Andre and Sonja Samson

All right, guys, CityBridge family. It's so good to be with y'all. And like I said, my name is Andre Samson. This is my amazing wife, Sonja. And we are so excited to get to share with y'all just how God has been at work in our lives, in our marriage, and just how amazing he is and how much we can trust him.

Yeah. So we've been married for seven years now. We met at Watermark Community Church, and honestly, we really didn't know each other or interact before we started dating. But we did get to see each other serve faithfully. Andre was on stage being a goof, acting like skit characters, and I was teaching the Bible lesson for the week.

And so because of solid community groups around each of us, there was really no confusing, like flirting, texting, like wondering what's going on between us before he asked me out. So yeah, it was great. I remember I still remember the day that I asked you out on our first date. Asking her out was like maybe the 10th word I said to her in our lives.

And what happened was I had been praying about whether or not I should ask her out. I had just seen the way she served, seen the way she loved the Lord. The things that stood out to me specifically were just the way she served, the way she loved kids, the way she loved God's Word, and the way that she loved and submitted well to her leadership at the church.

Those things I saw, and I went, man, I am convinced. And so I remember praying about it and praying about it and just being like, Lord, I want to be sure. And I walked into church one day, and we started something called the Watermark News, which is they give out like a flier this big and have somebody's testimony and all the news for the week.

And that week, it was Sonya's testimony, and it had this super zoomed-in picture of her face. I still have it over on my desk. And I remember sitting down in the auditorium, and I cannot tell you what series we were in, what message was being preached. I have no idea. I just remember sitting down, I read the whole testimony, and I looked around the auditorium, and it was like, you know, a couple thousand people.

And I realized, oh, she's not this, like, hidden gem in kids ministry anymore. Every man at church is walking around with a picture of her face. And so I jumped up—still, I don't know what was being preached that way—and I walked straight over to the kids' area, asked her out on a date, which she rain-checked me because she's like, hey, I'm walking; this is not the right time.

But it was amazing. I just got to ask her out. It was awesome. Yeah. It was honestly so much fun. Andre was super clear about his intentions of what would be considered a date, what wasn't a date, all of those kinds of things, which was just really helpful. And like I said, we had lots of people involved in our dating, so community was a big part of that.

Our second date was a group date with community members. We ended up going through Merge and had awesome table leaders through that. I was on staff at the time at Watermark, and some of the men on staff intentionally grabbed Andre to get to know him and disciple him. And then we did wonderful two-on-two mentoring once we got engaged—just pre-marital mentoring.

And so that was, I mean, eating dinner with them, having live conversations and arguments in their living room, and receiving feedback and correction. And sometimes it felt like everybody was up in our business more than we kind of wanted them to be. But looking back, we are so thankful that that's kind of how we chose for it to be because it was huge, and it was really a marker of our dating and engagement—just being surrounded by God and His people in His word.

So yes, yeah, I still remember being with them, and we had our first conflict while we were dating, and they were like, yeah, just come over and do it in our living room. Like, you just have our conflict in your living room? And they're like, yeah, we'll give you feedback on it; it'll be great. And I was like, this can't be normal.

And thankfully, our marriage hasn't been in the normal part of that. Part of the results of the impact of that, two other impactful things we did, was one of them was re:generation. And so there's a program called re:generation, which is a recovery program at our church. There's nothing special about the program, but there is something special about dedicating time to confessing sin and being sanctified into the image of Christ.

And so one of the guys on staff sat me down. He said, hey, the biggest problem in your marriage is going to be your own sin. It's not going to be money. It's not going to be in-laws. It's not going to be all the other things. It's going to be your sin. Are you going to deal with it?

And I was like, sure. And so I jumped into re:generation. re:generation was really hard. It was really long, but it's just an opportunity to deal with the baggage and the sin in my life. I had a really hard story and had run really hard away from the Lord prior to coming to Christ. And there was a lot of that that I just hadn't dealt with yet.

And so I started dealing with all of that stuff. And I still remember really early in our marriage, like right after our honeymoon, we got back—which, doing inventory during your honeymoon, wouldn't recommend that. But we did it. We came back, and I shared my inventory with Sonja.

For those of you that don't know, an inventory is just like a list of the impact of sin in my life. So all the harms that have been done to me, all the harms that I've done to other people, all of my fears, my doubts, my insecurities, all of my deepest, darkest secrets. And I shared all of it with Sonja. And I still remember just the way she looked at me after. It didn't change at all. And she loved me through all of it.

She heard everything there was to know about me. Everything bad about me. And she loved me, and she forgave me. And she gave me grace and accepted me through that. And so that was just a different level of naked and unashamed that we felt in that moment. And it's just been that way, I see for our marriage, that we confess sin 100%.

We forgive 100%. We don't keep anything hidden. We bring that to the community. We bring that to other people, and we deal with it right away. And we get to preach the gospel to one another. That level of knowing one another allows us to share grace with one another, to guard one another, to know where we're tempted, to know where we're weak, and to help each other there.

So that's our marriage testimony in a nutshell: you can trust God. And I know there may be some of you sitting here that have been married longer than us that are going, just wait, just wait. You'll see. And what I would say is, you might be right. There might be harder times that happen in our marriage, but our fundamental game plan will not change.

Thank y'all for letting us share with you guys.