Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (15 page)

It is why this principle of the crossroads is so important. The choices we make every day determine the quality of our marriages. But more important than those choices are the heart and motivation with which we make them.

The selfish pattern of see, want, get will never bring you the marriage you long for. It will never bring you the relationship with God you desire. See, want, get will allow you to pursue your God-given dreams but will compromise your character along the way.

See, want, get always leads you and your marriage to a place of ordinary.

QUESTIONS

1. What potential did you see for your marriage while you and your spouse were still dating? What potential, if any, feels lost at this time in your life/marriage? Why is that so?
   
2. Is there a crossroads you are facing? What has been your process of deciding which path to take?
   
3. Samson’s bad decisions incrementally destroyed his potential. Have you noticed this trend in your own life? If so, explain.
   
4. See, want, get
   was Samson’s Achilles’ heel. In what area of your life do you live out this pattern? What has been the result?
   

We moved to Noblesville, Indiana, on June 1, 2002, and on June 9, we had our very first core group meeting of Genesis Church. Nine people came, but from the energy in the room, it seemed as if one hundred were in attendance! What made this group even more special was that some people from the church in Kokomo—including my (Trisha’s) best friend and her husband—decided they would give us a one-year commitment to help us start the church. We all felt a huge sense of anticipation for what God could do through this small but determined group.

God’s blessing continued just a few months later as our family of four moved from an apartment to a four-bedroom house. Soon after, I gave birth to our sweet baby boy Isaiah. Meanwhile, our church was growing rapidly. All those earlier years of dreaming and fighting through disappointment now seemed worth it. It felt like we were finally realizing our potential. I loved my life and felt such excitement and passion for all God was doing and providing.

Even though our church was a small plant, God had gone before us. Our past marriage mistakes were truly behind us. Justin and I were doing this ministry together—as a team. Our church had potential. Our marriage had potential again. We had come to a crossroads in our marriage, and we had finally chosen the right path.

Or so we thought.

JUSTIN:

It didn’t take long for us to realize that God’s vision for the church we were starting was much bigger than our own. We moved to Noblesville with five thousand dollars and a sincere belief that we could have a church built to support us by the time we ran out of money. Keep in mind that this wasn’t the 1800s, when five thousand dollars was a lot more than it sounds like. This was 2002, when five thousand dollars was more like . . . five thousand dollars. It was a lot of money in many respects, but not a large amount of
money to support a family of four, soon to be five, and to start a church. But we went for it.

For the first few months of the church, we met at our apartment complex clubhouse and organized praise and worship with an overhead projector (we were cutting edge). Our “children’s ministry” met in our apartment with a college girl we paid to watch the eight to ten kids who would come each week. We had two-way radios that served as our paging system if the kids needed their parents. It was a very humble beginning, but it was a blast. Trisha led worship each week, and I’d cast vision. The twelve to fifteen people would be so excited at the end of each of our gatherings. We all really believed that God was going to launch a movement through us. We were so dependent on him.

One morning, I showed up for a breakfast meeting that had been arranged by a guy I had tried to convince to lead worship for our church. He loved the church he attended and wasn’t interested in leaving, but he wanted me to meet his pastor, Craig. I had no idea what to expect, but my assumption going into the meeting was that his pastor would not be thrilled that we were starting a church because many pastors see other churches as competition.

Craig shared his story of starting BridgeWay Community Church in Fishers, Indiana, just three years earlier. I knew immediately that our meeting was a God thing. When he had finished, he said, “So tell me the vision of Genesis Church.” I gave him the business plan I had come up with, but we didn’t open it in that meeting. I just shared my heart for our church, for the community, and for people who are far from God.

Tears streamed down Craig’s face. He said, “We moved here with that same vision, and I want to help you however I can. I want my church to partner with you.” I didn’t know what to say. I was blown away.

Within a few weeks, Craig had introduced Trisha and me to the leaders of his church and had given me office space with his staff. God’s favor continued in the church’s relationship with Craig and
BridgeWay, and Genesis Church moved our gatherings from Sunday nights at the apartment complex to BridgeWay on Sunday mornings.

