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Introducing... The "Surviving Saturday" Podcast!
156 Plays1 year ago
WARNING: This podcast is NOT for you if all you do is "win win win no matter what," or you are just "slaying" and "slapping" and "living your best life" every day.
Nope. It's for anyone who has encountered super-hard seasons in life. Where you or those you love are struggling or hurting in ways you never dreamed might happen. (Or in ways that you actually dreaded and may even have prayed wouldn't happen.) Maybe you've had a relationship with God at some point, but right now He feels distant, or cruel, or you're not even sure He's real.
Moments of doubt, despair, and disappointment can feel overwhelming. They can cause us to rage, or to go numb; to work harder to try fix it all, or to collapse in exhaustion; to clarify and commit to our deepest desires, or to abandon them in disillusionment.
But maybe, just maybe, these times can also be a proving ground of sorts. What if it's true, as singer/songwriter David Wilcox once sang, "all the roots grow deeper when it's dry"? What if coming to the end of ourselves and our own efforts to manage life isn't an end at all, but a beginning of an altogether different kind?
In this new podcast, licensed mental health counselor Wendy Osborn and her husband Chris share from their 30+ years of marriage what it has looked like to navigate those dark, lonely, and overwhelming seasons we experience as individuals, couples, and families. We'll draw encouragement from remembering what things looked like for Jesus' closest friends and family on the between his death on Friday and His resurrection on Sunday--when Hope sprang back to life and He changed everything about how we might know and relate to a God tenaciously committed to our good.
Brought to you by Nurture Counseling, a counseling, teaching, and training center committed to helping families flourish, one story at a time.
Special thanks to BIll Mallonee for the licensing rights to one of our favorite tunes about relational trainwrecks, and the road back to forgiveness, redemption, and renewal of hope. You can find this tune and more of his music at https://www.billmalloneemusic.com/ or on the Bandcamp app.
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Transcript
Introduction to Surviving Saturday
00:00:04
Speaker
Hey there folks, this is Chris Osborne and I'm super excited to welcome you to the inaugural episode of the Surviving Saturday podcast. This is a dream that when he's had for a while to be able to bring content in a different format to clients, friends, supporters, people who've been with us on our own journey and also who we consider part of the nurture counseling family. In this episode, it's just introducing what the podcast is going to be about.
00:00:29
Speaker
the kinds of topics we're going to be addressing and why we don't lead to start a podcast now. It's not like there aren't any already out there. So we look forward to having you with us and we're grateful for any time that you choose to spend listening or otherwise engaging in our teaching training and other offerings that we have designed to help folks flourish as we pull on our stories and find nurture and healing from God in the process. Enjoy.
Wendy's Experience with Clients
00:00:57
Speaker
Hi, I'm Wendy Osborne, a counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I am her husband, Chris, and we are so excited to welcome you to the Surviving Saturday Podcast. Wendy, why don't you tell folks why a podcast now and how we come up with the Surviving Saturday concept.
00:01:15
Speaker
Okay, so I am a licensed counselor who works with children as young as three up to an indefinite age and in my office pretty much every day of the week I have people who've been Christians most of their lives if not their whole lives come in and just be they come in weighed down
00:01:44
Speaker
by the confusion over how hard life is and how long they've walked with Jesus. And they're just really despondent and confused. What kind of challenges are they facing? What are you hearing them talk about? So a lot of people are dealing with kids who are anxious, with kids who are having trouble navigating the social requirements of life and regulating their emotions.
00:02:13
Speaker
people who are navigating deep disappointment either alone or in the context of marriage or parenting or dealing with aging parents. What kind of things do you hear them saying with regard to faith or how that impacts how they're dealing with these challenges?
00:02:29
Speaker
Well, they say I'm praying about it and I've been praying about this for a long time, but it seems like God is largely silent. So it's one thing that I hear a lot. Um, or I will have people say, I know the right answer to that question. And they're meaning that they have a square, a scripture or multiple scriptures that they're ready to quote of how they should be dealing with a certain scenario. But yet they're left feeling deeply disappointed and afraid.
