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Lysa TerKeurst stopped trusting her own mind. For years, the person closest to her told her that her instincts were a mental health problem. What finally showed her the truth is something most Christian women overlook. For more than two decades, Lysa TerKeurst was a New York Times bestselling author and the president of one of the largest ministries to women in America. She had built her entire life teaching women that God's Word was enough. And in her own home, she was slowly being convinced she was losing her mind. She'll tell you it started as just a feeling. An undercurrent. Something wasn't right in her marriage, and she couldn't name it, but she could feel it. So she did what any of us would do. She asked. And every time she asked, her husband told her the problem was her. "He would just say things like, you know, Lysa, we really need to work on your mental health." Read that again. She sensed the truth, and the person closest to her told her the truth was a symptom. That she was anxious. Unstable. The crazy one. "I now know," she said, "that the counseling term for that is gaslighting. I didn't know it then." For years, she didn't know it then. For years, she walked around doubting her own mind, because the person she trusted most kept telling her that her own instincts were something to be medicated. And here's what almost no one says out loud. A woman becomes that easy to manipulate for one reason. Because somewhere along the way, she handed the most important relationship in her life to a person instead of to God. When the person you've made your foundation tells you that you're crazy, you believe them, because they're holding the ground you're standing on. If your sense of who you are comes from someone else, then whoever controls that relationship controls you. Lysa found out for sure on the day of her oldest daughter's rehearsal dinner. The affair was real. It had been real the whole time. Her instincts had been right about everything. "I was smiling on the outside," she said, "when I was screaming on the inside. Just desperate to wake up and have this all be a bad dream." She had been right all along. And being right brought her no comfort, because she'd built her stability on a person, and that person had become the very thing breaking her. I know how that happens. Because I was that woman. Not in the dramatic way. I never had the affair, the rehearsal dinner, the headline story. Mine was quieter. I just spent my whole life handing the most important place in my heart to people instead of to God. I needed to be liked, so I said yes to everything and lost myself doing it. I needed to be needed, so I stayed where I shouldn't have stayed. I let the loudest voice in the room tell me who I was, and I rearranged myself around whoever I was afraid to lose. I called it love. Really it was that I had no solid ground of my own, so I kept borrowing it from other people, and they could move it whenever they wanted. And I went to church every single Sunday through all of it. I owned a Bible I genuinely tried to read. But I'd never understood it well enough for my relationship with God to actually be the foundation. So it wasn't. People were. And people will always eventually move the ground under you, not because they're evil, but because they're human, and they were never meant to be your god in the first place. I'd read three chapters in the morning and close the book having absorbed nothing. Made it through Leviticus wondering what any of it had to do with my life. Read Romans and couldn't explain a word of it. Read the Psalms and felt something for a moment and forgot it by lunch. Year after year, the same cycle. And the whole time, the most important relationship I had was the one I was neglecting, the only one that could have held me, and I never knew how to actually build it. That's the part nobody admits. It wasn't that I didn't love God. It wasn't that I didn't have discipline. It wasn't that I didn't have faith. It's that I had never made my relationship with him real enough to stand on, because I had never actually understood his Word. And so I kept asking people to be for me what only he could be. I kept needing them to make me feel secure, chosen, sure of myself. And no person can carry that. It's too heavy. It will crush them, and it will crush you, and it will leave you so easy to manipulate, because you'll do anything not to lose the person you've made into your god. Lysa says it better than I can. She said she will always desperately want things from other people in the exact areas where she's afraid God won't come through for her. That too many of us are desperately trying to get from people what we were only ever meant to get from the Lord. That's the whole thing. That's the gap in every relationship that keeps falling apart. Think about it this way. If the source of all the security and love you've ever needed wrote it down for you, in a letter, but the letter was written 2,000 years ago in a world you'd never been taught to understand, you could hold it your whole life and never receive a word of it. You'd keep going to people for the thing that was sitting right there, unread. That's what most of us are doing every time we open our Bibles. We're holding the one relationship that could anchor every other one, and we've never been taught how to actually read it. So we keep it on the shelf, and we keep handing our hearts to people who were never meant to hold them. Lysa has spent her whole life trying to give women that foundation, from a stage. But she can only reach you for an hour at a conference, or a few minutes on a screen. She can't be in your kitchen at 6am, when you sit down with your Bible and have no idea what you're actually looking at. That's when I found something that changed everything. A 52-week guided study that walks you through the entire Bible, one week at a time, from Genesis to Revelation. Before you read anything each week, it tells you who wrote it, when, why, what was happening at the time, and what it actually means. It takes the most important relationship you have, the one you've never quite known how to build, and finally makes it real. Not a book you can't understand. A God you actually know. Psalms: written by people who looked for their security in all the wrong places, and the God who became their solid ground when nothing else would hold. Genesis: not the Sunday school version, but the story of a God who has been pursuing his people, personally, since the very first page. Romans: what Paul was actually saying about who you are in God, so you stop needing everyone else to tell you. And slowly, week by week, something shifted. I'd open it in the morning and not want to close it. Verses I'd read dozens of times suddenly meant something completely new, because for the first time I actually understood them. And as my relationship with God finally became solid, everything else changed too. I stopped being so easy to manipulate, because my sense of who I was no longer came from whoever was in front of me. I could finally hear a lie and know it was a lie. But the bigger thing, the thing I never expected, was what it did to my other relationships. When I stopped asking people to be my god, I stopped being crushed every time they were only human. I could love people without losing myself in them. I could set a boundary without falling apart. I could stay where I should stay and leave where I should leave. And for the first time, I was able to build the kind of love that actually lasts, because I wasn't asking it to do a job it was never meant to do. My most important relationship was finally taken care of. And it turned out that was the thing every other relationship had been waiting on the whole time. There's a moment near the end of Lysa's story I can't stop thinking about. A friend she hadn't seen in thirty years found Lysa's childhood Bible in an old box and got it back to her. Lysa opened it, and there, in her own little-girl handwriting, was something she'd written decades before. That God would never want her married to a man who loved other women more than her. That God doesn't want your heart divided. Her own little-girl self had written the truth her grown self spent years being told was crazy. The truth that her security was never supposed to come from a man. It was always supposed to come from God. She took off her wedding ring, tucked it into the pages of that childhood Bible, on that very page, and put it on the shelf. Sorrow and hope, both at once. And she said something I think about all the time. That she could carry both. The foundation had been in her Bible the whole time. Since she was a little girl. She'd just needed to finally be able to read it. I used to think what I needed was the right person. The right relationship. Someone to finally make me feel secure. Now I know I needed to get the most important relationship right first. And once I did, I finally understood what I'd been missing the whole time. Not on a stage. Not from a person. On the pages I'd never been able to read. Right now it's up to 62% off, and every order comes with a free pen pack. Don't spend another year handing your heart to people who were never meant to hold it. Don't spend another year with the one relationship that could anchor everything sitting unread on a shelf. Tap below and grab yours before they sell out.