The War Within: Finding Hope After Trauma

What happens when war follows you home? When the training that kept you alive in combat becomes the very thing destroying your marriage? Justin and Jen's story peels back the layers of military trauma, revealing the raw aftermath of Justin's deployment to Iraq—where suicide bombers, mass casualties, and daily firefights rewired his brain for a battle that wouldn't end when he returned home.

"Your body comes home long before your mind does," Justin explains, capturing the essence of PTSD that military families understand all too well. His nervous system remained locked in Ramadi long after his boots touched American soil. Hypervigilance, emotional numbness, and rage replaced the connection and intimacy their marriage once knew. The drinking escalated. Walls in their home bore witness to outbursts. Eventually, an affair and divorce papers threatened to end everything.

But what makes this story different isn't the brokenness—it's what happened in the space between destruction and redemption. Jen doesn't portray herself as a saint with perfect, peaceful responses. Instead, she reveals her angry, tear-soaked prayers for vengeance and justice. Yet in that painful separation, God worked in ways neither could have anticipated.

"I was praying for a hit job on my husband," Jen admits, "while God was redeeming his soul." This raw confession leafs us to how healing often begins not when our circumstances change, but when we surrender our demand to control the outcome. For anyone walking through trauma, addiction, betrayal, or the slow erosion of connection—this conversation offers hope without glossing over reality.

The redemption they experienced wasn't instantaneous or perfect, but it was real. Their story reminds us that God meets us in our messiness, not despite it—and sometimes the greatest transformations happen when we stop trying to fix our pain and simply allow God to meet us there.

Subscribe and share this episode with someone fighting a silent battle. You're not alone, and neither are they.

Transcript

Welcome to Theo Psych

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to the Theo Psych Project. The fight within. This is where theology isn't soft and psychology isn't secular. Here we're going to confront trauma, identity and spiritual warfare with clinical clarity and ancient truth. No fluff, no filters, just real stories, real healing and a God who's not afraid of your pain. So head over to ReviveLococom, click the Theo Psych Project, send us your questions, share your story or pull up a chair.

Speaker 2 0:31

Hello and welcome back. This is Jen and I'm here again with Justin and just so we're clear, this isn't a highlight role. This is part two of our story. We are very real and raw and unfiltered and honest here.

Speaker 1 0:50

Yeah, honestly, if our story helps even one person feel seen or less crazy in what they're going through, then it's worth sharing.

Speaker 2 1:02

Yes, we're not here to convince you. We're not here to say that we've been through the worst of the worst or had the biggest breakthrough. We know that some of you listening have walked through sheer hell okay, maybe worse than we did and so we're not here for sympathy. We're just here just to be real. We want to show you what it looks like when two people come together and do the messy work of healing together.

Speaker 1 1:26

Yep, yeah, this is real talk. And listen, there's zero judgment from us. We've been in the mess, we've done damage and we've been in places where we're barely holding it together.

Speaker 2 1:37

Yeah, and for the ones who don't even know if they believe in God anymore, the ones who doubt right, the ones who are just exhausted, jaded and honestly don't even know if they believe in God anymore, the ones who doubt right, the ones who are just exhausted, jaded and honestly don't want to read the Bible because they don't feel like it can relate to what's going on with them. If that's you, I get it, just he gets it.

Speaker 1 1:57

I totally get that feeling that religion has nothing for you. Now I've literally been the one that's opened my Bible before and thought like this doesn't even apply to my life. This isn't speaking to what I'm going through, so if that's where you are right now, there's no shame. I've been there.

Speaker 2 2:14

Yeah, exactly, we've been here. We're holding space for you in this conversation. We've doubted whether God existed, we've doubted whether the Bible was applicable to what we were dealing with and, honestly, we learned. You know, healing doesn't start with asking what's wrong with me. It starts with asking what happened to me, which is why we're sharing our story. If you ever felt like redemption was for everyone but you, we need you to know that we felt that too.

Speaker 1 2:46

Yeah, I can remember even thinking that maybe God just didn't pick me Like you know, like the healing or the breakthrough, the second chance was stuff that he was giving to other people and not me, not my situation Yep, that's truth for sure.

