A Faith Choice

Leslie: Everybody knows what it’s like to face disappointment. So we’re all in pretty desperate need to know what God’s Word says about dealing with disappointment in a godly way. You have some friends to help by means of a new podcast from Revive Our Hearts.

The podcast is called Women of the Bible, and the first season of six episodes will show you the way Elizabeth dealt with disappointment. Here’s some of what you’ll hear.

Erin Davis: What we see in Elizabeth is that Elizabeth had a lifetime of "yeses." She was from this ministry family. She could have walked away from that at any point. She was married to a man in ministry. She could have walked away from that. She could have walked away from the marriage. There was no way for her to know if she was the problem or if he was the problem. She could have tried to figure that out in another way. And there's this situation where he's been struck mute. She could have assumed that was due to his sin . . . he had been in the temple.

Alejandra Slemin: Maybe he doesn't have a job any more.

Erin: She could have felt the need to walk away. But we just see her continuing to say "yes." And when we fast forward in her story. She does have John—spoiler alert. And let's be honest, John's a little weird.

This longed for child, we don't know how long she got to parent him. 

Alejandra: God know she only needed one.

Erin: But we see this legacy of "yes" in Elizabeth, despite a lifetime of disappointment.

Leslie: Subscribe to the Women of the Bible podcast today so you don’t miss a single episode! Just go to ReviveOurHearts.com/Elizabeth.

One of our guests on Revive Our Hearts also knows what it’s like to deal with disappointment. Bill Rose always wanted to be a baseball player.

Bill Rose: My hero growing up was a guy named Bobby Richardson, who was second baseman on the Yankees . . .

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Oh yes, right . . .

Bill: . . . and I really wanted to play second base for the Yankees.

Leslie: Fast forward a few decades. Bill finally met his hero, Bobby Richardson. By this time, Bill was part owner of the New York Yankees. He was a restaurant owner with a cocaine addiction, separated from his family, and unfaithful to his wife.

That meeting with his childhood hero was going to have a big effect on him. This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for Wednesday, March 6, 2019.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been talking this week with Bill and Vicki Rose. It's been a fascinating but bleak story so far. Vicki was looking to fashion, parties, and marriage to satisfy her. Bill was looking to business success, drugs, and extra-marital relationships. If you missed any of the program so far, you can hear them at ReviveOurHearts.com. Today we'll hear how this hurting couple found help. Let's pick the conversation back up.

Vicki Rose: I didn't realize I was really sick, in a sense, yet. I knew Billy really had a problem, and I thought that was the problem. I thought if he just stopped using drugs, everything would be fine. But really, it was just a symptom—in so many ways—of the problem. It was a problem . . . it was also a symptom of the problem.

Nancy: You told him he needed to leave. How did you think you were going to manage financially? Was that a scary thing for you?

Vicki: It was a very scary thing for me. Because of not knowing how I was going to financially provide, we got lawyers involved, so that I would have some guarantee that Billy would start paying the rent, child support, things like that. But my first inclination was that we were going to separate and that maybe Billy would see how serious the situation was and get help right away and get off drugs.

Nancy: You ended up being separated five-and-a-half years. But in the first year or so of that journey, you ended up coming to faith in Christ. The Lord had been preparing your heart; He'd been letting you see all the emptiness and the fact that marriage and kids and stuff couldn't fill that emptiness.

Vicki: Right.

Nancy: Unpack that journey for us, through which you came to a personal relationship with Christ.

Vicki: Well, a year-and-a-half after we had separated, I had gone back to work. I was actually working at R. H. Macy and Company as a corporate buyer, which involved travel to the Far East. I got back from a trip, having been away for two weeks. The children had been with a babysitter. By now they were three and five-and-a-half.

There was an invitation on the front hall table that, when I opened it read: "Mrs. Arthur S. DeMoss invites you to dinner to meet and hear Donald Hodel, Secretary of the Interior, and his wife, Barbara, share about Christianity in the world today."

