How can women overcome fear and shame around their bodies and embrace the beauty of God’s design for sex?
Whether from purity culture, other messages, or poor experiences, many women don’t see their bodies and sex as good or beautiful. Francie Winslow, host of the podcast “Heaven in Your Home” went through her own struggle with this, and joined Juli to explain how she is learning to embrace the goodness of God’s design.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli (00:01.56)
Well, hey there friend, welcome to Java with Juli hosted by me, Juli Slattery. And let me remind you that this podcast is funded by you, you who give money to our ministry, Authentic Intimacy, so that we can keep helping people essentially make sense of God and their sexuality. In that vein, there can be a lot of obstacles to embracing the goodness of sex. A few weeks ago, we shared a conversation I had with Jess Seitz who talked about pain as an obstacle.
Juli (00:30.008)
And there’s another obstacle that typically is felt by a lot of Christian women, and it really comes down to having a mindset or belief that at some level sex is not good or it’s shameful. Some of this, I think, came out of the purity culture, but even beyond that, I think many women are so attuned to just needing to say ‘no’ to sex before marriage that they don’t know how to start saying ‘yes’.
Well, we’re here to talk about this today with my friend, Francie Winslow, who has been on her own journey of learning to say ‘yes’ and bless what God blesses. Francie has a podcast called “Heaven in Your Home”. And as you’re going to be able to pick up, she is really passionate about helping couples, especially women, allowing this to be their reality. This is a conversation that addresses setting boundaries, exercising discernment, and also not letting fear keep us from good things.
Let’s dive into my conversation with Francie Winslow.
Juli
Francie, we go back a few years and have connected as friends in this ministry space. And I have to tell you, I was just talking about you to a group, I think just a few days ago. So like one of the questions that I was being asked was, ‘How do you make time for intimacy and pleasure and all the good stuff and sex when you have kids?’ And so I’m like, ‘Well, let me tell you about this friend of mine’.
And I talked about how you and your husband have these hotel dates, which I think is just… People are taking notes, they’re like, ‘That’s a great idea’. So you’re known for that now, for many other things, but you’re my ‘hotel date friend’.
Francie (02:18.006)
You know, I highly recommend it. It is a very fun gift when it’s able to be achieved and enjoyed. It’s really fun. So I’m glad that other people found that way too.
Juli
Yeah, I’m like, ‘She has six kids. If she can do it, you can do it’. So you’re a hero, a heroine. That’s right. Well, you’re in the thick of it and you really do have this passion for helping particularly women enjoy the gift of sexuality, enjoy the gift of their bodies. And you guide women through that with a very biblical framework, wanting to honor the Lord.
Juli (02:56.236)
You’ve been on this show before sharing some of your own journey, but you continue to develop resources particularly to help women that are struggling with that and boy, I just know there are so many women who say, ‘I want to have a great sex life. I wish this were more of a gift to me, but it I just can’t enjoy it I feel like my body betrays me. It’s not pleasurable’. So where would you start in even just encouraging a woman who’s in that space?
Francie
Yeah. Well, you know, Juli, this ministry or this offering is a funny space because not one story is the same, right? Nobody has the same background. Nobody has the same experiences. So what I think I found most helpful to me, and if it’s OK with you, I’m very willing to be very honest and very vulnerable, is sharing as much of my growth journey as possible, kind of my sexual testimony, because when I’ve heard other women, even if I don’t match their story exactly, there’s something contagious about hearing about someone’s freedom journey, because then it’s like the Holy Spirit can just write your story, you know, and that’s what He’s doing. Each person has their own journey. But I will say, you know, I grew up really loving Jesus and really wanting to give Him everything, but there was a really big missing part in my journey. And it became very apparent when my husband and I, we had been married even at this point for seven years.
One day we were going to a bookstore, which we were kind of known to do because we didn’t have a big budget and we would go read marriage books specifically in this aisle because we didn’t have money to buy them. And I’ll just remember, I’ll never forget the feeling of what happened after we went. We would go read, get a cup of coffee and then get in the car and drive and talk about what we had learned. And I would go through spurts of growth and like courage and then I would clam back up. But I remember this one drive home where he’s like, so what’d you learn?
And I just remember this viscerally, this feeling in my mouth clamming shut, my body shutting down, feeling like, ‘I cannot tell you what I just read’. And it was such a terrible feeling of like a brick wall fell between Wyatt and me in that car of disconnection because I think in my nervous system, like in my core of my body, I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel like this was okay. I didn’t feel like I had permission to be sexual.
