Happily Joyful After: Life-Giving Truth for Marriages

Dannah Gresh: Okay, I’m nervous—really, really scared. Bob and I want to be really vulnerable with you today. We believe that radical vulnerability in the Body of Christ is such an important component, and it’s missing in a lot of our congregations. So, we want to model that today, but we’re scared. I want to pray.

Jesus, we love You. You are my Redeemer. You have redeemed the darkest places in my life, and I want to help my sisters find that same gift from You. So let the words we speak be true, be honest, and point to the victory that You have won in our marriage and in our lives. In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

Well, our goal today is simple: Bob and I have a heart to shorten the time that you spend hurting and wondering and asking questions between what we’re going to call “Discovery”—that is, you find out there’s an area of trust that’s been breached in your marriage—and “Recovery.” You’re going to find out very soon that I don’t like the word “Recovery,” but we’re going to use it temporarily until we get to a better one.

Some of you are here for all kinds of different reasons.

Some of you are here because the discovery that you’ve experienced is you’ve discovered that your husband can’t keep a job, and he’s really frustrated, and you’re really frustrated.

Some of you are frustrated because your husband is addicted to a screen. And it wasn’t like he told you; you discovered it by watching.

Some of you are really frustrated because you’ve discovered that your husband is using pornography.

Some of you are really hurting because you’ve discovered that your husband has an addiction that you didn’t know about, and it existed before you were married, and he didn’t tell you.

Some of you are hurting because there’s been an affair or an emotional affair.

I want you to know that the reason that you’re hurting is because marriage is sacred.

Ephesians 5:31 and 32 says, “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

And then it’s almost like the apostle Paul has ADD or something, because he says, “This is a great mystery, but I’m really talking about Christ and the church.”

Absolutely everything in this world was created to showcase the glory of God and the character of God, and your marriage is no exception. In fact, it’s one of the highest and most sacred pictures on planet earth because it’s a picture of the love that Christ has for His Church.

And when that sacred trust of marriage is broken, the reason that you hurt so much is because it’s so sacred.

Bob and I had a beautiful beginning. We had a beautiful wedding. Violins lined the walkway, playing the wedding march as I walked down the aisle to my groom. And we had beautiful, beautiful reception where we had an orchestra. My dad got an orchestra from Penn State University to come and play! It was just like something out of a fairy tale.

But we did not ride off into the sunset. We did not experience “happily ever after.” In fact, if I’m honest, we couldn’t even find our Nisan Sentra in the parking lot after the reception. (laughter) Bob and I walked through the parking lot. The groomsmen had parked it, and we walked through that parking lot looking for that thing—him in his tux; me in my gown—laughing our heads off.

It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful memory that we have, but there was a day, in fact several, that were as painful as that day was beautiful. Maybe you’ve had some days like that, too. We want to help you with that.

But first, we thought maybe we would start by telling you about those days. Before we do, though, I want to let you know we’re going to have some Q & A time later on. We’re going to put a phone number up that you can text a question to, and then my friend Shanti is going to join Bob and I on stage at the end for some questions and answers—completely anonymous.

You can just send her that question anytime during the workshop. All you have to do is, I think I have a phone number. I think I have a magical, magical phone. There it is! Just take a quick snapshot of that, and you’ll have that available for when you have that question that you just really want to have asked.

I also want to say this before we share about our discovery, and that is that we’re talking on the presupposition that you are safe, that you are in a marriage with a man who hates his sin, is not intentionally hurting you, is repentant, is willing to work through things.

If you’re not safe, a lot of the things that you’re going to hear today, I would say differently to you. And what I want to say to you if you sense that maybe you’re not safe in your marriage for some reason, is that you need to go to someone in your church that can help you. And if for some reason you don’t feel like your church is safe—I hope that it is—but if for some reason you don’t think that they would understand the trauma you’re experiencing, you need to go to a church where you can find that kind of help.

But please know that this workshop is for women who believe they are safe, have a husband who wants to work with them in their marriage, and they want to see God work to redeem their marriage. All right? That’s really important for you to hear. Some of you needed to hear that.

Call someone today. Text someone today and say, “I need to talk to you. I need help navigating this.”

Alright, I want to introduce you to my favorite human in the whole world: I am preferential to one. His name is Bob Gresh. Baby, come on up here.

Bob Gresh is my husband. (applause) We have been married, I don’t know, thirty-three years. Right, Baby? Did I get that number right? And we met at Cedarville University in an advanced writing class where we graded one another. We were peer grading one another. And, yeah, we were called “The Misplaced Modifiers.”

Bob Gresh: We were. I remember seeing you for the first time. You were good looking. (laughter)

Dannah: Awwww.

Bob: That turquoise and white sweater . . .

Dannah: He still remembers what I was wearing that day. I think that’s a good sign. Yes.

