Physical touch is such a powerful and amazing gift from God. He designed us for it. We need it. And it is physically, spiritual and emotionally damaging when we avoid it or do not get enough of it. In this episode, we discuss why Physical touch is so important and we give some practical tips on how to touch and be touched more.

Embracing each other says “I trust you and need you in my life.”
A comforting hug says, “I’m here for you.”
A kiss says, “You are mine! And I love you!”
Holding hands lets your spouse know you like them and like spending time with them.
Tickle rubs, massages, running your fingers through their hair says, “I want to make you feel good.” ...And most times lets them know you desire more physical touch.

Being married and living in that sacred space of physical closeness, embrace, touch...there is no other relationship like it on Earth. Make the time to send those messages of love to your spouse through touch.

READ TRASCRIPT

[Aaron] Hey, we're Aaron and Jennifer Smith, with "Marriage After God."

[Jennifer] Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

[Aaron] And today we're gonna talk about "The Power Of Touch In Marriage." Welcome to the "Marriage After God" podcast where we believe that marriage was meant for more than just happily ever after.

[Jennifer] I'm Jennifer also known as unveiled wife.

[Aaron] And I'm Aaron also known as husband revolution.

[Jennifer] We have been married for over a decade.

[Aaron] And so far we have four young children.

[Jennifer] We have been doing marriage ministry online for over seven years through blogging and social media.

[Aaron] With the desire to inspire couples to keep God at the center of their marriage, encouraging them to walk in faith every day.

[Jennifer] We believe the Christian marriage should be an extraordinary one full of life.

Love.

And power.

[Aaron] That can only be found by chasing after God.

[Jennifer] Together.

[Aaron] Thank you for joining us on this journey as we chase boldly after God's will for our life together.

[Jennifer] This is "Marriage after God." Well, welcome back, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Marriage after God, we're super excited to have you. You're looking at me funny Aaron, why are you looking at me funny?

[Aaron] I was wondering if everyone knows that you're still pregnant. Or if they're waiting to hear about the baby 'cause I don' know if everyone knows the exact

I'm still pregnant?

[Aaron] March 20th is the due date?

[Jennifer] Creeping up on us.

[Aaron] More like, almost there. Also soon along with the baby coming, we have the end of our season coming. Season three of the "Marriage After God" podcast.

[Jennifer] You're just prepping their hearts.

[Aaron] I'm prepping their little hearts.

[Jennifer] Will come back don't worry.

[Aaron] Yeah, we have this episode and I think three more episodes. To finish up this season.

[Jennifer] It's actually really great timing you guys. And it was intentional, because postpartum is the real deal. And so I need time.

[Aaron] We're gonna take a break during the postpartum season and then will come back.

Right before summer starts. We're super excited about that.

[Aaron] Which always want to take these breaks gives you enough time to go back to all the episodes you haven't listened to yet, or haven't fully listen to.

[Jennifer] Or relisten listened to your favorite one.

[Aaron] Or relisten to your favorite ones.

[Jennifer] I wanted to before we get into today's topic, I wanted to start off this episode with an encouragement of something that happened. But Aaron, when I mentioned that's what I wanted to share about, you're like, "No, let's just do the whole episode on that." I'm not gonna share it right now. That's what the whole episodes gonna be about. Enjoy it later.

[Aaron] Right, but what we can talk about is so everyone, we've talked about how we're going through what's it called? "My Family 24 Ways".

[Jennifer] "Our Family 24 Ways".

That's what's it is.

By Sally and Clay Clarkson.

[Aaron] It's a family devotional and it's 24 weeks long. We did it twice. The first time we did it. We did it in a quarter of the time because we just kind of took each day was a--

[Jennifer] Each day was a new way. And they come with these coloring pages. Those are really great kind of quick overview of what it was about and gave us time to wrap our heads around it and get familiar with the content. And that was super fun for the kids. We did that last summer and then kicking off the new kind of school year in September. We're like let's do the whole week. And we'll use the was it a devotional or resource? We'll use it the way that they wrote it--

[Aron] Which is every way is a five day--

Process.

Process, yes. Every day, there's another verse you're reading, another idea, there's another question, but it's all in the same family way. And we just finished that a couple of weeks ago.

There's a couple of weeks we didn't do because of travel or different things. But we just finished it and it was great. The kids loved it, we loved it.

[Aaron] Yeah, and we're bringing this up to just to kinda recap that we told you we were going through we gave it as an example to you all, on a great way to start doing a family bible time. It was a lot of fun was really easy. I had a lot of prompts for the parents to walk through it gives you the questions to ask. But Jennifer, what are we doing now? We finished our family 20 or 23rd, "Our 24 Family Ways".

[Jennifer] "Our 24 Family Ways".

[Aron] By Sally and Clay Clarkson. You should go pick that on Amazon. But when we're done with that and we love that. But what are we doing now?

[Jennifer] There was that question creeping up to the end of that resource that were like, Hey, keep in mind, what are what are we going to do next? And there's lots of different things that we could have chosen.

[Aaron] Now we've done before, where we just like read through some of the Bible, read just whole chapters.

[Jennifer] I proposed to Aaron, I said, "Why don't we focus "on some of the kind of major Bible stories?" Our kids are still pretty young, and they know a lot of the stories but just clarifying for them, what actually was taking place during those stories, and what are the details and so we'll take a whole week on one story. And what I didn't share with Aaron was, my heart behind it was and let's focus on how Christ is pictured in these stories, which I just thought would be a really cool perspective, but I didn't share that part with you for some reason. I just said the Bible story thing really short and brief. And so I started making a list of the different Bible stories and I put them up on our chalkboard and you love the idea, and that first day that we started out with creation and Adam and Eve. You're like, and guys, because you're like, basically laying out what they can expect from how Bible time is gonna change for us. And you told the kids, "so we're gonna dive into these Bible stories, "one story a week, but we're gonna see how Christ "is at the center of each one." And I love that you did that we are totally like on the same page without even having talked about it.

[Aaron] And it's been really good. Elliot's been loving them, because He loves learning about these stories. And also the questions and the digging in and how those correlations to Christ and Adam, or these stories that we all know of.

[Jennifer] Just in simple things like in Genesis when it says, "we're gonna make them in our image" and get the kids to really like, focusing on what that one is.

Like who is the hour. Who is us, who's talking here about Adam and Ellie is like, "Oh, it's God and Jesus in the spirit."

[Jennifer] Yeah.

[Aaron] He got the idea in the beginning. And just an encouragement for those that are listening. You're probably thinking like, okay, like all of our kids know these stories, but you're actually surprised at the stories that you kind of know because you grew up in Sunday school, or how if they don't ever get brought up, your kids aren't gonna know them. They're not gonna know the story of Noah's Ark. They're not gonna know the story of Jonah and the whale. They're not gonna know the story of Joseph and Abraham and Isaac and Adam and Eve and creation. We have to do that. We have to teach our children these stories, and not just stories, their history.

[Jennifer] Yeah, and my encouragement would be for our sake, as adults, going back to some of these stories have been encouraging because then we either see things we never saw before, or somehow it's relevant to something that we're going through that we can apply. That's just an encouragement.

[Aaron] It's just getting back into the Word of God always and remembering these ...