Podcast

A Marriage Restored after Porn Addiction and Suicidal Depression. Kirsten Samuel

Kelly: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Unshakable Hope Podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kelly Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions, such as, How do I trust God’s heart when His ways and delays are breaking mine? How can I believe God is good when life doesn’t seem good? My prayer is that God would renew our hope in these conversations, and that each of us would experience the very real power of His presence and love.

 

Friends, I am so thankful that today I have Kirsten Samuel with me. She is a friend of mine from a long time ago, a writing group that I was in. And I’m just going to tell you right up front that if you’ve ever been in a situation that you thought was too big or too deep or too dark for God to bring beauty out of, you need to hear our conversation today.

You’re going to walk away with a fresh sense that nothing, absolutely nothing is impossible with our great, [00:01:00] big, good God. So Kirsten is an author, speaker, and coach. Her book is Choosing a Way Out When the Bottom Isn’t the Bottom, and that subtitle is a little hint of part of the story that’s going to be unfolded today.

Kirsten, I am so glad that you’re here with me. Welcome.

kirsten: Thank you so much, Kelly. It is a privilege to be with you. And yes, the subtitle does hint at this story.

Kelly: Yes. Your story is a marriage restored after porn addiction, but that is just the beginning of this story. It’s so much deeper than that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself right now?

kirsten: As you said, I am an author and a coach and a speaker my husband and I just celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary, which is a gift of God and every year we praise God when we cross another year.

We have three married children, so we have three bonus children and we have 14 grandchildren [00:02:00] and they’re spread out over the country. Our grandchildren’s ages are from six months to 15 years and each one is precious. Each one is unique. Each one brings such joy to our lives, and I love being a grandma.

Kelly: Wow, you don’t look anywhere near old enough to have grandchildren that age. Amazing. Okay. So what I’d like you to do is to just start by describing what your marriage was like, what your family life was like, and then just lead us to that day when your world fell apart.

kirsten: Sure. My husband and I married right after college. We met in college. And so we were in our early twenties, and both of us grew up in really strong Christian homes. We had, we had wonderful backgrounds, wonderful parents really great examples and, so we had just finished 25 years of marriage. We had just celebrated that, that anniversary. And our youngest son, we had taken him to university [00:03:00] over in Austria. And then our oldest son was heading back to school here in the States. And our daughter, our oldest had just gotten married.

Two months earlier, so we were getting ready to be like truly empty nesters. I’m very excited, wondering what this new phase of life was going to be like. And Dave was working full time. I was working full time at a local church as an executive assistant and life was pretty good we thought, and then I came home from work one day, just before our oldest son was heading back to school. And made dinner, and it was in August. So we just crossed the 16th anniversary of this day.

My husband was really quiet at dinner, which, sometimes he’s had a really because of what he was doing his, he would be really tired when he got home and I knew that and was like, okay, no problem. So I cleaned everything up from dinner and went into our bedroom and he’s laying down on the bed, which that was just weird. Okay.

He’s just he’s this ball of energy [00:04:00] and here he is laying down on the bed. And I said, what’s going on? And he looked at me and very quietly said, it’s very possible that I will not have a job tomorrow. And I looked at him and I just said, what, why? And I was not prepared for the next words that came out of his mouth. The next words were, because of a moral failure, and I just collapsed onto the bed. I couldn’t process anything and I just looked at him and then he said, I have a porn addiction and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. And I looked at him and in a nanosecond of time, Kelly, I went through a myriad of emotions and somewhere I landed on anger.

I landed on, who are you? And you’ve been lying to me. And then that’s followed by, and none of this I could [00:05:00] voice, but it was followed by what’s wrong with me? What did I do wrong? I thought you loved me. And as he began to unfold what had happened, he’d been caught at work.

He worked for an international Christian organization and this was something that they absolutely was grounds for dismissal. And then he said, I need to come up with a plan for recovery and present it to HR tomorrow. And I have no idea what to do. I had no idea. I’m still in shock. I’m still not breathing.

Kelly: Yeah.

kirsten: And he says, I don’t know what to do. And I look at him like what are you looking at me for? The next words that came out of my mouth, Kelly, I believe were God ordained because the first thing I said to him after hearing a little bit more of his story was: we have to get help. And there was a name that came into my head.