Bob is the kind of the brains and the C.E.O. of True Girl. Anything you see from that ministry is because he’s a great leader. In fact, in 2019 God put it on his heart that we needed to be ready to minister—now, consider, True Girl at the time was a touring-event ministry. We needed to be able to meet our mission and minister without events if necessary. That’s what God put on this man’s heart in 2019.

And we all looked at him and said, “What?”

But it helped us get ahead of the curve. He heard from the Lord, and he navigated us through that, and we thrived. We shouldn’t have survived, but we thrived because of his leadership.

He also started a Christian high school called Grace Prep. And he has a boy’s ministry, kind of like True Girl, but it’s a younger ministry called “Born to be Brave.”

And he’s my husband. The father of our three wonderful children, and the grandfather—that’s our favorite part.

Bob: Right. It is, it is.

Dannah: Of our two and one in the oven.

Bob: Three.

Dannah: Three and one in the oven. (laughter) Right. Yes. Okay, let’s sit down.

Bob: Our adopted daughter from China married a guy from Taiwan, so we had a little Chinese baby doll about four months ago.

Dannah: She is a China doll.

Bob: She looks just like a China doll.

Dannah: Yes, she does.

Bob: Stella.

Dannah: Stella Bella. I call her.

All right. We wanted to share with you our discovery moments. So, this is the hard part for us, but we’ll trust that you’ll be gracious, and I hope that whatever your discovery story is, that you’ll find the courage to tell it through our barely-there courage(??).

I want to read a quote from C.S. Lewis. He says, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.”

And that is true. Loving someone is risky. Committing to love someone for the entire course of the rest of your life is super risky.

And I guess the first discovery day was mine. I was too terrified to tell Bob that I had sin in my past when he proposed to me. The fact that he proposed to me on stage in front of about 3,000 people wasn’t a very convenient time to tell him about my past. So I used that as an excuse, but it was really the enemy just keeping me quiet.

But about five years into our marriage, I was driving down the highway, listening to a radio program, kind of like Revive Our Hearts. I was listening to an interview. And I heard the interviewer say, “What is the number one question on a teenage girl’s mind when she’s talking to her mom about sex?”

And without hesitation, I heard a woman’s voice say, “The number one question on that girl’s mind is, ‘Mom, did you wait?’”

Ouch! And, you know what? There’s some things you won’t do for yourself, but as a Mama Bear, you will rise up and do. And so, I realized that my secret and my pain needed to be dealt with. I needed to do the brave work of healing so that I could disciple and mentor my daughters through a life of purity. I didn’t want them to know the pain that I had known.

And so that night I drove home. I spent three hours in a dark bedroom with my husband—three hours. That’s how thick the shame was. He kept turning the light on. I kept turning the light off. He kept turning the light on. I kept turning the light off. I couldn’t face him.

And then I was finally able to say, “I gave away the gift that God meant for me to give to you on our wedding night.”

And I want to tell you that for ten years I had walked around in a prison. I was, at this point, twenty-five, and I had given my virginity away when I was fifteen. I was a baby. I wasn’t promiscuous. I loved the Lord. I just got in a Christian dating relationship that didn’t have boundaries or accountability. I was so ashamed.

But I want to tell you something: I expected him to reject me. I expected him to at least be mad. But he wrapped his arms around me. And for the first time in all those years of asking the Lord to forgive me, I felt it. I felt the forgiveness of Christ in his arms.

And then he said, “I don’t know if you need to hear this, but I think you do: I forgive you.”

And that was the beginning of my life being very different. I was radically different after that. You know what I discovered is the power of James 5:16 where it says, “Confess your sins one to another and then you will be healed.”

Now, the context of James 5:16 is it’s talking about leadership and elders, confessing to them. But I think the overall concept we can see in Scripture is that Satan loves our secrets, and he beats us up with them. And when we drag our sin into the light, as Paul writes about in one of his letters to the Corinth, we begin to feel the healing.

Confession and forgiveness happens with God, but healing happens with the Body of Christ, on this level. And Bob Gresh, you are my sweetest healer. Your turn. (laughter)

Bob: We have a donkey named Casserole, and . . .

Dannah: (laughter) What? Where are you going with this? Talk about something else!

Bob: I didn’t talk during your very sentimental talk. (laughter)

Dannah: Behave yourself.

Bob: During our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, somebody said, “We have a gift for you.” They drove in a truck, and they dropped off this donkey off in our pasture. It was abused and had overgrown hooves, and it could hardly walk. So, she’s become my baby, and she’s hard to get to do what you want her to do. She’s a donkey, and so it’s hard to get her to do things.

I feel like Casserole this morning because . . . I’m not being dragged on stage, but I’m struggling because five years ago Dannah did a talk on “Loving Well” here at True Woman, and we were just a few years outside of the darkest years of our marriage.

