From Drift To Redemption - Part 1

What if the greatest threat to your marriage isn’t a blowup but a slow drift you barely notice? We open up about our story—from teen romance and long-distance phone bills to a newborn during senior year and a wedding that felt like a sprint. The early cracks were quiet: family patterns we never examined, unspoken fears from childhood, and a version of faith that stayed mostly on Sundays. We share the decisions that seemed small at the time—who handles money, how we discipline, where we live—that slowly turned into walls we didn’t know how to climb.

You’ll hear how secrecy took root after a scary late-night accident, how serving at church without real discipleship left us coasting, and why leaving church for years made the drift feel normal. We talk about the difference between provision and love, presence and partnership, and how our love languages completely missed each other for far too long. Troy believed acts of service were enough; Amy needed words and time. That gap grew into loneliness, even as we worked together and did everything as a family.

As our kids grew independent, the scaffolding fell away and the emptiness showed. Control felt like leadership; silence felt like peace. It wasn’t. This is part one of our testimony, ending right before the breaking point. Next week, we’ll share the moment everything cracked open and the surprising way Jesus met us in the mess, exposed our blind spots, and began to rebuild trust from the ground up.

If this story mirrors your own in any way, you’re not alone. Listen now, share it with someone who needs hope, and tell us the one conversation you’ve been avoiding. Subscribe, leave a review, and send us your questions for part two—we’d love to hear from you.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

Transcript

Why Share Our Story Now

Childhood Roots And Worldviews

Troy 0:07

Welcome to Kingdom Chaos, a podcast for anyone trying to live a purpose and faith-filled life in a loud and messy world. Jesus said his kingdom in another story, yet here we are navigating real life and real struggles. I'm not a guru, just someone learning that God's grace meets us even in the chaos. This is Kingdom Chaos, where faith meets real life and purpose is still found in the mess. Hey, welcome back to Kingdom Chaos. My name is Troy. I've got my wife, Amy, here with me. We're going to go through our testimony. It's going to be really raw, really personal. We're going to be really transparent. It's something that in the beginning we never really thought we'd share publicly, but we've got to the point where we really want to glorify God. It's something we've talked to a lot of people one-on-one or two on two, but never really did this this publicly, where it's out and going to be there for anybody to see. But we really want to glorify God, glorify Jesus, walk through our marriage and show how Christ really changed our life. Because we almost lost our marriage, and it wasn't some dramatic, explosive way. It was a slow, quiet drift. And what we didn't realize is how much the enemy works in quiet places. So welcome. Thank you guys for listening today. And whether you're married or single or divorced, something in here is going to speak to you. This story carries something for you. So I hope you stick with it and listen to the entirety of this. So what we want to do first is start with our childhood because it really sets the foundation of what happened and what started the downfall of our relationship early on and our marriage early on. So let's go ahead and jump into uh our upbringing and I'll let Amy kind of start with her childhood and how she grew up.

Amy 1:58

Hey everyone, great being here today with you. Uh, I was not raised in church. I was raised by a single mom. My parents divorced when I was two. I have an older brother, and he moved to live with my dad when he turned 12 or 13. So for the most of my childhood, it was just me and my mom. She had a very hard life and a hard childhood herself. She struggled a lot with um trusting men, and that developed early on in my childhood as well, as I saw her with boyfriends or a new husband and things like that. And those trust issues became very prevalent in my marriage and in my entire relationship with Troy.

Troy 2:48

And and for me, I grew up in a home where my parents were married for three or four years already, and they stared stayed married through my childhood, and they're married still today. So we had definitely different backgrounds growing up, and so that really um carried itself over to uh you know how we saw the world and what the way we looked at each other and looked at people. Like she said, uh Amy said that she uh looked at men the way her mom looked at men because that's kind of how she raised and what she what she saw. Uh myself, I I grew up a little different with both my parents in the home. Uh, she also grew up with siblings. I'm an only child. That definitely played into things because I am a very selfish person, and uh we'll kind of talk through how that kind of affected us, but also uh religiously, uh we both had exposure to church, but it was different. I was Catholic, she was Baptist, she went to church. Some uh she was kind of brought to church with her aunt, but really uh it wasn't in her home from her mom. For me, I went to church every Sunday, so there was some of that that kind of transferred into um how we looked at life, how we looked at church, and how we kind of grew up. So you have a kind of a foundation of our childhood a little bit uh and an understanding when we get into talking about how things slowly started to drift away, these things are going to be very important to understand uh how the things developed and we just started this destructive pattern in our lives. It's not that overall either one of us was okay, we had extremely bad childhood or extremely bad parents or this or that, but every every experience we had started to shape us a little bit. And since we were two different people, two imperfect people coming together, it affected us going forward because we didn't confront what was going on, we didn't know what was happening until later on.

