AMAZING STORY
David & Lisa King: A Marriage Betrayal
By Gorman Woodfin
The 700 Club
CBN.com-David and Lisa King have been married for over 25 years. The Christian couple met when they were in college. He was 20. She was 19.
David remembers those days. “When we first got married, I really was just excited because I realized, ‘Man, I got a good wife.’”
“He stole my heart, he did.” Lisa says, “And our marriage was a storybook marriage.”
But Lisa had one fear. “As a young girl I used to journal all the time and I just said, ‘Whenever I get married, I don’t want my husband to cheat on me.’ I just never thought that it would ever happen to me.”
Five years into their storybook marriage, David ran into a woman he once knew. He had a one night stand. “We struck up a conversation. Next thing you know, we’re having a meal together, having some drinks, one thing led to another. My inhibition is down, and someone begins to stroke your ego…”
It was late and David didn’t call home. “I had a 6th sense that he was probably with another woman. Now, he had never given me any indication that he would ever be unfaithful to me. So when he finally did come home, I asked, and he denied it.”
David kept his one night stand a secret until he knew he couldn’t keep it from her any longer. He decided to come clean. When he told Lisa, she was devastated. “I just couldn’t process everything that was going on. It seems to me that my world just shut down. To me it just wasn’t –life wasn’t even worth living. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was horrible.”
When David saw what his betrayal had done to Lisa, he wanted to die. “I remember going in the basement and lying on the concrete floor in the basement and just crying. And just thinking, ‘God, how could I have been so stupid?’ and literally saying, ‘Lord, you know, just take me now, Lord.’ Just—really feeling like, ‘Why even live?’
On that cold concrete floor he began to pray. “’Oh God, how could I have done this? How could I have sinned against You? How could I have sinned against my wife? Lord, please forgive me. Cleanse me. Restore a right mind and give me a right heart. Give me a pure heart. I want to be in relationship with You again. Then God, help my wife to forgive me. Help her to be made whole.’ I was hurting because she was hurting.”
“I had to learn to trust him again. I did not – I was almost getting the point of paranoia. When he would leave the house, I was thinking, ‘Is he going to go back to that woman? Are they hooking up?’ You know, my mind just went everywhere.”
David fought hard to win back his wife’s heart. “I made myself very transparent. I made it where she didn’t have to wonder where I was going to be at. She knew where I was going to be at all times. I began to carry a pager in those days and I was like, ‘Anytime you need to reach me, you call me and I’ll call you back.’”
Ultimately through prayer and God’s help, their relationship and love for each other were restored. Lisa says, “The love that I thought would never come back, it’s come back and even greater. He knows my love language and he accommodates me with that. And my love language is acts of service. And then he just tells me all the time how beautiful I am.”
“I remember some years back we had gone on one of our anniversary trips. David recalls, “And I remember thinking, ‘This is what it felt like before everything happened.’ And we were like two kids again - two newlyweds.”
It’s been 20 years since his infidelity and David has advice for young couples on how to avoid what he and Lisa went through. “I think that when you allow yourself to become too familiar, or too comfortable in a setting with someone who is not your spouse, then you set yourself up for failure.”
David and Lisa say their marriage has never been better. It is clear to David, Who made it better. “I would say God is a restorer. God is a healer. He healed our marriage and restored our relationship with one another and with Him.”
Lisa concludes, “God is faithful because even through all the hard times that I’ve gone through in our marriage, He just continued to show Himself faithful.”
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