Introduction to 'Surviving Saturday'
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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.
Being Honest About Pain and Clinging to Hope
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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 Wendy and Chris Osborne
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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.
Exploring Unmet Expectations and Faith
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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. Hi, we're back.
Chris's Job Loss and Dependence on God
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Last time I shared from my perspective, um, a story that happened seven ish years into our marriage about a job loss. Yes. And so today, Chris, we're going to have you share the story from your perspective. And we're going to unpack a little bit of, um, what that revealed about what you were depending on and just how it struck you. Okay. Yeah. So let's just jump right in.
Family Difficulties and Personal Challenges
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Well, um, and I want to kind of set the stage for when the job loss came. Um, I think we mentioned when you were telling the story, I, uh, we had just had our second child. Um, but some other context for when this happened, uh, was, um, during that time with, that we had, you know, we're getting adjusted to a brand new, uh, newborn.
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Um, our oldest had actually accidentally scratched my, my cornea. I didn't mean to be like I was holding them close or something and their hands struck out or something. So somewhere in there, like I think we had it seven or eight day old had to go to the emergency room. Yeah. You were in a lot of pain. Yeah. Because we thought like, Oh, just enter my ha ha ha kind of get through it quickly. But it actually kept being sort of a stabbing pain in the middle of the night.
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And so we went to the emergency room and kind of dealt with that and like, what is this? This is such a random thing. You know, barely had, you know, she's two and a half. She barely has fingernails. Um, but somehow just randomly kind of scratched my cornea. So we'd had a night in the ER and then my, uh, this is right before Thanksgiving of 2000.
Grandmother's Passing and Family Eulogy
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My grandmother passed away and this was the grandmother, my mother's mother. We had been really close to, we had lived with her right after the divorce. We had moved.
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to the town where she lived after the divorce and stayed right down the street. Oh my gosh. So my most beloved grandparent, my grandfather had died long before that when I was in sixth grade and I had very little relationship with my dad's parents.
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Uh, his mother had died probably when I was a teenager, but we weren't close to her. And then we were not reconnected with that grandfather much later, but this was my beloved grandmother. So we actually with a less than two week old and a two and a half year old packed up the car and drove down to Albany, Georgia. We mentioned before.
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Uh, for my grandmother's funeral, I, because I had kind of grown up in the church and, and sort of had active faith, like got taps to give her eulogy. So I'm preparing to kind of, you know, speak in front of the church about my grandmother's life with everybody there.
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Um, we're staying in a hotel, you know, trying to adjust to, I think we had all this stuff for a second job, but we're still trying to figure out how do you take care of a toddler and a newborn at once.
Impact of Job Loss and Seeking Solutions
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And on top of all that, we got a rip roaring stomach bug. Oh, it was awful. I got a stomach bug the night before I'm supposed to give this eulogy. I have, I think I've written out, I know generally what I'm going to say, but I'm up in the middle of the night and it was one of those awful stomach bugs that
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your system is completely shut off, going off every different direction. So I'm up most of the night. We get up the next day, go, and we're doing, I'm giving the eulogy and giving this almost essentially like a sermon in front of those people. And I see you leave during the service. Oh yeah, it was terrible. And I knew exactly what was happening. It was now hitting you.
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And so we're just exhausted, drained, somehow made it through that. We get back to church. I think this is the Sunday right after Thanksgiving. And we literally were describing this to somebody else at our church and saying, we feel like Job. Like, we don't even know what else can happen. This is just ridiculous. And it was right after that happened that I go in
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on Monday, and I think it was either that Monday or Tuesday, that's when the law firm, it was a very small law firm, only three partners, sat me down and said, this isn't working out. We're gonna give you some time, but you need to find a new place to work. And this was, I had just barely even been there a year. And so that sort of lands, and it was pretty devastating. And I think my sort of bent was,
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Okay, I got to get through this. I had been sort of starting to wrestle with, and I thought about calls to the ministry at different points in time before going to law school, not much once I had gone. But really what stirred up in me was, I think I was an elder in the church at that point in time.
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And I had met, just before that, a couple people who had made career changes.
Considering Career Change to Ministry
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I had met a guy who was a gastroenterologist, actually, who said, I left being a medical doctor to go be a pastor because I realized most of the people's troubles that they brought in that were giving them stomach upset, gastrointestinal problems. They were probably spiritual problems, and I wanted to address the spiritual problems.
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And so having just had a taste of being an elder and we'd started working with some couples in difficult situations and all that sort of thing. And we were leading a community group and all that. I'm like, Oh, maybe, maybe this is what's happening for God to get me into the ministry. And so literally I do remember, um, cause I'd been thinking about that and intrigued by the fact that somebody can make a career change at all.
