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Lindsey Maestas is a wife, mom to two sweet boys and a podcaster – newly based in Franklin, TN. She is passionate about speaking vulnerably about relationships, faith, and real (hard) life with her community of tens of thousands of women. She shares hope, laughter, practical wisdom, and her favorite go-to products by means of her podcast, The Living Easy Podcast, email list, and social media platforms. In 2021, Lindsey created and launched The Wife Project: From Roommates to Soulmates- an online course created for women who desire to have a Godly marriage. The Wife Project Course has changed marriages in nearly every country of the world by God’s grace alone. She loves reading, baking with her boys, tacos and binge-watching Netflix with her husband.
Lindsey is what I call a biblical marriage expert. She is so sweet and humble. We actually connected when I found and started digging into her podcast. And then interestingly enough, she also does business coaching. So, this gal is an entrepreneur in the online space, and she actually became my business coach. She’s the one who guided me through creating and launching the Faith Fueled Breakthrough course!
Lindsey is full of the Spirit and wisdom, and I was really excited to dive into today’s topic because we can always learn and grow when it comes to biblical wisdom within marriage, right? Because even if it’s good, it can always be better.
Lindsey and I started by talking about what led her down the path of wanting to help other couples experience the goodness of Godly marriage. Similar to me, her parents got divorced when she was little. She lived a very sexually promiscuous life and was always dating somebody, with someone else on speed dial, basically because she was worried about being alone or rejected. She was always jumping from unhealthy relationship to unhealthy relationship.
Lindsey gave her life to Jesus at the age of 19 and when she did that, she started to see a shift in the relationships of the people around her. She was actually seeing the beauty in marriage for the first time in her life. When she and her husband got engaged, she immediately announced to her family that divorce wasn’t an option for them. She had always just been around broken marriages, whether it was affairs, divorces, women in and out of her dad’s home… it was just so messy. And she knew she wanted something different. And she also knew she needed accountability so she started asking questions. She found anyone she could who loved Jesus and had ever been a wife, and she would just pick their brain. She shares these learnings along with her own experiences inside of her course, The Wife Project. She mentioned that she really just wants a ministry of a marriage that is so God-honoring that when people look at her life, whether it’s on social media or in real life, they see a marriage and a relationship that is a witness to God’s grace. Because it doesn’t just happen on its own. She’s just so passionate about seeing other couples live this out and live out the faithfulness and the covenant and the promise that they’ve made to God, but not in a way that is a struggle all the time. Not in a way that is filled with resentment and anger, but one that is actually friendship-filled and joy-filled and life-filled, in a way that other people see God through their marriage. She also mentioned how she’s talked with couples who have been or are struggling in walking through some hard times in their marriage, whether it’s affairs or hurt or they’re just not happy together…and she’s seen restoration. She’s seen redemption from couples who never thought they would come out of it. And in that brokenness, marriages are restored by their faithfulness to God and their complete humility before the cross.
I just love Lindsey’s passion for marriage and how it all points to God…the way He worked in her life, and the way that marriage is actually meant to be a reflection of His great love.
God’s Intention for Sex and Intimacy
As we consider marriage as a picture of Christ and the church, Lindsey also discussed the roles of intimacy, sex, and connection and how those all play into that.
She talks about the fact that as you look throughout scripture, we see God’s intention for sex and intimacy. She mentions that the church has kind of made it to be this off the cuff subject because it can be uncomfortable, but when you read the Song of Solomon, all you see is sex and pleasure. There’s this idea in our world that especially in a Christian realm, that sex is for procreation only and once you get married, sex is just not as fun anymore. But in the Bible, we see that God favors this kind of intimacy because not only does it strengthen your emotional bond, it also strengthens that oneness that God has called us to in the covenant of marriage.
