Lysa TerKeurst Shares Hope-Filled Guidance to Heal From a Unwanted Divorce and Rebuild With Faith (EXCLUSIVE)
Her powerful new book guides women through gray divorce with hope, healing and renewed purpose
Christian speaker and bestselling author Lysa TerKeurst has never shied away from speaking truth in the messiest seasons of life. After 29 years of marriage marked by her ex-husband’s infidelity and addiction, her divorce in late 2021 left her heartbroken, weary of relationships — and even wrestling with trust in God.
Today, in her new book Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, Lysa offers not just her story but a roadmap for anyone caught in the aftermath of a marriage they didn’t see coming. She offers biblically grounded, practical strategies for letting go while holding yourself together and asks the hard questions like Does God hate divorce? How do I forgive? How do I walk toward a future I never envisioned?
Whether you’re in the midst of a divorce (especially a gray divorce), still processing what happened years ago, or walking alongside someone facing this pain, her raw, authentic journey invites you to move from devastation toward hope and serves as a reminder that a failed marriage doesn’t define the next chapter of your life.
Exploring forgiveness and trust post-divorce
Let’s don’t start with forgiveness. Let’s start with why we feel resistance to forgiveness. Forgiveness can feel like a very unfair gift we have to give to the person who hurt us the most. Sometimes we think forgiveness demands reconciliation. So if reconciliation isn’t possible or isn’t wise or safe, then we can feel like forgiveness is impossible.
But the Bible makes it very clear those are two totally separate dynamics. Forgiveness is a command by God, but reconciliation is very dependent on the other person’s heart posture, their willingness to course correct, and the ability for two people to come together in a safe dynamic. It doesn’t demand that we automatically trust them. Trust is the oxygen of all human relationships, but trust can only be built with ‘Time + Believable Behavior.’
Lysa emphasizes the importance of allowing enough time to pass that you see a heart change in that person before deciding to trust them again. “You can forgive automatically,” she explains, “but that does not automatically mean that you trust that person.”
On her own journey to learning to forgive again, Lysa says, “The biggest resistance of all that I experienced with forgiveness is I kept waiting for the other person to own what they did, say they were sorry, acknowledge how deeply devastating this was to me and promise to never do it again. And I felt like if I didn’t have that conversation, then I couldn’t forgive.
“But basically what I was doing, and I eventually realized that I was attaching my ability to heal onto choices another person may never make. Chances are, that person may be very unwilling or incapable of recognizing what they’ve done to you. That conversation may never happen, but you don’t want to be held hostage in this endless cycle of thinking about the pain constantly. That person already hurt you once, don’t allow them to then hijack your future.
“Forgiveness is really our opportunity to detach our ability to heal from what the other person did to us, put a stake in the ground and say, ‘I deserve to stop suffering because of what another person did to me.’
“That does not let the other person off the hook at all. It doesn’t say that what happened was no big deal. What it does say is God’s prescription for the hurting human heart is forgiveness, and so we’re going to walk through the process of healing and the process of forgiveness so that we can move forward in healthy ways.”
What the Bible really says about divorce
“Every part of divorce is extremely painful. One of the hardest things was when people would take Scripture and weaponize it against me and make me feel like I was an equal contributor to the divorce, and that God’s displeasure was on me.
“I finally drew a line in the sand. What they’re usually referring to is the verse Malachi 2:16 that says, ‘God hates divorce.’
“We have to have a proper understanding of what that word means, and that’s why it was really important for me when I wrote this book, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, that I bring in two people that are highly trained and educated to both handle the therapeutic side as well as the theological side.
Dr. Joel Muddamalle hosts the Therapy and Theology podcast alongside Lysa and Jim Cress — the co-writer of Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. She explains that they did a deep dive on this verse and what the Scripture means when saying, ‘God hates divorce.’
“If you have the English Standard Version or New International Version translation, that’s not what you’re going to find in Malachi 2:16,” Lysa says. “What you’re going to find is, ‘When a man hates and divorces his wife, he does violence against the one he should protect, thus says the Lord.’
“So you can see that the direction of the hatred is very important. The direction of the hatred that’s being addressed is not God’s hatred toward the people getting a divorce or toward the one who’s devastated by this divorce.
“The direction of the hatred is actually God saying, ‘I hate these choices that this person has made.’ And in this case, he’s referencing the man who has hated and divorced his wife and brought violence down on the one that he should protect. That’s what God hates.”
Facing a ‘Gray Divorce’
An unfortunate reality is that the ‘gray divorce’ is on the rise. Divorce rates among those 65 and older have roughly tripled since the 1990s and becoming even more widespread post-COVID.
“My therapist once said COVID-19 was like draining the lake, and we were all forced to see what was really there. When the busyness of life stopped, our life came to a screeching halt. We were forced to kind of see what the realities of some of the dynamics were because we had time to see them,” Lysa notes.
“Having that year of COVID, being at home, I could see the cycle more clearly in my relationship. I’m always careful to tell people I didn’t walk away from my marriage. I accepted a very, very painful reality, and it was not a reality that I wanted, but in the end, he did not choose me. He didn’t choose my healthy boundaries as valid and good.
“What happened during COVID is the same dynamic that can happen when your kids grow up and they leave and you look up and there’s one person there. It kind of has that same effect. It’s like draining the lake. There’s no longer busyness that can cover up, and you’re forced to see what reality is. And sometimes that’s a painful reality.”
A future after divorce
In 2021, Lysa ended her 29-year marriage to her ex-husband, whose repeated infidelity and struggles with addiction led to a devastating divorce. “While my now husband is one of the sweetest, most amazing gifts God’s ever given me, he’s not the redemption story. The redemption story is that I got through the most devastating season of my life, and I still raise my arms up and believe in God and praise God,” Lysa says with relief.
“I think the most important part of my healing journey now is when I use what I’ve been through to help other women who feel so lost and so alone. I use transferable wisdom from what I learned to see the light of hope spark back on in another woman’s eyes.”
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