Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 10, 2019 | Expresso - Carrie Dodds

Transcript

September 10, 2019 | Expresso - Carrie Dodds · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  unknown: Hi.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Normally I'm not nervous in front of people, but I'm not singing, so it's totally different.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: But my name's Carrie Dodds.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: My family and I have been coming to TBC for about seven or eight years.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is a older picture, because that little dude that was on Cooper's birthday, and he's now six.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this is one of my favorite pictures of our whole family with Carter meeting her brother for the first time and then Carter and Cooper's older sisters, Whitney and Valerie.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a more recent picture of our family.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've gone to church pretty much my entire life, and it was just what you did on Sunday.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember getting baptized at the age of eight.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So if I were ever asked, what was your life like before you know Christ, I I don't remember because it was just what you did.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Leading up to my teen years, we changed churches a few times.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: We finally settled at Light of the World, and my parents still go there today.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as I grew older, life got busier, and though church was still what we did on Sundays and Wednesday night, because that's what you do, that was just it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was a Sunday thing.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't I wasn't the best at carrying that through the week in all aspects of my life.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I still tried to be a good girl and stay out of trouble.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But to be honest, I more tried to keep my nose clean because my dad was a firefighter.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And even if there were people I didn't know, they knew who I was and who my dad was, and they would tell him, so I just tried to fly under the radar and be a good girl.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I did okay in school.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I had friends.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was never popular or completely an unknown.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was somewhere in the middle, and I was one of those that did band and color guard and theater and choir, and you know, I was a geek, but it's fun.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: One of my first jobs in high school, because of my love of movies and my geekdom, is I worked at Suncoast at the mall, and that's where that led me to meeting my first husband.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Worked there during like the Christmas holiday season, and then after the holiday season, I didn't work there.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um went back to just finishing out my senior year of high school.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: After I graduated, I went back and worked the next holiday season, and we kind of hmm, a little bit different than just working together or friends.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: We things moved kind of quick.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um we started dating.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: We ended up getting engaged about six months after we started dating, got married another eight months after that, and I was 19 and he was 23.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So most kids are going to college.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm getting married, you know, good idea.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we went to church most of the time.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um things started to take a turn for the worst about year four into our marriage, which happened to be about 2001.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: September 11th happened.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was like something out of a movie, but it was real life.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember being selfishly thankful that my dad was not a firefighter in New York.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I had this overwhelming desire that I wanted to follow in his footsteps and work in fire or EMS.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I looked into becoming an EMT, I got the information, showed it to my husband.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was excited and he was against it.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what if you get hurt, or what if you get stuck with a needle, or you know, and I'm like, okay.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I just put it aside.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was a gifted writer, and he wanted to be a movie writer director, which he very well could have.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I encouraged him and I offered to put everything in storage and move somewhere that he could go to film school and follow his dream, but he never took me up on the offer.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I settled, and I longed for us to have a normal life.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I started pushing to have kids and was wet with excuse after excuse, and I watched with envy as one of our closest couple friends had their first child, and they were the one couple out of all of us that was never gonna have kids.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that sunk in a little bit deeper.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was miserable.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I tried to find fulfillment in so many things, one of which was theater.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And ironically, hello dolly was the end of, was the start of Goodbye Marriage.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: We fought all the time, but put on a great face to family and friends, and nobody knew how bad it was.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And after after the fact, um, you know, my mom always said, Well, you deserve an Oscar because I had no idea that it was as bad as it was.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the straw that broke the camel's back was an argument over a football schedule poster of all things.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, long story short, I moved out.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: We tried counseling, we filed, and after six years of marriage, we were divorced.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So there I was, 25 years old, divorced, back living with my parents.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness, and feeling like a total failure.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I started going back to church on the regular, and I would love to tell you that I got involved in a young singles group and met a man that God had waiting for me.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I started trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I never lost the dream of being in uh BMS.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I started college, which I had never done before.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: 25-year-old with a bunch of 18-year-olds, yeah, non-traditional student.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I figured out I could get my ENT and work on an ambulance while I was going to nursing school.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a plan.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't necessarily God's plan, but I had a plan.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: I dated, I had a couple of serious boyfriends, but broke it off when I realized that they weren't really going in the direction that I wanted to go to in my life.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I got my ENT certification and shortly after I applied to work at AMR and I was hired and started working part-time.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Soon after that, my regular full-time job, I was working at Teletech.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody else?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like everybody in Topeka work there.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they announced that they were shutting their doors and I was going to be laid off.