Melanie: So we're both on a second marriage. And I think we had real big expectations coming into this marriage and we wanted to do things right and different than we had done it before. It was incredibly hard to learn how to live together.
Bryant: Blending families was very tough.
Melanie: And so we struggled in the beginning for sure.
We were at each other's throats all the time about the stupidest things. Now that you look back, just everything you could imagine we were bickering about. And so that was the first part of our marriage was a lot of outside stress, a lot of attack. And in some ways I look back and I'm like, we were such easy targets because we walked in fully prepared to have a godly marriage and bring God into our marriage. And it was like immediately, we just started getting hammered with life.
Bryant: Like even when we tried to get closer together, it felt like the closer we were coming, the further we were going backwards.
Melanie: His favorite verse is Romans 8 28.
But when they say that God can work good from anything where a picture of the most abysmal bottom of the pit. It just took us humbling ourselves enough to actually say something out loud and be like, we need help.
Bryant: We're actually still working every day. And it's a process that we continue to work on every day.
Melanie: We've always served in like children's ministry. It made sense. Bryant was a teacher. Um, but we've really been feeling led to like talk to married couples, um, especially ones that are struggling and just give them hope.
Bryant: Yeah. If you're new to the church, try to find somebody that you can lean on. Um, come to us? I mean, we we've been through it. We, we know what it takes to. To get on, to get to the bright side, you know, I mean, we've been in the darkness. We truly do love each other and just, don't be afraid to speak up.