Enough Suffering

When my counselor said today's a great day to start working on forgiveness, I remember thinking that's not even possible. They haven't said that they were sorry. And really, honestly, I don't think that they've suffered like they should suffer.

Like they don't deserve my forgiveness because if I forgive them, isn't that me saying at this point that what they did was okay when it very much was not okay? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. I've got a quote. I want to see if you can finish. Oh, no.

Is this a pass or fail grade? No, I think you'll easily finish this because we wrote about it in our book, and I've said it many times from the stage. It's a life-changing quote for me. The first time I heard it, you were sitting right beside me at the Weekend to Remember. We were there as an engaged couple and went to this marriage conference, which we didn't know anything about, with Family Life, the Weekend to Remember.

We need to go to this before we get married. And you actually remember a quote from 41 years ago? Oh, yeah. Let me tell you, because that quote and that weekend was life-changing. And I just got to say this. The Weekend to Remember is still happening. It's back on, and you can sign up right now and go for half price.

Half price. That's big. That's a big deal, and it's going to change your life just like it changed our life. It's an amazing weekend that you don't want to miss.

So sign up right now at familylifetoday.com. Well, let me tell you, here's how the quote goes. Now I feel more pressure. You'll know this. It starts this way. When you forgive someone, you set a prisoner free.

Only to realize the prisoner was you. Yeah. Is that right? Almost.

It's close enough. That was Lewis Smeeds. What's the actual quote? When you forgive someone, you set a prisoner free only to discover that you are the prisoner.

Okay. When I read that quote decades ago in a book on forgiveness, I realized I thought I was locking my dad up by not forgiving him for the divorce and walking out when I was a little boy. And that truth, a light bulb came on like, oh my goodness, I'm locking me up. I can't become the man God wants me to be because I'm in a cage.

Yeah, you're in bondage. And that literally started me on a journey, which was the hardest journey of my life. Because I thought, okay, I'll forgive him this weekend. And it didn't go that way. Well, I remember you saying, like, I'm going to forgive my dad this weekend. And then it took years.

Oh, yeah. And behind every journey like that is a really hard story. And I discovered a book that I think is the best book I've read on forgiveness. And we've got the author of that book, Lisa Turkhurst, with us today. Lisa, thank you for being here. Welcome to Family Life Today.

Thank you so much. It's an honor, as always, to be here, but such a treat to be here with you guys today. Yeah, we're pretty excited, especially we were on vacation over the weekend reading your book. And Dave is handing me your book every five seconds.

I gotta be honest. Like, read this, read this, read this. We're supposed to be like on a mini vacation, right?

We're on the beach, we're laying there, and she looks over and goes, what are you working for? You're reading a book that, you know, I'm reading it because we're going to interview you. And I'm like, honey, I cannot stop reading this book.

Lisa, I'm not kidding. Thank you. This book is such a gift to the body of Christ, to anybody, really. Your honesty, your vulnerability, the journey you've been on, which I'd love to have you talk about today. But you opened up things I've never even considered in the area of forgiveness. Let's let our listeners know.

It's called Forgiving What You Can't Forget, and your subtitle is amazing, discovering how to move on, make peace with painful memories, and create a life that's beautiful again. And many of you know Lisa. She's a New York Times bestseller three times, I think. Four times? Five times? Yep.

Yeah, just keep going. Every book that comes out is, you know, a great book. And you've written 21?

Actually, there's a debate on our team. I think it's actually 25, but I recommend the five latest books. When you start going back too far, it's painful for me to read some of my earlier books, because like anything else, I've grown as a writer and a communicator and everything. But I'm very grateful that God has given me the ability to process life through writing words. And I'm always quick to say, I write about what I struggle with. So this book wasn't born out of some kind of fake notion that I'm a forgiveness expert.

