1548: God Made Me and You Couldn’t Break Me, A Powerful Memoir of Survival with Denise Devroe

Robert Plank 0:01 God made me and you couldn't break me. It's a powerful and inspiring memoir by Denise Devroe. She's here now with us on the podcast, and she reflects on her journey through immense challenges and the strength she found in unwavering faith. She's a survivor, author and advocate for living a life of peace and strength through faith. And she has faced many hardships, including personal loss, difficult circumstances, but she has emerged stronger through her unwavering belief in God's guidance. And Her mission is to inspire others, just like you listening or watching this show, to find your path to resilience and peace and to always trust in God's plan. So we're going to find out the the secrets from the legend herself and about her book. God made me, and you couldn't break me. So Miss Denise Devroe, how are you today?

Denise Devroe 0:54 I am doing good today. Thank you for asking. I'm glad to hear it.

Robert Plank 0:57 It's important to have those pleasantries, right? Sometimes you see someone, you're like, hey, just helps have one little compliment or say one quick thing, and it feels good to get that delivered to you. So why not deliver it to others? And so having getting them out of the way, which is still important, what are you here to tell us today? What's your message?

Denise Devroe 1:16 My message is to let people know, like, if you're going through hardship in a relationship, whether it's a hardship, financial ship, or whatever you're going through in a relationship, what happens a lot. You can always look up to God and pray, and He will answer you and help you through your struggle. It may not be the time, at that time that you need the answer, but he'll get it to you sooner or later and make sure you're able to get out of any situation you're in and live happy and peaceful. And that's what I had to do. Okay?

Robert Plank 1:48 Well, I'm excited to dig into some of the those difficult times for you and what you've had to pray, but I had a discussion just earlier today about prayer and how sometimes people like misunderstand it right, as if I'm just, like, calling an Uber or placing an order at a restaurant, and then they say, Oh, but I prayed for this exact thing. I didn't get it right away. So there's more nuance to it, isn't it? So can you tell us maybe, like, what prayer is all about for you and what maybe we might misunderstand about it?

Denise Devroe 2:17 Yeah, for me, it's like, don't pray, like when something actually happens, you've got to stay faithful to God every day, you know every time. So when you're something's going good for you, stay prayed up. When something's bad, stay prayed up. Ask him what you need and want. You know, let him know what you're needing at the time. And like I said, he'll answer your prayers, but it may not be at that exact time, but he will, you know, when he feels it's time for you to have those prayers answered, he will get them delivered to you

Robert Plank 2:48 very nice. And you think about consistency, right? Like it's important to stay active and to eat good and to be consistent in your relationships. And if you went a month without eating healthy. Or if you had that friend that you went a month without talking to, well that's not really a friend and so, but it's, it's, that's one way of thinking about it. But if people take a month or longer without praying or without keeping this god relationship alive, Well no wonder you're frustrated and not where you want because you need to show up even on the hard days and on the easy days. And so as far as like you and your own prayer, Are you the kind of person, like, do you pray like, same time every day? Do you have a routine? What's that like?

Denise Devroe 3:29 It's like a routine for me. So in the mornings, when I wake up, I pray, and then at night, before I go to bed, I pray. And I've taught my kids and grandkids to do the same thing, so they do it as well. And I'm just, like I told everybody else, just don't do it when you need something to have, when something bad happens, you got to do it all the time, you know. So that's, that's how I feel, you know? Yeah, I've gotten over so I'm really faithful to God himself, because he has delivered me from terrible situations.

Robert Plank 3:59 And I'm curious about what sort of situations, because you put this in this book, and we all have our own difficulties, but it helps to hear about what others have gone through, right? We feel like we're not alone, and that Denise went through so much more than than I did, and if she can survive that, imagine what I can survive. So you tell me, what is this book all about, and what sorts of challenges have challenged you,