She also dives into this view that many women tend to have that sex and intimacy is an obligation or something that they’re pressured to do. You see it in Tiktok videos all over the internet where they’re making these jokes about promising intimacy to their husband if he does something and then complaining about actually having to follow through with it. It is just such a skewed view of what it can actually be because women should enjoy it, and men should be loving their bride like Christ loves the church…which means serving her, including not only with dishes and cleaning and being an actual partner in the home, but also with intimacy and with foreplay, and allowing that to be a part of the joy of their marriage. She mentions that she talks with a lot of people who struggle with this because they’re not feeling that connection with their spouses. But as Lindsey points out with her own experience, sex has helped and saved her marriage at some points because she’s been obedient to God’s calling, to not take a break from her husband, and to be intentional in that intimacy, even when she’s feeling emotionally disconnected from him. And that intimacy doesn’t always have to be sexual. It can be looking in one another’s eyes for 10 seconds or kissing for at least six seconds or holding hands… those small things can help to increase that emotional bond.
The world teaches us that you give up when things are hard, and we have to realize our reward is not on this earth. Our reward is in heaven, and we persevere in sexuality and love because, essentially, the Kingdom is at hand. Our goal is to be a witness of Christ’s relationship with the church and when we live that out emotionally and physically within our marriage, we then are able to prepare our hearts for the season of eternity. We are able to get to that point where we look like Jesus. We break the patterns of what we’ve seen in our families, and we stay married because we’re able to witness to others the goodness of God, even in the pain and the struggle and the lack of desire for one another or the lack of emotional connection. We can speak to the goodness of God in all of those things without feeling as if the world has a hold or has a say over the state of our relationship.
Here’s the truth…marriage is fine, right? It’s beautiful. It’s great. It’s God-honoring. But at the end of our lives, I think most of us would say if we were honest…“I love my spouse, but it was fine. It was really hard and it was really messy. It was not perfect or even close to that. And I may have married someone who I think is the greatest man in the world, but he does a lot of things to hurt me sometimes, and I do a lot of things to hurt him, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and in the end, it was fine.”
But if we can come out saying instead that through all of it, God remained our focus. We were not everything to one another because that’s not our role. Essentially, it was fine, but in it, we glorified God. In it, we saw Jesus. That is the ultimate goal and all of those things, the gospel and the goodness of God, play into all of that, which is why we’re intentional with our sex and intimacy, our personal bond, and emotional relationships.
Wisdom bomb after wisdom bomb, right?!
One thing I loved that she shared is that even still today, Lindsey and her husband sometimes still hurt one another. Because even when we love and follow Jesus, we’re still broken people in a broken world. And so there’s, unfortunately, going to be some of that. And we have to understand that ultimately, our satisfaction comes from the Lord and our relationship with Him first and foremost. And that, again, marriage truly is a way to point back to Him and point back to our relationship with Him.
And when it comes to talking about sex, I love what she referenced there because I think it’s so important that it’s talked about, even with children. We have had very open and honest conversations with our kids about sex inside of marriage and how it’s good and how it actually is pleasurable. But we’ve also shared that there’s a reason why God asks us to wait and keep that within the covenant of marriage. So, I just wanted to kind of point out that as parents, it’s really important to have honest and wisdom-filled conversations with our kids about what that looks like because the world is sending all kinds of mixed messages on that. I also want to give a couple of awesome resources that I found in my own motherhood journey that you might find helpful. One is a program by Focus on the Family, and it’s called Launch Into the Teen Years. It’s a six video series that is like “the talk” but from a very biblical standpoint and it covers puberty, but it also goes on to cover, in a very honorable and gentle way, sexuality and sex within marriage. And then another resource which is an alternative to YouTube is Pure Flix…like Netflix, which has a lot of awesome shows and series and movies.
Expectations, Adventure, and Communication
So, when it comes to walking all of this out, Lindsey shares some tangible tips and wisdom for gaining a deeper connection, intimacy and even more pleasurable sex within marriage.
