Does God provide second chances? Is there “new life” possible after the tragedy of divorce? We can testify that there is!
Melissa: I’ve lived in Oklahoma most of my life and have been at the same church for well over a decade. I have served in various roles including teaching a citizenship class, and being a member of a small group. I am an attorney with a local Christian non-profit (www.trinitylegal.org) that provides legal services to the poor. My first marriage was to an unbeliever, who ended up abusing drugs, which combined with infidelity ended our marriage of 9 years in 2011.
Jason: I moved here to Edmond from Texas when Melissa and I got married in December of 2021. I experienced incredible loneliness during my 20 year marriage, which abruptly ended when my wife filed for divorce in 2016.
Our Story Together:
Our experiences with marriage and subsequent divorce were extremely painful. After a season of healing, we were both determined to learn from the pain of our past and NOT to make the same mistakes again, if the Lord gave us another chance.
How we met:
We saw the hand of the Lord at work from the beginning – just the fact that we actually found one another online was a stretch. I (Jason) was arguing with God because I wanted to meet someone at church, not online. Besides that, my eHarmony settings were set to only view potential matches in the greater San Antonio area where I lived. Despite Jason’s “plan” – God clearly knew what He was doing. He used our physical distance to help us really focus on getting to know each other emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, since we were unable to be together physically during that first phase. Melissa’s skills of discernment and analysis, honed after years of practice as a lawyer, were put to good use – making sure we talked about everything good and bad in our past. We took multiple Christian “compatibility” assessments and were led through pre-marital counseling by a pastor of Melissa’s church. Our sessions included walking us through the book “What did you expect” by Paul David Tripp, which we highly recommend.
Since Getting Married
After getting married, both of us were determined to not just “coast” in our marriage relationship, but to make sure we were continually investing and learning to love one another better. Our church announced they were holding a marriage class led by a counselor and his wife named “Called 2 Love” and we were excited to jump in with both feet! The class was excellent, and another resource we highly recommend. The married couple were wise, fun, good communicators. They mad the course relatable by their transparency of the ups and downs in their relationship. The class format was great: 1) short daily devotional “homework” in our books + 2) marriage “staff meeting” – and then 3) class discussion. This combination allowed us to dig in and meditate on our own, discuss together as a couple, and also learn from others who are working through the same material.
One of the key ideas from the class that has been the most meaningful to us, is that we are called to love our spouses as our closest “neighbor” – applying both the marriage passages AND the “one another/neighbor” passages in our relationship. There is such power in the idea that God wants to partner with us, join us in the “yoke”, empowering us to be His vessel of love to our spouse!
The material helped Melissa and I to be able to more clearly articulate the particular type of emotional and spiritual support we desired from each other, and it’s often different than we expected. It has been incredibly enriching to explore our different relational needs and dig into the stories from our past, especially in our childhood, that helped to shape us into who we are today. The class has really enhanced our effectiveness at overcoming challenges in communication and taught us how to show love to one another in ways that are truly life giving to the other.
We felt the material was SO good that we have been teaching this material to our pastors and their wives in Kenya. The impact was profound. You can learn more about the impact it had on their marriages at https://gocrossway.org/couples-conference-2023/. We plan to take the class material to our Nicaragua partners as well.