Long-Distance Teen Romance

Amy 4:55

So me and Troy we met when we were sophomores in high school. I was 15, he was 16, and shortly after we started dating, my grandmother passed away about a month actually, to the date of when we started dating. Um, my grandmother passed away, and my mom decided to move us to my grandparents' property over in East Texas. So me and Troy started having a long-distance relationship at that point, just being away from each other and just only seeing each other on the weekends. You would think we would have worked really well on our communication skills. You'll come to learn that that was um a work in progress for sure.

Troy 5:39

Communication back then was a little different than it is now.

Amy 5:41

We recorded tapes, we recorded tapes and mailed them to each other.

Troy 5:45

Yeah, record tapes. We uh we wrote letters, uh, we did run up some phone bills pretty different. Yeah, we would uh we would fall asleep on the phone. Phone bills were four to eight hundred dollars a month sometimes um because there were no cell phones, so there was no text messages, there were no you know, FaceTime, all the stuff. It was uh back in the day we didn't have that, so we just had to be um so you yeah, you would think we would be able to work through communication, and that that didn't that didn't happen. But anyway, we were so we're me we're we're living apart right now.

Young Parents Still Apart

Amy 6:15

Yeah, so back then we thought we just loved each other and that's all we needed, and so yeah, we were just all in. Um come our senior year of high school, I got pregnant, and we had our daughter um in January of our senior year. We ended up getting married spring break of our senior year. He went home and I stayed with my mom.

Troy 6:44

Still living apart. Yep, still living. Seniors in high school, living apart with a kid, yep.

Amy 6:48

And married.

Troy 6:49

Yep, and married, yep.

Amy 6:50

But this is about the time when it became very real, I would say. Yeah um, just you know, just remembering Troy having to leave Ashley for the first time.

Troy 7:02

That was very hard. I remember sitting at the table holding her, crying that night because uh I had to leave. That was hard. Yeah, yeah.

Secrets, Fear, And Trust Wounds

Amy 7:09

So that was difficult. And I remember one night specifically where I had just gotten done breastfeeding and pumping, and I was extremely tired. And back then you had to boil your breast pump to clean it. So I had put it on the stove and I was boiling it, and I had fallen asleep, and when I woke up, the house was full of smoke. The water had evaporated from the pot, and the breast pump was um melting in the pot, and so the whole house had filled up with smoke, and everyone was fine. I woke up my mom, got Ashley out of the house. I remember my mom telling me, Amy, you cannot tell Troy because he will not think you're a good parent, and he'll take Ashley and he will leave you. These are the kind of trust issues that I had throughout my childhood, just because my mom's relationships were were hard. And so that just taught me um how to keep things from Troy and not to be so willing to share them just out of fear of him not trusting or not leaving me.

Starting Out And Moving Homes

Church Choices And Conversion

Troy 8:22

And so we're still being influenced by our parents, even though we're married, we have a kid, but we live in two separate households. But fast forward, finally, uh Amy actually, after she graduated high school, uh, moved in with I was still living with my parents, so she moved in with us, and eventually we ended up getting out of my parents' house for about six months. We moved into an apartment, and so we were a family of three living on our own for a while. Then we were like, hey, you know, we want we want more, we want better. So we moved back in with my parents and started to save money, or wanted to start to save money. Actually, we didn't end up saving money, the the goal was to save money, and finally uh we moved out after three years. But what happened was Amy finally said, Look, I'm I'm tired, like we need to again be a family together. Within that three-year period, we had our son TJ, where we lived with my parents, and we ended up eventually starting to save money, saved enough money to be able to move out and get our own place, and we got five five acres and got our own home and everything, and then we started our true life as a four-person family, right? And we had our two kids, and so from that point, our kids started to get a little bit older, and so we wanted to raise them in church, so we decided that we were gonna do that, and then it was like, okay, what church are we, what denomination, where are we gonna go? How is this gonna work? And so Amy actually ended up converting to Catholicism because that's where I was at.

