June 19, 2010 | Posted by drrick
I am sitting here in Wesson, MS this morning. Day Two of our Marriage of Our Dreams seminar continues. Yet I wanted to take this time to reflect
This past week the Southern Baptist Convention voted on a resolution which is simply a statement that they want to stop the increasing divorces in their denomination. Well, at the risk of sounding critical, it is about time. Sadly, how many casualties have had to happen before the SBC took marriage seriously. Too many. Again, many denominations are more reactive than proactive. And signing a resolution essentially means nothing without action.
But how did the Body of Christ get to this point in the first place? I believe we took our focus off the important things in life and put them on the institutional. Bigger buildings, programs, marketing programs, high profile consultants, bigger media outlets, etc. And this is the church! Not just McDonalds. Sadly when we get our focus off of being Father’s heart (a heart of love) and place it on numbers (A mega-church pastor once told me that “people are numbers and we are going after numbers”) people are no longer respected as people but mere commodities to be “gotten.”
Yet when I talk to young people today who have left the church, one message is dominant. How they saw people treated had a major impact on their understanding not simply of the people of God, but more important, who HE is.
If we want to take back marriage then a simple resolution in my mind is not sufficient. All talk, no action. So what is next. Sending people to marriage counseling is not the answer. 64% of those going to marriage counseling divorce. And, why wait to intervent after people have fallen off the cliff.
My anwer: a proactive approach. Develop ongoing and sustainable relationship ministry that addresses the needs of marriages and families and that include skills-based paradigms. There are enough people out there telling people WHAT to do and WHY, but very few showing people HOW to do the very thing they are asked to do. Don’t tell others to “stop doing that” but tell them “do this instead.”
Information does not change people..it only informs them. Showing them how can empower people to do the difference that will make the difference. may we in the Church come to fully understand this.
Categories: Marriage | 
Tags: church, Divorce, marriage and family ministry, SBC, Skills based relationship | 
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June 6, 2010 | Posted by drrick
Ok, now this post will be a bit different. It is not necessarily focused on marriage and family, but the larger issue of a spirit of separation and disconnection rather than a spirit of unity. I am becoming more keenly aware of the spirit of separation that is taking place with the Church and in society at large. We are divided racially, ethnically, politically, emotionally, and shamefully, even the evangelical christian community is divided. A house divided can not stand. Jesus said, Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand (Matt 12:25). Yet, we are a house divided. Baptists don’t agree with Charismatics so they stay separated. These folks disagree with those folks so they stay separated. A spirit of control, competition soon develops. Sadly, Father’s heart is about unity, connection, and relationship and the representatives of His heart do not live this way practically.
Is it any wonder why the generation today is so longing for a sense of unity and a bond even at the expense of connecting to anyone, even if that means condoning immoral behavior? Marriages are divided. Families are divided. Communities are divided. If I dont agree with your methods or thoughts, then we can not have fellowship. UGH! When we will ever get it?
Spiritual authority is present in proportion to the unity of relationships among believers moving toward a common God-given goal. Therefore, separation is Satan’s foundational tool to divide and conquer. Separation is one of the enemy’s main weapons. His first act toward man was to separate (alienate) man from God in the Garden of Eden. Where there is separation in the home there can not be healthy spiritual authority. The same is true for a community, a society, and a nation.
Anger, apathy, resentment, unforgiveness, no fear of God, control, pride, a desire to be right are all attributes of a separated relationship and these will assure you stay separated.
May it be that we seek unity. Oneness glorifies God; separation glorifies Satan. Let your house be one that is unified – in Love – centered around the fellowship of the Spirit – connected to the True Vine.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: anger, connection, oneness, resentment, separation, unity | No Comments »
April 22, 2010 | Posted by drrick
These past few weeks I have encountered many ministers who are in serious marital distress. It appears that these marriages have been in slow decline for years. It is only now that their issues have gone public and now it appears there is little to help them. We had one minister who informed his wife that the only needs she met for him were “sex and tea.” Another group of ministry couples were not at this level of coldness and indifference, but, be it all the same, their marriages are headed for divorce court. These marriages began in a house of God and will end in a court house!
This has caused me to seriously think through something I heard a little while back about we ministers. There are two primary skills for a pastor, teach and manage his home. It appears we only hold them to one condition and not the other. It is so bad that the term PK is a euphemism for a problem child!
