Video Interview: Barry & Lori Byrne with Face-to-Face Ministries
Barry and Lori Byrne talk candidly about how they are helping married couples experience intimacy on new levels in their “Love After Marriage” workshops. They also lead Single Life Workshops, both of which create space for more hopeful, healthy, restored lives and committed relationships.
Video Transcript
MELINDA: Welcome to Season Two of the Face to Face Ministries podcast. I am Melinda Wilson.
CATHY: And I’m Cathy Little. Thank you so much for joining us as we introduce you to ministries and leaders from around the globe who have said yes to the Isaiah 61 mandate to heal the brokenhearted and set the captives free, helping people to step into who they were always meant to be.
MELINDA: And for more information about us, please visit our website facetofaceministries.org; that’s all one word – no spaces, no numbers and no caps. And please follow us on our social media platforms – facetofaceministries.org on Facebook and on Instagram, facetofacemin.
CATHY: Welcome to today’s episode. We are so happy you’re here.
MELINDA: Welcome back to our podcast. We are at episode 65.
CATHY: 65. And today we’ve got some really, really special guests. And we just had the privilege of meeting these folks just last week, and it was just totally a God thing. These guys – man, we met this couple – the introduction came on a Tuesday night, and on Wednesday morning, we were sitting across the table from them having a conversation. And we’re very excited to introduce you to Barry and Lori Byrne of Nothing Hidden Ministries.
MELINDA: This is a ministry that’s focused on relational, spiritual and sexual wholeness. They minister to married couples and singles alike, and we really believe that there’s going to be something for all of us in this sit-down conversation with them. They were very candid, very open –
CATHY: Nothing was hidden.
MELINDA: And just like they say, they’re Nothing Hidden Ministries. It’s all about vulnerability, authenticity, humility before God and before your community. It’s really refreshing to be with them, and I feel just personally blessed to have met them and hear about what they do. And I really believe you will be, too.
CATHY: Yeah. So, thanks for joining us, and we’re just going to hop right into our interview with Barry and Lori Byrne.
MELINDA: We are sitting actually face to face,
CATHY: Literally.
MELINDA: So excited to not just be recording on Zoom with Barry and Lori Byrne of Nothing Hidden Ministries here in Redding. And we’re so excited to introduce you to them, and also, we get to hear their story as well. So, let’s just dive right in with our interview with these guys.
BARRY: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to share.
LORI: Love to be here with you.
CATHY: We are so honored to have you guys, and thank you for a very last minute very quick yes to the conversation with us. We are literally passing through Redding, California and had dinner with some friends last night. And we’re like, “You know what? These guys have something really special to offer.” So we’re really glad to have your voice on the podcast. And we would love for you to introduce yourselves and just explain a little bit about your ministry, what your focus is, and maybe a little history about why you do what you do. Because a lot of times, we have to start with why; that’s such a powerful piece. So, you guys just go for it, and share with our audience.
BARRY: Okay. So, I’m a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist; I did that for about thirty years. And back in 1994, we connected with John Wimber’s church in Anaheim and began learning inner healing methods and inner healing prayer, things like that on their ministry team. And I began incorporating that in my counseling. And gradually we learned from other people. We learned from Ed Smith in theophostic. We learned from Jack Hayford’s church, Cleansing Streams, and just other things we read. And then the Lord began teaching me things literally from Scripture, and I began incorporating inner healing in my counseling. And Lori was kind of coming along with me. I don’t know if you want to add more about you during that time period?
LORI: That was a time when the Holy Spirit was awakening us to Him. And so, we were hungry; we were a ravenous. We were looking for wherever He was, and He just began teaching us personally in our encounters with Him, in dreams and visions and in intervention with other people, and just divine encounters and stuff. So, there was a lot that was coming to us at that time because we were so hungry.
BARRY: Yeah. So, in 2003 the Lord moved us from Southern California up here to Redding, and we were attending Bethel Church. And actually, within the first year that I was here, I began – I was asked to do some oversight of the Transformation Center, so I became very familiar with the Sozo ministry and all of that. And yet I feel like what the Lord had taught me is what I felt most comfortable with; I was doing it in my counseling. And then we continued doing that until 2008. We began the ministry, Love After Marriage and Nothing Hidden Ministries, in 2008. And I gradually then – I’ve actually backed out of my counseling practice; I don’t do professional counseling anymore since about 2014 – 13/14.
