Forgiveness is a Decision AND a Process with Lysa TerKeurst
Today I get to talk to my friend Lysa TerKeurst about bitterness, forgiveness, and her incredible story of suffering, reconciliation, and redemption. Make sure to go check out her new book, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget - it comes out on November 17th!
Lysa, for anybody that doesn’t know, why don’t you just set up a little bit of where you’ve been these last few years?
Thank you for asking! The past 5 years of my life have been excruciating painful. They have been the hardest years I’ve ever walked through. I would have told you before this that I had checked all the hard boxes of stuff that a person could walk through. It’s not that I felt like I was protected from anything else hard happening - I just felt like I already had a testimony so now this should be a season where I’m just sharing my testimony and helping other people through their hard stuff. I had no idea that the hardest season was actually in front of me and not behind me. Art and I had been married for over two decades when I started to sense that some things were off with him. As a Christian wife, I very much tried to give myself those Christian pep rallies we always give like, “believe the best,” which I do believe. But sometimes we can believe the best and deny what’s actually real. Every time I would bring up concerns, he would redirect those concerns by saying, “I think it’s something you need to work on. I think it’s a perspective.” I would question him about something and then I would feel guilty because I felt like I wasn’t being encouraging or respectful enough. We got into this very dysfunctional dance where my discernment was telling me something was wrong, but the problem with discernment is it doesn’t give you details. When I went hunting for those details, I walked away feeling guilty that I was actually discouraging my husband. So I thought the issue was me. That’s very common, actually, when there are secrets in a marriage. One person can sense it but they can’t figure it out and they wind up thinking they’re the crazy ones. That’s what happened to me. I was utterly convinced I was crazy. One day, I found out the opposite was true. I was actually not crazy and there were terrible secrets that were being kept from me. But when I discovered it, I wish I could tell you it was a quick, tidy journey to repentance and healing and restoration and reconciliation, but that was not our story. I went to some really deep, dark, horrific places and every time I thought we were moving forward, I would discover something else. A little bit more of the story. It’s never easy when a marriage implodes and there’s infidelity and unfaithfulness. It’s never easy. But I experienced so much education on this in talking to people that when there is an affair, if the person who chose to have the affair is the one that comes to their partner and comes clean and does a complete, honest disclosure of what happened, then it’s a lot easier of a healing journey than if things leak out and are discovered over time. It’s a brutal process on the person who is healing. That was unfortunately the course my healing journey took. Over the course of 18 months, I thought we were about to cross the finish line of recovery and reconciliation, and we were about to renew our vows, but then more discoveries were made. I realized we hadn’t even started this journey. I thought we were about to cross the finish line, but we weren’t even at the first steps of healing yet. I was so discouraged and convinced at that point that our marriage was over. I told my husband, “I love you and I can forgive you, but I will not share you.” For the first time in the whole journey, I posted publicly what we were walking through. Mostly because the story was about to come out anyways - it was either going to be told through the rumor mill or I could get out in front of it and share it with truth. I had to kind of go into a season of healing and trying to survive. It was terrible and brutal. That’s the backdrop story of what I’ve walked through. I don’t share a lot of details, because those are for Art to share one day if he ever decides to tell his story, but I will say that I think knowing the pain I’ve walked through helps people see that I don’t approach this topic that we’re talking about today of forgiveness lightly. Usually, when you bring up the word forgiveness, it’s attached to the hardest and most horrific things people have ever walked through. So I don’t even start by telling people, “you should forgive.” I actually start by acknowledging the pain. I just say, “if no one else in this world has taken time to bear witness to your pain, I will. I’m so sorry for whatever it is you’ve walked through. I am so sorry that they hurt you the way that they hurt you, that they didn’t stay or they stayed too long. But you deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to you.” That’s really what this message is about today.
We were talking before we got on about marriages you get to be a part of because of this story, that you get to speak into and help. Specifically, we were talking about the line of enabling versus calling it. For a lot of Christian women, it’s really hard to know the difference. To know whether it’s something you’ve got to bring people into happening - it’s hard to do that. You’re protective of your marriage and your family’s reputation and your husband’s reputation. It’s also hard to know when to draw a line and say it can’t go on. Talk just a minute to those women or men who are struggling and saying, “I don’t know what stage we’re in here.”
