A New Song: A Christian Perspective to Bring Love and Life Back into Your Marriage

By Miriam Hampton

Rekindle Your Marriage  

and  

Sing to the Lord a New Song! 

 

Do you love the Lord and seek to follow Him in all areas of your life, including your marriage? In A New Song, Miriam Hampton

• Language: English
• Publisher: Capucia Publishing
• Release date: Dec 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954920514

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Copyright © 2022 Miriam Hampton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher, except by reviewers, bloggers or other individuals who may quote brief passages, as long as they are clearly credited to the author.

Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for professional help. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

Capucia LLC

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www.capuciapublishing.com

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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-954920-50-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-954920-51-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022922271

Cover Design: Ranilo Cabo

Layout: Mary Alethma Asagra

Editor and Proofreader: Karen Burton

Book Midwife: Karen Everitt

Printed in the United States of America

To my husband, Andy,

the love of my life

I waited patiently for the Lord;

And He inclined to me, and heard my cry.

He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay;

And He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm.

And He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Psalm 40:1–3

To help you digest and apply the information in this book to your life and marriage,

I have put together a FREE Journaling Guide to take with you on your reading journey.

You can download and print your Journaling Guide now at: www.morningsongcoaching.com/bookguide

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part One: Refocus

Our Past in Our Present

Chapter 1 Think on These Things

Chapter 2 Your Brain and You

Chapter 3 Living on Purpose

Chapter 4 The Return to Love

Part Two: Release

Let Go and Let God

Chapter 5 The Trust Portal—Step into a New Dimension

Chapter 6 Practicing His Presence

Chapter 7 Acceptance

Chapter 8 Releasing Resistance

Part Three: Renew

Grow Where You are Planted

Chapter 9 When You Grow Your Marriage Grows

Chapter 10 Being Your True Self

Chapter 11 You Are a Unique Expression of God in the World

Chapter 12 The Care and Feeding of a Lasting Marriage

Acknowledgments

References

Additional Resources

About the Author

Contact the Author

Preface

Presumably you have picked up this book because the title attracted you and struck a chord in your heart, a yearning to bring love and life back into your marriage—a yearning to reclaim the promise of continual love that you held in your heart at the beginning.

I could share with you many of the things in this book from a general perspective, but the heart of my message comes from the love God has for each of us and the love He calls us to have for Him, for ourselves, and for one another.

So, what is a Christian perspective on bringing love and life back into your marriage? It is the perspective of God, our Creator, as He has revealed Himself to us through His living and written Word. God is Love (1 John 4:8). If we are to know Him and walk with Him, we must walk in love, even as Christ, the expression of His love, did. We must walk in love until, out of an intimate relationship with Him, He is fully expressed in who we are being and what we are doing, until we are exhibiting the fruit of His Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22) in our most intimate relationship—our marriage. It is from this perspective we will explore how to bring love and life back into our marriage.

To bring love and life back into our marriage and to maintain a vibrant relationship, we must be intentional. It doesn’t just happen. Our relationship with our spouse is a reflection of our relationship with God and with ourselves. We must find wholeness in Him and give from that place of wholeness. This takes the continual growth and reflection God calls us to. If we are not going forward, we will start sliding backwards. This often happens in our marriages. God is always calling us, as Aslan, the lion, said in The Last Battle, book 7 of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Further up and further in! (Lewis, 1956) Life is a continual process of growth, a growth of love, perfecting us until we go home to be with Him, Who is Love. The soil of marriage is the perfect medium for that growth to take place.

To renewed love and life in your marriage—

Blessings,

Miriam

Introduction

It was the summer of 1971. My husband Andy and I were two young hippies joining together in marriage. We stood on the lawn of my parents’ home in the Vermont countryside, surrounded by family and friends. I wore a fine white cotton, hand-embroidered party dress made for my grandmother in the 1920s. A garland of wildflowers, gathered that morning from the surrounding fields, circled my head. Andy wore a white tunic and gold baggy corduroy pants (in July) and had a scruffy beard and wavy hair down to his shoulders. We stood there in front of the justice of the peace, full of love and idealistic dreams of happiness.

Looking back, never could we have imagined what it would take to fulfill those dreams. I thought we were already there, and we would pretty much live happily ever after, companions on the life journey ahead of us.

I had already lived through enough to know life was not a bed of roses, but I had no idea how hard the road ahead would be. God sets us on the Earth and calls us to Him. We come into this world to grow into loving union with Him and through Him with one another. For some of us, that takes a lot of growth, but His grace is there for us on the journey.

I am a musician. I sang at my own wedding. Joined by friends, I played my guitar, Andy his wash tub bass. We sang joyous songs that day. Songs of love and hope. The songs we sang at our wedding were an outpouring of our hearts. Those songs changed over time to songs of broken-hearted discontent and unhappiness.

What songs are you singing about your marriage? Are they sweet love songs? Or are they you done me wrong songs? Are they melodious or full of dissonance?

What does it take to sing a new song? What does it take to bring love and life back into a marriage? We will explore this in this book. This is not a what to do book—a if you do this and this, the outcome will be this book. This is a how to be book.

