Wedding Day!

Yesterday was my wedding day, I married Jared Schelvan. Jared's mother decorated her back yard and deck with pretty fall decor. Jared's dad performed the ceremony as he is an ordained minister and we completed the nuptials just minutes before it started raining. Each of the children walked down the stairs and gave me a flower to add to my bouquet. It was beautiful! We kept it pretty low key because we had, in fact, been married before, over 10 years ago. We have 5 kids together!! There truly is nothing remarkable about two people reconciling and getting remarried. People do it all the time, aside from the fact that this was Jared about a year ago... This was when he was arrested for maintaining a drug house. You see, we both strayed from the Lord. After my 5th child I had some post-partum issues and things got ugly between us. After about a year of not getting along I took the kids and left. A few weeks later someone offered him one of the most destructive and addictive substances of all time. Crystal meth. Within weeks he was a totally different person. I had already filed for divorce, after living with my step-sister and mother, I ended up in a women's shelter because of his erratic and stalking behavior. I had to call social services, and he wound up only being able to have supervised visits with the children. He adopted a neighborhood vigilante persona and was completely out of his mind. I took out a restraining order. He broke it and ended up in jail for the following: felony bond breaking, felony maintaining a drug house, felony theft of a firearm, felony possession of a firearm, and disorderly conduct. By the time he was in jail I lost everything. So did he. I left pretty much with nothing but the kids and some clothes, and before anything was settled in court he had pawned everything of value and our house was in ruins. There were squatters there even with him in jail and the police couldn't do anything about it until it was awarded to me in court, and it was. It was trashed but I still wanted it. I wanted something familiar for the kids to come back to after everything that happened with their father. So we put in the hard work, with the help of friends, family and community, to fix up the house and pull it out of foreclosure. (After I went with the police to kick out the squatters, that is) Everything was fixed up by Christmas, which was my goal. On top of that the police department and women's shelter provided gifts to the kids so we could have a real Christmas!! Nonetheless perhaps you can see the pain in their little lives and little eyes at that time. Jared began calling me from jail, apologizing left and right for all he had done. Saying he changed. I was already dating someone else at that time, and besides, how could I forgive him after everything he had done. He said he was looking at prison time. We divorced in February and his mother bonded him out in March, thinking he could have a few months freedom before being locked up, as his sentencing was in May. So he was out, and I was nervous. Despite everyone's hopes and wishes, he was back on the street pretty much right away. His mom called and warned me and it was only a matter of time before he showed up. He dropped off some clothes he picked up from a church and one of the kids saw him walk past the window. This was a turning point. Would I call the cops and have him hauled back off to jail or would I talk to him. Well, I let him in. I had a cup of coffee with him and let him take a shower. My boyfriend at the time dumped me right away, as he requested strict boundaries with Jared. It made my decision in the struggle to do the right thing much easier and God put it on my heart to just forgive him. And not only that: to give him his family back. He's been clean ever since. He promptly got a job and slipped back into his role as husband and father and we never looked back. The entire community took notice of Jared's transformation and as far as prison time: the District Attorney and judge said they've never seen such a dramatic turnaround and he was sentenced not to prison, but to probation!! We appreciate each other more than ever before and count each day as a blessing. Our family is a family again, lessons have been learned and life goes on. There's a reason God puts such a value on forgiveness. Forgiveness
has POWER!! ❤