reframe marriage ministry

  "A highlight of this past couple months of the REFRAME class experience was my wife and I working together to memorize scripture verses as we took walks on the beach during our recent vacation."

"My attachment style is secure/anxious. The REFRAME class has helped my wife and me better understand childhood experiences that have impacted how we react to each other." 

"Changing my old script of avoidance and being kind and compassionate instead. Loving her like Jesus has loved me and continues to do so. Being reliable to my wife and not failing her." 

"To my husband, I want you to know that my heart has been changed forever as a result of God’s work in me via REFRAME. As a result of this journey, I provide this summary of how I will REFRAME the way I love you going forward:..."

Why did we write the Love, Guaranteed book and create the REFRAME program? First, we wrote Love, Guaranteed primarily to testify of God’s grace and mercy toward us. Secondly, as we do throughout this document, we share our story to memorialize how our Great God brings beauty out of ashes. Thirdly, we wrote this book to declare and remind readers that God is in our everywhere, inviting us to make Him our everything. 

Finally, we wrote this workbook and designed the REFRAME program to pass on to you the lessons we gleaned along the way as God repaired and renewed our marriage. Over the past ten years, as God was teaching us obedience, and we began sharing His story in our lives, others started asking us for strategies and solutions for fixing their marriage. 

Early in our journey, we responded that we had no special strategy to share. However, as we grew in understanding what God had done and is doing in us, we came to recognize a significant change. God had changed our thinking. He brought about a REFRAME in our thinking about our relationship with Him, his purpose for our spouse, and the meaning of marriage. 

That’s it—that’s the miracle God wants to do if we let Him. He wants to reframe how we think about ourselves, our relationship with Him, and His design for marriage. The word REFRAME is defined as “to present or think of something in a new and different way.” Along these lines, we designed the REFRAME program to encourage couples to reimagine marriage, not merely as a source of situational or temporal happiness, but as a transformational relationship put together by God for our holiness and His glory.

Thus, REFRAME is a spiritual formation program for couples. Through 8 bi-weekly sessions, small group teaching, Scripture memorization, and meditation, and sharing personal growth stories, with transparency and accountability, spouses grow in their attachment to God and each other. 

REFRAME is what Jesus did and does. His entire ministry and mission was to reframe our thinking in order to transform our lives. He countered old thinking, with such ideas as “He who would be great among you must be the servant of all.” “If someone slaps you on one cheek, give them the other.” In contrast to self-promotion and self-preservation, he taught His disciples then and now to “deny ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow him.” REFRAME is counterintuitive. It confronts and contradicts the human-focused way couples learn how to act and think in relationships. Instead, REFRAME teaches us to stop and consider what God has to say, to believe and obey the Bible, in order to respond to our spouses in a way that reflects our love for Him and for them.