Marriage on Mission: What If God Wants to Use Your “Normal”? Trevor & Tanya Kravick

Trevor Kravick: We knew we didn't know much about parenting godly children or living a God-honoring marriage. So we developed a mission statement as a family, and we just prayed, "Lord, we want to go where You want us to go, we want to do what You want us to do, we want to say what You want us to say, we want to serve who You want us to serve."
Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.
Dave Wilson: And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. What do you think of my knee scars? They’re pretty sexy, aren't they?
Ann Wilson: They’re amazing, but I’m excited for our listeners today.
Dave Wilson: Wait, I’m just trying to tell people why we're not there today. I’m still recovering from double knee replacement surgery. Okay, just want people to feel bad for me and pray for me. I appreciate that. Go ahead.
Ann Wilson: Today, Cheryl’s going to be talking to Trevor and Tanya Kravick, and the topic is marriage on mission.
Dave Wilson: You're going to love this conversation because a lot of us don't realize God has a mission for our marriage, and it's bigger than us just being happy. It’s pretty epic, actually. When you understand that, everything changes. You’re going to enjoy today's show.
Ann Wilson: Here's Cheryl Shumake with Trevor and Tanya. Enjoy.
Cheryl Shumake: If I were to ask you to describe a couple living on mission, what would you imagine? Would you imagine the couple that you support who travels to great distant lands preaching the gospel? Or would you imagine the couple at church who has adopted 30 children in the last 20 years? I’m actually thinking about a couple who retired, sold everything they had, and moved to a gang-infested area to be light and salt in that community. While these are amazing, commendable, and beautiful expressions of living on mission, we would do a disservice to what it really means to live on mission if we only started and stopped there. We would also miss the amazing, wonderful, and extraordinary things God can do through your ordinary everyday life as well. Here to help us unpack what it means to be a couple living on mission is a couple doing exactly that. That’s Trevor and Tanya Kravick. Welcome to FamilyLife Today.
Trevor Kravick: Thank you, Cheryl. It’s an honor to be here.
Cheryl Shumake: I want to get to know you a little bit more. We were chatting before, but I would love to know how the two of you met, how long you've been married, and how many children you have.
Trevor Kravick: The love story begins in the beginning.
Tanya Kravick: The short answer is we met in high school. We became fast friends, and several years after high school, we were reconnected by a mutual friend. He called and said, "I saw Trevor, and he would love it if you would join us out at the bars."
Trevor Kravick: This was my 21st birthday celebration, and I was a prolific drinker already before 21 because of some things in my past.
Tanya Kravick: I was walking very closely with the Lord, so I was like, "I am not going to be going out to the bars drinking with you." However, he called a year later, this mutual friend of ours, and he said, "I ran into Trevor. Here's his number, you should call him." I called him on the phone, well, his roommate answered the phone, and he said, "Trevor, it's a girl." I thought, "I'm 24, I'm working at a law firm, I have a pretty good job, I'm pretty settled. Do I hang up the phone now, or what do I do? Are we 15? What's happening here?" I thought since this was pre-caller ID, if this gets weird, I'll just hang up, and it'll be okay.
Trevor Kravick: It got weird, and she didn't hang up. To clarify the story, when I hear it's a girl calling, I'm thinking, "What girl did I give my number to that might be reaching out to me?" I'm not going to remember their name based on their voice because it was so loud in the clubs and the bars that I was at. I pick up the phone, and it's Tanya. I immediately recognized her voice because my brain wasn't scrambled back then when we were sharing locker space. We got to catch up a little bit, and then I said, "I'm in Milwaukee all the time. Would you like to go out to the bars with me?" because that's my lead.
Tanya Kravick: I said, "I don't drink."
Trevor Kravick: I said, "How about the club? Do you dance?"
Tanya Kravick: I was like, "No, I'm not really much of a dancer."
Trevor Kravick: I'm at the bottom of the ninth, I'm on my third strike. If I strike out on this, she's going to be gone. So I said, "What about going to a play? Would you go to a play?"