Francie (05:07.86)
And I have heard that from so many other women as I’ve shared just my journey, how I’m growing, what I’m learning is that, ‘I realized, Francie, I don’t think it’s okay to be sexual’. And these are very seasoned Christian women who know all the right answers about how to think about sex and know the right biblical framework and know kind of the right Bible verses. But when it comes to them being alone with their body or alone with their husband there is a disconnection and there’s a sense of not safe, not okay, not good. I love, you know, obviously we know Genesis, God created it, male and female, all the world, male and female, and called it “tov”, really good, like really good. And yet I haven’t always believed it was really good. And I think about Psalm 139 a lot, like, Lord, you know me, you searched me, you knit me together in my mother’s womb, like that means that “yada”, which we’ve talked about, I think, in the past, “Yada”, like to know intimately. There’s not one part of my body, soul, mind, sexuality that God doesn’t know intimately. He sees it all, and He formed me. Literally, my body was formed by the knowledge and wisdom of God. My brain, my arms, my eyes, my hair, my genitals.
Francie (06:30.424)
And the psalmist gives us a beautiful poem, ‘Marvelous Are Your Works’, like the works of God and my soul knows it well. And I read that one day and I realized how quickly I say that Psalm with joy and like, yay, and I think of babies. But when I get really intimate with God, like I’d really know me, I realized my soul did not believe that my body was good, that the works of God were really that marvelous. So I would say that’s been a lot of my spiritual journey is working through those beliefs about my body, about being sexual, about being a sexual woman, about being capable of much pleasure, and having the Lord walk with me kind of step by step, emotion by emotion, even sensation by sensation, because we are embodied people with sensations made to enjoy those sensations and not to constantly put the brakes, especially in marriage. Like, we are kind of trained in that way, put the brakes, put the brakes in dating or in singleness, but how do you let go of that break and not feel that sense of shame or this is not right? And so I would say that’s been, we’re coming up on 20 years of marriage and that has been a huge theme of my journey of freedom is recognizing that. And anytime that comes back up to a head, I am like, ‘No, you said it was good. Marvelous are your works that my soul knows’. And finding the congruence between my soul and my body– I call that integration, where my sexuality and my spirituality can give each other a nice big hug and say, you’re beautiful, you’re wonderful, this is good, God is here. And being able to then let go sexually and feel and express and verbalize, that’s another level of embodying those truths. I believe it in my head, but then I need to actually work it out.
And honestly, it has taken practice. And Wyatt and I call it pleasure practice. That’s one of the little phrases in our marriage is that it doesn’t just happen, it takes practice. And so we can talk about all the specifics, but that’s kind of been my journey is realizing that there was incongruence between my body and my soul or my spirit. And while I knew a lot of right things, my body responded in a way that showed me otherwise. You don’t believe this is good. And so that’s been a lot of my freedom journey.
Juli (08:43.958)
Mm-hmm. Well, thank you for describing that and there is a lot that we can kind of zone in on and unpack. So I want to start with the word that you used, ‘brakes’, you know, because this is something that has resonated with me as well that we have what you might call like pleasure pathways. Like how do you get from I’m doing the dishes or doing my work to I’m enjoying great sex? Like there’s a whole journey from foreplay to ‘Yeah, like let’s do this’ to ‘I gotta get my body warmed up’, all the way to arousal and to climax. And if you think about that, almost like it’s a physical pathway, what you’re saying when you use the word ‘brakes’, we could say like there’s yield signs or there’s stop signs or there’s hurdles, there’s forks in the road in terms of what are you gonna focus on, what are you gonna think about? And I think that is like a key part that a lot of women don’t consider is that they have these stop signs maybe built in on that road that just put the brakes on. And it’s often subconscious. It can be about their relationship. It can be about their body, as you’re describing. It can be about their beliefs about God and sex. It can be fears of, you know, what if I lose control or what if I get rejected? But when we talk about like those ‘brakes’, can you also talk about like, how do you actually put in go signs?
Like not just take down the stop signs, but how do you build in the kind of thinking and patterns like you’re saying to actually practice, this is okay, let’s go for this?
Francie (10:26.412)
Yeah. Okay, so I love that question because it’s kind of like, what does this look like? So, I would say that what I like to look at is in my mind because I am a believer, I’m a Christian, I want to build my life on God’s Word. I’m looking at God’s Word and I, obviously we love, Song of Solomon gives us like a format.
But I love that Romans 1 talks about it’s through the works of God that we know what He’s like. And so I hold the word of God high, and I also have learned to study the works of God. And so actually studying my body has been a huge game changer for me because I tell you what, Juli, I’m embarrassed to say this, but I was a well-grown adult with multiple kids before I understood how my period worked. Before I ever took a mirror down there to see what was there.
