Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Faith Stories, the second to last faith stories of the twenty twenty twenty twenty five summer. Glad to see you here this morning. I'm going to introduce our speakers for the day. Today, we'll be hearing from Greg and Margaret Brown.

They have attended Faith Church for three years where Greg has been involved in FIAC, and they've both been members of a small group in other various ministries. They have three kids, Ryan, who lives in Iowa, Declan who lives in Wisconsin, and Mairead who lives in Indianapolis. Margaret is a special education teacher at a charter school, and Greg is a construction project manager. So, before they come up, let me pray for them, and we will get started. Heavenly Father, I wanna just thank you for this opportunity to gather here this morning to worship, and to learn more about you and, connect with each other.

Lord, I pray you'd be with Greg and Margaret as they share this morning, about the many ways you've been at work in their lives, and, I pray that you would just give them peace and clarity as they speak and be with those of us, listening this morning that we may hear, what you have to say to us through them. I pray this in your name. Amen. Well, good morning. Good morning.

I'm gonna start this little stopwatch here, so we don't go till 11:00. But we are Greg and Margaret Brown. And, I don't know if you saw the title, a new question mark exclamation point. You're probably wondering what that means. Don't worry.

We'll get to that. Like, what's the question mark for? What's up with that exclamation point? But before we get there, let me give you a little bit of backstory. Margaret and I met in the 1981.

We were at Illinois State University and we were both involved with the navigators, campus ministry there. I thought Margaret was awfully cute. She laughed at my jokes and so I wanted to start dating her. I thought it was important that I talk with the woman who was mentoring her, a woman named a friend of both of ours named Stephanie. I had this great big list of pros and cons and, I got together with Stephanie.

She's like, I see you have a list. Okay. I've got my answer. It's five words but but you go ahead. So I went through the whole list very diligently and, I finished.

She's like, so are you done? I'm like, yeah. I'm done. She's like, alright. Here's my answer.

What took you so long? And, so, we did start dating. We dated off and on throughout our college years. We each went on summer ministry program. Margaret went to Indonesia.

I went to Uganda. We both came back, worked in the area, stayed involved with the campus ministry, and then a couple years later, I felt led to go back to Uganda for a three year commitment and Margaret was going was headed back to Indonesia for a two year commitment. So, Greg had already left to Uganda and I was living with my friend and lifelong mentor Stephanie, the what took you so long friend. And she noticed that I was always happy which didn't make sense when you're near someone's roommate. There have to be some down times.

But I was so hard to get to know. I thought being emotional was weak and so she challenged me to read through the Psalms and to take note of David and all the emotions he had. And when I did that, I was not impressed. He's crying, he's dancing, he's leaping in public. So, I began to be aware that how I would make a joke in conversations if they got too intense.

But the strange thing was I did long to know others and tried to figure out a way to minister to them hearing their pain without sharing my own. And actually I was not allowing my pain to affect my relationships or so I thought. So I left to Indonesia and Greg was already in Uganda. So we dated for a long distance. You in the back can imagine, no cell phones, no internet.

So we went a year and eight months without seeing each other but we are still dating. Wouldn't recommend that. And there was only one phone on our team in Indonesia in the in the little town we were in. So when I first got to Uganda, we thought phone calls were great. I thought it was really cheap rate, that turned out not to be the case.

So we had to resort to letters and cassette tapes. And as the year as the time went on, my communication became more and more infrequent, less regular. I also was struggling with purpose and trying to remember why was I there in the first place. Was I there because I wanted to be regarded as a new navigator or to please somebody else? I was really confused about why I was there.

I also had a history of quitting hard things ever since childhood. I was aware of that, but I went ahead and made a decision to leave halfway through my three year term and go back to America. I was discouraged, but I knew that this decision was my own. And my boss at the time was really gracious and he released me graciously saying, Greg, if you go back to America and you let God get a hold of your heart, this could be the best decision you've ever made. But if you leave here and go back to America and you don't let God get a hold of your heart, this could be the worst decision you've ever made.

So that was encouraging to me, there was there was a way to make this a good decision. So I headed back to America, I moved here to Indianapolis, I started working for landscaping and I started getting some counseling. So I was scared about what that meant for us, for Greg not finishing this commitment. But I was about to see be able to see him because I was coming back to The US for my sister's wedding and my dad was sickly. So, I knew Greg was struggling, with what God wanted to do with him about many things, but one thing he was clear on during that trip was that he still thought we would be getting married.