LORI: And the ministry started with us. We had no desire to do a specified ministry. It started out with marriage, and we – because he was a marriage and family therapist, and I was a mom. And I was always counseling people and working with them, but we never thought we needed a ministry together. But one of our pastors said, “Do you know how many strong marriages there are in our church, in the body of Christ?” And I said, “It doesn’t feel like there’s very many.” You know, and this was a signs and wonders church. And how can we have signs and wonders and not have strong marriages?
Well, we went home that night, and the Lord gave me a dream. And He answered and gave us this ministry that He wanted us to start. I had no idea what this was, what it meant. But we were naked, and we were making love out in the back of a flatbed truck on my parents’ street.
BARRY: This is the dream.
LORI: This is the dream. Do not do this. But it was so poignant, and so – you know, I just knew it was from God. And so, when I told him [the dream], he goes – he had the interpretation. And as he gave it, as he started speaking it out, we started writing it down, and the Lord just gave us this download from heaven. And so, from there on, we started implementing this and just diving into this full force. And one of the things we realized that He wanted – it was going to very much be run by Holy Spirit; He was going to be leading. And the second thing we realized is that it was not going to be a one-on-one, behind closed doors – that the Lord wanted this to be done in community. And He literally began training us in what the body of Christ is to look like, I believe, in the last days. In a way where God chose – we’d put people in small groups; that’s what He wanted. And He literally picked every single person for the breakthrough of everyone in that group. And we’ve been doing this for how long?
BARRY: Eleven years.
LORI: Eleven years, and He puts the small groups together. And so, there’s that component of the inner healing – all the methods and all the things that the Lord had taught us. But that one factor of, you’ve got to do this in relationship with the body of Christ if you’re going to get fully healed. You know, shame can get healed behind closed doors. But when you are doing it with a group, and that represents people, and you look in their eyes after you’ve shared something just really horrible that you’ve done in your life, and you see nothing but acceptance and love and welcoming, “Come on, keep telling us more. We’re here with you…”
BARRY: I’m just going explain a little bit how we get there in the group.
LORI: Why don’t you do that first.
BARRY: Going back to the dream – in the dream, we were naked and making love. Of course, this was in the context of marriage, and that being naked really communicated the idea of living in truth. That’s actually where we get the name of our ministry, Nothing Hidden, because the truth is a lot more than not lying. It’s about not concealing, not hiding, and it’s about letting people really see who you really are. And in the dream, it was being done in the act of love. And so, the truth and love being put together. And I don’t really know exactly how to explain this except I feel like God is anointing this message so that – I did not believe that people would get as real and honest with each other in groups as they did in the privacy of a therapist’s office – you know in my office, because closed doors and legal confidentiality that I had to keep. And yet as Lori was saying, not only did people open up, but in the context of a loving, caring community who are not only loving and caring but are also trained to use the tools that we use to help each other, we find that people are opening up and healing. I can’t tell you how many people have confessed adultery for the first time in one of our workshops and worked through it, and then also had tools to work through it. One of the main principles is helping people become truthful in a loving way with each other.
LORI: And I would just add to that – the fact that we were making love out in the open, the Lord was requiring something of us. He wanted vulnerability; He wanted transparency. He really wanted nothing hidden. And He was asking – we didn’t know that back then, but He was asking that of us, even to the point where we share things very deeply, even about our sexual relationship. Which I never thought I would be doing that, but that’s exactly – it’s not only that, but it’s the struggles that we go through; it’s the things – you know, we’ll be teaching on a Sunday morning, teaching our Love After Marriage class, and we’ll have just had this big fight. And Barry will go, “Oh,” he goes, “we’re going to – the Lord wants us to share this. We need to share this with everybody.” And I’m going, “Oh, that’s so embarrassing! I don’t want to do that.” But when we started answering His call to be transparent and open and honest, He imparted that to the whole room where people were – you know, people who had been involved in prostitution or just horrendous things that we’ve heard, that would never have been shared in the body of Christ. But because they’re – and we started out with, you know, this whole thing of asking the Lord Jesus, “What do You want to say to us and what do You want to show us about our marriage?” We start with that, brand-new, before we do anything. We don’t talk about hearing God’s voice; the Holy Spirit just shows up, and He talks to people that have never even done anything of this nature, that are more evangelical. I’m from an evangelical background. But He just brings His Spirit in, and He releases the transparency and vulnerability in such a way that –
I’ll give you a quick, quick little example of what happens in the groups when people start – they get on the spiritual conveyor belt, and they’re following all these things that the Lord told us in the dream. There were four couples in this group, and four women all shared. The first woman shared her story. And we have them share spiritual journeys at the beginning; each couple does this, and then they get prayed for. And this lady came with an ugly secret that she’d never even told her husband. She had been sexually abused when she was young, and then a couple years later, she sexually abused one of her siblings. And we have a rule – you only share what Holy Spirit tells you to share, and you do what He tells you to do; that’s what this whole thing is based on. So, she did that, and she shared that. And the women in the group were all just weeping, and she thought, “Oh my gosh, maybe I shouldn’t have shared that. That was – ” you know, because that took a lot for her. She had kept that hidden; her husband didn’t even know about that. It had affected her with her children; she couldn’t fully give herself and be affectionate because she thought of herself as a child molester and a second-class Christian, you know? So, she shares it.