I remember our first baby, the doctor was like, do you want a mirror? I’m like, ‘no!’. I was horrified. And I even remember another Christian woman preaching, talking about this and saying, ‘Bless your body, get in front of the mirror, stand naked and bless it and say, thank you God for my strong arms. Thank you for my body that can breathe and move and hold and comfort and nurture and have pleasure’. And when she said the more intimate parts about body blessing, I thought, ‘I will never do that’.
That’s what I said. That is crazy. It was offensive to me. And what I realized looking back on it, I just was so afraid. I was so afraid of my body. And I think I realized I’ve internalized a message – which this could be another conversation that goes back centuries of theologians – that I do not trust my body. I do not trust it. I don’t trust it to be good. I don’t trust it to speak to me. I don’t trust it to lead me to anywhere good.
Francie (12:05.866)
And so I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning and that started for me by becoming sensual. And we think of that word as like a sleazy word, like, sensuality, because it’s used in some Bible verses, but I don’t think of it in that way. I think of it like your five senses and sensual, that God made us with five senses to be able to perceive, feel, experience beauty and pleasure. And that most of my sexual worldview, I try really hard to ground it in Genesis 1, not Genesis 3, because we all know we’re broken and we have the blood of Jesus that covers us. And I love that in Matthew 19, the Pharisees were grilling Jesus with questions about why is marriage so broken and sexuality, and he just kind of stopped them and interrupted them and said, ‘No, it wasn’t always this way in the beginning. Look back at the beginning’. And so I love that Jesus gave us a nod to the garden. So I take that as like, I’m gonna hang out there a lot and try to gain as much spiritual insight of God’s design.
And what I see there is a woman who is unashamed and naked. And Juli, I was reading recently, and I will get to practicals, but I was reading Genesis 1, because I just keep going back there asking the Lord to enliven the eyes of my heart to see His design. Because when I see fear and all the scary things in our culture and all the scary things our kids get into, I get clamped down.
Francie (13:29.602)
But I know that that is the effect of sin. but not the good news of redemption of my body. And so when I’m trying to disciple my kids or even walk in more growth in my marriage, I try to go back to the garden, my imagination, and just say, Lord, wash me clean, like make me pure. And so in the garden, what I loved is that Adam fell asleep because the Lord knew he was not complete. He needed another. So He put him to sleep, he formed Eve. And one of the little tiny gaps that I noticed just this week in the scriptures was that God, brought Eve to Adam, which tells me Eve and God had a minute of face-to-face time before she came to Adam. God brought Eve to Adam, which meant that he made her and then she stood up and she probably grinned ear to ear and she was totally naked before God, totally sexual, totally feminine.
Juli
Wow.
Francie (14:24.896)
And so I have tried to adopt that feeling when I’m alone with my body in the shower, at bed, whenever I’m alone with my body to imagine me as Eve, just newly formed, standing before God and Him saying, wow, you’re good. And then you see Adam’s excitement. He wrote a poem for her on the spot. Thank goodness he’s been naming all the animals. He needed to get his word count going because the woman was about to come to him. So he has some words for her, like bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
What I love is that small window of imagination that I could see Eve seeing God face-to-face alone with her body. And then God taking her to be with her man. And so I think that has helped me, that concept, and it just became even more clear this week as I was reflecting on it, is spending time alone with my body with God, blessing my body, doing what I said I would never do.
Juli
Mm.
Francie (15:19.606)
Standing in front of the mirror, learning my anatomy, learning literally what makes me feel aroused. And a lot of that happens privately, but also my sexuality happens throughout the day when I’m fully clothed doing regular things. And what I mean by that is becoming sensual and Eve, like attending to the garden and the beauty all around her, the life-giving creativity, knowing this is part of my sexual design also is that I feel. And I have sensation and I can greet that sensation throughout the day with a joyful, thank you God that my body is beautiful. Thank you that it’s working. Even the feeling of putting on lotion, or I use essential oils a lot in my car, because Juli, you know, my family is under a lot of stress. I’m not saying this as like somebody who has nothing else to do but like be with their body. We are dealing with chronic illness, special needs, a very debilitating situation in multiple areas of our family for a long time, and we probably will be for a long time. So this discovery of the gift of sexuality actually comes in the middle of fire. Like, it comes in the middle of refining, it comes in the middle of suffering. It’s not something that’s flippant just to be enjoyed because you’re having a vacation. It’s a way of being in my body that I’ve seen to be a place of worship where I can be alive in my body, alive in my senses, noticing beauty.