Speaker 2 3:03

So we're just going to go back to where we left off in the previous episode. And really we left off, justin, you know, just drowning in the chaos, I guess, at home, and really trying to make sense of the space that you were living and what you were doing with your life. And really you had pieces of connection, like your grandfather, who really instilled that deep sense of patriotism in you. And then you found that picture of your bio dad and saw that he was also in the military. And so you set out, like I feel a lot of people do, and decided to join the military, looking for structure and identity and purpose.

Speaker 1 3:43

Yep, that's where I was at.

Speaker 2 3:46

Yeah, and when you shared the last episode about your dad being MIA and being raised by two moms and a stepdad who's literally said multiple times, don't call me dad and really stuck with that for your whole life, and then a brother-in-law, you were really close to a Marine. Someone you looked up to just completely walks away from his identity and does the transition right, and no one ever talks about it, no one processes it, no one had a safe space for you and so, yeah, that kind of probably left you thinking what's going on here, and so you leave home and you decide to serve your country and, uh, yeah, tell us about that.

Speaker 1 4:30

Yeah, so 17,. Uh, joined the army and I would completely agree with that. I was, I think I was looking for, um, my identity, um, I was looking for how and and and what it looked like to be a man. I didn't have these things growing up. So the military answered the call on some of those things and so I chose the infantry and went off to Oset. And well, that was a different level of traumatization for me. Seriously, several kids committed suicide. So many ran away or went AWOL.

Military Service and Trauma

Speaker 1 5:05

We were actually commissioned. We were told to stand watch and beat anyone who tried to leave so that we could reduce people trying to leave in the middle of the night. That's wild and it was sold as patriotism. We trusted these leaders because we were impressionable and we looked up to them, like, for example, here we are nearly three decades later and I can still remember these men clearly because they were like father figures. I think most young people joining the military look at their drill sergeants like father figures or older brothers or uncles or whatever. But we, we graduated with, I guess, around 20, 25 people and started with a class of on nearly 50 people, so about half. Wow, yeah, definitely so. In in many ways, the military did just that. It gave me meaning, structure, clarity, clear expectations, uh, and didn't expect me to be emotional and honestly taught me how to stuff even more. So congratulations. You're now emotionally repressed and really good at folding socks.

Speaker 2 6:13

Right and making beds.

Speaker 1 6:16

Yeah, and making beds. I've mentioned this previously, but you talked about fight or flight. The military teaches you to abandon everything but fight. But, seriously, the childhood trauma I carried into the military shaped how I saw the world, so I can't blame that all on the army. However, basic training is designed to rewire your brain, stripping away your individuality to create uniformity, and really it's about survival, obedience and reacting without hesitation, and for someone like me, already conditioned to suppress emotions, it reinforced those patterns. It's a great formula for combat, not so much for marriage or fatherhood.

Speaker 2 7:01

That is so true.

Speaker 1 7:03

Then came the 2006, 2007 OIF deployment. So you know we're on the other side of 9-11. And for that deployment I was in Iraq for right around 18 months, but before I had even gotten to that point I had been gone from home more months than that doing field rotations. Missing life, missing kids, missing my marriage.

Speaker 2 7:26

Yeah, that's wild. I mean, we did the math once and I think out of four years when we were in Europe, you were actually only home for like seven or eight months or so. Around that total. I mean let that sink in A few weeks here, months there, the rest, the gone, rotations, the deployments, missions that didn't pause for anniversaries, birthdays were not rare.

Speaker 2 7:49

This isn't some one in a million story, right, we're not some diamond in the rough here, we're just one versions of thousands of military couples out there surviving or not surviving. I mean I think about special forces families, and they get hit even harder. Constant movement, constant separation. And you know other military I mean six, nine, 12 months gone. You know we can start living like roommates, we can start being strangers in the same story. You love each other, right, I mean I loved you, you loved me.

