Conversations with Faith-full Women:

  Kathy Gallagher


This lengthy conversation is especially for women whose lives have been affected by sexual sin. Or those who simply feel that they are trapped in a hopeless situation. 
I promise you - Jesus sees, He knows, He understands and you are never out of His sight or beyond His reach!

Mercy Hope: I'd like you to share the journey that brought you to the place you are today. 

Kathy Gallagher: I was raised in the ghetto in Sacramento. It was a really depressed area of town and in the particular neighborhood we lived in, I was the only white girl and I was surrounded by Mexican girls and black people. I fit in. I didn’t see the color difference. In my little world I didn’t realize that I was white and they were black and brown. It was never a problem for me, but when I turned 14 and I went into junior school, the Mexican girls absolutely hated me because I was blonde and had green eyes and Mexican guys were attracted to white girls, so it was just really difficult for me. I was getting beat up all the time and I wasn’t a fighter so because I didn’t fight, I was fair game to them. They always picked on the underdog. So I started using drugs. 
Up to that point I had been a very good little girl, perfect daughter, good grades, personable, mom loved me, you know the type. But then at 14, my heart just turned against my family and I started to rebel. I got involved with the wrong crowd, trying to find some acceptance and a place where I fit in, and I started adapting myself to different groups of girls and this particular group I got involved with were very promiscuous girls and used drugs, so I got into that whole thing--smoking pot, drinking and carrying on. I just turned so rebellious and ugly inside. 
There was one girl that I hung around who talked me into running away with her, so we hopped on the freeway and started thumbing it and hitch-hiked to Reno. Our intention was to be barmaids in Reno (a real aspiring career for 14-year-olds). I did that many times. This was one of probably four or five times that I ran away--on a major runaway, too. It wasn’t just around the block; it was out of state.
One time that really stands out to me, I knew we should have both been raped and murdered and cast out into the field, because it was 3:00 in the morning up in the mountains where there’s nobody anywhere and a carload of guys wanted to pick us up. I told the girl I was with I didn’t want to get in the car with her. She was going to do it but I flatly refused. It would have been horrible if we would have done it. I believe that God’s Hand was on my life then and at other times when the same type of things happened. 
I lived in a hippie commune up in the mountains in Oregon and things like that. My poor mother--I put her through absolute hell. She never knew where I was at. She didn’t know if I was dead or alive. I would try to call her at various points in my little journeys away and let her know, “I’m alive, I’m okay, I’m sorry I hurt you,” but I kept on doing it to her. 
Then when I was sixteen I moved in with my sister because I was so rebellious and my mom could not control me. Through my sister I met a guy whose aspiration was to become a Hell’s Angel and two weeks later I married him. 
That’s a long awful story that ended when I was 19. He was a wife beater. That was the thing, especially back in the early ‘80s or late ‘70s when you were trying to be a biker. You beat up your lady, you take her to the bar with you, you make her sit outside on your motorcycle, and it’s a very degrading kind of a life that these guys laid on their wives. I was still such a kid and I was like, “I’m not going to sit on your motorcycle!” I had a mouth on me that would drive anybody to beat me to a pulp, which he did. So it was ugly, and unpleasant. There were no happy days in that marriage so I filed for divorce. While I was divorcing him, I met Steve at my ex-husband’s brother’s house. I wasn’t interested in men, at the ripe old age of 18. I was like, “I’m done with men, I never want to see another man as long as I live.”
I was still friends with my ex-husband’s brother and his wife. They had two small kids and I loved their kids and I was still connected to the family in that way and I spent most of my time with them. They were drug abusers and drinkers and they were not treating their children well and I just had a heart for their kids, not because I was so great--I wasn’t even a Christian-- I just felt bad for the kids and I wanted somebody to accept me and they did because I was giving them my paycheck. 
So I was at their house one day and Steve showed up under the pretense of wanting to sell them a house because they had just come into some money. Steve never knew me, so he had no idea I was there, but he told me the first time he saw me he knew that I was going to be his wife. I didn’t have the same feeling toward him. I was sick of men. Steve was 24, and he just seemed so old to my 18-year-old mind. It never even registered in my mind that he would be somebody that I’d even go out with. But J & D (the couple that I was hanging around with) wanted Steve and I to get together because they thought of Steve as a rich person since he was doing good in real estate and they wanted to get in on his money via me, so they were really pushing this thing. D was helping Steve talk me into going out on a date, so after about three months of his persistence, I decided to go on a date with him. We went to a movie and we got in a fight--first night. I thought, “You know, I really don’t need this,” so I got out of the car and slammed the door shut and I was done with it but he called me back and said, “Let’s try and do this again. Let’s just start over and try and do it again.” So we did. 
We kept on dating and I wasn’t promiscuous with Steve or anything, but then he approached me and asked me if I would spend a long weekend with him in Santa Cruz, which was a beach resort area in CA, and I knew what that meant--a long weekend. 
With all the rotten things I did, I never did anything like that, but he asked me to go on this long weekend with him and in my mind I’m thinking, “Okay, this means wedding bells. If I’m going to go do this long weekend with him, I’m committing my life to this guy.” It wasn’t some moral thing on my part (again, I didn’t know the Lord), but to me that meant more than, “Okay I’m going to go have fun with some guy I don’t know.” It was a huge thing for me to do and I went along with it. We went on the long weekend and came back Sunday and I moved into his apartment on Monday. We lived together for a while and he wasn’t the most pleasant person in the world to be around. He’s always been kind of melancholy, and serious-minded and sober, but back then before he came to the Lord it was just negative. But we got along. We enjoyed each other’s company, and at this point I’m in love with him and wanting to spend the rest of my life with him and he with me, so while we’re living together, we’re both working jobs and in the interim, he’s beginning to witness to me, telling me about Jesus.
I knew a little bit about the Lord and we went to church once in a while. We went to Sunday School when we were little and I would hear that you have to “be saved” but I never understood what that meant so when I was little, I would ask my mom, “How do you be saved?” and she’d say, “You ask Jesus to come into your heart.” I used to do that all the time when I was little. I would ask Jesus to come into my heart and save me. That was my only knowledge of God or of Jesus or anything. So when Steve started witnessing to me about Him, it just resonated in my heart and the Holy Spirit started pursuing me like crazy. I mean, I felt this imminent death like I was going to die and go to hell if I didn’t get saved and it was like that for months. It was awful! 