The next lunchtime, another couple – it’s their turn to share, and that woman shares the exact same story. The next dinner time, the third couple shares, and that woman shared the exact same story. And the fourth woman did so – both getting sexually abused and then turning around and sexually abusing, which is so much what happens many times – people that have been abused, they become abusers. Well, in that workshop, as they all worked through that, the Lord had prepared this. These people came from all over the world; there was no way we could have known to put them in this group, but Holy Spirit did. And they were in a place of freedom and safety as they realized, “Oh my gosh, I have felt like a leper my whole life, and there’s three other women here that are going through this.” And three women got healed that week; three marriages got healed. If you think of the ramifications – when you marry, and you have a secret like that, you are not free to fully give and receive from your husband. Three marriages got healed; three families, three mothers were able to fully welcome their children in. Three bloodlines got changed.
CATHY: Wow.
LORI: And that’s just a little example of what the Holy Spirit does when He puts people together, and they’re ready to follow His lead.
CATHY: I wanted to address a couple things that you said. One was the part about healing happening a community. And we have talked about that many times, that it’s so important that there’s a community around. And in fact, I – just briefly, for those who have already heard I don’t need to share, but I was trained in healing rooms in North Carolina. And we practiced kind of all the inner healing models at that time that were available, but we practice on each other. And that was the main theme that would come out. We weren’t just ministering to people coming in; it was like – then, on off weeks, we would sit and minister with each other and take turns so everyone got to hear each other’s stuff. And that whole thing of healing happens within community was really ingrained in me as we just can’t do it alone. And I love what you said, you know, “I shared something really vulnerable painful, and you have a look of love and acceptance.” And that really is about – we were talking earlier, Dr. Jim Wilder, the definition of joy – knowing someone’s happy to be with you, not just an, “Oh, I haven’t seen my friend for a long time,” but, “You just shared the worst thing of your entire life, and yet I’m looking at you with love.” And that’s attunement, and that’s learning to see Jesus that way, too – that His face is still turned toward me, and there’s no shame. And that is so healing, having someone look at you with love and acceptance when you’ve just told them the most – what you thought was horribly shameful. And those two things are so key to healing. And this ties into my question. Why do you – and about vulnerability and transparency. Why in the Church has that not been taught? I mean it’s – and why has it been that, you know, these ladies that you were just talking about, it took them thirty years or twenty years? And that seems to be a common thing. We were ministering in Scotland several years ago, and this lady in her sixties – we were doing one-on-one ministry with her, and she said – she told us, “This is the first time I’m telling you this. I was sexually abused.” And it had been her whole entire life. What are we doing wrong in the Church, or what – maybe not to be negative about it, but why has it not been okay to be vulnerable and transparent? And I don’t even just mean, “I have this horrible background,” but just being real, like, “I just had a fight with my husband. I just had a fight with my kid, and I am so mad!” You know, and it’s like we’re not allowed to do that. Why? Why do you think that is?
