A Marriage Under Stress

Speaker 1:

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Darrell Bock:

Welcome to The Table. We discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at The Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. Our topic today is about a very unusual marriage story that involves the military, a new marriage, children in a surprising context, et cetera, and coping with all kinds of unusual circumstances. My guests today are, ladies go first in the South, right? So Paige and Josh Wetzel who live, I'm assuming you're in Alabama, and who wrote a book, which I'm going to hold up. I don't even know if this will reverse or not. It probably will.  Beautifully Broken: Paige and Josh Wetzel, An Unlikely Journey of Faith. If you look very carefully at the picture there, you will see part of the story.

Darrell Bock:

Josh was in the military, served in Afghanistan, and was the recipient of an IED explosion that removed two parts of both legs. The story is about the entire journey of that recovery. So it's a little bit unusual in terms of what we normally do here on The Table, but I was so captivated by the story and what it represented that I thought it was worth taking a look at and talking to the Wetzels about. So thank you all very much for being with us today.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Darrell Bock:

Glad to do it. So again, Paige, you get to go first because ladies go first in the South. Tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit of your story before you met Josh and got married. Then I'll have Josh do the same.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah. So I'm from Fort Payne, Alabama, a really small town in northeast Alabama, and I came from a pretty traditional family, had grandparents in my life, went to the same church my whole life. I never moved out of my home until I moved off to college. So I had a pretty typical upbringing and I grew up in church. It was a very traditional Southern Baptist-type scenario. I played sports my whole life and that's what ultimately got me to the school where I ended up meeting Josh. I was playing volleyball first at a junior college where he and I met, but I was just a very straight-laced and focused student-athlete and that's what I spent most of my time doing.

Paige Wetzel:

I was on a very fast and unwavering trajectory to go to college and play volleyball and to get a degree in four years or less. I wasn't very flexible with that plan or the means as to how I would achieve that. So very focused, very straight-laced, pretty boring, and that was kind of who I was and how I functioned before I met Josh.

Darrell Bock:

Okay. So let me ask you a couple of quick follow-ups. Is this Fort Payne, Alabama? Is that the name?

Paige Wetzel:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

How big was Fort Payne?

Paige Wetzel:

Well it's pretty small. I mean I graduated with a little less than 300 kids, but the band Alabama is from Fort Payne.

Darrell Bock:

Okay.

Josh Wetzel:

And it's the former stock capital of the world.

Darrell Bock:

The former what capital of the world?

Josh Wetzel:

Stock.

Darrell Bock:

Oh, okay. Interesting.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah.

Josh Wetzel:

No big deal.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah.

Paige Wetzel:

I'm surprised you haven't heard of it.

Darrell Bock:

Population roughly, do you know what the population was?

Paige Wetzel:

I'm not sure. It can't be more than 15,000.

Darrell Bock:

Okay. Very good. Very good. Josh, your story until you met Paige?

Josh Wetzel:

So I was the complete opposite of Paige. So I grew up, I was born in Frankfurt, Germany. My father was in the military. So I was born in Frankfurt, Germany, lived there for about a year, year-and-a-half, moved to El Paso, Texas to Fort Bliss for a few more years until I was in the first grade, and then I moved to the small town of Glencoe, Alabama which is also in northeast Alabama where my parents are originally from. There was absolutely nothing straight-laced about me. I was the wild child.

Darrell Bock:

So you were a crooked-lace and she was a straight-lace?

Josh Wetzel:

Absolutely. I like to compare myself. You've seen the movie Old Yeller?

Darrell Bock:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh Wetzel:

And you remember Arliss? I was Arliss bringing critters out of the woods and into everything and just carefree little boy. Lived down the road from my best friend and always hung out at his house and we were always causing trouble. I grew up in that little town. My grandmother made sure I was in church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. While I was there, I wasn't there. I was just kind of there because I didn't want my grandmother to be mad at me.

Josh Wetzel:

Then went to high school there and graduated and went off to school. My first year to a little school called Young Harris College and played baseball there for a year. That was a really good experience. I got to play with Charlie Blackmon who now plays for the Colorado Rockies and Cory Gearrin who's pitched in the Major Leagues for a good while and played with a lot of really good guys. I was that guy that really took the athletic side a little too seriously and just school wasn't. My parents weren't there making me get up, going to class-

Darrell Bock:

You went to school for athletics?

Josh Wetzel:

Right. Exactly. And partying. So I quickly flunked out of school and so I had to move back home. I started going to Gadsden State Community College. I was trying to play baseball there as well and that's where I met Paige. Again, the party animal side of me came out and Paige couldn't resist my amazing charm and that's ... that.

Darrell Bock:

Well we read about much of that amazing charm in the book. Before we get into the humbling part of this story, how large was Glencoe?

Josh Wetzel:

Glencoe was a good bit smaller than Fort Payne. There's no way there's more than 5,000 people in that entire town.

Darrell Bock:

Okay.

Josh Wetzel:

There's one red light. If you blink, you're going to miss it.