So I went back to Indonesia, and even though we weren't engaged, I got my wedding dress made. It was really beautiful and cheap. So, we were married in 1990 and in a few minutes we're gonna start sharing some of the the struggles that that we've gone through in our in our marriage. But before I do that, I want to give you some positives of what what Greg and Margaret were like as a couple. We had lots of mutual interests.

We had lots of close friends both individually and as a couple. We loved God, and we really loved each other's families. We were fun. We were zealous. We enjoyed being together.

We cared for the marginalized. We were always involved at wherever we were going to church. And we didn't fight, about that. We didn't fight not because we didn't have differences. We didn't fight because I would consistently divert any conversations about emotionally uncomfortable topics away from that.

I wanted to avoid talking about things where I felt inadequate or incompetent or areas of my weaknesses and failings. So we were married at 27 years old after seven years of dating and we lived in Indianapolis. I was teaching at IPS and Greg was getting his masters in agronomy from Lafayette from Purdue. We struggled with infertility, but then God blessed us with our first son, Ryan, when we were 30 years old. And I just want to add, Ryan has a wonderful wife named Ginny, and they live in Cedar Falls.

Oh, sorry. We moved to Lafayette, because Greg got his first professional job. And I love being home with Ryan. And we continue to pray for a sibling for him. And we were only in Lafayette for two years, but through that church, we made some really close friends that are even friends to today.

And Greg was transferred to Champaign, Illinois. And our second son, Declan, was born. And I loved being a stay at home mom but I noticed how I was quickly getting angry. And so I taped the verse of James one nineteen that everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. I had to put it right in the kitchen there where I see it every time we wash dishes.

So but I was I was a good mom, but I struggled with anger. I was asked about that time, I was asked to co lead a Bible study called Empowering I mean, Experiencing God by Blackaby. And this time, Greg and his career was up for a promotion. And I asked him, I said, I don't wanna go overseas, but we, we haven't talked about that in a long time. Do you think that should be in the mix as we discuss your next career move?

So this is 1997 now. And when Margaret asked me that question about, did I ever think about going back overseas, my answer was no. I really didn't want to go back overseas, but like she thought, maybe I'm supposed to ask a question. And we were about to have dinner with friends of ours, navigators, working in Indonesia at the time. I thought, okay.

I'll ask them one question about opportunities for us to live in Indonesia. Please respond no. And then we're going to go on the way that everything's going. That's not the way it happened. Not only did he respond with a resounding yes, he practically offered to buy our plane tickets that night.

Through that process, God was patient and gentle and he was also persistent. Through several months of us seeking his leading, he led us through times of prayer, counsel from leaders, counsel from friends, prophecy from others, but especially through his word. Margaret mentioned the experience in God study. In that study, they look at the passage from Isaiah 50 five:four and five where God is recounting how he led David to be involved with other nations. And that process spanned about ten years.

So Margaret came home that night from bible study. Okay, God may be leaving us in Indonesia but it's ten years from now. So that peaked my curiosity when she mentioned that passage because I felt God had given me that passage after college, that something he had planned for me and I had no idea what it meant. So I started thinking about when did God give me that passage and it was ten years to the month that, Margaret had that conclusion. So Greg was still working at Monsanto while I did most of our fundraising and also I didn't want to go to Indonesia until he finished his master's, which he did.

And during the vetting process, though, the navigator sent a couple to our, home to see how if we were good candidates for the field. And, there was one red flag that they saw. And it was a big one. They told me that they saw said I was having an extramarital affair, not an affair with another woman. They said I was having an affair with my job.

They saw me giving most of my emotional energy and time to the thing which was giving me the most affirmation. I didn't know it, but I was living convinced that affirmation from others was the oxygen my soul needed to breathe. And I was selfishly choosing to give my energy to pursuing what made me feel good rather than giving my energy to my family's best interests. I agreed I was wrong and I needed to change and I committed to doing so. But we would learn later that this issue in my heart was far deeper and more detrimental than we had realized.

So when we went to Indonesia, Ryan was five and Declan was almost two. Our first year assignment was to love God, love each other, and learn the language. Our family was, in survival mode going through many things, but that new red flag also had a warning for me. I knew that Greg's love language was to physical touch and words of affirmation. And I used to joke about it until it stopped being funny like, you rock.

Okay. I'm done. And, so I was really stingy with affirmation for him. Usually silently, and I process out loud and quickly and without a filter usually, I would often demoralize him. Our communication started to suffer, but there was something wonderful happening at that time too.

Our daughter, Mireille, was born in Indonesia. There's not enough time for us to share all of the things that affected our marriage, marriage both positively and negatively. I had experienced a we're gonna share a few of those. I had experienced abuse by a priest when I was a young girl. And my mom called me in Indonesia to tell me that he was on the news in Chicago, because another woman had, charged him.