BARRY: I think a couple things. One is – I think the Church, we’ve become more institutionalized, and we’re a program almost, a Sunday morning kind of thing. You go to church, and you go through a service. And pastors have not really been equipped well. They have not – they don’t know what to do. They are taught the Bible; they give what they have, what they know how to do. They have been taught for a long time. I’m talking generally here. And so, they tell people what they are supposed to be doing – what is true, what is right – and they have not learned how to really help people on a deep level. That’s why there’s been so much of a move towards psychology over the years. People go because psychologists have at least learned how to ask questions to help people go deeper. Even though in my experience as a professional therapist and from what I know of the field, it kind of falls short when it comes to the actual healing. It’s great for opening up people, for releasing emotion and empathizing and that kind of thing. And there can be and there is healing in that, but the real deep healing for the real deep wounds – really, we have a spiritual power from the Lord, the presence of Holy Spirit, to heal those wounds. And that hasn’t been taught in seminaries very much, I don’t think, so they’ve missed out.
LORI: I think as leaders, there is a lie, and it’s an old wineskin. But it says you have to have it all together; you have to have all your ducks in a row. You cannot be vulnerable; you can’t let them see the dark side of your life, or you will not be respected. And so, we come into leading with this lie that we have to be perfect and have it all together.
BARRY: We’ve actually heard pastors say – when they come to one of our workshops and hear it’s called Nothing Hidden, they said, “I was taught to hide everything in seminary.” So that’s a reality out there.
LORI: You know, we have a team of people that is working with us that we’ve trained. And they go around, and they do these workshops like we do. And almost every one of our top leaders that are doing this so amazingly and with such anointing and strength and power have had horrible backgrounds, have had horrible marriages, and they have pressed through. They have used the tools. It’s become a lifestyle, and they are so connected with Holy Spirit. And you know, we’ve said we would much rather have people like them that have not had it all together but are now walking with Holy Spirit, and He’s bringing their lives together, and they’re dependent on Him, and it’s changing their families, it’s changing everything about them, rather than somebody who comes from an old school of, “Well, we’ve been trained in this, and we know how to do this. And we don’t really – ” We don’t let anybody do our ministry unless they’ve been through our five-day workshop. That’s the boot camp. That’s the training because it’s not something that is so much taught, but it’s caught. As you step into that role with Holy Spirit in community, there’s stuff that goes on that we could never do. We are blown away by what is going on in the small groups, and it has just been –
So, I think Holy Spirit gives you a perspective on what is okay and what is not. And so, we start out by telling our leaders, “You know, we’ve chosen you guys to be leaders because Holy Spirit wanted you to.” And some people are going, “Well, I’ve never been a leader before.” We’re not choosing you because you have it all together or because you’ve even been trained. We’re choosing your ability to hear Holy Spirit and be open and vulnerable because you’re going to get a lot, and you’re also going to model to everybody else in your group. And it’s going to be safe, and they are going to start being truthful and vulnerable. We have people all the time say, “I’ve shared things that I swore I would take to my grave.”
CATHY: Yeah.
LORI: We have that happen all the time. Or they say, “I have never felt love like this. I’ve never been loved like this as I am in my small group.”
CATHY: There’s so much power in what you’re saying, to be loved and accepted without anybody being distracted by your behavior but seeing who you truly are. Because I – if you go back to episode 3 and hear my story – because I come from that where [I had a] major crash and burn in my own life, and God put me in a community that loved me back to life and never got hung up on that. And I was just thinking – I don’t remember who it was, some female classic rock-and-roll artist, the line in the song is, “Freedom is having nothing left to lose.” And when you have the façade – I remember the pastor of the church that God moved me to sat down. I was married for sixteen years; the marriage fell apart. I screwed up; it was like a mess.
And my husband and I were invited to both walk a healing journey, and this new church was wanting both of us. And I remember very specifically Terry Cantrell – we interviewed him a few episodes back – and he said to my now ex-husband, “She is naked and bare; there is no façade. She is not hidden any longer. And if you will stick it out, then you’re going to have the wife of your dreams, because she’s prepared for the greatest healing she’ll ever know.” Because we all hide behind that. We are all conditioned to put on the mask. But when that gets torn away –and for me it was torn away quite abruptly and harshly and painfully – but if you can be in a community that loves you to life and sees beyond your behavior and wants to walk you into healing – that in itself for me, being in that community where nobody got hung up on my stuff; they got hung up on who I was created to be, and they called it out of me. What a beautiful thing. So that piece of vulnerability in the sense of community and a judgment-free zone where you are just loving who the person is designed to be, that’s healing; that screams healing right there. Those conditions are prime.