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Um, to go into ministry and then, so yes, I stopped on the way home from this office in South Park. I stopped at, at, at RTS at the seminary and got a brochure and thought about, gosh, maybe I should go back to school and go back to seminary. Um, so yeah, then I come home and I did that before I ever, I've told you anything, not, you know, talking on the phone about this.
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And all I remember is letting you know, yeah, there was people in our house. We had to have a private conversation. I didn't like having to bring this kind of news, but just saying, okay, this has happened. But I kind of went straight to, it's going to be okay. I'm going to do either something else or who knows what'll happen. And speaking to sort of the, you know, I didn't like having to say that. I don't think I remember at the time,
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Settling into or even letting myself kind of at first experience any fear And I didn't I don't think I was in touch with any anger or disappointment frustration My friend was one of the three partners and I didn't work with
Processing Emotions Post Job Loss
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him closely. There was the other two that worked with me and So my initial instinct was well those two who I've worked with have let me go But I'll I'll maintain the friendship with him
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And so I think I even went to him, right? Cause he wasn't in the room when they told me the news and then I went and found him. We went and got lunch. And my, I remember my whole instinct was this is going to be okay. This is going to be a great story. We're gonna, we're going to come out of this, you know, stronger friends or whatever.
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And there's a whole host of feelings I don't think I was even remotely in touch with. And then, you know, you having these strong reactions like, well, wait a minute, why didn't your friend tell you or why didn't you know, or what were you doing? And, you know, did you screw up bad? And I hadn't, it was a personality disconnect. I've been
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working with, actually, ironically, that same pastor who had been so helpful the day I had the tumor surgeries and all was just a gift in our lives at that time. And he had been, I've been processing with him, hey, I don't feel connected.
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I don't feel connected with these people I'm working with. It doesn't feel like it's going well. And we process through it, and we realize there's a personality disconnect. There's some expectations that aren't matching up or something. But my thought process before this news was, well, I'm going to find a way to get through it, or I'll address it. I'll bring it up. I'll say, hey, what's going on? Are y'all not liking what I'm doing or whatever? And I don't want to get lost in the weeds of the inner workings of a law firm or anything like that.
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very interesting for anybody. But bottom line was there was a disconnect in what they expected I could do, what I could do, what they wanted me to do, what they would train me to do, all this stuff. And so for me, it was I, at first, it was just kind of, you know, find the next place, find the next solution. Of course, as we said, it was right. This was after Thanksgiving for Christmas. Terrible time to look for a job. And I remember it starting to come home after a few weeks of this, of realizing, wait a minute,
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Nobody's really looking around for, you know, to hire people right now. We had another conversation that was helpful during that timeframe with a couple that had been kind of a mentor to us in an informal
Mentorship and Career Realities
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sense. And they were in leadership in the church and had had us over for lunch lots of times. And I remember sitting with that couple and the husband in particular, who's a gifted businessman and I can name Ken because he just was such a great blessing during this time.
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But I shared with him sort of my idea of, you know what, I think I'm going to leave law and go into ministry or something. And it's either he or somebody else. He said, well, here's the thing. You're going to go to seminary, but how are you going to pay for life?
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And I had gone to college and law school, you know, on scholarships, basically, and I had either got enough money or maybe had a little student loan money, but I had sort of funded, you know, a student life, a student existence. That was a little different from once you have a mortgage and car payments.
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and mouths to feed and so I was thinking very naively well I'll just I'll go to you know graduate school again and get scholarships which you couldn't you know people's right well yeah but you gotta you know have a job still to pay the bills how are we gonna go school all that stuff and so I moved away from the idea of I'm just gonna go seminary then I realized well maybe
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Maybe I can go into ministry and not get a seminary degree. I know what I'll do. I'll develop a ministry for lawyers. That's what I'm going to do. My judge that I had clerked for before that was really active in Christian legal society. We need a local Charlotte chapter of Christian legal society. I'll start that, I'll get people together, and I'll create this basically parachurch ministry type organization.
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And this gentleman, Ken, was so kind in, you know, talking me through that. And he said, you know, Chris, the question I have for you is you're going to start administrative lawyers. Have you ministered to any lawyers? Like, do you have sort of a track record of ministering to lawyers that you can build on because
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Vision sort of has to be in place before people are going to commit resource because I'm like, oh, I will fundraise and I'll ask people for money and all this stuff. He's like, well, but you got to have something to point to that. Hey, the model works, some kind of proof of concept. And that was kind of sobering and in the kindest and best way.