That's not it at all. I was struggling with forgiveness so much, thinking that I honestly understood forgiveness and had a general concept of it, because I've been a Christian for a long time. But I wrote this message because I needed this message most of all. Yeah, and you can tell by reading it. In some ways, I felt like I was reading your journal, because you write so well. It's like I'm living. As a reader, you're sort of there.

You can feel the pain. Yeah, you're captured in the story. And you take us on a journey that's not just your journey. It's really everybody's journey that needs to go on that, like Lewis Meade says, to get free. And it has to do with forgiveness. So tell us a little bit, because I'm guessing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you weren't thinking, I can't wait to write this book.

No. This was not the book you wanted to write, but you wrote it. I also thought it was interesting as we get into your story that you were talking about how your life was divided into the BC and then the AD. What does that mean? It's before crisis and after devastation. I think sometimes we walk through situations or issues in our life. It could be hurt. It could be heartbreak.

It could be disappointment, disillusionment. There's such a scale. But when we walk through something that's so hard and maybe even so harsh, it's easy to define our life from before that happened. And then there's such a sharp line that divides before and after.

And so usually that's how time is marked according to the birth of Christ. But in my life, there was also a real marking of when my life appeared even to me to be one way. And then there came this enormous emotional crash after just realizing that some dynamics in my family were not what I thought they were and then forever marked that this is now after devastation. But when talking about a forgiveness message, I love that you said, I bet 10 years ago this isn't a message you ever thought that you wanted to write.

I would say 100 percent because it's not a message I ever wanted to live. And when I talk about forgiveness, I automatically know that just uttering that word, people are going to attach that this word is connected to probably one of the most devastating or a series of very devastating, hurtful events. So it's easy to hear the word forgiveness and think, that's nice. I know I should do it, but.

And it's easy to cross our arms, kind of push back and feel an enormous amount of resistance. And that's exactly where I was. So I knew I needed to work on forgiveness. But when I started writing the message, I spent over a thousand hours studying forgiveness in the Bible.

And my team showed up one day and I had typed out, they thought it was going to be a chapter. But what I actually typed out were all the reasons why I absolutely should not be the one to write this book and all the people that I really felt like I would not be able to forgive and all the reasons why I was so very justified in not forgiving those people. And it forced me to come face to face with the reality that I agree with biblical forgiveness as a principle.

But deep down inside of me, I have so much resistance to living it out. So that brings me back to the fact that I studied forgiveness in the Bible for over a thousand hours. I didn't do that because I wanted to become a theological expert.

I did that because I was looking for the loophole and the exception. And surely there has to be some circumstances where forgiveness doesn't apply. Take us back to that point of what happened that made you dig in the word of saying, God, I need answers. So I experienced a very dramatic crisis in my most precious relationship. And I wrote all about that.

And it's not supposed to be this way. It's the very thing that threatened to tear my family apart very much was the worst betrayal of my entire life. I think I thought I was doing OK until I went to a counselor and he has become an amazing advocate for my emotional health in this whole journey. I can't say enough about just combining therapy and theology as one pursues wholeness, healing and health. So I went to my counselor and it was during a particularly devastating part of the journey that I was walking through. I walked in.

I remember I had this thought. I don't remember when it was the last time that I actually washed my hair or brushed my hair or even put deodorant on. So that tells you like I was at a low place because I'm one like I'm going to tend to my personal hygiene. I'm going to wear deodorant every day. I'm at least going to put deodorant on. OK. Dry shampoo can really be a gift to those of us with complicated hair. So I may not wash my hair every day.

Shampoo is way overrated. Yeah. I'm just telling you.

You can't testify right now because you don't have a complicated relationship with the time that it takes. Exactly. But you're really you were that? Yes. You hadn't? Yes. I was just in this desperate place of feeling so broken and so hopeless and so exhausted from being hurt and then hurt again and then hurt again and constantly caught off guard in a situation where I thought trust was being rebuilt.