Denise Devroe 4:23 like my it's about me, about me and my ex husband. When we first met, things were going good, but, you know, didn't realize that he was the type of man that didn't one woman wasn't enough for him. So you know, he was always cheating and stuff. And when I first met him, I was not a fighter. I never was into fighting and stuff like that. But after I got with him, it was like I had to, because I was always getting jumped on by certain different women that I didn't know. He was involved with all the time. So that's one thing that I would have gone through financial difficulties with him, because he liked to shoot dice, you know, go to. To the hour spots and shoot craps all the time. And if he lost his money, I had to change my debit card and hide it from because he would come take my money out of my purse or debit card, and then I'd wake up the next morning and there would be no money in the account, you know, because he was shooting dice messing with this one woman he had kids with I'm driving down the main street in Lubbock one time, and her and her brother pull up next to me, and I can see them through the corner of my eye. And I get shot at three times. She busted out my back window, windshield, the side part where I was and then the front windshield busted out. So this was his, you know, side piece that he was messing with. I was the wife at the time, so I couldn't understand why she was shooting at me. You know, that was just kind of crazy to me. So I just like enough is enough, and going through that was bad, but the worst, worst part of my time was now having my granddaughter on Christmas Day was not bad at all. I loved that. The fact that I had her call my dad, let him know my granddaughter was born, and he was like, Okay, well, I get a call the next day saying, My father passed away. He passed away. I just talked to him on Christmas, and the next day after I found out he passed away, my ex husband's trying to come and take my car with him to go riding around. And he likes to do, you know, show out in the car like his. He's the one that paid for it, and I go out there to try to stop him. Of course, I had started drinking very heavily, so I did have some vodka in my hand. You know, I was born in the death of my father out there upset drinking, and he wouldn't give me the keys to my car. So when I tried to get out of the passenger side to go around the front. He literally hit me with the car. He put it in reverse, hit me the door, knocked me down, and he ran over my legs, and I hit the cement with my mouth and broke my two front teeth. And, you know, my son heard everything. He came out there and grabbed his dad and made him leave like you can't drive a car anymore. And it took me over a year to get my teeth corrected, you know, because you have to go through a lot of dental stuff to get that going, but that right there made me start saying that I have to get away from him. But it still was still bad for about another year or two after that, because he kept coming around.

Robert Plank 7:16 Geez, so so much pain and suffering and one single person, selfishness is the root cause, and it's not easily fixed or instantly fixed and so on that, on that journey of getting right, you learned a lot, and you develop this relationship with God. So, like, what was that like in that kind of painful path back to the light?

Denise Devroe 7:39 Yeah, no, I was, I would cry, you know, like, literally, like, pray for him to help get rid of my ex husband, like, keep him away from me, you know. And especially when I filed for divorce, you know, it got worse because they granted me spouse support. So he he had to pay the bills he left me with, and so that made him more enraged. So I had to kind of watch my back, because if I wasn't at home, or if I was at the store, he would try to jump me at the stores, or jump me at the house. Whenever he knew he could come in here, I had to take the keys from Him, knowing, not knowing, that he had made a copy. So I'm sleeping one night, and he still comes and jumps me in the middle of the night, you know, so stuff like that. I would pray for constantly, you know, I started praying real heavily after I got shot at and then especially after my dad had passed away, and that incident happened between me and him, and I made it a habit to pray every day regardless, not just for help to get out of the situation, but for help for my kids too, because they ain't they saw everything that was going on.

Robert Plank 8:38 Yeah, I can imagine how, oh, I can't imagine how unsafe you must have felt with just so many threats, not to mention that said, like your what your kids are experiencing, right? They're seeing all these sorts of things happen to you. But what's good is that you survived it, you made it. And is there anything that you think that you might have like told your younger self, or if you could get back there somehow. Is there anything that you might like, like, pass on as words of advice?

Denise Devroe 9:06 Yes, because I named my daughter, you know, and my son too. My son, you know, like he don't ever, you know, lay your hands on a woman. Um, that's not the right thing to do. And, you know, he's older now, and he's got a girlfriend, and he won't. He's like, I'll never put my hands on the female because he saw what happened to me, my daughter, you know, seeing what happened to me, she's like she didn't want to get involved with a man that started showing signs like her, her dad did, you know, at the time of being angry, start cheating and putting your hands on them a little bit at a time. And then after a while, it get worse. So I had to let them know, you know, kind of be careful. You know what you do with your relationships, because you don't want to go through what I went through, and I don't want them to go through what I went through. So helping making sure that they do right, it is a blessing for me to see that they've done good so far.

Robert Plank 9:57 So, oh yeah, seems like you've raised the. Right, and with these generational curses, it appears to me at least that they swing one of two ways, right? Either you continue it, and that might mean like you yourself are an abuser, or you partner up with an abuser, or you go the other way, and you say, hey, I can set some boundaries, and I can see the warning signs, the red flags, and if I see even a little bit of this bad behavior, I know that that's only the beginning, and it won't get better. And I might get trapped and hooked with the sunk cost and say, Oh, well, now I'm married. Now, now we have kids. Now I'll just, I'll stick it out, and they just, they keep taking more advantage of it, yes, and so, but if we hear this lesson, it might not stick, but we kind of live your story and read through your book, and we might get a kind of a better idea. And so you live through all this and like, what led you to putting this in the book form? Right? Because, like, we all have, like, a message, or we can pass things on, but putting it into a book that takes a lot of, like, hard work dedication. And so what was the inspiration for writing the book?

