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Society & Culture:Relationships
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 1) - Chris and Cindy Beall
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 1) - Chris and Cindy Beall
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 2) - Chris and Cindy Beall
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 3) - Chris and Cindy Beall
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Desperate for Freedom
Guest: Chris & Cindy Beall
From the series: Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Day 1 of 3)
Bob: Chris Beall had a secret and it came to a point where he realized as long as he kept his secret a secret—it was affecting his marriage and his spiritual life.
Chris: All the things that God wanted to do in my life wouldn’t happen until I had the courage to bring what was in the dark into the light. There’s something about bringing it into the light—confessing it to another person and praying for each other—that brings an exposure and a healing. The moment that I took that step was the beginning of radical healing in my own heart.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, August 28th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll learn about Chris Beall’s secret today—and how it almost destroyed his marriage. Stay with us.
1:00
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us.
We have a couple with us today who—some of our listeners will recognize them because their story. They’ve shared it on FamilyLife Today before. It’s been shared as a part of The Stepping Up® Video Series. It’s a great story of beauty coming from ashes.
Dennis: It is indeed. We have the author of the book Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New - Cindy Beall. Cindy, welcome back to the broadcast.
Cindy: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dennis: And her husband, Chris—welcome back to you as well.
Chris: We are excited. We love you guys.
Dennis: The Beall’s have been married since 1993. They have three teenage sons and their story is one of the classics on FamilyLife Today in terms of God showing up and truly not only redeeming but reconciling their marriage.
Bob: If our listeners would like to hear the complete story of what brought your marriage to the brink,
2:00
they can go to our website—FamilyLifeToday.com—and listen to the interviews we’ve done with you. But Chris, it’s rooted in you growing up with the exposure to pornography that lead you to some dark places.
Chris: Right. Eight years old I saw the first pornographic image—and for the next twenty years I was a prisoner—in one form or another—to the struggle. In 2002 we were invited to be a part of Life Church in Oklahoma City and we came. At that moment I really feel like there was kind of a do-over because I had an enormous amount of baggage and an enormous amount of lifestyle moral failures. Honestly, multiple affairs prior to us moving to Oklahoma City.
Dennis: That weren’t really known to anyone.
Chris: Correct. It was total double life. Cindy knew something wasn’t right in our marriage, didn’t know exactly what that meant or what it looked like.
3:00
I would say that I was a master deceiver—of myself and other people—to keep those worlds separate—but it was when we came to Life Church that it really seemed like, “Okay, God. We thought we were coming to be the next worship leader at this church”
—and the reality was God brought us there to heal us. That starts with the exposure of what the sin was.
Bob: Cindy, for you that exposure came out of the blue one morning when your husband came home from work unexpectedly and said, “We need to talk.” You had no idea was coming.
Cindy: I had no idea. As he began to unfold the things he just shared with you—the pornography addiction, the infidelity—as he began to say all those things, things just started happening in my mind. Of course, instant desperation, despair, everything terrible you can imagine that you could think, I thought it—but at the same time was—”Oh, it’s making sense now.”
4:00
Because it wasn’t our entire nine years of marriage leading up to this point—it was about a two and one half year period of really intense difficulty—so it was a total shock. I would never have imagined that he would have gone this far—this deep—into such a wretched place.
Dennis: You knew at that point that something was missing in your marriage. You just couldn’t say, “This is it”—but all of a sudden it was disclosed.
Cindy: Absolutely.
Chris: Correct.
Cindy: For me, I remembered during that two and a half year period I felt very alone where we were in our church. My husband was the worship pastor, the youth pastor and so I really—people looked to me—so who am I going to talk to? I just—it was really a lonely place for me so I became very well acquainted with my heavenly Father. He became everything to me. I remember just praying, “God, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.” I just remember Him saying, “Trust me. Trust me.”
5:00
So, I believed that had we not come to Oklahoma, been a part of Life Church—under Craig and Emily Groshell—that we might not have survived this.
Chris: I remember seeing a book that was always next to Cindy’s chair during her quiet times in the mornings during those two and a half years that I was living this double life. It was the Power of a Praying Wife.
Dennis: Yes.
Bob: Yes.
Chris: I will tell you, looking back, my wife was praying God’s word over my life in the period that I was the most prodigal that I had ever been. I know we’re going to get to this, but I truly believe where we are today—there are so many things how the church...
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