Joe and I love our love story.
Although as we often tell our kids, we don’t recommend it! Because it’s the kind of story where it could have gone either way. The story where we knew that only a complete dependence on God could make it work. There was no, Oh just put those two together and it will be just perfect!
I’m not sure if anyone has that story, by the way. That’s what romance is all about, not knowing what the future holds but jumping in anyway.
And jump we did. Joe was my first real boyfriend. I was in high school, he wasn’t. That’s a big deal when you’re 16 and you’re dating someone who is <gasp> in his 20s! Okay, so he was just shy of 21 but still that was old. Especially to my parents 😉
Not only was he much older than me but he had more past than me. The more I got to know him, the more I learned. The broken family, the foster care, the abuse, another broken family, more abuse, more abandonment.
And then there was the stuff he didn’t always share with me: the hopelessness he felt, the fear of rejection and failure, the loss of identity from so many broken families. The feeling that surely God had forgotten him, that he was alone when it came right down to it.
This kind of story was new to me. (If you want to hear the whole story, click here to hear the full podcast!)
I had grown up with an intact family, in a Christian home, with a mom and dad who loved each other. What they call a functional family, the kind of family that is becoming more and more rare these days. So as our relationship progressed, it became very obvious that we were working from completely different paradigms. (Even though those differences were so attractive at first!)
But our love for each other grew and we both knew this was It. We ended up dating for five years, and in the end we needed those years even though the waiting was hard. We both had growing up to do. I had to finish college, and Joe had to find a career path. It didn’t always look clear or even optimistic but together we trusted God with our future and He provided in so many ways.
In 1997, we had the wedding of our dreams and jumped into marriage thinking all the hard years would be behind us.
We had many good years in the beginning, and at the time we would have said we had a great marriage. And what made our marriage truly great was our mutual faith in Jesus, and that we both wanted to truly honor the commitment we had made. That kept our bond strong. But there was still something in the way of a truly great marriage.
There was a lot more going on the behind the smiles of our great marriage. Scars and hurts from Joe’s past that were chasing him down and keeping us from finding true intimacy. Emotional walls that we couldn’t get past.
I grew up knowing I could trust people and everything would be alright. Things always worked out. While Joe still struggled with trust and feeling safe and still wondering if he was truly lovable. And life had taught him that things never work out so don’t get your hopes up. At the same time, Joe did know that he didn’t want his past to define him- but in that desire he also wanted to deny that his past was chasing him at all.
The truth was- the enemy was at the gates of our marriage and was trying to use those hurts to pull us apart.
We both wanted to be close, we both wanted to have the marriage of our dreams— but we didn’t know how to get there. But God answered our prayers in a way we couldn’t have planned, as Joe shares below.
I wasn’t just running from Tara, I was running from a lot of pain from my past. I had convinced myself and Tara that I was all better. Several years into our marriage, in a desire to find some answers about my past, I had visited some places where some of my darkest and most traumatic abuse had occurred. I thought I would be okay, because you know, I’m healed and I’d be fine. But those experiences opened up some wounds and hurts that was almost too much for me to handle and it became one of the roughest years of my life.
It was a very very dark time for me. I couldn’t keep up the facade. Up to that point in our marriage I had convinced myself that I was healed, and liked to put on a shiny front, Look what God has done! But I was burying immense amount of pain and I found myself in a place where it wouldn’t stay buried any longer and that I had to give it to God. And I had to let my wife in.
God revealed to me in that season I would not have a greater capacity to love unless I was willing to trust Him and be truly vulnerable. God had to knock down my house of cards and expose the truth. There was so much pain to be dealt with. I couldn’t be close to Tara or find the joy I was looking for without first working through the hurts of my childhood and finding true healing.
If we wanted to find the healing and intimacy we longed for, we had to hold on tight and stick together. I had to learn to truly love Joe and lean into Jesus in ways I hadn’t before. And to understand that my love alone in the end wasn’t enough. It wasn’t something either of us could just fix on our own. But as we trusted God over those years, He came through for us, giving us both the grace we needed.
Looking back we can see how that season was the turning point in our marriage. Little by little we saw Joe’s walls come down. We started to put words to our feelings. That may sound pretty elementary, but for us it opened up our communication and helped us to see the roots beneath our conflicts and disconnection.
As much as most of our struggles stemmed from Joe’s past, we also had to find balance in our relationship. Our marital problems were not just about his issues. It was my issues too. For a while there it was easy to point to Joe’s past as the culprit in everything, but the truth was the problem also lay within ourselves and our own sinfulness. Even though we have different pasts, we both have hurts and failures. We both are sinners in need of a Savior. And when we recognize the level of grace and forgiveness we have received, how much more we can extend that same grace in our marriage. Amazing!
Know what the best part of our story is? It’s not over! As we’ve stayed connected to God and each other, we become aware of all the ways still need to grow. All the ways we both can love better. God is doing something new all the time!
Thank you for coming on this journey with us!
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you iwill bring it to completion at jthe day of Jesus Christ. Phillipians 1:6
