The divorce itself was not the first break. It was the public break. The legal break. The visible break. The dramatic break. In my case it became even more dramatic because it involved kidnapping, separation, international courts, and a chaos that permanently altered the landscape of my childhood. But even then, what shattered in public had been cracking in private for some time.
I have come to believe that this is true of more than marriage.
It is true of families.
It is true of churches.
It is true of institutions.
It is true of businesses.
It is true of nations.
The schism we finally see is rarely the first rupture. It is the unveiling of one.
That was one of the deepest things I heard in my conversation with Mark and Jill Savage, even though they did not phrase it exactly that way. Their marital crisis, including Mark’s affair, was not the beginning of the breakdown. It was the catastrophic manifestation of a deeper, older, long-running relational disorder. Their language of the “dog and cat marriage” was vivid and memorable, but what it described was more than personality difference. It was attachment wound meeting attachment wound. It was insecurity meeting avoidance. It was neediness meeting shutdown. It was fantasy colliding with fantasy. And over time, what had once looked manageable became destructive.
That resonated with me because my own life has moved through several versions of this same basic pattern.
The first book of my trilogy centers on the shattering divorce of my parents and, later, the divorce or schism of my church. The second book, The Hardness of the Heart, moves through my own divorce, my search for theological coherence about male and female relationships, and the larger question of how two can walk together if they are not truly agreed—not only in marriage, but in churches, ministries, and businesses. The third book moves toward a second-chance marriage and a more loving, inclusive religious approach that does not pretend fracture never happened, but refuses to let fracture have the last word.
So when I listened to Mark and Jill talk, I was not hearing a niche “marriage ministry” conversation. I was hearing something much larger and more human. I was hearing a pattern I know well: the moment when what has been defended, avoided, misnamed, or spiritualized for years finally becomes undeniable.
The affair was not the whole story
Mark and Jill were refreshingly honest about this.
Mark had the more overt failure. He pursued another relationship. He had the affair. He moved out. That is the obvious moral break, and it would be easy—emotionally satisfying even—to stop the story there. Hero and villain. Betrayed and betrayer. Innocent and guilty. We always want stories to simplify themselves in that direction.
But real life rarely cooperates.
Jill was equally clear that while she did not cause the affair, she had contributed to the dysfunction in the marriage. She described herself as emotionally shut down, avoidant, critical, almost parental in tone. Mark described years of insecurity, rejection, anger, and the accumulation of false beliefs rooted in childhood trauma. He needed reassurance constantly; she experienced him as painfully needy. He experienced her reserve as distance and rejection; she experienced his pursuit as pressure and emotional chaos.
That is not a story in which wrong disappears. It is a story in which wrong sits inside a larger broken system.
And that larger system is where the phrase hardness of heart begins to matter.
The hardness of the heart is not just “sin” in the abstract
In Christian language, we often use the phrase hardness of heart as though everyone already knows what it means. It can become one more religious phrase in the tool kit: true, but vague. Yet if my own life has taught me anything, and if this interview reinforced it, it is that hardness of heart is not abstract. It has texture. It has habits. It has defenses. It has a voice.
Sometimes it sounds like anger.
Sometimes like silence.
Sometimes like sarcasm.
Sometimes like contempt.
Sometimes like independence masquerading as strength.
Sometimes like emotional need disguising itself as moral grievance.
Sometimes like fantasy—the stubborn insistence that happiness lies somewhere else, with someone else, in some other life.
In Mark’s case, hardness of heart included blame, resentment, entitlement, and the surrender to a false narrative: God is not for me, my wife does not need me, I am alone, I will make my own way. In Jill’s case, hardness of heart showed up more quietly: bucking up, shutting down, struggling to identify her own feelings, dismissing his distress rather than learning how to hear it.
Different forms. Same disease.
That is one reason I found their conversation about attachment theory so helpful. It gave ordinary language to patterns many couples live without naming. Dog and cat. Anxious and avoidant. Emotional diarrhea and emotional constipation, as Jill put it with disarming bluntness. Crude perhaps, but not inaccurate. One floods the system; the other withholds from it. Neither is secure. Neither is free. Neither can build trust without change.
And here is where their insight became more theological than many marriage books dare to be: they said we are called to become like Jesus not only in word and deed, but emotionally.
That is a serious statement.
It means emotional maturity is not peripheral to discipleship. It means the inability to regulate, name, offer, receive, and steward emotion is not just a psychological inconvenience. It is a spiritual issue. Jesus was secure. He asked for comfort in Gethsemane. He set boundaries. He did not panic. He did not manipulate. He did not shut down the truth. He did not weaponize His pain. If that is so, then emotional security is not a secular add-on to the Christian life. It is part of sanctification.
That thought alone is worth dwelling on.
The real repair began when each went to God separately
One thing stood out to me very strongly in the interview.
