In this episode my special guests Brian & Linda Seitz share their individual journeys to relationship with Jesus and how that impacted their marriage. They share openly about their struggles for 7 years as an unequally yoked couple, and the impact of loving mature believers in their lives. Brian & Linda are counselors and mentors, the creators of the Rebuild Your Marriage class & curriculum and founders of peaksandvalleys.life
(Blog Starts at: 27:54)
Praying In An Unequally Yoked Marriage
Linda:
In an unequally yoked marriage, the Christian has to be careful about making certain that they are humble, because you tend to accept Christ and for whatever reason your humanness takes over and you’re like, “I’m right. This is the way it is. I’m so sorry that you’re not following this, but you’re wrong.”
God sends people into our lives. Two men were talking to Brian, it turned a corner for him. It helped him to understand. It was not me who was going to teach Brian. I knew very clearly that it wasn’t going to be me. But also something that changed during that time was my prayer life.
Because, we tend to pray to make ourselves comfortable. It’s like, “Lord, please make Brian a Christian. Lord, please make him want to read the Bible. Lord, please make him want to go to church.” I’ll tell you that same Titus woman she was probably an angel, because she hit me at the perfect times.
But I was at the point where I was ready to listen to it. Because we talked to a lot of unequally yoked marriages. There seems to be a sense of almost sassiness like, “Well it’s too bad that he’s not doing it, but he’s supposed to be the leader of my home and he’s not.” You hear this attitude.
I was blessed to be around women who also loved their husbands. Their husbands were Christians and they were leaders, but they were still very respectful. That same Titus woman, I can remember one day breaking down with her and saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to live this life. I don’t know how to raise my kids like this when my husband has no interest in it.
I don’t know what my next direction is.” She was so sweet because she would talk about this faith prayer. Faith prayer is hop over your circumstances now and start thanking God for how he’s already worked out your situation. I worked with her a lot, she said, “Come back next week and tell me your impossible dream.”
So I came back next week and I said the furthest thing from what could happen now, would be, “Lord, please make Brian a pastor.” Because I felt like he was so far from that. She said, “Great, that’s your faith prayer. You hop over what’s happening now. You start thanking God now for him being a pastor.” I said, “You are wackadoodle. This cannot happen.”
I was a new Christian, so I didn’t have a whole lot of rear view mirror stuff to look back on and say, “God got me through that, God got me through that one.” I didn’t have a lot of that. I had to go on being humble and being faithful and being obedient to what God calls us to do. It’s laying everything in His hands. Once I started letting go of that, things started moving and it wasn’t quick, but I kept being a good listener during that time.
Brian:
I don’t want you to take anything away from yourself, either Linda, because while all of that’s true, part of what changed in that day when you agreed to not go to church, is you began to be the wife in my eyes, at least that any man would want to be married to. Where there was some sasiness and there was some, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do. You’re not here most of the time anyway.”
That began to change where I began to see you putting me and my needs and desires ahead of your own, which actually made you Christ, now in hindsight. I wasn’t understanding what was happening, but the church became less of a threat.
Gina:
That was a turning point that weekend, and you are meeting with this group now that is accepting you where you’re at. Accepting your jerky questions and your good questions, your snarky responses and your good responses. Then what?
Brian:
For me it was a slow evolution. It was talking to people. I was not a nonbeliever, but it was trying to understand what belief meant, why it meant that. I’ll be the first to say I have a pride problem. I’m comfortable in my own skin, Sometimes in ways I shouldn’t be. I felt like I got it. Like I knew it, like how hard can this be?
And so there was a lot of my own reading and there was a lot of going to people that for whatever reason I had respect for. That helped me. There were some books that were hugely impactful in my life. There were some people that were hugely impactful in my life. Then there was patience. I needed patience.
For me, belief always existed. However, the significance of that didn’t hit until years later. I always talk about, Linda was a light switch on/off, I was a dimer switch. I needed that slow, steady, loving pressure to make the light burn brighter and brighter.
Linda:
The more you learn about yourself before Christ, how He individually made you, you can then recognize that being different is good and that you each have your own journey in Christ. I might be a visual learner and a feeling learner and a tactile learner. I want to go out in the woods and read the Bible, or I want to have pictures of a Bible verse, I’ll read a Bible verse and I can imagine it in my head.
He is not that learner at all. All the stuff that I was trying to give him, “Listen to this message. Read this book.” He was like, “Not getting it. Doesn’t mean anything to me.” He’s a complete intellectual learner. Once he found his authors and style, then he could take it on his own. Something else we didn’t recognize then, but now when we meet with police couples, we recognize that it’s hard for officers to hand their life over to another authority as in God, because you’re taught to be your own authority.