Darrell Bock:

Okay.

Josh Wetzel:

Everybody drives through Glencoe, but doesn't realize that they've been through Glencoe.

Darrell Bock:

Okay. All right. So it's not a life-altering experience to be there unless you live there, right?

Josh Wetzel:

Exactly.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, very cool. All right. So that brings us up to where you all met. One of the things I enjoyed about the book and I found fascinating was the kind of dual level it was written on. There was the story of what y'all were going through and experiencing. There was how you were each processing what you were experiencing, what you were thinking, and what the other person was thinking at the same time. Your story begins in the midst of what looked was a dating relationship that looked like it was all over. I mean Paige, it sounded like you had made the decision you were done. Okay. Right? You were processing that and trying to let Josh know that, et cetera. So that's where your story starts before you get married.

Darrell Bock:

So talk a little bit about from that point kind of to the situation in which you got married because your marriage situation I wouldn't describe as typical either because of the military background. By the way, Josh, just to let you know, I did some small world stuff, talking to Paige before we came on which you heard as well, but there's a small world connection between you and me as well. We lived four years in Germany, not in Frankfurt but in Stuttgart, but the church that we went to was International Baptist Church located right next to the American troop compound there in Stuttgart. So we're very familiar with the military experience and the military presence. We were ministering to people who are in the American military in that church context when we were in Germany.

Josh Wetzel:

That's awesome.

Darrell Bock:

So let's pick up with the story there. So Paige, let's put it this way, delicately. You were reconsidering your relationship with Josh, right?

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah. So it was in the beginning of our relationship, things were good and easy. We were around each other all the time. We just hung out. Then you kind of get on that ... you get past that freshman year and then it's kind of time to start picking your serious classes and you're looking at internships and all these things. I was still really sticking to my goals and I wanted to ... I was on a volleyball scholarship and I fully intended to graduate before that scholarship expired with my NCAA eligibility. So I'm really just probably taking too many hours some semesters.

Paige Wetzel:

Josh and I at that time had gone to separate four-year schools. He was excelling at socializing. So he wasn't just a total sit-around bum. I mean he was really expanding his social sphere so I got to give him that much, but in order to do that, class really gets in the way. So that kind of ... class was really getting in the way of his socializing and I just got to a point where I was like, "I think we just have different goals in life. When I get out of college, I've got to get a job. I've got to get out on my own. I want to be financially independent and all that stuff." I didn't feel like Josh was really working towards that and honestly I just found myself at a point of thinking, "Who am I to judge you or try to tell you what you're doing is wrong? Let me just kind of get out of your way to do whatever you think is right for you."

Paige Wetzel:

So we part ways and it was peaceful and respectful and that kind of thing. Then he just kind of shocked me one day, just contacted me out of the blue and just said, "I'm actually going to go into the military." I was just like ... my first thought was, "Wait a minute. The army does things early in the morning. You can't make it to your nine o'clock class. How are you going to make it to 5:00 AM PT?" But that was kind of how we rekindled because I was supportive of him. I was just kind of thinking, "Good for you for wanting to take control of your life in this way and go for something that is completely discipline-based."

Paige Wetzel:

At that time, it was 2009 and we were really going through the surge of transition from Iraq to Afghanistan. So it was a concerning time to be joining active-duty military and I could understand where people were really concerned for Josh, but I think it kind of came across as his family not really supporting him. So that's just kind of how we became friends again because I just thought, "This guy needs support. He is absolutely doing the right thing. This is something he probably should have done right out of high school." So I just really wanted to be there to support him and tell him that he was doing the right thing.

Darrell Bock:

So Josh, this is happening. The interesting thing about your book, y'all are very clear. Paige, you're focused. You know where you're going. You're going there full bore. Josh is kind of this laid-back, nothing, water off a duck's back, it's not going to be a problem, the half full, maybe it almost sounds like 7/8 full kind of guy.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah.

Darrell Bock:

So that's an interesting mix. Your relationship rekindles and, I guess a-la-military, one of the things that I did enjoy about the book is I know next to nothing about military life and I thought you all did a wonderful job of explaining the hectic nature of the life, the on-call nature of the life, the sacrifice really that people in the military undertake to serve their country and the way in which you really put yourself in Uncle Sam's hands when you're in the military. Your marriage is that story. So talk about how much time you had to get married or, maybe another way to ask it is, how much time didn't you have to get married?

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah. I joined the military in January of 2010. I was at basic training by January 5th. Obviously during that time, you don't get a lot of contact with the outside world for a purpose. So we mostly communicated through letters. We could write all the letters that we wanted to. So we mostly communicated through letters. While I was in basic training, I realized Paige is somebody that I want to spend the rest of my life with and I think maybe it's time we get married. While I was in basic training and writing letters and stuff, I got this idea. Then when I went to airborne school right after that, so this would have been what? Like April?

