My Story

It was Easter weekend and we were driving home from my in-laws house. The tension was so thick it could be cut with a knife. I knew the answer to the question I was about to ask, but I needed to hear him say it.

“Are you still a Christian?” I mustered.

“No.”

The reply stung and my eyes welled with tears as my cheeks burned with anger, hurt, … grief. I saw this coming from a mile away, but nothing could have prepared me for this punch to the gut and the years to follow. I’ll be honest, I really don’t remember much else from the car ride after that.

The conversation had begun with a discussion about the opportunity we had been given for me to finally get paid to do the work that I had been doing on a volunteer basis. As this was my dream job, I was naturally jumping at the chance, but his reaction amidst my excitement at my dreams becoming reality at 26 years old was devastating. The way I would be paid was as a missionary raising my own support through a missions organization and I was up for the challenge; however, the missions organization we’d be working with considered married couples to be married missionaries regardless if only one spouse did the missions work. Both my husband and I would have to attend a training and undergo an interview process with the Board before we would be accepted into the missions organization. He was adamantly against his attendance and participation.

“I’ll turn it down then.” I said with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Silence hung in the air, my heart raced, and I knew what was coming.

Just like that, in that moment, my husband verbally renounced his faith in Jesus Christ.

The weeks and months that followed were filled with exhaustion and one conversation through tears after another. In addition to turning down the job offer of a lifetime, I stepped down from leading a women’s Bible study at the church we had been attending. I couldn’t begin to grapple with the guilt weighing on me for not being more present at home in his time of doubt. And I scoured the internet for answers on how this marriage, my marriage, could possibly work. What I discovered was not what I thought or even wanted when I began looking.

I was unhealthy.

In almost every way possible, I was a very unhealthy person. My emotional, mental, and spiritual well being was not placed where it should belong, but rather in the one person who had suddenly failed me most. I had placed my identity in the man that I married and not in the God who created me and His Son who redeems me. As a result, my identity was stolen when his identity changed. Over the next three years I poured myself into finding myself again and learning to love my husband well (something I am still learning every day).

The Mismatched Wife was born out of that journey, the journey that I am still on. 

Sister or brother, you too may be walking in a spiritually mismatched marriage. Maybe you married your spouse and both of you were not Christians, but now you’ve come to know the Lord. Or maybe you are like me and your spouse professed Christ when you met, but has since rejected his or her faith. I don’t know your journey, but I do know that if you are a Christian and your spouse is not, God desires good for your marriage just as he desires for a marriage between two Christians. If you are feeling alone, lost, hopeless, and full of fear, I want you to know that it is possible to hope again. The God of the universe sees you. He hears you. And you are not alone.