Denise Devroe 10:58 I had, you know, before I retired from my job, I had been thinking about writing a book, and since I retired back in June of 420, 24 I was like, I'm going to go ahead and and get the book written. But I didn't write it. Write it. I had it ghost written. So the publishing company I went with would call me once or twice a week, and I would tell my part that needed to be told at that time. Some parts were easier than others. Some I would cry on because it was like, bring me back into the moment, you know, like reliving the the that time all over again. But it was so much easier to have a ghost written, because I was able to tell them, you know, give them a story, like an hour a day of what I needed to tell them about my story, my book, and it worked out a lot better for me that way.

Robert Plank 11:43 And that's good to know that if someone, like someone has these excuses, so to speak, and they say, Oh, well, I don't have the time, or I don't have the skill, like, there's ghost writing available, where it's still you, you still have those raw materials, but then a team goes and fixes it up. And what's great about creating a book, no matter what your method is, is, there's always seems to be like the the self discovery, self expression, right? You said that you kind of dug up some old wounds, and even though you weren't like writing the exact words you told these stories. So was there any kind of like connecting the dots, or any any ahas that you had when you were telling your story to this ghost writer?

Denise Devroe 12:20 Yeah, yeah. I mean, and they would sympathize with me, because they knew when I would get real emotional. But then, after telling all the bad stuff, and then starting to go into the stuff of after, you know, I started surviving. And after, I was able to get him completely away from me and and me and the kids having a better life, you know, without their dad, you know, because it was probably a couple of years that they didn't talk to their dad because of that. But with the peace that we had and endured was so much better for us, you know, to live happier and help them with with what they were going through, you know. So I made sure that they were happy. We started taking vacations together, and I started doing stuff with them more and more and more, and they saw the fact that I was doing so much better, and they were proud of me.

Robert Plank 13:09 So that must feel really great. Yeah, and it's like, you turn the bad into a good. And so many people are worried about divorce and what it will lead to, but if it, if it gets you out of a bad situation, and it leads to all these way better things in long term than go for it. And so what's the the situation with dad now, as you get along, is he just completely gone? Is he? Is he worse? Is someone else's victim? What happened?

Denise Devroe 13:34 He's somebody else's problem now, because the same woman that shot at me is the woman he's with now. And so my son and my daughter finally, you know, like I said, it took them a while to start back talking to him, but I did let them know, regardless, that's your dad, you know, regardless. So they they do associate with him now, you know. And they've seen parts where he still does the same thing. He He leaves, he goes out, he gambles, then the woman's in there crying, you know, about she didn't sign up for this stuff. Well, you knew he was married when you're messing with him, you know. So what did you expect? You know, he was doing it to me, you know. And he told me a long time ago, before I even divorced, that he told that lady, I You think I'm going to be, you know, honest and faithful to you if I wasn't to my wife, and she still is with them to this day. So I'm like, that's that's her problem now, and I'm okay with it. So you know, if I see him, I'll just wave high and by and that's it. I don't care to have a conversation with him or anything. But my kids, they still associate with him, though.

Robert Plank 14:38 Okay, so, so it seems like, in a way, it worked out. And there's that saying, If someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. And so this has been like you made me think right in our conversation here, just about how the way that life goes on and we make these important decisions, and we make our mistakes and and we can, you know, we have a choice. Right? We have freedom, and it's not always easy, but sometimes we can get the help of our Creator, or go and help our friends and get educated. But I want to make sure that we focus on what's important to you. Miss Denise because we jumped around these topics, but I have to wonder, do you think there might be a missing conversation in our discussion, a missing question in our conversation that I should be asking you, I just don't know what to ask you.

