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Shaking Up Shalom (and Waking to Reality) (Part 1-Wendy)
89 Plays1 year ago
This episode is the first of a 2 part series in which Chris & Wendy revisit another season of curveballs, derailments, and tilt-a-whirls from the early days of their marriage. (Yep, the metaphorical mashups keep multiplying!) In Part 1, Wendy tells the story of being a young mother of two, facing unexpected news from Chris, and what it stirred up in her. Wendy also shares one of the pivotal stories from her life that this turn of events landed on for her.
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Transcript
Introduction to Surviving Saturday
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
00:00:23
Speaker
That Sunday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel.
Meet the Hosts: Wendy and Chris Osborne
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
00:00:51
Speaker
Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new.
Broadcasting from a Special Location
00:01:07
Speaker
Hey there, and we're so glad to be with you for another episode of the Surviving Saturday podcast. We are still coming to you from Bar Harbor, Maine.
00:01:20
Speaker
And we are on our 30th anniversary trip and having fun doing kind of a retrospective, remembering things that have gone on over the years and ways that God showed up, things we've learned. But we've been revisiting some of the Saturday moments that we faced really, that we encountered in our marriage.
The Power of Revisiting Painful Experiences
00:01:41
Speaker
And Wendy, once you tell folks kind of, why are we doing that? What's our hope as we go through some of these Saturday stories and talk about how we survived them?
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. So the reason we're going to go back through some of these painful, desert time stories
00:02:00
Speaker
is because it helps us, and hopefully it will help you, to see the things we were turning to to make life work instead of Jesus. And so we're gonna take two episodes here where each share our perspective of a heart event, and we're gonna unpack the ways that we each responded and what led to that response. And now looking back years later,
00:02:26
Speaker
we can see ways that Jesus was inviting us to break some strongholds we have, meaning get rid of some coping strategies for how to make life work our end. Yeah, we should mention that we're able to dive back in and sort of connect some of these dots. I mean, really, you have to have the perspective of being past it, of time having passed, of having learned different lessons or been through different things.
00:02:56
Speaker
at the time, everything we're going to tell you about what happened in this particular Saturday situation, none of it was really apparent to us at the time. We could not have the meta-level analysis. No, that's taking a lot of work to get there. Yeah, and the hope is by illustrating that it can be something that hopefully gives people hope and a way of saying they're cleared
00:03:19
Speaker
more going on than we can see. For circumstance, God's always working something, but in the middle of it just feels like my leg is on fire, where this is burning, I've lost my leg, whatever. You're trying to survive. Feels really hopeless. Yeah, exactly. So I think you were going through for a particular Saturday season. It was quite a Saturday season for us, I think. And you were going to maybe start off talking about a time when I had a very unexpected job lost.
Facing Job Loss: Financial and Emotional Impact
00:03:47
Speaker
as we are brand new parents and a lot of things going on. So why don't you start with that, I guess. Yeah. So here's the story from my own perspective. Um, this was six or seven years into our marriage and our second child was a newborn. I'm guessing a month-ish old. And so I remember you coming home from work, Christ made relatives visiting because we had this new baby.
00:04:16
Speaker
And you pulled me aside and said, can I talk to you in private? It's really important. And I could tell there was this sense of urgency in your voice.
00:04:25
Speaker
So we stepped into our laundry room, and I could already read the level of stress in your body, and we both knew that it would be too much to ask these relatives to bear, that it would be unfair to their own tendencies and proclivities toward anxiety to share this with them, yeah.
00:04:49
Speaker
so you let me know that you had lost your job that day and My heart kind of stopped, but I didn't pay any attention to that I started racing and I was highly aware that I had stopped officially working Just a few weeks prior like you just had your cave our second job. I
00:05:16
Speaker
Yes. And so all sources of income that I had had were done. And so we were thoroughly dependent on you. And it was pretty scary.
A New Calling? Ministry and Emotional Support
00:05:31
Speaker
So, um, I remember you saying, Hey, it's going to be okay. I've already stopped by the seminary. Um, and I've gotten an application and I think this might be God's door to inviting me into full-time vocational ministry. So my stomach dropped as I heard you talk.