But you can't build trust that keeps getting broken. And so I felt utterly lost at what to do with my next step and just tired. So tired. Like even the thought of washing my hair was overwhelmingly enormously exhausting to me. So I walked into my counselor's office and I thought I can handle the fact that he's going to think that I look awful and that I haven't washed my hair, but I can't handle if I stink. So I snuck back to his bathroom and found underneath the counter some peach air freshener. And I thought, I'm resourceful.

I used it like deodorant. I did. I was going to admit it. But I walked into my counselor's office and he looked at me and he said, Lisa, do you want to heal? And I said, of course. Of course I want to heal. I'm doubting if it's possible because I just wonder, is it possible to be so broken that healing becomes impossible? But I do want to heal. And he said, then today's a great day to start working on forgiveness.

And I literally remember pushing Mac in my chair and looking at him and saying, are you taking something that's made you delusional? Because forgiveness at this point is not even reasonable for you to say to me. And here's why I had that perspective. Because when I was a little girl, my mom did a good thing. She taught me and my sister about forgiveness. So usually when we would get into an argument, my mom, the great judge would appear and she would listen to what happened and she would declare one person right, the other person wrong. Whoever was wrong had to say they were sorry. Whoever's right had to say that they forgive the other person. And then my mom would say, now the two of you hug and make up.

And if you don't stop treating each other poorly, then I'm really going to come in here and give you something to cry about. And that was a good lesson that my mom taught us. But I never let that little girl understanding of forgiveness grow up. And I carried that little girl understanding of forgiveness into some very adult situations.

And that's where things fell apart for me. Because when my counselor said today's a great day to start working on forgiveness, I remember thinking that's not even possible. I'm not even in communication with this person that's hurt me so badly. They haven't said that they were sorry. And I don't know if reconciliation is ever going to be possible.

And really, honestly, I don't think that they've suffered like they should suffer. Like they don't deserve my forgiveness. Because if I forgive them, isn't that me saying at this point that what they did was okay when it very much was not okay?

And isn't that me saying that it was no big deal when it was a huge deal? And don't they need to be remorseful? Yes. Right? And how do you even forgive if you can't even have a conversation? Right. And what if that other person doesn't even think that they need to be forgiven?

Then how do you even get traction in a situation like that? So my counselor listened to my resistance message. And he didn't argue with me.

And he didn't fight against me. He just listened. And then he said, okay, well, Lisa, let's just start with your pain. And he handed me a stack of three-by-five cards. And he said, why don't you just write out one thing on each card how you've been hurt. And just write this pain and this hurt and this wound. Just get it out. So I started writing one thing on each card the facts of how I'd been hurt.

And suddenly it was as if the entire floor in front of us was covered with my three-by-five cards. Lisa, as you continue that, do you think most of us could write down a ton or hundreds or maybe 20 things of why we've been hurt in our lives? I think that people would be surprised at how much pain is really locked inside of them. Because we generally categorize our pain as an incident when in realities there's 10, 20, maybe 100 facts of how we've been hurt that feed into that incident. And unless we look at the pain and deal with the pain, it's impossible to heal from the pain. And so a lot of us are trying to fix the incident that happened. But without dealing with the pain that is feeding all of the emotion that's driving the intensity of the hurt and the chaos, without dealing with that, my counselor has told me before, when it's hysterical, it's historical. And what's not worked out will be acted out. And so how it was playing out with me is I would say, oh, no, I'm not bitter.

Oh, no, I've dealt with the pain. But then I would get triggered. Somebody would say something or something would happen. And it was maybe a minor offense.

But I would have a completely out of proportion reaction to their very small offense. And my reaction didn't even have very much to do with them. It's that I had unhealed pain from my past and I was pulling it into my very present situation. So any time we act hysterical, not hysterical like haha funny, but hysterical as in too much emotion for what's right in front of us, when it's hysterical, it's historical.

