No Lipstick Required: Facing and Transforming the Wife in the Mirror Through Ordinary Life Lessons

By Renee Reed

Great career? Check. Upgraded wardrobe? Check. New home and car? Check. God finally sending your Boaz? Check, check, and check! The days you have dreamed of since you were a little girl are here. Status update: "Living my best life!" 

You marry your Boaz and enter the marital bliss you have always envisioned-sharing mornin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Opportune Independent Publishing Co.
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781970079951

Renee Reed

Renee Reed is a woman who wants to transform ordinary marriages into extraordinary generational legacies. She is passionate about living God's Word and encouraging wives to walk in their divine purpose. Her debut book, No Lipstick Required: Facing and Transforming the Wife in the Mirror Through Ordinary Life Lessons, encourages wives to pursue God, not perfection.Born in Greenville, Mississippi, Renee credits her determined approach to life to her humble roots. A proud country girl, she is characterized by her authenticity, compassionate heart and relatability. Renee can usually be found enjoying life's journey through family bike rides, late night UNO games, watching movies and cultivating her love for gameshows. Renee lives in Houston, TX with her husband and best friend, Mac and their two awesome kids.

Book preview

Introduction

Pass Me a Wipe

When God told me in 2007 that I would write this book, I felt unsure, inadequate and simply not ready. Initially, I refused to get started. As an educator, my passion was children. I loved molding the minds of my children and challenging them to believe that the world was their pearl for the taking. I felt more confident in my ability to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (which I do not know) to a classroom of wired middle schoolers than to write this book.

Certainly, I have always dreamed of being an author. Dozens of ideas for children’s books constantly ran through my mind. Writing was not the issue. The God-given topic was what I actually dreaded most. God wanted me to write about marriage, but marriage was beyond my usual scope of lesson plans and field trips. It was a feat I considered to be extremely different from teaching, and it required more than I was able to offer. In my mind, writing a book about marriage required a wealth of wisdom and extensive experience that I could not research on the internet. Even though I was married, writing a book about marriage required more lessons than I had experienced at the time. Furthermore, it required a level of exposure that I was neither ready nor willing to give.

Since my marital journey had just begun, I imposed my own timeline for God’s endeavor for me. Maybe this was an idea for later. Maybe God wanted me to write this book after I had 25 or 30 years of marriage to stand on.

When God first gave me this revelation, I laughed.

Who is going to want to read a book about marriage from someone who has only been married for two years, Lord? I retorted.

Honestly, I wouldn’t. I liked my marital couples how I liked my fruit—matured, in season and tested before consumption. With only two years under my marital belt, the mere idea was preposterous. I reasoned that what I had to say had already been said in plenty of other books about marriage, and there was no need for it to be said again.

Encouragement came from my husband, who wanted me to get started and ask questions later.

Just start a blog about our marriage right now, he enthusiastically suggested.

For me, it was not entirely that easy. Both a book and a blog meant giving pieces of my marriage to the reader. No matter the size of the piece, big or small, I was not willing to part with it.

The ultimate reason I did not want to write this book was because I thought my marriage was ordinary. Whenever the thought surfaced in my head, I would tell God, I just do not see it, Lord. I doubted that my story was enough. I doubted that anyone would want to read about my non-action-packed marriage. I had heard and read many amazing testimonies about how marriages survived struggles with infidelity, domestic abuse, addiction, sudden illness or family drama. These remarkable testimonies of survival served as encouragement about the faithfulness of God during tough times.

There exists a sacredness in the covenant of marriage. There are many people who have genuine problems and need real solutions. What would I say to assist them through hard times? How could I encourage someone to hold on if I could not relate to their intense challenges? The Lord revealed an incredibly significant point: There was no direct link between the amount of encouragement I was able to offer someone and the amount of struggle I had faced. It was not me who they needed to hear from, anyway, but it was me who needed to be used.

God chose me because I thought my marriage was ordinary. I thought nothing needed to change. Although I faced challenges in my marriage, they were no different from what I deemed as regular marital stuff. There was nothing rocky or Earth-shaking about my marriage. I was good. My husband was good. It was just us and our very ordinary marital journey. God helped me see that in my ordinary marriage, there were major areas where I was falling short. In my ordinary marriage, there were areas where God did not have all of me. In my ordinary marriage, there were areas that I completely shut to my husband. There were many things I needed to fix in my ordinary marriage so they would not lead to extraordinary problems.

Around my fifth year of marriage, I began writing even though I still had doubts and insecurities. When putting pen to pad, I had to tackle and overcome my fear of exposure. God wanted me to talk about me, not my husband. He wanted me to air my dirty laundry of mistakes, bad decisions and prideful thinking. Many times, if I tried to erase something I really did not want to share, the Holy Spirit prompted me to put it back exactly how He had given it to me, raw and exposed.