Paige Wetzel:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh Wetzel:

April, May-ish. I got in touch with my mom and my grandmother and I was like, "Look, I want to ask Paige to marry me, but I really need some help." So the three of us worked together and they helped me pick out a ring because it's not really my thing. I'm not really strong in that area. So they helped me out and they gave me a bunch of really good options and I picked out the perfect one. I came home from leave just one weekend during airborne school and I asked her to marry me. She said "yes." Again, she couldn't resist my amazing charm.

Paige Wetzel:

At this point, I'm like, "I've put a lot of time into this. We might as well just ..." After that, talking about time constraint, it was kind of like how do you plan a wedding when ... because I'm marrying the military.

Darrell Bock:

Right. Right.

Paige Wetzel:

To get Josh, you got the military. So we thought about next summer and whatever. Deployments were an absolute fact for everyone that was active duty at that time. So we just thought we couldn't risk next year, and so we knew for sure he'd be off for Christmas. So I had to do all the wedding planning myself because at that time I was still living in Alabama. Josh had been stationed now at Fort Bragg so he had gone from Columbus, Georgia to Fayetteville, North Carolina. He came down as much as he could, but that was still an eight-hour trip driving. I had to do all the planning and that kind of thing on my own. Then we got married during Christmas leave, which was ... we got married on December 29th and that is not Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. It is that random Wednesday where nobody knows what day it is.

Darrell Bock:

We did the same thing. We got married December 23rd. Okay? So right before Christmas. I know what that experience is like.

Josh Wetzel:

Perfect.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah.

Paige Wetzel:

Then we honeymooned for two days and then he had to be back at work.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah.

Darrell Bock:

So basically, what? A three-day window we're talking about or a four-day window that you-

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah.

Darrell Bock:

... basically had to get married, honeymoon, and then back to where you were?

Paige Wetzel:

Right.

Darrell Bock:

So one of the interesting things about the book that I did enjoy in looking at your story was, Paige, a clear observation that you made that most people don't get married and then go back to their college roommates. So I went, "Yeah, I think that's true." So yeah, everything about what's happened to y'all before we get to the main part of the story tells you this couple is going to go through a less than normal set of procedures. I mean amazing part of the story. All right. So Josh, you train and you end up having a shift in your training that ends up leaving you subject to a deployment, which came much sooner than you had anticipated. Why don't you fill us in with that? Because particularly in light of the marriage story that you have, I think this is another interesting part of your story and shows how much the military controls a person's life.

Josh Wetzel:

Right. So I was stationed at Fort Bragg and I was originally in the Special Forces qualification course and that was kind of my trajectory of where I wanted to head. At the time, Paige was still in school at Jacksonville State. She was trying to finish up her Master's and she was a graduate assistant on the volleyball team there. So we lived separately for a little while and we ended up getting an apartment that she never actually moved into. During my training, I ended up failing a run, just a random five-mile run that you have to run it in a certain-

Darrell Bock:

by five seconds. That's the thing.

Josh Wetzel:

Failed it by five seconds. That's one of those worlds where they don't have a ton of grace. Everything's cut and dry and it's for a reason. They're the elite of the elite. So I ended up getting orders pretty quickly to Fort Lewis, Washington. Usually when you're coming from a training environment like basic training or from the Q course, they're not just going to give you orders to a unit to just go sit there for a little while. When you get orders to go somewhere, they're usually trying to fill up a unit so that they can get ready to deploy.

Josh Wetzel:

So I was headed to Fort Lewis who was scheduled to deploy anywhere from December to March of 2010 or 2009 to 2010. So I knew right off the bat that I would probably be deploying pretty quick. So we got to Fort Lewis, to Tacoma, Washington in August of-

Paige Wetzel:

2011.

Josh Wetzel:

Oh, yeah. 2011.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah.

Josh Wetzel:

2011. I'm sorry. All my dates are wrong. Got to Fort Lewis in 2011, August 2011 and they were already talking about their unit had already done most of their pre-deployment training and they were already talking about getting ready to go in December timeframe. Which our orders actually ended up getting changed 10 or 11 times. Our mission completely changed one time, then it got pushed back for a while. Then we finally got orders that we were going to deploy in March of 2012.

Darrell Bock:

So how long have you been married and how long have you been able to be a couple?

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah. So-

Darrell Bock:

... by the time you deployed?

Josh Wetzel:

We got married in 2010, December of 2010 and then we didn't live together until we got to Tacoma. That was the first time we had had actually lived together. So August of 2011 is when we started living together for the first time. Then I deploy in March of 2012.

Darrell Bock:

So all about six months you'd been together and then Josh is off to Afghanistan.

Paige Wetzel:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Darrell Bock:

One of the things we probably don't have time to develop, but obviously is an important part of military experience, is being a military wife when someone's in deployment. You clearly were depicting the very much day-to-day element of what's that like in waiting for the deployment to come to an end, that kind of thing. This is where I think the fascinating two-level part of the book begins to surface because Josh is going through stuff in Afghanistan and he's made a decision as to how much he is going to tell you about what he's actually going through while you're sitting there day after day waiting for the days to go by.