Kelly: It’s the Lord because your brain was not even functioning.

kirsten: No. And so I said, and you have to [00:06:00] tell the kids. This is your problem, because right now I’m in anger. I’m not being very nice, that was how I learned of this story. And what happened over the next 24 hours, God reminded me as we were further down the healing journey that before you even knew to ask, I provided.

Kelly: Gosh, that is such a powerful truth. Wow. The Lord himself has gone before us. Deuteronomy 31:8 says that. And so we don’t have to be afraid when we are in a heartbreaking situation. What happens is we begin to imagine a future without God in it, but God himself has gone before us.

kirsten: That’s right. So, 30 minutes later, we were sitting with this couple. And I’m a blubbering mess. That ugly cry the, I can’t put two sentences together to make any sense. And the words that came out of their mouth as they heard. Our story [00:07:00] as Dave revealed his struggle and what had been going on in his life that what they said to us is this does not have to be fatal. And it was the 1st time that I felt this small little pin light of hope.

This does not have to be fatal. And I looked at them. And they said, don’t get us wrong. You have got a lot of work ahead of you and it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be painful, but it doesn’t have to be fatal.

They gave my husband some hope. And then my husband also reached out to a man that we have known since we moved here to Colorado. He met with this guy the next morning, and Peter laid out a plan and it’s from the book, Restoring the Fallen by Earl and Sandy Wilson and a few other authors.

And as Peter laid out the story on a napkin, he just wrote this all out. Dave took that to this meeting with HR and presented it to them and said,[00:08:00] here’s, what I’m willing to do. I know I need help. Please give me help. And they accepted this plan. They added a few things to it, but they accepted this plan.

I got a call from Dave in my office. And he said, I just finished my meeting with HR, he said, they’ve accepted the plan. We’re going to go meet with Peter and Debbie tonight. I want you to hear about this plan. Because we have to put it into action now, and so we did. We met that night with them. So this is 24 hours. This has all happened within 24 hours.

Now, you can’t tell me God wasn’t in this. You can’t tell me he didn’t have it all planned out ahead of time. There is nobody that could ever convince me of that. And as I’m sitting there meeting with Peter and Debbie, and I’m still in the ugly cry. I don’t remember much other than I, I don’t think I’ve ever cried that much of my life.

They laid out the plan for me so that I could understand it. And at this point I’m just plain numb. Yeah, I’m numb. I’m in disbelief. [00:09:00] I don’t want to talk to my husband. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to touch him.

I don’t want anything to do with him. When they asked me, what do you think? I said, I don’t have anything better. Let’s give it a try. And I had no hope. I knew it didn’t have to be fatal because I was still holding on to that, but I didn’t have any hope this would succeed because I was already one foot out the door.

Kelly: Yeah. I can’t even imagine how quickly all of this took place. The thing that comes to my mind is you went to sleep that night and had some sort of a sleep, but I’m sure every time you woke up, you thought, this has got to be a nightmare. I’m going to wake up from this nightmare. And then the realization of, no, this is real. This is not a dream.

kirsten: Yes, it was. Like I said, I have holes in my memory. From that time, there are some things that are very vivid and then there are some things that are very mushy very hazy. And, that’s also God’s grace. He lets us remember. He lets us endure what we can endure, [00:10:00] and in that time, I could not endure much more

Kelly: Right.

kirsten: So we began a process we were meeting with, 6 people. They happen to be 3 couples, who met with us on a weekly basis to walk us through a path of recovery alongside counseling. Dave, a week later, met with a counselor and then we were basically told we were going to go through intensive marriage counseling.

Which was a week-long counseling. And by the time we could get scheduled, it was the week after Thanksgiving that year. So here we are in August. David starting counseling, and we’re starting 2 weeks later. We started with this restoration group. And we met weekly with them. One of their questions to us, which really floored me was, are we an accountability group or an advisory group?

Kelly: Oh, that’s interesting.

kirsten: In my mind at the time, what was the difference? Yeah. And yet [00:11:00] we both said accountability. Basically, what that meant, Kelly was they took over our lives. Completely. There was not a decision we made without them.

Kelly: Wow.

kirsten: And what their focus was was prayer. What their focus was to really deal with us, to get us to get it all out to tell the whole story. And it felt like a surgeon coming in and debriding and debriding, but it was God’s grace because they were safe. I remember the first time Dave started to tell how long this had been going on for him and about his exposure. And I was so afraid of that. I was so afraid to hear the details because I figured I, I thought it would destroy me.