I look back now and it was wonderful. It was God pursuing me and showing me my depraved state and that I’m a sinner and need a Savior, but at the time, it was horrific--just pressure. So I went over to my sister’s house and sat in her living room with a little Baptist preacher who proceeded to show me the road to salvation and that I’m a sinner and I need a Savior, and Jesus can wash away my sin and cleanse me from all my wickedness, and I accepted Christ.. It was no great emotional thing, it was just, “Yeah, you’re right. I know I’m going to die and go to hell if I don’t get saved.” That was on August 1, 1979. On August 2, I left Steve. I went home and packed up my things. I did this under the cover of darkness. He didn’t know I was going to do this to him, because I didn’t want to face his anger. I knew he’d be mad if I came home and said, “Um, I’m done with you. I’m going to go run off with Jesus now.” I had to sneak out. He was an angry person, so I knew I couldn’t just maturely sit him down and say, “Look, we shouldn’t be doing this.” I left him and, of course, he was very, very angry with God and me. I was falling madly in love with Jesus.
Two weeks after I met the Lord, nothing much had happened, but I woke up one morning and I was absolutely a different person. It was just like someone had flipped a switch in a dark room and the light came on and I was completely transformed. I quit smoking that day, I never drank again, I never used drugs again, I quit cussing, I quit hanging around with all those people. I mean, my life changed literally overnight. I was completely a different person. 
I started going to a little Baptist church and practically everybody in there got saved. It was a radical conversion and everyone I got around either got saved or got away from me, you know, the fire got too hot. It was just wonderful. I really fell in love with the Lord, and it was a tremendous, dynamic, conversion to Christ. 
I had long since left Steve behind and was happy to be single. I didn’t have any aspirations or desires to get married to anybody, didn’t even want to have a man in my life. I was very content, but I started getting this desire to talk to Steve about the Lord, just to witness to him, because I had been witnessing to everybody and wanted to share Christ with everybody and by this point, three or four months down the road, I was realizing that even though Steve was telling me about Christ, he didn’t know who He was or he wouldn’t be living that way. So I called him up and I wanted to tell him about Jesus and the love of God and that God could set him free. At this point I don’t know anything about sexual sin or any of that stuff, other than what he and I had participated in together, but I had no idea that there was another life underneath that life that he needed to repent of or that was why he was such a bitter person.
When I got on the phone with Steve he was still pretty mad. He felt rejected and abandoned by me and God. He was very cynical and sarcastic, but at the end of that conversation, (which wasn’t very pleasant) he said to me, “Why don’t you pray about whether or not God wants you to marry me?” and I’m like, “Okay,” and got off the phone and in my mind I’m thinking, “Whatever.” You know, I’d never thought of that before, but I did, I started praying about it and all I can say is, only being three or four months old in the Lord, I felt like that was what I was supposed to do so the following January, I married him. That was in 1980. From August to January, I was single and with Jesus, and I only had those five months to really grow, which wasn’t much time at all. Promptly after we got married, everything began to unravel. I was excited and Steve was too, because what I didn’t know until years later was Steve wanted a Christian wife to bring him back to God. 
Steve had gotten saved when he was 16 and had a dynamic conversion to Christ. He had the same kind of conversion I did, just a powerful life-changing conversion, but he backslid. He’d had sexual sin in his life and was just overwhelmed by the temptations and didn’t know how to overcome and he didn’t know how to turn to God in it and he just succumbed to the pressure of the world and the devil and his flesh and had been backslidden for 12 years. That’s why he wanted a Christian wife to bring him back to God and be an anchor for him. A lot of women and men think that, “If I get married, that’ll take care of all my problems,” but it really never does; it only compounds it. Now you have another person in the mix; it doesn’t change who you are inside.
Steve just became more of what he was. Now that I was his possession, he had more liberty to just let it all hang out and he was a very, very miserable man. Probably the one word that would describe who Steve Gallagher was is “angry.” He was angry all the time. I didn’t see him smile very much. He never had fun. We never did fun things, other than buying property and things like that, which he was really into. He was into making money and I’m just this dingbat ghetto girl who could care less about money. I was very simple-minded. I don’t know what I was interested in to be honest with you. I guess my dream was always to have a husband and 25 kids. That was what I wanted, and he wanted to be rich and have all the world’s goods and stuff, so we were not on the same page in that regard.
Anyway, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with me. I was too skinny, and I didn’t make enough money. There was a constant flow of complaints, and rightly so. It’s not like I was this poor, innocent, beleaguered young girl. I didn’t have a lot to offer the marriage or him. I was very immature, I was very mouthy, and I didn’t put my heart into being a wife. I wanted to be served, but I didn’t want to serve. There was a lot of friction and tension for both of us, because neither one of us were doing the right thing, but I was more the victim because I was always very nice and personable and sweet and everybody loved me, so somehow that made it okay to be a dingbat and not get anything accomplished in life, but he was a brute, so nobody liked him. 
In 1981 an opportunity opened up for Steve to move to Los Angeles and apply to the sheriff’s department so we moved to L.A. That was very exciting because with as many problems as we had, we really did love each other, and we wanted to be together. We just didn’t know how to make things right so we were always looking at outward things to do, or go, or be, or buy to make us happy. This move to L.A. was a big thing for us because it was an opportunity for him, and it was a move to a big city and it was like, “Okay, let’s go start over.” 
That was within the first year of marriage and it was absolutely horrible. When Steve went through the Academy, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on him. It was like going into the Marines. They were in your face screaming at you all the time, telling you how worthless you are, working you physically almost to the point of death it felt like at times for him, so it was very difficult. They were working 12- to 16-hour days and when Steve would come home, he was an absolute bear to live with, so there was a lot of pressure on me because of that and things just got worse. Before he actually went on the department, they assigned him to work as a bailiff in the criminal courts building in downtown L.A. so he was doing that until they would assign him a permanent position, which was eventually a maximum security jail facility, but he was working as a bailiff in the interim.