Taking time to create something beautiful, to feel something beautiful, even to feel the fabric of my clothing helps my body wake up to sensation and clues my brain into a state of wellness and safety. The more I’m aware of that sensation of pleasure, even if it’s something like a texture or a smell, and then I’ve trained my brain to translate that into my body is amazing. I can take in all this beauty and pleasure.
And it’s changed the way I am sexually with my husband because I am finding beauty and sensuality all day. And it doesn’t feel like such a chore to then be like, gosh, I gotta go do foreplay. I gotta go get in the mood. And part of that is even like fluid movement. Like femininity is made to be fluid. It’s made to move. Masculinity is very linear. And you can even see it written on the body of a man and a woman. Men are very linear and straight and women are curvy.
Francie (17:31.54)
And even internalizing that gift of being a woman and finding myself in a very stressful, tense day with some of my six kids, I’m going turn on some music and I’m going to move. I’m going to get in my body and out of my head. So those are some of the ways that I’ve processed spiritually, but also practically getting in my body and out of my head as much as possible all day, because life requires me to be very goal-oriented, task-oriented, linear, which is kind of masculine-ish, which is fine, because I think we can operate in both. But part of my beauty is being nonlinear and open and receptive and aware and invitational. And so finding ways to engage that part of my sexuality throughout the day and reminding myself, ooh, you know, I feel stuff in my body and that’s good. And whether it’s something as simple as an essential oil and deep breathing. Or it might be a pleasure sensation, but trying to bring awareness to my body throughout the day has been helpful.
Juli
Yeah, well, I love the emphasis on just slowing down and enjoying the beautiful things that we have in our life, whether it’s food or a beautiful sunset or like you’re saying, enjoying the fact that we can feel a fabric or skin to skin touch, like just awakening those senses. And Francie, you said something that I want to follow up on, and we don’t need to do the deep dive of theologians on this, but you talked about not trusting your body.
And there are a lot of people who don’t trust their bodies and sometimes for good reason. And even theologically, like there’s this one verse in Ephesians that I was really like meditating on for a while. And it’s talking about like how we’re different as Christians and it’s describing people that don’t know God. And it makes a statement. It says, ‘Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality as to engage in every kind of impurity with a continual lust for more’.
Juli (19:29.794)
And as I spend time like meditating on that passage, there’s a difference between ‘sensitivity’ and what that particular passage is calling ‘sensuality’, which isn’t the good kind of sensuality. And I feel like there’s this parallel of when we become insensitive to the beauty of what God has made and to the work of His Spirit in us, we instead seek the wrong kind of sensuality where it’s like, I’ve gotta have a high, I’ve gotta look at pornography, or we go the wrong way with our sensuality. And I think this is particularly true for people who have experienced that, where they’ve experienced their desires leading them to wrong places. They’re afraid. ‘I’m afraid of awakening something that might lead me into sin, my body has betrayed me in the past’. How do you combat that which might be a legitimate fear?
Francie
Well, I don’t know. I think the longer I live, the less I feel like I know, the more I’m learning. But I did notice. I tried to notice what’s in me, and then I noticed the fruit of what’s happening around me. And for me, I did notice in me for a while a fear of learning too much about sex because I thought it would turn into an idol.
And I’m like, I just had this fear of like, ‘What if we read too many sex books? What if we spend too much time thinking about this? It might turn into something scary or bad’. And so I did a little digging and I actually found some solace in an old N.T. Wright book that talks about bringing gospel to culture. And it talks about everything that exists was in God first and the enemy has taken it and twisted it.
Francie (21:20.0)
And so I don’t need to be afraid of stewarding the gift and beauty of my body and my sexuality because it is bottom line God’s territory. My sexuality is 100 % God’s. Pleasure is 100 % God’s. The enemy, I think, takes it and twists it and perverts it into a substance or a temptation or a pit that causes harm and destruction. And I think I have struggled over the years to trust that, trusting God in this place of, this really, could we go too far? And I don’t know. I think we stumble forward in darkness, like we all are trying to figure it out. I don’t come here with the answer, like follow me, because I know the right way. But I know when I’ve invited God in and had that image of standing naked before God in the garden, it heals something in my soul to then have more love for my husband and have more love for my good body that’s very tired, and that also needs pleasure because I’m so tired.
I need stress relief with my husband because we are traumatized, Juli. Like, we carry so much hard in our bodies from the waves of life that have come against us, primarily through major health crises with people in our immediate family, major, that we’ve found sex and sexuality to be such a restorative gift and such a place of trauma release and such a place of healing and alignment so that the more love we make, the more love we have to be able to pour out to our very needy family.