Nancy: Let me just say, Mrs. Arthur S. DeMoss is my mother—the other Nancy DeMoss. She's a widow, and at that time continued for a number of years in a ministry that she and my dad had started together years earlier—holding outreach dinner parties to reach out to business and professional people.

They'd bring in a speaker and have them share their testimony and invite people to receive Christ. They had done this for years in the Philadelphia area, where I grew up. When my dad died, my mom—who loved New York City—started that outreach ministry in New York City. She didn't live there, but she would go up there for these dinners. This was one of many events that she hosted, to reach out to New Yorkers with the gospel.

How did you get that invitation?

Vicki: A babysitter that had worked for us had actually been a waitress at our restaurant, The Sporting Club. She had come and spent a summer with us to be a babysitter for the summer. Then, after she left us, she went to work at the ministry that your mom had started called The DeMoss House. She sent me an invitation to this dinner that your mom hosted.

In the lower left-hand corner of that invitation it said "Black Tie." I was a single mom; I didn't do much but go to work every day and come home (loved to be home with my children at night). So this was an invitation to get dressed up, go out, and I accepted.

The topic was not really what drew me necessarily, but I thought, I'll go. Actually, I had received an invitation prior to that and accepted, and then the night of the party, I forgot to go. The woman who had invited me, Debbie, had called at about seven-thirty and said, "Are you coming?"

I was literally in my pajamas, the kids were in theirs, and I had totally forgotten to go. And so, when the second invitation came . . .

Nancy: The Lord was pursuing you!

Vicki: Yes. When the second invitation came, I thought, I'm going to go to this one. Debbie invited me . . . I want to go, so I went.

Nancy: Did you go by yourself?

Vicki: I went all by myself. There were 900 people who accepted that invitation. It was at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in November 1987. I heard the Hodels share their life story, really, about growing up in church, but it was more of a social event for them. Then a crisis in their lives led them to a personal relationship with God through His Son Jesus Christ.

The crisis in their lives had to do with addiction, and a lot of what they said I could completely relate to—having the same issues in my life and in my marriage and in my separation from Billy. Everything they said made perfect sense, and it was almost like a light bulb went on.

They shared something that, even though I had grown up in the church from the age of ten on, I had never heard that God loved me and had a plan for my life. But I was separated from God by what the Bible calls "sin," and that Jesus Christ is God's only provision for the sin in my life, and man's sin. And if individually, each of us, if we receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, God will forgive all of our sins and give us the gift of eternal life.

In other words, when I die, I will spend all of eternity with God in Heaven. They shared that, during the course of their talk, that they had learned that when this crisis in their life came. At the end of their talk they said, "We would like to give all of you an opportunity to do what we did and pray and ask Jesus Christ to be Lord and Savior of your life."

So that night, at that dinner, seated in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, I bowed my head and asked Jesus Christ to take over my life. It just seemed so natural. There weren't lightning bolts or anything, but when I walked out of the dinner that night and went to get my coat, I remember thinking, Something is really different.

We were invited that night, at that dinner, to a Bible study during the week at the DeMoss House. I felt like this huge magnet was drawing me there. I couldn't wait to get there. As I went each Wednesday night to Bible study at the DeMoss House, I started to learn that the Bible is the truth, that every word of it was written and inspired by God, that Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

It all started to fill the emptiness in my heart. It was as if I finally found what I had been looking for. I finally came to a resting place. Everything I was hearing brought peace to my heart that had been so tumultuous: How was I going to raise my children? How was I going to support my children? How was I going to on with the rest of my life without the man I loved but who was checked out of our relationship completely? (At this point we had been separated a year-and-a-half.)

Nancy: So did you quickly go tell Bill about this? Did you wait awhile? Bill, when do you remember finding out that Vicki was now into this Christian thing?

Bill: Well, the first thing was, I was in the apartment with the kids, taking care of them, and watching the Yankees game. The kids were asleep and Vicki walked in. Something bad happened in the Yankees game and, I don't know which curse word I used, but I used one of them. She looked at me and said, "We don't use that kind of language in this house."

I was like, "What are you talking about?" So, that was a little strange.

Vicki: And then I remember sitting you down on the couch and reading through a little booklet called "The Four Spirituals Laws."

