AMAZING STORY
A Husband's Love Overcomes a Wayward Wife
By Randy Rudder
The 700 Club
CBN.com -When Kasey Van Norman was 13, her parents divorced. The split had a permanent effect on Kasey. “As a child, not having my father present, there was always that question of ‘Why? Why was I not enough?’” she says. “So at 13, 14, 15, I really wrestled with this feeling of insecurity and unworthiness.”
Those feelings would only get worse.
Kasey became a Christian and at 15 attended a conference where she made a promise to God to save herself for marriage. A few months later, she was raped by an older man. “What I really felt at that moment, was that I had kept my promise, but God had not kept his, and He had failed me,” Kasey says. “So I just decided if that’s what He was going to do to me, then watch what I was about to do to Him.”
Soon, Kasey was taking drugs, and having sex. She also started cutting and became bulimic. “I used every Band-Aid solution you could think of: sex, alcohol, drugs, popularity,” she says.
After years of struggling Kasey recommitted her life to Christ and started turning her life around. She met and married Justin and had two children, but she never learned to accept God’s gift of love. “I wanted to work for Him. I wanted to earn that love,” she says. “As long as I could stay busy in the things of God, then everybody would think I was of God.”
As much as she tried, she couldn’t get rid of the feelings of insecurity and unworthiness, and soon returned to old habits. “During the day I would live, what looked to be this very righteous, moral life, and at night I would be a completely different person, cutting my arm, just to experience one moment of power, or sticking my finger down my throat.”
Justin admits he didn’t know what was happening to his wife. “I was busy providing for our family, and trying to earn a good living,” he says. “We were teaching Sunday school and things at church. And I basically stopped being romantic with Kasey. I stopped taking her out on dates.”
But a fellow church member was ready to give Kasey all the attention she wanted. “Another man began to pursue me, and began to notice things that Justin didn’t seem to notice anymore, and I responded,” Kasey admits.
It was the beginning of a three-year long affair. Eventually Justin uncovered it while going through some phone records. Though it was hard, Justin eventually forgave his wife. “In that moment, it all became clear to me that I was as much at fault in letting the guard down and the boundaries down that we should have had in our marriage but didn’t.”
But Kasey was still overcome with guilt. “I was so disgusted with myself and I really believed that my family and my husband would be better off without me,” she says. “So I popped a bottle of Xanex and a big bottle of alcohol and prayed to end it.”
At that moment, a close friend happened to be out running errands.
“God put it on my friend’s heart to specifically, and urgently, get to Kasey Van Norman’s house. The house was unlocked. I was upstairs passed out and I knew that if I had stayed that way any amount longer, longer, my heart would have stopped,” Kasey says. “God used her as a vessel to save my life.”
As she recovered physically and emotionally, Justin was there by her side.
Kasey says his response helped her to finally understand God’s love. “I had been a Christian all this time, but I didn’t fully grasp grace,” she recalls. “And for him to look at me and say, ‘Kasey, I don’t know how to not love you’--this was the spirit of God in him, offering me forgiveness and grace, so that I would experience grace. And now I get to go and tell everyone this story, that God is saying these words to you, which is ‘I don’t know how to not love you.’”
Kasey says she stopped cutting and was also freed from her struggle with bulimia. She and Justin then began a long period of restoring their marriage.
“We began to weed out certain relationships, place higher boundaries around our marriage, and to communicate,” Kasey says.
Justin says their marriage is better than ever: “We share our hearts more than we ever did before. Intimacy is stronger now than it ever was.”
Kasey adds, “When you look at a marriage, it is the one thing on planet earth that God has given us to look at and say ‘This is how I love my church.’”
The couple now works at a ranch in Texas that houses women who have been saved from sex trafficking. Kasey is also a published author of the book, Named By God, and is a featured speaker at women’s conferences. She shares her story so that others might experience the gift of God’s love. “He is in control of every moment. He is the author of our lives,” she says. “And when you begin to experience Him on that level, everything changes. It is so empowering, it sets us free to truly live.”
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