Juli
Yeah
Francie (22:45.4)
And so it’s become this like, I have this a bit of like fire inside of me of I’m angry at every way that the world and the church and everything inbetween has caused people to close this gift down and push it away out of fear, because I think the enemy steals just as much from us when we’re trapped in fear as we are in perversion. And because it was designed to be this place of union and oneness that leads to fruitfulness. And what I’ve also realized is in the garden, there was a battle, there was evil in the garden. And I think sexuality was probably a part of their gift of like warfare, their gift of unity against this presence that was in the garden that God knew.
Juli
Yeah, yeah.
Francie (23:43.156)
I just kind of see that God had well thought through design and intention, you, you think of a woman’s body, the massive pleasure zones head-to-toe, that was not accidental. It’s not accidental that a woman can have way more than nine types of orgasms or that she has 12 or more erogenous zones around her whole body. Like, our entire bodies are capable of so much pleasure and that is good. That’s the design of God. That’s not perversion of the enemy. So, you look at the works of God, you actually look at the anatomy, nerve endings, brain function.
And then I’m like, that’s my God, He made that. And He’s jealous for it, I think, because He designed it for our good. And so it’s been this healing process that we don’t find wholeness in sex or marriage, but I do think we find healing. I do think God is at work in ministering to each other through unity and vulnerability. And what is required to have a great sex life is actually quite a lot of vulnerability. And that vulnerability requires us to do some healing work.
Because when you wanna grow, all of a sudden you’re like, I feel really vulnerable, I’m not sure I wanna go here. And then there’s a choice to make. Do I want to drop my fig leaves? Can I? Is that wise? Is that safe enough here? Maybe it’s not. But if you’re in a committed marriage and you’re both longing to love and lay your lives down in honor, that’s the space of healing. Because then there can be repair, there can be affirmation, there can be, ‘Hey, you are loved no matter what, whatever it is that we are embodying of the love of God in that intimate space’.
Juli
Francie, I love that perspective and I think something that’s embedded in what you’re saying that I want to just make really clear, I mean this is how we know that we can enjoy pleasure is that this is meant to happen within the covenant of marriage. And so a lot of our harm, sexual harm or the danger comes when we are pursuing sexual pleasure that’s stolen pleasure and the scripture even uses that term.
Juli (25:41.73)
So if there’s like this analogy even with food, like it’s wonderful to enjoy a great meal, but if you stole that food, it’s not to be enjoyed. It’s because it’s not to be stolen. And I think that’s something that’s just important. Like when it’s within the covenant of marriage, when it’s within the heart of loving each other, that’s when pleasure is to fully be celebrated and enjoyed. And I agree with you, you can’t really go too far in enjoying what God has given you if it’s within those confines. That’s what keeps it safe.
Francie
Yeah, well it’s been surprising to me. I heard older women tell me, a few older women – not many older women are willing to talk about this like you are Juli – but a few older women would say, you I think that there are limitless potential possibilities for pleasure in marriage. Like you can’t get tired of it, you can’t get to the bottom of it, and maybe part of that’s because we keep changing and we keep maturing and growing or healing, but When I look at the body, I just think what a generous gift. When I look at and I study feminine, specifically anatomy, and I study the fact, like even what we understand now medically, Juli, has been surprising to me how little understanding the medical community. We can talk about theological frameworks that have maybe not served women well in understanding our bodies, or receiving the gift of our bodies, but even medically, the data has not been there until recently about what a woman’s body is capable of, or even mapping out the clitoral network has been very new news within the last few years. And so even that makes me realize there’s, I think there’s a battle for pleasure in marriage, actually. I think there is resistance towards a husband and a wife fully embracing each other with vulnerability and joy.
Francie (27:26.462)
And getting lost in love, I think there’s a resistance to that on every level, practically with busyness and with stress and with missing each other, because the power of unity, the power of oneness, the power of joy and letting go and the gift that God wove into our anatomy and our biology and our brain function and our nervous systems to be enjoyed with sexuality and with sexual pleasure is so abundant. It is so abundantly clear that it’s so healthy for us and so healthy for the mission of God to go forward from our lives. Like I think I have been in season trying to white knuckle it and just try harder, but when I get back into the gift of being in my body and realize, there’s a gift here to be sexual so that I can be more restored as a woman, as a mother, that I don’t just have to white knuckle my way through life and think that’s the highest spirituality.
Finding rest in my body, finding connection, kind of a Sabbath, if you will, or a place of unwinding together is very meaningful and very spiritual and a truly, I think, a garden gift that we can miss when we’re so afraid or so busy or so tired.