I thought it would. I would be completely rejected, even though it wasn’t my story, it was, I’m still connected to it and the grace that they showed us the love that [00:12:00] they poured out on us was beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. And they became this, it was like, God put us into a cocoon and these people were that cocoon. They were the ones that protected us. They were the ones that held us. They were the ones that nourished us, and they loved us back to the Lord.

Kelly: That is such a beautiful picture of unconditional love. I am amazed you had those people in your life. What a gift.

kirsten: What a gift. Yes.

Kelly: And the other thing that I’m curious about is, just from a practical standpoint, You are processing, Dave is processing. Y’all are meeting with people. So many emotions are being unearthed all the time. And when you’re in a trauma response like this, your brain doesn’t work well. So I’m just wondering how the two of [00:13:00] you even got through every day. Was he still going to work? Did you have work? What in the world did your days look like?

kirsten: We were still going to work. Dave was going to work. He had weekly meetings with his supervisor and had to do different reporting to H. R. but Dave’s company helped pay for the counseling. They were very supportive. They were very clear on the guidelines and what the expectations were, but they were very supportive.

I did go back to work and about a month later at my job I had my very first job review in four and a half years. I had heard, you are so good at what you do. I really appreciate everything you’re doing for me. I was functioning as, like I said, an executive assistant, but I was also functioning as an office manager.

And during that review, my boss came in to me and said, started laying out some things that he was very unhappy with, which [00:14:00] was completely blindsiding to me at this point. I hadn’t really told my boss what was going on. I just said that we were struggling and I’d taken off some time to go to counseling and I asked 1 question finally, and I said, do you want me to continue in this position? And the response was, I don’t know. And in my fragile state, I couldn’t process that.

Kelly: Yeah. That must’ve just felt like a kick to the gut.

kirsten: It did. And I went home and I know now, that I’m past a lot of this and I’ve gone through a lot of the healing and the counseling and the coaching and the things that God has done in me, I know that I went into a full trauma response, a PTSD response. Because when Dave got home, I was sitting on a couch in a fetal position. And I poured out what had happened. And his first words were, because again, he’s reeling, I’m reeling. And he says, you need to call the women from the restoration team. So I made those [00:15:00] phone calls. I made three of them. And each one of them, were very encouraging. They heard me. They said, You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. And they said, are you able, which I was so thankful that these are the words. Are you able to go back on Monday and ask for some clarification?

I wasn’t, I was not able to. The next Monday I walked in and resigned because I didn’t have the capacity to deal with that.

Kelly: How can you process that when you’re already barely processing this huge trauma that’s going on in your life?

kirsten: But here’s the goodness of God. Okay. I walked in and because of, the laws in Colorado, I did not have to give a two-week notice. So I didn’t. I walked in, I gave my notice and I walked out. I was called back in and they asked if I would give them a couple of hours, a day for the next week or so to just get everything done [00:16:00] and hand it off. And I agreed to do that.

3 weeks later, I was hired by another company on a contract basis, to come in and work with their donor department. And God put me in a job with two direct supervisors who were going to be able to carry me when the rest of the story came out.

Kelly: Oh, wow.

kirsten: Now imagine going into meeting with your new boss for the first time and having to tell them three weeks after you started this job, that you had to take a week off. And when they asked you why you had to tell them that your marriage is in trouble. And you’re going into an intensive counseling session and you cannot report for work at all.

I had to tell this to the HR department when they were hiring. And then I had to tell this the very first time I met my bosses, I had to tell them this and they graciously accepted it. There was no judgment. There was just, we’re going to be praying

So I had started working at this [00:17:00] organization, the beginning of November. And we walked into this the counseling session. Both of us not having any idea what was going to happen, what to expect.

We had to do it. We needed help. We knew that. And by this point, we were starting to be able to talk again we met with the counselor. We had to go through a battery of tests and we took those on Monday and on Wednesday, we got the results.

The counselor looked at Dave and said, the good news is: What you’re dealing with, we can work on, you don’t have any personality disorders. What you have is a very low self-esteem. You do not see that you have value. Pornography is your medication of choice.

And I think it was the first time I exhaled because I was so afraid that there was a personality something going on that I never saw. Was he living a double life, was, what was going on? And then the counselor turned and looked at me and his complete, his demeanor changed completely.

And he said, Kirsten, I have to ask you a [00:18:00] question. He said, have you now or ever considered taking your own life? And I looked at him and didn’t see that one coming. And said, no, why would you ask me that? He said, because you are suicidally depressed and you have been for a long time. It’s very severe. You have PTSD and you have a mild, you have an anxiety disorder.

