"Back in Tune" | More Than Conquerors Victor Marshall

Victor had a promising future in college and with music. He grew up in a Christian home but like many, he lost his way. What happens when you grow up in church, do everything "right," and still find yourself completely lost? Victor Marshall knows that story well. After leaving for a Christian college with big plans, Vic spent years drifting — skipping meals, skipping class, and skipping God — stuck in a season of stagnation he couldn't seem to escape.

In this episode, Vic opens up about the depression he rarely names, the moment at a beach lounge that made him take personal inventory, and how one decision to get back in church changed everything — leading to professional singing opportunities, the wife God had for him all along, and a ministry to the next generation he never saw coming.

If you've ever felt like you're going through the motions, or wondered how to find your way back, this one's for you.

Today's test is tomorrow's testimony.

Looking for Hope?

Transcript

Lou Lepore: Welcome back to the More Than Conquerors podcast, where today's test is tomorrow's testimony. I'm your host, Lou Lepore, and today we have a good friend of mine, Vic Marshall, with us. Vic and I share a love for music. However, the biggest difference is that he is actually talented and gifted in that way. The boy can play instruments, the boy can sing. We appreciate him for those things, as well as many others. Victor Marshall, welcome to the show.

Victor Marshall: Thanks for having me. This is pretty awesome.

Lou Lepore: Thankful for you to be here. So you are living life right now. You got full-time gig. You have multiple jobs you're doing. You're running a business, musician at the church. Your first ministry, obviously, with the Lord, second ministry with your wife, and you have three precious young daughters at the house.

Victor Marshall: Yeah, life is really good. God has really blessed me and just given me more than I could ever ask for, and He's given me my three girls, my four girls, and I just — I just love it. Life's really good.

Lou Lepore: It is, especially with the family life, and one of those things as a younger man, I thought, "I don't know if I'm ever gonna get married." And then you get married and you have kids, and you turn around and you say, "I don't know how I ever did it without a wife and kids." And so it's funny how the Lord switches things in your heart that way, isn't it?

Victor Marshall: It's so true.

Lou Lepore: So you grew up in a Christian home.

Victor Marshall: I did.

Lou Lepore: So after the nurture and admonition of the Lord via brought up that way, you went to Pensacola Christian College down in Florida, and majored criminal justice.

Victor Marshall: Criminal justice, yeah.

Lou Lepore: You had it all set. You were gonna go to Christian college, find the love of your life. You were gonna get a job in the criminal justice field. Is that how it played out?

Victor Marshall: No, not at all.

Lou Lepore: Wait, you mean to tell me that God's plan and your plan weren't the same?

Victor Marshall: They were vastly different.

Lou Lepore: Oh, wow.

Victor Marshall: Yeah, so my plan actually wasn't to go and find someone or really do anything. My plan was just do what my dad says and go to school. So he said, "Hey, you're going to school right now." And I was like, "All right." I was 16, and I was like, "Let's go." So I went, I applied. I got accepted the day that I got there, and I just dove right into criminal justice thinking that I could make it work for myself, and it was something that I was interested in. Quickly learned I wanted nothing to do with it. Then struggled to find what my purpose was. The school's preaching, "Hey, you're gonna find someone, you're gonna find someone, you're gonna find someone," and it just didn't work out that way for me. Yeah, I just didn't end up where I thought I was. It was kind of a sobering and scary thought, honestly.

Lou Lepore: I think of the Bible verse from Proverbs 29:18 where it says, "Where there's no vision, the people perish." And that kinda hits home with you, doesn't it?

Victor Marshall: Yeah. It really hit home around junior to senior year. I realized I had no vision. I was 19, gonna be 20 years old, and had no idea what I wanted to do, and it really got dark because I thought, "Okay, I don't have this person I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with. I don't even know what I wanna do for the rest of my life. I don't even know what it's gonna look like, so what do I do?" And instead of seeking counsel and trying to find people who understood where I was and getting guidance, I just kind of went blank, and I just went stagnant. And that was kind of the theme for those next three to five years of my life — I was just stagnant, just hung around and did nothing.

