Vip and Carrie Vipperman were just two of the early reasons our new book, Hungry For More: Marital Intimacy came to be. Separated by continents, their engaged relationship depended on weekly phone calls. “How do we make the time count?” came the cry. Mark and I began jotting down pertinent questions that could be dealt with individually, then shared openly during their phone dates.
The “Marriage Modules” of those days have been modified, collected, and compiled into workbook form. Designed to strengthen any marriage through pointed questions and vulnerable conversation, Hungry For More: Marital Intimacy is now available in both paperback and ebook formats. Join Carrie Vipperman as she describes her experience with the material:
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“If you were to summarize my 15-year relationship with my husband, Vip (thirteen of them as married), the highlights would go something like this…
Long-distance friendship, long-distance dating, engagement, amazing newlywed years, selling all we owned and moving overseas for work, extreme isolation, infertility, parenthood, miscarriage, moving back to America, and starting all over again.
I’m sure you could compile your own highlights too, maybe with even a few similarities to our’s. Marriage includes really great times, as well as some extremely difficult times. We have been blessed to have Mark and Kandy walk with us from the very beginning. During our engagement, we had the privilege of going through some “Marriage Modules” they developed and which later expanded into their recent book, Hungry for More: Marital Intimacy. The truths we discovered during that study were monumental in laying the foundation for our marriage. We learned about God’s plan for marriage, how to have the kind of marriage He designed, and that He supplies the strength to do the hard work it would take. We also learned it’s worth the effort to fight for it. Only that leads to a marriage you enjoy.
As we walked through this book together early in our marriage, Vip realized his need to depend on God to love me me through him. Not only is this overwhelmingly comforting to me, but is a foreign concept to many people. It’s not a 3-step process to guarantee an amazing marriage. This means letting go of control and acknowledging that you need God’s help to do this marriage thing right.
Another one of the concepts in Hungry For More: Marital Intimacy is identifying your marriage’s core values. As we have reflected on our own 13 years together, we are beyond thankful for those we were able to identify. We have learned to empathize with each other, accepting that one’s joys, sorrows, and trials belong to both of us. We’ve learned the value of thankfulness and how to labor for it in the good times and bad. We’ve learned to fight for contentment, which encourages us to have faith at all times, which then allows us to have hope. In taking the time to reflect (there’s that hard work I mentioned earlier!), we also saw the need to be intentional about fun, which exhausted parents of young children often neglect (because they are so exhausted)! These core values are gifts from God. He wants us to be people of empathy, thankfulness, contentment, faith, hope, and joy, and He will supply them as He loves through us.
I love the way the Persalls explain biblical mutual submission. When they first explained it to me years ago, it was the first time I was able to truly understand it, as well as desire it. They cover supporting each other, communication, respect, intimacy in the bedroom, and so much more. Buy the book, take the time to work through it together, and trust God to build a marriage that you will enjoy for the rest of your lives.
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