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After forty-two years of marriage, my husband died on a Thursday afternoon. That night I knelt beside our bed and tried to pray. All I heard was silence. Lysa TerKeurst knows what that silence sounds like — and what she found in her Bible is the only reason I'm still standing. For more than two decades, she was a New York Times bestselling author and the president of Proverbs 31 Ministries — one of the largest ministries to women in America. She had built her entire life on telling women that God's Word was enough. And then life shattered in a way she said she never thought her family would face. She has talked about it openly from every stage she's stood on since. "I was heartbroken. I felt so incredibly betrayed. And though I fought and begged God to save my marriage for years and years and years — I would forgive and things would fall apart. I would forgive and things would fall apart. I would forgive and things would fall apart." Read those last lines again. I would forgive and things would fall apart. I read those words and I understood them in a way I wish I didn't. Not because my marriage was betrayed. Because my marriage was taken. My husband died on a Thursday afternoon after forty-two years together. He made his coffee that morning the way he always did — too strong, too much sugar, same mug since the kids were in grade school. He kissed me on the forehead on his way to the garage. The hospital called at 2:15. By 4:30 he was gone. How many times have you prayed for someone you love and watched God stay silent? How many times have you trusted Him with your life and felt like He walked out of the room? How many times have you sat in church on Sunday smiling at everyone — and driven home to a house so quiet you can hear your own breathing? Lysa describes one of her lowest moments like this. She was on her way to a counseling appointment. "I remember looking in the rearview mirror and thinking, how long has it actually been since I washed my hair? I thought to myself, I look awful. And then I had a second thought — I can't remember if I put on deodorant today. I went to the bathroom and there was no deodorant. But there was peach air freshener. And I thought — that'll do." She walked into her counseling session smelling like a freshly baked peach cobbler. That isn't a woman who was lazy. That's a woman who was living hurt. And there's a difference between being a Christian and being a Christian who is living hurt. You can love Jesus and still not be able to get out of bed. You can know all the right verses and still feel like God left the building. You can go to church every Sunday for forty years and still feel completely alone the moment the person next to you is gone. And here's what almost no one tells you. Going to church more doesn't fix it. Listening to more sermons doesn't fix it. Having people tell you "he's in a better place" and "God needed him" and "everything happens for a reason" doesn't fix it. Those platitudes don't reach the place that actually hurts. Lysa figured out what does. When her life fell apart, she did something most Christian women never think to do. She didn't read another self-help book. She didn't try to white-knuckle her way through it. She went into her Bible. And she stayed there. "I did over 1,000 hours with a theologian, studying in the Bible exactly what God's Word says about forgiveness. But before you get all impressed — I want you to know, about 750 of those hours, I was looking for the loophole." One thousand hours. Not one thousand hours of reading. One thousand hours of actually understanding. And what she found in those pages didn't just give her information. It gave her her life back. But here's what most Christian women never figure out, and what nobody in church seems willing to say out loud. You don't have to wait until your life falls apart to do what Lysa did. Most of us only open our Bible the way she did when we have no other choice. When the husband dies. When the diagnosis comes. When the child walks away. We get desperate enough to actually study it. The rest of the time, we read three chapters in the morning, close the book, and can't remember any of it by lunch. I know because I was that woman. I went to church every Sunday for over forty years. Owned more Bibles than I could count. Started reading plans in January more times than I can remember. Made it through Leviticus barely holding on. Read Romans and closed the book unable to explain a single thing I had just read. Year after year, the same cycle. Start in January, slow down by March, quietly stop by April. And carry that shame all the way to December. And underneath all of it, the whole time — after my husband died — I was living hurt. Hurt I couldn't name because grief doesn't come with a vocabulary. Hurt I never gave to God because it felt like God was the one who caused it. Hurt I just learned to walk around with, like a stone in my shoe that got heavier every month. I wrote in my journal: "I talk to God, but it feels like I'm talking into an empty sky. I'm