And he said, you need immediate medical help. And if you will not seek that, I have to put you in the hospital.

Kelly: This is where the bottom fell out.

kirsten: This is where the bottom fell out because Kelly, I believed that if you had enough faith in God. If you were, continued in your relationship with God, if you believed what he said, if you went to church regularly, if you prayed, if you read your Bible, you would not deal with mental illness.

And you know what it’s like to pass out… I got into tunnel vision and I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe. He said, I think we need to take a break. And I picked up the phone and called my [00:19:00] doctor’s office.

I said, I need to make an appointment with the doctor and I was expecting a week or so before I could get in. And they, they said, okay can you be here at 1 o’clock? This was 1030 in the morning and I said, yes, I can. And in the receptionist of course, she’s filling out the information.

Can you tell me what this is about? And I choked on the word depression.

So when I came back and I said, I called my doctor’s office and the counselor said, that’s great. Thank you for taking action. And when can you get in? And I said at one o’clock today and his jaw dropped.

Kelly: Yeah, that’s crazy.

kirsten: God went before me. Yeah. I walked into that doctor’s office. Again, I’m in a fetal position on the floor in the corner when he walks in and Dave is with me and the doctor sits down and he said, tell me what’s going on.

And I choked it out. He looked at Dave and Dave was able to give more information. And my doctor said, Kelly. The [00:20:00] last few times I’ve seen you over the last couple of years, I’ve wondered….

Kelly: interesting.

kirsten: God went before me.

Kelly: Yes. He opened his eyes to wonder what was going on. He opened up an appointment in an office where I’m sure that never happens.

kirsten: Never happens. I was able to get on medication right away and I went into the deepest, darkest pit I’ve ever been.

So we’re dealing with Dave’s issues. Now we’re dealing with me at a whole nother level. I go back into work and I have to go start seeing a personal counselor to deal with the depression, with the PTSD, with all of this. And the PTSD traced back to a sexual assault I had as a child that I’d never told anyone about.

Kelly: Wow. You always knew it was there, but you had never talked about it.

kirsten: I had never talked about it. I didn’t know how to.

Kelly: Yeah. Yeah.

kirsten: I didn’t know how to say what had happened and as that story came out, and of course, we [00:21:00] told the restoration team,

and their first words again to me were, You’re going to be okay. We’ve got you. You are not alone. And that’s what I want women to hear. You are not alone. You are never alone. You are never ever alone. God has put into place people that you might not even know about right now, who are there to walk with you to help you breathe, to love you like Jesus loves you.

I call them “Jesus with skin on people” and they come and we began this journey of his recovery. My recovery. And then watched God not, rebuild our marriage. He did rebuild it, but in the end he gave us a brand new one, 41 years. I’m still married to the same guy.

I love to introduce my husband when I’m speaking because this is God’s work. I’m not that smart. I’m not that forgiving. I don’t know how to work through this, [00:22:00] but God does. And he tells the story, he says, if you will walk with me, if you will listen to me, I will show you the way to go.

Kelly: I’m honestly in awe of all that God did, Kirsten. When I consider the depth of the wounds that you’re describing and the processing of the trauma, all that just seems so overwhelming. But I’m reminded that God is strength in our weakness, that He provides the victory in our stories.

I love Isaiah 41:10, where it says, don’t be afraid for I’m with you. Don’t be discouraged for I am your God, your personal God. I love that. I’m your God. I’ll help you. I will strengthen you. I’ll hold you up with my victorious right hand. That promise has been such an anchor for me. At some of the most overwhelming times in my life.

kirsten: Just a few chapters earlier in Isaiah, there’s another verse that I love. Isaiah 41 :10 is one of the ones that the Lord just [00:23:00] gave me. And I clung to, but the other one says, I have called you by name. You are mine. Jeremiah 1:5 says, before I created you, I knew you and had a purpose for your life.

He tells Jeremiah, he purposed that he would be a prophet, but you can put yourself in this verse and you can say, before God created you, he knew you and had a purpose. You’re not an accident. I don’t care what anybody else says.

You’re not an accident. Yeah. What happens to us that we think is so devastating, and it is devastating. I am not going to minimize any of this pain. Any woman that I talk to and I hear their stories, I feel their pain. I’ve lived a lot of that pain. Stories are different. Circumstances are different. But the pain is what we identify with.