When we started the ministry, I was kind of a hero. She wrote a book called The Bride Wore White, and I was kind of the hero of that book. That’s kind of how that story ended. And that was a good time because I got a lot of kudos.

Now, in my heart, I knew I was not deserving of that because I couldn’t judge Dannah because I was . . .

When we got married, Dannah was not a virgin, but she was pure. I was a virgin, but I wasn’t pure because of my continued struggles with pornography and lust and things like that I had brought that into the marriage.

And we believe in transparency. We believe that 2 Corinthians 1:4 talks about the comfort we receive from God is the comfort we give to others.

And so many times in our life, the things that we minister through the most are the things that are the hardest to talk about.

When I gave my testimony about what I had done in the marriage five years ago, we got off the stage, a book publisher was right there and said, “You need to write a book about this.” And I was kind of like, “Yeah, that’s not going to be what I want to do.” But, honestly, Dannah was much more excited about it than I was because she had felt that freedom.

I think it’s important that you hear from guys that struggle and have put a real torpedo in their marriage, but it’s not fun. You know?

We’ve been very careful about this because we don’t want to kind of manipulate it and use it. It’s serious business to us. Like, we’re living it. You know? And a lot of times people have something happen, and they write a book, and they’re not really through it, and that can be really dangerous.

So, I kind of delayed the contract a couple of times, and now the book is coming out. It’s one of the first times we’re talking about it since the first time I talked about it for the last five years.

So, it’s not like I don’t want to be here, but I do because I think it’s important. I think it’s important for your marriages to understand where your husband is coming from a lot of times.

Dannah and I are both Type A+ personalities. We run two or three different ministries that aren’t always in the same direction. I have students in high school. We might have an event that I’m missing at Senior Night at Grace Prep, and we have to negotiate these things all the time.

I think in really short bursts—ADD bursts. And Dannah writes a 15-page document about this session. So, we’re back there negotiating how we’re going to do this.

But I can say I’ve really put Dannah through hell. (That’s the only word I can think about it.) I put our marriage in kind of a toxic amalgam of with my struggle of lust and pornography throughout our marriage and the ups and downs of that—anxiety and depression.

The complication of what is physical depression and anxiety, and what that’s cost spiritually, is all mixed up in that. It produces in me sometimes not being very present in the marriage.

So many times throughout our marriage she’d say, “You’re such a good husband. You’re so good to me.”

And I’d be, like, “I’m 10% of what I could be. I’m just faking it until I make it.”

That toxic shame hurt our marriage for a lot of years.

I remember a few years ago realizing that I’d crossed some boundaries and the lack of presence in our marriage. What I was doing to our marriage was harmful, and it wasn’t going to get any better until I told Dannah.

So, we had these really, sort of expensive, red, leather chairs, really comfortable red leather chairs. They kind of swivel, and they rock, and they’re really awesome. We had them in our living room. I loved those chairs. I realized at some point a few months earlier I was going to have to tell Dannah.

I actually sat her down in that chair. I secretly took a picture of Dannah because I realized I was going to break her heart. I don’t know if it’s a weird thing, but I took a picture of her because I thought, I want to see what she looks like before this because I know she’ll never look at me quite the same way again.

In those chairs that day, I confessed some of the details of my sin, how long they had been going on. And the explanation of all those things brought her to a point in our life where she had not known many good choices, and that’s really the great sadness of my life.

And being transparent about it is a terrible thing to do to a marriage and to the one you love.

I’ve never really been caught. There’s been times in my ministry where I’ve had to step down and say, “I need to take a year off or two years off” because I’d fallen below the qualifications I think for a leader. I had to go to my board and say, “I’m going to step down for a while.”

At this point in my life, I had to call the publisher to take my name off of a couple of books that I’d just helped write.

There’s a point during this period where I had to call Nancy up because I didn’t know how this situation would affect Dannah’s role in Revive Our Hearts. And Nancy was very graceful to it all.

But Dannah stood by, endured the pain, and we worked through it.

God uses these hard places, these cracks in our life, to shine the light through His glory. And He also uses these things to help talk to others about the light that can shine through their marriages and your marriages here today.

A lot of you have been going through this. A lot of you have husbands who have confessed. A lot of you have husbands that struggle with different things besides pornography, whether it’s workaholism, or some kind of addiction.

Our discovery stories are not much fun. They’re not a real crowd pleaser. But I believe that they have been the greatest part of our ministry to others, to make sure that people see that leaders of ministries are not any different than anybody else.

Any leader that gets up on stage and doesn’t tell you their weaknesses and leads with their limp, I think is doing a great disservice, because people naturally glorify leaders. They naturally think they’re just a little bit better, and that’s why they’re on stage. That’s not what we’re here to say. I would not want anybody to make that mistake.