00:05:57
Speaker
but my sense of caretaking and compliance took over.
00:06:04
Speaker
And I remember I just smiled at you there in the laundry room and I was, I said, yeah, okay, yeah, great, sure. At the time I was living, not very embodied, but I was living very much out of my head, out of my cognitive resources. I didn't have any authentic sense of hope. I didn't even really with whether I felt hope less,
00:06:35
Speaker
I was just willing to be naively enthusiastic because this had been my instinct for a long time in life. I didn't take time to process what you were telling me. I just went straight into my natural mode of not paying enough attention to my feelings or needs, but making sure that you were okay, that you weren't afraid of the job loss, that you weren't in pain, that
00:07:02
Speaker
I could hold everything and let you know, oh great, this is great. Now, that's one thread of the story. The other important part is that you had been fired by an old friend.
00:07:18
Speaker
And that in itself led not just to shock that you hadn't seen it coming, but an incredible awkwardness in figuring out how to pick up the pieces after the fact and knowing how to move forward. So at the time we were in church with this friend, you were an officer, I think, in the church already, and we were both deeply
00:07:47
Speaker
active in the church in any case. And so we had to see this person every weekend. Now the time of year,
Fired by a Friend: Social and Holiday Stress
00:07:56
Speaker
it's important to mention, was right around the holidays. I think this was early to mid-December.
00:08:03
Speaker
And we had no known source of income. We had a new baby and a three-year-old. And we had to engage this person essentially in a meet and greet every weekend. How are you? And I wanted to scream terrified.
00:08:23
Speaker
But I would say, we're good, we're good with our new baby.
Fear and Anger: Emotional Masking
00:08:27
Speaker
And again, just living very detached. So moving on from there, I remember that you verbalized forgiveness to this person pretty quickly. And you told him you wanted to stay friends. I was so jolted and super confused by what had happened.
00:08:48
Speaker
And I was over here as a stay-at-home mom, really scared for our future. As our relatives found out what was happening, their fear revved my fear up even more. And so to survive, I covered all those multiple emotions with an impenetrable anger. And I was mad as heck. Now,
00:09:17
Speaker
Some level of anger is an appropriate response to events that feel us. Well, yeah. So I want to be clear there. But my anger went into super protection mode. I wanted to fight to keep you, me, our family safe and provided for. So in this
00:09:41
Speaker
situation, I read you as being passive. And so I took things in my own hands and used anger as my fuel.
Demanding Answers: Confrontation and Protection
00:09:51
Speaker
And I picked up a phone and I called your friend to ask what had happened. I forgot he did that. It was not one of my final moments. Not because I called, but because I called with anger and demandingness.
00:10:11
Speaker
Now, he was not very reassuring or apologetic. Part of that could have been the way I was asking the questions. I see that. Part of that could have been that he didn't quite know what to do with my questions. But I hung up the phone, a mixture of deeply sad and still very angry. The confusion hadn't dissipated at all.
00:10:41
Speaker
So I told you what happened, and I remember you being confused and surprised and also a little bit embarrassed. So that, in my experience, motivated you to find a way to fix the friendship even more.
00:10:59
Speaker
So I'll pause right there before I give any more of my own thoughts about what exactly led me to handle the situation this way. But I'm wondering what you're thinking as I talk. Gosh, yeah, I'm remembering aspects of that story. And when I tell it from my perspective, I'll kind of walk through it. But I'm struck by
00:11:29
Speaker
Um, just as we look back, I mean, just looking at you at basically your, you're 30 years old at this point, um, a mom of two now, and you have just stepped away from your career. Can you step back into sort of, uh, get in touch with what, what did that feel like of, um, you know, you were fully dependent on what I could do.
Fear and Career: Personal Reflection
00:11:53
Speaker
And here I come very unexpectedly saying,
00:11:56
Speaker
I've got to find a new place to work. They didn't say get out right away, I didn't have only two weeks. But it was holidays, it was a tough time to find a new job.