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And the other great thing about what he shared with me during that time is he also shared that he was very successful in insurance, financial planning, all that. And he shared about time when he was about 27, 28, not much different age than I was when he had lost a job. And I remember him saying, you know, my wife and I were, while I'm in this period of unemployment, debating what do we have the money to buy a can of paint? Like we need to paint a room in our house. Can we even do that? And he had erred on the side of, well,
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I got to do something with this time." And I remember I sort of followed in his footsteps in that I had to do something with the time because when you're looking for a job, and again, my place of employment had given me a while to try to look for something new, but they said basically, or I had to do something with the time. Like you can put job feelers out there, you can send resumes out, you can try to get interviews, but then you have all that waiting time.
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Um, and when we got to the end of, you know, the law firm eventually said, look, I know you haven't found anywhere. It's like, you know, mid February after they've sort of told me in, in early December or late November, you know, your last day is February 15th. And so there was a, fortunately we only had like a two week gap in there where I didn't have any employment. I was able to get a contract job with the law firm that I ended up
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Loving staying at becoming a partner. I landed at a really good place as a result of this But the getting there it started as it went, you know, I think I had this ridiculous optimism to start with or I'll just you know, I'll figure it out. We'll make the best of it. It'll work out. Okay to oh gosh, I do have some feelings Oh, wait a minute
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mate wait what what do i think about my friend and my friend who didn't give me a heads up and and sort of was passive when the other guys were saying he's not working out it's not going very well i've
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realized there are other ways that could have happened. There are other ways that could have played out. But I might have felt at least a little bit more cared for. They might not have changed the result. But I might have had a heads up. I might have been able to plan. I might have been able to adjust my performance, whatever. And so we ended up, actually, I got in touch with some feelings. And then it was like, well, dang, now I am mad. Now I am frustrated.
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And again, that same pastor who was just a great godsend at the time, I remember having to do, he did some conflict resolution work with us and had me and my friend have to sit down and sort of, we couldn't
Childhood Chaos and Emotional Coping
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fix it. We couldn't talk through it. That whole naive image I had of, oh, this is going to be a great story. This is going to be fun. This is going to all work out. There'll be forgiveness and mercy, blah, blah, blah.
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when that shattered and sort of fell apart, in part because we were communicating about it, trying to deal with it, and we couldn't. Well, and partly, you know, I'm thinking you got to a place where you had to contend with the fact that there was something that mercy and grace needed to cover. Yes. Because mercy and grace in the abstract
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are hollow. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. They're short of a fast forwarding, a spiritualizing. It can be the form it takes sometimes or just an optimistic, let's get past this. And that was a, I think that was a pretty deep seated drive in me. Yeah. Do you have ideas of where that came from?
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So that's a really good question. And I'm glad you asked it earlier today when you were walking. I'm still trying to think through it. But as I look back on it, I think there's some roots of that in my family growing up, and in particular,
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Uh, my mom was very much this or eternal optimist and, uh, you know, uh, you know, we're going to get through this. I, I was remembering actually a phrase that, that she said a lot, like, we're just gonna make the best of it. We're just gonna make the best of it. We're just gonna make the best of it. I can hear her saying it and I've been trying to connect that to when, when was she saying that under what circumstances? And I know it was a lot. And I think one of them, one of the major ones had to be.
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when she made the decision to leave my dad after three years of just utter chaos. Story for another time, but basically he had a lot of challenges with substance abuse, mental illness, unfaithfulness. We had three years from the ages seven to 10 that I was growing up. They were in absolute chaos of conflict. He had been hospitalized in mental hospitals about two or three times during that timeframe.
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And so my dad would be gone for lengthy periods of time, either in a mental hospital or times that they separated because their conflict was so difficult and bitter. And we would be adjusting to the new circumstances, the new situation. And we did that so many times. And I think that's just what sort of got absorbed into me.
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Well, we're just going to make the best of it. We're going to make the best of it. You know, like this, I don't, I'm not saying we never grieved or felt, but I know I can sort of connect with my fourth, fifth grade self of like, I am just trying to put on the face I need at school each day to get done what I need to get done. And sort of by the time I get to school, I'm sort of checked out anyway, because so much has been going on at my house.
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Yeah. When I hear that, we're just going to make the best of it. We're just going to make the best of it. And I knew your mother. I met her when I was about 13 and I loved your mother deeply. And she said similar phrases later when we were married and had children. But I feel the sense of the door slaving in my face.
