Jim: My name is Jim Paul.
Samantha: And I'm Samantha Paul.
Jim: And we've been married for 27 years.
Samantha: I grew up in Brazil in a nominal Catholic family. Jim grew up in the church at a very small Baptist church. We both knew about God.
Jim: I knew about Jesus, right. Growing up in a Baptist church.
Samantha: But, we didn't have a relationship with him. Mutual friends of ours introduced us, and we had an immediate connection. Jim was very sweet, funny, easy to talk to.
Jim: I mean, she was beautiful. There was just this tenderness about her that was impossible to ignore. And I immediately knew that she was the one. I just made the decision that I was going to marry this girl, and I got down on one knee and proposed to her.
Samantha: So we decided to have our wedding in Brazil because my family is much larger than Jim's. I don't think Jim fully understood what he was signing up for. I think it's fair to say the wedding day was a little overwhelming.
Jim: It was definitely overwhelming, but in a wonderful way.
Samantha: And he did say all of his vows in Portuguese. As a young married couple, life was nothing like I had expected it to be. We certainly had cultural differences that came to a head. I was very focused on finishing my studies and getting started on my career. You were focused on transitioning out of the Navy into the civilian world. We were running parallel lives.
Jim: We thought that it was supposed to be a honeymoon all the time. There were so many places where we fell short. But we were doing our best with the tools we had with conflict in our marriage. I don't think we had the tools necessary to resolve conflict.
Samantha: There was a lot of grudge holding for me.
Jim: And for me. Right. Even though I would forgive, it was more of I would forget. And so we never really were able to resolve the problems.
Samantha: I don't believe either one of us acknowledged that we needed to fix things within ourselves.
Jim: I was exposed to pornography during my adolescent years. But as I grew up, that exposure became an addiction.
Samantha: Early in our marriage, I discovered Jim's use of pornography. I confronted him about it, and he downplayed it. It was very hard for me to fully forgive or to move past it until things came to a head and Jim realized the significance of his addiction.
Jim: When my addiction came to light, God showed me what it was going to look like if I continued down that path. And then he also showed me another path, one that led to Christ and relief from this addiction.
Samantha: God doesn't waste anything. He used Jim's addiction and the destruction that he brought into our marriage to draw me to himself. I lived for a long time thinking that if I could just fix my husband, everything would be better. You know, I had been praying for God to change my husband, when in fact, I needed to be changed within me as well. It was in that space of such brokenness and destruction and desperation that I cried out to God because I realized there was nothing I could do to fix our marriage. I met Jesus at that point, and after surrendering my life to him, he started chipping away at my heart and showing me my own brokenness and my own need. Jim truly is a new creation in Christ. He's still the same Jim I fell in love with, but he's a different person. In the 10 years after we met Jesus, we had restoration in our marriage. We thought our marriage was in a great place. We were invited to participate in the Re|engage pilot at our local church in Connecticut. The invitation came as a little bit of a surprise. So when I talked to Jim about it, his initial reaction was...
Jim: No, absolutely no. I felt as though, although our marriage was good, we were ill equipped to guide couples through a marriage program. Until I realized that God had a plan. And that plan was to honor him through our weakness and to share with other couples what his restoration can be.
Samantha: And we did go through the first pilot session, and it was mind-blowing. The amount of growth we experienced in our own marriage, in areas that we thought we had mastered, we learned that we hadn't. And since then, we've led four small group sessions. And it's been amazing to see the growth in our marriage, the growth in our faith, to see God work in other marriages and to see restoration and improvement in the lives of other couples, not because of what we do, but because of what God does.
Jim: We recognize that there are couples out there experiencing challenges that they may feel hopeless. We've been there.
Samantha: But through Re|engage in the power of Christ, there's freedom, there's healing, and there's certainly restoration for your marriage.