Bill: Yeah, that went over big.

Vicki: Not exactly.

Bill: You know what I thought? I thought it was a cult, a fad, and that it would just go away. She would get over it. I was certainly hoping that was the case!

Vicki: When I first came to know the Lord and I started going to Bible study, there was a weekend seminar on singles and dating as a Christian. I thought, Well, great! Here I am as a new Christian, and I'm single. So I went to this seminar, and at the seminar I learned that, really, I was not single, because in God's eyes I was still married to Bill Rose.

I went to the counselor by myself to clarify, after the seminar was over, and really discovered that in God's eyes I was, in fact, still married. I discovered that dating would not be appropriate at all; that I had the choice to walk God's way or my way. I was thirty-five years old when I accepted Christ, and I had spent thirty-five years of planning my life my way—having the desires and dreams, to get married, to be rich and famous . . . all of those things.

I wasn't happy. I was miserable. I had gotten to the place where I just wanted God to take over. I wanted to live my life His way, with Him in charge, not me. So I learned at this seminar that in God's eyes I was still married. So that was, immediately as a new believer. A year later we were still separated. We were separated a total of five-and-a-half years.

By year four, or three-and-a-half, I'm thinking, Maybe I should get a divorce. This isn't going anywhere. So I went and talked to two different pastors and this Christian counselor, again. All of them said I definitely had biblical permission to divorce and that it was okay. They said that given the timing, things weren't going to change, and I should go ahead and divorce.

I just didn't have a peace about that, because I had really started to read God's Word. I had started to read the Bible from cover to cover each year, and I was so in love with the Lord, and so in awe of His Word, and so wanting to try to do what it said. I understood everything that I had done that wasn't okay, but He had forgiven me.

I felt like, This is what I want to do. I want to live my life right, now, because living it wrong certainly didn't work. Living it the way God prescribes is giving me peace. Really, at that point, that was what I longed for—just peace.

Nancy: So even though these Christians counselors, pastors, said you had freedom to divorce . . .

Vicki: I did not have a peace about it, and I decided to wait. I had a couple of friends from Bible study and a prayer partner that encouraged me that way: to wait on God and wait for Billy.

Nancy: You probably have friends, as do I, who didn't wait, who took the pathway of divorce, and felt free to do that. But in your heart you just didn't feel like that was going to honor the Lord.

Vicki: I didn't feel the freedom; I didn't feel like it was going to honor God; I didn't feel like it was a faith choice—it was a Vicki choice.

Nancy: It took faith at that point, because you weren't seeing the marriage improve. There wasn't a marriage, to speak of.

Vicki: No, there was no marriage. But there was God, and God was what was most important.

Right after I came to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I started to read a little book of Bible stories to the children at breakfast, to try to calm down the morning crazies. It was a little book called Leading Little Ones to God. And one morning Douglas said, "Mommy, we should pray for Daddy to come to know Jesus."

In my head I thought, Pray for him? I'd rather kill him. But I didn't say that. Thankfully, I said, "Douglas, you're right. Let's pray for Daddy to come to know Jesus." At that point, Douglas was six years old and Courtney was three-and-a-half. So every morning at breakfast, we would pray and ask the Lord for Daddy to come to know Jesus. And every evening, when I would tuck them into bed, we'd pray the same prayer. And then I started asking my friends—everyone at Bible study—to pray for Bill Rose to come to know Jesus.

Nancy: So your kids had been praying that Bill, their dad, would come to know the Lord. Were they praying that he would come home?

Vicki: Yes. They would ask, "If Daddy comes to know Jesus, will he come home?" And I didn't know. I was learning to give completely truthful answers, so I would say, "I don't know if that's what will happen. Right now, our hope is in the Lord. He alone is our hope. We will just continue to pray for Daddy and let God work things out."

I did not want to get back together. I had a lot of fear around going back to Billy and to what our marriage had been like. In the process of praying with the children for Billy to come to know the Lord, God started to change my heart toward Billy, and I started to love him again.