Tanya Kravick: I was all in for the play. He came in to visit, we went to the play, and in the morning, he visited my church. I was attending a 90% Hispanic church at the time. That's the church that I really started growing in my relationship with the Lord at. It was not necessarily a seeker-friendly church; it was a church where you came to learn and grow.
Trevor Kravick: He wanted to visit, so he did. I can only articulate that the Lord met me in that place in a very unique way, speaking to my soul and asking me a question of what I was doing with my life. When you hear a voice in your head that asks you a very personal question like that, you can't deny it's from outside of this universe. I thought I had to be honest, and I was making a mess of my life. The next part of the conversation was, "Would you surrender your life to Me?" In that very moment, in a church that was very uncomfortable to me, picking up banners in the background and tambourines, and the lead pastor was playing the bass guitar, I just felt out of place. But the Lord ushered me into the children's area in that moment, and I just gave my life fully to the Lord, surrendered 100%.
Cheryl Shumake: I love how God uses everything. He wastes absolutely nothing. So He would use your desire to reconnect with an old friend to bring you back to Him. How precious that is. You were a Christian in high school? How did you come to faith, Tanya?
Tanya Kravick: I grew up knowing about the Lord and knowing about who He was, but it was sometime later in my early 20s that I really came to a question of faith. I had been surrounded by individuals who were from many different denominations that were saying a lot of different things. I just really wondered what's really true and what this God is all about. They’re all reading the same Bible, but they’re all telling me very different things. I had a moment where I made a decision that I really wanted to know who He was personally and was led through a prayer to talk to the Lord and invite Him to take control of my life. I was on my way to a job, and when I got there, one of my coworkers was there who wasn't expected to be there. He worked at one of the churches that I had been visiting during this journey of spiritual curiosity. I said, "John, what are you doing here? I didn't see you on the schedule." He said, "I was on my way to work today, and I really felt like I needed to be here because there was something you needed to tell me that happened." My very first moment after that was really realizing that it wasn't a God who was out there in the clouds. It wasn't a God who I just knew about, but that He saw me. He knew me in that moment and He knew that I needed to know how real He really was, so He showed up real quick. That was just His kindness in that moment.
Cheryl Shumake: And His mercy. There's a vast difference between knowing about God and believing in Jesus and surrendering to Him as Lord. We can go for many years believing, even going to church, even being active in fellowship, without really surrendering our lives to the lordship of Jesus Christ. That is what He is after. He's after our whole life so that He can transform that life and conform us to the image of His Son.
Dave Wilson: I don't know if this is true for you, but it's super easy for us to let our schedules squeeze in everything except for the person I married. Work, kids, everything competing for our attention, and before you know it, your marriage has slipped into autopilot. You don't always notice you're drifting apart until it's already happened.
Ann Wilson: That's exactly why FamilyLife's Weekend to Remember exists. It's a chance to put your marriage back on the calendar and focus on what matters most. Right now, through September 21st, registrations are 50% off.
Dave Wilson: That’s half. All you have to do is visit FamilyLifeToday.com and click on the banner at the top of the page to give your marriage the time it deserves. Make sure to use the promo code SAVE50 during checkout.
Cheryl Shumake: How did the two of you know that you were it for each other and you got married, and you now have how many children?
Trevor Kravick: It’s not a glorifying story from our own standpoint. We started dating after that date and time at church. I knew that I was interested in going long-term with Tanya, but I was resistant because of my past. I didn't have a good model of what it looked like to go the distance with another person, and I was unsure of myself. I had just fully put my faith in God at that time, and so as we dated, it was a struggle as I felt like I was a long-distance runner catching up to the lead runner in a team I couldn't compete with spiritually. But the Lord is faithful, and He allowed me to start to learn more. We were spending a lot of time together. I invited her on a camping trip, and in that camping trip, we shared a tent. I've got to tell you, Christians, don't share a tent with the opposite sex that you're attracted to, point-blank period, just don't.