And I'd say that it was kind of a depressed period in my life. I don't like to use that term, but if we're gonna really talk about it, I was depressed in the sense of where I was and should've been. I was pushing it down because of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own feelings about it. Because I didn't have the answers, I got in my own head thinking I would find the answers in my head.

And if any of you have been in your head, you know that that's not where the answers are because your head leads to your feelings, and your feelings are always about you. They're always about selfishness and about myself, and how come this isn't working for me and I don't understand what's going wrong, and what am I doing? What am I not doing? What are people doing to me? And I went through the whole thing, and it got to the point where I wouldn't eat. I would skip meals. I would skip classes if I could. We had this thing in college where you had to go to class every day. You had to go to church. The only reason you couldn't is if you did something called check-in. You had to literally go down to the lobby, swipe your card, and push a button that says you're gonna stay in your room for 24 hours. And you can't leave your room except to go grab a box lunch. You grab your box lunch, and you come back in your room. Someone would come and check on you to make sure you were in your room.

I was checking in a lot, and I wasn't even going to get the lunch. I was going to the vending machine and grabbing a big Texas cinnamon roll and maybe some ramen. And I was just, you know, just kind of not existing. That was a pretty low point for me, 'cause I figured, "Hey, I have no real prospects in life. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna exist." And it kind of took on habitual form for me, and it was a pretty dark place, and I was just not looking at the life that God gave me. And like I said earlier, I was stagnant.

Lou Lepore: I don't want to say I find that odd, but being in that Christian environment at the college with professors and men who served as pastors, there was plenty of things around you that were trying to project you forward to follow Christ, that you were probably going to chapel and hearing messages, and you were going to the church on regular, and it wasn't like God wasn't around you or that people weren't trying to reach you. But when Jesus was talking to the Pharisees and he said, "Beware, because they honor me with their lips, but their heart was far from me," is that something what you were feeling?

Victor Marshall: Oh, yeah, definitely. Like I said earlier, you get in your own head and into your own feelings, and I think that in and of itself takes you away from God because you're supposed to have the mind of Christ, not the mind of yourself, and I definitely had the mind of myself. And you are 100% right. There were tons of people who were around me to give me good counsel. Even Dr. Shoemaker, who I saw a couple weeks ago at the church, he said to me himself, he said, "Hey, I have a job for you when you graduate. Come see me." I never did. I didn't feel worthy enough to. I didn't feel like that was what God wanted from me or what I wanted for me. I had no idea, so I didn't even try. I got a paper back from a class my senior year, and my professor gave me an F 'cause I deserved it, but on the top of the paper, he said, "I wish you would just try." And I knew I was passing the class. I knew I wasn't gonna fail the class if I failed the paper, so I didn't try, and that's the metaphor for all of that time in my life.

I didn't try. I wasted potential in those periods of time. I just didn't have direction. And I think a big part of that was because, yes, even though I'm surrounded by Christians in a quote-unquote Christian environment, I was just existing as a Christian and not acting or serving like a Christian would.

Lou Lepore: You mentioned drifting. Hebrews chapter 2, and honestly, the life of Solomon shows us the dangers of drifting as well. It doesn't take long to find yourself in the wrong situations. Did anything like that pop up in your life?

Victor Marshall: Yeah. After college, I stayed in the area for a year, again, stagnant, having no idea what I'm going to do. I got a job at a temp agency working for a hospital — and it was, "Hey, whenever you wanna work, you can work." So when I wanted to work, I worked. When I didn't wanna work, I didn't work. And I wasn't pushing towards any goal. I was hanging around people who were also stagnant, also went to the Christian college, were good people, and some of them have gone on to do good things for God. But at that period in time in our lives, we were all stagnant, so we were chasing whatever made us feel good in that moment. So would we go to church? Sure. We would go to Marcus Point Baptist Church in the morning, but we'd go to the early service so that we could go play soccer with the UWF girls after the service at nine o'clock.