Love doesn't just go away, but the feelings of love came back. I started to desire what God's best would be, and that would be for our family to be together . . . and ultimately, that was my desire. I did not want to be divorced; I did not want to be a single parent.

Single parenting is one of the most difficult jobs. I wanted us all to be together. I had seen Billy as a dad in glimpses of time, and he was special with his children. I longed for that. I longed for intimacy with him.

Bill: Vicki invited me to one of your mom's dinners, and there was some classical guitarist guy playing there, which was hardly the thing that I . . .

Nancy: Christopher Parkening?

Bill: That's exactly who it was.

Nancy: Okay, our listeners have heard enough, I think, to know that this baseball-crazed guy who's into sports, that the classical guitarist was not the speaker that you would be most drawn to.

Bill: No. I think he was actually playing his guitar at this moment. I remember getting up from the table, going to the bathroom, getting high, and leaving the dinner. It was not for me. I also remember, as the years went on while we were separated and the drugs and alcohol increased, my life was just becoming out of control.

I remember waking up on Sunday mornings, getting down on my knees, and praying to a God . . . I mean, I believed in God. I didn't know anything besides that. I was in tears. I remember just praying, "There's gotta be something else." I remember watching this certain TV evangelist, actually, on Sunday mornings.

You know, it was one of those guys that probably shouldn't have been on TV, and I think he spent some time in jail. But you know what? God uses anybody.

Nancy: Something was drawing you?

Bill: Oh yes. I wanted out of the lifestyle that I'd been living for the last five-and-a-half years. Then Vicki called me up and said, "There's a guy speaking at a baseball chapel luncheon, and you might be interested in going?"

And I said, "Oh yeah, well who is this?" Her track record now was not so good.

She said, "It's some guy named Bobby Richardson."

I don't think Vicki really knew who he was, but I do think she remembered that I had talked about him as being my hero while I was growing up, and a guy that I wanted to play like.

Nancy: Did you know he was going to be talking about his faith?

Bill: Well, it was a baseball chapel lunch, so I figured there was something going on. So I went to the luncheon and heard Bobby speak, and he was eloquent. I enjoyed listening to him. I introduced myself to him as one of the partners of the Yankees, and told him I had fashioned my baseball career after him.

He couldn't have been nicer. He actually went back with me to The Sporting Club and spent a couple of hours with me. He talked with me, prayed for me, but I still wasn't ready, but seeds were now certainly being planted in my life. Then in December 1990, Vicki invited me to a dinner at your mom's house.

It was a small Christmas dinner; it was just a number of tables. I don't even remember who the speaker was that night, but I do know that that night I prayed to receive Christ.

Nancy: The Spirit of God drew your heart, opened your eyes, gave you faith, gave you repentance. Do you remember anything special about that night, or was it just like, "This is the next step," of the journey you'd been on?

Bill: I just knew that I needed something. I guess I felt being drawn. I just started praying, "Jesus, if you can get me out of this life that I've been living, I'm a buyer—I'm ready." That was the beginning of a new journey for me.

Nancy: So he came home, and you all lived happily ever after?

Vicki: Not exactly. It was a year from when Billy prayed to receive Christ, until he came home. We went through some really difficult things in our counseling . . . some very helpful things . . . but it was hard.

Nancy: And it actually was several months of turmoil. Is that a good word for what followed?

Bill: It was. It was a slow process that year, because I was still at The Sporting Club. I wasn't ready to make a total commitment to Vicki, to get out of one lifestyle and go to the other. Because I knew once I moved back in, that was a huge step. The things that I felt were fun, I'd have to put aside and put away.

Vicki: So you prayed to receive Christ in December, and you went into rehab in February.

Bill: Yes, I knew I had to stop the drugs, but I was scared to death because I had tried so many times on my own and the withdrawal symptoms were just too much. Back then people would say, even doctors, that cocaine was not physically addicting; it was all mental.

They had no clue what they were talking about. It is so physically addictive, I can't even tell you. So I went into this rehab place, and I lasted one night. It was like boot camp, and this place just wasn't for me. You had to make your bed at like six in the morning, and they came and inspected it, and if you did something wrong you wore something around your neck.