At the same time, I think being transparent allows us to be a safe place for people and to identify it in others so that we’re the first ones to rush in and be first responders when we see these sorts of things hitting other people’s marriages.

Dannah: Yes. You might not be ready to share your story, and that’s okay, but I do think one of the witness tests of when you are well is 2 Corinthians 1:3 and 4. When there’s somebody sitting next to you who, the comfort God has given you through whatever you’ve walked through, and they need that comfort, do you have the freedom to give them that comfort? If you do, then you’ve experienced the healing of God in your life. If you’re not, there’s still some element where God wants you to have some freedom. Hopefully you won’t have to get on stage and share your discovery stories like we just did. We hope that for you.

Thank you, Baby. That was brave. (applause)

Since I know that many of you are struggling with different things, it makes me nervous.

I want to talk to you about the topic of trust. I know that many of you are dealing with different things. Your story, your discovery is different from ours. But I want to introduce you to a route that we have found that is a little more sacred than the recovery route.

When Bob and I entered into this, and he said a few years ago, it was actually a little longer than that. It was five years ago that we spoke about it here in Indianapolis with some of you. And we tried to use the world’s best methods to heal our marriage.

Somebody said, “Do whatever it takes.” And we did.

So we found what we thought was the gold standard in recovery for men and couples who are impacted by pornography. We borrowed some money, and we invested in that program. We thought, We can add the truth of God into this because we’re strong believers.

We also asked them, “Is there a faith-based tract?” 

And they said, “Yes.”

Well, it wasn’t working. Several weeks into it we felt like, “This just doesn’t work.”

And we learned something. The short version of it is that recovery is not what your marriage needs. What your marriage really needs is redemption.

I want to invite you to not make the same mistake we did. It doesn’t mean that God won’t use counselors, He won’t use therapists, He won’t use programs as a part of your healing. But if those things are divorced from the Word of God, the truth of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, they really won’t have very much power and efficacy in your life.

I want to read to you the definition of redemption: “Redemption is the act of being saved from sin, error, or evil.”

It is sin that has gotten you to a place of discovery and hurt. And it is only redemption that will make you and your husband move forward, away from that pain, into a place of wholeness once again.

A.W. Tozer said this: (You can tell I like him.) “There are some things that only God can do, and for us to attempt to do them is to waste our efforts. Among the things which only God can do is the work of redemption.”

If there is sin involved in anything you and your husband are struggling with, you cannot experience wholeness and wellness outside of the redemption of Jesus Christ—period. End of story.

And, you know what? Bob and I aren’t what you would call “Dumb Christians.” We’re not weak Christians. But we fell for it. I want to read to you some statistics because I think it’s really alarming. But the percentage of couples who actually receive recovery in some of these programs is roughly 30–50% when they’re in these programs. (And this is any kind of marriage-therapy program.) This is secular research data. And of those couples, one year later, only about 30% of them are continuing to experience progress in the right direction.

The statistics are very different when you start to look at Christian-based, biblically based models of therapy and help. Do not divorce God and His Holy Spirit from the work that you need to do.

I think that today the modern horses and chariots of our day are psychology, therapy programs, positive affirmations. All these things sound really good, but when you get to the heart of their efficacy, and you look at the data, it is alarming that they do not work. And yet, we’re putting millions and millions of dollars into it.

There’s actually a Bible verse that says, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God,” Psalm 27. David wrote that. It’s not that he didn’t have chariots. It’s not that he didn’t have horses. But he didn’t put his trust in those things.

We need to stop putting our trust in the things of this world, and we need to start putting our trust in the name of the Lord our God. That’s where you need to put your trust right now.

And that’s a really important thing because many women come up to me as they’ve heard our story, “Can I trust my husband?” And that’s where I want to land today because no matter what it is that’s brought you to this workshop, that’s probably something that’s been broken. How do you rebuild trust in a marriage? And I want to talk about that today.

I want to define trust. Trust is “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something.”

If you and your husband are observing biblical boundaries in your life, in your marriage, you should experience trust in marriage. And there are three areas where you’re probably going to experience trust. I want you to just take inventory.

Are you experience trust in these three areas?

Fidelity.

It’s actually one of the Ten Commandments. “You shall not commit adultery,” Exodus 20:14.

I really believe that pornography is included in that commandment because Jesus said, “He who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart.”

We can’t say, “Oh, it’s just pornography.” The world wants us to say, “Oh, it’s just pornography.” The world wants to tell us all these kinds of lies. “It’s not as bad.” But God’s Word is really clear. It’s a big deal.

And this is where we get afraid of using the word “sin.” Pornography is sin—period. It will bring destruction to your marriage—period.