BridgeWay had two Sunday morning services, and the church gave us meeting space during the nine o’clock service and provided our kids with childcare. Then our entire church—all twenty of us—would attend their eleven o’clock service together. Craig pointed us out each week and invited people from his church to join what God was calling us to do in Noblesville. It was something I’d never experienced in church before. Craig was so unselfish, so Kingdom minded. Over the next few months, God grew our church from twenty to fifty, and we were running out of space.

One of the things I learned about Craig was that he had moved to Noblesville five years before we had with a vision to plant a thriving, growing church in that community. God hadn’t opened any doors for that church in Noblesville, so they moved to Fishers, just a few miles south of Noblesville. Craig and his wife, Lisa, like Trisha and me, had moved to the community not knowing anyone. Just as BridgeWay was adopting us, they had been adopted by Grace Community Church, who had given them meeting space, offices, people, and resources. Craig introduced me to Dave Rodriguez, the senior pastor at Grace, and I set up a lunch appointment with him. Grace was the largest church on the north side of Indianapolis—and possibly the whole city—so I was a little intimidated.

When I sat down to meet with Dave, he said, “I hear you’re running out of meeting space at BridgeWay. We’d like to offer you space here at Grace. Not only that, we want to give you as many people as you can take with you and some money to help with your launch.”

I remember saying to Dave, “You know we’re planting this church in Noblesville, right? We’ll be less than three miles from your building. Are you sure you want to help us out like that?”

I’ll never forget what he said to me in that moment: “Justin, I wouldn’t care if you planted your church across the street from Grace. It is God who draws people to churches, not pastors. We want to help you because as we help you, we help the Kingdom.”

On Mother’s Day weekend 2003, we held our first Saturday night service in a Sunday school classroom at Grace Community Church. We had seventy-eight people there that night. God was definitely up to something big. That summer, Dave allowed me to speak at Grace’s services one weekend in front of seven thousand people. At the end of the message, he came up and said to his congregation, “This fall, Genesis Church will launch public services, and some of you need to leave here and go with them.” It was incredible. God was blessing. God was moving. God was watching over our church.

But as the church grew and the pressure of being a senior pastor set in, the church became my idol. Without fully realizing it, I began to worship the blessings of God more than I worshiped God himself. I started counting on the church, its attendance numbers, its success, and the feelings of significance and value it gave me more than I counted on God. It wasn’t a sudden shift; it was subtle. The vision
God
had for our church had become an all-consuming vision that
I
had for our church. My life and marriage revolved not around God, but around the roles and responsibilities Trisha and I had at the church.

TRISHA:

By summer 2004, the church had grown to over five hundred people. Not only had our vision become a reality, but those who called Genesis their home took ownership of the vision. Parents were bringing their teenagers, wives were bringing their unsaved husbands, and we even had an elderly couple attending from a nearby nursing home. We were preparing for a capital campaign that would allow us to purchase the Arbortorium banquet hall (the “Arb”), which we rented each week for Sunday services. It was a sweet time in the church’s history.

But where there is growth, change is always soon to follow. As the church grew, so did our need for leaders. That July we had our
first leaders’ retreat. About twenty leaders attended, and for me, it was the first time in the history of being in ministry that I felt out of place. What should have been an extraordinary moment in the life of our church was for me lonely, confusing, and frustrating—not exactly the emotions you’d expect to flow from a heart that was being blessed with so much.

I sat in the back watching the leaders in the room soak in the vision Justin was casting. As he talked, I wondered,
Why doesn’t he notice me sitting here? Why isn’t he fighting for me?
I was jealous of the intimate relationship he seemed to have with his church but not with me. I was angry over all I had sacrificed for these leaders and my husband to even
have
this church to lead. I felt that the church had become more like a mistress than the bride of Christ. The church was my competition, fighting for Justin’s time, attention, and affection.

In that moment I felt God tell me to confess to Justin and my close friends how I was feeling. I could sense his gentle whisper encouraging me not to give up but to stand firm in him and fight—fight for the extraordinary relationship that was only possible through him. But I ignored God’s plea. Not wanting to create conflict, I said nothing. By not sharing my struggles, I allowed my heart to wander down a dark path where my jealousy grew into a cancer of resentment that began to slowly kill our marriage.

JUSTIN:

In the spring of 2004, Trisha and a team of volunteers went to Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago for an arts conference. She was going to be gone for a few days, and that left me home with our eight-year-old, five-year-old, and almost-one-year-old. Our boys are good kids, but me plus them for two days equaled stress fest.