00:12:05
Speaker
But can you get back in touch with what your body was feeling and what it felt like at that point? Oh, I was petrified. And, you know, we have to remember that what we shared in the last episode was only a couple years old at this point, where we had conceived our first child, your mother was diagnosed with cancer, a struggle with problems that came out,
00:12:33
Speaker
then you had major surgery followed by radiation. And so there were so many things swirling that already led me to think the people of my life would prove unreliable. And so this landed there.
00:12:49
Speaker
And I was scared to death. I felt betrayed from so many angles. And that included from God. And I remember sitting on our bed, I think I was reading a Christianity Today article, and it was
00:13:10
Speaker
giving a survey of the lives of many of the men we look to in Scripture as our heroes. And it talked about Jonah and Moses and Elijah and others who had reached a point of desperation such that they said to God, if this is all there is, kill me now. Oh, well.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I just remember getting in touch with a darkness of, is life ever going to feel safe to me? I can feel tears coming really close right now as I think back.
00:13:51
Speaker
And I also realized I was not alone with those feelings, that biblical characters that I had looked up to and drawn strength from had been in that very place. And was that like a new sort of revelation and a new... It was brand new because I've mentioned before that part of my story is that if I suffer, it's somehow my fault.
00:14:18
Speaker
that the Christian life should show Jesus off very well, sort of this victorious Christianity. And I can't say that a singular person ever said that to me, but my body believed that if Jesus was my rescuer, that he would be very protective. Okay. Okay. And so what were you thinking then? Because you were right, I did come in and say,
00:14:49
Speaker
Hey, one of the things I did was on the way home literally from getting this news I stopped off at we have a seminary near where we live here in Charlotte and I'll get more context on why I did that later. But how did that strike you when I said hey, here's what might be happening I might be being called out of law into the ministry anyway How did that land?
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think in the moment I gave myself time to notice what happened in me. I went straight into this instinct of I'll make it okay. Okay. And so I said, oh, sure, sure. And I wanted to believe that that was maybe the source of provision. And I didn't stop to contend with just how scary the whole thing felt.
00:15:41
Speaker
And as you've kind of processed back through, thinking back on that story, can you say, because I know you couldn't have made this connection then, but are there times in your past before that where you had felt that a similar sense of that sort of overwhelm, powerlessness, and your job is to just deal with it, get through it, push through? Yeah, so the first story of that story that comes to mind
00:16:11
Speaker
would have been when I was eight or nine years old.
00:16:16
Speaker
And I was lucky enough to have a dad who built two of the houses that I grew up in. Building and construction were not his career, but he was very gifted in that. And so at this point, we were building our second home and the one that my parents would stay in until you and I were married.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so we rented a house in a completely different part of town that at the time was not considered very posh. It was a little edgy, but it was what we could afford to rent while my dad was building our house.
Childhood Memories and Patterns of Compliance
00:17:03
Speaker
And so I was already a little bit scared of what this new neighborhood might bring. But we went in to look at the house right before we moved in. And, you know, in my memory, looking back,
00:17:19
Speaker
the house, it was definitely very sparse, like we just needed a place to live as a family of five. And the floors were concrete, the walls were white, sort of that stucco look, and it was just bare bones.
00:17:35
Speaker
And so my parent showed me the room that would be my bedroom. And it was right inside the front door. You took an immediate left and it bordered the front porch. And we got in the room and we were looking. And I remember it had like this musty smell, the whole house did. It was just an old house.
00:17:57
Speaker
And so one of my parents said, one thing to know about this room, Wendy, is that the last owner died in here. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like, I've heard of that, like, diagonhouse.com that now you can see, you know, if anybody's died in your house when you look there. Oh my gosh. But this was our version of that. And so they said, you know, the last owner died in this room, we hope it's not haunted.
00:18:25
Speaker
Now, I'm sure that they were just intending to have fun.
00:18:32
Speaker
but I was a little girl, eight or nine, with a highly sensitive spirit. And I remember being so scared. And I also knew I couldn't say that I was scared because nobody quite knew what to do with my emotions. I felt things deeply and the way that they handled it,
00:19:02
Speaker
was to confuse it with humor. Okay. And so what happened is I was petrified to be in that room when it got dark. And I don't think I ever spent the night in the room because I couldn't stop thinking about ghosts being in the room with me, like thinking haunted. And so my parents said, well, just go sleep in your brother's room.