Yeah. But God says, I’ve called you by name. You are mine. He says that [00:24:00] he is like a mother who wraps her arms around her children and holds them tight. He said, you may stumble, but you will never fall. Amen. And I was stumbling and I was falling. And when I hit the bottom, Jesus was right there. I’ll never forget that day.

I’ll never forget reading. I would read my Bible and it made no sense. The only thing that made sense was the book of Psalms. And I would read the passages in the book of Psalms, Psalm 90, where he talks about though you go through tribulation and pestilence and all of these things, I am with you. And I would read some of the Psalms where David is talking about what his enemies have been doing.

And I would cry those out to the Lord. I would say, I feel surrounded on all sides. I don’t know where to turn. Nothing makes sense. I remember that day sitting in the rocking chair in my living room and I had been reading and I had been trying to pray and I couldn’t pray. It was like [00:25:00] I was in this vault and nothing could penetrate this vault.

And I remember saying that day, Lord, if you are not who you say you are, then I don’t want to live. There’s nothing for me to live for.

And I remember crying that out to the Lord. And as I’m sitting there, ugly crying again, when my eyes closed, there was this image that came to my mind and it was Jesus. And he was standing there with his arms wide open. And he said, I’ve always been here. I’m here right now. And he said, all you have to do is reach for me.

And I did. And I grabbed on and I said, don’t let me go because I was ready to be done. And I just remember that day being the turning point. That was my pivot. That was my day where I either am going to believe God is who he says he is with my heart, soul, mind, and strength, or I am not going to live. And I clung [00:26:00] for dear life.

Dave started to pray over me, the restoration team prayed over me. They would come to our house. There was one night that I literally, I had been very ill. I was driving home from the doctor’s office and I was so sick. Dave couldn’t take me for that day for whatever reason. I don’t remember, but I was driving home and this was about a year into our recovery.

It was dark. I was coming down a road here in Colorado and there’s a few hills around here. was coming down this road to a bridge and I thought: All I have to do is drive off the bridge and I screamed and I said, I can’t think that. And I just cried out and I said, God, where are you?

And I managed to get home and I walked in the door and Dave takes one look at me and he said, What happened? What’s going on? And I couldn’t put the words together, but I managed to garble out what had happened and what my thoughts were. He immediately called a couple from our team. They were in our home in 20 minutes.

Holding me, holding Dave [00:27:00] and saying, you’re okay. We’ve got you. You’re going to be okay. And they said, you’re going to the doctor Monday morning. Dave, you are taking her at 8 a. m. to the doctor . You’re going to tell him what’s going on.

You need more help and it’s okay. You’re going to get through this. Satan was lying to me again and telling me I did not matter. I had no significance. There was no purpose for my life. But Jeremiah 1; 5 said. I created you with a purpose, created you with a purpose and he prayed over me. They prayed scripture over me until I could sleep.

Kelly: Gosh, that is so beautiful.

I think I cried through most of that such a beautiful story of God’s redemptive heart. Of his unconditional love being lived out through the people that he himself placed in your life ….  Just the power of [00:28:00] God to rescue us when we are in the deepest, darkest pits.

kirsten: Yes. Dave and I say this both Kelly, I want your listeners to hear this. So many times we think these horrible things that we go through our punishment. Now they’re the result of our sin. They’re the result of bad choices that we make sometimes. Sometimes they’re not. If you look at the book of job, they weren’t because Job screwed up,

Kelly: Right!

kirsten: They were because God allowed it. In the book of Job, we see that this was not punishment for Job, the things that he went through.

God was allowing this to test him to see if Job really understood that God was always good, that God would take care of him, that God had a greater plan. So Dave and I, while we don’t wish what we went through on anybody. And not even my worst enemy, I don’t want them to go through that. I don’t want any woman that I talked [00:29:00] to any couples that we talked to, to experience what we experienced.

Yeah. But we know that God took that and he changed us and he now allows us to take that pain to take what he taught us and to go to others and say, You’re going to make it, you’re going to be okay. And it’s just my reminder that if I’m not looking at Jesus, if I’m not focusing on Jesus, I’m going to slide back in that pit.

But by God’s grace, the apostle Paul tells us, and we all like to quote, my grace is sufficient in your weakness, but we don’t understand that Paul goes on after that verse to say, and this was God’s grace to me. See the struggle is the grace. It’s not punishment. It’s not punishment. No, it’s the grace so that we can experience the greatness of our God and the goodness of our God and how he goes before [00:30:00] you.