Darrell Bock:

Josh, talk a little bit about that decision. In one sense, I understand it. We do things to try and protect people if I can say it that way, I don't know if that's what you had in mind, and to deal with that. What is that like? Because you were trying to be as positive for her as you could be in the midst of going through really challenging and horrific sets of experiences.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah. So contrary to popular belief, when things come up in my life, I'm a researcher and I look really deep into things. So I had done a lot of research on the area we were going and talked to a lot of people who had had previous deployment experience. So I knew the area we were going was going to be pretty dangerous. I made a decision going there that anytime I talk on the phone to my family, I didn't want to fill it with negative things that was going to make them worry later on. So basically their only view of my experience was that I just told them we were handing out candy and soccer balls. So they sent me candy and stuff the entire time I was in Afghanistan, which I handed candy to kids, but that's because I wanted to keep them around.

Josh Wetzel:

I'm not a journaler, I never journaled anything in my life, not even really a writer, but I knew that if I didn't write stuff down, I would forget it. So when I got there, I decided I was going to start journaling for the first time. I had this nice little green book that I had no plans to write anything else in. So I started journaling. That was kind of where I put all the bad things and the real things that happened while when I talked on the phone to Paige which was very rare. I think we only talked four or five times the entire time I was there, when I talked to her, I just tried to keep everything light and nothing. I never talked about the dangerous side of the deployment.

Darrell Bock:

And you were actually there how long before the accident?

Josh Wetzel:

So I got there in like mid-March and then got injured right at the end of May.

Darrell Bock:

Okay. Of course, Paige, you're at home going through the day-to-day just trying to survive the life and counting the days when you get your husband back. Okay. So now, we're going to ... I'm going to have to speed things up because of our time, but the accident happens. An IED explodes. You're injured. I'll leave the details of the days that happened right after. And what I want to do is I want to go to the time from basically Walter Reed on, which is an extended period of time. How long did it take you to recover from the time you arrived til the time you were living at least the first time outside the hospital in the related area that they kept people in while they continued to recover? Do you know what that time period would be?

Josh Wetzel:

It was a fairly quick-ish turnaround. I was very lucky. I only had one major infection. So I tell people all the time I was injured on May 31st and I was walking on prosthetic legs before Christmas. So I had the most amazing doctors and nurses and stuff in the world. I was very lucky to be there. I think we were living in Building 62 by what? Like November-ish?

Paige Wetzel:

No, it was earlier than that. It was shortly after Labor Day. We were able to kind of do a trial and then I think we got our permanent room assignment right after that.

Darrell Bock:

There were surgeries three times a week for a period. You were on very heavy drugs initially and then eventually weaned off of that. Paige, talk a little bit about the care that that required, and then I think my sense is from the book that this is when your faith, which was there but it had been real low-key, began to really kick in.

Paige Wetzel:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think it was just a testament and I think even at that point, I was very immature just as a person, but especially in my faith. I think one of the first things that I thought about is when you stand at an altar on your wedding day and you make those vows, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Darrell Bock:

That's true.

Paige Wetzel:

You really have no idea what you're talking about. So when you say "in sickness and health, better or worse," I mean that can surpass anything you could ever imagine for yourself or for your spouse. So I was in this ... It was truly just being thrust into a world. I had no medical background. I mean thank God for Josh's mother who was a nurse for almost 30 years, but I had no way of knowing is this normal, should he be doing this, or whatever. So in a matter of just five or six days at Walter Reed, it was just worse than any newborn baby schedule you could ever be on. I mean he was uncomfortable all the time. He was either burning with fever, hallucinating, sick to his stomach, literally vomiting on us sometimes. He was in such intense pain all the time, just almost blackout pain, and it was just so overwhelming for me because I could tell that I was deteriorating too.

Paige Wetzel:

It wasn't just like, "Oh, I'm really tired." It was, "I haven't gone to the bathroom in two days because I literally can't get out of his line of vision." It was that way for every single wife, but you don't ever get out of your room enough to know that hey, there's somebody right down the hall going through the exact same thing. So discovering the other families was a huge thing for me in, not just my physical recovery because we tried to jump in and tag-team and help each other, but it also just kind of helped me know that I'm not doing as bad as I think I am.

Paige Wetzel:

The faith part of it, it was just such a ... I'd just never been that desperate and that not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's kind of like you're in these situations where we go through 10 or 12 hours of Josh just absolutely suffering. I mean you've just never seen a person suffer like that and there's nothing you can do to really help them. All I could think is like, "How long is it going to be like this?" That almost instills a sense of panic. So I would just ... I prayed the most honest prayers I'd ever prayed in my entire life. I was done with the Miss America prayers and I was just literally on my knees sometimes crying and praying out loud in front of a room full of strangers. I just didn't care because I had stretched myself. I'd definitely come to the end of myself. Looking back, that's one of the greatest things I think that could ever happen to someone, is when they realize they've come to the end of themselves.