00:19:30
Speaker
And so that's what I did for the next year and a half, two years while we were there. My dad had his own job, so the building of the house would stop fast. So I think we were in that house, the rental, a year and a half or two. And so I just slept elsewhere.
00:19:48
Speaker
Is that the one we went and found when we were home in Albany? We did. Probably a few years back for a reunion or something. And we went and found kind of where it was. And I think the house is gone, but the fence that bordered my best friend's house, because I made friends with the girl next door, the stone fence is still there. And that was really fun to see. Yeah. But I'm struck by, as you tell that story, you're at a really vulnerable age. You're eight, you're nine.
00:20:15
Speaker
What's a kid's conception of themselves and the world around them? Like developmentally, what's going on for an eight or nine year old at that point?
00:20:24
Speaker
Well, I mean, I really wanted to please the adults in my life. Like I had learned that being a good kid and being compliant made the adults in my life pleased with me. And that made life go much smoother. And that's pretty typical for eight and 10 year olds just to be very compliant.
00:20:50
Speaker
Okay, it's at about 11 they start in waiting and being able to think of themselves apart from the family. But at this point, I really need my family to be pleased with me. Sure. And so instead what you're giving you instead of welcome into this new phase of life and phase of being a kid, they're saying, kind of almost having fun, like, Oh, this scary ha ha ha somebody died there.
00:21:18
Speaker
That's kind of got an impact on your on your little body your system. Oh my little body like I can still feel the knots in my stomach and Like the holding of my breath and those are two things that happen now When I get into stressful situations if I'll tune into my body, I feel those Now knowing more now
00:21:44
Speaker
My parents both had dealt with very scary family situations when they were young. And I think they didn't know what to do with fear. So they also had found ways to cope. And a lot of it was through minimization and humor. But I didn't have the cognitive capabilities to minimize that. This was
00:22:10
Speaker
a story that they told me that felt very real, like perhaps it is haunted. And my brother didn't want me in his room. I mean, it was all a little sister there. But I was so scared that that led to it. Now, I didn't think about it. For years and years later, no one suggested we split trains.
00:22:30
Speaker
Because I really could have thought that was fun. When he's four years older, he might be like, hey, the age of goat westerns. Right, exactly, exactly.
00:22:43
Speaker
And so I just learned to acquiesce, to conform, and to be okay. So I didn't continue to tell anyone I was scared. I just made, and I just went and slept in the other room and just figured out how to be okay. And my body just stayed, I think, a lot of times in knots.
00:23:08
Speaker
So when this job loss things happen, you're a young mom of your own kids.
Boldness in Confrontation: A Complex Reflection
00:23:15
Speaker
It sounds like you're saying that was, it was natural for you to be knotted up, to be sort of tied up and to, you know, you just, this is just another challenge you have to just suck it up and face. Yes. And so there's something kind of,
00:23:35
Speaker
redemptive in a way that as I look at it now, I don't think I thought it at the time, but the fact that you pick up the phone and call the
00:23:45
Speaker
friend of mine who was the partner in the firm and spoke to it. There's something kind of bold and defiant in that in a kind of good way. Yes. And so I will say I've come to see God planted a tenacity in me at birth. And so I've sort of lived both in the place of
00:24:07
Speaker
just make do to keep everyone happy and life is up to me. So I've kind of been in both of those places, but my tenacity in the story of the job loss looked like me being able to pick up the phone and speak to how the experience was for me. Now, I didn't do it well. I didn't do it with maturity. I was way too angry.
00:24:31
Speaker
and contemptuous but it was movement forward as compared to when I was young and felt and really didn't have a lot of choice.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, it strikes me and partly because I know some of your other stories that I'm sure we'll share at some point in time about times of fear where you were kind of rendered mute. Yes. You didn't speak and you were haunted sort of by this silence. Yeah. And so here where you actually vocalized, you know, disappointment, frustration, you asked questions and you asked, as we look back on it, you asked questions that I wasn't really asking and probably should have been.