It's undealt with pain. Yeah, it sounds like it's if, and it's hard to do, but if you could step back and be objective or have a good friend say, hey, and you look at a situation and go, wow, that triggered me at an eight or nine on an emotional letter, anger or whatever, and it should be a two or three, you probably need to go, oh, I've got something, right? That's what you're saying.

Yeah. And I used to think triggers were just awful, like the worst thing in the world. But now I look at triggers differently.

They are inconvenient. I wish I could time my triggers. I wish I could say, okay, Tuesday night at 7 p.m., I'll be sitting in my bathtub. I'll be all alone.

I'll be listening to worship music. It's a perfect time for a trigger to hit. And then I'll be able to work through it without creating chaos in another relationship.

Right. But that's not how triggers work. And so because triggers catch you off guard, I used to think this is so cruel. Why would God allow the triggers to happen like this? It's so awful. But then I realized it's actually God's mercy because of the full impact of hurt would hit us at the exact moment when the devastation happens.

It could kill us. And so how good and gracious of God to let the pain leak into our life months, even sometimes years, so that we can almost bite off our healing, you know, one little piece at a time. So go back. You're in your counselor's office.

Yes. Can you share some of the writings that were on some of those cards? Some of the deepest wounding was, I thought I could trust you. I felt like I had it all together. And then choices were made that I had no say so over that made everything fall apart.

This is my favorite part of my life. And you took it away. So a lot of deep pain there. And I remember when I stood back and looked at all those cards on the floor, I remember thinking, no wonder I'm so exhausted.

Look at all I've been carrying. And I didn't even realize how much was really there until I wrote it out. And you even mentioned like you were sick, physically. Yes. Do you think that had something to do with what was on the floor, the effects of the stress and the pain and the betrayal?

Absolutely. Because in your body, the neuro pathways that carry physical pain also carry emotional pain. The two are very connected. It's just when we're in physical pain, there's a protocol that's set up that people know exactly what to do.

And people know how to support you. You get to a doctor and the doctor, if it's intense enough, admits you to the hospital. And if there's brokenness, then you put a cast on it. If there's bleeding, then you stitch it up.

You know what I'm saying? There's like a whole protocol. But if you're sitting on the side of the road and it's emotional pain, there's no blood, there's no broken bone, there's no place to go. Like if I was in this much physical pain and they did surgery, they would put me to sleep because they've had mercy on the intensity of the pain. But when you're in intense emotional pain, you feel like there's been surgery done to you, but without being put to sleep. And that almost seems just insane to me that we would have to suffer on that deep level of emotional pain without some kind of immediate relief.

And obviously, people can go and get medication and all of that, but there just wasn't that instant protocol. It's like there was this time where you have to figure it out and it's very complicated. So I was there in my counselor's office and he looked at all of those cards and he said back to me one of the kindest, most meaningful statements that a human has ever spoken to me. And he said, Lisa, I believe you. And I not only believe you, but what's happened to you was wrong. And if no one in this world dares to say they're sorry, I'm sorry.

I'll say that to you today. And so I know that there's a listener right now who is resonating with the intensity of emotional pain, feeling betrayed, feeling abandoned, feeling broken, and maybe it's because of choices you fed into or maybe you had choices placed on you. And whatever the circumstances are, maybe you're even feeling brokenhearted and not able to forgive yourself. But whatever it is, I just want to say to you, I believe you that pain is hard and it is all consuming. And we don't need to compare our pain with someone else's pain. We just acknowledge in the context of our life, it's intense and it's hard. And what happened to you that fed into all of the situation that you are in and that's causing you so much pain, what happened was wrong. And I am so, so sorry. And if no one else in this world has ever dared to bear witness to your pain, I will. And when my counselor did that for me on that day, it helped me put my guard down.

