How Adam and Ashley Mesa Healed Their Marriage by Facing the Past

Key takeaways

• Your past comes with you. Adam and Ashley found that choices made before marriage did not disappear when they both loved Jesus.
• Name what is broken. Seeing a harmful pattern and bringing it to God, to counselors and to each other is where repair begins.
• Spiritual intimacy is the foundation. Physical and emotional closeness grow best when each spouse is close to God first.
• Honesty, intention and perseverance keep love going. Truth told with grace needs a follow-up, and a vow needs a decision to stay.
• Pour in before you pour out. Ashley's effort to please people left her exhausted until she put God first.

A live conversation at Hope City Church

This episode of the Beyond I Do podcast is an interview recorded in Houston, Texas, at Hope City Church, where Pastor Daniel and Jackie Groves invited Adam Mesa and his wife Ashley to speak during a weekend on relationships. Adam says it shows the two of them in a different setting, since they are the ones being asked the questions.

The church had anchored its series to 1 Corinthians 13. The host had the room speak the passage over their own lives as a personal declaration, saying that they are patient and kind, and pointing to Job 22:28 and the idea that words spoken aloud can take root in the heart.

Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

(1 Corinthians 13:4-7, WEB)

Meeting in the church courtyard

Adam and Ashley met twelve years ago, in their early twenties, in the courtyard of their church. Adam was a youth pastor. Ashley had just retired from professional soccer and was getting serious about her faith, serving and volunteering and wanting to do things God's way.

Adam already knew part of her story. Ashley's mom would send prayer requests to Adam and his dad, including who Ashley was dating. He jokes that for a while he could not turn on ESPN, whatever sport was playing, without seeing one of her ex-boyfriends on the screen.

Sixty days into marriage, the baggage arrived

They married believing that loving Jesus settled the past. Adam says it took about sixty days to learn otherwise: every decision they had made before meeting was still with them. Adam believes God can heal and deliver, but when the work of confessing and healing is skipped, he says, the past simply travels along. In his words, "It's like you packed your emotional baggage, your trauma into a bag, and you moved in together."

The first step was to accept what was in front of them: the insecurities, the hurt and the past that could not be erased. The second was to address it. They saw two options, to be selfish or to be selfless and want what the spouse and the marriage needed.

Ashley named what she brought: trust issues, pain and insecurity. As an athlete she was used to performing for applause, and she carried that into relationships as people pleasing. Adam would tell her she was trying to please him when he was upset and did not seem to care when things were good. Ashley recalled that Adam had taught that iron sharpens iron, and she added that "iron isn't sharpened unless there's friction." Each of them had to admit their part so they could line up again on Christ as the foundation.

Seeing what was broken

About a year in, they kept running into the same struggle with physical intimacy. Adam noticed a pattern. In Ashley's past, affection had been something she turned on to win attention, such as when a boyfriend was going out. When a woman asked Adam for prayer after church, Ashley would ask about her on the drive home, and by the time they reached the house she was affectionate.

Adam recognized that as broken. He did not want to be rewarded when someone else showed interest in him, and he saw that it would hurt their marriage over time. He also said it really was not an Adam problem to fix. It came from a heart wound tied to choices Ashley made before they married. They invited accountability and counseling into their lives to work through it.

The host observed that what we do not repair, we repeat. Adam added that the moment you see something broken is the moment you show how surrendered you are. You can let shame tell you that you are broken, or you can turn to God as your deliverer and healer, trust him, and still do your own work to repair the pattern.

Three kinds of intimacy, one foundation

Adam and Ashley described three kinds of intimacy: physical, emotional and spiritual. Adam joked that men tend to say amen to the first and women to the second, which leaves couples bargaining. He wants more physical closeness, she wants more emotional closeness, and both skip the spiritual part.

Spiritual intimacy, Adam said, is the one that holds the rest up. As he put it, "it's the linchpin, it's the foundation that both need to be pursuing." It took about six years of marriage before Ashley was delivered from the pain, fear and trust issue behind their struggle. They had done counseling and conversations, and there was no new information to be had. So Adam kept going to God in prayer and asking him to speak to his daughter, since Adam had already spoken to her as her priest and as her husband. Ashley, in turn, sometimes told God that his son was working too much.

Ashley tied this to James 1:19-20.

So, then, my beloved brothers, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God.

(James 1:19-20, WEB)

She said that when her heart is right with God she can speak with love, and then affection follows. When it is not, she is short with Adam, and he will ask whether she has prayed that day. Both agreed it is not our job to fix the people we love. We can pray and offer grace, and ask God with open hands whether there is something in us he needs to change first.

Honesty, intention and perseverance

For a relationship to last, the Mesas offered three habits. The first is honesty, telling the truth with grace instead of speaking passive-aggressively. On date nights they ask each other how to be a better husband or wife.

The second is intention. After a hard conversation, Adam said, many people stop at the thought that they were only being honest. Intention means following up, perhaps with a check-in or an invitation to coffee on Friday, and not waiting for the other person to speak first.

The third is perseverance. They decided ten years ago, when they made their vows, that they were not going to quit. Ashley once asked Adam why he stayed through the six years when physical intimacy was so dry. His answer: "because I love God more than I love you." His vow to God came before his vow to her. On the days his flesh resisted, he would tell himself to go to the other room and hug his wife, text her, or send her a funny video after a fight.

When pleasing people runs you dry

Ashley spoke about what changed once she stopped performing for people. She became overly fatigued with what she called compassion fatigue. Because she is open and loving, people tell her everything, and she listens all day. Then she realized, "you're giving too much of yourself, and you're not being poured into."

That fatigue turned into anger, frustration and cutting people off. She came to see that she had control over her own posture and boundaries, and that she did not need to please people to earn their love. She says God told her to love him first so that she could love others well.

What this means for you

If you carry a past into a marriage, a friendship or a family, the Mesas' story says you are not the only one. Everyone brings something. A few questions can help you start.

• What pattern in you keeps repeating, and who could help you look at it honestly?
• Where is your time with God, since the rest of your closeness grows from it?
• After your last hard conversation, what did you do to move toward the other person?

The conversation closed in prayer for anyone who feels too damaged, too impure or too far gone to be loved. Those praying asked God to make something beautiful from the ashes of the past, and to let people walk out with their heads held high because of what Jesus has done. Whatever season you are in, that offer of freedom is for you too.