You know, looking back at it, because there was a family from the church that I grew up in that moved out to Florida when their kids were going to college, and they were going to a church that was about 45 minutes from where I lived. They invited me to come to their church. Their pastor saw me and he said, "Hey, I hear you're a good singer. Come back and sing tonight at church." And I didn't wanna go back. I didn't wanna drive all the way back out again. I didn't wanna have to practice a song or anything like that. But it was a special night for them, and they wanted me to come sing, so I did. I went to our friend's house. I practiced with their mom on the piano. I came back to church and I sang, and I just remember how good that felt. And it's something I'd been doing since I was a young child at church, and it felt really good. But I was so aimless at that point, not even that was enough to bring me back to the point where I kept serving.

Lou Lepore: Were you struggling to really have your identity in Christ?

Victor Marshall: Not just in Christ, in myself, too. I didn't know who I was, and I didn't know what my goals were, my foundation was. Realizing my foundation is Christ now, I realize that and I can look back and say, "That's where my identity begins." But again, when you're aimless, you're not thinking about Christ. You're thinking about yourself, and the more you think about yourself, the more you get into your feelings about who you think you are and who you perceive yourself to be in the eyes of other people, and you start to focus on that more than anything else.

I was in a point where I was trying to fit in. I was trying to be the guy. I was trying to be everyone's friend and have friends, and I was neglecting the one person who is my friend, and who's always gonna be there for me, and who loves me more than anybody else, and who always takes care of me.

Lou Lepore: Yeah, I think of Colossians 3:16 where it says, "Teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord." You're a singer, I know that. And for you to be in church and to do that and enjoy it, but not continue doing it, I think of James 4:17 where it says, "To him that knoweth to do right and doeth it not, it is sin." I see that here. And in the life of Samson, I see where he was given instructions by God, but did not obey them directly, and eventually he did find himself in trouble. Did you have anything happen to you that caught up with you eventually?

Victor Marshall: Yeah. There's a few. I remember being out with my friends one night, and we were at, like, a beach lounge area. Some guy comes up drunk and gets in a fight with one of my friends at the moment, and there's police officers and all these things involved. And I just remember standing there thinking, like, "Why am I here? What am I doing here? Why am I involved in this? This isn't what I do. This isn't my atmosphere." And there were instances like that where I would have self-reflective moments and be like, "What am I doing?"

That night was one of those moments where I sat back and took personal inventory and said, "I'm going nowhere." And I believe this was around the time when I started to think, "Okay, I need to remove myself from the situation. I need to go forward and not backwards, and I think I need to go back home."

Lou Lepore: What I hear you saying is that where the Holy Spirit was moving in your life a little bit, and almost like the prodigal son —

Victor Marshall: Yeah.

Lou Lepore: — where the Bible says, "And he came to himself." And he started to look around and go, "What am I doing?" And really evaluating what was going on.

Victor Marshall: Yes.

Lou Lepore: So continue the story. You go back home. What happened next?

Victor Marshall: Yeah, so I go back home, and instantly I'm back with mom and dad, and there are certain rules that mom and dad have. "You're going to church, and I need you involved in something." Now, I know a lot of people come to a new church, or they go to the church they've always been at at home, or they go somewhere and they're like, "Hey, I don't know where to plug in." I know you and what you do for our church — you hear that all the time. "I don't know where to plug in. I don't know where to interject myself." I don't have that problem. I know for a fact, since I've been a kid, where God wants me in a church, and that's in the music department. He wants me singing, making music, and I know that if I don't do that, I don't feel like I am serving.

