Our God Is a God of Precedent

We want to tell you something we haven't fully said out loud yet, partly because it's still unfolding, and partly because saying it out loud makes it real.

But first, 2021.

Marcie was eight months pregnant with our first son, Charlie, when she caught Covid-19. I caught it too. We were both working minimum wage jobs, barely any paid time off, and just short of the months required to qualify for real parental leave. The math didn't work and the timing couldn't have been worse.

Going back to work made no sense for Marcie. So she quit. At the time, I felt the need to stay as close to her as possible so I also resolved to not return to work. I signed up for DoorDash and started delivering food orders to keep us afloat.

Some evenings, she rode with me.

Eight months pregnant, bundled against the winter cold, Marcie sat in the passenger seat while I ran orders up to apartment doors and back down to the car. We didn't talk about it like it was noble. It was just what the season required, and she wasn't going to let me do it alone. That's the part we still talk about. Not the hardship, but togetherness inside it. Two people who had decided, without needing to say it, that whatever this season asked of them they would meet it together.

We used to say we'd share a single slice of bread if we had to. In that season, we meant it literally. It still holds today.

On the morning of the night Charlie was born, I attended a job interview. Hours later, our son arrived into the world right there in our apartment, as we had a home birth. Marcie doing the hardest and most courageous thing I have ever watched another person do, and both of us actively present for every moment of it, with the support of our midwives. There are no words that adequately describe watching your child come into the world. There are even fewer words for what it does to a marriage. Something deepens that cannot be manufactured any other way.

And by the time Charlie took his first breath, we had a job offer waiting.

We have sat with that timing many times since. It is not lost on us.

There is a passage in Psalm 77 where the writer is in genuine anguish. He can't sleep. He's questioning whether God has forgotten him, whether His promises have expired, whether the silence means abandonment. It is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture. And then something shifts. He writes: "I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old."

He doesn't get a new circumstance. He gets a new posture. He turns his face toward what God has already done and lets that become the ground he stands on.

This is what biblical remembrance actually is. Not nostalgia. Not wishful thinking. A deliberate act of faith: naming the specific moments where God showed up in your actual life, your actual marriage, and letting those moments speak into whatever you are facing now.

Think about Joseph. Sold by his brothers, falsely accused, forgotten in prison. At every point the story looks like it is ending badly. But God was threading something through each of those painful chapters that Joseph could not see from inside them. The pit was not the end. The prison was not the end. What looked like abandonment was actually preparation. And when the moment of vindication came, Joseph could look back and trace the hand of God through every single thing he had suffered.

He didn't understand it in the middle. He trusted it afterward. And that afterward became the foundation for everything that followed.

That is what we mean when we say our God is a God of precedent. He establishes patterns. He asks us to pay attention to them. And then He asks us to let those patterns be the thing we stand on when the ground feels uncertain again.

The 2021 story is our Psalm 77. It is our Joseph pit. We return to it not because it was a beautiful season but because it is evidence, real, dateable, documented evidence of God's faithfulness in our specific marriage. And evidence matters when fear starts to speak loudly.

We are standing at the edge of a similar season, and we want to be honest about what that actually feels like.

Our third child is due in late April or early May. I begin my 12-week parental leave on April 27 (or whenever the baby chooses to land) and do not plan to return to my current job. The goal is to find something with more flexibility and better income to serve our growing family in this new chapter.

Three children. Leaving your job. In the current global crises? We know exactly how that sounds.

And if we're being fully honest, there are moments when it sounds that way to us too. Faith is not the absence of fear; I’m sure you’ve heard it many times. There are quiet moments, usually late at night, where the questions crowd in. What if it takes longer than expected? What if we miscalculated? Three children is different from one. The stakes feel higher. The margin for error feels smaller.

But then we go back to 2021. We remember Marcie in that passenger seat. We remember the job offer that arrived on the same night our son did. We remember that God did not ask us to have everything figured out before He moved. He just asked us to be faithful with what was in front of us, to serve each other through the season, and to keep our hands open.

We are not stepping blindly into the unknown. We are stepping into a pattern we have already lived, with open hands and clear memories of what happened the last time we stood somewhere like this. That is not arrogance. It is the hard-won confidence of people who have watched God work and chosen to believe He will work again.

If your marriage is in a heavy season right now, we are not going to hand you a list of tips. What we will ask is simpler and harder than that.

Sit down together and tell your story. Not the polished version. The real one. The season you barely got through. The moment things shifted. The time God showed up in a way you still can't fully explain. Name it out loud, to each other, as specifically as you can.

That act of remembering is not looking backward. It is building a foundation. It is saying: He has been faithful before. He can be faithful again. And it is one of the most underused tools available to a married couple facing something hard.

Faithfulness in marriage is almost never dramatic. It is Marcie riding in the passenger seat on a cold night because she refuses to let you face the winter alone. It is choosing, again and again, to serve each other in whatever the season asks. It accumulates quietly until one day you look back and realize it became something unshakeable.

We are moving into this new season with diligence, with faith, and with full awareness that we have been here before. Please pray for our family as we trust God through this chapter. We are believing for a new role, for provision, and for the same abundant grace that carried us through the winter of 2021.

And whatever you are facing in your marriage right now, we hope this story lands somewhere useful. If it does, pass it along to a couple who needs it.

Sit with this question together this week: What has God already brought you through, and what would it look like to let that become the ground under your feet for what is ahead?

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