children, our family, future generations that come and just be considerate of.
The power of your marriage today and what it means for tomorrow and the next day and on and on.
What does God say?
Aaron: We’ve also added a scripture, a unique scripture for every single prayer. And I don’t think there’s one that repeats itself throughout the whole book. And so we wanted to tie people that are reading this, husbands and wives, to be like what does God say?
Jennifer: It’s like the why, like, why are we praying this for our marriage? What makes it important? If they see the scripture tied to it, and hopefully dig in even more beyond just the one that we gave they’ll see that, which I think is a really cool tie in.
Linda: Yeah. I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than speaking out what God has already spoken over your life, and I, we have a sheet of prayers for our children that we got from our church, probably 15 years ago. A long time ago, and it’s just line by line.
Bob: It’s starting to disintegrate.
Linda: Yeah, it started, but it’s just all scripture just like that. It’s all scripture and it even gives you the references for each line of what to pray.
Praying over our children
Linda: And it has been so good because there are things that I don’t even think to pray over our kids. But. I love that I’m like, I know that I’m praying what the Bible already says about who we are, who our children are, our marriage… all that stuff.
Jennifer: So good.
Linda: So I think that’s so powerful and I love that because oftentimes you’re right. You don’t know where to start. And so if you can just have that prompt of Oh yeah, start here. It’s just really powerful.
Bob: Yeah.
Linda: So I love that.
Bob: All right, there’s kid number one
Linda: kid. Number one is interrupting.
Bob: All right. So my question
Aaron: I feel good. Good. Because this is, this looks like our life.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Bob: You just have two more in the mix than we do, you have five?
Aaron: That’s right.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Bob: You guys are champions.
Aaron: We get four of them down for naps.
Bob: That’s really impressive.
Getting your spouse on board
Bob: Okay, let’s talk to the couple, or the spouse who’s like, all right, I know this would be good thing for me and my spouse to begin doing. But like you mentioned, I feel awkward. I feel like my spouse isn’t going to be interested. What would you say to them?
Like the prayer prompts, is that the main thing? Like the main helper are there other things you would, other advice you would give to them?
Aaron: Can I bring up Jiu Jitsu for a second? We’re new to Jiu Jitsu and we’re…
Linda: I want to hear all this.
It’s okay to feel awkward at first
Aaron: Yeah my wife and I started jujitsu at the beginning of this year, and to answer your question there’s lots of good things in life that you’re going to feel horrible at in the beginning and you will be horrible at, and you’re going to feel awkward and you’re going to feel uncomfortable and it’s going to be weird.
And so my encouragement is just like jujitsu is you just got to do it and you just got to jump in and just accept. That you are going to feel awkward. And that first time you go to your husband and say, can I pray for you? They’re going to look at you and be like, okay, sure. It’s going to be, feel you go to your wife and say, can we pray together? It’s going to feel awkward.
Jennifer: And also it doesn’t mean that the second time you go, it’s going to be any easier because talking about jujitsu I feel like for the first three or four months, every single time I drove in the morning, the entire way in, I was doubtful.
I was thinking, why am I doing this? I should have just stayed in bed. I’m gonna, I‘m gonna lose, fail and not understand or learn the process. But over time, I have seen growth. I have experienced a layer of this is really fun, even though I’m not very good at it yet.
It takes practice
Jennifer: And so the practice, you’re practicing something. Prayer is the same way.
Aaron: Yeah.
Jennifer: You enter in, you take that risk, you say yes. And you’re practicing something that builds over time. And just like any muscle, you get better at, you get stronger at.
Aaron: And here’s an encouragement for all of those listening that are thinking, Oh man, like I would love to pray with my spouse, but that that is terrifying.
Prayer is intimate
Aaron: Cause prayer is, in some ways, more intimate than even sex. Like that’s a physical thing and a lot of people can do that and even disconnect from what’s going on.
But prayer, you actually have to be opening up your heart in honesty. And you’re doing it not just before God, but also before your spouse who’s listening and looking at you.
Like… wait, I didn’t know that you were dealing with that. Or, I didn’t know that was even inside your heart.
Jennifer: You’re making yourself known.