And at that same time, I was exposing a pedophile that was on our team. And so, I became just obsessed and started processing through that. And I, I was having a nervous based breakdown basically. So, in 02/2003, when we came from this came home for the summer, Charlie Kelly, face on Charlie Kelly, who was our doctor and he diagnosed me and treated me for the depression. And then people in our Lafayette church, ministered to us as well.

And during a counseling session of listening prayer, she asked me how I saw myself, as a little girl. So she had me picture yourself as a little girl. And when I closed my eyes to pray, I saw myself as this do you remember the napalm girl that was on the, New York Times? Do you guys in the back won't remember? But it was a picture of a little girl that had been affected by napalm and the clothes were seared to her skin and she's just running in fear and horror.

And that's, how I saw myself and then we prayed some more and eventually God gave me the true picture of how he sees me. And he sees me all blinged out in a cloak of righteousness that's covering me. And it was paid for by Jesus's blood. So it was I was God's child, and he always protects and adores me. And he always protects and adores me.

Another factor, that affected us from our family and our marriage, during that time was in 02/2005, I started working on tsunami relief and rehabilitation. And it was too difficult for Margaret and the kids to live up there in that zone, so they would they returned to the city where we'd been living. And my schedule became twenty years twenty years twenty days off away from them on the job site and then ten days home with my family. And we did that for several years. The physical separation was challenging enough, but I made it worse when I started to choose to disengage emotionally when I was away from them physically.

That adulterous, self absorbed patterns of my heart, they started coming back to the surface again. Well, we finished that three year commitment, that contract with Tier Fund. We moved back to America. And we called the next nine years, so we moved back in 02/2008. We called the next nine years the attack years.

When we came back, we felt led to go back on staff with the navigators full time. And to live and minister in the Chicago area, I was doing urban farming and working with people from the reentry community. The challenge was, we had told all of our donors to stop giving to us when I had started work for the tsunami because it came with full benefits and salary. So we transitioned home with about five donors. And I had a lot of fundraising to do.

And I loathe fundraising. So Greg and I, we were coming home. But for our children, they were leaving home. And, our oldest Ryan was very angry. He went for us because we were leaving home for him, and he had to go from this wonderful community to a huge high school outside of Chicago, and with 3,000 students in it and he didn't know anybody.

That was very challenging and, another big factor was because we came home underfunded, and Greg wasn't doing the fundraising, we used up all of our savings and we were living at poverty level. So I was angrier than ever and I started emasculating Greg by just saying, Okay, I'll do it myself. Another significant attack was with, mental health. So all three of our children over those years had to be hospitalized at different times for their severe depression and but the more they hurt, the more Greg pulled away. So I attended a NAMI, a class, nine week class that was at our church to help people understand how to, help people suffering from mental health.

But I did that alone. And I was so lonely and angry, at Greg that the war he neglected his family, when we really needed him. There are other counter attacks though, of course, with our faithful God. Along with faithfully supporting Greg, his challenging to raise support, his navigator boss blessed us with a live mentorship course for seasoned believers. It's called Surge in Sonship.

I don't know if you've ever done it but it's wonderful. And for me this course was life saving because I had to learn to start preaching the gospel to myself every day. Yes. Are you a sinner? Yep.

That's clear. Are you saved and redeemed by the blood of Christ? Yep. And do I have that cloak of righteousness on you? And I so it really helped me by stop living like an orphan and live like a child of God.

So there's a lot more we could share about the attack years but after much family therapy, marriage therapy, individual therapy, Greg basically, being fired from his job for his unfaithfulness, with his job with the Navigators and having never raised enough support, me continuing to emasculate Greg, our marriage was in serious trouble. I was reading some helpful books about that, troubled marriage and and one by Christian authors like Leslie Vernick and Henry Cloud on boundaries. And I was doing an intensive bible study on Sarah and Abraham and learning a lot about how she responded to her husband. And, I also went to Colorado to a company, Mairead, on a family trip to the She was going to a navigator family camp. And I sought counsel from my mentor there that had shepherd us while we were on the field.

I had asked her about, I think I need to separate from Greg so that we can save this marriage for the purpose of the marriage. I thought she would say, absolutely not. That's not a thing for Christians. And But she had just been to a conference for the NAV staff where they were, the woman, the therapist was speaking to them about the value of troubled marriages separating with the intent to reconcile the marriage and get intensive help? So I don't remember the date, but I remember Margaret saying that she wanted to talk to me.

