Marriage, Mentoring and Messiness

Few things fill my heart like having my house full of people. It’s one reason I love Sunday nights. When Tom and I became empty nesters, we committed to mentor a group of young married couples. So for nearly three years now, our Sunday nights have been filled with food, fellowship, and Bible study with seven of the coolest young couples out there.

Even though most members of our group are 20 years younger than us, it turns out that the struggles of young marrieds haven’t changed much in the past two decades. Marriage was, and is, hard. It is often not what we expected it to be and is a whole lot more about being holy than we bargained for. Career decisions, finances, children, in-laws - the list of distractions and potential sources of conflict are endless.

One of the best, yet hardest parts of mentoring these couples is that it allows God to redeem some of the brokenness that Tom and I have experienced in our 24 years of marriage. See, I’d love to tell you how perfect our marriage has been, how we’ve never argued a day in our lives and how we have never let the sun set angry at one another. But I can’t. That’s not our narrative.

We were already pretty beaten up by the world when we got married - even if we didn’t realize it. At 23, I had survived some pretty unpleasant things in life, but had convinced myself they didn’t impact the adult I had become. Tom, 28, had married and divorced his high school sweetheart and watched his best friend become a quadriplegic. We also had very different backgrounds and ideas about what a “good marriage” would look like.

Broken and ill-equipped, we learned to protect our bruised places instead of allowing them to be exposed and healed. We developed patterns of communication that weren’t fruitful or God-honoring. We denied our need for help and pride kept us stuck in our destructive patterns. I know, without a doubt, that without God’s healing work in our hearts, our marriage would not have survived.

But it did and God has made (and continues to make) our crooked paths straight, which is why we are able to be open about our struggles. We trust God to use us and our shortcomings to help these young couples navigate these familiar pitfalls. We are honest about the fact that our marriage is always a work-in-progress and that we don’t have all the answers.

And you want to know the best part? These 14 people don’t judge or condemn us. They just genuinely appreciate our willingness to walk alongside them and lovingly speak truth when they ask for it. They remind me that God uses broken people - like Moses, David and even Tom and Robin May - to accomplish his purposes.

I wonder, is there an imperfect area in your life that God is calling you to use for His glory? If so, let me encourage you to walk boldly into that calling, trusting Him with it all - even the hard parts.