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So thankfully I was able to change to full-time status at AMR and get after getting laid off, so I still had a job.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So close to three years post-divorce, I'm working full-time AMR, still living with my parents, and now enrolled in paramedic school.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It seems completely logical.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just another day working on the ambulance, and I pulled into headquarters behind another truck.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Jumping out of the back of that truck was somebody that looked oddly familiar.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Are you related to Chris Dodds?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because you look just like him.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's my little brother.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the day I met Brian.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Brian's younger brother, Chris, and I went to junior high and high school together and graduated in the same class.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know Brian existed until that day.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they also have an older brother and a sister.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Brian was taking his EMT class at AMR and doing his right along time.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was on duty, I would go down and help out in his EMT class and you know.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then Brian asked his brother about me, got my phone number, we started talking.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: But before I would go out with him, I asked him about church and his thoughts on God.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, let's do it the right way this time, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he visited my church and wasn't scared off.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we started seeing each other more.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I would stay at his apartment, which turned into more of my stuff at his apartment, and the next thing I knew, we were living together.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not really the plan that I wanted to go with.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: He liked my parents, my parents liked him.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't like anyone I'd ever brought home before.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: He had plans, he had determination, his own place, job, a part-time job, and two daughters.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: In all my life growing up and imagining getting married, I never added in automatic kids.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: That was just not ever part of my life plan.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: For the most part, we got along okay with the girls, but there were struggles.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And looking back, there's so many things I would do differently now, but as they say, hindsight is 2020.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Things started getting more serious with Brian and I, and we wanted to, he wanted to buy a house, and I had a couple conditions.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get married and have kids of my own.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't against either idea.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And soon after he bought a house and asked me to move in with him.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I was approaching 30.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know that sounds so ridiculous now, but you know, when you're almost 30, you're like, oh my gosh.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, still not married, living with my boyfriend and his daughters every other weekend.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: The spring of 2007, Brian was in the Air National Guard.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was his full-time job.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: He was a weekend warrior, but he also worked there during the week.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in the spring of 2007, he was offered the opportunity to deploy to Iraq.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: He agreed and he would leave in September of that year.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't happy.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: When he told me about his decision, not because I didn't want him to go, but because I knew I knew he had a dirty duty to serve, but because I wasn't included in the decision.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I felt very alone.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to tell you that I took this opportunity to get closer to God and strengthen that relationship, but my flesh was leading me.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: I made an ultimatum to myself that if Brian didn't ask me to marry him before I turned 30, I was out.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, lo and behold, Brian asked me to marry him on my 30th birthday.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Good timing.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which was a month and 10 days before he would be leaving to go to Iraq in six months.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't the strongest while he was gone.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I had gotten on at the VA working in the call center and was still working part-time at AMR, so I took extra shifts at AMR and kept myself busy while Brian was gone.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: But my flesh was weak and I didn't use that time to grow my relationship with the Lord.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Brian returned home, and just after the first of the year in 2008, we worked on wedding plans, and in September that year we were married.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a good party?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Was that fun?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: That was good times.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's my cousin.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone lived happily ever after.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not so much.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: We struggled.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next few years, we battled with Brian's ex over custody with his daughters.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: We started looking into having children together, but had to go about it unconventionally because Brian had had a vasectomy.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there were underlying struggles we went through due to Brian's time overseas and things he didn't talk about.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: During all of our struggles, God was there.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: We just weren't actively seeking him.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Through a new position at the VA, I had learned from a nurse that the VA would do a vasectomy reversal.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: We checked further into it, and because of Brian's time serving in Iraq, he qualified to be seen at the VA and had his reversal done.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as, you know, it was an expensive surgery that we otherwise would not have been able to afford.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Within a year of his reversal, we welcomed our daughter Carter, because it was successful.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And our life was pretty good, but there was still something missing.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't feel important or like I was a priority in my own marriage.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Brian was busy working his full-time job at the guard and part-time with AMR, and he was also on Shawnee Heights fire as part-time firefighter, which is where he works full-time now.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So wasn't really home a lot.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: The last time he deployed with the Air National Guard was right before Carter turned one, and I felt more alone than ever.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He would call home and would mainly talk and ask about Carter.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And when I would say, Are you, you know, gonna ask about me?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, she changes every day.