Aaron: Yeah you’re being really vulnerable. More vulnerable than normal, probably.
Human instincts vs divine instruction
Aaron: So here’s my encouragement to everyone listening, is all the things that come naturally to us in our flesh, the Bible has to tell us not to do.
God comes in and says, don’t do this because naturally that’s what you want to do. It’s not something that you have to work at. It’s something that you have, you’re just going to you’re prone to do it. And all the things that are unnatural, supernatural, God has to teach us to do.
Jesus taught his disciples how to pray
Aaron: So Jesus taught his disciples to pray. They said, “Jesus, how do you, like, how do we pray?” They’ve all been praying their whole life. They were Jews, they knew prayer. But they see Jesus praying and something was different.
And so they’re like, Jesus, would you teach us how to pray? And He teaches them. If that was a natural thing for us I’m just going to pray and talk to God and it should come naturally. And if it doesn’t, then you’re, something’s wrong with you.
No, prayer’s not a natural thing. It’s an actual supernatural thing. You’re talking to the creator of the universe. You’re going before Him and revealing yourself to the one who already knows everything. Yet, He asks us to do it anyway. And it’s okay that it doesn’t feel natural.
Praying when you don’t feel like it
Aaron: And to be honest, we’ve been praying our whole lives with each other. With our whole relationship. And there’s still days that I don’t want to pray, don’t feel interested in prayer. When I pray, feels weak, feels empty, feels flat. But we still try and do it.
Jennifer: Or sometimes we’re just on autopilot, day in and day out week to week. We’re just like, okay, we’ve got to take the kids here. Do this, etc. What’s on your agenda? Here, this is on mine.
And we’re forgetful people. We forget that some of the most important things in life, I don’t know why or how we forget them. But I think having something like this resource to be able to remind you and just be like a little alarm of Hey, come and do this, I think it’s good.
Linda: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah. And I think the thing about it, is when you understand how important it is. That helps you push through. Like jujitsu. It’s great, great. Like you’re getting in shape you’re all kinds of other great things with it. But your prayer communing with, the creator of the universe, It’s so powerful and important.
The shocking statistic
Bob: I just went and found this real quick because I remember we did a marriage class a while back. We were talking about money and marriage. And I found this stat that blew my mind.
Okay. So this is from a Gallup poll. You guys might’ve heard this, but they did a Gallup poll. And, they studied the divorce rate.
And obviously we know it’s about 50%. Okay. It’s not that much different in the church. It’s still about 50%. But they found the divorce rate among couples who pray together is less than 1%, who out loud pray together.
Linda: Less than 0. 1%.
Bob: Yeah. It’s just bonkers. Like it’s absolutely insane.
But back to your point of what you’re saying about this being like the highest level of intimacy, like that starts to make sense to me. You know what I mean?
Jennifer: Yeah.
Praying with your spouse builds trust
Aaron: Yeah. There’s a trust that gets built when you’re willing to pray with your spouse, because if I’m a part of prayer, there’s things like confession, there’s things like repentance, there’s things like asking God for help. And so those things become known to your spouse as well as God.
And so God gets to work. God gets to participate because He, again, He already knows, and this is one of the weird things about prayer… He’s all knowing and yet wants us to pray without ceasing.
Bob: Yeah.
Divine parenting insights
Jennifer: And it’s like an offering of like He, even though He already knows, He still wants us to be able to offer that up to Him.
Aaron: Yeah, it’s similar to in the Old Testament the free will offering that was given. It’s like, I command you to give this… but only if your heart is willing. And so it’s a command, but it’s attached to the willingness of the participant in the command.
And so even though He knows, just like a father, when I see my son. I can be watching them on the trampoline and see the backflip and then the kick to the face and they’re crying. And I’m watching the whole thing and they come up to me and they’re like, I was just doing this and I backflipped and someone kicked me in the face. And they’re crying.
I want them to still come to me and tell me. And I’m like, I know. Thank you, how are you? And I can comfort them. And so it’s that approach to God that we’re trying to encourage.
Inspiring couple’s prayer life
Aaron: What we want to see marriages do is we want to see them, like you said, coming together and having this intimacy with each other on a level. And it’s something that needs to be practiced.