In jail, there was a man that they had in holding who was a porn star and Steve came home and told me about him. I never knew what pornography was. I mean, I knew what Playboy and Penthouse was, but that was the extent of it in my mind and for most women that is the extent of it. That’s all they’ve ever seen. But he started telling me about this guy and what he was famous for and I showed a little bit of interest, not because I was interested sexually, but I’d never heard of anything like that before. That little bit of interest made Steve interested in my response so we were talking about it and somehow I went along with looking at a video of this guy. That was the first time I’d ever seen pornography in my life and I was flabbergasted. I could not believe my eyes. 
After that, Steve sat me down and told me that this is what he does and he showed me some magazines that he looked at. He told me also that he would visit prostitutes and go to massage parlors and things like that. I was absolutely crushed! I was devastated, and he was so oblivious. He didn’t have a clue that my world just fell apart. Because I went along with looking at that video with him, in his mind he’s thinking, “This is what our marriage needs. This is what we’ve been needing. This is what’s been missing--for you to throw away all of your morals and become a slime ball like me.” That’s basically what it amounted to and that’s what he thought he needed-- for me to participate with him so he didn’t have to feel so guilty or so bad. He always would rather have been doing it with me rather than sneaking around doing it. So now that it was out in the open, he was absolutely oblivious to how badly this was killing me to see the competition. Up to that point, I was never afraid of other women. Up to that point, I didn’t think of myself as inferior to other women. But at that period in my life, there was this plague on me that I just didn’t quite measure up. 
I think that part of it came from the area I grew up in and all of that, but this really cemented it in for me. I guess you call it my inferiority complex, lack of confidence, which is very perverted because our confidence doesn’t come from what we look like or even what we can do. It comes from God, but I didn’t have that and I’m so backslidden now that I really don’t even know how to turn to God for help in any of this. It never even dawned on me to turn to Christ. I was so into Steve at this point and so into pleasing him. The real issue was I was deathly afraid of losing him. I was so selfish, I was so full of myself. Not that “Oh I’m just so in love with this man and I just want to serve him and give my life to him.” It wasn’t that at all. It was that I was so stinking self-centered and so into myself that I couldn’t imagine life without him. So I went along with him in these videos and this whole thing for a while, but it was killing me because it was such a double-edged sword. On the one side, we were so much closer than we’d ever been, but at the cost of me seeing him with other women and just enjoying all of that and it was killing me. 
I had started using methamphetamine again to numb myself because there was no way I did any of this straight. I never did any of it when I was level-headed and clear-minded and straight. I had to be either drinking or using drugs. It became a roller-coaster ride after that for a few years. I would leave him because I couldn’t handle it. I was like, “I just can’t live like this. Please don’t make me do this anymore.” I’d leave him and I couldn’t live without him, so I’d come back two weeks later. I was in and out like that for two or three years. Couldn’t live with him, couldn’t live without him. The thought of him being with other people was killing me, and he never really got his heart broken over me being gone. I think in his mind he always knew I’d be back, so it wasn’t any permanent damage. He could live without me for a few weeks, go find another girl and be fine and I’m just dying. 
At one point, we got involved with other people actually coming to our home, and that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, because the drugs weren’t working anymore. I never put a needle in my body, I never injected drugs into my vein, I was too coward to do that, but that was the next step. If you don’t do that, what you’re doing now is not enough to numb you and you can’t stay high. I was miserable. I was physically sick. I weighed around 90 pounds. I was just a shell--so empty and so miserable--and Steve was living for these weekend things, which is when everything would happen. Start on Friday night and end Sunday and then go back to work Monday. I had to stay high all week long to gear up for the weekend. I just couldn’t handle it, and I finally got to the place where I said, “I can’t live like this. I’d rather be single than to live like this for the rest of my life” so I left. I got what I could, put it in my car and moved to Sacramento. Within 24 hours, I met another man.
I met a guy who helped me fix my car. He was a nice guy and as far as I was concerned at that particular point, he wasn’t looking for anything. He just wanted to help me fix my car and that night, I had drinks with him in a bar and I was with him from then on. His name was Tim and he was 20 years older than me. He was a “Christian” musician who had a LOT of money on him and I never thought any of this was weird, or wondered “Why isn’t this guy working?” 
I found out a few days later that he was from Los Angeles, which is where Steve was still at, and where I just came from and the whole thing was just weird, but he seemed wonderful and treated me like a princess. I had never been treated this kindly by a man in my life. He bought me new clothes, he was buying me diamonds, he was just lavishing me. He was what women would consider a fantasy, you know, this imaginary guy that’s going to waltz in and think you’re the most perfect person in the world. He quickly helped me forget about Steve, and I justified immorality with him because, “Look what my husband has done to me. Tim is God‘s answer to me. He sent Tim to me to help me get over Steve. We‘ll get married and get it all right and I‘ll be right with God again.” I was in so much delusion. I was so incredibly deluded that I actually believed that God sent this man to me.
So, we’re wandering around the country and he has this painting company, so he didn’t have to work, and he had his pocketbook full of cash, so we were running all over the countryside together and I ended up going back down to L.A. with him just hanging around, going places, going to the beach, going to the mountains, doing stuff with no responsibilities, footloose and fancy free, living for the devil basically and I have no conviction inside that what I’m doing is wrong. My whole line of thinking was, “This is God’s answer, this is God blessing me, this is God making it up to me for all the stuff I’ve gone through with Steve,” and by this time I hate Steve’s guts. Tim helped me to get to the place where I never wanted to see Steve Gallagher’s face again in my life, and that was one of the reasons I believed he was from God because I felt like if I had to leave Steve on my own and stay away, I couldn’t do it because I wasn’t able to do it in the past. Tim helped me not to go back, so I clung to him for that reason, because I didn’t want to go back and I just blamed it on God, basically. 
While I’m running all over the countryside, Steve is back in L.A. doing his thing, and he’s got three or four girlfriends that he’s juggling and one morning God came to Steve when he was lying in bed next to some woman and showed him what he was. He just saw what he was, what his life had become, that he was this lazy pervert and next to that was this desire to get right with God. Steve’s next desire was, “I want my wife back.” All of these things happened to him in one day. God took this hard, cold, strong-willed, arrogant cop and just shook him and ruined him. Only Steve and God understand the enormity of that day because what God did to Steve Gallagher was nothing short of an actual parting of the Red Sea kind of miracle because this man’s heart was so cold. He was so callous and so full of wickedness that only God could do what happened that day. 
