Riva Tims talks about finding forgiveness for her late husband

Pastor Riva Tims knows just how painful life’s unexpected tragedies can be. Her former husband, Pastor Zachery Tims committed adultery and the marriage ended in divorce. He was found dead in a New York hotel room last year in a suspected drug overdose.

In her new book, “When Life Falls Apart”, Riva opens up about her heartache but also the amazing solace she found in God’s love and mercy.

Riva recently sat down with the 700 Club to talk about her relationship with her ex-husband, the rejection she felt by the church, and the path she found to inner recovery.

She and Zachery were 22 when they met at church. They married not long after and launched their own ministry in Orlando, Florida, which became a staggering success with thousands of people turning up for services each Sunday.

At first their celebrity status within the church didn’t affect them – her husband had a poster with the word “humility” on the back wall of the church so he could see it when he preached – but as the church grew and grew, and they started to broadcast on national television, things started to change.

“It becomes an empire,” she told the show. “It becomes your own name that’s highlighted and it becomes about you when that’s never how it’s supposed to be.

“People tend to pull that out of you and if you’re not careful, they’ll begin to worship you more than they worship God.”

Their high status in the church also began to interfere in their marriage. A “distance” began to appear, she recalls, and then Zachery started to travel a lot and wouldn’t allow her to go with him.

It was at that point “I knew something was wrong”, she said. Later, she found out about the infidelity.

In the beginning, he was “remorseful he got caught”.

“And that’s the part that hurt. There was no running after me, coming after me. He was trying to keep everything together.

"My heart hurt, not just in a spiritual way, not just in an emotional way, but in a physical way and I didn't realise that people hurt that badly. But the Lord told me to hold my peace. That was the hardest thing you could ever do."

Zachery reluctantly agreed to counselling but after just three months, he returned to the pulpit. Well meaning people in the church encouraged him to return to preaching, telling him that it didn’t matter what he had done, she recalls.

“If I could have just had my husband sit down for a year … that’s unheard of. Pastors are like ‘no, the church is gonna die’.

“No, if it belongs to God, someone else can come in, run the ministry and the family can get healed.”

She continues: “I was booted out so to speak and asked not to come back. It was like, ‘if they see you, they won't heal,’ I was told. So just stay away."

She found herself wondering why the people in the church were rejecting her and blaming her. There were also many occasions when she thought she had forgiven Zachery but then found herself in a room screaming out “I hate him”.

There was “bitterness” and she was “resentful”, she told the 700 Club, because she felt that Zachery had ruined her life and taken away everything.

The turning point came when she started to pray for her ex-husband.

“It wasn’t until I began to pray for him - for real. I began to get compassion, I began to see the root of his struggles, I began to feel sorry for him, I began to feel love for him.

“Then and only then forgiveness came.”

God also prompted her to look inside herself and allowed her to see the things in her own heart that needed to be changed, things like “self-righteousness”, “lust”, “wanting to be accepted by men and not God”.

“He was purging things out of me when I thought he was just dealing with my husband,” she told the show.

“But he said, no, there are things in you that also have to be rectified and changed and done better, and thank God I listened.”

Now Riva is leading a new ministry called Majestic Life Church.

“I was given a call and I had to complete it,” she said.

And one of the things she is passionate about teaching is: "No celebrity pastors. It’s all about God.”