BARRY: That makes me think of another issue. I think some of us in the Church are taught that it’s a very Godly thing to just point out other people’s faults. And I think that’s an honest belief that it’s a good thing to do, and that’s what’ll change people. And there probably is a time for that when a person will not look, cannot see, wouldn’t hear, that they need to hear something strong. Jesus ended up doing that in Matthew 23 after several years of being patient, relatively patient, with the Pharisees and stuff; He really called them on the carpet. But that isn’t – especially when a person – another important distinction is, a person who’s running away and not wanting healing that may need a confrontation to even like – kind of like in AA where they need some sort of intervention to stop a person from really destructive behavior – versus people who are looking for help, and then you start just pointing out their fault when they’re looking for help, instead of saying, “Oh, okay. God wants to help you, too.” You know, and join with the Lord and in that healing process.
LORI: So this thing about being in community is paramount to this ministry. He would even be counseling people, you know, and he was even doing it with Holy Spirit. And they were having dreams and visions and getting healed, but there was a component he found out – you need to be doing this with people; you need to do this in front of people. So, when people are put in the groups, that’s the only group they’re in for five days. You know, we do 60-hour workshops, and they are getting inundated with Holy Spirit. And they are learning about what – it almost repatterns you on what family is because many of us have not had good families. And then we just do a lot of different tools that bless your spirit and allow you to connect with Holy Spirit in a way. People just start feeling God’s Spirit for the first time, and they get addicted. And they’re ready to open up; they’re ready to do anything because they’re all of a sudden feeling free. They’re feeling love. They’re feeling things that they’ve never experienced before. And so, God will choose who He wants to be there, and then He’ll do what He wants to do as people are open. And so, we always say, “You can get as much as you want if you’re willing to step out and do what Holy Spirit tells you to do, and then, you know, follow through with that.”
And then we have tools that we give because, you know, all of us have been to conferences where you learn all this stuff, but you go home, and your conference book sits on the shelf. And you keep thinking, “Someday I’m going to go through that again.” This is called a workshop because we spend time – we work them. We work our people so that they learn how to do this, so that when they get home, they have a head start. And that’s where most of the healing happens, is in the small groups. It’s not with the head honchos up front; it’s with Holy Spirit and the people in the small group.
BARRY: Yeah. You really want to release people to learn to bring God’s healing presence into their home, into their marriage, with their children. Many times we don’t minister outside on the streets or with other people, which needs to be done, and it’s great. But ministering inside the home is different. And our mission statement is to lead people into spiritual, relational and sexual wholeness. And all those areas are important to God, obviously. And we start with the spiritual because that is the real foundation – the connection with God, and get the healing from Him. But we also have – and this probably comes out of my – well, I know some of it comes out of my counseling and stuff – relational tools. What do you do? How do you really work through conflict and resolve conflict? How do you reconcile when you’ve brought hurt to each other? And how do you, you know, listen well to each other? Things like that – some of those tools.
And then Lori alluded to this earlier, but she had an encounter with God regarding sexuality years ago. And when she shares that, we’ve seen so much healing in the area of sexuality and homosexuality, other things, and just so many marriages. It’s a really – as much as people start thinking sex is going to be something they just have, and it’s going to work automatically, not many couples can – well, I’ll just say, many couples cannot maintain a good spiritual connection, relational connection and the following sexual connection. Because when people – when a couple – they can be beautiful, but when you don’t like each other, it’s hard to really want to be that close. And maybe hormones will drive sexuality, but to make it an act of love, and to make it something you really want to be close is – we really believe this is something God wants for the Church, for the Church to take back the area of sexuality. I mean there’s so much controversy on this right now, so many different beliefs on the area of sexuality, that I don’t believe God has changed his ideas on it at all. And I think God wants the Church to not only talk about these things but literally have couples living out sexuality in a way that the world will say, “Oh, you have something we don’t have, and now you have what we’re really looking for.”
CATHY: I remember part of my healing journey in this new church where God placed me, you know, after divorce and on my road back into healing. God very supernaturally connected me with a couple who shared the same maiden name as me. We were not related, but we had the same maiden name. And I was invited on a hike with the wife, and then she invited me to their house for Easter. And I spent that weekend with the family, and they became family to me. And I’m telling you, these two model the most amazing marriage. And for me, not having a good model for marriage with my own parents who – I don’t know how I was conceived. I never knew them to like each other really, you know? And so, I didn’t have that modeled. And then there were things that got dragged into my marriage that kept me from having a really healthy healthy marriage there, and my own brokenness and some areas of my life that I hadn’t really dealt with. And then all hell breaks loose, and now I’m face to face with it. “Okay, let’s do the work.” And then I was on my own. But God put me in this family.