The other area you should be experiencing trust is:

Honesty.

Also a commandment: “You shall not bear false witness.”

These are really basic: Don’t lie to your husband. Don’t lie to your wife.

I lied to Bob when I got married, and I didn’t tell him. Did I lie overtly? No. But did I tell him the whole truth on something that was really important in our marriage? Absolutely, I did not.

And it’s not sometimes that we’re telling a lie so much that we’re living a lie.

Fidelity. Honesty. And, consistency in behavior.

Matthew 5:37 summarizes this as doing what we say we will do. We have to be faithful. We function well in a family when we do what we say we’re going to do.

I am the cook, the chief cook and bottle washer in our family, and Bob needs to be fed. We just had a little fight the other day about how we eat at all these different times. And he was, like, “You feed me some nights at 5 o’clock, and some nights you feed me at 8 o’clock.”

And I was like, “I know because some nights you come home at 5 o’clock, and I’m ready to feed you, and you say, ‘I just ate lunch thirty minutes ago.’ And then I have to wait and feed you at 8 o’clock.”

Does anybody have these things in their house? We, in general though, act very consistent in our behavior towards one another. That’s an area where you should expect trust in your marriage.

Now, I realize that, for some of you, as you’re taking inventory, you’re like, “Nope. Nope. Nope.” Or maybe two of them? “Nope. Nope.” That’s an invitation for you to enter into the sacred work of redemption for your marriage.

For me, one of the things that was important was understanding how to rebuild trust in our marriage. In the book I write about seven truths that I needed to process through and work through and cling to and hold on to so that we could really experience marriage the way that God wanted us to experience. One of those is about the topic of trust, because trust had been broken.

So I want to share with you four things I learned on the hot pavement of life. These are hard fought for, ladies—blood, sweat, and tears in these four things I want to teach you about trust. I hope they will bless you for your marriage.

The first one is this: The Bible warns us not to put our trust in mere humans. The Word of God indicates that we can't count on humans. Probably the hardest verse, for me, when it comes to this is found in Isaiah 49:15. It says, “Shall the mother forget the baby at her breast? [And God says] Though she will forget, I will not forget you.”

That verse is hard for me to wrap my mind around. How does a mother forget a baby at the breast?

Listen, this isn't back in the day; they didn’t have formula. How could a mom forget that baby, or that that baby couldn't trust in that mother?

The Bible associates great danger with trusting in mere humans. We put ourselves in positions to be (this is according to the Scriptures), “cursed, dismayed, and put to shame” if we put our trust in other men and women. (That's from Jeremiah 17:5–6 and Isaiah 20:5)

And Isaiah 31 says that “sorrow awaits the one who trusts in other people.” Whoa!

Isaiah 2:2 says, “Don't put your trust in mere humans, they are as frail as breath. What good are they?”

We are not supposed to put our trust in other people.

Now, you might be saying, “What? I'm supposed to trust my husband. Doesn't marriage . . . ?” We'll get there.

This was an important foundational thing for me as we were rebuilding trust.

The other thing that was very important is we are commanded to put our trust in the Lord.

I really felt the need to saturate my mind in the Scripture, so I got this little spiral-bound index card set. Every day as I found a verse that I needed, and as my heart was trembling, I would write a Scripture on it, and that would be the verse, because my brain was a little bit, “Ugh.”

I don't know if you've ever been there where you’re just, like, “I don't know what to do with this. My brain isn't processing it right. I don't know how to handle it.”

I couldn't sit down and read the Bible at length. I couldn't study the Word. But I could handle one verse. And so the first verse I wrote in here was Proverbs 3:5 and 6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.”

We can trust the Lord, and we are commanded to trust the Lord. We are told over and over again that that’s where our trust should be.

Number three: Trust in marriage must ultimately be rooted in trust in God. Okay?

Now, I'm not saying that trusting your husband doesn't matter, okay? Because there actually is a Bible verse in Proverbs 31:11 that states that “a man's heart safely trusts in his wife.” So the Bible does talk about trust in the confines of marriage in this context. But even if you do build a relationship on trust, let me ask you something: can you forever trust your husband?

I have a friend who just put her husband in a home because his brain is failing him. He has Alzheimer's. Can she trust him?

Let me go back to that definition: “Trust is the assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.”

You know what? One day, my abilities, my strength, my brain, my body may fail Bob. His brain, his body may fail me. So even if we do have trust in marriage, there will be a time when we have to be a caretaker, one for the other. We don't know which one it will be.

But if you root your trust in God, then those care-taking moments are a joy. Do you hear that? When Nancy read that little text, that was a hard thing that she read from that friend who is having to care for her husband—changing diapers. That’s a hard thing. She can no longer trust in her husband, but she is caring for him. And did you hear the joy that she has in her heart for how she approaches it?