Juli
So you’ve spent a lot of time researching this over the years. This is a passion of yours for that woman who is like, ‘Man, I wish I could experience that. I don’t have the capacity to do the kind of research that you’ve done, Francie. I want to take steps’. Like what are the practical steps that she needs to take and that she can take in order to get to the place where she starts to really experience sex as sort of that respite, that sanctuary, that thing she looks forward to instead of what it currently is.
Francie (29:08.31)
Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, something really simple is be purposeful to learn, like be purposeful to learn about your body and talk about it with your husband, with your spouse. And husbands, if you’re listening, which I hope you are, this is a very important conversations for husbands to know because it’s often hard for women to know how to express desire or even locate desire. And so a husband might read that as she doesn’t want it, but it may be that she doesn’t have language for it.
It may be also in my case it was that I was actually numb. And the clinical term would be more ‘dissociated’ and numb because I was so focused on being spiritual and the thought of being near my body actually was linked to feelings of danger in my nervous system. Like this is bad or dirty. I had detached my neural networks from my bodily experiences. And so it takes conditioning just like renewing your mind with truth, being in a moment of pleasure and thanking God. ‘Thank you God for this good feeling’. ‘Thank you God that I can experience more’, and in helping rewire the neural networks to associate pleasure with goodness and pleasure with love and pleasure with an opportunity to be fully glorifying to God. Like this is a gift. I practically I talked about becoming sensual, being aware of your five senses, even holding a warm cup of coffee, smelling it, feeling the steam.
Finding ways all day to feel your body is a pathway towards better orgasm because it doesn’t just happen by ‘rub this way really fast’ because we are whole beings and we need to bring our whole person into the bedroom and kind of get lost in a holistic way in that moment of pleasure and not just focus on one movement that will equal pleasure because I think we kind of think it’s a formula, and I think it’s more of a way of being, a way of receiving, a way of letting go. I think another practical that Wyatt and I practiced was blessing each other’s bodies with our words, telling each other what we love about each other’s bodies, and then taking time to verbally say, thank you, God, for these body parts. Part of that is also reconnecting our brain and our body to know that it’s good. I would say…
Juli (31:21.14)
Yeah, let me ask you about that before you get to the next thing. For a lot of women, they don’t really like their body parts. And it’s not just because they’re uncomfortable with their sexuality. It’s because they look in the mirror and they see cellulite. They see small breasts or saggy breasts. And they’re like, I don’t look like I’m supposed to. I don’t feel sexy the way my body currently is.
How do you overcome that?
Francie
Well, again, I cannot speak to every woman, but I will say I’ve had six babies, right? I’ve had six kids and one miscarriage and my body has changed a lot over the years. And it’s very sweet. Even in my earlier years, I was about 20 pounds heavier. And I’ve talked to Wyatt about my body changing and I’ve told him that I feel insecure. And I’ve also asked him, will you please speak life over my body? Will you encourage me? Because there’s so much power in our words, because he would say, ‘You’re fine, you’re great’. And maybe he was being kind and maybe he really believed that, but no matter what, I have to get to a point where I like my body as it is. And I am thankful for the body positive movement, like Dove Commercials, where people are showing bodies visually in different commercials and advertisements that are many sizes. And I have to tell you, Juli, I’ve been going to the gym a lot over the last few years because my body needs to move for stress levels and I feel more sexual. This is embarrassing, but I’m just gonna say it: I will go to the gym for like a few days after missing for like a month. And I’m like, I feel so good. And I’ll like prance around in my sports bra and Wyatt’s like, ‘You don’t look any different, but you feel different’. And that’s the bottom line. But I feel like I’m suddenly, you know, a sport model, but it’s because I moved my body and I got into my brain that I am healthier. I did a good thing for me today. So I think some of it is our mindset. Just, we don’t need to lose, you know, 20 pounds, but we need to love our bodies where they are.
Francie (33:16.244)
And be verbal about the need for affirmation, but also care for ourselves in a way that we can feel connected to, I’m making healthy choices for me. And so it’s a bit of empowerment. Like I can eat mindfully today. I can drink water. I can take a nap. And those small things make a big difference. And I really hope to be old and saggy and wrinkly one day and having great sex. Like I really hope for that. And I hope to love my body so much, that as I age and I’m working on that and I have thanked my husband. So husbands, if you’re listening, you have such a significant role in affirming your wife’s beautiful femininity and I will say too if I can Juli: husbands if you’re listening, by God’s design, your eyes are only for your wife. And my confidence has been so protected because Wyatt has made it clear that that is his aim. Is he perfect? No, but when your wife sees your eyes looking at other bodies, it’s really hard for her to believe that her body is good for you because she compares. And so I’ll just say as a challenge to my brothers, your eyes are meant to be a window to your soul. So everything you see goes right into your heart and you want to feast on your wife. And so it’s like this dance of relearning how to let him feast and him being committed to feast on you and your beauty and nothing else.