And this is the thought that popped into my head. I deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to me. And so then it was less about having that epic moment where the other person realizes how wrong they were and they say they're sorry because you don't have any control over what another person says or does or will or will not do. And if you wait for them to make choices to let your healing journey happen, then you are letting the person that hurt you the most hijack your ability to heal. So I knew I had to detach my ability to heal from another person's choices. And I put a stake in the ground and said, I deserve to stop suffering because of what another person has done to me.

This is my pain and it's my choice to heal. And Jim looked back at me and he said, OK, now it's time to just verbalize forgiveness and have that marked moment where you know you've been obedient to God. And I said, that's great, but what if my feelings are not cooperating with this because my head says yes, but the pain inside of my heart says no and I don't want to fake it with God because God sees. And so Jim said, Lisa, you just have to remember that forgiveness is not something you conjure up in yourself. Forgiveness is something that God has provided. And I had this picture of as God's forgiveness flows to me, I simply must cooperate with it and let it flow through me. So forgiveness isn't something that I have to figure out.

I just have to cooperate with God's forgiveness. And so Jim gave me a little script to say, and I went card by card by card. And the script that I would say is, I forgive this person for this particular pain and whatever my feelings will not yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover it. And he handed me some red felt squares. And so each time I said that, I would lay a piece of red felt over that card. And by the time I got to the very last card and the very last time I said, I forgive this person for this specific pain and whatever my feelings will not yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will cover it.

And I covered that last one with red felt. I looked back and it was no longer the pain that was staring at me. And I realized I've been obedient to God and I still have some stuff to work through. And that's okay because forgiveness is both a decision, which I made that day, and it's a process of healing. And it can be both. We forgive in a moment for the fact of what happened, but learning to forgive for the impact, that's going to take a long time.

And God's command for us to forgive allows space for both. Boy, oh boy. I remember reading that again, sitting on a beach in a glorious setting, that very chapter where you talk about the cards. You shared it with me. And I shared it with Ann and I just thought, I need to do that.

You know, and I've had the big moment in my life of forgiving my dad was a big one. But even as you talked and even as I read your book, I'm like, oh, I bet you have 30, 40 cards right now. I could easily write. I think we all do. I think we all could. So that's why I bring it up. I thought, what if a listener or thousands or tens of thousands of listeners did that process today?

I think it'd be amazing. It'd be really interesting to share this whole concept with a family around the table. I was thinking it'd be really cool to talk about that and the necessity of it, but also the reality of forgiveness. Like, it's not an easy thing and it's not a one time thing. It's a process.

And it starts today. Forgiving someone who has hurt us can be really hard. It's also not an option for us who are followers of Christ. We've been forgiven much and we are called to forgive one another. David and Wilson have been talking today with Lisa Turkhurst, who's written a book called Forgiving What You Can't Forget. Discover how to move on, make peace with painful memories and create a life that's beautiful.

If you are struggling with this issue of forgiveness, if there's someone who has hurt you and you think I can't forgive them. Let me encourage you to get a copy of Lisa's book. It's available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or call to order at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the website to order a copy of Lisa Turkhurst's book Forgiving What You Can't Forget is familylifetoday.com. The number to call is 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. And don't forget, this week and next week we are encouraging you to join with thousands of other couples from all across the country who this fall are going to be joining us at an upcoming weekend to remember Marriage Getaway. We're so excited to have a full schedule of getaways planned for this fall. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to find out when a getaway is happening in a city near where you live. If you register today for an upcoming getaway, you will save 50% off the regular registration fee. So it's a great opportunity for you and your spouse to have a getaway as a couple. And honestly, I think all of us could use a couple of days to getaway and refresh a little bit.

It's been quite a season, hasn't it? Find out more. You can register online or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Register now so you can attend an upcoming weekend to remember Marriage Getaway and save 50% off the regular registration fee. Again, details are online at familylifetoday.com or call us to register at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Now tomorrow we're going to hear more from Lisa Turkhurst about the process God took her through as she had to wrestle with forgiving someone who had hurt her profoundly, very deeply. The conversation continues tomorrow. I hope you can join us. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.