Bad things happen to good people.
It is one of the oldest and most uncomfortable truths of the human experience, and one of the hardest to reconcile with a faith that promises a good God.
You can go to church, pray without ceasing, be faithful in the small things and the large. And still, heartbreak or disaster comes your way.
For Lysa TerKeurst, this was not a theological abstraction. It was her life.
She had built a ministry on encouraging women to trust God with their everyday lives. She had written books, spoken to thousands, and watched Proverbs 31 Ministries grow from a small Bible study into a worldwide organisation that reached millions. By every visible measure, her faith had “worked.”
Then her personal life fell apart.
A Foundation Built Through Fire
Her story did not begin in a place of comfort.
TeKeurst’s early years were marked by instability and pain, circumstances that could have hardened her heart long before she ever stepped into ministry.
Lysa TeKeurst smiles in a photoBut it was during her college years at Furman University that her faith was renewed, not inherited, but chosen.
That renewal became the bedrock she would later stand on when everything else shifted beneath her feet.
She went on to co-found Proverbs 31 Ministries, named for the biblical passage about a woman of strength and dignity. Under her leadership, it grew into a global Christian organisation for women, offering devotionals, Bible studies, and resources that pointed ordinary women toward an extraordinary God.
Along the way, she became a multiple New York Times bestselling author. Books like Uninvited, It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way, and Forgiving What You Can’t Forget found their way into the hands and hearts of readers who felt seen, perhaps for the first time, in their disappointments.
But success, she would learn, is not the same as safety.
When the Bottom Falls Out
In 2017, TerKeurst was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In the same season, her marriage of more than twenty-five years began to collapse under the weight of her former husband’s infidelity and substance abuse.
The two crises, one attacking her body, the other her heart, converged in a way that would have silenced many pe
ople.
She has been candid that she questioned God. Not politely. Not theologically. She questioned Him the way the psalmists did, raw, unfiltered, and desperate for answers.
Why was her life unfolding this way? Why, after decades of faithfulness, was she facing a betrayal she could not control and a disease she could not reason her way out of?
The divorce was finalised in 2020. Whatever healing came afterwards did not come quickly, and it did not come cheaply.
The Choice Between Control and Stewardship
What makes TerKeurst’s story remarkable is not that she suffered. Suffering is common to all.
What makes it remarkable is what she chose to do with it.
She refused to hide. She did not retreat into a polished public persona while privately unravelling. Instead, she chose radical honesty, telling her readers not just that she was struggling, but how</em>. She wrote openly about grief, about the loneliness of a marriage that looked fine from the outside, about the exhausting work of forgiveness when the wound keeps reopening.
Along the way, she learned to distinguish between two things that often look identical but are spiritually opposite: anxious control and spiritual stewardship
Anxious control insists on managing outcomes, forcing closure, and gripping what cannot be held. Spiritual stewardship releases what was never ours to carry and asks a different question: What is mine to do today, with what God has placed in my hands?
That distinction, hard-won through tears and prayer, became a lifeline.
Turning Pain Into a Place of Refuge
Out of that long season of healing came something new.
TerKeurst helped establish Haven Place, a retreat centre created to offer emotional and spiritual restoration to others who are walking through their own valleys.
The vision was simple and profound: give people a place where they can stop pretending, lay down their burdens, and encounter the God who meets them in the middle of their pain rather than only on the other side of it.
Her life’s work since has carried a single thread: that God does not waste pain. Not because every wound has a tidy explanation, and not because suffering is somehow good in itself, but because God is present in it, and He is capable of bringing something redemptive out of what was meant for harm.
What Her Story Teaches Us
There is a version of the Christian life that promises: follow God, and the hard things will be kept away from
you.
Lysa TerKeurst’s story exposes that as a false gospel.
The truer promise is this: God will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5). Not that the storm won’t come, but that He will be in the boat. Not that the marriage will always survive or the diagnosis will always be reversed, but that His presence will hold you when nothing else does.
Her life stands as a testament to something Scripture says plainly: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say all things are good.
It says God works, patiently, faithfully, redemptively, bringing good out of what was never His desire for you.
That is the difference between a faith built on circumstances and a faith built on the character of God. Circumstances shift. They disappoint. They break. But God’s character does not.
We can learn to bring everything to God. The disappointments, questions, unanswered prayers, because He knows the beginning from the end.
He sees the full story when we can only see the current chapter. And He has already assured us, in words that have carried believers through every kind of valley: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Lysa TerKeurst did not get a pain-free life. She got something better: a God who stayed.
And if you are walking through your own unthinkable season. This is the invitation her story extends to you. Not to pretend the pain away, but to bring it to the One who does not waste it.