Tanya Kravick: There you go. We decided to be intimate, and after that, in August, shockingly in August, I thought I had the flu. I went into the doctor and they said they wanted to do a pregnancy test. I said I couldn't be pregnant because when I was 19, I was told that I couldn't have children. They said they needed to run this anyway. Before I'd even returned home, the phone was ringing telling me that I needed to start taking prenatal vitamins. Congratulations. It was a very difficult phone call because I thought this isn't how it's supposed to be. This isn't what I thought. But also, I was so overwhelmed that the Lord would allow me to have something that man had said I couldn't, but the Great Physician said I can. Less than three months later, we were married. We had our first child, and then we continued to have children. Four children in five years, in there a miscarriage as well. In His sense of humor and the God of abundantly more just showed off. We are very thankful. We're the parents of four of the most amazing people we've ever known in our whole lives, and parenting them has been a great joy. They're all adults now. We have our first grandbaby.
Trevor Kravick: We'll be celebrating 25 years of marriage this October.
Cheryl Shumake: Congratulations. That is so wonderful. God is the best redeemer of our stories. Every bit of our story is woven into His greater story, and He redeems all of it. Here you are with four children and 25 years later, and you are a couple on mission, which we are getting ready to talk about right now. Before we do that, I know that there are a lot of people at home thinking, what is mission?
Trevor Kravick: Early on, we knew we didn't know much about parenting godly children or living a God-honoring marriage. So we developed a mission statement as a family, and we just prayed, "Lord, we want to go where You want us to go, we want to do what You want us to do, we want to say what You want us to say, we want to serve who You want us to serve."
Tanya Kravick: Mission for us was realizing that we wanted to live for something bigger than ourselves.
Cheryl Shumake: When did that realization happen? Was that immediately after you got married, or after some time?
Trevor Kravick: If you have a household with toddlers or young children, you realize that it feels like chaos.
Tanya Kravick: Organized chaos. It was organized. I'm organized, so it was organized chaos. Bless you, with four children in five years, bless your heart. We all have different gifts. That would not have been mine.
Trevor Kravick: The Lord had surrounded us with people who really believed in us early on. I remember some of the first things we got invited to consider doing were running a nursery at the church, being part of that.
Tanya Kravick: Teaching a financial class was really early on. I literally remember holding Sebastian in my arms as we're walking around our small group that we're leading in this financial class, and they just loved having him there. We would hand him off while we're leading small groups in the church on finances. And then once we started leading marriage groups, then it was our daughter Tirzah, or our daughter Shiloah, or our son Tianer all being walked around while we were engaging in community with other people who wanted to live for something bigger than themselves, who wanted to keep learning and keep growing.
Trevor Kravick: During this time, I was holding down a full-time job in the IT sector. Anyone who works IT knows it's more than 40 hours a week. And then Tanya was at home doing the heavy lifting of managing our household and the children. There were times that we weren't clicking together in the same direction, so there were moments that we had to realign the wheels as we ventured in and out of these different ministry opportunities. We met with a pastor who was very wise and he gave us a challenge. The challenge was basically that God has laid a buffet out in front of you. As a leader of the church, we can have you plugged into all these different things and give, give, give, and serve, serve, serve wherever we need you to. But what would be your best contribution to the body of Christ? That allowed us to take a time of reflection. In that same timeframe, we transitioned away from that church into a larger church body and decided at six years into our marriage, maybe we ought to go and attend a getaway to invest in our marriage relationship.