Amy 9:58

Well, before that, we did I had gone to church with Troy a little bit, and I had asked him some questions about the Catholic Church, and questions weren't exactly encouraged, and so I was always told, just do it. You're supposed that's what you're supposed to do.

Troy 10:14

That's what I was told. Like, you just do it. Like Ginjufleck, do the whole, you know, I mean sign of the cross, put your finger in the holy water, like this is what we do. Like, I don't know.

Amy 10:21

And so I did, I don't know how I convinced you, but I I did get you to try a different church, and we went and it was definitely not the right fit for us. So then that kind of even scared me. And so I was like, okay, fine, I don't know where else to go, so I'll join the Catholic Church. So I went through all the classes, became a part of the Catholic Church, the kids were sprinkled in the Catholic Church, our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, and we went pretty regularly.

Troy 10:57

Yeah, we even started serving.

Amy 10:58

Yeah, we served in the kids' ministry. Right when Ashley was supposed to take first communion, they changed the rules to where she needed to do her first reconciliation before her first communion. And knowing how Ashley was, she was just a very stressed-out child. I was so young, I didn't know how to explain confession to an eight-year-old. And so that's kind of whenever we just kind of walked away. I didn't feel like I should have my eight-year-old confess her sins because she would have stressed out so much about anything and everything that I just didn't think that was right for her at the time.

Troy 11:42

Yeah, and and I want to do make it clear as we're talking about the Catholic Church, obviously, and we'll probably talk about the Catholic Church more. We have nothing against the Catholic Church. There's things that we don't maybe agree with, but I didn't even understand confession at that time.

Amy 11:54

I love confession now.

Walking Away From Church

Troy 11:55

Yeah, yeah. So there's things that we didn't understand. There was a process going through when when I grew up in the Catholic Church, I didn't have a relationship with Jesus. It just it didn't happen at the time. I do now, but I I don't blame the Catholic Church. So when we talk about it, I just want to make sure it's clear, like we're not anti-Catholic, you know, it's just part of our story was through growing up through the Catholic Church, and we didn't understand what was going on through that. So I just want to make sure that was clear. But yeah, and so we left the church for a long time, for years and over a decade. And so this is where things really started to fall apart. And and ironically, even though we didn't really have a relationship with Jesus and we weren't following, you know, what I would say the the right way, like we weren't weak.

Amy 12:41

We weren't living the Christian life.

Slow Drift And Growing Bitterness

Work, Kids, And Misaligned Priorities

Troy 12:44

We were more Sunday Christians. We were going to church and we were serving, but that's as far as Jesus went in our life. It was only Sunday. It was only Sunday. So, you know, we went a long time uh away from church, but while we were doing that in church, still we we were protected by God. Like I we could see now looking back how God really worked in our life. But then once we left church, it seemed like things started going downhill, and it was again some slow things that happened, small stuff that would take place that ended up being destructive down the road as it built up, and really uh in Amy's heart really built up a lot of bitterness. In my heart, I had I was clueless. I'm a typical guy and I didn't know what the heck was going on. So, I mean, I just I am saying the truth. Like, this is just what's very true. Uh you know, it it just whenever we got to a certain point and and she got to a certain point and kind of let me know what was going on. I I felt really blindsided, even though looking back, I'm like, man, there was a lot of signs, a lot of things that I didn't do right, and uh it was just eye-opening to me how blinded I really was. But anyway, let's go through our our uh our kids' childhood really, and just growing up, our our kids kind of took over our life in two different ways. So for me, I became a workaholic. I uh, you know, I I started out small in this job, and and I grew and grew and grew into a larger role in this job, and my goal was to provide for my family, for us to be able to have cars and houses and clothes and all these things to provide for my family, food and all that stuff. And but for Amy, it was a bit different on what she what was her world. Uh, we both had family as a priority, it was just in different ways, and her world uh and her perspective of family was a little bit different.