Brian can speak to this better than I can, but we came to a light bulb moment where it was like, “That’s hard for you because the academy training teaches you you’re the one in control. You’re the one that’s going home today.”
Brian:
You’re taught to assess the scene, you have about half a second, you make a decision on what you’re seeing and then you take control and when you take control you do it firmly quickly and you don’t relinquish it until you leave. That’s one of the reasons police marriages suffer so much, because people enter into this union having a vision of what that’s going to look like. The vision doesn’t often match reality.
Especially as officers get more and more seasoned in their careers, because they take more control, they have more success, suddenly they’ve got this endless cycle that takes them through something that is successful everywhere except in their house. They come and they try to dominate and control their wife. They dominate and control their children. Suddenly that starts to go sideways and it’s like, “Why is this not working here? It works everywhere else.”
Mentoring Unequally Yoked Couples
Gina:
Talk a little bit about mentoring couples and your passion for marriage and where that came from.
Linda:
Being refined in different areas in our marriage did propel us into wanting to care for marriages, because not that we have all the answers, but we’ve been through a lot, so a lot of things don’t surprise us. It started with a sleigh counseling at Saddleback church. Having a couple in front of me, as an individual lay counselor. The gentleman happened to be a police officer.
Although I was using the same scripts and the same tactics and the same tools that we had learned through our counseling class, it was literally bouncing off of him. I could tell there was a complete wall up with him. When you lay counsel there, you get supervised once a week. I went to my supervisor and I said, “Next week, do you think I could bring Brian in?” He was already counseling men.
They said, “It’s a great idea. Brian is a counseling police officer. He’s a police officer. There might be a good match.” The next week I brought Brian in and it was like magic happened in front of us. Wheels began to turn, things began to make sense. He was able to speak his language and it happened all in front of my eyes. From that point forward, I thought “We have a good thing going, we can talk to marriage as well. We have a great way of building rapport with this couple.”
They actually ended up doing very well at the end of our sessions. We probably saw him another five to eight times and worked through some tough stuff then there were moments where Brian would have to bring him into another room and they would have a session by themselves for like 20 minutes. I would meet with the woman for 20 minutes. Then we would all come back together.
That also gave us the idea that a lot of men don’t have other men to talk to. Men don’t have men to mentor them. Men don’t have men to help these guys lead marriages, which is what the wife wants. But the disconnect is that the leadership component can’t take place out of nothing. We have to teach that leadership component. That leadership component is best taught to a man by a man. It is the way it is. That worked out so beautifully that we started doing counseling marriages together.
Brian:
The men counseling men thing is interesting. We need a ball to be able to talk with any depth. Even then somebody drops the ball and the whole subject changes. The women I’ve seen in my life, can sit down over a cup of coffee or a tea and go crazy places that men would take years to get. We’ll grab a football or a golf ball or a fishing pole, and then you can start to have some of that conversation, which is how I experienced relationships in my non-professional life.
At the same time, I had been introduced to a form of police psychology by a psychologist, Larry Blum, who’s a dear friend. At first I was a little skeptical. As I got to see how it worked I was blown away. Our police department had a team of officers. I was fortunate to be a part of that team that anytime an officer had something traumatic, shooting, a baby passed away in his or her arms, that the team would get called in.
We would help that officer deal with their post-traumatic stress or the potential of them developing post-traumatic stress. It was a life changing and eye-opening experience that got me to the point where I began to value certain aspects of the psychological sciences. I had done that forever. And Linda, when I was working nights again, and to fill her time, she was taking some counseling classes at church and she would come back.
When we talk, she’d say, “You would like this. This is what I learned tonight. You should see this.” She had a book and I looked through the book and I’m like, “This is in my wheelhouse. I would love this.” When I got off nights, I then took the class and then we started counseling and I loved it. I also loved the difference between secular counseling and Christian counseling.
There’s value in both, although I personally have a much higher value for Christian counseling, because secular counseling often asks you, “How does that make you feel?” and Christian counseling says, “Well, it’s interesting you feel that way, but what does the Bible say about what you’re doing or how you’re feeling or what your reaction is?” The Bible, for me, gives a clear and more precise worldview on how we should be behaving and treating each other.
When I was going through the classes and then especially when Linda and I began to counsel each other, I began to see some of the chinks in my own armor. Here I am counseling a couple and I’m saying, “Bro, you can’t say that to your wife and expect that to work.” Realizing as I’m saying that, that I had said the same thing to my wife two weeks prior.
