“On our first date we said, ‘on the count of three, say how many kids you want,’ and we both said seven!” shares Katie Walters, reflecting upon her relationship with her husband, Josh, a pastor at Seacoast Church.
After 22 years of marriage, seven children, and 16 home renovations, the couple looks forward to sharing their book, “New Marriage, Same Couple” with the world on Jan. 9, an endeavor that grew from a place of brokenness.
Katie and Josh Walters are pictured with their seven children. The parents recently wrote a book called "New Marriage, Same Couple."
“We started out like most couples do,” explains Katie. “We started to burn up any of our margin and our capacity early on. We both got our master’s in counseling, we had two little kids at the time, and Josh had started working with a church out in Columbia. Josh would have called it ‘normal adulting,’ but we started to have this emotional drift.”
That drift ultimately led to an emotional affair. “I thought I wanted to leave our life, our family,” she discloses. “We went through a time of brokenness, but it was the greatest thing that happened to us in our marriage and our ministry. There’s no pretense, no saving face, just a humble and broken willingness to do anything to save the marriage.”
Josh held a vision for their marriage, even through the pain, and encouraged Katie to go to a deeper place of love in their relationship. “God started to heal our trust and our connection over the course of a year, and then we saw him start to restore powerful emotions for me,” Katie shares.
Together, they decided to embrace the idea of “10 to 2.” “Our marriage is a 10 compared to the kids, family, job, etc. at a 2,” she describes. “We really try to put marriage first. Over time, we learned principles to make this covenant the marriage of our dreams.”
“New Marriage, Same Couple,” embraces the idea that everyone deserves a second chance at a fulfilling marriage – with the same person. “We talk early on in the book that it takes two people to have an incredible marriage,” Katie says. “There’s times when that’s not the case, there are times when people long to never get divorced and they find themselves there. It’s not at all a condemning book against divorce, but it's an encouragement that there’s this fracture in our culture against endurance. We don’t know how to stay faithful to anything anymore – most people don’t stay in a job, city, or church for many years. We haven’t worked this muscle in having to endure hard things.”
While every couple faces hard times over the course of their marriage, many couples who stay together learn to embrace new versions of their relationship, over and over again. Katie emphasizes that starting over with a new person might seem easier at first, but “if you don’t heal through past trauma or wounds, you’re just taking it with you. This call to endurance is an incredible path to self-care. It helps you to face those things,” she says.
The book dives deep into four main principles, organized by the acronym, STAY.
Start with you: When one person changes, the entire relationship changes.
Take quitting off the table: bring your whole self to the solution.
Allow others to be a part of your journey.
Yield to vision: Look past what is, and imagine what could be.
Josh and Katie Walters are the authors of the book "New Marriage, Same Couple."
“In parenting we are more open to getting advice – what has worked for others, what’s the best of what people are using, etc. Somehow we wake up in marriage and think we’re supposed to have the answers, that we should be able to figure it out or there’s a problem with our love if we don’t know how to grow into new places,” Katie says.
Together, Katie and Josh have found a routine for connecting in the midst of busy seasons of parenting. It involves three key steps:
- Daily dialogue
- Date night weekly
- Depart quarterly
“In those years with the littles, it's the most important time to remember you were lovers first, you were girlfriend and boyfriend first,” says Katie. “Now that we have seven kids, and two of our oldest girls are leaving the house, we have a 3-year-old still and it seems like we’ll always have children in the home, but we won’t. The best thing we can do is show our children a loving marriage, pour into them from a place of overflow and not of lack.”
Katie and Josh hope that readers will choose 2024 as the year of the best marriage they’ve ever had, and that their story would bring hope to busy parents in difficult seasons of marriage. “One of the greatest gifts you could give to your children is a strong and healthy marriage, and that can be possible with the same person,” encourages Katie.
Visit joshandkatiewalters.com to pre-order a copy of the book "New Marriage, Same Couple.”
