God in the life of Frog and Amy

Frog and Amy Orr-Ewing were married in July 1997, aged 21, having met as students in Oxford. Here they talk about their faith and how it enables them to entrust their marriage into God’s hands.

Interview: Jemimah Wright.

FROG: I always knew that God was there. I got confirmed when I was 12, more out of wanting to show God I was serious about him. I remember at my next school when I was about 13, seeing the chaplain up there, and thinking if Jesus is real, He should be everything.

That summer I was on a Christian house-party in the Isle of Wight. They had a seminar on the Holy Spirit. I had been to chapel every day all through boarding school, and it was the first time I had heard God talked about in a way that was real. I asked to be prayed for and was filled with the Holy Spirit.

I had been quite depressed and badly bullied at school for a whole year up to then. It just all rolled off and I was filled with a sense of joy, and of God’s majesty. The pure joy of being alive, and the sense of destiny and preciousness overwhelmed me. I saw a picture of Christ on the throne, and began to speak in tongues. I remember going back to school and saying ‘by the way, everything they said at chapel is actually true!’. I felt I had really met with God, I hadn’t just heard about him, and it was life transforming.

Then unfortunately hormones kicked in, and I couldn’t get the lifestyle to work properly. At the end of my gap year, I had been teaching in South Africa, I came back very depressed, drinking a lot, and not very happy, but then in 1994 I had a fresh, deep encounter with God before I came up to Oxford. At the back of my mind I knew I wanted to serve Him, full time, I just hadn’t seen any break-through in my life, until this time. I gave up alcohol. and began to be able to live differently, and hear from God. I stopped swearing over night.

So then I got really excited, and over the holidays, went off on a mission to Uganda. I came to Oxford convinced that Jesus was the best thing since sliced bread, that He could change the world, and use me. I could be part of building the kingdom of God.

AMY: My Dad was a lecturer in Australia at the University of New South Wales, in Politics and Economics, and he was converted quite out of the blue when I was two. Quite quickly after his conversion he felt the call to ministry and we moved back to England as a family, and he went to train at Trinity College in Bristol and became a Vicar.

By the time I was nine we were in the inner-city in Birmingham in a really tough, very Muslim parish. So my memories of growing up in a Christian home were in the context of ministering to the poor and seeing people who were totally not Christian at all coming to faith in our home.

I made a commitment to Christ myself as a child and then my first real experience of God was at Sunday school in that church. We started praying for healing as children, and I was probably about nine or ten, and we prayed for this girl who had a skin problem, and she was healed. That had a massive impact on me, the incredible sense of Gods presence and the reality of the Lord.

As a teenager I really began to think through some of the intellectual questions about faith. I found answers in the writings of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. I went on missions as well in the summer with Youth With A Mission, and saw amazing things happen. Then at 18 I came to Christ Church to read theology. The summer before I came to Oxford was the Toronto blessing time, and I was on a mission trip in Uzbeckistan and Khazakistan doing missionary work. While I was there I felt a clear prophetic word to take a team to China from Oxford the following year. So when I got to Oxford and got involved in the Christian Union, I started a prayer group for China and central Asia. It was through this that we met, because when Frog was in Uganda he had a similar prophecy about going to China, and he came along to the prayer group.

FROG: It was a 7.30am prayer group before lectures and I didn’t actually speak to Amy at all there. But we were both going to St Aldates, so on the last Sunday of term I said to Amy let’s meet up and have some lunch and talk about going to China. By the time the next term started we were best friends.

We began to plan the trip. We were able to pray together in the Spirit, and worship together. That was what our friendship was based on. Then I began to think I was falling in love with her, and I thought that was very unspiritual, and I tried to submerge the thoughts for a few weeks. In February, Amy said ‘Don’t you think its important that friends should be really honest to each other’. I was mortified. I thought oh no, I’ve got to come clean. So we met up at ‘G and D’s’ (an ice-cream shop) that night. I said ‘I don’t think we should see so much of each other’. She said ‘what do you mean?’, So I said ‘Will you go out with me?’

In the summer of the second year I proposed on a punt, drifting down from the Cherwell Boathouse.

AMY: We decided to get married straight after our finals so we could have a nice long honeymoon. I had a viva (oral examination) the day before the wedding, and Frog went away for a two day selection process to work for the Church of England. We had a sense of amazement that God was so good as to want us to marry the person we were so in love with.

Our relationship from the beginning was part of a community as well, into which we could welcome other people. We quite often hosted other events for friends. Marriage is given for the building up of community. A Christian marriage can be so powerful and prophetic - what the Church is and should be with Christ’s love.

FROG: God’s plan for our lives involved us being married. In order to be obedient, and if we wanted to put God’s kingdom first, then being married was part of that for us. In the back of my mind there were two things I was scared about. Not that Amy was ever going to let me down, but because my parents were divorced, I wondered whether I was going to let Amy down, whether I could stay true and loving. There was a little seed of self doubt in me. It was a really important part of my walk with God to trust Amy into God’s hands, to believe that God was going to hold us together and nurture our marriage. It was a question of trusting God and not myself. You are sometimes afraid about what you are going to be like in 20 years time, will we cope and still be in love. But God was saying will you trust me and allow me to nurture and look after you. It’s a day by day thing.

Frog (Francis) Orr-Ewing was born in 1975. He graduated from Regents Park Oxford in 1997 and became a stock broker in London for a year. He then did a Mth at Wycliffe Hall. He became a curate at St Aldates in July 2000

Amy Orr-Ewing was born in 1975 in Sydney, Australia. She graduated from Christ Church Oxford in 1997 and then did a MA in Theology at Kings College London. She works for The Zacharias Trust as Training Director.