Before there was a MyR2B, before there was a podcast or a single subscriber, there were just two stubborn people who happened to be madly in love.
Michelle and I have been married thirty six years. And I will tell you straight out, from the very beginning we both knew God had put us together. Neither one of us had ever found the person we were supposed to be with, because nobody ever fit the mold we carried around in our heads. Then we met during a play called Hello, Dolly. Here is the part I love. The original name of that play was The Matchmaker. You cannot make that up. God has a sense of humor, and He was already at work before either of us had a clue.
Two weeks after I met her, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. We did a year long engagement to do it right, and then we built a life. There is a whole lot of story packed between that yes and where we are now, more than I can fit on one page, but that is the gist of how Michelle and I began.
Two Hard Heads
Now let me be honest about who we were, because this testimony does not work if I clean it up.
I was a hard headed fool. So was my wife. We loved each other fiercely, but we had our own ideas about where our life was going and our own direction we were determined to take it. And the whole time, God kept nudging us toward ministry. Ministry was nowhere on our radar. It was not going to provide for our family, or so I thought. My whole mind was on providing. I have to provide for my family. Michelle and I have to provide for our family. We were not thinking for one second that God was the one who was going to provide for our family. That part had not sunk in yet.
We both came up Catholic. I was your typical kind. I went to church maybe once, twice, three times a year, because that is how my family did it. Michelle was the opposite. Her family was in that church two or three times a week. She was far more devout than I ever was. But here is the thing about being religious and being surrendered. They are not the same. We had religion in the house. What we did not have, not really, was God in the driver’s seat.
And God spoke to us anyway. Even back then, He spoke to me about my future, about our future. And every time He showed it to me, that future always ended up being about Him. Always. But we kept grabbing the wheel back and steering toward business, toward career, toward the way we wanted to do it and the things we wanted to do. Emphasis on the word we. It was always about we.
Thirty Years of Knocking
Michelle did chase the things of God in her own way. She went and studied theology, even earned a degree in it. She will probably read this and correct me on the details, and that is fine, that is what she does and I love her for it. But even with that, neither of us ever pictured a life given over to ministry. That was just not who we thought we were.
We started a family fast. Within a couple of months we were expecting, and in the end God gave us three kids, Stephen, Michael, and Victoria. And the honest truth about those years is that we worked our tails off and felt like we got nowhere. We achieved plenty if you are counting accomplishments. We learned a tremendous amount. But none of it ever became the thing we were reaching for, because something was always missing. That missing piece was God. Not religion. God.
And He kept knocking. All through our marriage He would tell us to do things, and most of the time we would do them. But every so often He would say something that knocked us clean out of our shoes. We would be stunned by it, amazed, certain we had just heard from heaven. And then later we would end up disappointed, and the disappointment was our own doing, because we did not actually follow through with what He told us. We marveled at His voice. We just did not obey it. There is a verse that names exactly what we were doing, and it convicts me to this day.
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1:22, ESV)
That was us. Hearers only. Deceiving ourselves into thinking that being amazed by God was the same as obeying Him. It is not.
The Year and a Half We Spent in a Cult
I have to tell you about a stretch I am not proud of, because it is one of the biggest reasons we do what we do now. And it is the same season God reached in and saved my son’s life, so stay with me.
Back in those early years, Michelle and I were spiritually hungry and unmoored, living in Ventura, California, far from family. That hunger is not a weakness, but I want you to hear me clearly. That hunger is exactly what high control groups go looking for. They do not chase people who are satisfied. They chase people who are searching. And we were searching.
It started with one conversation. I overheard a couple of guys at work talking about their faith, and it was not the usual going through the motions church talk. They were excited. They had energy, they had answers, and when I asked about it, that was all it took. They invited Michelle and me to a Bible study in someone’s home. Warm, smart people. Good food. First names right away. No pressure, just come and ask questions. For a young couple, that sense of belonging hit us hard, and we kept going back. We brought our boys. Stephen was about two, Michael was a baby. We were building our family’s life around these people.