Tanya Kravick: It was the first time in six years that we weren't pregnant or breastfeeding. We actually had a really healthy marriage. We were doing very well, but neither of us had an example of how to live out a godly marriage, how to raise our kids to know and love Jesus. We just didn't have that example either one of us coming in, and we'd heard about the Weekend to Remember on the radio. We thought, "Let's go do this. If it's our first time away in six years, let's go do something that would be good for our marriage." I had no idea what to expect. We went and we laughed so hard and we had so much fun. When we came home from that event, we brought lots of resources home. I remember having all these conversations and telling people we had the greatest time, we laughed together, we got to talk through things that we don't necessarily have time for. Every person without fail that we shared that with said, "We are so sorry, we had no idea your marriage was struggling." That is really the statement that the Lord used to draw our heart into starting to get involved with FamilyLife because we thought how could we be part of changing the way that people think of proactively investing in their marriage. We did not attend in a place of brokenness. We were in a very good place; we just needed some tools, some encouragement. We needed to hear that we weren't alone in the things that we were learning and facing and wanting to grow in, and we found that. That's how the Lord drew our hearts to FamilyLife as a ministry. We started volunteering with a Weekend to Remember team. At that time, that was really the only way to be involved with FamilyLife as a volunteer. We started that in 2008.
Trevor Kravick: The reason why we decided volunteering at a Weekend to Remember was the best next step wasn't because we just showed up there and were like, "We want to be part of this team." It was in part due to the responses we were receiving, but there's a couple that was praying mightily for the Lord to do a work in this city that we are part of. They came over through a connection and had coffee with us. They were the directors of the volunteer team, so this was an exploratory conversation to learn more about what it looks like to serve. Mind you, I'm on the floor changing diapers, Tanya's managing things in the house. All four kids are in either pull-ups or diapers. They're at our house and they're like, "We think you guys would just be perfect to be volunteers for the team." We were like, "Do you see us over here? We have no idea what we're doing, are you kidding me?" They said, "We believe you'd be perfect and we're going to help teach you and we think you're the right people to say yes."
Cheryl Shumake: So that was the start of you beginning to make intentional moves to being a missional couple. Mission is to live for something bigger than yourself, and that is what God has called you into. Living for His purposes for your life and living as a missional couple, how would you define that? What does it mean to live as a couple on mission?
Tanya Kravick: I just want to go back to what you just said because we believe very strongly that God prepared the good works for us to walk in in advance. Let’s just say that scripture, Ephesians 2:10. We have been created in Christ Jesus to walk in good works. We are essentially a masterpiece with a mission. That mission has eternal implications. It came from eternity for us to move in history in it, and it has impact into eternity. He prepared the good works, so I think as believers, sometimes we think, "Oh, I should be doing more." That verse should really free us up, that He prepared the work. We don't have to manufacture it; we get to walk in it. It really is just a following of God into where He is already working and that He has already designed us to work in it alongside Him.
Trevor Kravick: Being a missional couple and what that means to us is again, it is tied out that God has created a work for us to walk into. It shouldn't be like walking outside in Orlando in 98-degree temperatures. When we encounter resistance in something that we want to try to accomplish, knowing that we can set that aside and that we can pursue something different and knowing that God's going to make the path clear. But that doesn't mean sometimes our first step might not be in the mud or off the path a little bit or through the humidity as we try to struggle in understanding what's mine and what's God's with this. A lot of it has to do with just that question, like, "Will you give your life to Me?" and I said I would surrender it to You. So what does that surrender look like? It’s truly letting Him in all aspects of my life and He controls the outcome. Our job is obedience; God's is outcomes. It's almost like the waving of the white flag, like, "I give up, You have complete control of every bit of territory in my life. It belongs to You to reconstruct, to manage how You will, and it's Yours." And that really is what it is to surrender to Him and then consequently, you'll follow Him into the mission that He has pre-purposed for you to fulfill.
Dave Wilson: What a great conversation about marriage on mission. By the way, we have a FamilyLife couple's study called Your Marriage Has a Mission. It’s something you can get at FamilyLifeToday.com. Just click on the link in the show notes, and I think it will help you in your marriage take off to be all that God wants it to be.
Ann Wilson: Guess what? We've got Cheryl back tomorrow with Trevor and Tanya. We’ll see you then.
Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.