PICKERINGTON, Ohio (BP) – Charles Fraley had walked away from God long ago, and he had even moved out of his house and left his wife and 6-year-old son behind when God drew Brandy Fraley to a marriage class at Change City Church in Pickerington, Ohio, near Columbus.
With her marriage all but officially ended, she tearfully told Pastor Darryl Baker and his wife Patrice what was happening.
“I had seen Change City on a Facebook ad,” Brandy told Baptist Press. She had been looking for a new church earlier this year after being out of church for a while, and she desperately needed God’s intervention in her marriage.
Charles, a veteran and the grandson of a pastor, agreed to meet with Baker simply to get Brandy to stop mentioning it. “He listened to my story, and he shared some things about his life with me, which actually made me feel a little better,” Charles said.
Even so, the husband was determined to get out of his marriage. “I was angry. I was confused. I was bitter. I was just lost. I was a ship with no rudder,” he said.
“While this was going on, I just had no peace. One day, I was in my son’s room looking at his toys and his bed and everything, and I realized something was really wrong with me and I didn’t know how to fix it,” Charles said.
For the first time in years, he prayed. “It was the only thing I knew to do,” he said. Later that day, he heard a voice telling him to go home. Though he didn’t understand and didn’t want to go home, he obeyed.
The couple started going to counseling and to the marriage classes at Change City, and they began to slowly rebuild their relationship, Charles said.
“I have to be completely honest. I can’t give any credit to anyone but God because I know where my mind was,” he said. “There was nothing that no man could say to me or do to me to change my course.”
Since then, they’ve had bad days where memories resurface, but their response is to pray, Charles said. “Even if it’s 30 seconds, I’ll pray and just ask for peace and grace and mercy, and everything ends up OK.”
Brandy is grateful for the role Baker and his wife played in their story.
“When they say, ‘Changing hearts, changing homes, changing cities,’ they mean it,” she said of the church’s mission statement. “They are invested in people, not even just their members. We weren’t members. We weren’t paying tithes. We weren’t attending consistently at the time, but they still invested in us.”
The marriage classes helped the couple learn to have healthy arguments and how to bring everything back to God, she said. Though they had premarital counseling and had a church background before, they “still didn’t understand what God’s calling for us as husband and wife was until we took that marriage class and learned it.”
“When I finally stopped being stubborn and being rebellious and I truly had a conversation with God, I know that things really started to turn,” Charles said. “It was foolish of me to take God out of my life.”
Baker sees the change in Charles and Brandy and says their lives have made a 180-degree turn from when he met them only a few months ago. “It’s like a totally different couple, and they both serve in the church now.”
Change City is a 10-month-old church plant drawing as many as 135 people on Sundays. People are building relationships with one another, the pastor said, and “we’re seeing homes totally be changed, not just individuals.”
“We believe that if we can get strong marriages, it will build strong families, strong churches and strong communities,” Baker told BP. “We’re going back to the basic building block of what God did in Genesis – Adam and Eve.
“We have the answers right there. I tell our congregation it’s an open book test, and the answers are right there in the book. Get back to the book. Let’s focus on getting people biblically literate because we live in a biblically illiterate generation.”
If people can learn what God’s Word says, they can apply it to marriage, parenting, finances and other areas of life that present challenges, Baker said.
“When I think about it,” Charles said, “I really just can’t believe that we’re here because if you had asked me months ago, I would have bet my house that I would not be in this place.”
If he had gone to God when his marriage got rocky, “maybe I would have saved myself from years of torment and anguish, but I wasn’t speaking to God at the time,” Charles said.
Going into Christmas as a restored family, Brandy said, “When you feel you have absolutely nothing, you do have something. You have God. I had to learn again that I’m not alone in this world and read His Word and see what it says.”
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