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I want to have another couple
talk about this for a moment. Robert and Janette would you come up here?
I've heard both Robert...
and Janette tell this story and I'm going to ask them
to squeeze a very big story down to just a few minutes.
Ok... Go...
This probably won't be as long of a story as Jon and Esther's
love story... how they got together.
Basically Janette and I met when
I was taking Electrical at SAIT, Janette was taking Hotel and Restaurant Management,
we met at volleyball, fell in Love, got married. There's the Cole's Notes version.
After that we got married and
most people say the first year of marriage is the hardest,
because you start living together, you start figuring each other out.
For us it was great, because we didn't really see each other very often,
because she was Hotel and Restaurant Management, which meant evenings and weekends, and I'm working as an electrician
during the day. So its pretty much hallway passing, "Hey honey,
how's it going, see you later," but our second year of marriage
we adjusted Janette's schedule. We thought it would be best.
Then we started seeing a lot more of each other, and started trying to figure each other out.
Definitely...
We started to learn about each other, and that's where
our personalities started to come out, and we could just
tell that there were some things that we needed to work on, and that's what we started doing.
We just started working on it every which way we could. We tried this,
we tried different devotionals that are supposed to
bring us closer, and I think those devotionals just got us further apart.
"Ok well you have to find out this about this person, and
they gotta discuss... ok you're stubborn and I'm stubborn, and this is my button,
and this is your button, and you have to protect my button, and I don't push your button,
and then you're sitting there thinking... Hey you're pushing my button!"
We went through all sorts of stuff like that.
It just got worse, and worse, and to be quite honest if it wasn't for
the grace of God, then I don't even know if we would be together today.
That's just telling the truth of where it was at, because we just got to that point where
we tried everything. We read every book we could. We
tried everything. I'll let Janette take the story from here.
Well we got to the point where we just didn't know what to do,
but we made a promise before God to stay together so
we were kind of just together, but fighting every
day pretty much. It was a really hard time in our lives.
I don't remember the exact sequence of events but through this whole process
we started attending a church in Airdrie, and we met
Paul and Kathleen Humphreys. They were attending our church at the time, and Paul really took
Rob under his wing. He really
saw something in him. I'm not sure why but...
We are sure thankful for it.
I don't mean it like that...but...
So anyway...
Paul got Rob to attend a "Stranger" seminar at our church.
I just couldn't take the time of work.
Really I probably could of if I really tried, but it just wasn't a priority.
Rob went through this seminar and
he was so excited when he was done. He kept telling me
"You have to do this! It's so exciting!"
I was like, "Yeah sure, I've been a Christian my whole life. I probably know it all."
Soon after that seminar things started changing in Rob.
It wasn't like a magic change
or anything, but things just slowly started changing.
He stopped focusing so much on me and what was wrong
with me, and he was reading his Bible more, and sitting there highlighting
different passages in the Bible, and he was trying to get me
involved in this too, but I was kind of stubborn at the time.
I think it was probably about a year before I actually went through...
Before I actually got the time of work to go through the seminar, but
I just remember...
It was like a two by four hit me in the forehead after going through that.
I had know idea... I had believed... I had been a Christian
since I was really young, but never truly understood.
At that point I just...
I had been a Christian for so long. I felt stupid asking those questions like, "Really?
Why did Jesus really have to die?" You know? I finally understood,
and there's power in understanding.
Like everyone here says. It's just so true.
For us then... finally we were on the same page.
We could start working together. It was from that point
forward that God just really started working a
miracle in our lives, in our marriage.
The funny part is, is that, after we
took this study, and we just started focusing on the Lord's
word, I got excited. I was like, "I can do this. I can share
the reason why I believe what I believe."
All these things, all these issues in our marriage;
we can honestly say we don't know what happened
to them. They just disappeared.
We tried everything. We tried this. We tried that.
It was like a giant loop tape, you fix this and another one would
come up, and we fix that, and this would come back,
and it went away. It's not that everything went perfect after that.
It's not that we were all joyous walking through fields and holding hands
and skipping along, but, you know what?
The issues weren't important anymore.
What was important was serving the Lord.
Somehow, some way, the Lord just put us back together,
and that's what was important.
If you would have told me at this time that... "Guess what? You guy's are going to be involved
in helping other couples, other relationships get back together and help them."
I would have said, "you're crazy!" And what's happened now is that I would say that.
We have had chances to teach Sunday school, and youth groups, and
that kind of group thing, but the individual relationships
that Janette and I are most involved with is other couples.
And their relationships, and they come to us with issues, and they've
their doing the same thing, saying this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and they are pointing back and forth
and we just go right to the principles. We say, "you know what? I can't
fix your issues, but let's talk about some principles.
Let's talk about who we are and about how we are made, and let's go into that." Then we go through the study
together with these couples, and then that's where
all of a sudden the issues just slowly fade away. Just like that hymn that we sung this morning.
The worries of this world go strangely dim...
As we fix our eyes on Jesus. I can honestly say that as we,
you know the triangle, all these analogies that we come up with. Just fix our eyes on Jesus
and that's the thing that really solved our
marriage, and that's been the tool that we have been able to use
in helping other marriages and relationships.