That’s what was happening to Steve Gallagher while I was out on the countryside running around with Tim and having a wonderful time, thinking everything’s fine. I took Tim to this building that he had a crew working in, in downtown L.A. which was the opposite side of town that Steve was on, and for some weird reason when I should have been traveling west, I was driving east thinking to myself, “Where are you going?” The whole time I’m doing this, I’m thinking, “I shouldn’t be going this way, this is not the right way to go,” but I just kept driving that way, and eventually I ended up right across the street from where Steve lived. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t know why I wanted to talk to him because I was so done with him. I was repulsed by him and didn’t want anything to do with him. I was so resolved that I had filed for divorce a month before. It was over. But for some strange reason, I’m driving toward him, wanting to talk to him.
So I called him on the phone. When he heard me, he was elated and he told me that the night before he gave his heart back to God and that he was just so excited! He just came back to God and he was on fire again, thinking that I should come back to him. I never came out and said, “I’m not coming back to you,” but he knew by the tone of my voice that I wasn’t coming back and at this point he still didn’t know that I was with somebody else. I basically just kept it as, “I’m happy for you, Steve. This is wonderful, I’m grateful and glad that it’s happened for you, but I’m not coming back.” He asked if I would call and talk to my mom and dad about it, and I said, “Yeah, I’d be glad to.” 
My mom and dad hated his guts, there was no way they were going to tell me to go back to him. I was fine with calling them and just working it out with them and I think I told him, “I’ll do whatever they tell me to do,” thinking the whole time that they’re not going to send me back. So I called them up and my dad answers the phone and I’m not even finishing my sentence and my dad is saying, “Kathy, the Lord has spoken to us, He wants you to be at home with your husband.” I was done. I was toast. It was over for me when he said that because I knew it was God. 
Because my dad has always been loyal to the death to my mother that was one thing that was a strong foundational stone in my life - my mom and dad’s love for each other. So my dad has never even noticed another woman on this planet and for his little girl to be married to someone like Steve, it was like the worst thing in the world for my parents and so I just could not even fathom my dad telling me to go back into that. That’s how I knew it was God, it had to have been the Lord that laid that on his heart and it had to have been so clear for my dad to say such a thing. Then my mom got on the phone and said the same thing and then my older sister, who is my dearest friend said the same thing and all three of them had been against Steve, they did not want this marriage to work, they had told me to divorce him, so this was just such a shock. 
Well, I got my marching orders. At this point I was crumpled up in this phone booth, bawling my head off, because I realized that this wasn’t between Steve and Kathy anymore, this is between Kathy and God, and will I give my heart back to Jesus? My repentance meant going back to Steve and entrusting myself to the Lord and letting him work it out. So I went back, but not out of love for Steve, or some great desire for my marriage to work, or because Tim had done me wrong, I only went back because God asked me to go back and that was all. So it was very difficult leaving Tim, because I’d gotten myself attached to him and when someone’s been so good to you, it’s very, very difficult to walk away and to go back to what hadn’t been a pleasant marriage to Steve up to this point. I just felt like I was going insane. 
When I went back to Steve it was awful, but now it was awful for a different reason. After five years, Steve finally decides to fall in love with me and my feelings for him are just gone. I don’t have any feelings left, I don’t have feelings of love for him, I don’t have respect for him, I have nothing, it’s just gone and yet I know I have to stay. It was just brutal. He would touch me and my skin would crawl, I couldn’t stand him to kiss me. I could stand any of it. It was horrible going through that. I cried all the time, partly because I missed Tim and partly because I didn’t want to be with Steve. It was probably one of the most agonizing experiences of my life. To top it off, I’m trying not to let my feelings show, because I don’t want to mess up what God is doing for Steve and I never wanted to hurt him. So I’m pretending that everything’s great, you know, and that I’m just as excited to be with him as he is to be with me because I don’t want to mess him up, but nothing could be further from the truth, it was just the opposite was how I felt, but I did what God asked me to do. I obeyed and I sacrificed and I gave up and I went through. 
About four or five months into this agony, something just started stirring in my heart towards Steve, it was like, the Lord gave me love for him. I started to see him differently, you know, part of the reason was because Steve had changed so much. He really did have a genuine repentance and brokenness from the Lord and he was a tender-hearted, sweet man now, he wasn’t the same guy. He was just different. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bitter, he wasn’t barking my head off all the time, I couldn’t do anything wrong now. And something really began to happen in my heart and I really was starting to fall in love with him, but the main thing that happened was that God began to give me this respect for Steve. Just respect that every wife has to have for her husband, you have to respect him for it to work. More than anything else, I respected Steve’s walk with God and I wanted to follow him Spiritually. So the thing just started to mushroom and grow and develop and just become this beautiful thing where I’m following him instead of him following me Spiritually and me trying to take the lead and not even know how - now he’s doing it.
Steve went into Bible school and in 1986 God laid it on his heart to start a ministry for men who are in the same battle that he was in, struggling with sexual sin. So Pure Life Ministries started out as a little support group in a large Assembly of God church in Sacramento. At first we were meeting in our living room but it outgrew that pretty quick, so then the guys would meet at the church and I’d have the ladies in our living room at home. We’d meet with them once a week and the whole time that this thing is going I’m thinking, “this is just one more thing that Steve’s doing, he’s always off on some adventure, doing something.” I never thought it would go anywhere. I just thought that it was going to be a support group and that it would fizzle out and he’d go on to the next thing. But you know, God has really blessed Pure Life Ministries and we now have a residential facility in KY where we minister to men in sexual sin. They come from six to nine months and they’re discipled and are taught to live in victory over sexual sin, and we’re not into the band-aid stuff, we’re not into the hype thing. We’re really training men to walk with Jesus and forsake the world. We have a telephone counseling program for couples that can’t come and we have teaching materials and videos and other recourse. Steve speaks all over the country and I do some ministry and radio shows and interviews like this one. 