BARRY: Yeah.
LORI: Wow.
CATHY: And still to this day, they are family – to both of us now since, you know, Melinda and I’ve started working together and everything. And they are home to us in Atlanta when we’re there; we stay with them. But there’s something so amazing to see that healthy – I mean, even with the sexuality and how they relate to each other. And I mean, it’s just – it was so healing for me to see how it should be. So what you’re saying, it makes so much sense. It’s like you’re talking about these things and modeling these things. It makes all the difference in the world.
LORI: The Lord goes really deep in this whole thing of sexuality. And we don’t believe sexuality is the most important thing in marriage, but we feel it is equal to the spiritual connection and the relational connection. And I think the reason why we’ve had the most spiritual experiences and encounters and dreams and visions about sexual things is because again, the church has been afraid to even approach this subject. And so, there are things that the Lord has this go very deeply in. You know, we talk with couples, and it’s important that you go through the whole thing. We start out with the spiritual and relational; the sexual is like two and a half days or a day and a half at the end. Which it’s not as much as the other three days, but we need that time because God made us to have relationships spiritually, emotionally and sexually. And when we come together like that, and all those three things are working, we have people at the end say, “We have had the most amazing sexual experience together that we’ve ever had.” Women will say, “I’ve never – I feel like a new bride. I feel like I’m loved for the first time.” Or women who have never had an orgasm before in their whole marriage will have an orgasm. And we give a lot of instruction. We really give a lot of instruction, a lot of parameters and a lot of information to get people to a place where they have a structure around them that is safe to be able to grow in these things. And so, we have people healed on the night – we call it the Sex Challenge. But you know, men –
BARRY: This is just for the married group; we do work with singles. We don’t do this with the singles.
CATHY: Oh, yeah. Two single women over here.
LORI: We do talk very, very openly about sex. You know, the Lord showed us to do that and how to do that with singles. We don’t want to awaken love before its time. But this all just comes – as we’re in the workshop, the Lord shows us what people need. And it’s like they’re pulling this out of us, and things that we end up sharing that we would have never shared in a million years. But He helps us do it in a way. It’s almost like when I had that experience with the Lord, that was a real – that was a miracle in my life, and what God did, and how He opened me up. And when I share that, other women and men in the room will have that same experience. And we call it the power of the testimony. If God does it once, He’s going to do it again. And so, we do share a lot on the power of the testimony in every area. You know, we’re were sixty-five and sixty-seven now, and we have heard a lot of testimonies, a lot of miracles, and, you know, interacted with people and done a lot of counseling, a lot of inner healing. And we share those testimonies. And when we share it, the Lord makes that happen again with the people that are in the room. Many times, something will come up that is an issue, and we don’t know it. But the Lord is showing us, and three quarters of the room will stand up and say, “We need prayer on that.” And then He’ll do it. Then it becomes corporate; it’s not just a small group.
BARRY: I think about the area of sexuality, and I actually just kind of thought of this as Lori was talking, that obviously the secular world releases tons of freedom sexually; there’s freedom to do whatever you want. It’s not the freedom that comes from Godly, loving, sexual connection. And I think the Church has been afraid and ashamed of sex – to talk about it, and ashamed to present it in the freedom and openness of God – God’s not ashamed of sex; He’s not ashamed of our bodies. And so, there hasn’t been – for the most part, there hasn’t been a place for Christians to learn and talk and discuss and talk together and learn about healthy, Godly sexuality as well. And I mentioned we do workshops with singles as well, and Lori tells her story. Actually it was our youngest son that, when we were writing our book, that –
LORI: He was helping us edit it.