Speaker 2 8:23

But it gets tired when it's always packing bags and kissing through FaceTimes, and we didn't even have cell phones back then. So you know that was rough and you know what people don't see is how it builds, right. It's the small fractures, the missed moments, the unresolved arguments that come about. They get shoved under these emotional armors that we build. You don't notice the damage right away. It's not loud, right, it's cumulative One deployment, then another or something else that separates us or desensitizes, or compartmentalizes, and then reintegration and then distance again, until one day you realize that you've built a marriage that's pretty much.

Speaker 2 9:00

It's running on survival instead of connection. And we're not telling you this again for sympathy, we're telling you because you're probably familiar with this. If you're listening to this right, maybe you've wondered why everything feels off in your own marriage, why tension won't break, why your marriage feels stuck. And I just want to say that this is the part that nobody talks about. Marriage isn't always broken by betrayal or abuse. Sometimes it's broken by absence or slow attrition, by the grind of duty and silence and time. And the truth is is just because your story feels worn down doesn't mean it's over. You don't have to give up, right, you get to start peeling back the layers, looking at the seasons, understanding where this stuff comes from.

Speaker 1 9:43

Exactly All right, so shifting gears. Where are we headed on this podcast?

Speaker 2 9:49

Oh yes, sorry, I got a little off topic there. Getting back to the deployment, though, can you kind of walk us a little bit through that? It was a tough season, right?

Speaker 1 9:58

Yeah, it was a tough deployment. I mean, while we were there we were operating at a FOB right outside of Ramadi Station there was SEAL Team 3. And we lost a ton of people. I think in my battalion alone we were well over 100 KIA for that deployment. Several mass casualties, a firefight every day, an explosion twice a week. The things you see you can't unsee, the smells you can't unsmell, sounds that follow you home. War doesn't ask for your permission. It just takes pieces of you. You don't get to choose which ones. I'll never forget. We had been on Iraq for less than 24 hours and I was on QRF or Quick Reaction Force, for this traffic control point. In this traffic control point we'd set up serpentine barriers. On each end there were sweeping teams. At the end there were gun trucks to pull security. There were sweeping teams. At the end there were gun trucks to pull security. There were sweeping teams at the end, and what we were trying to do is slow down IED-making materials coming down this main thoroughfare headed north to Ramadi.

Speaker 2 11:14

For the listeners. What's an IED?

Speaker 1 11:17

An improvised explosive device. So we're trying to slow down because, you know, rarely do you come across an entire bomb, but it does happen. We're trying to slow down because, you know, rarely do you come across an entire bomb, but it does happen. We're trying to slow down parts, right. So you look for things like, you know, an excess of washing machine timers or a plethora of deck cord or things that you can make pressure plates out of, and these things are all suspenseful. So a car pulls up to one side, drives slow, compliant, nothing suspicious, the kind of routine that you train for over and over again. He passes the first gate, he winds through the barriers and then he detonates before he gets to the, to the part where the area where they were doing searches. So he was a suicide bomber and a vehicle-borne IED.

Speaker 1 12:04

We just talked about that. And you know I would say that the explosion didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. It didn't sound like a mortar, you know, not something you'd heard in training, not claymores, something else was deaf, deafening, ringing ears. You felt it in your chest and and then, right after that, the screaming. I've never heard people scream like that in my life. It wasn't, it wasn't just pain, it was pain and terror that's heavy it was uh, it was souls breaking open and honestly it's still haunting.

Speaker 1 12:40

Bodies torn apart, limbs where they shouldn't be. The air at the site was thick with smoke and blood and burned metal and other things I don't even have a word for. But chaos doesn't move in straight lines. It crashes and in that moment I froze. What do I do? Do I pull security? Do I scan for the threats? The gun trucks already have security covered, so I just moved. I started rendering aid, holding pressure where I could, sitting with the dying. When it was over, we had to clean it up. We had to collect the pieces, match the parts to the names so their families could bury them whole, so they could go home whole. That was our job. That was the job that no one talks about. That's the parts that we don't tell we. Just you know we hold that inside and I didn't even, jen, I didn't even tell you for years and years.

Speaker 2 13:47

Yeah, not until you started going to counseling.