Amy 14:49

Yeah, so for me, I also worked outside the home. I always worked, but the kids were everything to me. They were a priority, they were um whatever the kids wanted to do, whatever sports, extracurricular activities, sleepovers, parties, vacations, we did it. So they were absolutely first priority in my life. That was whatever was on TV, whatever I mean, they kind of ruled the house. Um where me and Troy really struggled the most was when it came to disciplining the kids, which it was easy to discipline Ashley. You looked at her the wrong way and she would cry.

Troy 15:33

Yeah.

Amy 15:34

TJ was a little bit more difficult, um, just trying to figure out what worked for him. Um, I wanted to protect TJ a whole lot. He was my baby, and um Troy wanted to be very hard on him. Um, we didn't have to be hard on Ashley because she stressed herself out. We were good with a B and she thought the world was falling apart. Whereas TJ, I was just like, please pass, babe, just pass.

Troy 16:00

Hey, at some point we were like, just make it to class. Like there was a point where we got a call from the truancy officer. I was like, Listen, can you just make it to class?

Amy 16:09

He's 18, buddy, he can do whatever we want.

Troy 16:11

So that yeah, so that was difficult. So we started to grow apart in this, we started to grow apart relationally. Uh, and honestly, we really I don't know if we really formed a true relationship of really talking about the things you should talk about, um, you know, at you know, as a married couple. While we were raising kids, it was way past that.

Finances And Power Dynamics

Amy 16:32

So in our finances, um, I remember one big argument. Um, it was before TJ was born. Um, Ashley was probably about a year old, and at this time I was not working, I was staying at home with Ashley. Troy was working six days a week, and I had just got done paying the bills, and we absolutely had zero money left over. And I remember Troy coming home very frustrated after working 12 hours, twelve 12-hour days, six days a week. And I told him, hey, we need to watch finances. We really don't have any extra money, and he just blew up and didn't understand where all of our money went. And so I threw the checkbook at him back when we had checkbooks, and I was like, I'm never doing the finances again, and I have not.

Troy 17:23

He has not, and that was many years ago that I do the finances.

Amy 17:26

Ashley's 29 now, so 28 years ago.

Troy 17:29

So it's been it's been some time, so that's been fun. So yeah, so it's just uh these little things that that happened, and there might have been some small explosions like that, but there was a lot building up to different things that we do. Not communicating was the biggest thing for us, and we wouldn't when when we had fights, we wouldn't have fights. We would have a conflict and we'd go to our separate spaces and not talk about it, sweep it under the rug, and those things just kept building up because we never found a resolution for the conflicts that come up. You cannot uh avoid conflicts, conflicts will happen, but you have to hit them straight on, and we were not doing that. We were just not communicating and we'd shut down and we were done.

Amy 18:11

Well, no, no, because I mean now it was you doing the finances and you would come to me, Amy, stop spending money, and then I would get frustrated. So it didn't solve anything, it just turned the tables, right? Yep. So, and what was really bad about this is because whenever you started doing the finances, then I really felt like I had no say in any of the finances.

Communication Breakdowns Deepen

Troy 18:33

Yeah, so that's when her her opinion overall, I I ran our family like a dictatorship. I was in charge, everything I did. This is where my my selfishness and my uh only childhood came into play, is that I ran our house like it was mine and nobody had an opinion. So Amy had no opinion or not one that mattered to me at the time. So, you know, I I just ran the house that way. And so all the things that would come up, like there was a big disconnect from us that I was comfortable we were at. I wanted to live in Texas, I wanted to raise our kids in Texas, uh, because I was just comfortable, and that's how I But I don't I don't think you meant that as my opinion didn't matter.

Amy 19:15

Yeah, you just you were making the best decision for our family.

Troy 19:19

True, yeah. Because looking back, even I believe that the decisions I made were the best ones. Yeah, absolutely. The the problem was I was not allowing you to come in the conversation. You were completely I was pushing you away from it.

Amy 19:30

Right, yeah, because the one decision that really did take a toll on me is the decision to not move to Florida. Like I always have had this yearning to live close to my dad and my brother and my sisters and my stepmom. And I've always wanted to live in Florida, and that was just never up for discussion. I mean, it just got shot down every single time. Yep. And so that's where I just started feeling defeated, and I did get very bitter, and I held resentment in my heart for a long time about that.