So my trust in Bob has to be rooted in my trust in God.

And then, finally this: Trust in marriage is risky

When Bob and I entered into our marriage covenant, we were making ourselves vulnerable to one another. We were saying, “We want to be a picture of the covenant of Jesus Christ.” And we talked about that today. Right? The covenant of Jesus Christ is a messy thing.

The first covenant that we see ratified in Scripture, between Abram and God, they sliced those animals in half, and God walked through the bloody pieces and said, “May I be as these bloody pieces if this covenant is broken.”

That's what we are saying when we get married.

Listen, the reason that the bride’s family is on one side and the groom’s family is on the other side, the tradition was built out of a risk. It’s a called a “between”—walking between the animals. And the bride and the groom are walking between the two sides of the family, symbolizing this is a covenant.

Listen, we are putting ourselves in a place of risk and hurt if the covenant is broken. There are grave consequences. That doesn’t mean that the marriage can’t be healed. That doesn’t mean we can’t experience redemption, but it’s risky.

So, when I have these four pieces of truth about trust, we were pretty far on our journey, and I realized, “Huh. I can’t trust Bob. I’m commanded to trust the Lord. But I can root my trust in my husband in the Lord. And even if I do that, when I do that, trust in marriage is going to be risky.”

All those things are biblical. That’s what I can find about trust in marriage in the Bible. But I wanted to trust him. So we went out with two of our friends, and we had dinner. We just said, “Bob and I, we’re having trouble with the trust factor. Like, we’ve worked through a lot of these other things. This seems to be big, and we’re stuck.”

And I will never forget, Dan looked across the table at me and said, “Dannah,” (after listening to my heart, after listening to a lot of things), trust ultimately is a gift you choose to give.”

Now, some of you aren’t in a place yet where you’re ready to give it. You haven’t done the work that the marriage needs to do. But at some point, I want you to know something: you need to give the gift of trust back to your husband. I don’t know how it works, if he gave it back or you stole it when you had discovery, but at some point trust needs to be the gift that you give to one another. And you have to choose it.

So, I left that meeting deciding, “I need to choose to trust Bob. I need to give him the gift. But how?”

That’s when I remembered a lesson that I had gotten from our marriage coach. His name is Mike Bivens. Long ago I started calling him “My Cookie-Jar Man.” He’s a really crazy guy, and he’s always making these weird analogies. One time in our marriage coaching, he just looked at me, and he said, “Dannah, you’re not really giving it. You’ve got to put some cookies in your man’s cookie jar.”

And I’m, like, “What are you talking about?” 

“I think we’re not talking about cookies here.” 

And he’s, like, “You know, right here, you gotta put a cookie in the man’s cookie jar right here.”

And I’m, like, still not sure. But then I began to read some research after I’d had this conversation with Dan, some research about trust in marriage. I found that trust in relationships is built in many moments. There’s great research for this in the workplace, in family relationships, in friendships.

Trust isn’t built on great, big amazing things. It’s built in little things. For example, in the workplace, it’s built on, “Hey! I heard that you just had a baby. I’m so excited about that. I want to celebrate that. I brought you this little gift.”

Or, “Hey! I heard your mom was diagnosed with cancer. I’m praying for you.”

Those little things. That coworker who stops and says that, suddenly there is a cookie in the cookie jar. Are you seeing it now?

All right. So, here’s the thing: You have to give the gift of trust to your husband, and you have to fill up his cookie jar. But I want you to have eyes to see how he has been filling yours as you have been rebuilding trust in relation to whatever your discovery issue is.

Here are some ways that Bob Gresh has filled up my cookie jar. 

He’s confessed his sin with full disclosure. That is like an apple pie in my cookie jar. It did not feel like one when we sat in those red chairs, but I promise you that your husband’s humble confession is one of the greatest gifts of trust that he will ever give you.

Bob was willing to answer any questions I had, no questions asked about what I asked.

He eagerly established and abided by healthy boundaries.

He humbly accepted any discipline that needed to be given by authorities in his life—elders, boards.

He demonstrated an increasing ability to talk about his feelings and his needs.

He began to be present to me.

Those were lots of little cookies in my cookie jar at lots of little different times.

He asked to hear about my feelings—and I told him. 

He pursued community with other Christian men. Every time my husband goes to D.C. Group—that’s what our church calls it—it’s a great big cookie in my cookie jar.

He meets regularly with a local body of believers. He enters into the fellowship of the body eagerly.

He stays in counseling. Every morning my man is up on a Wednesday morning, and he’s on a phone call with his counselor out of Nashville.

He takes responsibility rather than making excuses when I feel hurt or triggered by something we see on a TV show or we read about or a story that I hear.

He’s attentive to my physical needs, my emotional needs.

He makes change and growth his personal priority. I see it every day.