Darrell Bock:

There's no way to ... I can imagine for someone who is as focused and able to direct their lives as much as you had-

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah.

Darrell Bock:

... that to be in a position where absolutely nothing is under your control-

Paige Wetzel:

Right.

Darrell Bock:

... has got to be completely disorienting.

Paige Wetzel:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah. So Josh, one of the things that's clear from the story is the way in which people who had been through similar experiences rallied around each other and really became close friends. In fact, I think your forward is written by someone else who went through a similar experience, Travis Mills. The story is literally chock full of these relationships that you have with other people who are helping you, you're helping each other really get through this. Can you talk about that a little bit? I think that's a personal touch that's pretty important.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, that was huge for me. I think that's part of being at Walter Reed and why it's so special. You have some of the best doctors in the world there and they do some of the coolest surgeries and stuff, but I think the best part of it is being there with other men and women that are going through the exact same things that you're going through. You're sitting there, laying in a bed with no legs, and then you realize there's a guy four doors down the hallway that doesn't have arms or legs, or you see people in the physical therapy room that only have, they're only missing one leg or they're missing both arms and they have both their legs. It's such an interesting dynamic.

Josh Wetzel:

So it was great to have those guys and it was great for me and just my morale, I guess you could say, because I could see other men that were going through the same things that I was going through and me being a military person, it turned into a competition as well. You want to be bigger, faster, stronger than the other guy. So you can't let anybody outdo you in physical therapy. My physical therapist, Lieutenant Marmelaho, he was unbelievable in bringing out that competitive edge in me. So it was awesome having those guys there and we really got close with their families. Paige, it was great for her to have the wives and they call themselves "The Clique." They got their own little club and they still talk all the time. They got a group text message and us being dudes, we just grunt at each other every now and then when we see each other, but it's good. We still have those relationships to this day and we still keep in touch with everybody.

Darrell Bock:

Now, the fascinating part of the book is that you would think that once the recovery happened and you're beginning to live independently, et cetera, that the story is all downhill from that point, but that's not what happened. Y'all had a first child, which was portrayed as the absolute great blessing that having a child would be. That was terrific and seemed to be going well, but then you flipped into the routine of being parents not under the most normal kinds of circumstances in many ways which impacted your marriage. Then you had your second child, which it seems in the book to have been a different kind of experience. Talk about that a little bit because it almost sounds like the challenge of your relationship almost became greater in that context than what you had already been through.

Josh Wetzel:

Right. Yeah, so when we had our first daughter, it was awesome. It was a great moment. I'll never forget that because the doctors had told me because of injuries that they weren't sure if I could have kids. So finding out like, "Ha, gotcha. I'm going to be able to have kids," that was awesome and it was a great experience. Just being a girl dad, I think I was made to be a girl dad so it was perfect. But then we got out of the military and we go into civilian world. We moved down to Auburn. When you're in the military, it's beat into you from day one to always have a battle buddy basically for two reasons. So one, you've always got community and you've always got that person there to pick you up when you fall or have your back when things get hairy. When you get out of the military, you don't have that anymore. You essentially lose that battle buddy.

Josh Wetzel:

I didn't realize how strong or how important that community was while I was in Walter Reed. So I got out and I got into a really bad place. I was essentially actively running from God and my wife at one point. Everything on the outside looked great. I was going to school. I was going to Auburn which was the school of my dreams. I had gotten a job in the athletic department at Auburn, which was awesome that I was getting paid money to go to sporting events, which I could have never dreamed of as a kid. But behind closed doors, our marriage was falling apart and like I said, I was actively running from God in every aspect of life.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah, I think with our second child, it was such a ... I think it's just you react differently to suffering that you've induced yourself. When we were at Walter Reed, we kind of saw the opportunity there. It was an opportunity for Josh to continue to lead because his unit was still deployed. They needed to see him overcoming things. They needed to see him with a smile on his face and things like that. So we were really motivated in that regard to kind of not just put an image out, but truly live up to, "I'm making the most of this situation."

Paige Wetzel:

Well then when you get out and you think, "I'm going to be able to control. Walter Reed was so much chaos and now we're getting away from the chaos, and I'm going to get to decide how it goes and we're going to have these jobs and this is how it's going to happen," I think that's something that really is often surprising for a lot of people about veterans because you think that the combat environment or the active-duty environment is the thing that's causing all the stress all the time. It is stressful for sure, but you're on mission, you're on purpose every single day. When you get out and, like Josh was saying, you don't have that, you don't have battle buddies, you're not really sure what your mission is, you're just trying to live kind of this low-key life because you've lived in such chaos for so long. You don't realize that you're just playing it small and you're just doing what's convenient, you're not necessarily doing what's right.

