Born in the Middle of My Miracle -

Now, things are wonderful!! Thank you Jesus!!

If you’d like to read the full story, here it is –

When my husband and I met, God was not a part of my life, and hadn’t been for a long time. I’d spent years angry with him for allowing things to happen, and I had recently gone through a “situation” within my family that broke me. I was working really hard to put myself back together.

That’s when we met.

He was full of light. I’d never met anyone so full of light, and I was drawn to it like a moth. And when we got together, he brought Jesus with him.

As the spiritual leader of our home, he prayed diligently for discernment for both of us, and I followed his lead when it came to church and worship. In July of 2025, we both started attending King James Bible College online, and I’m so proud to say he has since completed both his Bachelor’s and his Master’s in Biblical Studies.

We tried a number of churches but never quite found a home, and ended up watching church on YouTube. My husband noticed no one seemed to be preaching on hell anymore, so he went looking for preachers who did.

And that’s where things started to go wrong.

His heart was in the right place. He wanted so badly to lead our home well and to know God’s Word. But he fell in under the wrong ones, a few preachers who used the Bible to judge and condemn instead of to love. Remember that discernment he prayed for? Well, I got a good dose of it. From the beginning, something didn’t feel safe to me. You know that feeling when someone isn’t being genuine? When they’re performing?

Before long, those preachers were playing in our home nearly all day, every day. And little by little, the man I loved started to sound like them. I truly believe he was being brainwashed.

I tried to explain what I was seeing and how it was affecting our home, our marriage, and each of us. But it only got worse.

And worse.

And worse.

Eventually, our relationship broke. We’d become isolated in our town, and then isolated from each other inside our own home. We couldn’t talk without arguing. I was angry all the time because home didn’t feel safe anymore.

His light had gone out. And I was begging God, night after night on our porch, to do something. Anything.

This summer, a friend of my husband’s who checked in on him every now and then asked if he’d like to serve at an upcoming Christian men’s retreat. He’d signed up the year before but pulled out after those same preachers tore the retreat apart. Thankfully, his friend didn’t give up on him. He didn’t harp. He just asked again.

I could see my husband hem-hawing about it, but something told me he should go.

“Do you think I should?”

“Yes.”

At his first meeting, he reconnected with men he knew and was given a job. I was out running errands when he called and asked me to meet them in town for lunch.

Ugggh. Groceries in the truck, pulling up to the gate, blah blah blah.

“I really want you here.”

So I put the groceries away and went. And I have to say this – God has such a way of doing things. For so long I’d felt nearly abandoned by him, but what began that day at lunch led to amazing changes in our lives.

His friend asked me, again, if I’d go through the women’s retreat. He’d been asking for a year and a half, and I’d had a year and a half of excuses. This time he called me out on them, and when I paused, he asked if I had any more.

Before we left the restaurant, I’d decided to go. He called to check for openings. There was one spot left.

A week and a half later, my husband served at the men’s retreat. He went to be a blessing, and he came home blessed. He was lit up again, beaming, overflowing with joy.

While he was there, he talked with three preachers about what had been happening in our home. They saw the same things I’d been seeing.

And he humbled himself and apologized. He told me he saw it now, all of it, and the division it had caused. And he said he wanted us to get involved in a church in our own community.

I felt hope. For the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my whole life.

I was due to leave for the women’s retreat the following week, and those 4 days in between were some of the hardest we’ve ever had. There were moments I wasn’t sure either of us would make it through. The day I left, I was sitting on his lap on the porch, crying, inconsolable. He told me I needed to go.

Then he told me he needed me to go.

So I did.

When I got there, I was just trying to make it through the welcome meeting without crawling out of my skin or hitchhiking home. I didn’t trust preachers. If I’m honest, I didn’t trust Christians much at all anymore.

The next day, I found out the word for the whole weekend.

Hope.

Hmmm, ok.

More and more of those “coincidences” kept happening. And on the last morning, I woke up full of peace and joy, two things I’m not sure I’d ever really felt before. That morning, I knew what joy felt like. I knew what peace felt like.

When my husband came to pick me up, he saw me before I saw him, and he could tell I’d been changed. We sang a few songs, and I threw my hand up to worship the Lord, something I had never, ever done before that weekend.

Seeing me throw my hand up, singing, my husband fell apart.

Even now, thinking about this …

I believe God did that because I finally surrendered. That was the missing piece in all those midnights and early mornings on the porch, begging Him to save me.

I believe that our marriage had to get to a certain point of broken in order to be restored, and that he used the retreat as a tool do it.

Through serving, God changed my husband. Through the retreat, he changed me, by changing us both he restored our marriage and our home.

And through all of this, I figured out that all of the “yuck” was the middle of the miracle.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say that there haven’t been bumps. I believe that the Devil is coming after us harder now, with spiritual attacks wherever he can find a crack, an insecurity, etc. 

But – now we are fighting them together, instead of fighting each other.