I understand when I have these conversations with people and they’re saying, “my spouse has basically abandoned the marriage and walked away from it.” Maybe they’re with someone else or maybe they’re sucked so deeply into addictions that they’re very focused on protecting their addictions but not fighting for the marriage. I’ll often talk to women and men - it’s both, so I don’t want to generalize this and say I’m always talking to a woman who’s fighting for her marriage, because sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes my husband and I are talking to husbands who are fighting for their marriage. I’ve seen both sides. Often when one spouse is fighting for the marriage and the other person has walked away, I think the one fighting for the marriage thinks they are the ones that can pray enough, work enough, say they’re sorry enough, go to counseling enough, read enough, study enough, and beg enough that eventually their partner is going to turn around. Jennie, I am here to say that you can not work harder on another person than they’re willing to work on themselves. The reason I know to say that is because ultimately at the end of the day, I had to come to the realization that I could not change Art. I could only work on me. Art’s choices were his to own. The more I kept running around trying to save our marriage by preventing him from hitting rock bottom, the more I was enabling the chaos to continue. What’s so brutal is you know you can’t change another person, but when you’re married to them, their choices very much affect you and your children. It can feel like the most awful, brutal trap to be in to say, “I have to try to prevent them from hitting rock bottom, because if they hit rock bottom my children and I are going to suffer the consequences.” The reality is that if the other person doesn’t decide that they want help, that rock bottom is going to hit at some point. The longer you prolong it, the longer you’re staying in the chaos of the hurt and heartbreak. It’s very hard. Every circumstance is different. I always say get some wise, rounded people around you who have experienced brokenness but also have experienced healing. Get counselors, pastors, Godly friends around you and don’t try to make these decisions on your own. But where there is smoke there is a fire, and eventually unless the fire is put out, the hurting will continue.
I am so grateful for how you talk about this, because I am talking to so many friends and people I’m ministering to that because of the pandemic, they are experiencing the hardest season of their marriage. I think what the pandemic has done is reveal what was already there, but we don’t have the distractions or coping mechanisms we have in place to protect us from those things imploding in our lives. That’s true across the board, but with marriage it’s so hard. I remember when Zac and I were in the season where we didn’t think we would make it. I look back at that and I could handle almost anything. In that season, we walked through all different kinds of difficulties - kids acting out, friends having strokes, church issues - I could deal with all of that if we were okay. But if we weren’t, I couldn’t deal with anything. It was the foundational layer of my life where if you attack that, my whole house falls down. I just want you to talk to those people that maybe they’re not in an affair, but they don’t have intimacy or they’re fighting or there’s just difficulty. Talk to that person about what it looks like to pay attention to that smoke and how to put that out before it turns worse.
The pandemic certainly has caused us to see what’s really there. My counselor says it’s like draining a lake, and the water is so good at covering things up, but now we’re forced to see what’s under it. We’re seeing the stuff at the bottom of our lakes. A couple of things I would say is 1. It takes real courage to be honest about what’s really going on, but until we are honest, we don’t have a shot at healing. What happens is we get into a dysfunctional dance because we just need to survive. A lot of us are really good at dancing around the dysfunction instead of ever calling it what it is. Let me give you a funny story to illustrate this. My sister came to visit me a couple of years ago and we had done a renovation, and somehow in the renovation, our hot water heater had gotten connected to the back flood lights of our house. If you turn the back flood lights off, you would not have hot water. It took awhile to figure this out, but when I did, I just thought, “I have to remember to tell everyone to turn the back flood lights on or they won’t have hot water.” Honestly, it never occurred to me that there was a bigger problem that needed to get fixed. I just danced around it. Until my sister came to visit and she said, “Lysa, I don’t have any hot water!” and I said, “oh shoot! That means I need to turn the back flood lights on.” So I go turn them on, and she came down in her robe a little while later and said, “tell me what you said again - how did you get the hot water to work?” I said, “I turned the back flood lights on.” She said, “let me get this straight - if you want hot water, you have to turn the lights on in the back of your house?” I said, “yes.” She said, “you do realize that’s not normal, right?” I think that’s what can happen in our relationships. In order to survive and keep the peace, we know something’s not right, but it’s easier to dance with the dysfunction than to do the hard work of fixing the issues. Sometimes we need other people’s peek into our lives where they can say, “you do realize that’s not healthy, right?” The problem is that a lot of us get so isolated, because we want to protect the sacredness of our marriage. We don’t want to tell everyone what we’re facing and betray our partner by telling other people the issues. I do think the enemy knows that if he can isolate us, he can influence us. The enemy never wants us to move closer and closer to healing. The enemy wants us stuck in our hurting, pain, and isolation. That’s why I think it’s great to do what we’re doing today. I’m not asking anybody else to reveal things about their marriage, but what I am saying is if there is dysfunction, we’ve got to call it what it is. If we have any hope of healing and getting to the place where we can function the way we should function, we’ve got to start talking about those issues. I’m so glad we’re having this conversation today, but I also want to encourage people that you need to have some safe people in your life. Whether it’s a counselor or a really wise friend. But you need people to ask, “is this okay? Is this something I should be concerned about?” Chances are if you’re asking the question, there’s something there.
