Nick Merritt

Nick Merritt grew up in Maryland the grandson of a career preacher, in a household where faith was present but never personal. He has almost no memories of his childhood before middle school, a gap he links to abuse both from his mother's first husband and later from his own father, abuse severe enough that he and his siblings sometimes had to be locked in a closet for safety. He was raised instead by the man his mother met when he was a toddler, the father he claims today. He played sports through high school, drifted through a rough first semester of college, and eventually found stability studying exercise science and meeting the woman who would become his first wife.

Nick enlisted in the Army at 29 after a Tough Mudder convinced him he was wasting his physical ability behind a desk. But the life he was building came apart when he was unfaithful to his first wife while the two were stationed apart early in his career. She found out, they tried to reconcile over video calls, and it ended in divorce. Alone at Fort Campbell in a new job with no support system, Nick spiraled into what he calls a deep, dark hole of depression, drinking alone most nights until he blacked out just to sleep, then repeating it the next day for years.

A rejected call to Special Forces recruiting pushed him instead toward Psychological Operations, where he found both a career and, eventually, his current wife, whom he met on Facebook Dating during the pandemic. On their first date he made the deliberate choice to be honest with her about his past rather than lie again, a decision he credits as the start of everything that followed. She brought him to Grace Church, where a sermon on what the church calls the freedom cycle became the only message he can say completely changed his life: he had long known God had forgiven him, and that his ex-wife had forgiven him, but had never once forgiven himself.

What followed was not a single dramatic moment but a slow, visible transformation, most clearly tracked in how he engages with worship, moving from standing silently in the back to now singing every word with his hands raised, sometimes moved to tears by songs about his family. He built a discipline of praying before public speaking and says his confidence has been unmistakably different ever since. At home, he and his wife pray nightly, raise two daughters in a house full of scripture and worship music, and serve together nearly every Tuesday night feeding and praying with people in need through a ministry called Moore Manna.

Today Nick is a PSYOP officer who currently oversees PSYOP Assessment and Selection, a different program from the Special Forces Assessment and Selection that turned him away years earlier. In less than a week from this conversation, he leaves for two months to requalify into an entirely new Army career field built around nuclear weapons policy, work that connects to graduate study he never finished. He is honest that he still does not know for certain whether this next chapter is God's specific calling or simply an opportunity that checked every box he personally wanted.