“God showed us that what upholds a marriage is not our strength but His.”

Jack Engel, Washington Heights

Through job transitions, moves, and getting married in the midst of a pandemic, Jack has learned what it looks like to truly trust God with his plans.

Erika and I met at Church of the City in 2018 in the prayer room. Both of our families had recently gone through divorces and I was in the process of mourning the departure of my father; a man who, just a few years earlier, was one of the central spiritual role models in my life but had turned away from the beliefs and values that I had been raised to hold.

After meeting Erika, I immediately knew she was the person I wanted to marry. Still, I felt helpless and even tormented by the thought that what I had been raised to understand as a healthy, happy marriage between my parents had ended in destruction and pain.

I knew the same propensities and sin that had caused my dad to leave my mom also existed in me and as I thought about dating Erika, I asked myself, Am I ready? Can I trust myself with this right now?

Spending time in the prayer room — a place where we could seek God’s presence together — was healing for both Erika and me. A few months later, we began dating. We decided that the whole rhythm of our dating life would be based around our church community. We went to church together, joined a community group together, and we pursued mentors who modeled what it looks like to be a family led by the Holy Spirit. As we lived out this new rhythm, we started to develop a vision for what our relationship and family could be.

I proposed to Erika in November of 2019 and at the beginning of 2020, we had every intention of starting our married lives in New York. Things were looking up as I was one semester away from finishing my bachelor’s degree and had just secured an internship at a real estate firm that was hopefully going to turn into full-time employment after graduation. In March, two days before I was supposed to hear about the job, COVID-19 hit. Everything shut down, the firm stopped offering new positions, and Erika and I found out we both had COVID. So we packed up our stuff and left New York to quarantine with her family in Virginia.

Living in Virginia was tough. We didn’t have our rhythm or community, and we were removed from the place where we had grown close together. We were supposed to get married in June but didn’t know where we would live, what we’d be doing, or what a ceremony would look like. Our relationship became stressful, and we began struggling with what to say or how to comfort one another.

One day, sitting at my desk, I felt an immense spiritual weight attack me as the enemy targeted my identity and hope for the future. I laid prostrate on the floor, pleading and praying that the Lord would give me the words and direction to navigate through this season. That afternoon, I got a call from a friend from church. He said, “Jack, you and Erika were brought to mind this afternoon, and I just feel like the Lord gave me some things to say to you.” I hadn’t talked to this friend in months, but he spoke encouraging words over our marriage. “Move ahead with your marriage,” he said. “God’s got you and His hand is over you.” He spoke over our children, and how God would work redemptively through the divorces in both of our families. I was dumbfounded. I wrote down everything he said and immediately shared it with Erika. Strengthened and encouraged, we ended up getting married in May, at a small ceremony with just our immediate families in a backyard.

During that time we were in Virginia, Erika and I wanted to come back to New York but God kept us in Virginia to strip us of our training wheels and remind us that our primary relationship is with Him. He used unknown vocation, location, and community to lead us into deeper dependence on Him. He showed us that what upholds a marriage is not our strength but His. By taking us through a season where all we had was Him, He began to deposit everything we needed to fully trust Him.

At the end of June, after months of not knowing how or if we’d ever come back to the city, I got a job with a developer in New York. In July, we moved into a small apartment in Washington Heights and are now settling into our lives as a married couple. We are grateful and still processing everything the Lord took us through, but we couldn’t be happier to be back in our city. Not only has this been a journey from New York to Virginia and back, but this has been a journey of learning trust again — not in myself, but in God’s Spirit in me, in Erika, and in our community. God showed us how to turn our desire for answers into a desire for Him.