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And I don't know how it was for you, but it to me reads as a refusal to enter into reality and grieve what is actually happening. It's this desire or this belief that a person should rise above and not have to deal with the things that really Jesus came to deal with.
00:18:29
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And that definitely resonates. And I think that's a lot of what just got ingrained in me. That was how I feared, how I learned to survive, basically. I can't stop to feel the sadness, the anger, the weight of what's there, partly because if I do, I felt like it would crush me. I don't know that I felt like I don't know what to do with that. I don't know that I would emerge from that.
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And some of it was this, well, I've got to, I've got to make things happen. I've got to be, you know, take my share of things and move forward and be positive. Well, and if, you know, if there was so much chaos swirling in the family and you were seven, eight, nine, and 10, I wonder if there was room for you to have any feelings.
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It doesn't. I mean, as you say that, that resonates.
Shame from Upbringing and Its Impact
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There really wasn't because mom and dad's conflict was so big, it loomed large. It is the main thing I can remember from within my house. I have lots of memories of being at other people's houses in my neighborhood, both in Charlotte and in Greensboro, where all these kind of wheels fell off and everything was so difficult.
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I have memories of being in other people's houses and around the same age and observing them and going oh they kind of dance and have fun together they're sort of relaxed or they're you know just having a meal and it's sort of just you know and as I look back my house I have you know the few memories I have are these pretty
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heavy duty conflict moments where I'm a combatant, I'm in the middle of it with them. And so their feelings are taking up all the space. And then here I am trying to figure out how they're looking at me to almost be involved and team up with them and fix this and all. And it was a lot. Yeah. I'm wondering what is happening in your body as you tell those stories, because we could slow it down.
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I feel such a sadness and like my shoulders are tense thinking of a seven, eight year old enjoying learning that other families dance in the kitchen after dinner as they're cleaning things up.
00:20:48
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And yet you had to wade back in to chaos. And there wasn't room for you unless you could serve another person by being such a good kid. Well, even as you're saying that it was chaos, and I think I've been, as I revisited some of this time period recently, I'm realizing there was also a hell of a lot of shame.
00:21:12
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because we were that family. Everybody on the street knew that major shit went down in the Osborne house because we as the kids, my younger sister, three years younger, we would have to stay with them on an emergency basis when mom's taking dad to the middle hospital and the police have come to the house. I know my mom sent me to the next door neighbors occasionally like go get
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The young dolls go get the neighbor somehow get somebody to help. So I think there was shame. And then I've started to connect as well. There was a terror. There was a, as I saw their conflict play out.
00:21:51
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there's way more terror than I could give any voice to because there wasn't room. Mom's feelings were, um, understandably, I mean, her marriage is falling apart. Her husband's betrayed her in these very volatile and, and, and, um, horrifying ways. Um, so I think I learned early, you know, a form of stuffing, a form of denial and it's,
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lightning quick. It like happens before I even recognize that it's happening. Yeah. So it's like you learned to move away or separate yourself dissociate to use like a psychological term from the hard situation that was happening.
Survival Instincts in Marriage
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Yes. And you just had to head down, get through. Well, and then I brought that into our marriage too. I know cause that's where the instinct of mine came from a lot.
00:22:48
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when we would have conflict or something would go wrong more in your world than mine or whatever. And I brought that same energy of
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Why do you let this bother you? Why is this such a big deal? We got to move through it. We got to go on. Like I didn't have a category for sometimes you have to sit in the loss. You have to sit in the sadness. You have to grieve. I wanted to short circuit that shit so much. It feels so natural to me. Like we don't have time for that. And by the way, it'll probably destroy us. Well, it would be a swirling storm of chaos. Yeah. Right. That's what you were living in the middle of. Yeah.
00:23:24
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And so you were trying to stay out of the storm, but yeah, you had to be in the storm. So you had to hunker down, but to give weight to the reality, who knows where you would have been swirled up into. Yeah. Like it's my body. I even just, I'm trying to feel myself just trying to relax as I'm now with some perspective able to talk about it.
00:23:52
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Oh, there's such an instinctive, um, autonomic physical response to not want to feel that terror, to feel that shame, to feel, oh no, shit, here comes chaos. Um, and I'm even thinking, and you can tell me if this is right or not, but how that might've insulated you from
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personally experiencing Jesus care for you because to dip down into the pain of what life really had for you and was offering you
00:24:33
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would have been way too much for a little kid to bear. Yes. And so then later to maybe attach a spiritualization to, oh no, what I'm doing is I'm extending mercy and grace and I'm receiving mercy and grace, which is all true.
