I am back from vacation now, having enjoyed an incredible week of friendship and fellowship with several dear friends in the mountains of Colorado. One of these wonderful women recently had been featured on the Revive Our Hearts national radio show, which I had missed due to my work deadlines. Fortunately, Revive Our Hearts has everything catalogued online, so I was able to go back to the week of July 12th to listen to four days of marital wisdom from LeRoy & Kimberly Wagner. I've heard Kim's testimony about her marriage before, but never with LeRoy's perspective. As I listened in, I kept thinking of how much wisdom is packed into their words. So whether you are married or not, I highly recommend you listen to (or read the transcript of) these programs.
I'm going to jump in here with the counsel from the third program, which was titled, "Do You Intimidate Your Husband?" That word -- "intimidate" -- comes up a lot in my discussions with women. You don't have to be married to be intimidating. Men can find women intimidating in a lot of relationships, from the workplace to the social setting. What we women often don't understand is that being intimidating really is not connected to accomplishment, but rather it is connected to attitude. Why am I so confident of this assessment? Unfortunately, it is because I have had to learn about and repent from my own arrogance in this area. Many dear brothers in the Lord -- men I know in a variety of settings -- have helped me to understand this. So here are LeRoy & Kimberly Wagner's words to flesh out this concept, taken from the radio show transcript:
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Announcer: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Wednesday, July 14. When you go to church and everyone looks perfect on the outside, you don’t know how many painful stories hide behind the church smiles. LeRoy and Kim Wagner were working hard serving in the church where LeRoy was pastor, yet their marriage was barely surviving. Yesterday Kim told us about the conviction God brought for the way she criticized her husband. We’ll pick up the story as Kim describes meeting Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Kim: So within that year with my heart changing and attempting to change my treatment of him. I became very frustrated though because it seemed like he was going even further into his cave. I thought, "Nothing’s changing. Nothing’s improving." You and I had a conversation, and I’m thankful that we had time that we spent together. You asked me some very tough questions. Our conversation, Nancy, to me it so validates the truth of Titus 2. Although you’re not that much older than me, although you’ve never been married, the role of women that are further along spiritually, in the spiritual growth process, in sanctification is to come alongside younger women, young women that need to have truth poured into their lives. We had a conversation one day where you asked me some very difficult questions and gave me truth. I remember the first question you asked me. LeRoy Wagner: When I heard, excuse me, when I heard this question that you asked her, the first question, I thought, "Wow! God is on His throne. He really knows what’s going on in our lives. I don’t know this woman, but she is in tune with the Spirit." Nancy: And the question was . . . Kim: You looked at me, and not in a condemning way but in a gracious way, you said, “I think you may intimidate your husband.” That was the statement. And then you said, “Do you think you might intimidate your husband?” I said, “How can I intimidate my husband? I can’t imagine that. Well, no, he wouldn’t be intimidated by me.” The more I thought about that, the Holy Spirit began to confirm that. I didn’t realize that with my vocal, opinionated statements, it was intimidating to him. LeRoy: Emotional outbursts that I had no answer for and could not deal with in any way. Kim: For him, he saw it as standing in opposition to him. He had such respect for me that at times he even thought, "Well, maybe she does know better than I do." He would many times say to me, “You’d do a better job at being the pastor of this church than I do.” LeRoy: And not that those that know me would have seen me as a weakling because I dealt with very, very difficult challenges. I could endure, outside of the home, confrontations, conflict. Even though I did not like to deal with that, I could. As a pastor you have to deal with all kinds of things in people’s lives that are just in chaos. You have to stand on truth that sometimes is very difficult. You have to take stands. You have to go to meetings where people are going to disagree with you. You have to lead in a way that you know there’s going to be opposition. There’s going to be criticism. So I’ve always been able to do that, but it’s quite different when the one you love, when the one you’re joined as one with, when she has expressed that she has no confidence in you; that she would do it another way; that that was not the way it should have been done. So then it became, although I was a person that could do that and had done that,it became more and more paralyzing for me to do what I needed to do in this public part of my life when the private part of my life with the marriage was not as God intended for it to be. Nancy: I think that’s such an important point you just made, LeRoy, because we look at the culture and see men so struggling. Not all men, of course, but a lot of men really struggling with confidence issues, with stepping up to the plate, with taking leadership, with making good and wise decisions. You wonder how many of them really could have or would have but because of what’s going on in the home, in the marriage, have felt beat down, brow beaten, intimidated, incapacitated, emasculated, whatever all the words are. And then tey go outside the home with their tail between their legs. LeRoy: I think there are two reactions to that, which is so affecting our Christian homes. We’re talking about Christian homes and how the feminist influence that started in the culture has crept into our homes and even Bible-believing homes. I think men react in one of two ways, both of them equally destructive. That is either to recede, like I did, into a shell. I think depending probably on their personality. Or then to lord and dominate and say, “I will not take this,” and for the home to become just a battle ground of anger