Paige Wetzel:

When you're giving up your leadership, and I say that in we were bad leaders to each other, we were very lazy parents, we just kind of tried to clock-in, clock-out to our jobs, and things like that, I mean we were miserable. It was truly like, "Why did we go through all of this just for life to end up this way?" So we kind of realized that we're in a situation as a result of our own doing. Taking responsibility for that was a real eye-opening and painful thing to admit, but once we did, that was kind of the road to kind of tying it all together. How does what happened to Josh fit into the civilian world that we're trying to live in today? I think we were able just through a lot of prayer and some counseling and just asking more of ourselves to kind of really tie that together and, I don't know, make our lives make sense after time in the military.

Darrell Bock:

I have two pieces here that kind of show how you got out of this dark space that you were in together. One is a marriage retreat which I think, if I remember correctly, took place in Alaska. Is that right?

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah.

Paige Wetzel:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

And then it's about as far away from Alabama as you can get. And then the second was a small group that was, I guess, part two. I may have that ... I think I have that in the right order.

Paige Wetzel:

You do.

Darrell Bock:

So talk about that a little bit and how that lifted you up, how the Lord lifted you up by those relationships because one of the themes that clearly comes through the whole book is that there were people journeying with you through this all the way. I mean from family members who were there when the accident happened all the way through to the support that you got, the parts of the book that I find fascinating are, you go to move in and there are troops of people literally there to help you move in, that kind of thing. So share about the retreat and the small group.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah. So the trip to Alaska honestly was just a complete God thing. We were at a point in our marriage where everything was literally falling apart. We were coming to a breaking point, and we were literally at that point where we're like, "All right. We just got to figure out how to move on." So we are working through that and then a trip that we had applied to go to, what, three or four years earlier, they finally reach out to us and they're like, "Hey, we noticed that you applied for this and we'd love to have you if you guys still want to come." So Paige at that time was like, "All right. We're just going to figure things out and see what this trip has in store for us."

Josh Wetzel:

Man, when we went there, a lot of people just really poured into us, and we were there with a lot of amazing couples that were struggling with a lot of the same things that we were struggling with. They really worked with us on, one, how to really understand each other on a deeper level and, two, they really worked with us on getting the tools to help navigate life once we left. They taught us how to argue correctly or how to understand each other a little better in certain situations. It was an amazing moment, an amazing trip for us. On top of that, we got to do a lot of cool things like fishing and bear watching and everything that you could imagine.

Darrell Bock:

You were totally shut off from the rest of the world during that week. Is that right?

Josh Wetzel:

Absolutely. No cellphones.

Paige Wetzel:

We had to use a landline to call anybody.

Josh Wetzel:

Right.

Paige Wetzel:

No Wi-Fi.

Josh Wetzel:

No WIFI. Nothing.

Paige Wetzel:

But the thing for me was that Alaska made me feel normal. It was like, Walter Reed, it was par for the course. Nothing was normal. It was you just learned to live with the abnormality of not just you, but what your friends might be going through and that kind of thing. But I think we had just really, we wanted to look like we were handling civilian life like pros and we weren't. So when we go to Alaska and there's people that are, and they weren't, not all of them were wounded. They just had one of the two in the couple had been in combat. They would just ask us questions and it was kind of like, "Raise your hand if you've ever gone two weeks without talking to your spouse." All of us just slowly raised our hands. While to an outsider that's kind of like, "Oh my gosh, that's horrible," inside I was jumping up and down. I was like, "We're normal. We have normal problems," which just made me feel like there was hope for us.

Darrell Bock:

So the small group, talk about that. That was a trick. Okay? I don't know how else to describe it, Paige. I guess you get full credit for being pretty clever, but you tricked him. Okay.

Paige Wetzel:

Yeah.

Josh Wetzel:

She's pretty good at that, but when we got back from the Alaska trip, a lot of things changed in our marriage and a lot of things were getting better, but I was still actively trying to avoid going to church and I still didn't really have that community. So Paige started seeing that and started seeing patterns and stuff develop again. So she was like, "You know what? I'm going to, we're going to figure this out." One day, she's like, "Hey, let's hop in the car. Let's go get something to eat." I was like, "All right. Whatever." So I'm just letting her lead the way and all of a sudden, we end up in somebody's driveway. I was like, "We're not, this is not a place to get food." She was like, "Well, good news, we're here for a small group."

Josh Wetzel:

I was completely opposed to it. I was like, "I don't have time for a small group. I'm working." I work with the basketball team at Auburn and we were right in the middle of basketball season the year we went to the Final Four, and so I was like, "No chance I have time for this." I was like, "But whatever. I'll just go in here. Paige said they have food. I'll eat." So we went in and right off-

Darrell Bock:

She also told you if you didn't like it, that would be the only time you needed to go which is a fabulous, fabulous approach to the situation in terms of-

Josh Wetzel:

Right, yeah.

Darrell Bock:

... taking the pressure off and bringing it on at the same time.

Josh Wetzel:

We go into the small group and we worshiped together and then they split out the men and the women into two separate groups. So I go in there and I'm like, "All right. Let's see what this is all about." I liked what I heard and at the end of it, a guy from up where I'm from in northeast Alabama, they were asking, "What are your prayer requests? How can we pray for you this week?" He was just right off the bat, he was like, "Listen, I need y'all to pray for me. I got a DUI three days ago. I don't know what I'm going to do." I was like, "All right. So there's people like me here." I wasn't out here getting DUIs, but-

Paige Wetzel:

It wasn't churchy people.