Speaker 1 13:49

I just kept it in my nightmares and to myself. And that was just one day, one of three mass casualty events I was a part of. Uh, there were missions, patrols, ieds, uh, the day a mortar hit so close to where we were staged for redeployment, just hours before coming home it tore through a footlocker that I still own and uh, yeah, I was doing. I was doing what any good soldier does right before he gets on a bird to come home. I was laying on my rucksack up against my footlocker and, frankly, that thing saved my life.

Speaker 2 14:28

Hearing you tell this story, I had no idea how close you were. That's crazy.

War Stories from Iraq

Speaker 1 14:35

I didn't realize that until later. But I get home, I start unpacking, I open it up and there's a hole in the side of it. You know a chunk of shrapnel and it had embedded into the box like shot through the side of the box and ended up in my stuff.

Speaker 2 14:52

The box you were laying beside.

Speaker 1 14:55

Yeah, so I was. I was leaned up just on the other side of the box and then we got on birds and came home. Yeah, I came home with no debriefing. No, you know reintegration process, so you know no one to tell me how to come home from war. They just trained us how to fight. They didn't train us how to feel when we got back.

Speaker 2 15:19

Yeah, so true. They didn't prepare the spouses either. We had zero clue what was walking through that door and certainly didn't know how to love someone or care for someone who's been mentally living in a war zone.

Speaker 1 15:35

Yeah, you're just left to deal with it. So what happens? I just brought all that back with me into our marriage, into my parenting style, um, into my habits, uh, late, late nights of drinking so I could sleep, uh, without the screaming in my head. And honestly, that's that's what you call PTSD. But here's, here's what most people don't understand call PTSD, but here's what most people don't understand PTSD isn't just about flashbacks or nightmares. It's about a brain stuck in survival mode constantly. It's irritability, it's desensitization, it's anger, it's compartmentalizing emotions and, just like you said previously, jen, it's bleeding everywhere and all over everyone. And that's exactly what I did A lot, you know, always scanning for danger, even in safe places, and never sitting with my back to the door. I'm not a big fan it wasn't and I'm still not a huge fan of big crowds Wanting to always be in control. It's the moments when you lose the ability to feel and just numb everything, which I already knew all too well, even with you and the kids.

Speaker 2 16:57

That makes so much sense, knowing what you've walked through. Yeah, and the drinking got worse. And the kids? That makes so much sense, knowing what you've walked through. Yeah, and the drinking got worse and the anger got louder and faster.

Speaker 1 17:05

Yeah, Yep, Drinking. So I drank and I drank and it helped me at least. So I thought it helped me function, until Jen was dragging me home night after night and there wasn't a room in our house that didn't have a hole in the wall somewhere. Listen, y'all, I wasn't well, I was still at war. The battlefield had just changed. On my way out of the army in late 2007, I could not. I could not tell the army because I had perceived that admittance as as weakness. The admittance that I had an issue, the admittance that I needed help. That was a weakness. So I couldn't even. You know, I could have walked away with a full PTSD diagnosis of the brokens and I could not even bring myself to be honest with the physicians that were facilitating my exit, as I ETS out of the Army.

Speaker 2 18:15

I want to just pause here for a second and say I'm so grateful you're talking about this. It's not easy and most people won't. They don't have words, you know, or maybe they've just buried it really deep, you know, and they've got spouses begging them to tell them what's going on and they're shutting down and in survival mode and not healing. And I just love that you're putting this out there and just because you've lived it and you know what it's like, you're being real and this took a long time because I begged you to tell them.

Speaker 1 18:47

And what did I say to you?

Speaker 2 18:48

You said I can't. There's no way I can't.

Speaker 1 18:52

Yeah, I think so For a long time. I don't even think I realized that I was disconnected, because the numbness feels normal when it's all you've ever known, and that that was my childhood.

Speaker 2 19:06

Right. You learned how to numb things. You learned how to separate yourself from things you care about.

Speaker 1 19:13

Yeah, and after after war, after trauma like that, uh, it's, it's really worse than people realize. Your body comes home long before your mind does.

Speaker 2 19:26

I love that you said that. Can you say that again?

