Former Hillsong Church pastor Carl Lentz’s wife, Laura Lentz, shared more about her mindset during her husband’s cheating scandal in their new book, Overcoming Infidelity: 10 Conversations to Help You Heal the Hurt.
“I don’t know why, but in the early days, the pain often hit me like a wave as soon as I entered the bathroom,” Laura, 48, wrote in a chapter titled “Will the Pain Ever Go Away?”
She continued, “My legs would wobble, and I’d lean my back against a wall and slide down until I was folded in half on the floor. There weren’t any dramatic thoughts or big prayers from there. Just a surrender to the tightness in my chest, hollowness in my stomach, and burning in my throat from an entire day of trying not to cry in public or in front of the kids.”
Laura added that she was “overcome with anger” during the first few months of Carl’s infidelity, to which he admitted in 2020 while revealing that he had been fired from Hillsong for cheating on his wife.
“But sadness was my emotional epicenter,” she continued. “It was a heavy and confusing sadness, mixed with a kind of dread that felt permanent, like it was foolish to even consider that our marriage might make it.”
Laura recalled wondering if the pain would last “for the next 40 years.”
The Secrets of Hillsong star said that enduring Carl’s unfaithfulness felt like an “unjust experience” for a woman who had “saved herself for marriage.”
“I’d done my best to obey the rules during my teenage years, waiting to fall in love with a godly man,” she wrote, adding that she and Carl, 47, raised their three children — Ava, 22, Charlie, 20, and Roman, 17 — “according to the faith we’d inherited.”
“Carl and I had even devoted our lives to ministry, which had involved sacrifice, particularly in the early days. When my life fell apart like this, it felt … unfair. It was like I had held up my end of the bargain and God had failed to hold up his,” she wrote.
Laura continued, “A person can do hard things. You can take pain for a season. You can push through when the end is in sight. But betrayal pain is different because it doesn’t feel like a season; it seems interminable, as if there is no end in sight. Life feels forever altered, and your marriage feels forever tainted. Even your view of marriage changes once the façade is torn down. You start to question whether the rest of life will be a painful act of survival.”
Laura added that a person who betrays their partner also suffers.
“There is a special kind of pain that comes from knowing you’ve hurt people you love. You may even feel like the ultimate villain, convincing yourself that you deserve to suffer — a belief that amplifies the pain,” she shared. “You probably wonder if the guilt and shame you feel will ever lift, and you might struggle to believe that anyone — especially your spouse and children — will respect you again. Infidelity doles out pain on every side.”
Though Carl’s infidelity brought Laura “the greatest pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” the experience taught both of them that “pain is a teacher.”
“It reveals, and it instructs, and it changes those it touches,” Laura concluded. “An experience of pain will transform your life in a way a painless existence never will. Pain is so disorienting and overwhelming that it can be difficult to pay attention to it in the moment. But as the saying goes, the pain will leave you only after it’s done teaching you.”
