Tim and Stephanie Broersma and a Marriage Reclaimed After Marital Betrayal

Last month, I traveled to Lynden, Washington to meet with Tim and Stephanie Broersma to interview them for episode 22. We recorded at their church and drove 45 minutes down the highway to Larrabee State Park afterward to take some photos. Stephanie has a ministry called Reclaimed Ministries: Helping Women Heal from the Betrayal of an Affair. It’s been fire season down in Southern California and the damage fires can cause can be irreparable. I asked Stephanie if that’s what that season of her marriage felt like, smoke, ash, disintegration after discovering a conversation between her husband and another woman after he left his Facebook page open in the 7th year of their marriage. She shares she didn’t even see the smoke, she didn’t realize her marriage was in danger.

the testimony

Tim and Stephanie share the process they went through after Tim confessed to multiple affairs and to a 10-year pornography addiction which took them both on a journey to restoration as they determined to do the hard work and fight for their marriage because the prospect of the alternative was harder to bear than going through the uncomfortable middle.

On the other side, they have found beauty truly does rise from the ashes when we find our life and/or marriage has caught fire. Walk with them through the rubble as they share their testimony and the ministry God birthed in Stephanie as she coped with the pain, the devastation of grappling with marital betrayal.

11 years post confession, Tim and Stephanie have been married 18 years, we say “18 rings in their marriage tree”. I couldn’t help but think of the cover of Stephanie’s book, a tree stump with a heart in the center, along with the evergreens all around us as we ventured down the Pacific Northwest coast. The photos are a stone of remembrance to solidify this part of their marriage, which they say is still imperfect yet restored, and parts reclaimed.