“I’m leaving you. I don’t like this town or this life and I don’t love you!” The conversation took longer but it was what she meant. Within a few days, my wife of fifteen years had packed her clothes, half of our furniture and many of our memories in a borrowed pickup truck and moved away to start over. Left behind were two crying children, an emotionally wrecked husband and a confused church community. (Quote from a minister on a website I found)
A Newsweek article states: “In recent years the divorce rate for protestant clergy has risen to match the general population.” In other words, clergy and their families are not immune to the human tragedies that infect us all. The Bible explicitly describes how pastors should treat their families: “You must manage your own family well, with children who respect and obey you. For if you cannot manage your own household, how can you take care of God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:4-5) Good question!
Charles Stanley is divorced. Benny Hinn is getting a divorce. Other lesser ministers are getting divorced. With so much family fragmentation in the Body of Christ, how can the unchurched look at us and assume the faith we say we believe is real? They will know you by their fruit! What kind of fruit are we bearing?
Am I frustrated? Yes. Satan will never defeat the Church. He can not. He only needs to emasculate it. Why not through broken marriages and families?
Antonio Gramsci, was an Italian communist who died in prison under Mussolini. The ten years he was in captivity, he wrote a few thousand pages of his view of why communism failed and what would have to happen for it to succeed. I wont go into the details here. Except to say that in his reflections he blamed Christianity for communisms failure in Italy. He argued that since Christianity is a counter-culture movement it must be weakened so that the children raised in these homes would not accept the faith they were taught. Gramsci surmised if you weaken Christian marriages and families, the children of these homes would not embrace Christianity and this would allow the culture to teach them and indoctrinate them into socialist ideals.
I think Gramsci was right. The cultural transformation of the USA into socialism is well documented back to the 1950s.
Fight for your marriage. Support your pastor. I think it was Andy Stanley (who learned from watching his father) who said that if you are going to cheat something, cheat the church not your family.
Lord, may I be a better lover, husband, friend, father, listener, communicator, and example of your heart to my wife, my kids, and then to the world around me.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: crisis marriage, Divorce, divorce rates of pastors, gramsci, Marriage, Richard Marks, Rick Marks | No Comments »
April 9, 2010 | Posted by drrick
I am up here in the beautiful North Woods of northern Wisconsin at one of the most beautiful and peaceful places I know: Fort Wilderness. This year round Christian camp has been a blessing to families since the mid 90s. And to my amazement, this place has also been the meeting spot for hundreds of young people who would later fall in love and marry. I have met quite a number of married couples who met through Fort Wilderness. Talk about a great matchmaking site!!! A real world eHarmony if you will.
It is only fitting that with this long history of ministering to families, that FW began 3 years ago to offer couples retreats as a part of their minstry offering. Twice a year they invest in couples through a FRI-SUN retreat. I am honored to be able to lead these retreats with our Enriched Christian Marriage curriculum. We have seen many couples enriched, and some healed from long term issues through this simple relationship skills focused Christian retreat for married and engaged couples.
It is my hope that you are investing in your marriage too. If you desire to make an investment this fall, we have two offerings here at Fort Wildereness. Contact them today at www.fortwilderness.com. See you either in September or October.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: couples retreat, fort wilderness, marriage enrichment, rhinelander, wisconsin | No Comments »
February 23, 2010 | Posted by drrick
This week Louella and I celebrate 26 years of togetherness. I would like to say that we have had a strong sense of USness the enture time. Sadly this is not true. There have been times US left the house because of unresolved hurts, disappointments, resentments and anger. I am glad however, that our US prevails. Like Louella said to me once in one of our down times, “We are a team.” Boy, did my heart jump for joy and feel secure at those words. We are a team. And all teams have times of relationship struggles. It is only natural when two imperfect people live close. But, it is the Team that keeps the seam together. We are an US. I am grateful and appreciative that she chose me. What a wonderful thing to be chosen. Choose your partner today again. And remember, our Heavenly Father chose you too. That is why the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Again I say, it sure is great to be chosen.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: anger, anniversary, disappointment, Louella, Richard Marks, Rick Marks, US, Usness | No Comments »
February 2, 2010 | Posted by drrick
Hijacking the Brain — How Pornography Works
Posted: Monday, February 01, 2010 at 1:26 pm ET
We are fast becoming the pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into advertising, marketing, and virtually every niche of American life. This ambient pornography is now almost everywhere, from the local shopping mall to prime-time television.
By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America. New videos and internet pages are produced each week, with the digital revolution bringing a host of new delivery systems. Every new digital platform becomes a marketing opportunity for the pornography industry.
