We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex & Jen Lesko a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alex & Jen, appreciate you joining us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?

Website with our full story is here: https://www.marriagerv.com/about

What we’re doing today: we live full-time in an RV, traveling the country, with a heart to visit many of the ~600 “re|engage” (https://www.reengage.org/) marriage ministries, to provide support and encouragement in hopes of enriching both ministry leaders and participants with what we’ve learned. Since we’ve been on this mission, we’ve found that we are the ones who are also encouraged and enriched by the unique aspects of each ministry we visit. To date, we’ve visited 30 churches who host re|engage and have traveled about 25,000 miles (not all of it in our RV) from Alaska to California to Massachusetts, and later this year to the Florida.

How did we get here? From the time we first met until the time we became Christians, our relationship was a disaster. We started out in an affair and divorced our spouses to pursue a relationship with one another. We married in 2012 and by 2016, were separated when news of an affair Alex was having with a coworker came to light. Alex’s brother recommended we get help through the re|engage ministry in North Texas. As we started re|engage, we both (being non-believers at the time), came into a relationship with Jesus. As our faith deepened, our desire to serve also increased. We primarily served in re|engage, initially just helping with coffee, but later as facilitators to help shepherd other marriages towards Jesus, and subsequently, health. After serving in the re|engage ministry as leaders of small groups for several years, we felt God’s call to sell our home and most of our possessions. We then bought and moved into a 43′ class A motorhome (think tour bus!). In 2023, we launched into full-time RVing to share our story of hope that we firmly believe God gave us. All marriages are hard and require active work and maintenance, but many don’t know what that entails. Some marriages coming into re|engage are in bad shape like ours was, but some are healthy to start. For those who are struggling, many believe the only way out is through divorce. For those who are healthy, we want to encourage them to keep fighting the good fight, while sometimes uncovering problems under the surface that weren’t previously addressed. We’ve seen over and over that couples who choose to follow Jesus find that not only are their marriages either saved or taken to a new level, but the impact of their new story can have generational impacts on families, along with the people they are in relationship with.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

As we moved into full-time RV life, the goal was simple: to pour back into the ministry (re|engage) where Christ saved us and our marriage. This would look like visiting re|engage ministries around the country (there are ~600 of them!), in efforts to provide support and encouragement to both ministry leaders and participating couples journeying through re|engage. Additionally, we both made a conscious decision to continue working full-time as well, such that funding the ministry would come from our own pockets. Because we both work remotely, this seemed like a straightforward decision.

During our first six months on the road, we learned how to live in an RV (a process unto itself!), and visited 16 re|engage ministries across a dozen states and drove 8,500 miles. When we would visit a church, we would stay a week or two and fill up our evenings with dinners and ministry events. The weekends were reserved for drive time between destinations. Any margin we had was spent building out our new website, blogging, creating content for our new ministry pages on Facebook and Instagram, connecting with churches about potential upcoming visits, and making campsite reservations.

We learned quickly that building this new traveling ministry we affectionately call “marriageRV” required a lot of time and energy. It was quite literally a second full-time job for us. We had very little time to breathe, rest, date one another, or explore the areas we were traveling to. Doubt, frustration, and marital conflict set in. We had overcommitted ourselves and Alex recognized the pace we were moving at would not be sustainable.

Following this realization, we spent intentional time in conversation with one another and with our friends and mentors, and learned at the outset, we had two very different ideas for this ministry. We gave one another space to share personal goals for this ministry, the desired pace at which we travel, how much time we each feel is needed to rest, date, explore, etc. Alex shared that he preferred staying in one place for 3-4 weeks at a time, spending a few nights a week meeting with others and reserving time for rest and exploration, and he also wanted to be thoughtful (logistically-speaking) about where we were traveling. Jen conversely desired to say “yes” to as many churches as we could who invited us to come visit (regardless of location), was willing to move around as much as needed to make all these visits happen. She was willing to commit to ministry events and dinners every night. With the help of our mentor couple, we eventually moved toward one another, both recognizing our goal is long-term, and we must build in margin for doing everyday activities and cultivating our own relationship with one another and God.

We had to learn that building a ministry is similar to building a business in a lot of ways…it requires over-communication about goals and decisions, coming to an agreement among all stakeholders, all of which can be time consuming. The one-year anniversary of “marriageRV” is upon us and we have slowed down, even if we still do have short periods of running hard. We’ve worked toward spacing out our travel, building in date nights and weekends of exploration, and giving ourselves space to simply catch our collective breath. From a ministry perspective, we learned we cannot pour ourselves out for others when we are depleted. We don’t love one another well, nor those of whom we are trying to serve. Most importantly, this is not what God is asking of us.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Little did we realize it, but we began this journey the moment we completed re|engage in 2017: by serving in the ministry, sharing our testimony for with our home church on multiple occasions, volunteering ourselves and our testimony for re|engage’s website, attending and volunteering at all of the ministry’s conferences…just saying “yes” has, in many ways, formed the foundation of our “reputation” well before we considered launching this full-time RV ministry. That said, practically speaking, we connect with churches who host re|engage around the country in various ways, and it’s been a blast!

1) A simple email outreach to a church sharing who we and our desire to come see them.
2) Word of mouth: friends or churches we serve introducing us to other churches.
3) The church who developed re|engage, Watermark Community Church in Dallas, hosts a semi-annual marriage conference in which they invite churches around the country who host re|engage to come be encouraged, strengthened, and sharpened ~ we’ve met numerous churches at this conferences and shared our desire to travel to them.
4) We occasionally receive direct referrals from Watermark or the national re|engage ministry coaches.
5) We share our travels on the FB group for re|engage leaders and will receive invitations to come visit periodically.

Our heart is to serve well, so we are all in on serving each individual local church ministry in the way that best fits their own local culture and needs. Whether it’s sharing our testimony, having a meal, offering a teaching to the leaders, sitting in and participating authentically during group time, or even providing pastoral care for couples who have a story similar to ours…when we’re with them, we are truly all theirs. We believe this helps cultivate trust among each ministry. Our hope is that, ultimately, there will come a time for a tipping point moment. That is, when we reach out, others will understand who we are, and why we are there – to serve them in love. That said, we also recognize it’s not about the numbers. We shared above that our pace of travel has been unsustainable. This is about being faithful to where we’re called, to shepherd the hearts of those placed in our collective path, and understanding what we can say “yes” to now, or “yes” in the future, even if it might be a year down the line.

Our goal in visiting with a ministry is that they feel encouraged, spurred on, and loved, but often we leave being the ones feeling so well cared for!!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.marriagerv.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarriagerv/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551468205099

Image Credits

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