I began to verbalize things in a way that I was hearing them and realizing that I can be a better husband. I can be a better father. I can be a better friend, a better son, a better everything. Going through that counseling and then actually using the exercises and giving people advice made me want to be the person that I was counseling from.
Because the people looked at Linda and I like we had it all together, “Well, you guys have it easy. I mean you’re married to Mr. Wonderful. You’re married to Mrs. Wonderful.” Well, it wasn’t true. We would go home and fight and we would go home and have those rough moments, like all couples do. What counseling in that environment taught us to do was, argue better.
We still disagree. We have something going on in our lives now, mostly it’s my life, where somebody who I love tremendously has essentially told me that love is not enough that they need me to approve of everything they’re doing and the choices that they’re making and also the way that they’re living. I don’t approve of everything. My wife does.
But we talk about those things and we dialogue about them and we work hard to make each other better. Sometimes, even though I don’t approve of what Linda’s doing, we talk about it and we come to a resolution. We’re a better couple and a stronger couple because of it. To demand that you have to think exactly the way, you have to approve of everything I do, that’s not a relationship.
Gina:
That’s not spiritual leadership either. Which is a big thing in Christian marriages is the submission model and the distorted definition of what spiritual leadership in the home means.
Linda:
Fast forward where we met you, Gina, at that church, because our kids were there. We reluctantly left Saddleback, because we left our lay counseling ministry that we were doing there, but quickly met the psychologist on staff at the new church. She was familiar with the training that we had undergone at Saddleback. We began to counsel marriages under her tutelage and with her prescribed curriculum and it became a class.
We started to run that class like we were comfortable meeting with marriages. We started out together and then we separated the men and the women because we felt like that model was working out fantastically. Then we bring them back together again. Through that, we had to have our own way to talk about the submission model because we found that a lot of the counseling that we did and a lot of the couples that we met with, that was their primary problem.
You would get rigid responses from both the man and the woman because they were at a stalemate and they didn’t know how to make sense of it. The woman had stopped doing everything because he wasn’t leading. He had stopped doing everything because he said, “She’s always gone at church. She doesn’t even want to be home. Why should I do anything?”
Brian and I had to talk about how we’re going to define this for these couples, so that we can make some breakthroughs, that it is biblically based, but it also makes sense to them and it can get them to the next step, make a breakthrough, break the chain and you have a good way of describing that to couples.
Brian:
It’s trying to put things in language that people understand. What we talk about in the submission model is that we are the Bride of Christ and we’re supposed to treat our spouse, as men, the way Christ loved the church. What did Christ do for the church? He died for the church. We’re supposed to put the other first. The way we visualize that for people in simple terms is, if you and your wife are in disagreement, that’s okay, have that discussion, do it politely, do it respectfully, but at the end of the night, we’re not supposed to go to bed in anger if we can avoid that.
But at the end of the night, somebody has to make a decision so that there can be peace in the home. Husband, I’m asking you make the decision, but the decision I’m asking you to make is the one that benefits your wife, because that’s what we’re called to do, we’re called to be sacrificial. That’s a difficult thing for a lot of couples to do.
Linda:
We get a lot of raised eyebrows during that time, because these couples believe that it should be much more strict than that. “It should be much more rigid than that. That’s not exactly the way it should be. It can’t be that easy.” Actually, when it is that easy, it starts this cool snowball effect. That runs down the hill and it picks up speed and the wife then wants to respect her husband even more. The husband then wants to love his wife in different ways.
It creates this continual cool flow in the marriage. That’s what we’re called to do. We love meeting with couples. That’s one example of where we’ve seen light bulbs turn on within couples. I feel like we’ve been equipped through our struggles and our pain and raising kids and getting through finances and getting through illnesses that we’ve been able to identify with a lot of these couples and walk them through to a beautiful new understanding of each other.
Brian:
That’s another way to see miracles. There’s the miracle of healing and there’s the miracle of healing. Some of those are physical and some of those are emotional.
Gina:
I can imagine that a lot of things were stirred up. If you were in a marriage that’s unequally yoked or if you’re in a marriage that’s struggling now and wrestling through pain and hurt and distance. I want to encourage you if there were things that triggered you during this episode to not recoil and get offended and let bitterness and resentment and frustration settle in. But to stop to go before the Lord to say, “Jesus, show me, speak to me. What is it that You are trying to say?” And let Him speak to you. He never brings shame or condemnation or accusation. He brings an invitation for healing, for restoration and for hope.
Check out Peaks and Valleys
Check out the rest of this conversation Unequally Yoked
Check out the Dwell Meditations
