Forgiveness After Betrayal: How Country Artist Stephanie Quayle Gave God Her Bitterness
By Movieguide® Contributor
Christian country artist Stephanie Quayle has some difficult life experiences under her belt, but there’s one that she had to work harder than others to get through — forgiving someone who betrayed her.
“In my early twenties, I am working at this little clothing store in Santa Monica, California, and working that job to pay for my life and my music and trying to do all the things like most young twenties are doing. Right? And I met this man. He’s got a young daughter,” Quayle said on the “Jesus Calling” podcast.
“It just started off as acquaintances that then turned to friendship, that then turned into a relationship. I had a very strong intuition and gut [feeling that] something wasn’t right,” Quayle explained. “I couldn’t pinpoint it. And every time I would question him, there was no discussion.”
He dismissed her concerns and called her “crazy” or “insecure” whenever she would question if he was unfaithful to her.
She chose to believe him and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.
“And so then cut to being in this little kitchen in our rental that we were sharing with his daughter,” the singer said. “Eden [his daughter] was out in the bedroom watching TV with the dogs.”
“And I’m preparing dinner, and I get the phone call that you never want to get: ‘There’s been an accident. You need to come quickly,’” Quayle continued. “So all I could think about in that moment was, ‘Get this little girl to her father.’”
Eden’s father had piloted a plane that crashed on Jan. 28, 2009.
“I didn’t even know that he was going flying that day. He went flying all the time, and we’d just talked just a few hours prior,” she said.
“So I packed up Eden in the car and I don’t know how I drove the speed I did, how I got to the airport, I just had to get her to her dad. All I could think about was, Can I get her to her dad? If there’s still one moment, I want her to have that moment.”
Emergency vehicles met her at the airport. Quayle and Eden ran to the edge of the runway, but the police didn’t allow them to go further.
“They didn’t want us to see what was left to see, for obvious reasons. And I can still hear her screams,” Quayle said.
“Grief is the strangest experience. Wednesday night I grieved, Thursday, Friday, Saturday as everyone came in for the memorial. And on Sunday, we had the memorial at the same airport.”
On the day of her boyfriend’s memorial, Quayle found out that he had been unfaithful.
“So grief turned to betrayal. I think if there was a race between grief and betrayal, I think betrayal will win every time, because it’s so insidious and it makes you question yourself,” she said.
“I just was in shock. How did I live with this and not know?” she said.
She questioned God about why this happened to her and realized that her younger self thought that if she was “good enough,” then she would be “worthy” of her ex. But in reality, that could never have happened.
“And so when I met David, my husband, I’m like, Oh, all that’s gone now. I’m good! I find myself a Christian cowboy. He’s my Southerner.”
Though David is a good man who loves God and her home state of Montana, Quayle’s relationship with him didn’t wash away the bitter feelings she had about her ex.
“And so I’m putting out music, everything looks bright and shiny. Everything’s fine. The past is in the past,” she said.
In April 2021, Eden, now a grown woman, called Quayle and told her how she was healing from the incident.
“When she reached out to say she was no longer going to keep his secrets, it just blew my mind at the maturity and the self-awareness to not allow something to hold on to your soul, to really be free from that,” Quayle explained.
Then Quayle started to journal, meditate and read her Bible.
“And just before that, I had been at a prayer breakfast where pastor Chris Hodges was a speaker, and he had the most simple message: ‘Is Jesus the center of your life?'”
“I started just kind of haphazardly praying and then I’d open the Bible at random. And it was such a cool treasure hunt. And I would call my dad and be like, “What does this mean?” And then he goes, “What do you think it means?” So then we got into these conversations and my heart just kept getting pulled,” Quayle said.
She came to the realization she never forgave her ex-boyfriend. So she learned to forgive him and felt a new freedom better than she could’ve imagined.
Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt recently spoke on the freedom of forgiveness. Movieguide® reported:
“When you’re able to practice forgiveness, you feel this amazing sense of freedom and weight lifted off your shoulders,” she said. “There are a lot of people who feel like practicing forgiveness feels like a betrayal of their own hurt…you have to think about it, practically speaking, what are you looking for? [Then] you are able to eventually shift to you being able to look at yourself and give that gift [of forgiveness] to yourself because it’s actually not about another person at all.”
“And cut to this last summer, I got angry,” Quayle said. “And I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’m doing all the things, I’m convicted in my faith, I’m unapologetic about my love of the Lord. What am I missing?”
“Last fall, I was watching my church in Birmingham, Alabama, online. And they said, “If you haven’t been water baptized, that’s something you need to do because that’s when you proclaim it to the world, ‘This is my faith. This is what I believe.’”
So she drove in faith to Birmingham and got baptized.
“I went into the water one way, and I came out different. It was immediate. I’d already been forgiven by God, I didn’t get that forgiveness of myself until that moment,” she said.
Eden inspired her to continue her healing journey. So Quayle started to create music with other songwriters about her feelings and what happened in the past.
This resulted in her new album called “On the Edge: Forgiven.”
“And what shocked me the day that the album came out was how many women had been through something similar. You know, I think sometimes we feel like islands, like we’re the only ones. And that was really revealing,” the singer said.
“And I’ve always kind of looked at my music as like, Is it creating a positive impact? Forgiveness, that is such a powerful word. Because you only get forgiveness through faith.”
She says her “biggest lesson” from her experience is learning that “only good” will come out of the grief, betrayal and trauma.
Quayle also wrote a book about her story, “Why Do We Stay?” which released on April 30.
“My prayer is that my book and my story, through total dissection, can be a tool for both women and men to use to avoid making some of the mistakes I made, to give them their time back, and to show that healing, forgiveness, and redemption are all possible no matter where you are on your journey,” Quayle shared on Instagram in January.
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