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CBN.com –“I wanted to get married and have kids. That was it.”
Sarah Marcoux was sure a husband and kids were her ticket to happiness. But at 18 she found herself and boyfriend Dan stuck in a cycle of fighting, breaking up, and making up. The couple finally split for good. Then Sarah found out she was pregnant…
Both were raised in church and reluctantly decided to marry out of obligation.
“We went to pick up the rings, and I left her in the food court,” Dan says. “I was angry because I had been pressured into this whole day. So when I got back, I pretty much threw the rings at her and said, ‘Here ya go. Hope you enjoy this.’”
Thus began the Marcoux marriage.
“We would argue over having time to go to the store. We would argue over the price of formula,” Sarah recalls. “We argued over absolutely everything.”
Sarah and Dan eventually had another child. They had both attended Sunday school growing up so they took their kids to church and even joined a Bible study. But the fighting continued for years.
“Basically I was looking to him to meet every need that I had,” says Sarah. “No matter what it was: -- companionship, financial. I just expected him to be there for everything.”
Dan eventually reached a breaking point.
“The badgering was persistent. It was from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep,” he says. “A large scale fight ensured and nothing nice was said between either party. I was being verbally assaulted. It got to the point where I needed to unleash on something, and I lunged out, put my fist through the door, and got away as quickly as I could. I was thinking, ‘Escape! This is going to kill me. This isn’t going to work.’”
With Dan gone and a divorce looming, in tears, Sarah called her Bible study leader.
“He said, ‘Your marriage is over. If you go after him, you will just push him away. What you need to do right now is press into the Lord. If your relationship is going to last the Lord is the One who will do it.’”
Sarah was willing to try. So she began to read her Bible and pray.
“It was painful for me to realize that the majority of the issues going on were not about my husband,” Sarah says. “It was not his responsibility to meet my needs. It was not my children’s responsibility to meet my needs. It wasn’t my neighbor’s responsibility. The things that I needed were the things that belonged to the Lord.”
Sarah started concentrating on the family’s needs instead of her own. God began to replace bitterness with joy. Gradually Sarah realized how wrong she’d been and one day broke down and asked God for forgiveness.
“After I realized what was going on, I had to ask the Lord to remind me on a daily basis how blessed I was and what it was that He put me here to do,” Sarah says.
Sarah also asked for Dan’s forgiveness.
“I wanted a second chance,” she says. “I did my best to verbalize that I wasn’t going to pretend to be a perfect person but that I wanted to work on the relationship.”
But at first, Dan didn’t buy it.
“I knew from the history we had it was a doubtful feeling,” says Dan. “’Is this just a show to get me back into this relationship? Is it a ploy?’ That’s what I thought at first. But it never changed! It just kept getting better and better and better.”
Dan began to read his Bible too.
“I was learning that it wasn’t about me. It was about everything else,” says Dan. “It was all about Jesus. It was about Jesus dying on the cross, and He took all that away from me. He took all the sin, all the hurt, all the pain, all the history with my wife, and all the history with bad church experiences. I could start all over again.”
And that’s exactly what the Marcouxes did -- start over with Jesus Christ as the center of their lives. Their new relationship inspired baby No. 3.
“I am very grateful for everything that the Lord has done in my heart, in my husband’s heart, in my family. Every once in a while, we stare in awe of where we came from,” says Sarah. “It gets better every day.”
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
