We would like to welcome you to Inspired Marriage. This is our marriage ministry. We are Chris & Sandy Benton and we have been married over 14 years now with our 15th wedding anniversary coming on Oct. 5th, 2017.
I will talk a little bit about how we met and a little about my addictions on this page. You will find that we have a crazy story but our story doesn’t come from all pleasure. The first 5 years of our marriage I was still addicted to many things. You see my addictions lasted for 19 years. They started back when I was 17 years old.
It was Dec. 26th 2007 when I woke up with this feeling of God telling me it’s time before it’s too late. I was dragging down this marriage just like I destroyed my first marriage.
I woke up that morning pleading with God to take this desire away. I said if you want me to quit, I can’t do this alone. I need your help. I went on to say that I needed him to take the desire completely away because I was going to die.
A short time sober from that point to where everything clicked and I have had no desire to drink or drug since. I am still in awe that God took that desire completely away from me. I sometimes questions why because I know so many people that struggle with their addictions every day. I am very grateful to God and I believe one of the reasons why he took that away is, we are supposed to tell our story.
Sandy put up with a lot with me the first 5 years as I struggled with my addictions. I will go more into details as we write articles and things but for now just know that it was a huge struggle. We are writing a part of our story within the book “Inspired Marriage”.
Living an Inspired Marriage,
Chris & Sandy Benton
The story of how my wife and I met:
Beginning of 2001, I (Chris) was going through a tough time with life in general. Nothing was going right from money, to love to friends. I have always loved motivational quotes so I was searching some inspirational sites and didn’t find much that I like. I thought to myself that I probably could build a better site than 95% of these that I looked at.
On April 15, 2001 I launched Inspiration 4 Everyone. It was only going to be maybe a 10 page site with nothing but quotes on it. As I started getting visitors to the site,a I started getting many people tell me to add this and add that so I started adding more sections. The site started to grow faster than I realized would happen.
Around September of 2001, I found this Christian Singles Site. They had a free 14 day trial so I thought I would try it for the free trial and drop it because I was really cheap back then. After the 14 days, I thought to myself that I really do like this but didn’t want to pay for it. I asked, mmmmm how can I get this for free? I always try and think outside the box. Well I saw that they had an affiliate program so I emailed them and asked if I became a part of their affiliate program will they throw in a free membership to their site? All they could say was yes or no. They emailed me back and said “They have never done that before but would consider depending on my sites traffic”. I let them know that the site was up less than 6 months and had over 35,000 visitors within that time. They told me to make the account and they would do that.
Well February 02, 2002, I was looking for someone to chat with. I found Sandy on that day. Here are 2 funny things that make this a thin line we met on. First, I only chatted with people who had pictures on their profiles, guess what? She didn’t. The other thing is, she was only on that site because she got an email saying she had a message on that site. She just deleted the message and was logging off as I messaged her (Thank God I caught her before she logged off).
We talked on the phone 2 days later on February 4th. We set a wedding date on February 18th (People thought we were crazy). We met in person on March 4th of 2002. Yes, we might have been a little crazy. Yes we set the wedding date before we met in person. Guess what? We did get married on the day we set which was October 5th, 2002 and still together today!
So our whole life together the internet has played a part!
As of Jan 11, 2012 our lil son Chris Benton Jr was born and what a Blessing he has been in our lives!