00:25:12
Speaker
Um, you, you, I think part of my recollection and we'll get to it in the next episode was I wasn't letting myself feel the weight of what was going on and the way it all played out.
00:25:26
Speaker
And I almost had to kind of learn from you, wait a minute. There's a trail I expect to this. There's a sadness to this that I wanted to move and mow the past and not give any time for. And we'll talk about that in the last story. But I love that you had integrity and you connected with feeling. You were angry on my behalf. I was angry on your behalf.
00:25:55
Speaker
And there was a holiness in that. I think there was. Again, not in how we played it out and not in how it was communicated, but the fierceness that alarm and use something is wrong. And at this point in my life, I'm actually going to say something about it. There's something kind of beautiful and preemptive.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was desperate for people to join me in the reality of what was happening. And that's just a theme throughout my life of will other people see what's actually happening and do something? Because otherwise I'm left with life is up to me.
Counselor's Perspective: Naming Reality in Therapy
00:26:36
Speaker
I've got to make do to make it work. What's intriguing to connect that to, um,
00:26:43
Speaker
eventually your career path becoming a counselor because would you say a lot of what you do sometimes in counseling relationships is you are seeing dynamics and naming things that maybe people aren't naming because you're coming in from the outside, because you have different perspective, but you kind of have to have that courage to be somebody who names things.
00:27:04
Speaker
in a way that enables people, invites people to deal with their feelings. We have so many barriers to naming reality. One is, as a Christian, should my life really be that bad?
00:27:17
Speaker
Another is, if I'm a Christian and life really is that bad, how does that represent Jesus as if we're responsible for saving his reputation? Um, sometimes we're ashamed of what's happening in life and we don't want to share. Sometimes we have stories where we haven't been able to feel or to speak.
00:27:38
Speaker
And so we don't know how to do that now. So yeah, the role that I often play is very gently pulling back the veil and helping people see what's actually happening because Jesus works in reality.
00:27:57
Speaker
in what's going on. He doesn't work in fiction and in pretend and denial. He's on the scene live. And so to see him, we've got to actually see what's truly happening in life.
00:28:10
Speaker
Well, that sounds like something you were saying when we were on a walk earlier today and we were talking about even just looking at present day challenges. If you get the sense that I'm not engaged with reality and I'm sort of either checked out or in denial, that makes it harder for you to engage. 150%.
00:28:31
Speaker
Because it sounds like it takes you back to that place of, dang it, I've got to be the strong one. I've got to be the person. I've got to take over here. And then it becomes very disrespectful of you and your dignity where there are places that
00:28:48
Speaker
You could live more if you really are, but I collude with your denial, not just taking over and saying, fine, I'll get things done. I've been calling you out of that. Yeah. So kind of wrapping this episode, we're going to come back to it from our perspective in a little bit here.
Embracing Reality: Lessons from Challenges
00:29:11
Speaker
I love hearing that invitation to, you know, and Jesus was like this. He named reality. He named what was she saying. Like when he counted the woman at the well, he's like, well, no, you can't go get your husband because the man you're with, you're not married to, and you've had others. He names reality, but not in a shaming way and not in a way that crushes her. But he's like, well, let's be in the realm of reality. Let's don't, you know, be happy, clap in denial.
00:29:41
Speaker
But then let's embrace that reality. And Paul talks about that. You know, we've known shipwrecks. We've known betrayers. We've known enemies coming after us. To the point that we wanted to die. Yeah, we despaired Nazan to death. The Salts have so many elements of let's name what's not going well and how we feel about it. I remember that being an invitation for me to connect with my heart. And part of the thing we can underscore, too, is it's hard for two people.
00:30:11
Speaker
who have challenges in connecting to reality, naming what's going on without either having a huge big overreaction or being in denial. You know, that's where the journey of marriage is two people learning to understand that. Well, that's a good place to pause on this story and we'll be back with the next episode. See you again. Bye.
Episode Sponsor: Nurture Counseling PLLC
00:30:35
Speaker
The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:31:02
Speaker
and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net