We didn’t have three couples that we were friends with that were strong enough spiritually to do what this restoration team did. We struggled to find them. We had one. And then the Lord gave us some names and we had to reach out to a couple that we barely knew that our kids were friends. We reached out to them and tell them the story because we needed somebody, but we knew they loved the Lord.

We knew they were strong. We had to tell them the story and their very first words of their mouth were: We’ve been there.

Kelly: Oh, what a surprise.

kirsten: Yes. Yes.

Kelly: Again, God going before you.

kirsten: That’s right. So don’t ever believe that God doesn’t have the plan. He didn’t go and take a vacation and doesn’t know what’s going on. Yeah. Whoever you are. He is intimately acquainted with you down to the cellular level.

Kelly: Amen. That’s right.

kirsten: And this is what he was teaching us I [00:31:00] am so much more. And I want to give it to you. I want to give you more. Just come to me. Our pastor refers to it is that you and I walk in oceans of grace. We just don’t accept it.

Kelly: Yes our life should be a receiving life. There’s so much being poured out from the Lord that he wants to give us if we would just take a moment, a pause, a breath and open our hearts to receive all that he wants to pour into us.

kirsten: Yes.

Kelly: And Kirsten, your story is just a beautiful reminder and picture of how that can look in a life that is broken. God brought beauty out of this place. He went before you, he met every need in the most impossible circumstances and he restored a marriage. He rebuilt, he gave you a new marriage, a deeper, better marriage than you’d ever had before this happened and he restored you out of [00:32:00] a place of woundedness, deep wounds that had never been processed. He restored you. That’s so beautiful. It’s such a story of hope.

Would you tell us now how people can get in touch with you and something about some of the resources that you have available on your website?

kirsten: Yes. First of all. You can reach me on my website, which is my name, Kirsten D Samuel.com. Right on the front page, there’s a free session. It’s a big blue button that says, let’s talk and it’s a 30 minute session where I will listen to you and together we will learn to breathe and together we will map a plan forward for you. There’s nothing anyone can tell me that’s going to shock me. Nothing.

So that’s the first thing anyone can go there. Any woman can go there. Secondly, I do have a download that deals specifically if you’ve [00:33:00] just discovered that your husband or your significant other is looking at pornography. Kelly will have the link that she can put in her notes,

When you’re recovering from some sort of betrayal trauma, you have to identify what the lies are and replace them with truth. And we’re going to replace them with God’s truth. So we have to look at the lie. And one of the lies, believe it or not, Kelly, is you have to forgive and forget.

That’s the lie is forgetting. Because yes, God tells us that we need to forgive as we have been forgiven, but that forgiveness is a moment by moment, day by day, it’s allowing God to come in and restore your heart, which is what I had to do. And realizing that forgiveness isn’t for him, it’s for me because the forgiveness as Steve Arterburn says, is it unhooks me from the problem.

It helps me separate him from the problem, the wound. And me from having to be trapped by that wound again, and again, and because then I can start allowing the [00:34:00] Lord to do the work he needs to do in my life. But forgetting is like saying, I’m going to slap him on the wrist and say, just don’t do that anymore.

No, there’s consequences when I know there’s consequences when we sin, I remind people all the time that Jesus forgave the thief on the cross, but he didn’t take him off the cross. He was restored and he was given eternal life. He says, today you will be with me, but he didn’t take him off the cross because there were some very real things that he had done.

So as a result of discovering the pornography, there were things that Dave and I had to go through. There were changes that my husband had to make for me to recover from suicidal depression, PTSD, and an anxiety disorder.. There were changes in my life that I had to make to become healthy. Those are the consequences. And if we say just forgive and forget and move on, we deny what God is able to do to restore.

Kelly: . Yeah. So much wisdom today, Kirsten, thank you for opening up your story. It was [00:35:00] truly inspirational because of the ways God worked and met you in that pain. We always have hope we are never alone and that’s what we can walk away with today. So I will include all those links in the show notes for our listeners. Thank you so much, Kirsten, for all that you do and for being with us today.

kirsten: Thank you, Kelly. And to God be the glory. Amen.

Thanks for listening to the Unshakable Hope Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe and leave a review. To continue the conversation and for free resources, be sure to visit me at kellyhall. org. Thanks so much.