And our hope is that this makes it an easier transition of learning. That this doesn’t become their prayer life. That’s not our intent.
We’ve never, none of our books about prayer are intended to be replacement for prayer It’s intended to be something to be a catalyst for prayer, to be an inspiration for prayer of saying… Hey here’s some ideas for you to pray. Now build a habit over this next year so that you and your spouse are praying with each other to your creator
Bob: Yeah.
Linda: That’s great.
Newlywed advice from experience
Bob: That’s good. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about advice that you would give to, yeah, let’s go back to your newlywed self. You guys are dealing with the struggles, all the challenges and whatever, knowing what you know now, where you are now what would you tell yourself then if you had to give yourself one piece of advice?
Jennifer: Only one?
Bob: As many as want, you can make a laundry list.
Linda: How long is this episode? They have a lot.
Keep trying and pressing on
Jennifer: I think the first thing that comes to my mind is to keep trying. I think that early in our marriage I gave up on a lot of things like real quick. As soon as it was hard, it was like, nope, and I’d shut down and I’d not want to deal with it.
And encouraging my younger self to press in a little bit and to and to trust God with my own heart and his no matter what we were struggling with and to keep trying again, even if those things didn’t meet my expectations or didn’t happen the way that I really wanted them to and to hang in there.
Linda: That’s good.
Bob: Yeah.
Truly believe what God says
Aaron: I would tell myself back then to truly believe what God says, because we can be believers, and there’s many believers that have been believers their whole lives and we can believe the essentials. Like, I believe I’m saved by the blood of Christ and be saved.
But we can also not believe certain things that God has said. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read the Bible before and thought to yourself like wow, that says that but my life doesn’t match it. That doesn’t feel true, right?
Why doesn’t it look like that? How do I get there? And that’s a belief issue. There’s like that, there’s the man that comes that has to be healed and Jesus says do you believe I can heal you? And he says I do believe, but help my unbelief. And so there’s that. We do believe, but there’s a lot of things that we don’t believe that’s true.
Specifically about sin in my life there, those scriptures that says, with every temptation, the Lord will provide a way of escape. That’s one of the things that a lot of Christians don’t believe. And so we stay stuck in certain habitual sins as believers who are actually truthfully set free by the blood of Christ from the chains of sin and death.
But don’t believe, we don’t believe it. We believe in Jesus. We believe we’re saved, but we don’t believe that the power of that salvation is working in our lives. And we don’t believe that scripture is true. So I would tell myself to not believe what that says that is true. So you can walk in it.
The 80/20 principle in marriage
Bob: Yeah. That’s good. So another question I’d love to ask I’m an 80, 20 principle (see how the 80/20 principle applies to your finances). You guys familiar with 80, 20 principle?
Aaron: Very clearly, yeah.
Bob: Yeah, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort you put in. And so you guys, I would assume like, 80% of your views on your blog come from 20% of your blog posts you do. Probably the same with your book. That pattern just appears everywhere throughout the world.
But if you’re looking at your marriage, I’d love to hear from you guys, like what do you think? What’s that 80/20? What are those 20% of things that have yielded the 80% of the fruit, or the disproportionate benefit? And this could be habits that you’ve done anything, anywhere you want to go with this.
Linda: Prayer is probably one of them.
Bob: But within prayer, I’d love to hear are there specific patterns that you guys have? Do you have a… We’ve had seasons where we’ve prayed every morning together. And then we’d have seasons where every Sunday night we would pray together.
Do you have anything like that? Yeah, I don’t know. Anything. I want to leave it open ended, but not too open ended…
Aaron: Good question. I’ve never thought of that. So what’s the 20% of our life that has produced the 80% results in our life?
What does the Bible say?
Aaron: So going back to The Word believe what we believe affects how we behave. And so I think there’s been a lot of, I would say a big portion of the 20% is anchoring on what does the Bible say?
And so we try and in our life, when it comes to anything, I always say what does the Bible say about that?
And so we, that’s one, I think I would say one trend that we’ve had in all of our conversations and all of our arguments and all of our decision making in life. We try and go back to what does the Bible say?
What does God say about these things? So that’d be the first thing.