Her first tip is to change your expectations of who you think your husband is supposed to be. She talks about walking through this with her husband and how she’s learned over time that she is in control of her own faith walk, and her own leadership. So when she lowered her expectations of who she thought her husband was supposed to be, she found that she is able to then be more vulnerable with him and even more feminine with him. She’s not protective and defensive and on guard because he’s not doing the things that she wants him to do. Instead, she’s able to look at him and say, “Hey, you’re exactly who God has created you to be with all the flaws and failures that sin brings into the world. And if I actually truly believe that you are that man that God is morphing and chiseling and sanctifying, I don’t feel this pressure to change you or to fix you. I am instead just here to love you and not get in the way of God’s work.” So her perspective over time has changed where she used to want to fix and change her husband and now she knows that God created them both so differently. And when he fails, she is able to see that it’s not all about her. Because when things are all about her, it affects the bedroom because she’s angry, which leads to withholding love or intimacy. But we never see Jesus withholding His love. He pours out His love in the midst of people’s failures, in the midst of people actually betraying Him, He is still loving them faithfully. And so as a wife, when we limit the amount of expectations we have and entrust our husbands to God, we’re able to be more vulnerable and to just show up as we are, and not expect so much of them, even in the bedroom.
Secondly, Lindsey talks about the importance of adventure, spontaneity, and communication in marriage to reestablish your bond when you’re struggling. She offers some cool date night ideas along with some questions to ask to open up communication with your spouse. I know for Chad and I personally, we do little weekend getaways a few times throughout the year and we have the best time. It’s almost like we are the truest and purest version of ourselves when we’re not parenting. I don’t know if that’s everyone’s experience, but that’s totally our experience. It’s like, the fun factor is resurrected. We laugh and we’re so silly and goofy and it’s sweet and romantic and it totally rekindles the fire.
I also love Lindsey’s tips on communication. She talks about asking thought-provoking or curious questions and then listening…closing our mouths and opening our ears and hearts to be receptive to what our husband is sharing and then ultimately taking action on what they shared with us.
Cultivating an Intentional Marriage
Now, if you’re reading or listening to all of this and you’re thinking, okay, this is definitely not what I have experienced in my marriage, or where and how do I even begin to cultivate an intentional marriage like what we’re talking about, Lindsey has some great wisdom on this too.
The most important and beneficial thing that you can do is to put God at the center. Even if your marriage is a mess and even if your husband or wife is not willing to do any of the work, you are responsible for your faith life. And then secondly, accountability and community are extremely important as well. She mentioned that there have been so many moments that she can look back on where she probably would have left her marriage or would have at least done something really stupid if she hadn’t had accountability and community. So, if you’re struggling in your marriage, and you’re seeing this brokenness, and you don’t even know where to begin, find a community and really pursue that fellowship. And then, start having those hard conversations that you don’t want to have. There are so many women who struggle with sexuality and are feeling pressure in the bedroom, but they won’t tell their husbands. And it might feel so awkward and uncomfortable but you’re not going to get anywhere without the communication.
Lindsey dives deeper into all of this and so much more in her course, The Wife Project. I’ve taken the course and there is so, so much wisdom inside there! It’s a self-paced video course that includes a 55-page workbook and covers everything from communication to sex and intimacy to ideas on how to become best friends with your spouse again, betrayal and forgiveness, being a faithful and prayerful wife…and so much other good stuff! My favorite part about it is how Lindsey shares so openly and vulnerably about her marriage. And as I went through it, there were so many things where I was like, I’ve experienced that; it’s so relatable. I also love how she always relates it back to God’s Word and His great love for us.
Lindsey is so awesome and offered us a 25% off coupon! You can find the direct link to the course at the end of this blog and just use Katie25 at checkout.
I pray that this episode helps you to learn, grow, and deepen your relationships and makes your marriage even better.
Connect with Lindsey!
- Connect on Instagram @lindsey.maestas and @livingeasywithlindsey
- Hang out on TikTok
- Check out The Wife Project and use Katie25 for 25% off