Personal Connection and Finding Hope
00:02:55
Speaker
that life isn't going to get any better. And so they're confused about who God is in the moment.
00:03:01
Speaker
And then what does that confusion and frustration look like for them? What kinds of things do they go to to try to deal with it? Well, a lot of times people come in feeling really guilty and really ashamed that they don't know what to do with God during an ongoing dark season of life. And so they are looking for strategies. They're looking for books. They're looking for sermons.
00:03:26
Speaker
they're looking for something that will tell their left brain a better way to think about things so that finally they can be the Christian they believe they're supposed to be. So I guess I'm curious then, it sounds like this work resonates with you deeply. What drew you in? What makes you excited about being able to sit with people and give them hope in these kinds of struggles? How can you relate to it?
00:03:50
Speaker
Well, I think for a couple of reasons. One is I get a lot of similar questions, some of what I've mentioned, um, every single week in my office. And so I thought that there were probably a lot of other people who have similar questions and this might be a good way to reach other people that might not otherwise come into my counseling office.
Chris's Journey from Law to Counseling
00:04:11
Speaker
Um, and I think the other is it just keeps me in a place of reflecting on the ways that I need Jesus
00:04:20
Speaker
the ways that it's hard to find him, the ways that he shows up when I least expect him, the ways that life has set me up to want to trust him with my mind in ways that my body has not been able to as easily because of situations I've lived through. Now, this might be confusing to people out there who are listening, but you're the counselor. I thought that means you kind of have it all together and you're the answer person.
00:04:46
Speaker
since you've lived with me for 30 years, you know, that's not true. That's right. Well, we both know that's true. And that's one of the things that we have hoped for about this podcast is to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit so you can hear more about sort of where we've come from and what we've been through that's drawn us into this work. And quite frankly, it's work that I'm transitioning into. I've been a practicing lawyer for over 28 years and I'm in the process of getting
Impact of Shame and Isolation
00:05:11
Speaker
a counseling degree so I can come join winning this work.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yes. And the reason for that is because it's, you know, in counseling rooms and in marriage retreats and conferences are the places where I think we've been impacted, where we've been at that kind of proverbial end of the rope or wondering, why is this happening? Why is this so hard? And where we've been met with some real hope and encouragement and insight. But man, it's been a process. I mean, you know,
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, for me, and I find for a lot of the clients I sit with, there is a way that evil wraps people in shame when life is hard. And it's as if we feel that we must be doing something wrong to be putting ourselves in the place of so much suffering. And it can make it really painful to reach out to other people. It can make it even intimidating to reach out to God, honestly.
00:06:07
Speaker
because I think that there is this implicit belief that a lot of us hold that if we're suffering, we must be doing something wrong. And if we were the right kind of Christian, we wouldn't. Now, we know from scripture, without even taking a deep dive, that that's not true. But that's often how we navigate life, particularly in our middle-class white Western world, that the goal is to try to circumvent suffering in any way that we can.
00:06:33
Speaker
I think that can be where it's very difficult to separate out between what does the Bible tell us, what does the Christian story tell us about being set free from shame and given a righteousness that we couldn't get on our own and fully redeemed. And yet there's this westernized culture of churchianity, some people call it urgent of like,
00:06:56
Speaker
Yep, you must not be doing it right if it's not working out for you, if you're not getting all the rewards and blessings or things are going smoothly. And I think that was difficult for us at many places in time. Can you say a little bit more about just how does evil use shame as a way of either keeping us small and isolated or disconnected from others? And why is that important?