So I get back to church, and the first thing I start doing is I join the choir and I start singing again. And that's when I feel like God started to get me out of myself and back into what he wanted for me. I started making better friendships. I started having better opportunities in life. I actually got an opportunity to sing professionally. I sang professionally for a year and a half in San Diego because I was in church singing in church. And those moments got me to the point where I got a really good chance to do some really good inventory outside of the stagnance, outside of the muck — and say, "You know what? I realize that me being depressed, me being in my feelings wasn't anything bad happening to me. It was me not recognizing the good that God has given me, and it's me not serving."

Lou Lepore: One of my favorite promises, besides salvation, in all the Bible is James 4:8, where it says, "Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh unto you." And he says, "Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded." And then drop it down to verse 10, "Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up." It fascinates me. Regardless of where we are, regardless of what we've done, the mistakes we make — you're right, you should have known better. But you make the mistake and you go back to God and you repent, and he forgives. And when you make that move, it's like boom, like it never happened. And his grace is sufficient for us. We know that. I'm hearing you say in your last conversation, you started singing professionally. So here you are in Pensacola, nowhere close to God. And then in a couple events he gets your attention — prodigal son, come on back — and you run back, and with open arms he accepts you, he plugs you right back in. And not only are you singing in church, but he opens up that opportunity. So what was that opportunity? You're singing professionally.

Victor Marshall: Yeah, so it came because of a choir member in our church. She was singing with a group in San Diego called Sacra Profana.

Lou Lepore: Seek first the Kingdom of God.

Victor Marshall: Exactly. And she said, "Hey, we have a tenor spot that needs to be filled, and I think you should go audition for it." And I had never auditioned for anything in my life. Again, I'm thinking I'm not worth anything, right? So she says, "I think you could do this. I think it'd be great for you." I go audition, I get the part right on the spot.

Lou Lepore: Praise God.

Victor Marshall: And I spent the next year and a half singing at Comic-Con twice, concerts, we sang in front of Alan Menken, the Disney director. We sang various spots all over San Diego, and I got paid to do it. I got paid to practice and I got paid to perform.

Lou Lepore: Wow.

Victor Marshall: Even in that, one of the things that the choir member told me — she said, "Hey, I know we're doing this together and I know that we do this and we sing with this group professionally, but we still need to give God his due." And I was like, "You know what? You're right." She's like, "We don't sing on Sundays on purpose. I make sure we don't do that so that we can be in church." And I was like, "You're 100% right." So I would still go sing in church every Sunday, and then Saturday through Monday I'd do my various jobs that I had that I worked at the time, and I'd sing my gigs. And that's when I met some of the best friends that I will have in life. That's how I got another job that would ultimately lead me to here because of my respiratory. And then I also met my wife doing the same exact thing. God just delivering over and over and over again once you do what he asks you to do. And all he asks you to do is serve. It's like you don't need to know anything else. You just need to plug in and do what you're supposed to do. And that's something that I can say profoundly that I know what I'm supposed to do. And I'm supposed to, at the very least, use the vocal talent that he's given me to serve him. And if I do that, all my ways acknowledge him, he directs my path. And that's exactly what he did.

Lou Lepore: So you said you met your wife out in San Diego?

Victor Marshall: So we actually went to college together. Her best friend was in one of my classes, but we didn't speak to each other the whole four years. I had no idea who she was. One of my good friends was in Florida getting married. I went to his wedding, and she had hit me up while I was there and said, "Hey, I'm coming to San Diego. We kind of know each other. We have mutual friends. Will you hang out with me and show me around?" This was four years after college. So I ended up picking her up. After I get off the plane, I go pick her up, we hang out, and we just kept hanging out. She went back to work about a week later, and we just kept in contact. We were long distance for like 11 months, almost like a year, and then I moved out here. We got engaged and we got married, and that's the end of that.

Lou Lepore: And she was from out this way, and that's how she —

Victor Marshall: She grew up in Quakertown, yeah.

Lou Lepore: She comes out to San Diego, looks you up. You guys have an opportunity to kick it a little bit, get to know each other. God puts the space, makes sure your relationship's tight, and so he's really just blessing there, and I see his hand all over. And so you guys come out this way, you get married. Now you're serving at Valley Forge Baptist. So what do you guys do there?