Mercy Hope: But you wouldn’t say that you exactly went on to simply “live happily ever after.” 

Kathy Gallagher: You know, I often end my testimony where God restored my feelings toward Steve and then the founding of the Ministry, but there’s so much more to it than that. In January Steve and I will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary and it’s not the kind of story where everything just happened to turn out okay. We really struggled, we struggled for a long time, it wasn’t like he repented and the whole thing was over with. It wasn’t that way. Steve still struggled, he still had to fight temptation, thought-wise, there’s so much out there for men to just, he could be completely innocently walking somewhere and see something that would just get the mind going and we really had to battle, both of us had to battle through this thing for years to come, but you know, when I saw my husband repent, I wanted to support him, I wanted to love him. He wanted Jesus so much, and I wanted the Lord too and that is the key ingredient in any marriage - regardless of weather they’ve been in sexual sin or not. God is the reason Steve and I are still close. Not because we’re just so compatible and we’re just so great together. That’s not true. Jesus is why we have such a close marriage and why we’re so united. You know, we truly are one flesh, but it’s because of God. It’s the Lord that has done this tremendous thing, it’s not us. And that’s the hope I want women to walk away with: just make Jesus your focus, don’t worry about your marriage, don’t worry about what your husband is doing, don’t worry about how it’s going to work out. Just worry about your walk with the Lord and trust yourself to Him and He’ll take care of it. 