BARRY: And he says, “You need to tell the story to the singles; they have to hear this, you know? They have to hear about the kind of attitude that God is showing you about sexuality.” And to our surprise, one of the comments we hear often is singles saying, “Oh, now I know why I would want to wait for marriage to have my sexual relationship.” You know, we’re in a – my generation grew up kind of like, we heard the rules, and it was like, “Okay, the rules are the rules, and they’re probably good. And we’re – ” I mean, not everybody followed them, but it’s different now where younger people really need an explanation, and they want some understanding behind why, the question, “Why?” And some of that’s really good, and some of it, sometimes it’s not. But that question seems to be getting answered. And these are some things that surprised us. The Lord has done so much more than we could have ever imagined when we started this, even through the community that we’re experiencing. It’s like, “Whoa, God! We had no idea what You were going to do by putting people in community, letting them share open and vulnerably, and learn how to pray for each other and bring healing to each other, or to talk openly about sexuality – the kind of healing You were going to bring through that.”
It reminds me of a story. One of the first times we did a marriage workshop, we were actually in another country, and we’re doing it in a church. And there was an older couple, I would guess in their sixties or so, married thirty-one years. And so, we taught the first day on this lesson on Nothing Hidden. And at the end of it, the pastor who was translating for me asked – he goes, “Oh – ” we were in Switzerland, and he said, “Oh, Swiss people aren’t like that.” And we found out everywhere, every country is like this.
LORI: “They’re not open,” he said.
BARRY: It’s a condition of humanity, really. And he says, “Swiss people aren’t really like this. They’re private. They don’t share their stuff, and they hide it.” And I said, “Well, you know what? This is God’s idea, not mine. So, we’ll see what He does with it.” And the next day, this lady asked to give a testimony – this lady that had been probably in her early sixties. And she says she and her husband went home that night, and they talked and shared things that they had never discussed with each other in their thirty-one years of marriage. And she said, “One of the things I shared with my husband was that I was sexually abused when I was a little girl.” And this is her testimony. She said, “We made love last night, and it was the first time in my life that sex was a beautiful thing. It was a loving thing. I didn’t feel dirty. I didn’t feel ashamed.” And I thought, “What a miracle.” I mean, I know what it’s like to spend years trying to work through sexual abuse with a person – with a woman and with men as well. And here in one night, God turned that around. I wish everyone could be healed that way. But to me the miracle was that God turned around and – let’s say forty, fifty years of her life, she lived with this shame, with this guilt over her body, over sexuality, that did not come from God; it came from the enemy. It came from perverse sexuality she was introduced to. And for thirty-one years of marriage, she was robbed of being able to really love her husband physically and experience his love through sexuality. And the miracle is, in a night, God turned that around for her.
CATHY: Wow. We’re kind of wrapping up here, but I would love to give you an opportunity to just kind of share some of your resources with our audience and how to get ahold of them, and maybe how to be connected to your ministry, and maybe about attending one of these phenomenal workshops. I’m thinking, “Oh, I wish I had this, you know, years ago.” But would you just take a moment and share just what you have available and how our audience can get ahold of that?
BARRY: Sure. We’re not very good at this actually; our staff has to do this for us, but we’ll try.
LORI: You know, I will say this, that we have a Single Life Workshop that does the same thing for the singles as the married one does for the marrieds. And it prepares you for marriage, and it helps you get rid of the things in your life that steal intimacy from you or experiences that you’ve had that were wrong perceptions. And the Holy Spirit just kind of cleans you up. And so, we have that. And we just put men and women in a small group, and that becomes your family. And it is safe for them just like it is for the married people. And Holy Spirit does the same things and requires, you know, “Let Me lead you in this, and I want to take you where I want you to go.” And so, we have people say the same testimonies. “I’ve never felt love like this.” “I’ve never been this open.” And people get – we didn’t say this, but people get healed of major strongholds that they’ve been in counseling for years, or gone through all kinds of inner healing, or read all kinds of books, or gone to every conference. You know, the Lord does that with everybody, but He will do that with them.
BARRRY: Okay. She loves to tell testimonies. I’m going to try – I actually wrote down a few things here to give some resources. So the first thing really is our website, nothinghidden.com. And if you look on there, you’ll find everything. And I can remember to tell you, but we also wrote a book Love After Marriage. And it’s designed for a couple to go through and actually take them through the experience of a workshop as a couple. Some people won’t come to a workshop, and even our name, Nothing Hidden, scares a lot of people. But some people are willing to do it just together as a couple.
LORI: But people have even gotten healed by doing the book.
BARRY: It’s true.
LORI: But it does make them want to come to the workshop and get more.