The journey to a great marriage is first an inner journey—an inner journey that is reflected in outward results. Andy and I have learned lessons on this journey we didn’t know we needed to learn, have grown in ways we didn’t know we needed to grow, and now enjoy a relationship that we didn’t even know was possible when we first married. What we have overcome is quite significant, and the journey has been well worth the effort. Out of the dysfunction that took over our lives, we have grown together as two individuals becoming one in partnership with one another. Our song has changed from one that became a song of dissonance to one of harmony.

This inner journey is a journey out of the kingdom of self and the kingdom of the world into the kingdom of God—the rule and reign of Christ in our lives. The kingdom of God is first an inner kingdom. It must be an inner kingdom before it will ever be an outer kingdom.

The kingdom of God is a transformation from the flesh to the Spirit—a change of focus. It’s a letting go of control and an ongoing process of growth that bears fruit in all our relationships, in our marriages, and in the world. My ultimate goal for this book is actually not that it helps you have a great marriage. It is that it helps you grow in loving union with God and that transformation is then reflected in a great marriage.

To know God, that we may successfully live in loving union with Him, we must know ourselves, as Saint Augustine said. Without that knowledge, there can be no forward progress. We will be flailing in the dark. The light comes with true self-knowledge.

We are co-creators with God. By that statement I mean: although only God can bring something into existence, He chooses to work in our lives and in the world through His relationship with us—through our faith and obedience. When Jesus was in his hometown of Nazareth, He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief (Matthew 13:58).

As we walk in loving union with Him out of that self-knowledge, the life we create can be nothing less than miraculous. After fifty years of marriage, looking back at the insecure nineteen-year-old I was, who fell in love with and married the seemingly confident, gifted twenty-two-year-old that my husband, Andy, was, I am amazed at what God has done. The co-dependent, alcoholic relationship that took over our lives has been transformed. Out of the darkness of depression and addiction, it has grown into a mutually loving relationship that I didn’t even know was possible at the time. It is not perfect, nor will it ever be in this life, but it continues to grow as we continue to grow.

The transformation of a marriage starts with one person. For us, God started with me. It is so easy and natural to assume: if the other person would just change, everything would change for the better. But transformation starts with us as individuals. First, we must refocus on the good we can see—for what is good is from God. That is the beginning of stepping into the kingdom. We will explore this in Part One of this book. Then we must release everything to God, step out of the way, and let Him work. We will explore this in Part Two. Then, we will be free to grow into the fullness of who He created us to be and bear the fruit of His kingdom in our marriage and life. We will explore this in Part Three. As we grow, our marriage grows, and we sing a new song of love and life and of praise to our God. If you desire to sing a new song, this is my prayer for you, and I invite you to keep reading.

Part One

Refocus

Our Past in Our Present

Andy and I met the year I graduated from high school. I was eighteen and he was twenty-one. I had just spent the last four years at a private boarding school in southern New Hampshire and was pursuing my desire to become a studio potter. We met at The Great Barrington Pottery in western Massachusetts in the fall of 1970, where I had just started a live-in apprenticeship. Andy had come from Colorado that spring. After a stint in the army, he had traveled across the country to pursue the same desire to be a potter. He was friendly and warm, creative, and a natural leader. I was young and inexperienced in the world, an introvert coming from a sheltered environment.

We connected right away. He drank a fair amount of beer, but so had my dad, and he smoked dope, but neither seemed to affect his creativity and natural charisma. By the next summer, we were married and continuing our two-year apprenticeship as a married couple with a vision of a happy life ahead of us.

Five years later, I found myself living in the mountains of Colorado, building a pottery (a place where pottery is made) off the beaten path, with a controlling, alcoholic, dope-smoking husband and our one-year-old daughter. This was not the vision I had when Andy and I were married in the idyllic environment of our pottery apprenticeship. The real world had caught up with us. We weren’t prepared and it wasn’t pretty.

I was suffering from depression. I no longer felt loved or supported. I felt like I was the only one doing the loving and supporting, but I was clueless. Nothing I did was helping. God meets us in our pain, and I was crying out for answers—Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why and how do I get through it?—and He met us at a weekly prayer meeting at a rancher’s house in the area.

It was Christmastime, and I had tuned up my dulcimer to go sing Christmas carols. When we arrived, we were met by the light of the Lord in the eyes of the people there and were welcomed by a love we had not experienced before.

Andy had said on the way there, We can’t make a habit of this. I’m too busy! But we did, coming into a personal relationship with God through Christ and attending the little church in the area.

We were growing in the Lord, and my questions were being answered, but life was still a struggle. Andy was still quietly drinking and smoking dope—belligerent when under the influence of alcohol, sickeningly sweet when smoking pot. There were times when he was out driving somewhere, probably under the influence, that I secretly wished he wouldn’t make it home. Finally, I reached the point where I didn’t think I loved him anymore.

We take our past into our present when we get married. Looking back, I can see a similar pattern in my childhood. My father had his own business. My mother, a teacher before she married, was home full-time raising a growing family of three children, myself and my younger sister and brother. We were well cared for, but deep inside I longed for the adults around me to reach out