Just tell the truth, one of my married girlfriends encouraged me one day when I was speaking about my hesitation.

It was through her encouragement I realized that many newly married people were failing at marriage because of a lack of transparency from seasoned married people. We do not readily remove our lipstick, nor do we share what we discover when we face the mirror! Do not get me wrong; I adore a vampy liner with a matte lipstick, but this is not about makeup. Removing the lipstick means removing the pretense, and facing the mirror means admitting, It’s me, Lord. I’m the mess. Sometimes, we dress up and put on lipstick to hide our marital imperfections. There is an image we try to present to others that says, There’s nothing to see here. We are all good. We do not share the dirt. We do not share the foolish decisions we have made or the unauthorized actions we took. We do not share those hurtful words we released in the heat of the moment and how they affected our relationship. However, we are quick to share how we were wronged or what our spouses did to us.

But, if we really removed our lipstick and closely examined ourselves in the mirror, we would see the blessing in the nakedness. There is a special blessing in sharing your wrong thinking or the wrong actions you took to resolve a problem. There is a special blessing in sharing how God revealed to you that you and your mouth caused the problems in your marriage. There is a special blessing in sharing the humility it took to forgive your husband after he made you question your self-esteem. There is a special blessing in sharing the freedom that comes from accepting correction from God. There is a special blessing in sharing what it took to reconcile after hurt. There is a special blessing in sharing the story of the tears you sowed in the broken seasons of your marriage.

So, let’s do it! Let’s face the mirror and confront what we try so hard to conceal. I will take off the lipstick and talk about my ordinary marriage, discussing my journey as a wife and using my revealed faux pas as examples. Let’s examine my shortcomings, but also see the beauty that bloomed from the lessons God taught me. I will let you inside my mind through my No Lipstick Moment and ask you to look in the mirror as well as allow the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth through your No Lipstick Moment. Let it all hang out—the good, the bad and the indifferent.

My prayer is that many of the things you read in this book will activate your faith and reaffirm or confirm what God has already told you. Hopefully, you will read this book, see yourself and draw closer to God and your husband. You will stand in God’s revealed truth about you and walk in the beauty of His love and forgiveness, allowing you to mature in your relationship. Do not feel judged about your mess-ups because we all mess up. You will be transparent and deepen your relationship with God because you will honestly tell Him what He already knows about you. You will be freed from the pressure to be perfect because perfection is overrated! In marriage, no spouse is perfect! There is a perfect God who wants to perfect you through the honesty, transparency and humility you present to Him in your ordinary marriage, unfiltered and uncut. God wanted me to tell my ordinary story because the ordinary needs to be written about too.

Chapter 1

Removing My Lipstick

I will probably never get married.

These were my words as a young child that were birthed from the reality I lived at home. My paternal grandmother was married for 22 years until it ended in divorce. My mother was married for seven years (not to my father), then separated and headed for divorce when her husband was killed in a car accident. My father was married multiple times, and the result of each marriage was the same—divorce. Therefore, my perception of marriage was far removed from the 30-minute television sitcoms I loved watching every Friday night.

My childhood reality consisted of watching countless hours of parental relationship drama, silently hoping for my parents to reach an amicable solution so we, too, could become a family sitcom of our own, resolving our Family Matters Step by Step in the same 30-minute scripted television show-like manner I admired. While I hoped and waited, internally I lived every relationship in which my parents were involved. I lived my parents’ relationships no matter how many times they told themselves, and me, that I was just a kid who did not understand what was happening.

I, too, invested time getting to know each potential stepmother or stepfather. Occasionally, I felt hurt after a breakup, too. Sometimes, I even shouldered the blame for the breakup. Renee, Myron doesn’t think you like him. Renee, Katie doesn’t feel comfortable around you. With each of my parents’ failed relationships, the adult chatter behind the breakup led me to adopt many of the adages I heard. Sometimes, love hurts. You know a man will be a man. You cannot trust a man. But these sayings were not rooted in God’s truth.

After years of watching the yo-yo relationships of my parents, coupled with the frequent bickering and inward fighting with their own spouses and then between them two, I built an emotional wall and told myself, I will probably never get married.

If by chance I would ever change my mind, it would be solely because God Himself would appear to me in a modern-day burning bush, telling me clearly, Renee, this is the one whom I have sent.

Even then, I would ask God to please provide a full description: distinct facial features, significant birthmarks, color of hair and eyes, style of clothes, shoe size, blood type, etc., just to be sure I would not see the wrong person.