He’s committed to pursuing covenant love with me.

And he actively nurtures his relationship with Jesus Christ.

Listen, ladies, if any of those things have been true in your husband’s life, some of them aren’t the best news, some of them are the hard things, but those are cookies in your cookie jar of trust. When he starts giving you those, you need to celebrate. When you don’t celebrate those little victories, you are withholding a gift that God really does want you to give.

I hope that maybe today you can just take some inventory.

Write a list: “These are some ways my husband has been putting cookies in my cookie jar.” It might be little things. It might be big things. And then thank him. 

Text him before you get home. Sit down when you get home and say, “Hey! You know what? I’ve been telling you about what isn’t working. Can I tell you some things that are working? This has been really helpful and good for me.”

I’m going to ask Shanti and Bob to come on up, and we’re going to have just the last ten minutes of our time to do some quick Q & A. We’re probably only going to get through about three quick questions, but we did want to take some time for anything that you might have on your heart.

So, Shanti McKenzie is one of the lead teachers at True Girl and a dear and new friend that Bob and I have just been getting to know over the last year. Shanti, do you have some Q’s because we might have some A’s.

Shanti McKenzie: I’ve got a lot of Q’s.

Bob: I realize I was a real downer the first ten minutes, wasn’t I? (laughter)

Dannah: You weren’t yourself.

Bob: We also have a sheep, a new sheep named Epley. He’s a really happy animal.

Dannah: Are you feeling like Epley?

Bob: I’m feeling more like Epley right now.

Shanti: Bob, we love you.

Bob: That first thing is over.

Shanti: Well, first of all, thank you both for being so transparent.

Dannah: You’re welcome.

Shanti: We just know that God is going to be setting people free today.

How many of you have already been helped by what’s been discussed? Amen.

So we have some questions coming in pretty hot and heavy. My fingers don’t move that fast, people. Thank you, though. You text quickly.

The first question is: How do I know my husband is truly repentant? What does that look like?

Bob: Well, I think this is really important for the Church, as it helps with this. There’s a couple of things I would say: repentance is the real key to everything, and sometimes repentance doesn’t come real quickly.

I can tell you what repentance isn’t: it’s not crying, and it’s not saying you’re sorry. Those are easy. Those are really easy. And they, in general, a lot of compassion. People think, Oh, he’s crying. That means nothing, really. Honestly, it really means nothing. You just push a box of tissue across to your husband if he does that.

It’s not that it’s not a good thing, but here’s what repentance is: repentance is owning your story and not blame shifting.

So, when I sinned, it had negative effects. There were times when people said, “Well, you were really transparent, and they shouldn’t have done that to you.” And I was like, “Everything that’s wrong that’s happened here is my fault. It wouldn’t have happened without my sin.” It’s not blame shifting.

It’s also not wanting back in leadership until you’re asked to be. You should be the last person they would ask. Other people should see a change in your life.

It’s also owning your whole story, being able to tell it without any shifting or equivocation.

And I think one of the things Dannah said that’s really important about triggering and stuff is there are things that happen when we’re watching TV or movies. Things that I do or whatever. Before I was fully repentant, honestly, it used to aggravate me. And then I thought, I did this. I did this. What she’s feeling is because of me, and I need to eat that and own that.

That’s a long-term thing, but I think that repentance is the entire thing. I don’t always want to be in counseling. I don’t always want to be doing all these things, but it means a lot to her, and I know it’s good for me. So I embrace that discipline and accountability because I don’t want to go back there.

Dannah: Good answer. Thank you, Baby. You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.

Bob: I’m an expert on repentance. 

Shanti: We should all be experts.

Bob: Yeah, it’s not a good thing, but it worked out.

Shanti: We had a few questions asking: How do you reconnect physically? Dannah, I’ll ask you this: How do you reconnect physically and emotionally when you have a husband who was addicted to pornography or something else, and they are repentant?

Dannah: I actually decided not to talk about that today because there are men I work with in this room. But I have a whole chapter on that in the book. It’s really important, and it’s really complicated.

There are different theories, like, taking a time of sobriety—not having sex with one another. There are reasons for that. I navigate through what I think about that and whether it’s good or helpful or not. I navigate through what authentic sexual integrity looks like in the marriage bed: what is okay, what’s not okay, when it’s okay.

There’s a lot of complicated questions there, but one of the things I’m really committed to, Bob and I are really committed to, is that, as much as we need to speak freely about sex, we also need to have some . . . It’d be nice if people had some blush factor about something that was supposed to be a treasured intimate experience between husband and wife.

So I’ll leave that in writing for you to get in the book. If you can’t afford the book, I’ll send you a free one because you need to know.

Shanti: Good answer.

Dannah: Bob’s like, “She just said she’s gonna send you a free book. Did she just say that?” (laughter) He has to pay the bills.

