While She Was On Stages Teaching Millions Of Christian Women How To Have A Godly Marriage, Her Own Was Ending In Betrayal.

For more than two decades, Lysa TerKeurst was a New York Times bestselling author and the president of Proverbs 31 Ministries, one of the largest ministries to women in America.

She taught millions of Christian women how to hold a marriage together with God at the center.

And while she was doing it, her own marriage of 29 years was ending in betrayal.

She has talked about the season when she barely recognized herself.

Here's the part of her story almost nobody talks about.

When it all finally collapsed, she did what most Christian women never think to do.

She opened her Bible and didn't close it for 1,000 hours.

She wasn't reading like a ministry president.

She was reading like a woman whose life had fallen apart, looking for what God actually says to someone whose marriage ended, whose identity shattered, whose prayers felt unanswered.

And somewhere in those 1,000 hours, she stopped being the one who got hurt and started being the one who got healed.

I'm telling you her story because of what it did to mine.

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How many times have you sat in church on Sunday with a smile on your face and gone home and cried in your car?

I did it for almost two years.

I'm Diane. I'm 54. My marriage ended three years ago, after 23 years, in a way I never saw coming.

I grew up believing that if you follow God, your family stays together. Broken marriages were something that happened to other people.

So when mine ended, I didn't just lose my husband.

I lost the version of me that knew who she was.

All of a sudden I was a divorced Christian woman, and it felt like wearing a scarlet letter around my neck.

I kept asking the same question into the dark:

"I was a good Christian girl, God. Why did this happen to me?"

I'd been the strong one all my life. Now I couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, and some nights I didn't have the strength to pray.

And here is the worst part. I told myself my distance from God was a faith problem.

That a better Christian would be handling this better.

I wasn't faithless. I was living hurt.

A woman who can't focus on three chapters of scripture while her life is collapsing isn't lazy.

She isn't backsliding.

She's living hurt.

And God isn't punishing her. He hates what the divorce did to her. He isn't done with her.

Once I understood that, I had to be honest about what I'd been trying instead.

Here's what most Christian women never figure out, and what nobody in church seems willing to say out loud.

Most of us only ever truly study the Bible when we have no other choice.

When the marriage ends. When the diagnosis comes. When the child walks away. When the friend betrays us.

We get desperate enough to actually study it.

The rest of the time, we read three chapters in the morning, close the book, and can't remember any of it by lunch.

I read the Psalms when I was at my lowest. They comforted me in the moment, but two days later I couldn't tell you a single thing I had learned.

Lysa had 1,000 hours to give. I had thirty minutes in the morning, before work, with a cup of coffee and a book I didn't really understand.

That's where I was stuck when a friend from my divorce-care group put her copy of a spiral-bound study in my hands. She is three years ahead of me on the same road.

She said, "This is the closest thing I've found to being walked through the Bible by someone who knows you're hurting."

It's a 52-week study that works with the Bible you already own. Any translation.

And the part that changed everything for me: before you read anything each week, it gives you a short explanation of exactly what you're about to get into.

Who wrote it. When. Why. What was happening in the world. And how it connects to Jesus.

So when you open the Psalms, you already know they were written by people who were also living hurt. People who cried out from the same dark places you do. And what God said back to them.

When you open the gospels, you understand why Jesus put forgiveness at the center of the most important prayer He ever taught, and what that actually means for the person you can't stop thinking about.

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It's deep enough to finally understand. And simple enough for a woman with nothing left to give.

Not homework. Not guilt. About fifteen minutes a day, broken into pieces small enough to do on the days you barely can.

Verses I had read dozens of times suddenly meant something completely new, because I finally had the context to understand what they were saying.

Somewhere in those weeks I stopped reading like a woman doing a chore, and started reading like Lysa did. Like a woman looking for what God actually says to someone like her.

Here's what the rebuild actually looked like for me.

Maybe you're where I was. Divorced, separated, grieving, or just holding a life that doesn't look like the one you prayed for.

I want to say the thing I needed someone to say to me.

You are not too broken for this. You are not disqualified.

You don't need more willpower. You don't need to perform your healing for anyone.

You need the Word to finally get inside. That happens when someone explains each week's reading before you read it, in pieces small enough for the worst days.

I'm not the only one who found it this way.

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This study is the closest most of us are ever going to get to Lysa's 1,000 hours.

The same depth, broken into pieces small enough to actually do.

It's still in stock as I'm writing this. Up to 62% off, with a free pen pack included with every order while they last.

Don't spend another year being a Christian woman who knows about God but has never actually met Him on the page.

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