Josh Wetzel:

... it wasn't a churchy people.

Darrell Bock:

Right. Right. Right. You're getting the real deal.

Josh Wetzel:

Right.

Paige Wetzel:

Right.

Josh Wetzel:

So I kept going just to see what was going to happen next and ended up really liking it. In that small group, we learned a lot of different things. It was great to really see that there are men outside of the military that struggled with the things that I was struggling with. I think our entire marriage, it's always come back to seeing that we're not alone in the things that we're going through. There are people around you that are going through the exact same things that you're going through. You just have to open up and let them in and you'll see that and you can go through it together.

Josh Wetzel:

During that small group, I learned a lot about myself. We had a conference afterwards in which you kind of go back over everything, and there's a portion in that called, it talks about fear. Me, I never had a healthy fear of anything. When I was a kid, I didn't fear jumping off of the house or picking up critters or handling snakes or anything like that. As an adult, I didn't fear jumping out of airplanes or anything like that. When I stepped on a bomb, I never feared dying. I didn't have a healthy fear of anything. So I was like, "Ah, this didn't really speak to me." So the guy I was praying with was like, "One thing that men have trouble with and a fear of is the fear to lead in their family and spiritually." It's just kind of like in a movie when all things just kind of, in reverse, plays through your entire life.

Josh Wetzel:

That kind of happened and I realized I have an extreme fear to lead because the last time I had led in the military, I got injured and then others subsequently got injured or killed. So I just didn't want to lead in any capacity, whether it was in my family, spiritually, at work. I didn't even want to be the first person in line going somewhere. So I realized that during this conference and God really just showed me right then and there, "It's time for you to lead again. It's time for you to step up and be a leader in your family and in your church and in your community and at work."

Josh Wetzel:

Came out of that and came down and sat down and I think this is kind of when it all came full circle for Paige, but I just sat down next to her like I had just lost 2,000 pounds and I was like, "Whoa. I think I got to lead a small group." I could just see her out of the corner of my eye almost choke like, "Do what?" I was like, "Yeah, I think God's calling me to lead a small group."

Darrell Bock:

You were just tricking her back.

Josh Wetzel:

Yeah.

Paige Wetzel:

I was glad, I was so thankful for just how God set it all up because when I felt the inclination to deceive my husband into a small group, I think that's what I was seeing. We went to Alaska and it was like we were so intensively working on our marriage and that was great, but it was just step one and it was not going to solve all of the problems. I think what I didn't have the language for, or didn't have the understanding of, was that I knew Josh was a leader in all regards and all aspects. I knew he was going to be a great dad. I knew he was working everyday to be a great husband as well, but you're not everybody's dad. You're not everybody's husband. The rest of the world needed his leadership as well, and I think that was just kind of the thing where Josh was really just trying to keep himself in a box.

Paige Wetzel:

I knew that he was stifling very important aspects of his own personality, but also just God's purpose in his life. I didn't understand that at the time, but when I saw it kind of unfold throughout that semester in that small group and then ultimately at that conference, it was just so awesome for someone else, someone other than me to go, "A lot of guys are just afraid to be this spiritual leader because they're just afraid they're going to mess it up so they let their wife do everything," and for that to speak to him so profoundly. Transformation is bigger than a single moment, but I think that was as transformative of a five minutes as Josh could ever get other than the moment he stepped on a bomb. I was so thankful for that.

Darrell Bock:

So you've written this book. I have no idea how long it took to do. You got the idea for it and you did it or someone talked you into telling your story and you did it, however that happened. I don't know that part of the story, but I just want to commend you for, and obviously you had someone alongside of you who helped you do this, but the honesty and the sensitivity that you all give to this makes it a very interesting and reflective exercise. I know at the end of the book, you make a point about why you did the book and what you're hoping to accomplish by it, et cetera. I think you succeeded. I mean it just is a very well-done book that lays out at, so many different layers, a faith journey, a faith journey in the midst of challenge. It's about challenging marriage. It's about facing up to who we are, how we sometimes get in our own way, and then how God relentlessly doesn't let us stay there-

Paige Wetzel:

Right.

Darrell Bock:

... but just keeps knocking on that door and with maybe the message, "Will you please get this? Because I'm here to help you and be with you." The way in which it's clear that God was ordering steps in many ways and yet at the same time, you all were having to come to grips with what was going on. I just want to thank you for really a wonderful story and for giving us the time to kind of follow up and dive in. I really do appreciate your willingness to retell your story. Let me ask you this. So since the book has been done, what have you been doing and what's been, probably not the right word, but what's been the fallout of doing the book? What's been the result of doing the book?