She told me she thought we needed to separate for the purpose of saving our marriage and she wanted to know if I was willing to do so. I did not feel concerned. I mostly felt annoyed and defensive. I acquiesced to the to the separation but I did not embrace the opportunity to save our marriage. I did not see the glaring need for me to change and I did not recognize how perilous the situation was for our marriage.

We were separated for sixteen months. We were in counseling and our last counselor finally told me, before she said, we're we're not going to continue anymore. She said, Greg, you know all the right things to say in your head. Just none of it is getting to your heart. During all these attacks and challenges and throughout the separation and, my heart was growing harder.

I was so selfish and emotionally immature that I chose not to engage on issues and challenges like our son's autism, our financial crisis, my codependent relationship with my mom, my wife and children's physical health, and our family's struggles with mental health. I abdicated my responsibilities and stuck my head in the proverbial sand like an ostrich, hoping that Margaret would stop talking about the issue and or someone else, usually Margaret, would take up the responsibility. I abandoned and neglected my family while standing right next to them. I became emotionally abusive as I carelessly made my children think I was suicidal because of the separation. I expected all of them to meet my needs while I neglected theirs.

I chose to remain unwilling to see how I was failing to care for my family as a partner, as a parent, as a protector, and as a provider. And although the separation was intended to bring healing to our marriage, I did not show Margaret any sign of change or even willingness to acknowledge how I was wounding her and the kids. So my therapist during the separation had shared an illustration. You wanna do it because I'm done. Done.

She had there you hold the mic. She had shared an illustration of, our unhealthy dance that we were doing. So I was we were leaning against each other in an unhealthy way. And so as I step back and stopped emasculating Greg and, doing all those things that I was doing to that he could have been doing, I he had three choices. When I step back, he could fall down, he could walk away, or he we could stand up together with one voice and glorify our God and Father in heaven.

So, and then around that time in 2017 when we were separated, our daughter had another, mental health crisis and she needed to go to Colorado to get a certain kind of therapy. When Greg came and saw her in the hospital, he was so detached from her he didn't hug her. And I went out to Colorado but I needed Greg to come out for a weekend. So I had something in Chicago I had to do but he wouldn't come. And, other things happened while I was in Colorado from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve with Mairead.

It was made very clear by Greg and his that his heart was hardened towards Mairead and I. So I was out in Colorado and I went to Glen Eyrie where the beautiful navigator Campus is and we had so many memories there because that's where we would go for family gathering and we'd go every summer. It's a very special place to us. And I was on the And I was on the and I was on the even though it was Christmas time, there was nobody else around, and I was standing by a rock in front of the, castle. And I think that I need to divorce Greg.

And I know you hate divorce, and but I think that's what's necessary with this heart and heart. But please send me an angel like you did to Joseph when Joseph thought he was supposed to divorce Mary. Send me a word or an angel. And God spoke to my heart and said, Give me Greg. When Margaret shared with me that she was going to divorce me, I asked if we could get together.

I wanted to share with her why I wanted to share with her why I didn't think that was a good idea from the bible. When I was getting ready for that, I was looking at Matthew 19. The Pharisees are talking to Jesus and challenging him. Like, hey, isn't divorce okay? Moses said it was okay.

And I thought that's what I was going to use to convince Margaret to not divorce me. But as I said, as I started studying the passage, the Pharisees used the word, put her away in the divorce. That's the same term that they used for throwing out the garbage. And, God graciously gave me a moment of clarity at that point, and I realized I had been treating Margaret like trash for decades. So, when we got together, I told her, I understand why you're divorcing me.

I'm not at the point where I'm ready to agree with that yet, but I'm not going to contest it. After that moment of clarity, I'd like to tell you that I continued on with a softened heart towards God, but I didn't. It wasn't until several months later and multiple repeated woundings of Margaret and Mairead and Declan, that I finally began to acknowledge and admit out loud to God, all the ways that I had failed. And I began to take ownership of the type of man that I had become. So you remember Stephanie, the what took you so long, friend?

She was one of our biggest cheerleaders. And all of our friends were shocked, and and Stephanie was angry. And so she wanted to meet with me and find out what is going on. How could Greg and Margaret Brown be getting divorced? I warned her when we got together, I said, if I share, you're gonna think differently.

If I share honestly, you're gonna think differently about Greg when this was over because almost nobody really knew what was happening. I said, do you still wanna hear it? And she said, yes. So we talked for six hours and the first two hours of that was her challenging me because she knows me, she knows how I communicate, she knows my sins, my weaknesses, and, she knows how I disrespect Greg. And so we talked through all of that and, what I had been learning and what we'd been learning in therapy.