The turnaround did not begin when one finally out-argued the other. It did not begin with a perfect counseling framework. It did not begin with one dramatic conversation in which everything was laid bare and solved. It began, first, when each of them went to God personally.
Jill, the day after discovering the affair, begged God to tell her what to do. What she heard was not strategy, not revenge, not self-justification. She heard: I want you to love him. Not because he was lovable. He plainly was not, at least in that moment. But because that is how God had loved her.
Mark, on Easter Sunday 2012, in desperation, heard something equally direct: If you will trust me, I will take care of this. And his surrender was not first to Jill, not first to the children, not first to saving his reputation. It was to Christ.
That matters.
Because in my own experience, and in the experience of institutions as much as marriages, the real turning point often comes only when we stop trying to manage one another and begin allowing God to deal with us. That does not remove the need for conversation, apology, repair, accountability, or changed behavior. But it changes the center of gravity. The other person is no longer my god, my judge, my savior, or my project. God is.
That is where healing can begin.
Agreement is deeper than sameness
I will mention only briefly something that has been central to my own second book: Can two walk together unless they be agreed?
That question is often misunderstood. Agreement does not mean identical temperament. It does not mean one person wins. It does not mean both read from the same script or feel on the same timetable. Mark and Jill remained very different people. But they came to a new kind of agreement: shared humility, shared submission to God, shared willingness to learn, shared risk, shared truthfulness.
That is covenantal agreement, not just emotional compatibility.
And the same is true in churches and organizations. What breaks things is not always difference itself. It is defensiveness around difference, dishonesty about difference, and refusal to grow through difference.
Trust is not rebuilt by promises alone
Jill said something simple and exact: trust is rebuilt by consistent changed behavior over time.
That should be obvious, but people in pain often need obvious things said clearly.
Trust is not rebuilt because the guilty party is now very sorry.
Trust is not rebuilt because the innocent party is very spiritual.
Trust is not rebuilt because both would prefer to skip ahead.
It is rebuilt slowly. Painfully. Repetitively. Through observable change. Through new patterns. Through truthful speech. Through risk. Through hearing and being heard. Through refusing the old scripts.
This is where their practical framework impressed me. The old communication pattern was criticism, complaint, sarcasm, assumption, escalation, shutdown. The new pattern is slower, more awkward, and much more human. Name what you feel. Make a request. Reflect back what you heard. Resist the urge to defend. Stay in relationship while the conversation unfolds over time.
As Jill put it, good communication is never efficient.
That line reaches far beyond marriage.
A second chance is not going back
This may have been the most important thing of all.
Mark and Jill did not rebuild by trying to restore the old marriage. In fact, both of them knew they did not want that. The old marriage was what had broken. What they needed was not a return but a new build—what they call marriage 2.0.
That language resonated deeply with me.
A real second chance is not nostalgia. It is not pretending the previous version was better than it was. It is not wallpaper over rot. It is not religious language used to sanctify denial.
A second chance worth having is more truthful than the first arrangement was. It is humbler. Less performative. Less idealized. More grounded in reality. More spacious. More honest about wounds. More willing to row, as they put it, because if you are not rowing, you are drifting.
That is true in marriage. It is also true in faith.
The third movement of my own life, and the third book of my trilogy, lives in that territory. A second-chance marriage. A broader, more loving, more inclusive religious approach. Not because truth no longer matters, but because love finally matters enough to tell the truth without the old defensive armor.
That is what I heard in Mark and Jill’s story. Not perfection. Not formula. Not sentimentality. Something harder and better: the possibility that what is broken can become more honest than it ever was when it was only appearing whole.
There is hope in that. Real hope.
Not cheap hope.
Not hope without repentance.
Not hope without risk.
Not hope without time.
But hope grounded in the reality that God does not merely patch things up. Sometimes He leads us through the death of an illusion into the birth of something truer.
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Next on Created in the Image of God
Because these conversations are never isolated, but part of a larger search for truth, healing, and the recovery of our shared humanity, I want to close with a quick look at what’s coming next.
On Sunday, September 20 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be joined by Christopher Benek—pastor, author, and thought leader on artificial intelligence and faith. He’ll explore how emerging technology is reshaping our lives and the spiritual and ethical questions Christians should be asking about AI. From digital culture and human flourishing to imagining how faith can guide us through a rapidly changing technological world, it promises to be a timely conversation.
Then on Tuesday, September 22 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be speaking with Kutter Callaway—theologian, author, and cultural critic. We’ll explore the relationship between theology and contemporary culture, and how film, television, and technology shape the way we understand ourselves and our faith. From modern media and psychology to the deeper spiritual questions hidden within the stories and culture around us, it should be a rich and needed discussion.
If this conversation with Mark and Jill Savage stirred something in you—about fracture, trust, second chances, or the long work of becoming more truthful and more loving—I think these next two conversations will carry that search forward in meaningful ways.
I hope you’ll join me.