angry. I'm heartbroken. I feel abandoned. I don't know how to pray anymore." A man who'd lost his wife young wrote something I've read a hundred times since: "Grief already rewrites your future without your permission. You're not broken. You're wounded. And wounds can be sacred." Lysa says something at every conference she stands on now. "We've either just been through some hurt, we're in the middle of some hurt, or we're about to go through some hurt." That's all of us. And the problem isn't that we don't pray about it. The problem isn't that we don't believe God can heal it. The problem is that we don't actually know Him well enough to let Him. It's like reading letters from someone you've never met and wondering why you don't feel close to them. The one time I tried to open my Bible after his death, it made everything worse. Romans 8:28 sounded like God planned my husband's death for good. Psalm 23 felt hollow at the funeral. Jeremiah 29:11 — "plans not to harm you" — felt like a lie. I closed the book and didn't open it for nine months. Lysa needed 1,000 hours in the Bible with a theologian to finally hear God speak to her pain. Most of us don't have a theologian. We don't have 1,000 hours. We have thirty minutes in the morning with a cup of coffee we drink alone now and a book we don't really understand. That's when my daughter left a package on my kitchen counter with a note: "Mom, this helped me understand the Bible for the first time. I think it might help you too." A 52-week guided study that walks you through the entire Bible, one theme at a time, from Genesis to Revelation. Before you read anything each week, it gives you a short explanation of exactly what you're about to get into. Who wrote it. When. Why. What was happening at the time. And how every page connects to who God actually is, and how deeply He loves the woman reading it. Psalms: not pretty poems for sympathy cards — prayers from people who screamed at God from the darkest places and were never punished for the screaming. David hiding in caves, terrified, abandoned. And God keeping every word in the Book so a woman sitting alone in a quiet house could find them and know she wasn't the first. Romans: what Paul was actually saying to a suffering church — not "God planned your pain" but "even here, even in the worst night of your life, God has not left you." That verse stopped being a wound and became the deepest comfort I'd ever read. Lamentations: an entire book of grief I didn't know existed. Nobody at church ever showed it to me. Raw, unfiltered pain brought to God — and God making room for every word of it. For the first time in my life, I read my Bible and I knew who I was reading about. A God who doesn't stand above my pain — He enters it. Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb knowing He was about to raise him. He enters the grief even when He can see the ending. I'd open it in the morning and not want to close it. Verses I had heard at funerals and on sympathy cards suddenly meant something completely new — because I finally had the context to understand what they were saying. And slowly, week by week, something shifted. I stopped living hurt. Not because the hurt disappeared. It didn't. But because I finally knew the God who could carry it with me. The empty sky wasn't empty anymore. His voice had been there the whole time — on every page, in every passage. I just couldn't hear it until someone showed me what I was listening for. Lysa says it like this. "When cruel things have been done to you, it is life altering — but it does not have to be life ruining." She's right. But you can't get there by reading three chapters and closing the book. You have to actually go in. This study is the closest most of us are ever going to get to Lysa's 1,000 hours. The same depth, broken into pieces small enough to actually do. It's already helped over 25,000 women finally understand the Bible they've been carrying their whole lives. It held me together in a season that should have broken me. And it turned a book that felt like paper into the voice of a God who'd been there the whole time. Right now it's up to 62% off, and every order comes with a free pen pack. Don't spend another year living hurt. Don't spend another year talking into an empty sky when God's voice is waiting on every page. Tap below and grab yours before they sell out. P.S. I showed the study to a woman from my grief group who hadn't opened her Bible since her husband's funeral. She told me Romans 8:28 was the verse that broke her — she thought it meant God planned his death. I showed her the synopsis. She read what Paul was actually saying and to whom. She went quiet, then said: "For two years I thought God did this on purpose. Nobody told me Paul was writing to people suffering the way I was." She took the study home that night. P.P.S. If you're angry at God right now — the Bible is full of people who were too. David screamed from caves. Job questioned from ashes. God kept every word. Your anger isn't a sin. It's a prayer He's been waiting for. P.P.P.S. The 62% off won't last. Don't sit on it.