What we did not know yet was that the whole thing was built on one man, Victor Paul Wierwille, who claimed God had spoken to him in 1942 and promised to teach him the Word as it had not been known since the first century. Once you accept a claim like that, even halfway, it quietly tells you every other church on earth is spiritually beneath you. That is the first wall they build. They did not lead with it. They let us get comfortable, let the relationships deepen, and after about a year they invited us into their signature course. We said yes, because by then we trusted them completely.
Then life started reorganizing itself around the group, one small brick at a time, until the people inside were the only people we really spent time with and everyone outside started to feel spiritually behind. Even our roommates, the couple we split rent with, were in the fellowship. The group was not just our church anymore. It was woven into where we lived and how we survived.
And it was at one of those very fellowship meetings, inside the group that claimed to have all the truth, that God did something they could never have done.
We pulled up to the home meeting like any other night. Michelle took the boys inside while I stayed behind to put away the stroller. I was standing in the hallway when I heard a voice. An audible voice. It said, “Matthew, go out the back door.”
And I did what most of us do. I dismissed it. I figured it was one of the guys messing around, joking with me, and I kept right on doing what I was doing.
Then it came again. Stronger this time. Louder. Heavier. “Matthew, go out the back door NOW.”
I knew that house. I knew exactly where the back door was. And something in that second voice did not leave room for debate, so this time I did not argue and I did not delay. I went straight to the back door and opened it.
The instant I opened it and looked to my right, I saw Stephen out in the backyard. And in that very same instant, he stepped onto what looked like solid ground. It was not solid ground. It was a dead jacuzzi, full of cold dead water and abandoned, covered over with bubble wrap and leaves so that it looked like part of the yard. He stepped onto it and he went straight through. He disappeared beneath the surface at the exact second my eyes landed on him.
Because I saw it happen, because I was looking right at that spot at the very moment he went under, I could move. I sprinted over, dropped to my knees, reached down into that water, found him, and pulled my son out.
Sit with the timing, because the timing is the whole miracle.
The first warning came while Stephen was already moving toward that danger. The second came with enough force that I changed course immediately. And I arrived at the precise moment he vanished under the water. Not a moment early. Not a moment late. If I had brushed off that second voice the way I brushed off the first, if I had finished with the stroller, if I had taken even a few more seconds to think it over, I never would have seen him fall. And if I never saw him fall, I would never have known where to look. I do not let my mind walk very far down what that would have meant.
I do not believe God sent that danger. I believe the enemy meant to take my son that night, and I believe God saw it, warned me, and stood in the way of it. And here is what I want you to catch. We were sitting inside a group that told us they alone had the real truth, that no one else heard God the way they did. But it was not their system that saved my boy. It was not their course or their teaching or their special revelation. It was the plain voice of God, speaking straight to a hard headed father, going right around the whole thing they had built. The cult could not save Stephen. The voice of God did.
That should have woken us all the way up. It did not, not yet. But God was not done with us, and He was about to use that same group to push us out into the open.
Not too long after, the phone rang at home. The head of our fellowship called us, and told us plainly, that we were not welcome back until we got our child under control. Our child. A normal, rambunctious two year old who was being made to sit through three hours of adult programming every Sunday. If our roommates had followed that same counsel, we could have been spiritually exiled and homeless in the same week. That is not pastoral care. That is a control system protecting itself.
On the way out came the words from “our leader” that I will never forget. The message was, “now that you have learned what you have learned from us, no other church will ever be enough for you. You will walk into any other congregation and only see how shallow it is.” That is not a farewell. That is a threat dressed up as one, built to make leaving feel like a kind of death. A curse.
Michelle was furious, and it was a holy fury, the kind you only feel when you realize people you trusted with your family have been manipulating you. She said it plain. This is wrong. This is not how God works. This has to be a cult. And she was right.
