Chaz Adams, the Florida health insurance broker Lysa TerKeurst married in January 2024, once had to leave a visit with her earlier than planned. He rolled his suitcase out to his truck, and when the door shut behind him, she broke down in tears.
“There was something about that that evoked enormous fear in me,” TerKeurst said on The Neighbors Podcast, in an episode she and Adams recorded together in October 2024. In her first marriage, a suitcase going out the door had meant heartbreak was on its way. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she remembered thinking. “This feels so scary. Why is he leaving early?”
She called him as he drove away and told him she was working through a serious trigger. “He was like, ‘OK, tell me about that. Tell me more,'” she said, according to ChurchLeaders. Then he asked, “What do you need? Do you need me to turn around and come back? Because I will.”
“His reaction comforted me so much,” she said, “to where I was like, no, actually, I don’t need you to turn around.”
TerKeurst, 57, is president of Proverbs 31 Ministries and the author of a string of bestsellers about betrayal and trust, many of them drawn from the collapse of her 29-year marriage to Art TerKeurst. In her new book, Making Peace with What I Can’t Control, published Sept. 15, she writes about why she trusts her husband and why she still can’t guarantee he will never hurt her. Her tour for the book starts Nov. 7.
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How Lysa TerKeurst and Chaz Adams met
After she and Art separated for good, TerKeurst spent about two years healing before she dated anyone. “I waited and I worked,” she said in October 2024, during a livestream with Adams on the Proverbs 31 Ministries YouTube channel. “I did my work.”
In January 2023 she met Adams on a dating app, though she had once vowed never to use one. She chose an app she considered safer and kept close friends involved from the start.
Early on, she sent him something she had written. He read it on the way to an appointment, teared up and called to offer to fly to Charlotte just to take her for coffee. Before they met a second time, her friends got him on FaceTime and gave their approval.
They got engaged in the fall of 2023 and kept it private so she could share the news face to face. They married that January, “surrounded by our family and some beautiful mountains,” she wrote on Instagram, and danced in the falling snow.
Who is Chaz Adams?
Adams grew up in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where he still runs the insurance agency he started in 1996, according to his company biography.
| Chaz Adams | Details |
|---|---|
| Job | Group health insurance broker |
| In insurance since | 1994 |
| Company | CMA Insurance and Financial Services |
| Children | Leah and Michael |
He has said he started going to Alcoholics Anonymous as his first marriage was falling apart. His younger brother died of alcohol addiction at 39. Adams has been sober for more than a decade and still goes to meetings. His daughter invited him to church, and TerKeurst writes in the new book that he has “an authentic relationship with the Lord.”
On the same livestream, she said what attracted her was that he had “the humility and the wherewithal to get the help he needed” for his addiction and had done “10 years of pretty intensive healing work.” “I wanted somebody who had been intentional about getting healthy,” she said. “And he certainly had.”
Adams said he was drawn to how hard she had fought to save her marriage to Art. “Believe it or not, I found it attractive that you tried a second time at renewing your vows,” he told her. “This is a woman who was trying hard.”
What he told her about cheating
Adams talks about infidelity as openly as he talks about drinking. “I’ve been on both sides of the cheating thing,” he said that evening. “I’ve cheated and I’ve been cheated on.” In Making Peace with What I Can’t Control, TerKeurst recalls what he promised her about that part of his past.
“I remember one of the most comforting things he ever shared with me was that he would never cheat on me because he would never cheat on himself by getting pulled into the dark horrors of an affair. Many years ago he lived in that darkness and has no desire to ever return. I believe him.”
What happened to her first husband, Art TerKeurst?
Lysa and Art TerKeurst married in 1992 and raised five children. On the rapper Lecrae‘s podcast in late August, she said she found out in February 2016 that Art was living a double life. By that June she was in surgery to have part of her colon removed, and her doctor asked whether she had been in a terrible car accident because her organs were out of place. “Did he ever hit me? No,” she said. “But you tell me how serious emotional abuse is.”
Their 2022 court filings gave two very different accounts, The Christian Post reported. Art asked for alimony and sought to undo a 2016 postnuptial agreement he said he signed under duress, and described himself as “a faithful and dutiful spouse” since signing it. Lysa’s response said he signed the agreement freely and argued that his infidelity should rule out alimony. No reliable report says Art TerKeurst has remarried.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1992 | Lysa and Art TerKeurst marry |
| February 2016 | She learns he is living a double life |
| June 2017 | She announces she is pursuing divorce, citing infidelity and substance abuse |
| Fall 2017 | While separated, she is diagnosed with breast cancer and has a double mastectomy |
| December 2018 | The couple renews their vows |
| November 2020 | They separate again |
| December 2021 | She files for divorce and announces it on Jan. 1, 2022 |
| By October 2024 | Her ex-husband takes her back to court |
The court fight that came later
In an October 2024 interview with CBN, TerKeurst said that right when she thought everything was finally settled, a sheriff’s deputy came to her door with papers “informing me I have to go to court and face him again.”
In the book, she writes that her ex-husband was suing her and that she spent “years and an alarming amount of money” defending herself. She has not said publicly what the suit was over. “I’d won the court battles,” she writes. “I’d found love again. I had gotten re-married to a wonderful man named Chaz and was very happy.”
What she says she still can’t control
Even so, she writes that fears left over from her first marriage still creep in. A skipped date night can start to look like “the beginning of us growing apart.” She also writes, “I don’t have the power to ensure Chaz never makes choices that could hurt me.”
On the Neighbors episode, she described the safeguards they keep:
- There is no alcohol in their relationship.
- Adams keeps up his own recovery, including AA meetings and church.
- She keeps a list of people she can call “if I even sense a hint” of a problem. “I’ve never had to make that call.”
When something goes wrong, she still calls him. On Lecrae’s podcast, she said she sometimes phones Adams and tells him exactly what “Lysa without Jesus” would say or do. “He’s a safe space,” she said. “I can get it all out.”