Josh Wetzel:

We tell people all the time 2020 has been tough for a lot of people because of COVID and having to be locked down in their houses and everything, but for us, I think it kind of had the opposite effect. We actually go the opportunity to slow down and just kind of evaluate things. I'm very career-oriented and so in athletics, it's 90 to nothing. When COVID hit, I was right in the middle of basketball season. We were going to the SEC tournament and then to the NCAA tournament. So there was literally going to be no stop until the end of March. It just gave us that opportunity to literally just grind our lives to a halt, experience each other, really experience our kids and spend a lot of really good quality time with them, but then it also gave us the opportunity to kind of see where we needed to give back.

Josh Wetzel:

We've been so blessed since my injury and we've had so many people that have poured into us whether it's monetarily, we've got a house built for us here in Auburn, or through people helping us in other ways in our community. We realized that it was time for us to start serving others. We had all this stuff, but God calls you to serve and serve others even in the time of tragedy. We went and they had a serve project in Columbus, Georgia and we had really been called to that area which is just right down the road from Auburn, but we had been called to that area because of the high military presence there. We went to a serve project there and we met a couple there that work with crew military and they serve the basic trainees on Fort Benning, their chapel services and then they have bible study time afterwards as well.

Josh Wetzel:

Then another part of that is this class called Reboot where they, it's essentially for traumatic, veterans who have gone through traumatic things, and that was just right up our alley. We've been through a lot of things and I've been through a lot of things individually with my combat experience that kind of affected our marriage in a lot of ways and we feel like we have a lot to give to other veterans. So it's given us that opportunity to see kind of the areas where we can give back and serve other veterans. Then on top of that, it's kind of given us this platform to really challenge churches and what they're doing. A lot of churches, they say they're military-friendly and everything, but if you really boil it down, what does that mean? Do you know how many veterans are in your congregation? Do you have military-led small groups? Do you have specific programming for military members?

Josh Wetzel:

This military community as a whole, they're hurting. They're broken. There's a lot of things going on in the military whether it's suicide or divorce, and I personally feel like the way to change all that starts through the big C, Church. So this COVID time has really given us just kind of a clear vision on where God wants us to go next. We really feel strongly like God wants us to serve more in our community, serve the veterans more in our community and Columbus, Georgia, and then also encourage churches to figure out how you can help the veterans in your community in a strong way and how you can bring the community to them because, like I said earlier, when you get out of the military, you lose that community. You lose that battle buddy. So how can the church, big C Church, come alongside the veteran and be that battle buddy?

Darrell Bock:

Paige, you have anything you want to add to that?

Paige Wetzel:

I think we've gotten the opportunity to do some speaking and I have really been pleasantly surprised with the feedback of just it seems like finally a wife is saying something, but military families do go through a whole lot and along those lines of what Josh is talking about of how the church can step up is realizing how it's not, veteran ministry is not just about the veteran because just like I said at the very beginning, I married the military. So the military affects everything that I did. So if you've got, maybe you don't have a ton of veterans in your congregation, but I think every church would be shocked to realize how many immediate family members there are, whether it's parents, grandparents, siblings of someone that's deployed or about to deploy or whatever.

Paige Wetzel:

If you think about how many churches have ministries for single mothers or Celebrate Recovery for alcohol and drug addiction, things like that, but if you did a military ministry, veteran ministry, that could cover people from 18 to 90. They all need each other and they all need to be aware of each other. So it's something that we really have just kind of, just like Josh said, we took a breather and kind of realized with this book in one hand, this ultimate accountability of our lives as a married couple, along with what's going on right now in 2020 and beyond, what are the consequences going forward. We really just hope that our book opens the door to, "Hey, I know everybody thinks that my life as a military wife or Josh's experience as a soldier is this really crazy one-in-a-lifetime thing," but it's not because for every soldier that is injured to the extent Josh is, there were 25 of them that had to witness it and they are still carrying that and they are still trying to figure out how to function in their life knowing that that happened to their friend. They're married to people and they're trying to raise children, and they just don't know what to do and you shouldn't know what to do.

Paige Wetzel:

So what can we do to kind of come alongside them and say, just like what we experienced in Alaska, "This is normal and Christ has an answer for it," but if Christ doesn't, if we're not putting Christ in front of that problem, the world will tell them how to handle it, just like with anything else. So we're really just trying to hopefully just let this book open the door to having really important conversations like that.

Darrell Bock:

Well we want to thank you because I think the book does that. It does it well. To put voices and faces on this has been really a treat for me. So I want to thank you for the time, taking the time with us to talk about it. We wish you all the best in the future. How old are your little ones now?

Paige Wetzel:

Seven and four.

Darrell Bock:

Seven and four. Long way to go still, but that's okay. We really do thank you for taking the time to do this with us and we wish you all the best, and we thank you for being a part of The Table. We hope you'll join us again soon. If you have desire to subscribe to The Table Podcast, it's voicedts.edu/tablepodcast and you can do that. We'd love to see you again.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to The Table Podcast. For more podcasts like this one, visit dts.edu/thetable. Dallas Theological Seminary. Teach truth, love well.