End of day reflections
Jennifer: As far as prayer, there’s been many days that we’ve missed and we’re not perfect in walking this out, but our consistency with praying with each other at night before bed has always been something that I’ve looked forward to and have clung to in our marriage.
And so I think that it gives us a moment at the end of the day to recap and say, okay what have we been walking through? Has it been easy? Has it been hard? Or, looking to the future, the next day, whatever, and say submitting the goals that we have and the agendas that we before God and each other and just keep our minds on it.
I think the repetition of keeping your mind on the things that you’re working towards together, whether it be relational, spiritual, or business, which we’ve done a lot of business together. So we always are praying over that has yielded a lot of fruit.
Date night dreaming sessions
Aaron: And one other thing that I think. Has been I would say this is probably a big chunk of a 20% also. We do these regular we’ve actually, we used to be more consistent with it, but I think because we’ve been in a busy season, we haven’t, but we’ll do it again. A couple times a year we do, dreaming dream sessions and what those are is we have a date night where we go and we bring a notebook and it’s strictly dreaming.
Jennifer: We carve out a lot of time so that we’re not interrupted or distracted (listen to our podcast episode to find out how Linda and I plan out our personal goals!).
Aaron: And so we’ll go through, we’ll go through different aspects of our life. What’s some dreams we have for our marriage? What’s some dreams we have for our kids and our family? What’s some dreams we have for our work? And so that’s where this book came from, was from a dreaming session. That’s where these other books came from, too. They all came out of dreaming sessions.
Trips we’ve been on have come out of dreaming sessions projects We’ve you know built and developed came out of dreaming sessions doesn’t mean they all are successful.
But when we meet together and we write down ideas and they’re physical on paper, it goes from like this metaphysical to physical. It’s Oh, it’s there in front of us. And you specifically, Jennifer, are really good at like once there’s a list. She’s like I can start checking things off the list.
So we get this big idea and we say how realistic is we did years ago we did a retreat called the Marriage After God Retreat. And that came out of a dreaming session. And that’s where book after God came from was from that. And so I would say our dreaming sessions.
Jennifer: It’s cool because it gives us a time together where we just brainstorm and throw out there. Like even the wildest of ideas, what’s in your heart? What do you want to see come to life? And same with me. And then we go from there and narrow it down to okay, now what’s reality?
What could we actually pull off? And so it’s just a fun time where you go from the extravagant and extraordinary to like realistic. But you’re right, from there came a lot of seeds that I believe God planted in our hearts that came to fruition.
Aaron: And there’s always this, we start off with what do we see God doing? Like how does God want to use our marriage? And often it’s 12 months to 24 months. Like I would, it’s rarely beyond that. It’s hard to, plan past that.
Bob: Yeah, it really is. I agree. But that’s so cool. Yeah, because it’s like you’re opening up the opportunity to sit in a moment with each other, with eyes of faith, seeing what God might want to download and might want to deposit to what you’re doing.
Linda: Yeah. And it’s really easy in the day to just try and keep up with the demands of the day, and so I love that intentionality of what do we want to see as a whole? Yeah, I think that’s really great.
Nightly prayer routine
Bob: Yeah. One thing I want to touch on real quick, just like really getting in the weeds, but I’d love to hear what your daily evening prayer thing looks like.
Linda: Yeah.
Bob: It’s like for us, we tend to, put the kids to bed and then we’ll watch a show and then we’ll go to bed. Do you have a rhythm like that? Where does that fall in that for you? And what does that look like?
Jennifer: There have been so many different seasons of our marriage that, I could describe that look different just based off of our personal needs and what we’re going through in those different times.
Aaron: And also us being lazy at times, just going,
Jennifer: I would say most consistently though, it does look like us putting the kids down for bed and trying to find time that we can share together.
This last season, we’ve had a hot tub. Aaron got me a hot tub last year. And so we’ll spend time, hot tub time or a movie. The thing with the movie though, is the older I get, I tend to fall asleep and I don’t, I can’t stay awake.
Aaron: I know, especially when it’s like a movie that you wanted to watch and then I lean over and she’s I can’t stop watching because I have to finish movies,
Jennifer: But anyways, that’s more recent.
