The story of our marriage is not a typical one. Our background stories looked like this – on one side was the death of a spouse; and on the other side, divorce papers had been served. Both of us, along with our combined six children, were deeply broken and scarred. Little did we know that our gracious God had a plan to heal us and our families, and that plan involved bringing us together. A little over ten years ago we embarked on the journey of blending our two families together.
We were counseled that most people fail at second marriages, especially ones that involve blending a family together. In looking back, this was extremely wise counsel because we began to see why. While we could see healing in each other and in our children, we could also see how far we still had to go in honoring God with our marriage and our parenting. There was pride, anger, and selfishness that neither of us knew existed to the extent that it did. We needed the Gospel to once again transform our hearts. We especially had to learn the very practical message of the Gospel as it relates to marriage – that I married sinner, but my spouse married a bigger one. We had this backwards for quite some time. We were too concerned with the other one’s speck to notice our own log. God began to heal that as well.
Through His Word, taught by His Holy Spirit, we were learning patience, compassion, forgiveness, over-looking offenses, and self-denial. We already knew these as believers, but the Lord was showing us how far we still had to go in our sanctification, especially as it related to one another. And He was faithful to do so. He still is. He also blessed us with the local church that we are members of – that being Millcreek Community Church. At MCC, we not only had faithful, biblical leadership to guide us, but we also had a strong community of believers to walk with in sharing many of the same struggles.
Today, we are not even close to having it all figured out, but we are better than we were. We can now say we are beginning to achieve the goal we had from the beginning – the primary purpose for marriage – to honor our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
~Dave & Brynn Zebrak