That reminds me of the first time I ever admitted to someone what was going on in our marriage and it was so interesting because it was a counselor at a pastor’s wives’ retreat. I signed up for a 30 minute session for free and I say just some basic things about our marriage. She grabbed my hands and she said, “honey, you aren’t going to make it if you don’t get help.” I was shocked. I had no idea that our issues were that out of whack and we were that unhealthy. I could not agree with what you were saying more. Because of that woman being brave enough to say that to us, I went home, talked to my husband about it, and he was resistant to counseling at the time, but we ended up going and it changed the trajectory of our lives. There wasn’t anything huge wrong with our marriage, but there was so much dysfunction that I was so unhappy. She saw I was dying to who God made me to be and that I was living in this marriage that was dead. I probably would have done that a really, really long time. But I’m guessing we would’ve done that long enough and infidelity would be just a step away. That’s what I want everyone to hear: it’s possible anywhere that would happen. The reason it’s possible is because the devil is good at his job. He will trick you and make you think that this small little thing is no big deal. Nobody gets to a huge life-altering difficulty without a lot of little steps in that direction. I think what you’re saying is so crucial. Find who you’re going to share your fight with. Who are you going to share what you’re wrestling with? For us it’s our small group. When we get in a fight, even if we’re completely reconciled, we still walk through it with our small group. Just for exactly what you’re saying! They can see if it’s really resolved, if we have unhealthy patterns, etc. I can not tell you how freeing and helpful that has been. We’re fans of counseling but we’re also fans of having those few friends you can be honest with. I want to hear the end of the story, even though I know it because I got to walk through it with you, but tell everybody about what has happened since that point when everything fell apart.
Yeah, so every time fell apart about 18 months in. Art and I did not live in the same house for over two and a half years. A big part of that is there were addictions involved and unhealthy behaviors, and my counselor helped me see that I needed to spend some time working on my side of the street and Art needed to spend some time on his side of the street. We had to work on ourselves individually before we had any hope to come back together. There was a lot of back and forth in that season. There were times where we would go long stretches without any communication and certainly when I announced we were getting a divorce, there was a season of no communication. I needed time for the dust to settle and to gather the pieces of my heartbreak together. Art also went and checked himself into treatment. But, it was probably 4 years into it that God finally got a hold of Art’s heart in a big way. Through a series of events, part of that being me getting breast cancer, and the other part of it was just waking Art up, and then also the addictions getting under control. It was a combination of a lot of things, but God started to show Art what life would be like without me. I think that woke him up. Art then did the very humble and hard work to start coming back home. Honestly Jennie, I don’t see a lot of people making that choice. I think it’s much more common that shame kicks in and causes people to build barriers where they refuse the work of humility. Especially when there’s addictions involved - it’s so complicated. I’m here to tell you that I do believe God visits every person even in the midst of an extreme pit of shame. Art was in a deep pit of shame and God came to him and gave him a choice, and Art made an unusual choice to surrender to the Lord. I do think every person is given that choice even when they’re in the deepest, darkest pit of shame. I just don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of people make the choice. Whether or not reconciliation ever happens, redemption with God is just between you and God. If your marriage is failing or maybe you’ve already walked through divorce and you’re thinking, “I don’t have a reconciliation story like Lysa’s, so I don’t have a redemption story,” don’t believe that lie. Redemption and reconciliation don’t have to hold hands. Reconciliation requires two people doing the hard and humble work of coming back together. Redemption with God is just between you and God. You can have a redemption story starting today, and that is a big reason I wrote this book on forgiveness.