Mercy Hope: I’d like you to talk a little bit about your book, When His Secret Sin Breaks Your Heart.

Kathy Gallagher: It is a book written to wives whose husbands have been involved in all kinds of sexual sin. It’s a compilation of 56 letters and the reason I wrote letters was because when I set down to write a book, it just seemed so impossible to write a book in chapter form to address the vast situations that I had dealt with up to that point. I had been counseling wives for 13 or 14 years, and I had encountered just about anything you could imagine. So I took actual letters that I had received from women and responded to them in the book. 
It deals with everything from a husband asking you to do weird things in bed, to a husband who is a pedophile. To questions like, “What should I do with my anger?” “Why should I forgive him?” “Why should I stay with a man who repents?” and “How do I know if it’s real repentance?” I tried to address those kinds of issues because those are everyday things that women deal with. I approach it from a spiritual standpoint of what God is looking for from us, and why God allowed you to go through this. 
My personal testimony is that this wasn’t an accident, the devil didn’t throw God a curve. This was, in my mind and in my opinion, ordained of God. This is what Kathy Gallagher needed to bring her to her knees, to bring her to a place where she found Jesus to be everything, and not a man. Because my struggle was that Steve Gallagher was going to be my whole happiness in life and that’s not the way it is and God knew that He was all the happiness that Steve and I both needed. So the Lord takes us through suffering of all kinds to refine us and purge us and mold us into the women of God that He wants us to be. 
Suffering isn’t something to be shunned or run away from. It is to be embraced and God is allowing it. If it’s in your life, God has allowed it. So I approach it from that standpoint. Not that women should just put up with everything their husbands are throwing at them, you know, I said it was spiritual, but it’s also very practical. When his secret sin breaks your heart discusses things that they can do, things that they should do, and things that they should not do. Everybody’s situation is just so different that you can’t say, “This is what you do for this situation.” 
The book has been well received and accepted in many places and it seems to be used of the Lord to help wives navigate their way through this horrific struggle that they’re in.