Control, Resentment, And Florida

Troy 20:05

Yep, yep. And and it all again, I just want to go back to this over and over. It it all stemmed from us not communicating. Like you can't stop conflict from coming out, but we just didn't talk about it. We just swept under the rug and would not discuss it. So all these little things would come up and they would build up, and finally we got to a point where we were really uh relationally separated, like we are emotionally separated. Our kids started to get older, they started to get their own cars, they started to get jobs, so they got started getting their own lives, and they didn't need either one of us as much anymore. They were living their own life for the most part. I mean, they would obviously come home because they're still teenagers, still in in high school and everything, but we weren't as big a part of their life anymore. So as our priority, both of our priorities, while they were not on the same page for the you know, the the most part, it was all family, and now our family started to you know disconnect a little bit because of that. And so we didn't know what to do, we didn't know each other anymore because we spent we spent no time together, like really connecting.

Emptying Nest Exposes Distance

Amy 21:14

We did everything together, yeah. I mean, because the kids were in sports, this isn't this isn't it? Yeah, we worked together. Yeah, we were together, we did everything together, but we yeah, we didn't talk, we didn't truly, truly connect. So a lot of times we were always together, yet I felt so alone, yeah. Right. So I think that's really big is because I think uh early on I tried to communicate like certain things like when you would hurt my feelings or when I didn't feel like I was appreciated or felt valued or heard or anything. And I remember you telling me, well, you shouldn't feel that way. Right. And so for a Long time. I mean, I would try to communicate. You were telling me I shouldn't feel that way. And so then I was like, okay, is something wrong with me? Like, I shouldn't feel that way, but I do. So then I just kind of stopped communicating.

Troy 22:13

And I was like, what's the point? I mean, we're not getting anywhere. Why continue to do this?

Amy 22:17

Right. And then I remember one thing you said was I asked you, and this was once the kids had gotten older, maybe middle school-ish. I said, Troy, do you love me? Because I was kind of wrestling with, do I want to be married or do I not? Or what's going on? And I asked you, I said, Troy, do you love me? And you said, Amy, if you do not know that I love you by now, you're never gonna know.

Troy 22:42

I just thought that was a stupid question at the time. I really did. And and and looking back again, it's like, man, what shouldn't you tell your loved ones I love you? I mean, that's just seems ridiculous now, but that's just where my mindset was.

Amy 22:55

Well, and I think you showed us love by providing for us, but that's not how now that we know, right? That's not how I accept love. Right.

Troy 23:05

I don't care about we finally found out what our love languages were. I mean, I mine's acts of service is my big one, and so doing acts of service is how I showed love, and I didn't know Amy's was words of affirmation and quality time, so she wasn't while she appreciated what I did. Don't get me wrong, she just wasn't feeling the love because it's not our love language. So we were very disconnected through that time period.

Amy 23:28

And we had no idea that we were loving each other wrong, right? Right. Um, we had no idea at this point.

Love Languages Misunderstood

Part One Closing And Prayer

Troy 23:35

And now we get to a point where we are really far apart emotionally and relationally, and things go really bad. Yes. Yep. All right, that was part one. Next week we'll release part two, where you'll hear the climax of the destruction of our marriage and how Jesus came in and totally restored it. You're not gonna want to miss next week. We've laid the foundation and showed you how our early childhood started to build what we saw and how we saw in the lens that we looked at through life, and how we came together as two imperfect people, started to drift apart from each other. And we're gonna tell you, like I talked about in episode three, that snowball going down the hill. We started collecting all that bitterness in our heart and the destructive force that it was. We'll talk about what that destructive uh thing was and then show you how Jesus came into our lives. We accepted him and things totally transformed from what they were before. Thank you so much for listening. Let's pray, Lord. I just thank you so much for this podcast. I thank you so much for our story and what you've brought us from. Thank you so much for your redemption. Thank you so much, God, for your son Jesus. Jesus, I just pray that you use this story, your story, to change lives. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Okay. Why do you keep doing that? Because I'm working through things.