Healing Through Sharing Stories
00:07:19
Speaker
Well, I mean, oftentimes I'll have people come in and they'll say, I've never told anyone the sum total of this. And they'll say things like, doesn't my life sound like a Jerry Springer show? And I'll say, no, it just sounds like you're human.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah. And it sounds like you're fully aware of the things that are going on. But we feel the need to pull away often and to hide, just like Adam and Eve in Genesis, when we feel that disruption in the, the peace that we have with how life's going, with ourselves, with God, with others, we want to pull away and hide. And so that's really evidence of shame when I don't want to bring you in and let you see that I'm suffering.
00:08:02
Speaker
because I'm so afraid that that is a statement about what is true of me. Yeah. And then shame sort of has that way of metastasizing and multiplying on itself because in my case, like sometimes it would cause me to do things or reach out to certain things for comfort and relief that would cause me more shame and be like, well, I can't let people know now I'm that person doing that, having that particular struggle.
00:08:25
Speaker
And so I get further isolated and I get further disconnected and evil is just sitting there cheering like this is great. I want to, you know, I love one of the things that you've said frequently.
00:08:35
Speaker
You know, evil is not creative. It can't create anything. It can't come up with anything new. It just tries to go around wrecking the good things that God has created. Right. Right. So can you speak then just a little bit and we're going to, one of the themes I know we're going to talk about a lot is the role of story and the role of, of how we, we didn't come to our relationship just out of the blue, you know, um, innocent and, and
00:08:59
Speaker
ready to do good and ready to be great spouses. And nobody does, but can you speak a little bit to the idea of kind of story and why do you work with clients on going into what's happened in the past to help them deal with things that are going on now?
00:09:15
Speaker
Well, because the past is always with us in the present, unless we fully healed from it. So Friar, Father, rather, Richard Rohr has this saying that I repeat often, that which the pain which is not transformed will always be transmitted. And so the pain of our past that has not been fully healed,
00:09:38
Speaker
will come out in our present relationships. And so we go back to the past, partly because scripture is very clear in its call for us to remember. And I think that faith for the future looks at hope that we can glean from what God has done in the past. And so I think we have to go back to places where there's been heartache,
00:10:01
Speaker
where there's been rupture of relationship, where there's been a stunting of our growth, and let God tend to those places that evil has tried to mar and take out. And I think we'll stress as you hear, as you keep listening with several podcasts that that
00:10:18
Speaker
is a long-term ongoing process. It's not like one counseling session. It's not 10 counseling sessions. It's lots of them. We're not saying that say, hey, come for counseling a lot. That's not the point. We're talking about what we've experienced where we have been able to find these threads, to find these story elements that keep showing up and getting us.
00:10:43
Speaker
a relative one time that I was speaking with and they raised a question about why do you have to dredge up the past? Why are you dredging up all the past? And I told this person, I said, well, I'm not dredging anything up. I am trying to find out why the past keeps showing up and biting me on the ass and getting me to do certain things. There are ways that I'm acting or reacting to things that don't feel like me or don't feel like present me. I'm a pretty mild-mannered, you know, down-to-earth, gentle guy.
00:11:09
Speaker
and then all of a sudden I'm smashing a glass or breaking a chair or something, where is that coming from? And so it's kind of thinking about where is story showing up? And of course we're not aware of it. How do people tend to become aware of story elements in kind of a marriage relationship typically?
00:11:27
Speaker
Well, I think it's the same in any relationship. I think they usually come in with a story of present harm. And then we begin to investigate together where the roots of that pain first got planted. Okay. And one of the things I know we'll talk about is the idea of living in story. And that means living aware of our stories, living cognizant of, Hey, you,
00:11:53
Speaker
have a history and there are places you've been and things that have happened to you that are affecting how you respond when I act certain ways, when I speak certain ways. Is it possible in becoming aware of one another's stories to kind of use that badly and to do harm as we kind of become, at least we see it in the other person?
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think if our goal isn't integrated personal healing, and we're still out for self, then we're going to use any tool or coping strategy we get to save self, to preserve self. Right. And what does that look like? Just as a quick, for instance, for example, for you or for us?