And then before we go to bed, we do spend time in prayer. And we we also have a home church that we’re a part of. And so we tend to spend time praying for people in our home church, pray for our marriage. We pray for our kids. And every night looks a little bit different depending on what we hit on, what we’re praying for.
Seasons of struggle
But then there’s been other seasons where they’re really brief prayers and we can’t even keep our eyes open. Or just one of us prays. In our early marriage, I struggled a lot…
Aaron: With wanting to pray.
Jennifer: Yeah, wanting to pray. Because, I was frustrated with God. I struggled a lot with feeling like I didn’t deserve the circumstances we were walking through and didn’t want them and was really wrestling in my relationship with understanding who he is and my belief and all of that.
And Aaron really stood in the gap for us on those nights of being willing to pray over us and pray over our marriage. I would hear him pray for my heart. And even if he didn’t know, every small detail of what I was walking through he could tell and knew parts of it. And so he prayed for me. And I appreciated that.
Standing in the gap for your spouse
Jennifer: So for those listening, if you’re a spouse who’s eager to pray and you’re Significant other is not…. pray for them. Stand in the gap.
Aaron: And that actually, that’s one of the ways we wrote this book is that it’s not, it’s, there is no requirement for both husband and wife to read it. One spouse could read the prayers themselves. Cause we know that there’s a lot of listeners probably who have an unbelieving spouse or a backslidden spouse or a spouse that has no intention and is just in a spiritual laziness.
Creating a prayer habits in our children
Aaron: But our hope is, of course through time, that they come together and that this becomes a part of their every day. A part of our night routine just to back up a step. We always pray with our kids before bed.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Aaron: And if we don’t, if we try and walk out without praying… you didn’t pray for…
Linda: That’s so cool.
Aaron: Creating those routine And those habits of prayers is showing that they’re important, praying before meals, praying when we drive by accidents, praying when we, when someone texts us and says, Hey, I’m going through something. Hey guys, we have a friend that’s going through something.
Let’s pray. And we all pray in the car while we’re driving. And so it’s just the throughout the day, whenever, it’s always yeah. And we let our kids pray a lot too and they’re so simple and so sweet and sometimes really funny. And sometimes we have to stop.
Bob: Yes.
Jennifer: In Jesus name. Jesus name.
Aaron: We’re fairly normal parents, I think.
Bob: That’s great.
Linda: That’s awesome though, because it is creating the habit in your children so that when they do get married, it won’t be weird for them. They’ll just be… what do you mean? We’re not together, you know?
Jennifer: I hope.
Aaron: That it’d be weird.
Parenting in Reverse: When Kids Teach Us
Jennifer: We had a time this last year where we were in a heated discussion and the kids could tell there was some tension. And our oldest, he’s 10, he came up and put his hand on both of our shoulders. He just starts praying for us. And I’m just like, oh yeah.
Aaron: And it’s so humbling.
Jennifer: So humbling.
Aaron: Cause you have to shut up and listening okay, he’s right.
Jennifer: He’s totally right.
Aaron: He’s saying he’s right. And we look at each other and we’re like, Walk away quietly and with our tails between our legs.
Jennifer: But it’s good. We have set that example for them of what do you need when you’re in crisis? Oh, it’s prayer. It’s always prayer.
Linda: Yeah.
In closing
Bob: Yeah. That’s so good. All right, guys. I appreciate you taking the time to come share. I think this is going to be super helpful for our audience and really excited. So everybody run out and grab the book, The Marriage Gift.
Linda: The Marriage Gift. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, really.
Jennifer: It’s true.
Bob: Keeps on giving. And where else can people find you? Where do you want people to go visit you?
Aaron: So the quickest, easiest way to get access to the book is themarriageprayer.com. It’s all one word.
Jennifer: And if you want to follow us, we do have a podcast as well called Marriage after God or Instagram @marriageafterGod.
Bob: That’s awesome. All right. I appreciate you guys coming on. It’s been a joy getting to chat.
Aaron: Yeah.
Bob: It’s been fun. See you guys soon.
Jennifer: Thanks for having us.
Aaron: Thank you.
Linda: Thank you.
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