The Power of Healing and Honesty

The Cut Chapter: Doug and Rochelle's Story of God's Redeeming Love

Every book I work on, I have what I call a “cut” file. As a book progresses, editing can call for making a sometimes painful cut. Making Your Marriage a Fortress already exceeded its length, so in this case we had to cut an entire chapter. The reason I was asked to cut this one wasn’t the quality; it was the subject matter. I initially thought it might even be the opening chapter, as it’s a great example of a man who had to straighten out his life so that he could be there for his family just when they needed him most—preparing for the storm before the storm hits (an underlying theme in the book). But what brought caution to some editors is that this man’s struggle was a sexual addiction. So many women have accepted betraying husbands back, only to be betrayed again, that celebrating God’s grace in this chapter was seen as potentially troublesome.

Doug took recovery seriously and his demonstrated actions—not just tears—revealed genuine repentance. But I, too, have heard enough stories of men whose wives took them back only to be betrayed again that I understood the concerns and cautions and agreed not to include this chapter in the book (a few paragraphs made it into a later chapter).

But this is where Substack is a great place for people to get to read “behind the scenes.” Perhaps Doug’s story is an outlier—so unusual that it’s not wise to share it as the norm. Perhaps Rochelle’s desire to keep her marriage together for the sake of the children has been the same desire that has hurt as many children as it has helped once the betrayal continues. Perhaps. But in this case, I do want to celebrate with key supporters of this Substack column the power of God’s grace to bring a couple out of devastation and ruin to a place of support, love, and renewed intimacy.

And I still think it’s a great story that honors the power of God’s grace to forgive, heal and redeem. So, here you go. Thank you for being one of the paying supporters of this column. I appreciate it very much.

---

Doug and Rochelle:

The Power of Healing and Honesty 

Doug and Rochelle’s fourteen-year-old daughter had a tender bump under her knee. She ran cross and country and track, and doctors kept telling Rochelle the bump wasn’t anything to worry about. “She probably just has Osgood-Schlatter disease, which is common among runners. Have her take some time off and she’ll be back.”

Rochelle did her own research when the bump persisted so she scheduled another appointment.

“Look,” the doctor responded. “You can’t do a Web MD search and make an accurate diagnosis. We think she’ll be fine.”

Rochelle finally got another physician to order a new set of x-rays. He saw something that concerned him and asked Rochelle to bring her daughter in the next day for an MRI.

As soon as this physician reviewed the MRI, he called Rochelle again and said, “I need you to bring your daughter in as soon as she’s out of school.”

During that appointment, the doctor spoke the words that changed the course of their lives: “Your daughter has cancer. It looks like osteo sarcoma.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re probably going to have to amputate her leg to save her life.”

This diagnosis came in 2017. Had Doug and Rochelle received it just a few years earlier, they’re certain they’d be divorced right now.

There’s a reason Doug and Rochelle are still married, and that reason is the thesis of this book. Their story is a classic case of why we need to keep our marriages growing strong, as none of us can anticipate the challenges we may eventually face. An emotionally detached marriage might survive in a life climate that resembles Santa Barbara, with temperatures rarely below fifty and above 75, but can your marriage survive when the seasons change and you have to face an August heatwave in Houston or a January snowstorm in North Dakota?

You hopefully will never face the level of infidelity mentioned in this story, but consider the larger picture. What is the distance between the two of you? What’s creating that distance? And is that distance dangerous if something like a child’s medical crisis should erupt? 

A Naïve Beginning

About eighteen months prior to their daughter’s devastating diagnosis, Doug finally got “caught.” After years of Doug’s lying, Rochelle had incontrovertible proof that he had been unfaithful to her. What she didn’t know was just how unfaithful he had been and with how many people.

The two of them met in college; when they got married, Doug was 22 and Rochelle was 21. It was young love! But then the marriage began to slowly pull apart.

They didn’t know it was happening at the time, but Rochelle can look back now and see it. The growing cavern was so subtle that their movement apart was more like that of a glacier. Shortly after their wedding, Doug finished up his schooling and got a teaching job while Rochelle started working on grad school. The result? “My life was very separate from his. I was studying music, working rehearsals at night and at the opera on weekends (Rochelle sang in the chorus of the Houston Grand Opera). Doug worked during the day.”

A husband who works during the day and a wife who is gone on evenings and weekends created a slow crawl toward emotional alienation. 

Doug came into marriage with “separatist” qualities. He was watching porn before and after he met Rochelle. He never stopped watching porn, but he lied about it, telling Rochelle it wasn’t an issue for him.  Lies are mini-separations, spiritual declarations that the marriage is not really a marriage. They pull two lovers apart with a fierce force.

Rochelle admits she was naïve; she came from a small town and a conservative upbringing. She went to a private Christian high school and a private Christian college and she hadn’t dated a lot of guys. She didn’t know porn was a common struggle. If a young man she was in love with told her he didn’t look at porn, it didn’t even occur to her that he might be lying.

“Doug didn’t cuss, he didn’t talk inappropriately about women, he didn’t comment about sleazy things that might appear in movies, and he told me he didn’t struggle with lust. Why wouldn’t I believe him?”

“My lies and secrecy were a lot to carry,” Doug admits.

Doug believes, and I agree, that the biggest problem with guys in marriage isn’t lust; it’s dishonesty. With honesty, lust can be exposed, confronted, confessed of, repented of, and dealt with. Whatever the sin, lying perpetuates it. Lying provides the spiritual greenhouse that keeps lust (and other sins) flourishing.

Doug’s porn use escalated to touch. He began multiple affairs (often at the same time), ranging from one-night stands to long term relationships, with strangers or with (and this hurt Rochelle the most) close friends.

If your marriage is overly busy; if either of you has a problem with the truth; and if there’s any ongoing, unaddressed sin, it’s like your “house” is on a cliff that is getting a hundred inches of rain a year, slowly eroding the land underneath you.  This does not explain or justify Doug’s behavior; he’d be the first to say that.