and resentment. It’s just destructive because if the woman is strong, she’s going to rise up even stronger and then the man is going to . . . Nancy: . . . or the woman’s going to cower. LeRoy: Or she’s going to cower and then you have just equally a devastating situation where there’s not the union, the harmony, the fellowship that the Lord intends for us to have. Without God’s grace and without standing with tenacity, with unwavering commitment on the Word of God, there is no hope for a godly home. We cannot do it in our own strength. We cannot do it in our flesh. Even though we’re in church, some of us three, four, five times a week, even though we’re in ministry, even though we believe the Word, even though we believe the right things, we want to do the right things, we still must have the work of the Holy Spirit and the truth of God continually cleansing us, continually directing us, encouraging us, comforting us. We must have that. Nancy: Kim, once you started realizing the intimidation factor here, did you talk about that with LeRoy pretty quickly? Kim: I did. He wasn’t real open about it. LeRoy: I wasn’t communicative because I was so careful to say anything because if it caused any reaction on her part, then I didn’t feel like I could counter it, match it, converse with her, match her emotion, match her intensity. So I tried to be so careful and measured in anything that I would say, to anything I would respond to. Nancy: So at that point you really weren’t able to express your heart. LeRoy: I did not feel the freedom to express my heart. Kim: He didn’t feel safe yet with me. He was not safe. I was asking questions that were too painful for him. He could not go there yet. LeRoy: God had to, in His timing, bring me to a place that then I could begin to be a part of this healing, redemptive work that began with your booklet and your conversation with her. So we were both on the journey, but it was at different paces and the Lord was using different means to bring us to where He wanted us to be. Kim: He came back from being away for a week alone where God dealt with his heart and revealed to him this stronghold of fear toward me and that he needed to be open and honest with me about it. He just humbly and openly communicated that to me. But, Nancy, I don’t think he ever would have if he didn’t feel like he had a safe place. It took time of me preparing that safe place of doing the hard things, of beginning to flesh out the truths of Scriptures that we had taught on, like Philippians 2, walking in the humility of Christ. Colossians 3, demonstrating true love, grace, humility. Those type of things that we should treat just fellow believers with, but I hadn’t treated my husband with, but to prepare a safe place for him to be able to come and be honest with me. Nancy: So you said . . . LeRoy: Well, I just poured out my heart and expressed to her what God dealt with me about. In each of us God alone knows how we’re made, what our experiences are, what are our thoughts, what are our inner most emotions and feelings and our experiences. So He knows exactly where He needs to deal with us, pinpoint grace. I came to realize, and I was afraid to admit it as a man, that fear had gripped my soul. Fear had paralyzed me. I was afraid of my wife. I was afraid of making decisions. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of every meeting of every opportunity to interact with anyone. I had literally become a very fearful person, and I’m not weak. I’m quiet by nature, and I am introverted by nature, but I’m not a, by nature, fearful person. The Lord took me back to where all through my life that had really been an issue with me. Our marriage, by the grace of God, He didn’t want it to destroy Kim. He didn’t want it to destroy me. He wanted to bring out the things that had always been a part of our life that He knew, in His goodness and in His omniscience and knowing all about us, that it would have to take to be a godly marriage, committed to sticking together. He knew what we were going to do, but He put us in that so He could work on the very issues that would keep us from growing to the degree that He wanted us to grow, to serve in the way, to be the people that God desired for us to be. He used the crucible of marriage and the fires of difficulty and of heartache and of pain to go to the very heart of the issues in our lives that we had long before we knew one another, that maybe we were not conscious that we had. But really He took us to those very dark and painful places in order to redeem us, in order to rescue us, in order to free us . . . Kim: . . . to conform us to the image of Christ. LeRoy: To conform us to the image of Christ. I’m so grateful that He did it. I’m so grateful for the truth of God, for God using you, for the Holy Spirit never letting go of us, never releasing us to ourselves and to our own destructive attitudes and actions but continuing to work in our lives.
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There's so much more to this four-part series! Please check out the other interview segments, too, and then leave your feedback. It's my great pleasure to feature this interview because I really admire the relationship that the Wagners have now built. Their journey of repentance is quite hope-filled!
This is a very interesting interview! It makes me wonder if there should be a distinction made between intimidating another person (as an aggressive action) versus being perceived as intimidating (as a projection of another person's insecurities). The reason I wonder about this distinction is that I can see a very real difference between the two in my own marriage--There are times when I push my husband and intimidate him to get my way (clear sin on my part), but he is not at all intimidated by my education or achievements, an aspect of myself that can be/has been intimidating to others.
I think this distinction is an important one--While it is certainly important for women to have quiet and gentle spirits, it's also important that a lack of security in God is not ignored by projecting blame onto another person. Whenever we feel intimidated by someone, we must ask ourselves where that fear is coming from, and whether it is from the person's aggressiveness, or from an area of our own lives that is not standing confidently on Christ.
Carolyn, any thoughts on that?
Posted by: Sharon Hodde Miller | August 13, 2010 at 01:28 PM