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Goodness Out of Grief
January 14, 2025 | Written By Nathan Foster and Abigail Reed

“God wants what’s best for you,” Megan Fate Marshman, MA ’08, shared with the audience at Sun Valley Community Church as she encouraged the congregation to rejoice and find contentment. For those who know Marshman’s story, this message may seem contradictory to her circumstances: Just two years prior, Marshman lost her husband, Randy, to an unexpected heart attack. She was left to raise her two young sons, Jedidiah and Foster, as a young widow. Even so, Marshman—speaker, author, and pastor—continually encourages others to have faith, even in the midst of tragedy.
“God understands. Not only does He know us in those places, but we can also know Him,” said Marshman. “If we’re open to it, we’ll see how His Spirit uses all those things to form us more in the likeness of Him.”
This strong foundation of faith traces back to her parents, who taught her that ministry is not limited to the Church—and words have power to build God’s Kingdom. This stuck with her as she went on to study communication at Westmont University with the goal of telling stories as a videographer. God, however, had different plans.
Those plans involved using a poor decision that Marshman made in college to change her trajectory and her understanding of Him. She had made friends with a group who shoplifted and one day she joined them. “I got caught, thanks be to God, and it changed my life for the better,” Marshman said. After six hours in a holding cell, her parents bailed her out. She walked out with her head down, expecting to be met with anger. When she looked up at her parents, however, her mom was holding her arms out.
“I told her, ‘Mom I don’t deserve that.’ With kindness and compassion, my dad told me, ‘My girl, you never did.’ That was the first time I met grace face to face,” Marshman said.
Marshman still had to face court, though, but dozens of her friends and family wrote letters to the judge attesting to her character. In response, the judge gave her a unique sentence: She was required to make a public presentation at local high schools on the topic of decision making. That’s when she discovered she had a gift for speaking.
In that moment, my greatest weakness revealed my greatest strength.
When Marshman graduated from Westmont, she eagerly accepted an offer to play professional basketball in Europe. Her sister, however, reminded her to pray. “At 4 a.m. on the floor of my bedroom, I prayed and asked God the direction He wanted me to take. It was then that I realized the whole decision to play basketball internationally was all about me, not God’s purpose in my life,” Marshman said.
So she changed course. The very next day, Marshman received a call from a place near to her heart, the place where she had made life-changing decisions to follow Jesus—Hume Lake Christian Camp. They needed a summer lead counselor, so she packed her bags and drove up a day later.
“That was when one of my college basketball teammates contacted me,” she said. “Her dad was going to coach at Azusa Pacific, and asked if I wanted to coach with him.”
God wanted to use her basketball experience after all—for His glory, not hers. For two years, she coached, taught classes as an adjunct professor, and worked on a master’s degree in organizational leadership at APU.
After her time at APU, she married the love of her life, Randy Marshman. Newlywed, they spent one last summer counseling campers at Hume Lake.
“That final summer orientation changed my life—I saw a woman stand on stage giving a profound message on God’s grand, full redemptive narrative,” Marshman said. The speaker took her under her wing that summer and offered her a position at a Christian publishing house.
Suddenly, every little detail of my life came together. I had the exact qualifications needed for the job,” Marshman said. “I realized God was sovereign over the whole thing, and had been orchestrating this from the beginning. He will use absolutely everything if we’re walking in step with His Spirit.
She and Randy soon welcomed two boys into the world, and life was full. So when Randy died on February 21, 2021, Marshman turned to the Scriptures and honest prayer in grief and confusion. She was sad, angry, and hurting, but because of community and authentic prayer, she was never alone. She leaned on Romans 8:28-29: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His son” (NIV).
“I sat and considered how in the world God could use Randy’s death for good,” she said. “Good, based on Romans 8:29, didn’t mean comfortable or happy. While everything is not good, God is wildly creative in still using it for good. God can use ‘all things’ to bring us into deep intimacy and honesty with Him. And He has.”
This spring, Marshman returned to APU to deliver a morning chapel message. Facing the audience of students filling the Felix Event Center, she shared a simple yet profound truth she has learned from her journey: “God wants to meet you right where you’re at. He won’t meet you where you’re not, so you might as well open your heart and be honest. He’ll meet you right there.”