Speaker 1 19:29

Yeah for sure. Your body comes home long before your mind does. You can be sitting on the couch holding your kid, eating dinner with your family, but your nervous system is still staged on a rooftop in Ramadi. Your brain doesn't know you're safe. Your eyes keep scanning the room.

Speaker 1 19:47

I can remember the physiological engagements. My heart would still react to loud noises like they were an incoming mortar round or not, or an IED blast or an attack of some type. Everything felt like a threat, even when there's not a threat. I remember more than once waking up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm or whatever. The case was, thinking that I was right back there. I was right back in Ramadi in Iraq. I'd be right outside in the yard before even I knew what was happening, with a pistol in my hand, scanning the perimeter, fully prepared to return fire. And I'm in a rural neighborhood Before the numbing got worse, before the addiction really set in, and then everything fell apart. It rewires how you see everything. You don't just lose sleep, you lose access to your own heart. Emotions start to feel dangerous. Intimacy feels like exposure.

Speaker 2 20:49

Yeah, you're right. Trauma really does it messes with your mind, right, it really rewires the way that we relate. Connection can start to feel like pressure or like a setup. I mean, you did not trust it. I remember, clear as day, you didn't want intimacy, you didn't want closeness. There was nothing emotional there, more physical. You'd sit in the same room but I remember thinking where are you? And really trying to hold someone together, embrace for impact at the same time.

Speaker 1 21:20

Yeah, so when that's your baseline, connection becomes work. It's not. It's not that I was trying to be distant. I just remember I really couldn't feel anything.

Speaker 2 21:30

Exactly and, like you mentioned earlier, vulnerability and connection and even like caring, like you considered that weakness instead of leaning in, you kind of pulled back.

Speaker 1 21:41

Yeah, and honestly, vulnerability didn't. It didn't feel safe to me, so I flip a switch and shut it down and not let anyone in, and I think a lot of us do that. We compartmentalize, we shove everything into boxes and we don't plan to open those boxes because feeling feels like weakness.

Speaker 2 22:03

I remember thinking where is God in this?

Speaker 1 22:05

That was a whole nother layer. I didn't know God, I didn't think he existed at this point and, honestly, my rage, my questions, I thought I had to show up strong or not at all. And God didn't really come into my life until later. With you I wanted connection, but I didn't, or really even couldn't feel anything. I'd shut down when you'd cry, I'd push you away. When you reached in, I was so withdrawn and angry and I blamed you for everything.

Speaker 2 22:45

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you put a lot on me.

Speaker 1 22:49

And then with the kids. That's maybe the part I regret the most. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be the kind of dad that I never had, but sometimes I'd hear myself bark orders or shut down or detach completely and I'd think why? Why am I doing this, why am I this way? But I really I didn't know how to regulate myself. I had no emotional intelligence, my brain was still running on threat mode, still trying to keep us alive, even in a house that was already perfectly safe. Yeah, trauma doesn't just live in our memories. It also lives in our reflexes, our reactions, our relationships. And until we put in the work to heal it, until you name it and face it, it runs your life.

Speaker 2 23:42

You know, I just want to take a moment. Justin, thank you so much for sharing. I know you, so I know this is not easy. Justin, thank you so much for sharing. I know you, so I know this is not easy, and it's not easy for me either. Right, we're sitting here opening up parts of ourselves and our story that we've buried or that we don't talk about.

PTSD and Coming Home Broken

Speaker 2 23:59

But everyone listening I want to clear this up. This is not some emotional purge, right? This is not trauma-borne. We're not here venting or processing with you. We're here to reveal to you how the slow burn of unhealed wounds like silence, pride, shame, disconnection can be very explosive. And maybe your story looks different on the outside, but what about underneath? What about inside? Is there isolation, resentment, self-sabotage, a hunger for, maybe, something that's more real and a pushing away of, maybe, somebody that you love or people that you love? That's parts of it, right? And we've all felt that. We're all still bleeding from Eden, trying to stitch together our identity from scraps of the past and our pain and what the world tells us that strength looks like. So let's go there. I want to talk about the affair, not because I want to sensationalize it, but because it matters, and because I don't want you to think that it was just easy. I want you to know what God did.