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: You don't, you know.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that just kind of sunk me lower into feeling alone.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And again, my flesh was weak and God was not my priority.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everything in our marriage became focused on the kids.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Our relationship as husband and wife was somewhere on the back burner, maybe like near the stove, but maybe not even close.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: I kept feeling more and more lost.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: About three months after Carter turned one, I was in the Sound of Music at Topeka Civic Theater.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I hadn't been in a show for 10 years, mind you, with that last show being Hello Dolly.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not good mojo for marriages.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then Brian encouraged me to be in the show because he knew how much I loved doing it, and I was having a blast, but I was tired.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Surprise, I was pregnant.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So add pregnant hormones to an already strained marriage with a toddler and teenage girls and a husband who works a lot and generally busy schedule, recipe for disaster.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: In my personal struggles, I reached out to trusted friends.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: One in particular suggested I try a Bible study at TBC.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: She had gone before and met with Patty and knew that it would be helpful for me.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: The first study I attended was what happens when a woman says yes to God.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was wonderful.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I felt a part of something.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I felt wanted and not alone.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I met with other women that could to that I could relate to and who fed the word into me.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Amid all the chaos at home, Brian and I started to attend TBC.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: We had visited with his brother before Brian went to Iraq, and it was somewhere Brian felt comfortable going to church.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: He grew up Lutheran, and I grew up going to non-denominational, charismatic kind of church.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So for us to find a place that we both could agree on, I was like, okay, that's where we're going.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: So some members of the Sound and Music cast also attend and still attend at TBC.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we would pray every night before our show and have great discussions in the dressing room.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And God was working in my life, but I hadn't fully realized it yet.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Brian and I continued to have some serious struggles in our marriage, and we tried counseling.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: We continued to struggle.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Life was a mess.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the more of a mess it became, the more I realized that what a mess, that it was a mess because God wasn't in the mix.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've never blamed God for the struggles that I've been through or my marriage troubles.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: I can look back now and I know that he has always been there just waiting for me to invite him to be involved.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I moved out from Brian in early 2016.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was done.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to do what was best for our kids and give them a happy home with without parents who fought all the time.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: We still talked and did things as a family, but I was very arm's length with Brian.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: We had both hurt each other and we were both very wounded.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I learned through our struggles that the only person I can change is me.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I fought that for so long because I was always like, well, if Brian would just do this or Brian would just do this, but I did need to work on me.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to seek God and learn who I was through him.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I learned that my identity is not my husband, my kids, a nice home or vehicles, the job we have.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: My identity was not the hurtful things that I felt in my marriage or from my husband.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: My identity is in Christ who died for me and bore my sins as if they were his own.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And once I realized that, I didn't feel alone anymore.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was ready to move on and be done with Brian.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then he surprised me on Father's Day in 2018.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: He got baptized.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: His eyes were open and we could talk about things we hadn't before.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't been perfect since Brian was baptized.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's been difficult, but it's been different.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've made more of an effort to fix what was broken, and there are still things to be fixed.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I can say here today, or I can stand here today and tell you that you are never alone.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And having a boyfriend or a husband does not make you who you are.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: God says who you are, and he loved you enough to die for you.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So be picky and don't settle.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Take it to the Lord in prayer, and when you feel lonely, cry out to him.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes all you can do is cry, but he knows what your tears mean.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Just talk to him like you would a friend.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Go to Bible study and meet new people.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I guarantee you'll find somebody going through what you're going through or someone who has reached the other side of what you're going through.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it's so important.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So many people say, Well, I don't have to go to church because I can worship God wherever I am.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to be fed by people that you go to church with, people that have like you know, beliefs and can help lift you up when you need it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing in my life has happened by chance.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every struggle has made me stronger, and every fall makes me seek God more.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here today because my parents never stopped praying for me.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here today because my group of if sisters have been through the trenches with me.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here today because my village, who has been there during some pretty bad times, but has continued to love me and never judge me.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm here today because of a loving God who has put all these people in my life.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's a void in every one of us that can only be filled with Him.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: No one else or anyone else will complete you.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: The word tells us in John 16 33 that we will have trouble in this world, but in him there is peace.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: God is still writing my story.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let him help you write yours.