00:24:52
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But you didn't want to go down into the dark depths of why mercy and grace were needed. And so it's almost like that mindset insulated you from being very close to Jesus authentically. Yeah. And I wanted the great Christian story. I wanted the way to wrap it up in a bow. And that had been a way that I
00:25:16
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you know, quickly learned to try to put the best spin on things. It's like, well, God must've meant it for some good or something.
00:25:24
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I'm reminded of you and I were talking the other day when we were on a walk. And remember, we were talking about just before this season, we had gone to a marriage retreat at Glen Eyrie in Colorado. I think the navigators
Constructive Engagement with Chaos
00:25:38
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should put it on. And we had gone to this marriage retreat. And I remember at the time, because you were expecting Sarah Kate. So it had to be right before this. We were trying to piece together which which child it was. And we're out there. And I remember I was reading Larry Krebs book, The Silence of Adam.
00:25:53
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Oh yeah. And I remember it being very formative for me to read where he said, you know, God made man to speak into chaos. And like, like you were actually part of your job as, as, as he conceptualized it as a man. And this may not be perfect theology. I don't want to get lost in that. But for at the time,
00:26:14
Speaker
It was a radical concept for me to recognize, hey, chaos is sort of what the world is after the fall. Even before the fall, Adam is naming animals. Adam is joining with God in sort of the creative effort. Eve is eventually doing that as well when she's created.
00:26:31
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man being made to sort of, we're supposed to help, you know, that's how we image God. We'd bring him to chaos. That was radical for me. And it didn't, and it was an invitation, I think it was where an invitation began to say, you might be okay in chaos because God is with you. And I remember going on a hike, we had had some kind of awful fight during a marriage retreat, which tended to happen sometimes because you get away and stuff gets drawn out and
00:27:00
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Set on the table and and and sort of things get lit on fire and I remember going on this hike by myself up this mountainside near Glen Erie and There was a place where basically the trail kind of ended I wasn't sure exactly where the trail was that I had set off on But I went forward and I knew where I was trying to get to I saw you know kind of a summit Kind of a style I could get to and I went off the map. I went off the grid I remember that being a formative
00:27:28
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I might be able to go places where I don't know exactly what's happening. I might be able to go into the chaos of your feelings about a situation or my feelings. Let there have some space for that.
00:27:44
Speaker
And I hear that as like stepping into the chaos in a different way than you had to do as a kid. Yes. They brought you in, but you were in some ways like a tool. Yeah. You were a weapon to come in and wield for one of them on their behalf the strong winds.
00:28:04
Speaker
But here you're stepping in with eyes wide open knowing I'm walking into chaos and I'm petrified and yet I can do really hard things.
00:28:18
Speaker
And even when things don't wrap up, which I think we're old enough to know is more often the case, I can walk in the chaos that God is there in those places. He's not in my denial. He's not in my pretending, but he's very much here on the ground in my reality. He's not in my escape. He's not in my instantaneous shutdown.
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, because that that doesn't give him much of a chance to show up, even though I'm saying I want this great storybook ending. Yeah. Oh, we forgive each other. Everybody's all the believers have grace here. The real Jesus isn't containable like that. Yeah.
00:29:02
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Yeah, and so I think that was at least on my mind at some point as we started trying to navigate through that and really wrestling with, okay, what does the future look
Support and Humility Amid Transition
00:29:14
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like? And again, God provided, God in a weird way provided that two week gap that we had, my dad who had been fairly estranged from and had had much contact with, we had been reestablishing and kind of getting a relationship going, but he provided us a financial,
00:29:29
Speaker
A little band-aid that helped us get through that gap. Talk about unseen places of provision. Unexpected. And you know, as I think about that, that wouldn't have happened had I not named my need with him, which was a freaking terrifying thing to do. Right. Because part of my life up to that point, Ben, I'll show you, you know, bastard who left our family and all this stuff. I'll do it on my own. And for me to need him was
00:29:57
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agonizing and it was kind of a beautiful thing that he showed up and he had. It was an incredible setup where God offered you the opportunity to be needy before someone who had not been able or willing to meet your prior needs. But that was you coming into yourself I think in such a beautiful way. Yeah well that's a powerful thing to remember now as well and as
00:30:25
Speaker
Different transitions are going on we'll talk about later, but that's a good place to stop today. Thank you for sharing that. It's really fun to walk through where our hearts have been and how God's growing us. Thank you folks who are listening and we'll see you on the next episode.
Podcast Sponsorship by Nurture Counseling
00:30:46
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.
00:31:13
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