“What advice do you have for a woman whose husband has stepped away from the church and no longer spiritually leads the family?” asked an attendee at a Living Proof Live event held by author and Bible teacher Beth Moore.
“My answer to this is gonna sound so hyper-spiritual,” Moore replied, adding that nevertheless, “It’s the truth, it’s the only answer I’ve got, and that is just that my stability has been in Jesus, and it is the only way I’ve been able to stay stable.”
“I have had quite the journey with my husband, who I love very, very much,” Moore shared with the crowd. “I’ve been married this coming fall for 45 years, 45 miraculous years. And the reason why Keith and I have made it is because we’ve each been married to five different people, truly…we didn’t ever have to divorce and remarry because we kept being different than we were.”
Beth Moore: ‘Hold Tight to Jesus’
Beth Moore is an author, speaker and Bible teacher and the founder and visionary of Living Proof Ministries. She has written numerous bestselling books and Bible studies, including her memoir, “All My Knotted Up Life.” In that memoir, Moore describes difficulties she has faced in her marriage to Keith Moore, including dealing with severe trauma that he suffered from an event that happened to him as a child.
RELATED: Beth Moore: What Will ‘Make or Break’ Your Bible Teaching
During a Q&A session at the Living Proof Live event, Moore alluded to particulars of her marital struggles. “He’s had quite a journey and so have I,” she said. “My husband has had to live with bipolar and very serious, serious PTSD that he earned through the worst tragedy, the worst kind of tragedy, a fire when he was a little boy with his brother.”
“I just want you to know, I came in with equal junk,” Moore said. “Baggage attracts baggage…so I literally picked the guy on my campus that I thought was as—he was so cute that I could hardly bear it and was probably as messed up as I was. And then we made it together. So you can imagine what our lives were like.”
But even though Moore says that her marriage has survived only by the grace of God, she also told attendees that she didn’t “know what [my] ministry would look like without this exact marriage…I think about the arrogance I would have had.” Moore does not believe that God would have carried out the same work through her had she been married to a man similar to her friends’ husbands.
“I’d be going all over the place, me and my husband, doing marriage seminars,” she joked. “If you ever see that I’m doing a marriage seminar, come get me.”
“[Keith and I] just keep falling back in love,” Moore continued. “And the last time I really didn’t want to. I was like, I’m not doing that again. But I did, and…hold tight to Jesus and try to stay off the roller coaster.”