In our age of social media, I just don’t think it’s very helpful. I’m really grateful that my husband’s not on social media. And I’ll say that. Like, I’m not gonna tell everybody what to do, but it is a lot out there. And I think it’s a calling of masculinity to have your eyes only for your wife and to honor her in that way so that she feels like the most beautiful woman in the world, no matter what. And the more your eyes are trained to see what’s real, a real woman who has really had a baby, who is really you know, 50 years old and you love her and you have sexual experiences with her, the more that will become the definition of beauty rather than images that are all around that are fake or fixed or, you know, unreasonable. And so I think it is like a reclamation of our eyes that his eyes are for his wife and she has eyes to see the beauty that she really does carry as a real woman, not as a compared woman to a swimsuit model.
Juli (35:28.398)
And so he’s not just doing that for her, he is doing that for her, but also your brain literally will be wired to see your wife’s naked body as the most beautiful thing in the world if you’re only looking at her. So let me ask you somewhat of a controversial question. What are your thoughts on a woman practicing self-pleasure? You know, even to understand how her body responds, some women feel like ‘I just have this performance demand when my husband is with me. I don’t know how to climax. I don’t know how to experience pleasure’. And then a sex therapist might say, well, maybe you can explore your body and your pleasure by yourself first without that pressure. Like, I know that’s, again, an issue where people have different views, but what are your thoughts on that in terms of how God would see that?
Francie
I think God loves my body and I don’t think God’s afraid of me spending time alone with my body. I think there is a difference when we are, it’s again back to the heart, like if we’re motivated by selfish, secretive, manipulative, isolating behaviors that don’t promote unity or beauty in your marriage, maybe rethink that.
I don’t know how, I’ll just tell you honestly, Juli, and this is where I am, I’m on a journey, so I might think differently later, but I don’t know how a woman can break through to greater levels of joy in her sexuality without spending time alone with her body first, because it’s such a vulnerable thing to not know how your body works and then be expected to perform or share it or be vulnerable. And I think it’s a very tender, beautiful space, honestly, to be with God alone with your body. And I don’t mean to make everything so spiritual, but you don’t have to like perform a certain prayer ritual. Like, but just knowing that God sees it all anyway, and you’re discovering His gift and you’re learning how it works. And I have found, I used to be afraid of that. And I will say that I used to think, that’s too close to masturbation. But the word I like to use is ‘self-cultivation’, because it’s like cultivating a garden so that it can be soft soil to grow something beautiful.
Francie (37:40.398)
And I have had to get to the point where Wyatt actually, because I was struggling with this so much, he said, ‘Francie, go self-cultivate, go get to know your body and come back and teach me because you’re so stuck in your head and you’re so afraid and you’re so disconnected. I don’t know how to read your mind. I can’t get to you when you’re in that place’. And so that was our journey is that we were open about it. We talked about it and we kind of took out the word ‘masturbation’ because it’s such a trigger word to make us feel like it was just like, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not out, like I’m not thinking about other images. I’m not including anything else in this conversation. This is something completely different. And even that was healing because I had to work on my feelings and emotions as they arose of, ‘God is my body really good?’ Because that’s where the rubber meets the road of healing and how God can rewire our hearts and our minds to say, yeah, it’s good. And now you can share it with this man I’ve given you with a sense of joy and confidence and then still learn together. It’s not like, you know, the separate thing, but it is a measure of being alone with your body enough to know in your knower, this is good and I get to share it. And I will say too, I used to wonder if you did that, would you be so satisfied alone that you wouldn’t want to share or you’d be satisfied? And I would say for me, it’s been the opposite. The more time I’ve spent with my own body cultivating, the higher my sex drive has become. And I would say I’ve had a pretty low sex drive my whole life. And maybe it’s just disconnection. But I would say it actually fueled my fire for more intimacy. So much so that my husband’s like, ‘Go self-cultivate, like I’m coming home’. And it’s like a joke or a playful invitation for me to get into my body and love it because he loves it when I love my body.
And so that’s been my journey with it. I don’t know what your opinion is, but it’s been, that’s also been a journey of healing. What is your take on that?
Juli (39:33.486)
Yeah, I think it goes back to the heart, you know, is the heart that I want to be fully present with my husband and I want to overcome barriers and I want to learn my body as you’re describing so that I can enjoy it with my husband? And sometimes that’s a step. But if the heart attitude is, I don’t want to trust my husband, like this is mine, I want to have my own pleasure. You know, that’s where I think we’re working against the unity that God created sex for. So.