BARRY: So our workshops – Love After Marriage and then Single Life Workshop – and then we also do Spirit Connection Training which is our inner healing training. And that’s just a three-day training where we talk about the tools, and people practice them with each other in a small group.
LORI: And in our workshops, we have people come up in front. The Lord told us this when He gave us that download – “I want you to do this up in front of the whole room.” And you know, as a counselor and as inner healers, we thought, “We’re going to get thrown in jail or something.” But what we found – what happens is, there’s so much anointing there for them because the Lord knows the cost of that. And then the whole room turns into intercession on their behalf, and they get tremendous breakthrough. And the Lord picks those people because then He knows – all the other people in the room that had that same problem, they pray through the same prayers, and they get the same breakthroughs.
BARRY: Yeah. We have several eCourses – our Love After Marriage and Single Life, Spirit Connection Training, and we just released – it’s not free now, but we release it for free during the COVID thing. It’s called Family Time – releasing a lot of the same principles and teachings for –
LORI: Same tools for families.
BARRY: For families, parents and children together to be talking and working through things. One real quick testimony from a couple – the lady emailed us, and she said she did [the Family Time eCourse] with her two teenage sons and their girlfriends.
LORI: She and her husband.
BARRY: She and her husband together watched the video. And it’s like a maybe twenty-minute video and then a couple hours of activities for them to do as a family afterwards. And the husband and wife said, “Okay, we’re not going to go deep.” I’m not sure if they said that for their sons, “You don’t have to worry about going deep.” But she said, “We went deep. And we laughed together, and we cried together. And we got so connected together, and we’re all looking forward to going on.” And so, that’s our desire. Again, it’s the spiritual, relational and sexual wholeness.
LORI: Or parents that say they can hardly wait to do the next session because their little four-year-old had such an encounter with Jesus, and they can hardly wait to see what Jesus is going to tell them on the next one. So, it’s for all ages. Our Single Life is for ages eighteen to eighty-one. We’ve had a lady who was eighty-one. Because, you know, singles are the largest people group. And it’s divorced, it’s single parents, never dated at all, or – you know, it’s just for all ages.
BARRY: By the way, the testimony of that woman that was eighty-one years old – it happened to be in Germany. She said, “These were the best four days in my life.” At eight-one years old. We also are on Facebook, Nothing Hidden Ministries.
CATHY: Awesome. Yeah, we have a guest resources page, so we’ll put a little brief bio with you guys, and people can go to that page on our website as well under the podcast tab. But man, what an amazing time.
MELINDA: Yeah, thank you. Just for our audience, we only heard about these guys last night, and just a quick turnaround. So thank you for your willingness and saying yes. And it seems like God wants to get the word out about this. That’s why we’ve gotten yeses. It’s really – from big names and little names and every name in between, is that He just wants His church healed. And so, it’s always an honor to meet people that are –
CATHY: Isaiah 61, man.
MELINDA: We’re just all linking arms in this. And you know, we all have different gifts and callings and different ways that we’re seeing God’s kingdom advance and Him bringing His healing. But I mean, we need all of these types of ministries. I don’t think we’ve talked about sex before; let’s just be real. I’m like, “Okay, audience, this is good, you know, and let’s be real.” So, thank you guys so much. It’s really delightful, refreshing to hear your story, what you’re doing. I’m sure we could, you know, listen and ask a lot more questions, but for time’s sake, just thank you very much for the honor of your time.
LORI: Thank you for having us.
BARRY: Thank you. It’s our privilege.
LORI: We loved being with you.
MELINDA: Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Drop a comment or two and let us know what you thought. And we do have – as of this moment, on June 16, 2020, we have a couple more spots for our ladies’ retreat weekend, Dash Away Weekend in Lake Tahoe.
CATHY: Yeah. We almost didn’t have it, but we are definitely having it. In light of some adjustments – we’re in a little bit smaller venue, and so our capacity was shrunk down to thirty participants instead of forty. And so, right now we only have a handful of spots open. So, if you’re interested, go check out dashawayweekends.com. We also have some other resources for you that we’ve been working really hard on, and they’re going to be ready in the next week or so. So, be watching; we’ll let you know about what’s happening next week as well. So, thank you guys for being part of the podcast, and we will be back with more content.
MELINDA: We look forward to hearing from you.
CATHY: See you.
MELINDA: See you later.
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MELINDA: Thank you so much for listening.