To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of those who consume pornography are males. It is no trade secret that males are highly stimulated by visual images, whether still or video. That is not a new development, as ancient forms of pornography attest. What is new is all about access. Today’s men and boys are not looking at line pictures drawn on cave walls. They have almost instant access to countless forms of pornography in a myriad of forms.
But, even as technology has brought new avenues for the transmission of pornography, modern knowledge also brings a new understanding of how pornography works in the male brain. While this research does nothing to reduce the moral culpability of males who consume pornography, it does help to explain how the habit becomes so addictive.
As William M. Struthers of Wheaton College explains, “Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives.”
Struthers is a psychologist with a background in neuroscience and a teaching concentration in the biological bases of human behavior. In Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain, Struthers presents key insights from neuroscience that go a long way toward explaining why pornography is such a temptation for the male mind.
“The simplest explanation for why men view pornography (or solicit prostitutes) is that they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy,” he explains. The urge for sexual intimacy is God-given and essential to the male, he acknowledges, but it is easily misdirected. Men are tempted to seek “a shortcut to sexual pleasure via pornography” and now find this shortcut easily accessed.
In a fallen world, pornography becomes more than a distraction and a distortion of God’s intention for human sexuality. It comes as an addictive poison.
Struthers explains:
Viewing pornography is not an emotionally or physiologically neutral experience. It is fundamentally different from looking at black and white photos of the Lincoln Memorial or taking in a color map of the provinces of Canada. Men are reflexively drawn to the content of pornographic material. As such, pornography has wide-reaching effects to energize a man toward intimacy. It is not a neutral stimulus. It draws us in. Porn is vicarious and voyeuristic at its core, but it is also something more. Porn is a whispered promise. It promises more sex, better sex, endless sex, sex on demand, more intense orgasms, experiences of transcendence.
Pornography “acts as a polydrug,” Struthers explains. As Dr. Patrick Carnes asserts, pornography is “a pathological relationship with a mood-altering experience.” Boredom and curiosity lead many boys and men into experiences that become more like drug addiction than is often admitted.
Why men rather than women? As Struthers explains, the male and female brains are wired differently. “A man’s brain is a sexual mosaic influenced by hormone levels in the womb and in puberty and molded by his psychological experience.” Over time, exposure to pornography takes a man or boy deeper along “a one-way neurological superhighway where a man’s mental life is over-sexualized and narrowed. This superhighway has countless on-ramps but very few off-ramps.
Pornography is “visually magnetic” to the male brain. Struthers presents a fascinating review of the neurobiology involved, with pleasure hormones becoming linked to and released by the experience of a male viewing pornographic images. These experiences with pornography and pleasure hormones create new patterns in the brain’s wiring, and repeated experiences formalize the rewiring.
And then, enough is never enough. “If I take the same dose of a drug over and over and my body begins to tolerate it, I will need to take a higher dose of the drug in order for it to have the same effect that it did with a lower dose the first time,” Struthers reminds us. So, the experience of viewing pornography and acting out on it creates a demand in the brain for more and more, just to achieve the same level of pleasure in the brain.
While men are stimulated by the ambient sexual images around them, explicit pornography increases the effect. Struthers compares this to the difference between traditional television and the new high definition technologies. Everything is more clear, more explicit, and more stimulating.
Struthers explains this with compelling force:
Something about pornography pulls and pushes at the male soul. The pull is easy to identify. The naked female form can be hypnotizing. A woman’s willingness to participate in a sexual act or expose her nakedness is alluring to men. The awareness of one’s own sexuality, the longing to know, to experience something as good wells up from deep within. An image begins to pick up steam the longer we look upon it. It gains momentum and can reach a point where it feels like a tractor-trailer rolling downhill with no brakes.
Wired for Intimacy is a timely and important book. Struthers offers keen and strategic insights from neurobiology and psychology. But what makes this book truly helpful is the fact that Struthers does not leave his argument to neuroscience, nor does he use the category of addiction to mitigate the sinfulness of viewing pornography.
Sinners naturally look for fig leaves to hide sin, and biological causation is often cited as a means of avoiding moral responsibility. Struthers does not allow this, and his view of pornography is both biblical and theologically grounded. He lays responsibility for the sin of viewing pornography at the feet of those who willingly consume explicit images. He knows his audience — after all, his classrooms are filled with young male college students. The addict is responsible for his addiction.
At the same time, any understanding of how sin works its deceitful evil is a help to us, and understanding how pornography works in the male mind is a powerful knowledge. Pornography is a sin that robs God of his glory in the gift of sex and sexuality. We have long known that sin takes hostages. We now know another dimension of how this sin hijacks the male brain. Knowledge, as they say, is power.