And we cried some more and, I shared things with her that I'd never shared before and that how his relationship with Mairead had gotten so bad that she wouldn't even speak to him. We cried some more and then she asked me a question saying, do you think that you should have divorced him years ago? And I said, I probably should have. So after the divorce, I went to spend extended time with God because I needed to own my part in the divorce because I was a part of causing it as well. So I went to, I went on a cruise for with Chuck Swindoll and, Insight for Living, the family cruise, but I went by myself.

But I prayed Psalm 139 before I went, Search me, oh God, and know my heart. See if there's any offensive way in me, and lead me out everlasting. So God showed me many sins but the big one that I learned on that quiet time with him on the Alaska cruise was that I had all my all my life to Greg and to my children, I just prescribed everything. It was so controlling like, here's how you fix this, here's how you fix this, a prescription for you, a prescription for you. Instead of letting him lead, I would just take over and do it.

And it was so disrespectful and enabling of me. And then Chuck Swindoll shared the next message was about your children and and relating with your children and raising them in the way they should go. And he literally said, and don't you don't need to worry about your children because God will prescribe for them what they what their future is. And it just again spoke to my heart like the yes, God is the one who prescribes and and leads people. So I needed to repent from prescribing for my children too.

I needed to trust God with their future, with my future, with Greg's future that he had prescribed for them. After I began to acknowledge and and own, the ways that I had failed God, my heart was more responsive to God. And, in terms of repentance, God brought to mind some of these lessons from sonship. They finally started to sink in And, it began to soften my heart towards God. He also gave me a promise from Joel two, verse 25, in the midst of, of devastation brought about by the people's sin, God made a remarkable promise to restore things.

And the word that he used to restore was a relational term. God was promising me giving me a promise he was going to restore relationships and forgiveness. God taught me about forgiveness, not that I needed to forgive, but I needed to realize how much I was the one that needed to be forgiven. And he began to help me understand how much it was going to cost Mairead and Margaret and Declan and Ryan to forgive me. New things started.

We started having we communicated after oh, so sorry. 08/29/2019. Not a glamorous day. Margaret was taking me back to court for the second time after our divorce. She was angry.

I was angry. I was so angry and resentful that Margaret was taking me back to court again. I asked God to give me a new heart. And somehow he did. So that day, in the choices I made, in the conversations that Margaret and I had, she was able to get a first glimpse of tangible changes that were taking place inside of me.

So there's not enough time to tell the whole story. How about how God used the song of Solomon to tell me to wait until the pomegranates bloomed in my relationship with Greg. He had told me that years before about the pomegranate and what that meant, would be when Greg demonstrated by putting me after God above everybody else. So I was caught off guard on court that day when that happened in significant ways. I saw a difference in Greg too.

I saw true signs of him wanting to be our protector and provider texted him, which he was shocked to get. I said, he had known there was something about pomegranate, but I never told him what I was waiting for it to mean. And so I just told him, I just wanted to say, I saw pomegranate blooming today. So, wow. After that, we started communicating a little bit more and we both said, we do not want our relationship back.

That marriage is dead. We want a new relationship, something completely new. So we started relating in new ways. This is when we started the reconciliation process, bringing everything out on the table, all the ways we've been hurt, all the ways we hurt each other and the kids. This is when I chose to start being honest about all the things I used to refuse to talk about earlier.

I didn't know what was going to happen if I did that. This this might be our last conversation for all I know. But even if it was, I still chose honesty because I knew where the avoidance and lighting and lying ended up. It always ended up in destruction. There was so much to be reconciled.

We literally had to make a timeline. Right? Oh, today we are talking about this section, this time period, these issues, this child. We're not talking about anything else. And it took us months and months to get through all that.

So Stephanie, our loyal friend back in the picture, she gave us great counsel during this time. She said, don't focus on getting married. Focus on healthy relationships in healthy ways amongst all of you. We didn't want our old relationship back, so we'd be marrying anew. For my engagement ring, Greg gave me a pomegranate ring inside of a claddagh, an Irish claddagh ring.

But not all of our kids were happy that we were engaged and that we were marrying Anu. Ryan and Ginny and his wife came to the wedding, but Mairead and Declan were, Declan supported Mairead who was too angry to come. So the Anew question mark part of our title, we knew reconciliation was what we needed to do. That scripturally, we were meant to reconcile with each other. But what about after that?

Is trust going to be restored? Is the relationship going to be restored? That was the question mark after ANU. As we embrace that and made the the goal healthy relationships, God was then able to lead us forward to the anew with the exclamation point. And on 08/21/2021, we were married anew.

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