November 19. Bill McCartney. When Bill was hired as head coach for the University of Colorado’s Colorado Buffalos, he said, “I promise you we will have a program built on integrity, honesty, and character.”
That’s how Bill ran his whole life. As a coach, he won ninety-three games, three Big Eight championships, and a national championship.
In 1990. Bill founded Promise Keepers— one of the biggest movements of God in history. In 1997, more than a million men assembled to take a public stand for Christ. By 2020, Promise Keepers has influenced seven-million men. And it is still helping men “fulfill their destinies as godly husbands, fathers, and leaders.”
On this date in 1994, Bill resigned as Colorado University’s Buffalos head coach. Here’s what happened.
Climbing the ladder of success only works if there’s room for your family on the way up.
In 1994, at the pinnacle of his coaching career, Bill had an undefeated football team, a monumental men’s ministry, and a marriage scarcely fastened to reality. His next critical play was as a husband and father.
As if running the football program at the University of Colorado and taking the team to new heights in victory weren’t enough, Bill started an international men’s ministry, Promise Keepers.
And at Promise Keepers events, tens of thousands of men gathered to be encouraged, to become better husbands, fathers, and men of God. It became the largest men’s event of its kind in America.
Life’s back seat, a place to which Bill’s wife Lyndi had grown accustomed, was taking a toll on her emotionally and physically. Battling an eating disorder, she lost eighty pounds, rarely came out of her bedroom, and fought suicidal thoughts. “I just felt like I was getting smaller and smaller.”
Bill, unaware of his wife’s trauma, failed to practice at home what he had been teaching at those stadiums full of men. Lyndi said he was like a plumber. “A plumber never fixes anything at home,” she said. “He’s always out fixing everybody else’s plumbing.… I felt like God was the only one I could trust.”
But on most Sundays, Bill and Lyndi sat in their customary seats at their home church and worshiped together. This particular Sunday, a guest preacher stood in the pulpit.
He had a message that he said he considered the most important lesson he had learned in all his years of preaching. “Do you want to know whether a man has character or not? All you have to do is look at his wife’s countenance, and everything that he’s invested or withheld will be in her face.”
“She was sitting right next to me,” Bill said. “I turned and looked at my wife, and I didn’t see splendor, I saw torment. I didn’t see contentment, I saw anguish, and I tried to defend myself to myself, but I couldn’t. That’s really the reason I stepped out of coaching. I realized that before God I was a man without character.”
“Escorting my wounded wife out to the church parking lot, I began to pray about the timing of my resignation from the University of Colorado.”
On November 19, 1994, Bill called a news conference, and with Lyndi at his side, he announced his retirement from coaching to spend more time with his wife and family.
In that brave moment, their healing began.
“What a real man does is he lays down his life for his wife and that enables her to blossom and become everything she could be,” Bill said. “Whenever a man takes time to really listen and serve his wife, she blooms like a flower. I didn’t always understand that.”
“For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:23–25 NIV).
If life slaps you in the face, how will you respond? Ignore it, or change? Climbing the ladder of success only works if there’s room for your family on the way up.
Morley, Patrick. “The Next Christian Men’s Movement.” Christianity Today. Posted on September 15, 2000. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/september4/6.84.html.
Lanferman, John. “Marriage Problems? Biblical Marriage (Part 1).” Posted March 7, 2011. http://johnlanferman.blogspot.com/2011/03/marriage-problems-biblical-marriage.html.
Goodstein, Laurie. “A Marriage Gone Bad Struggles for Redemption.” New York Times, October 29. 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/29/us/a-marriage-gone-bad-struggles-for-redemption.html.
Story read by: Chuck Stecker
Story written by: Shelli Mandeville, https://worthy.life/