About halfway through day two, I decided I was going to make frozen pizza for lunch. There was no way I could mess that up. I put the pizza in the oven, set the timer, and got the kids down
stairs and ready to eat. As I opened the oven to pull the pizza out, our youngest son, Isaiah, was right at my feet. I tripped over him, and he lost his balance, falling forward into the open oven. Trying to brace his fall, he put his hands on the open oven door.

Instantly I heard skin burning. He cried as blisters appeared, and I frantically ran his hands under cold water. I called Trisha to see how close she was to the house. Isaiah was screaming in the background as I tried to explain to her what had happened and that I needed her to get home as soon as possible. My makeshift bandages would have to suffice until she arrived. I had an elders’ meeting that night, the kids were stressing me out, and I’d had about all I could take. Trisha told me they were just leaving Willow Creek and that she would be home in three hours. That was about two hours and forty-five minutes longer than I wanted, but I couldn’t change anything.

Two hours later I called to see how close they were. Trisha told me they were stuck in traffic just outside Chicago and hadn’t moved in over an hour. I went nuts. How in the world could she let herself get stuck in traffic? Didn’t she realize how stressed I was? Didn’t she know I had a meeting in a few hours that I couldn’t be late for? How dare she do this to me!

Another two hours passed, and it was time for supper. I wasn’t going to take any chances cooking, so we went to McDonald’s. On the way home, Isaiah puked in his car seat, which would have been manageable except for one detail.

I’m a sympathetic puker.

So as I raced home, the car filled with the unhappy smell of a vomited Happy Meal. I began to gag, and waves of nausea washed over me. Struggling to hold it in, I screeched into the driveway and leapt into the fresh air. I was so furious at Trisha by this point that I refused to clean up the puke. I yanked out the car seat with puke all over it and sat it in the middle of the driveway.

About thirty minutes later, Trisha pulled up to the house.

I was mere minutes away from being late for my meeting. I met her in the driveway, handed her my puke-smelling, hand-blistered
son, and drove to my elder’s meeting—to talk about how to lead our church spiritually.

In my mind, everything that day was her fault. She did it all on purpose. She got caught in traffic. She made me late for my meeting. She forced me to cook and then to avoid cooking. It was her fault things weren’t extraordinary.

This attitude and behavior had moved from being the exception to the norm. Trisha was high maintenance. She was holding me back from ministry. She was at fault for just about everything. Our relationship wasn’t necessarily volatile, but it was passive-aggressive. She would be mean, and I would heap on guilt and shame. We each had our ways of making the other pay, and it was eating our relationship alive.

TRISHA:

If you had been a fly on the wall in our house, you wouldn’t have heard crashing dishes or loud arguments. It was in the small things that Justin and I tried to hurt each other. I would withhold physical intimacy. You don’t come home when you said you would? You don’t meet my expectations? You’re on shutdown. It was one area I knew would hurt Justin. But I had no idea the fire I was messing with in this whole area of our relationship.

My new goal was to force Justin to make up to me for all the times he moved me. To make up for the fact that the only reason he had his church was because of
my
willingness to live sacrificially. To make up for using me to start this church and then pushing me to the side when I was no longer needed. I was placing godlike expectations on Justin to fill a void in my life that I felt he was responsible for causing in the first place. Justin became my idol: I was looking to him to give me what only God could give. Because God never designed Justin to fill that void in my life, he failed at it no matter when he did or didn’t try.

But there was still a church that needed our attention, and in
order for Justin to continue leading it, we needed to stay married. My partnership with Justin was now reduced to stepping into areas of ministry where he was desperate for a leader and taking care of our home and kids. Our once-extraordinary dream of changing the world
together
was coming to an end. We spent the next year learning to accept our marriage for what it now was: ordinary.

In the summer of 2005, we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. We had always wanted to go on a cruise to celebrate an anniversary, and now more than ever, we needed time alone. In the back of my mind, I hoped some time alone with Justin would allow us to rediscover some of the passion that had cooled over the years. For the first time since Micah’s birth, it was just the two of us. For those four days, we went without e-mail, cell phones, parenting duties, and ministry issues. And in those four days, I fell in love with Justin all over again. Extraordinary still had a chance! All the distractions of life that seemed to bring out the worst in us were gone. It was just us, and I loved every minute.