Denise Devroe 15:25 Literally, like the a lot of people, as far as you know, like the book itself, they asked me about the book, you know, who are the How did I come up with that name? I did. It took me over a month and a half to think of the name, but I went to sleep one night, and I was thinking so hard about it. It just came to me while I was sleeping, and I had to wake up and literally write it down so I wouldn't forget it. I'm like, boy, this, this book, the name of the book, just came to me so, so easily in my sleep. But, yeah, that's, that's bad. And then it the cover itself. You know, it took me a long time to find the type of cover I wanted for it. So I just wanted something that was eye catching, that will catch people's attention, you know. And I would love for people to read it and see that there is light after the darkness, you know, there's hope, don't, you know, take it upon yourself to be selfish and and continue to stay because you still have kids involved, you know, and they they can take a bad part of being like that, because my son could have been the type of man that would do the same thing as Daddy did, but he decided upon himself. He wasn't going to do that, and I'm so glad. But yeah, there's even if it helps one person, you know, to me, I'm okay with that. I just want to be able to give out something to these people, to learn and listen like, hey, there's light after the darkness, and you can be happy all over again, and it can happen well,

Robert Plank 16:51 that's beautiful, and that's wonderful, and it's easy as a crutch to give up or have the low self esteem and say, Oh well, it Doesn't matter what I do, because it's just about me. What? When others are depending on you, especially your children, it's like, well, you have to sometimes step it up. And so you say that the the name of the book is, God, make me, and you couldn't break me. And we can go to Denise devro.com, that's d, e, v, r, O, e.com, to look at this cover, and there's like, a tear coming down, and it hits upon there's the ripple effect. In my own interpretation of that as, like, the the idea of the ripple effect is you, you help so many people that you don't even know what, in which ways you're helping. But you tell me, like, what's what should we be interpreting from this cover with, like, the teardrop coming down and the ripple going out?

Denise Devroe 17:40 Yeah, yeah. The teardrop coming down is the pain that you felt, you know, the crying and stuff, and the praying to God. And the ripple effect is him seeing you through everything you know, like the happiness, the light you know, the the you know, the presence of being happy all over again is what that ripple effect is for you, your kids, your family, you know. So especially family too, they see you go through stuff like that. So that's the presence of the ripple effect is for the happiness and God itself. You know that God helps out. So I just don't want anybody to think that, Oh, I'm going to start praying right now and see if he answered. No, you. It's gotta be something that's in your heart. You gotta have faith in Him and believe in Him, and He will answer you sooner or later.

Robert Plank 18:31 So have discipline and consistency and exactly that, that grace, which means that I'm given things by God, and I don't even know what they are, and I don't I'm not deserving of them, but they're just given to me to help me out, and then it's up to me to either squander that gift or to help others and bring happiness to other people. And so if we're stuck in our own lives or we just need that extra help, and we say, well, you know, is there a great book out there that I should read and study from Well, here it is, right. It's by Denise de row. It's called, God made me and you couldn't break me. It's this powerful and inspiring memoir. It's got heartfelt stories of struggle, growth and healing, and it serves as this reminder that even in the darkest moments, Faith can light the way, and nothing can break the spirit that God has shaped. It's a memoir for anyone who has faced hardship, if you're looking for inspiration or you're looking to find strength in the face of life's challenges, because we all have those challenges and those problems, and it helps to read a book such as this excellent memoir written by Denise to know that we're not alone and that there are tools available. And it begins with our relationship and our faith with God and to show up every day. Because if we want God to show up for us every day, then we can't just be that fair weather friend. And so the book is, God made me, and you couldn't break me. And then the website is Denise Devroe.com D, E. N, i, s, E, D, E, v, r, O, e.com, you can click around and discover all about the book. You can contact Denise, but as we're checking out that website and that book, it's time for the scary part of the podcast. Missed Denise, where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking about a fun or interesting quote or lesson that has served you. So what comes to mind as far as a fun or interesting quote or lesson?

Denise Devroe 20:26 Okay, let's see interesting lesson. Oh, to me, the lesson itself was that the happiness that I endure, your kids, your grandkids, enjoying life and and making sure that they're okay, and that's my main priority, is my kids and my grandkids so and I love it. Oh, and one more thing, I do have my mother living with me, and everybody tells me that's a blessing, you know, because a lot of people's mothers aren't around anymore, and I always make sure she's happy and has what she needs as well.

Robert Plank 21:01 So very good, very thoughtful. It helps to nurture these relationships and to feel good and to just hear about, you know what? What has been transformed from this terrible situation is something now is helping others. So check out this book, God made me, and you couldn't break me by Denise Devroe. We can go to DeniseDevroe.com or search. God made me and you couldn't break me on Amazon. Check it out. Read it. You'll love it. You'll feel good. You'll learn some lessons along the way. And thank you very much. Miss Denise Devroe for showing up, stopping by and just getting us on a enlightened path. Thank you very much.

Denise Devroe 21:38 Oh, you're so welcome. It was great being on the show with you. Thank you for having me. Thank.