Victor Marshall: So I'm in the music department. I sing at the church, but we also are team, like youth workers. Both of us work in the youth department. She has the 11th and 12th grade, and I have the 11th and 12th grade myself. So we get to sit down and talk to the guys and girls and just kind of bless them that we've been blessed in our lives too.

Lou Lepore: Pass on the goodness down the line, yeah. And here's the goodness of God. I mean, this is Romans 8:28 to a T. The place where you struggled the most is where God gives you one of the most effective ministries to go reach the youth. And I've seen you guys work with the teens, and the teen group is jumping. I know you guys have been serving there for a long time and been very effective. So what kind of interactions do you have with them? Do you have an opportunity to say, "Hey, here's where I went. Don't go that way"?

Victor Marshall: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, we talk about it constantly. A lot of them are going off to college in the next couple months. So we've had these discussions about not wasting what God's given you and making sure that you're doing what God wants you to do and serving when appropriate. This past week, we talked about the 10th leper that came back and said thank you to God. And I was telling them, like, "Hey, that's my life." Yeah, God healed those nine, and he said, "Hey, go show yourselves to the priest," and there was a huge process they had to go through in order to get back into the camp and get back to their families. And the 10th person had to go through the same thing, but that Samaritan, that guy that nobody really cared about, the guy that everybody kind of looked down on, he stopped to give thanks to God. And I told them, like, in my life, when I've stopped to give thanks to God, I start to realize that my problems, the things that I have to do, are really small. The processes that I have to go through in order to get what I want are really small compared to what God has for me, and that is the key to not going down to that place again of stagnance, of aimlessness. Because looking back, I know I got there because I was thinking about myself, and now I realize there's no reason to go there because God's so good — that even when things aren't looking up for me, things are looking up for me. Even when things are going bad — things are going good. I can point out seven bad things that are happening in my life currently, right now, that are struggles that I have to go deal with as soon as I walk out of here. But I can count a million things that God does for me today that should keep me sustained, should keep me focused on His goodness to me and His love for me, His love for my family, His love for His children in general. And if I focus on all of me and all of my feelings, I'm gonna be depressed. But on the other hand, God's so good, He's always taken care of me. He's always helped me through it. There's no need to worry about anything. It's take no thought for tomorrow, right? And He takes care of me. He's just so good. And to me, that's the framework. It's like, how do you avoid getting back to that spot? How do you avoid the depression? How do you avoid the aimlessness? You just look to God. And you don't just look to Him like, "Yeah, God, what do you have for me?" You look to God like, "Thank you for what you've done for me." You start with gratitude like that 10th leper — and everything changes. It's a shift in perspective.

Lou Lepore: Yeah, and it partners together. I think of Romans 8:31, where if God be for us, who can be against us?

Victor Marshall: Nobody.

Lou Lepore: Right. You do that mental check, and you go, "All right, there's even purpose in this season. It might not be the way I drew it up, it might not be exactly what I wanted — and you know what? This one thing might be downright hard. This might be a really busy season — and things are not going the way I planned, but it will shift."

Victor Marshall: Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 Verse 11 says that God makes everything beautiful in His time.

Lou Lepore: Yeah. So for someone hearing this and they're going, "Yeah, but Vic, you don't know my story," what would you say to that person?

Victor Marshall: I would say not to invalidate your story — because your story is your story for a reason. God has given you your story, but there's a lesson in your story that you're missing. If you're focusing on yourself, you're forgetting what He wants to do with your story — and how He wants to use your story for His good and His glory, right? It's about Him, and the more we are focused on us and what we want, the more we go astray. It's the framework. It's the math problem, right? If we're gonna focus on ourselves, then we're gonna do dumb stuff. But if we focus on God and we focus on what He wants for us and how He's using us, and keeping the mindset, "Hey, God woke me up today for a reason. God's given me this life for a reason. He didn't have to. If He didn't want me here, if there wasn't some good coming my way, if He wasn't using this for His glory, I wouldn't be here." God doesn't waste time. So if I feel like I'm away from God, it's 'cause I've moved, not God. So I need to bring myself back to the point where God is the focus, God is as close to me as possible because I'm as close to Him as I can possibly be. And if we can do that — then nothing else matters.

