Matt Testimony – Part 2
(Part 2/11)
“I got married really young and it didn’t work out. Getting married really young you think you can figure out marriage and figure out how to be married to someone when you don’t have the emotional stability or maturity going into it. Thinking you’re doing everything right, working toward doing everything right, and then realizing ‘Wait it’s not just me, it’s the other person.’ Then the other person decides this isn’t the marriage they want to be in and it’s not working out. Then it just crumbles in front of you. That was probably the time I learned the most. Getting married. Being super young. Being divorced. It was a hard thing. And then the career you’re in is one of hyper-focus on people’s lives. Then you get judgment. Understanding that people’s judgments don’t define you but maybe you had let them define you for a long time, but they don’t define you. Then you really lean into God because I know that You said I’m not done just because of what’s happened in my life. Wondering if God can ever restore it.
We worked on a missionary training campus, so people were living there and working there. It was hyper-focused in a lot of categories. It was tough because as a couple you were trying to put a face on that everything was great, but it was not great. All of a sudden when it comes out that this is happening, people think it happened in an instant. It didn’t happen in an instant, it had been horrible for a lot of years it just didn’t feel like it was appropriate to share that. There’s a pressure inside of religious culture that everything has got to be okay. And if it’s not okay, you can’t work in your gift set. And it’s like, why? You get to go to work when your marriage is tough and you still pay your bills, but I can’t go work and pay my bills because I’m having a tough time in my marriage? That’s part of the hyper-religious mindset, that we’ve put people on a pedestal of having to look a certain way. In fact, to be honest, in our culture we’ve done that in a lot of categories now and that’s why everything is falling apart around us. All of the sudden no one is who we think they’re supposed to be. Whether it’s the leader of our nation, the small business owner, or the school board chairmen: no one is who we think they’re supposed to be.”