00:12:32
Speaker
So I mean, I'll have couples come in and I will often work with them together and then I will rotate working one and the other and they'll come in and say, well, she told me this. Well, she told me that. And they've, they've found a way to put me in the middle.
00:12:49
Speaker
of their turmoil. And so they're basically both trying to use strategies I've given them to help them see things against the other. So weaponizing them, if you will. Sure, sure. And the other thing I was thinking of is, I know part of our story was it was easier for each of us to see and name the dysfunction in the other's family.
00:13:10
Speaker
and recognize. Or the other self, the other person. Yeah, exactly. It's easy to point out the flaw in the way of, well, you're not getting this right, or you've got something to deal with, or whatever. You need to time out right now. You need to take a break. Not our own regulation of ourself, our own awareness of what we're bringing. Right. And I would say, if we are not on the true road to healing ourselves, then we will be trying to do everything we can to get the other to serve us in our kingdom.
Influence of Evil and the Path to Healing
00:13:39
Speaker
Right.
00:13:40
Speaker
And that's sort of what we talk about. You'll hear come up through the podcast, the idea of un-storied living. There's a couple of different ways to live un-storied. One is to just be oblivious, oblivious to think, oh, what? I had a great family. Everything was fine, which you may have, but yet you still were formed in certain ways and given certain expectations that when they're not met and most of the time they're probably not going to be life being what it is.
00:14:03
Speaker
you have ways of reacting, ways of either disappearing or bowing up or whatever, and we'll kind of unpack that. Another way to live on story the way I did for a lot is
00:14:14
Speaker
Yes, I had a very chaotic home life growing up. My parents divorced when I was young. I saw a conflict, but damn it, I'm not going to be that. I am the good guy. I'm the nice guy. I got this. I saw how a man treated a woman terribly, and I'll never do any of that. That was a form of sort of denial and not recognizing the weight that my story particularly had.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah. And the goal here, I just want to underline, is never ever to malign or blame any person or parental unit in a family. Right. Okay. The, as Ephesians tells us, the fight is against powers and principalities of darkness.
00:14:55
Speaker
evil will use anything at its disposal to steal, kill, and destroy the goodness of God in humanity. Yes. Who bears his image. And so the goal in looking back is not to place blame, but to see how evil has set the stage to mar the goodness of God and the glory and the calling of each of us.
00:15:22
Speaker
And I think as we understand with more kindness, the ways that evil has worked in each of our stories in the past, that's how we gain that sensitivity. I mean, you and I navigate a lot of our conflict very differently now. I mean, this is 30 years in after a lot of work. And it's still an ongoing process because we'll still lose it. We lost it earlier the day we were recording this. We kind of lost the tether with each other for a little bit. But we're able to get back a little quicker because we can see, oh, here's what's going on in me.
00:15:52
Speaker
Here's what it came from. Here's what's going on. And you probably, or I can have curiosity about that instead of presuming, Oh, I know how you think. I know what you think. Um, we, we give each other a chance. That's where it will tell me what you're feeling. Oh, well, and that's the difference of when we're operating out of a desire for both of us to flourish or for one of us to save face.
00:16:12
Speaker
I like that, I like that. The other metaphor that will kind of blend through this is this idea, and we've gotten a lot of this from the Allender Center and the great work that those folks are doing there, but the idea of Shalom and the sort of Shalom arc. Can we speak to that for just a second? Yes, yes.
Understanding Shalom and Achieving Peace
00:16:29
Speaker
So the idea is first that we're made for, humanity was made for fellowship with God, fellowship with one another. When creation was launched, it was good, it was right.
00:16:42
Speaker
And that longing that we have in our relationships with anybody in our family, our kids, our parents, our spouse, that longing that we have for things to go well is a good thing. It's a God-oriented thing. It's not just, oh, I want life to be perfect and selfish. It's no, we were made for that kind of thing. We were made for Eden. Yes. Yeah. And then, of course, you spoke to this a little bit earlier, but say that again, Eden is not here now.
