Starter Kit Marriage and the Gospel of Try Again

🕊️ Starter Kit Marriage and the Gospel of Try Again

What happens when they use your covenant as a discarded practice round—and call it healing.

📅 April 23, 2025
✍️ by Pastor Matt | Church of NORMAL™

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🎙️ Intro: When Covenant Becomes Casualty

I waited for marriage. I believed in covenant.
Not just because my church told me to, but because my soul wanted it to mean something.
I didn’t just hope for it—I trained for it.
I thought, “This is the hard way, but it’s the holy way.”

So when someone now says:

“Sometimes people just marry the wrong person the first time…”
I don’t hear wisdom.
I hear a rebrand of betrayal—a soft gaslight wrapped in pop psychology and a lukewarm gospel of “try again.”

And worse?

Sometimes it comes out of my kids’ mouths. 😞

Because when the person you married starts using world frameworks to rewrite the past—
and the people you raised start repeating those words—you realize:

Your sacred vow just got edited… without your consent.

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🔍 Section 1: When World Frameworks Help… and Hurt

I’m not anti-psychology.
I’ve learned so much from attachment theory, trauma bonding, and the pursuer-distancer model.
Those frameworks helped me realize:

“This wasn’t just sin or selfishness—this was nervous system warfare.”

It helped me stop blaming myself.
It helped me name the loops.
It helped me understand why love felt so unreachable sometimes.

But then the same frameworks were weaponized.
Used to say:

“See? That marriage wasn’t real. That covenant? Just trauma cosplaying as faith.”

And that’s where the alignment broke.

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⚠️ Section 2: The Gaslight Gospel of “Try Again”

There’s a new gospel spreading in post-evangelical spaces:
💍 Marry again. Cry enough. Say Jesus louder. Reboot your vows like a phone.

But it’s not redemption.
It’s narrative laundering.

Brenda isn’t an atheist now.
She still wants to get remarried in a Christian church.
Still wants to say the same vows—just to a new man.
Still wants the Jesus branding, just not the original covenant.

That’s not spiritual freedom.
That’s spiritual rebranding with selective memory.

And when our daughter Kendra hears me name this dissonance, even she struggles.
Because the church taught her that love equals loyalty—but now the grownups are remixing the rules.

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💔 Section 3: Echoes in the Kids

When Kendra repeated the quote:

“Sometimes people just marry the wrong person the first time,”
it hit me like a betrayal in surround sound.

Not because she betrayed me.
But because I could hear Brenda’s pain hiding inside it.

Those weren’t Kendra’s words.
That was a script—one passed down while I wasn’t in the room.

I’m not mad at my kids.
I’m grieving what the truth used to mean.

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🔄 Section 4: Reform ≠ Rewrite

I’m not here to guilt anyone back into anything.
This blog isn’t about shaming Brenda into coming home.

It’s about truthful reform.
The kind that says:
🛑 Don’t use psychology to bypass repentance.
🛑 Don’t use grace to erase someone’s grief.
🛑 Don’t call it “healing” if it means pretending the first vow never happened.

The world says “try again” like it’s brave.
But sometimes the bravest thing you can do is say:

“No. That was real. I broke it. And I’ll name it honestly.”

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🙏 Outro: For the Ones Left Holding the Vow

To those who are still carrying your ring on a chain…
To those who hear your kids repeat the edited story…
To those who didn’t get a second ceremony but still wear the weight of the first—

You’re not forgotten.
Your covenant wasn’t fake.
Your love wasn’t wasted.

It meant something.

Even if they try to call it a starter kit.
Even if they put Jesus on version 2.0.
Even if your grief makes them uncomfortable.

The Church of NORMAL sees you.
And you don’t need to rewrite your history to belong here.

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📍 Church of NORMAL – Where sacred vows and brutal honesty don’t cancel each other out.

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