While all of these failed relationships were happening, I was not dismissive of the idea of love. I would watch many of the popular ‘80s teen movies and gush over the romantic endings. Afterwards, still romanticizing, I would leave my feelings on the inside pages of my school notebook in the form of the paper game Mansion, Apartment, Shack, or House, appropriately abbreviated MASH. This was a juvenile paper game in which one allowed counting numbers and scratching out carefully placed choices to decide who their future spouse would be, where they would live and many other pivotal life decisions. Many times, this game would have unfavorable results for me, leaving me confined to a shack with six kids, a job I did not really want and in a relationship with the absolute last, space-taking choice on my list. Deep within, I still hoped it was possible to have the happily-ever-after movie ending. It did not have to include a wedding ring and chiming bells. After all, there were many happy, lifelong couples who were not married. If being married meant being anything like the real-life marriages I had seen growing up, then marriage was not a viable option.

I did not imagine I would lead a life of isolation; however, based upon my short-lived experiences relating to marriage, I did not think I would live in marital bliss—and, apparently, neither did MASH.

As a teen, I prayed and had faith in God. But when your experiences do not cultivate your faith, the monster of doubt can constantly gnaw at you. Here is where you ask, Did you have other examples of good marriages and relationships outside of your home? What about at church?

Because there were no examples in my immediate family, I decided to look for my ideal example of marriage in couples I had seen at church. Sure, my pastor and his wife had a wonderful relationship. But in my mind, I always separated them because I assumed their obligation was different from the regular parishioners. As a kid, I secretly thought they had some sort of super spiritual connection because of their spiritual position as God’s chosen leaders of our congregation. I thought their connection shielded them from the same bickering and fighting many other couples faced.

After closely observing other couples at the church (along with being privy to inside information I probably should not have heard as a child), I sadly learned that many of the marriages at church were riddled with infidelity, domestic violence and substance abuse. I can recall several instances when deacons of the church came before the congregation and openly confessed to cheating on their wives. I witnessed many couples get married one year only to get divorced the very next year. I even witnessed a wife slap her husband across the face right in the middle of church service! When combining those situations with my parents’ ineffective attempts at marriage, discouragement loomed. Many of these occurrences had a tremendous impact on my thoughts about monogamy and marriage early in life. At a young age, I thought I had seen the pinnacle in the category of adult relationship dysfunction, but people can and will always surprise you.

When I was about 15 years old, a couple at my church was rumored to be working through a separation. (I will call them Jack and Jill for the sake of anonymity.) Every Sunday, we had service during the day and evening service started at 6 p.m. Membership at my church was about 150 people strong, which made for an extremely large congregation in my small hometown. Moreover, the evening service attendance was comparable to the day service attendance. As the church’s pianist, I had to attend both services. One particular Sunday evening our choir sang a hymnal that Jack led, called Only What You Do for Christ Will Last.

Jack led the song with such fervor and conviction. Everyone was extremely moved as he sang, knowing that his wife, Jill, had not been coming to church regularly. Eavesdropped conversations were always commendable towards Jack for being such a good man who was still coming to church in spite of his marital situation. On the other hand, those same conversations were less favorable towards Jill because she was rarely seen for weeks at a time. So, Jill was perceived to be the issue in their marriage since Jack often attended church consistently. When Jack finished singing, tears flowed from many eyes, and the presence of God was truly apparent. Everyone was moved by the passion with which he belted out the song. Hands were waving and people were shouting voluminous hallelujahs and amens. Then, it happened!

Even though there was no testimony period, Jill walked slowly up the aisle with tears in her eyes and made her way to the podium. Many in the congregation looked surprised to see her. Resting in my naiveté, I reasoned how coincidental it had been that she decided to testify right after Jack finished singing. Many different thoughts flowed through my head as I continued playing the hymn softly. Being impacted by the side conversations about the couple, I had multiple thoughts. I thought, Maybe she is coming to rededicate her life to Christ. Maybe they are reconciling, and she is coming to tell the church. Maybe she feels just as moved by the song as the rest of the congregation and wants to share. On the contrary, all my assumptions were wrong. After all these years, I have never forgotten her opening words.

Tearfully and slowly she screamed, For five long months… for five long months I’ve taken it, but I can’t take it no more! And you stand there singing ‘Only What You Do for Christ Will Last,’ but you don’t mean it.

In sheer disbelief, I abruptly stopped playing the piano and stared directly at her. As she continued, she described before the pastor and the entire evening congregation her account of the things Jack had been doing to her since their separation: name-calling, harassing her at home and at work, vandalizing her property, telling their children horrible things about her and encouraging them to disrespect her. When the pastor asked him if Jill was