00:17:09
Speaker
fall has happened and evil comes in and shatters this idea we can't have heaven now we can't have right we can't get back to Eden on our own but we try we try and then that's sort of the third movement of the ark is Shalom sought we each adopt different strategies or ways of trying to get that peacefulness trying to get that connectedness whatever it is and they may be very dark ways they may be really
00:17:33
Speaker
shiny, nice looking ways, like working really hard or being really devoted servants in the church. Right. I was very dutiful and very sweet.
00:17:43
Speaker
I was Mr. Nice Guy, and I was nice and a smile to everybody, but then I also disappear. One of the ways that I would find myself trying to seek Shalom is by dissociating, withdrawing, getting lost in TV, lost in work, lost on the internet, whatever it is. I didn't understand them. My body is looking for some kind of, oh, we need peace. We need relief. If we can't get it in relationship, then we'll just run from it. We'll check it out. If we can't make it happen,
00:18:13
Speaker
then we'll just give up on trying for it to happen. And so what then, Wendy, would you say as we wrap this up, what does it look like to try to live with a view for Shalom restored?
Faith and Scripture as Guidance
00:18:25
Speaker
To have a hope that, hey, Jesus is on the scene and that, you know, he's at work.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, that's where the complication comes in, because we really do live in a dark and broken world. And it really is hard to see the way. And so that's where I have to draw a lot on scripture's description of who Jesus really is.
00:18:55
Speaker
so that I can borrow from that as I await him to come in the darkness. And so the earth as we live on it is a battlefield. And I am looking for him as I scramble through each day. And so one day he will be back and all things will be made new.
00:19:18
Speaker
I mean, I think a lot about there will be a final tier that any human cries, but we don't know when that's coming. And in the meantime, our faith is, you know, as somebody put it ages ago, just enough to see the next step. You know, there's just enough light to take one more step before I collapse.
00:19:40
Speaker
And that's a lot of what the invitation was in our journey as things were falling apart between us and in the life that we thought we were supposed to have, we really had to start learning. I think I remember you reading, it was a Brother Lawrence's book, Practicing the Presence of God. Yes. Or, you know, we were taping up scriptures.
00:19:58
Speaker
because we dutifully do it, but because we need to remember this. We need to call this to mind. One of our favorite verses that we use when we do counseling intentions with couples is Zephaniah, I think it's 3.14. The Lord, your God is in your midst. Yeah, 3.17. The Lord, your God is in your midst. Yes. He is mighty to save. And then there's a part where, am I getting it mixed up?
00:20:25
Speaker
I remember the, oh, no, it's the Ecclesiastes first, actually.
Closing Encouragement and Hope
00:20:28
Speaker
I remember the bitterness and the God. And yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Yes, that God is still with us, that God is still active and on the scene. And so this podcast, you know, we hope will be focused on
00:20:42
Speaker
you know, honesty about Saturday. Saturday is dark. Saturday is hard. We're not going to whitewash things. If, you know, you're looking for, uh, 10 tips on how to have the happiest relationships everywhere and they'll work all the time, go somewhere else. That's not what we have for you here. Uh, but what we do have is honesty about a Saturday is hard. Saturday is dark, but Sunday's coming.
00:21:04
Speaker
resurrection powers available, and God is available in present moments. I think that's what we had to learn, that he was real, he was available, and to be more connected to him in the midst of the chaos, in the midst of illness, loss, grief, whatever it was, God made him safe and available. And as we got more of that, we were able to love and connect with each other in a better way.
00:21:26
Speaker
Absolutely. So as we go on in the podcast, we'll be sharing specific stories and unpacking them to let you see how we've learned to find healing and hope as we've investigated things that have formed us in the context
00:21:44
Speaker
of how we now live life. And so we hope that you will stay with us as we walk out the tenacious hope in the resurrection and in the God who makes all things new and how that is allowing us to survive Saturday.
00:22:03
Speaker
The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, the 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.
00:22:30
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