David Sanchez’s smile comes readily these days. He serves in the Children’s Ministry at East 96 almost every week, singing and dancing along with worship. And he seems to never grow tired of meeting new people, getting to know them, and sharing Christ’s love with them.

His wife, Sharon, is amazed at his transformation because she always saw David as a true introvert. She jokes, “Now he wants to talk to everyone!” He feels that people have been put in his path that need to be there.

But the love David shares so freely now is a powerful contrast to the type of love he grew up with. Raised in the foster care system, David learned early on that love was often conditional, even transactional. The kind of love he longed for simply wasn’t there—and deep down, he knew it never would be.

–

David Sanchez was born in a border town in South Texas to an abusive mother and her boyfriend. The family was very poor, and at the age of eight, David became a ward of the state and was put into foster care due to the physical and sexual abuse he was enduring. He was separated from his sisters and the only family he had ever known. His sisters stayed in the home and were not abused. At first, he missed his mother, but he was happy to have enough food and his own bed and a reprieve from the abuse.

David’s initial foster parents took him to church, and he witnessed a community who were able to genuinely love people because of their love for Jesus. He realized that he wanted to be a part of that and have Jesus in his heart. He was baptized at the age of nine but didn’t have anyone to disciple him as he bounced around in several other foster homes over the next five years. He described his faith as “becoming stagnant” during this phase of his life.

David learned much about how he thought life worked during those years in foster care. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. Because of the direct abuse David had suffered and the life he witnessed in foster care, he became very calculated and saw his life like a game of chess during this time. He saw the devastation of the other foster kids when they would hope to go back to their families but then get phased out of the system.

Through it all, his inner voice became I’m the guy. None of this is going to get me down. I will be successful.

Around the age of fourteen, David caught a break and was able to enroll in a magnet school called The Science Academy due to his gift for math and understanding how things worked. It was around this time that he met Sharon—his future wife. They could not have been more opposite. She was a rule follower, while he was breaking them all. Sharon was very focused on her academics, and David was hanging out with troublemakers and making poor life decisions. Despite this, Sharon said once she got to know him, she could “just feel how big his heart truly was.”

Sharon had her own story of abuse. Sharon’s father had been abusive to her mother and siblings but had spared her. She felt a continuous need to rise to his high expectations of her, for fear he may turn on her if she didn’t follow his every rule. She had a very strong Christian upbringing from her mother and remembers coming to Jesus while staying in a hotel with her mom and sisters after one of her father’s abusive attacks. Her mother wanted to sing devotionals, but Sharon was so filled with rage towards her father that it was hard for her to be in the moment. Her mother persisted, and while she was singing the old hymn “It Is Well With My Soul,” she came to know that Jesus was her savior.

These two deeply hurt people were able to see the best parts of each other and come together. The struggles they had both endured during their childhoods created a special empathy in each of them for others, and when they recognized this in each other, they fell in love. David graduated from college with an engineering degree, married Sharon at the age of 28, and they started creating the family and life David had always hoped for.

Five years later, when Sharon and David’s first daughter was born, everything seemed to come crashing down again for David. As a man, he had normalized anxiety and rage as what men just do. The false belief playing in his mind was that men have to be strong. They can’t feel their emotions. David vowed to figure parenting out and studied it like he would an engineering project. Having never been given unconditional love as a child, he found it difficult to feel compassion for his daughter and her sensitive ways.

Sharon leaned on her faith and knew when to pick her battles. She never forced her beliefs on her husband, yet she stayed faithful to her relationship with Jesus. David and Sharon had a second daughter, and as family life became busier, they made church attendance a goal. They tried to attend Clear Creek Community Church when they could but without making any true connections.

Then one day Sharon and David found themselves in front of a group of tables at Clear Creek looking for a small group to join. They began talking with Peggy and Randy Trout, who were starting a married couple’s group. They felt at ease in each other’s presence, and the date and times matched their schedules. So, David and Sharon took a leap of faith and joined their small group.

The group was composed of a lot of older couples with grown children, and even though David and Sharon’s new family was just starting out, they felt like they were amongst aunts and uncles in this small group. The mission of the Trout’s group was “to know and to be known.” David and Sharon soaked up this unconditional love they had never consistently experienced in their young lives.

Soon David and Sharon had people to sit with at church, and they felt known there. This church family that was growing out of their small group started breaking down hard fought for walls. While David felt that his faith was “still lukewarm at times,” he sensed the steady love and support changing him.

Sharon felt constantly in awe of the consistent connection she felt with the people in their group. The older couples modeled how to live a godly life, and the interconnectedness of their church family brought peace to the struggling new parents.

Randy invited David to attend a men’s gathering on the topic of leadership in the home. The speaker talked about how loving your family cannot be done from your own limited source of love, but that you can only love from God’s abundant love. This struck David as very profound. The hardships of parenting and the gift of having two little girls started to slowly chip away at the hard exterior David had created to survive.

David started to understand how selfish and cynical he had been. He could feel the walls he had built as a child slowly starting to come down. In foster care, love was seen as a weakness. But as they experienced love in their small group, David began to feel how good it felt to love others deeply.

He also began to see how his wounds from childhood created a lens of brokenness that he carried into his adult life. But he also discovered that those same wounds that Jesus healed could be his own gift for reaching out to others carrying the same pain.

These lessons naturally flowed into their home life, as their new community showed them how to more confidently disciple their two daughters. The girls could feel how much more their parents had to give to them after they had been poured into during small group meetings.

David and Sharon have been a part of other small groups since the first one that began their journey of transformation. Sharon recalls when one small group leader told her it would bless the group if they could provide meals for their family after one of David’s back surgeries. “That was a pivotal moment that touched our hearts so deeply,” she said.

The endless support from small groups has helped the Sanchezes reach a place of peace within their marriage as well as each of their own inner struggles. They’re able to share the word of God together each morning and bring more patience and compassion to parenting their daughters.

David now seems to carry an abundance of love in his heart for people and shows a deep desire to help those that are fighting similar battles that he once fought. He and Sharon both serve in Children’s Ministry and are planning to become Navigators. Looking back, David and Sharon realize the spiritual drought that they experienced helped them clearly see and appreciate their church family, the authentic community God has beautifully placed in their lives.