Speaker 1 25:06

Yeah, and this part matters. When I came back from Iraq, I didn't know how to process anything, what I'd seen or what I'd done, even what I'd become. I didn't have the framework to do that no tools, no language. So I did what I think a lot of people do I self-sabotaged. The drinking got heavier. It was already a problem, but now it was a crutch. And the truth is I didn't want the life I came back to. I didn't want to be in my own skin. I was trying to escape reality really by destroying it.

Speaker 1 25:38

So that affair, it wasn't just a mistake. It was a misguided attempt to feel in control. And yeah, it went on for a while really longer than I'd like to admit but through all of it you never raised your voice, you never threw it in my face, you didn't engage the angry, violent version of me. You looked past the wreckage and you saw me and instead of reacting, you kept saying things like I'm praying for you. This is not who you are. And I tried to push you away in every way possible. I sent you divorce papers. I tried to justify all of it and solidify in my own mind that this was over. You had every right to walk away to be done with it. To save yourself from the mess I'd become, but you didn't. You stayed calm. To save yourself from the mess I'd become, but you didn't. You stayed calm. You were kind even though I was full of rage, and trust me when I say it got really ugly.

Speaker 2 26:36

So, jess, I want to get this right. Right, I don't want to get this twisted. When he talks about or you talked about, like me, being calm and loving, you know, when you were angry and really honestly out of control, I was not some saint-level grace dispenser, okay, I was not soft and patient and unshakable. Right, I'm not floating around the house on this high and mighty Christian cloud. No, what really happened is that God placed space between Justin and I. We weren't talking.

Speaker 2 27:05

There was a period of silence, and he was in the middle of this affair. And it wasn't just this one-time thing, right, it went on for a while. And I was praying, and let me tell you, not the kind of prayers that you put on a wall, okay, I prayed God, seek vengeance. God, burn it down with heaping holy coals on their head, defend me and defeat my enemy. That's the kind of prayers I was praying. I didn't attack Justin because we weren't communicating for a period. We had some distance, right, and that distance allowed me to have some honesty with God. I wasn't calm because I had peace. I was calm because God gave me a boundary at first, and while I wanted to scorch the earth here right and rain fire down from heaven. I thank God for that silence, because he was working in the silence.

Speaker 1 27:57

He does that.

Speaker 2 27:58

And if you can put space between you and the thing that is triggering you, then it can allow you to make room for a new version of yourself. Right, and I'll be honest again, I'm not praying these pretty prayers. I'm clenched fist, I'm tear soaked, I'm pillow muffled, screams, words I will not repeat on this mic because they're hostile and angry and totally unholy, but they're real. Because they're hostile and angry and totally unholy, but they're real. And I knew that God could handle this, so I talked to him about it. I don't want to confuse this with this broken religion, this performative church culture we have. God isn't scared of us being messy and he doesn't turn away when we're breaking down. He meets us there and that's what he did for me. So, no, I didn't stay calm and have it all together, right? No, god created a space where I could take it to Him and while I'm praying, rain down, fire, take vengeance and burning heaping coals.

The Affair and Breaking Point

Speaker 2 28:53

I had no idea what I was actually praying. I knew enough scripture to be dangerous, but not really how I thought it was turning out. Right, I was quoting scriptures like Romans 12, 20, burn heaping coals on their head. But those coals, guys, those weren't for punishment, they were for conviction. I was literally praying redemption, not destruction, and I didn't even know. I prayed protect me from my enemy and God said watch me, turn him into your friend. And I didn't get it. At first I thought asking God to help meant I was going to win, but I didn't know what the outcome would be. And while I was praying for a hit job on my husband, god was redeeming his soul and God started putting back together these pieces right.

Speaker 2 29:44

And God gave me a scripture during this season, and it was Jeremiah 17, 9. The heart is deceitful, above all things. And beyond cure, who can understand it? Guys? That verse wrecked me. Beyond cure, that's what it says. Man, that hit me. I could not trust my emotions. My feelings wanted validation, escape and revenge, but God was after something deeper in me transformation. And then came Matthew 19.8, and Jesus gave this to me Moses permitted divorce because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. Oh man, that one, that one stopped me and really made me realize this was not a loophole, it was a diagnosis of the heart. I had every biblical reason to walk away. I wasn't the one who filed for divorce. You did right, jess.