Al Mohler
Categories: Marriage | Tags: addiction, brain, sex, sexual addiction | No Comments »
January 10, 2010 | Posted by drrick
I was thinking back about when I met Louella. Well, I did not actually meet her…I saw her…from a distance. I was on active duty in the US Navy (A great decision for my life I might add) in 1981 and was attending a Tuesday night church function and I saw her. She walked across the room. From right to left. I remember seeing her. The first time. It would not be the last. I didn’t know her name or who she was. However, what i distinctly remember was the “feeling” I got when I saw her. It wasn’t a tingle. It wasn’t a feeling of passion, or a sudden impulse to jump up and introduce myself. No, I was actually very insecure and afraid of girls for the most part. But this “feeling” when I saw…her. All I can say is that in that moment I knew I wanted to marry her and spend my life with her. I can not explain it. I don’t encourage this for others. But, I knew. It has now been almost 26 years of marriage and I still have those feelings. Ah. I hope I never lose them. More on our meeting and how we got together later.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: Louella, love, Marriage, passion, romance | 1 Comment »
December 25, 2009 | Posted by drrick
On this Christmas day, and at the risk of being judged unspiritual by some, I still want to share what has been pondering in my heart the past couple of days. I even made a comment about it on my Facebook page. It is about a single word, that when I hear it, I relax, I feel safe; like all the problems in the world are big enough to tackle because of this one word.
Have you ever thought about the power of one word. Of course, it is not the word itself, but the meaning behind the word. And here is when I risk being judged, I am not referring to Christ at this moment. I recognize that in Him, all things decrease and His peace can increase. No, what I am thinking about has to do with this earthly realm. So, bear with me on this one.
The word I am thinking about is: Louella. Yep, that’s it, Louella. This past week I was feeling some what anxious and when I thought of Louella, I wasn’t so anxious. When I think about my day being in her presence, I sense peace. It is with this one word, Louella, I feel loved, accepted, peaceful, and am challenged to be a better person. To think about Louella, is to gleefully think that at the end of the day, I will be next to her when I lie my head down to sleep and when I raise it the next day. Louella. I love that word because of not just WHAT it represents, but WHO. My wife. My friend. My lover. My confidant. My life partner. Louella.
I wonder, do you have such a word? It doesn’t have to be “Louella”: after all, that’s mine. What is yours? Maybe it’s Rudy, or Tom, or Cindy, or Sheniah, or Ahmed, or maybe simply, Mom or Dad. May we all have that one word. And May we all have THE Word: Jesus!
Categories: Marriage | Tags: comfort, Jesus, Louella, love, Marriage, peace, word | No Comments »
December 16, 2009 | Posted by drrick
The holidays are times when we focus on family, friends, and our most intimate relationships. We take extra time thinking about them, spending time with them, and showing expressions of love. This is a great time of year and one that is rooted in the theme of love: God coming to our world in the form of a man, Jesus.
However, I find it interesting that sometimes we, including myself, dont take care of our relationships like we do at this time of year. Let us take special care of our relationships like it’s Christmas each day.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: | No Comments »
November 29, 2009 | Posted by drrick
I have sat here today watching the UF/FSU football game. The Noles lost. My family are doing different things: one at work, one at friends, and my wife and youngest son here at home with me. Today has been a day where I have done little of any consequence, and it has been very nice to simply sit back, read books, watch TV and just relax. But it is also on days like today where I am afforded the opportunity to sit back, watch, think, and appreciate. The fact that this is Thanksgiving weekend makes this time even more meaningful for me.
If you lost everything you owned, all your stuff, what is left that matters to you? Hopefully you would say your family, friends and relationships. What makes life meaningful is not what we have, but rather WHO we have. Love means nothing if we have noone. For love can only be expressed in relationships. Without relationships, loving and intimate ones, we lose purpose and meaning.
While I have been typing this a documentary on my local PBS affiliate has been airing. It is about the terrorists that attacked the hotels in India and killed so many people and interviews with the survivors. Listening to the survivors was humbling. Many of the testimonies were not about the things they would lose, but rather, the people they would not be able to see again and regrets. I think a life lived well, will love well. And a life that has loved well, will die with few regrets.
Be grateful for those you love and for the fact that they are in your life today. Forgive each other, overlook differences if possible, and live fully in the present with those you love. This way, you are able to better appreciate them, and what they provide for you.
Love well.
Categories: Marriage | Tags: community, family, forgive, love | No Comments »
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