Yeah, and another way this comes up too is single women ask like, ‘Should I do any of that self-cultivation before I get married?’ So how would you respond if a single woman is asking that?
Francie
Well, again, I’m still learning. I’ll kind of be like, what do you say, Juli? But my honest gut right now, because I am seeing such devastation from women who get married and have no grid for their bodies, that I think we are designed to be free. I’ll just say that. If anything becomes something that’s no longer free and an addiction or a compulsion, then that would be a, we walk by the spirit, not by the flesh. And by that means, I mean, you can love your body and walk in the spirit. That’s what I think. And I’m going to encourage my daughters to know how their body works as they grow up because I’ve seen the carnage of devastation from marriages that we celebrate virginity so loudly. And basically we’re celebrating ignorance. And that does not serve a new couple well. It could take years for a new couple to recover from the pain of that first year when there is so much disconnection from a girl in her body, because then she feels all sorts of hard feelings when she’s numb or when she has vaginismus or when she has so much tension.
So I’m not gonna make any rules, but I would not tell a girl that her body needs to be like this off limits thing until that day she gets married. I think she should educate herself.
Francie (41:35.928)
I would encourage her to get to know it, to feel things and be like, that works and be excited about how good her body is. And, you know, not again, not get stuck anywhere, but not hide or be afraid.
Juli
Yeah, so what do you feel like it’s saying in Song of Solomon when it’s saying don’t awaken love until it’s time?
Francie
I don’t think that means don’t have a sexual feeling in your body. I’ll say that, because that’s asking way too much. When you do have a sexual feeling and the idea is don’t, what you’re doing is you’re reinstating this idea that bad, body bad, sexuality bad, don’t do it, disconnect.
Francie (42:18.264)
And what I’m dealing with in ministry with women, and in friendship is so many precious, amazing, strong Christian women who are so disconnected from their body, because they interpret it to mean that, that they are dissociated and they cannot feel anymore because they train themselves not to awaken love. So I don’t really know what it means, but I don’t think it means be asexual. I don’t think it means don’t have sexual feelings. I think it means maybe just like, no, this is a gift and you get to share it someday. But I don’t know, I don’t read too much literally into that as kind of we have in generations past maybe. What do you think?
Juli
I don’t know. I mean, I’m learning and I’m listening. I think that there’s an element to which we don’t want to have the messages of my body’s bad, my sexuality’s bad, I can’t have a sexual thought or feeling. But I think to awaken the journey of arousal intentionally, it doesn’t serve single women well. So like even as you said, like the research shows that the more a woman self-pleasures, the greater her sexual desire and drive is, which is good in marriage, but if you’re a single woman saying, I want to explore my body, I want to explore arousal, where do you go with that? So, yes, I think there’s this tension of like embracing my body, understanding my body, but not like, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying when we first get married, like it’s going to be a learning journey.
You know, I think what you’re talking about, which is really true is we don’t want to have to undo damage. And that’s what’s happened, particularly when women go on their honeymoon with no expectation, no training, the husbands don’t know anything. Yeah, I mean, probably you and I had that situation of years of kind of the desert. But I also don’t know that we have to get a running start. So, yeah.
Francie (44:05.718)
Yeah, I think it’s I’ve had a lot of single women listen to my podcast and kind of say is it okay that I’m listening, and it’s not explicit, but I think being comfortable knowing sexuality is good, knowing, like knowing anatomy and I think a woman maybe should you know spend a few times with her body before the wedding night so that she feels happy with what she is and not afraid or ashamed of it, but yeah I agree like it does rev you up and so knowing, knowing that and holding that before the Lord and not focusing on that.
There’s so many beautiful ways to use your energy as a single woman that are beautiful and unique to that single season. And so I think that what I’m hoping for the women that I’m walking with is that they have a sense of knowledge and confidence and excitement about their body and that they are familiar enough to give it as a gift and not feel the opposite, that it is an overwhelming experience that is shocking to their system. And so I hope my daughters see that side of it, that your body is amazing and understand how it works. So.
Juli
Yeah. Well, you are doing a great job in encouraging women along that road and you’re just such a needed voice. I’m cheering for you. I’m thankful for you. I’m thankful for what you shared with us today and we’ll continue to look forward to conversations like this that we get to have.
Francie
Thanks, Juli. Thanks for letting me be on a journey.
Juli (45:29.518)
I’m there right there with you. I’m right alongside you.
