SWM007: Spiritual Intimacy – Praying with your spouse

This episode is about praying with your spouse, and what it does to the rest of the intimacy in a marriage. Prayer is a level of intimacy a lot of couples are frightened to step into, and getting past that first attempt tends to pull the other areas forward with it. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. A marriage has several kinds of intimacy: physical, emotional, and the one we forget, spiritual. They work like the staves of a barrel. If any one of them is short, that is the level the whole thing fills to, no matter how good the others are. Praying together works because authentic prayer requires vulnerability. It is a time to be open and honest with God, and doing it out loud beside your spouse means they see the real you. It keeps your spiritual lives aligned, keeps you current on what is actually going on with each other, and forces you to make a little uninterrupted time together. When we ran a week of prayer challenge, half the couples who committed to praying together daily reported a 35% increase in sexual frequency. Start short and simple, or follow a devotional if you are not sure what to say. You can both pray or just one of you. If your spouse will not, ask whether you can still pray with them, model it, keep it safe, leave a gap in case they want to join, and ask again occasionally rather than constantly.