I said, "Nah, nah, nah, this is ridiculous." So that next morning I said, "I'm out of here," and I left. I think it was that was a Thursday night. I got back home on Friday, went to my parents' house, and stayed clean that weekend. I didn't do anything, which I don't know how that happened.

I then went into another rehab that Monday. That first night I was going through just incredible withdrawal symptoms. I mean, I was scared to death. I went into my room (I had my own room), and I got down on my knees, and I just started to pray. I said, "You know, Lord, I need help. I'm desperate here."

I just felt, in a second, all these withdrawal symptoms were just lifted away. I just felt like this whole weight had been lifted off of me, and I felt terrific. I was really excited. I got off my knees after this whole episode occurred, and really had no desire anymore to do coke—right then and there.

I knocked on the door of the counselor on that floor and I said, "I'm good. I can go home!"

And he said, "Well, you may want to stick it out the week."

I stayed out the week and took part in whatever I had to take part in—talking to counselors and doing the group thing and whatever. I enjoyed it because I had no more symptoms, no more desire to do this stuff.

I got out, and we started slowly putting things back together.

Vicki: We started counseling. Billy was still living someplace else. We would go to counseling once or twice a week, and we would go to church together on Sundays.

Bill: One of the guys that we were counseling with said to me, "It's time to make a decision." He put it in a little more harsh terms. "You need to make a decision. Either you're with her or you're not with her, but you can't do both."

Nancy: That's Bill Rose, describing the messiness the sin brings to our lives, and the hope that's found in Christ. Bill and Vicki Rose have been talking about the way God rescued them from lives of sin and hopelessness. They'll pick the story back up tomorrow.

Vicki writes about this story in a book called Every Reason to Leave and Why We Chose to Stay Together. You can order a copy for yourself for a friend from our online store at ReviveOurHearts.com. And I hope you’ll also watch the video our team made with Bill and Vicki, telling their dramatic story. Again, that’s at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Did you know you can also search ReviveOurHearts.com by topic to find free digital resources? For example, if you type the word "marriage" into the search box, you’ll find a variety of radio programs, blogs, and videos on the subject. We’re able to offer all this to you at no cost thanks in large part to the generosity of our Monthly Partner team. This is a group of listeners, people like you, who have been blessed by this ministry and who have committed to supporting the ministry with a gift of $30 or more every month. Their generosity helps us continue speaking to women like Vicki.

Vicki: One of the great tools for me has been Revive Our Hearts, to embrace my womanhood, to embrace the things that I need to do to walk obediently to the Lord as a wife. I have learned so much listening to Revive Our Hearts. I have listened, Nancy, to your teaching when you have other married couples on, when you have on women sharing about their marriage.

This is where I have been a student, and this is what has been so very helpful to me.

Nancy: When you become a Monthly Partner, you’ll be helping women like Vicki hear biblical truth that they desperately needed at a really difficult time in her marriage. As a Monthly Partner, you’ll receive regular communication from the ministry. That includes a monthly devotional booklet we've prepared just for our partners called Daily Reflections. And you can attend one Revive Our Hearts conference per year—the registration fee will be on us.

Here in March we’re asking the Lord to raise up many new Monthly Partners. And when you sign up as a new partner this month, you’ll get an amazing welcome package. It includes all the messages from the True Woman '18 conference on CD. Plus the True Woman Manifesto booklet with a 30-day challenge and a set of Seeking Him Scripture Memory Cards, and two of my latest books, Adorned and Lies Women Believe.

I hope you’ll get all the details at ReviveOurHearts.com. I hope you'll pray about whether the Lord would have you join the Monthly Partner team. Again, you can sign up or get more details at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Today, we heard how Bill and Vicki both came to know Jesus. But their lives were still very, very messy. Tomorrow we'll hear how Vicki learned to love her husband in the day-to-day challenges of real life. If you know someone in a struggling marriage, let me encourage you to invite them to listen to this week's series with Bill and Vicki Rose. Please be sure to join us tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is reminding you of the hope you can find in Jesus. It's an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.