Speaker 1 30:42

That's right.

Speaker 2 30:43

I had people telling me take the easy way out, but none of those voices brought peace to me. I had other voices, which I am so thankful for, including my parents, who were saying listen to God's voice over your feelings. What God whispered to me was not some church cliche stay and suffer, right? No, he said, sit and watch me move.

Speaker 2 31:08

That's so good and so I asked myself am I trying to escape this marriage because of my pain and because of my right to do so, or so I can win, or is it because God has told me to leave? Well, let me say that again For someone who needs to hear it this is not a formula. I'm not romanticizing pain. I'm not sanctifying toxicity. I'm not putting a holy bowl on some kind of betrayal. What I'm saying is this my healing didn't start when Justin apologized. It started when I stopped trying to get my pain fixed and I surrendered control to God.

Finding God in the Silence

Speaker 2 31:48

And then we started having these conversations, we started talking again and by that time I had already made the commitment I'm going to walk in obedience with the Lord, even when I don't feel like it, because it certainly didn't feel like it. But God had given me direction in His Word. He gives it to us. Kindness leads to repentance. Do not overcome evil by evil, but overcome it with good. And so I obeyed and I chose kindness instead of meeting that angry man with another angry man, and through that, god led us to redemption. And I fully believe and just you can attest to this, I truly believe that is what led to true repentance with you.

Speaker 1 32:34

Yeah, so I think that's really where our journey to overcoming infidelity began. It was your kindness that led to my repentance and my faith in Christ, because you were able to put skin on Jesus in a way that was real and was tangible for me, so that I could understand who he was and his grace and redemption and forgiveness, because you were practicing it in real life. Practicing it in real life, and maybe the most challenging and struggling situation that you've ever been in you were forgiveness and grace. Yeah, so there's really a lot of wisdom in the action that you took. You know, it's like what we've learned that sometimes you approach worship with your hands high because you feel like it, and sometimes you approach worship with your hands high until you feel like it. So if you want to hear more about our journey to forgiveness and what that looked like in our life and in our marriage, stay tuned for the next episode, because Jen is going to dive deeply into what it means to have a heart of forgiveness.

Speaker 2 33:43

Yes, and this is exactly what I did is going to dive deeply into what it means to have a heart of forgiveness. Yes, and this is exactly what I did, and this is exactly what I'm talking about. We can take all of that to God, and there's no judgment there. He holds space for us, and so I hope today, when you listened to our story, that it was encouraging to you and a reminder that you are not alone and that God can hold space for all the things that you're carrying.

Speaker 1 34:11

Guys, the reality is that God didn't give us this story to just keep quiet. He gave us this story so that he could show us, and you all, the glory of the redemptive power he has. You know, the word says that we receive salvation through the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, and that's exactly what we're doing here. It's not about our story being. You know, we're not glorifying the mess, but we are glorifying God's redemption that met us right in the rawness and the messiness of the catastrophe of our marriage and our life and redeemed us and set us apart and called us for his purpose. Enjoying the content. Don't just listen. Lean in, subscribe, leave us a review and share it with someone who needs hope today. Every click helps us to reach more people fighting silent battles. You're not alone, and neither are they. Let's keep fighting the good fight together.

Speaker 2 35:22

Thanks for tuning in to Theopsych, where psychology meets theology and healing begins. We're just getting started, so head over to the next episode. Disclaimer the content shared here is for educational and inspirational purposes only and is not a substitute for counseling. If you're in need of mental health support, visit revivewellcocom that's, revive W-E-L-L-C-Ocom to request a session with a licensed clinician or to connect with us directly through the email on the site To share your story, explore additional resources or get involved with the podcast. Click on the tab Theopsychproject at revivewellcocom. We're here to walk with you mind, soul and spirit. Thank you for being a part of this journey.