Mercy Hope: I’d like you to tell a little about Pure Life Ministry’s counseling for women…how it works, where woman can call in and talk with a phone counselor if they’re currently struggling. How can they find out about that aspect of your ministry?

Kathy Gallagher: If a woman is in the midst of this struggle, she can call the ministry. We have a lady counselor that is available on Fridays so that one day a week women can place a one-time call and get some direction. Unfortunately, there are currently only two female counselors, so that’s why we we’ve set aside Fridays only to minister to those one time callers. And when they contact us we usually encourage them to get my book because the book has a lot of answers in it and then the next thing that we’ll encourage them to do is to get into the Overcomers At Home program. OAC is our telephone counseling program that I referred to earlier. It’s the other option for a man who can’t come to the live-in program, but it’s for his wife as well. It’s a 12-week counseling program. We give them 12 weeks worth of taped messages and they have to do homework. They also go through The Walk of Repentance, (which is a 24-week curriculum, so they won’t finish it while they’re in the program) and that homework gets mailed in weekly to their counselor and their counselor reviews that homework and uses that as the jumping off point for their counseling session that they will have once a week. 
The counselor and the counselee decide on the same time every week and she calls in and the counselee is responsible to make the phone call and that’s how they get ministered to by women who have gone through what they’re going through right now. It’s a very wonderful program, it’s very encouraging, it’s just a tremendous support for a wife. So many women who are going through this are by themselves, because it’s so humiliating to tell someone that your husband’s a pervert and basically, they just don’t have anybody that they feel they can talk to. It’s so upsetting, so this us such an encouragement to them and they’re talking to Godly, Godly women who have come out the other end of it and done it right. So that’s there for them to utilize if they want to.

Mercy Hope: I know that a lot of women who are reading this are going to be given hope by your testimony. I just pray that they will contact your Ministry as a result of this conversation. 

Visit: www.purelifeministries.org

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