Lou Lepore: Right. Yeah. I think the motto of this show is today's test is tomorrow's testimony. And what God's doing in your life now, you might not be able to see it. Really, the proper perspective is when we look back is to say thank you. The biggest struggles I ever had, in an odd way, are the biggest blessings God ever gave me — because I wouldn't be ready to do whatever He's called me to do if I didn't have those experiences. So how do you now approach both the highs and the lows of life? Listen, a parent with three children, a wife, you got your work in full time. I know Kez is working full time. How do you balance all that?

Victor Marshall: I'll answer it like this: I don't wanna ever come across like I've got it all figured out, 'cause I don't. And these are conversations that me and my wife have constantly, this exact question. And we've kinda come up with a motto in and of ourselves of just praise him in the highs and praise him in the lows. And again, that spirit of gratitude gets us to the point where we can say, "God, thank you that I had to pay this bill today and I didn't have the money. Thank you that you gave me the money. Thank you that our kids are doing great in school. Thank you that they struggled today. Thank you that I have the opportunity to go through what you have for me, because I know that what you have for me is gonna be used to help someone — or gonna be used to help my family, or the examples that you're giving me now are gonna be examples my kids can look at later." Each one of us has our own separate road to walk, but every one of us has the spots that we fit and that God plugs us into, but we have to be willing to let God plug us in. So everything that God gives us, every lesson that we learn in life, he's molding that shape to fit exactly where he wants it to fit, and the minute we get in our own heads, and the minute we think about ourselves, and the minute we start to, "Woe is me, life is hard," we start to buck against the molding — and we're not allowing God to shape us the way he wants to shape us.

Lou Lepore: I heard a quote, "Not everything feels good, but God is still good in it." And the challenge as you mature in Christ is not to ask the question, "Why is this happening?" But ask the question, "What is this for?" And that is a much stronger Christ-centered response. I'm challenged right now because I know there's a couple things that I need to reevaluate in my own head. I'm talking strong on the podcast, but Lord knows I need a savior.

Victor Marshall: You know what's funny, Lou? We expect God to get us to where we think we should be at the moment we think we should be there. And God says, "No, I'm building you." My favorite verse is Isaiah 26:3. "I will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee because he trusteth in me." And if we don't trust in God completely, we won't find that peace.

Lou Lepore: Amen. Well, Vic, thank you for being on the show, and we appreciate you very, very much for sharing your story and for being open and honest about where you were, how God brought you back, and then giving Him the glory for all He's done in your life. We appreciate you, and I know everybody in church is looking forward to hearing you sing this Sunday.

Victor Marshall: Yeah. This was fun. Thank you for having me.

Lou Lepore: Well, there you have it, folks. Colossians chapter 3 verse 2 tells us to set our affection on things above and not on things of Earth, and Vic Marshall shared a wonderful story about how that slipped in his mind and how he reverted back to keeping Christ first in his life and seeing the change happen from there. If you have any questions about the show today, email us at morethankonquerorspodcast837@gmail.com. And if you're looking to connect with God for the first time because you've never done that, you can visit our website, morethankonquerorspodcast.buzzsprout.com, and click Looking for Hope. The Bible says there is only one way to connect with God, as Vic Marshall has shared today, and that's through a relationship with Jesus Christ. A special thank you to Sweatshirt of Hope, our sponsors, and for you, our listeners, for tuning in today. I'm Lou Lepore. This is the More Than Conquerors podcast, where today's test is tomorrow's testimony. God bless you.