78: Lisa Goldberg | Marriage Ministry After Infidelity

Lisa Goldberg

Lisa Goldberg is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Side By Side Ministry.

She and her husband, Steve, created Side By Side after they experienced a crisis in their marriage and felt God calling them to boldly share their story.

For the last five years, they have been ministering to hurting couples and have seen God do some miraculous works in seemingly hopeless situations.

Lisa is passionate about sharing how God transformed their lives, so that others may be inspired and encouraged to allow God to lead them to a God-centered, thriving life and marriage.

Lisa Goldberg joins me to chat about her journey from a marriage of hurt and deception to hope and redemption. We talk about the hardest part of fighting for her marriage after discovering her husband’s infidelity, how God had been softening her heart long before the discovery and the way they use their experience to encourage other couples through Stay Side by Side Ministry.

Questions Lisa and I Discussed:

  1. (5:07) How did you meet your husband Steve and what was marriage like in the early years?
  2. (8:39) Eventually, you discovered your husband was having an affair. Will you share about that discovery and what life looked like in the months following?
  3. (20:01) Did your husband immediately agree to go to counseling? Was it easy for him to walk away from his mistress? How was that process for him?
  4. (23:23) What would you say is the hardest aspect of the journey of choosing to fight for your marriage after infidelity?
  5. (25:46) Tell us a little about how Steve ended up coming to know Jesus?
  6. (27:31) Your experience led to Stay Side by Side ministry, because you desire for all marriages to be God-centered and thriving.
  7. (30:12) What do you do as a couple to protect your marriage now?

Quotes to Remember:

“When we decided to unite, it was like we’re not going to do what all those other people did. And so we had to kind of create this wall around us..and I would say I was more the wall builder than my husband was out of this just protective quality of not wanting to make the mistakes that they did or have outside influence that we felt would stop us from heading in this beautiful direction that we thought we were headed, which was all based on the foundation of human love and infatuation.”

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. I think a lot of lean not on your own understanding has to do with that emotional quality. It’s not a bad thing to feel things, but what we do is we take those feelings and we create these actions that end up being extraordinarily unhealthy for a relationship.  That’s why we have to look to the Lord for that clear plumb line, because our emotions are wackadoodle all over the place.”

“Then you all of a sudden realize that the last year and a half of your life, there was this whole other world being experienced by your spouse, and it’s the most debilitating, painful experience the deepest kind grief I had ever experienced.”

“I was almost thankful that I knew so clearly that God was telling me to fight for my marriage… If I didn’t have that deep clarity I couldn’t see the future like even with the clarity. I believed that God was real. I knew the Holy Spirit was living in me, but the darkness of the deception and the truth of all of it was so hard to handle that I couldn’t see.”

“God had changed me…the old me had gone and the new me was rising up with Jesus, and so you couldn’t ignore it.”

“One of the worst things that happens in affairs is that it’s not treated like the addiction that it is…. You are addicted to this fantasy world that you have got to make a clean break of and so you have to view it in the same way that you might view being addicted to a narcotic or something.”

“We set boundaries in multiple areas of our life. And I want to be clear that we set the boundaries not because we don’t trust each other, but because we don’t trust the enemy that we’re fighting against. We’re not fighting against flesh and blood, we’re fighting against the forces of evil.”

“As soon as we start to think that somehow we are above a sin, that is right where the enemy wants us to be.”

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