By the grace of God, we found a pastor willing to sit with us. We brought him all of it, the books, the class notes, everything. And over about a day and a half, with no condemnation and no argument, he laid the plain truth of Scripture right alongside what we had been taught and let us see the difference for ourselves. That was the moment Michelle and I looked at each other and said it out loud. We were in a cult. A year and a half, with our kids, with our whole lives built around it. And God, by His grace, walked us out.
So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:36, ESV)
I tell you all of that for one reason. When that pastor pointed the light of truth at the darkness we were sitting in, it changed our lives. Somebody did it for us. Somebody should have done it sooner. That is a big part of why MyR2B exists. Point the light, tell the truth, and help the next hungry, sincere person find their way out before the walls close in.
If this is landing on you the way it still lands on me, let me say something plain. This work, teaching people to hear God’s voice clearly and to tell the real thing from the counterfeit, takes real resources to keep going. If the Lord is nudging you to have a part in it, you can buy us a coffee over at Buy Me A Coffee. No fancy pitch. Just two people who got walked out of the dark by grace, trying to hold the light for the next person. No pressure. Open door.
The Struggle We Do Not Hide
Here is what humbles me most. Even an alarm as loud as God saving our son with an audible voice, even getting walked out of a cult by His grace, did not fully break our stubbornness. We were shaken to the core. And then, in time, we drifted right back to business, right back to our careers, right back to the wheel in our own hands.
I am not going to paint our marriage as some smooth highway, because it was not. We struggled. For something close to thirty years we walked through some of the hardest things a husband and wife can walk through. It was not easy. It was not pretty. There were a couple of times we came right up to the edge.
But here is what was always true even at the edge. We never stopped loving each other. A day never went by, not one, where we did not say I love you half a dozen times, a dozen times. We knew how much we loved each other then, and we love each other just as madly now. That part was never in question.
What I have to confess is that for all of it, we kept breaking God’s heart. I say that with as much emotion as I know how to put into words. We broke His heart in a hundred ways, big and small, by hearing Him and going our own way anyway.
And here is the gospel of our whole story, the thing I most want you to walk away with.
Even though we broke His heart, He never stopped loving us.
But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8, ESV)
He held us together when we had no business staying together. He kept His hand on us when we were not keeping our hands on Him. And out of two hard headed, stubborn, struggling people who spent thirty years steering their own ship, He raised up a couple. Michelle and me, together, with a fire to show everyone we can reach about God, about Jesus, and about the kind of love that holds on to you even when you are running the other way.
Then Came the Wall
For thirty years we ran our own race. And then we hit a wall, and the wall had a name. COVID.
Everything I told you about in the first post, the panic, the fear, the decision Michelle and I made to hunker down and finally listen instead of steer, all of it happened on the other side of this story. The hard heads, the struggle, the heartbreak, the cult we got walked out of, the night His voice pulled my son out of the water, the God who would not let go. That was the soil. COVID was just the moment the seed finally broke the surface.
That is when MyR2B was formed. Not because we suddenly got it right, but because after thirty years God finally got two stubborn people to stop, get quiet, and say the words we should have said decades earlier. Okay, sir. What do you want of us. We are here. Use us.
So if you are tired of hearing Him and going your own way, if you are worn out from steering a ship that keeps running aground, you are reading the right series. We are not going to teach you anything we did not learn the hard way ourselves.
Next Wednesday I am going to take you deeper into the early years and show you more of the specific ways God spoke before we were ever ready to listen. There is more to this, and I am going to tell it.
And if anything in our story put a lump in your throat or a nudge in your spirit, do not let it pass without doing something with it. That is the whole point of everything we do here. Some of you are being prompted to stand with us, and if that is you, come alongside the mission at Buy Me A Coffee, or link arms with us as a Faith Partner for five dollars a month. Either one helps us reach the next stubborn, struggling, deeply loved person who needs to hear that God never let go of them either. Hear it, then do it.
Keep your ears open and your boots on.
Matthew T. Adams Co-founder, MyR2B Ministries, alongside my wife Michelle Revival Through Discipleship. Truth Over Trend. Faith Over Fear.
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