Shanti: Bob’s like, “Wait a minute. Hold on.” (laughter)

Bob, you said your shame was toxic to the marriage. What should / could a wounded, suffering wife have said to you before you decided, “Enough is enough”?

Bob: What could she have said to me?

Shanti: So, what was the impetus for you telling Dannah?

Bob: Well, I think the impetus for me was knowing what we could be, and knowing that what she was satisfied with was about 20% of what I was giving. It felt like a lie. Every time she said, “You’re a great husband,” it was like a curse on me. I felt horrible about it.

Dannah: He was a great husband, but he knew what we could be. I didn’t, because I didn’t know.

Bob: So I think that whether it’s pornography or workaholism or anything else, I think the lack of presence is one of our biggest struggles. I think it’s a struggle for me. I think it is for women, too. I know what the beauty of transparency can be, of living in total rigorous honesty in a marriage. And once you feel that, it’s a place you want to get back to.

Dannah: Total rigorous honesty in marriage, let me land on that just a second.

So we know that marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church. Right? We love the new beginning of the marriage. When we first enter into covenant, we’re in the honeymoon stage. We’re a picture of Christ and His Bride.

But Christ suffered and died for His Bride, and marriage is a picture of that, too. And your marriage is no less a picture of the gospel when you are working through the brokenness than it is in those easy places. In fact, if anything, that may be where you get to show that we do marriage differently than the rest of the world. We do marriage as a picture of the gospel where we enter into the brokenness and the healing of one another. (applause)

Bob: Honestly, it was also the fact that when she was sensitive to me and sweet to me and encouraging to me, it did convict me. It was easier to go on with my sin when I was aggravated with her or if she was on me about something.

Dannah: I never do that. (laughter)

Bob: She never was. I mean, she never was that way.

Dannah: Quit while you’re ahead! (laughter)

Shanti: We have one last question. How has this impacted your children?

Dannah: I have a lot of people ask that. We’ve been really honest with our children. We took them out to pizza one night and said, “Here’s the details of the story we want you to know. Here’s what we don’t want you to learn from it.”

I have something here that I didn’t quite share yet, and I’ll share it now, I guess. Those red chairs that he confessed in, I hated them after that. We saved them for a long time. They were really expensive, so it was really a bummer. I couldn’t get myself to sell them on Facebook Marketplace. So I moved them to my office—instead of in the house, to the office—where I wouldn’t see them all the time, and I could ignore them more.

But then I felt like God was inviting me to let every area of our story be redeemed. One day I saw those red chairs, and I was, like, “Ugh. I still hate them, Jesus.”

And He’s, like, “I can redeem it all.”

So I had some friends move them back, and it’s been really neat to see through the years the Lord use those chairs as a place where we welcomed our grandbabies. I watched my two girls become aunts and a comfort to two preemies. We’ve had prayer meetings where Bob and I sit in those chairs, and we lead from them.

But the greatest redemption happened, well, let me just read this. This is the epilogue to the book:

About those red chairs—inexplicable joy erupted from my spirit. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined God redeeming those red chairs. Not this thoroughly. Not this obviously. After I had them brought back to the house, I began to sit in one each morning. Coffee in one hand, Bible in the other. I soaked in the presence of Jesus. Sometimes I even imagined Him sitting in the other chair next to me. In this way I was participating in their redemption.

Then our beautiful twin grandbabies had arrived, born prematurely. When they came home from the NICU, Addy and Zoey’s four-pound bodies were nurtured in those very chairs by their mom and dad, their aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, by Bob, by me. That had been such a sweet bonus.

But now even sweeter, my daughter-in-love, Allelia had just sent me something I’d asked her to write. It was a forward for my book on parenting tween girls. She could not have imagined how healing these words would be to my heart. This is what Allelia wrote:

“Just a couple of years ago, Bob and Dannah opened their home to Robbie and me when we brought our beautiful twin baby girls home from the hospital. Bob and Robbie cared for our girls late into the night. Dannah woke up very early to help me with the first bottle feed of the day. We sat in two cozy red chairs, snuggled up close to her fireplace. For me, these chairs are holy ground, a precious place where I encountered the radical and undying love of Jesus. Dannah and I held my baby girls and talked and laughed and cried and prayed. She listened to my heart and spoke truth into it—truth about my Savior who sustained the lives we held in precarious times—truth about my girls—truth about me.

“When you pick up this book, Dear Reader, you are cozying up in Dannah’s red chair in her living room. You are laughing and crying and receiving truth from her heart to yours, and the immense love of your own Savior Jesus Christ.”

Oh, the immense love of our Savior. May you experience our Redeemer as beautifully and as thoroughly as I have, my friend, and then may you tell someone your redemption story.