Let’s talk about it because this is the issue. Art has this moment, but there is so much hurt! You’ve walked through breast cancer alone, he has abandoned your family, he has hurt you in ways it’s hard to even get our minds around. What did that process look like for you? Because bitterness is around the corner knocking at the door. That’s what we’re talking about this week is bitterness and how easy it is for that to take root and grow and grow and grow. What did it look like to interrupt that and not live in that place? And even before he repented too! You couldn’t live in that place of bitterness for 4 years or that would take you over and swallow you up too.
Let me tell you: bitterness feels good at first. At the beginning, bitterness feels like it is a protective barrier so you don’t hurt again. But make no mistake, bitterness doesn’t just want to be a feeling, bitterness wants to be your only feeling. Bitterness doesn’t just want to move into your heart - it wants to take over your heart. I started to feel consumed by the heavy weight of unforgiveness. I was feeling so weighed down, but I could not figure out why I was weighed down. If I started to think, “maybe I’m bitter,” I would quickly think, “of course I am!” How could I not be? I am bitter, angry, hurt, and resentful. I want him to suffer as much as I suffered! I want the scales of justice to balance out. But what woke me up more than anything was this realization I had one day that bitterness doesn’t often visit a hard-hearted person. Bitterness often comes to tender-hearted people. Tender-hearted people love deep, so they hurt deep. Bitterness isn’t an indication that you have a cold, hard heart. It actually probably means you have a very tender heart, but it has come in because you have experienced a loss. When you experience a loss, whether it’s through rejection or death or separation of any kind, there is emptiness there. Something is going to fill that emptiness, and we can either fill it with forgiveness, or we can let nature take its course and what naturally happens is bitterness comes in. But I didn’t want to live broken-hearted the rest of my life. Hard hearts break, but soft hearts don’t - they mold. I realized if I wanted to set my life up for continuous heartbreak, then having a bitter, hard heart would set me up to have my heart broken over and over and over again. I had to figure out a way to get my heart to a softer place so that when other hard things happen, and hard things always happen, my heart could mold rather than break. The only way that could happen was through this work of forgiveness, but it started with me acknowledging my pain. I could not start by just bossing my feelings around or over-riding my resistance. I wrote in the book, “hurt feelings don’t often want to cooperate with holy instructions.” I had to start with my pain first. That’s where the journey really began - in the middle of the hurt and heartbreak, without any promise of Art ever coming home, I sat in my counselor’s office and he said, “Lysa, do you want to heal?” and I said, “yes.” Then he said, “well today is a great day to work on forgiveness.” I remember thinking to myself, are you high? Are you crazy? I can’t work on forgiveness because I don’t know how this story is going to turn out yet. I don’t even think I’m done hurting. I certainly don’t want to betray myself. I was afraid if I started the pathway of forgiveness that was me saying that what happened didn’t matter, and it did matter. My counselor said, “Lysa, we don’t start with forgiveness, we start with walking toward forgiveness by acknowledging your pain.” So that’s where we started. He handed me this stack of 3x5 cards and I wrote out one thing on every card of how I had been hurt, wronged, devastated, shattered, rejected, betrayed. I wrote all these painful things out on these cards and they snaked all the way across his office floor. When I got to the very last thing I could think of, I looked at my counselor and he did the best thing anybody could ever possibly do. He looked at me and said, “I believe you. Your pain is real and if no one else is there to bear witness to your pain today, I will. What you’ve been through is awful and I am so sorry this happened to you.” Something inside of my heart cracked open just enough for me to say, help me. I don’t want to drown in all this pain! But I don’t know what to do with it. When I was a little girl, my mom taught me how to forgive. Often what would happen is, I would hurt my sister, she would cry, and my mom the great judge would appear. My mom would come and stand in front of me and my sister and ask what happened. My sister would say, “she hit me!” so my mom would say, “Lysa, say you’re sorry.” So I would. Then she would look at my sister and say, “now you say you forgive.” She would. Then she would say, “now the two of you need to hug and make up and don’t let that happen again. If you don’t stop acting foolish I’m really going to give you something to cry about.” I think as I stood there that day and I was telling my counselor that I didn’t know what to do, it was because I was carrying a very little girl understanding of forgiveness into a very adult situation. The great judge was not appearing declaring me right and them wrong. Nobody was saying out loud, “Lysa, what happened was wrong.” Art wasn’t agreeing to never do it again. He wasn’t even saying he was sorry! We weren’t hugging and making up. It just seemed like forgiveness was impossible. That’s the enemy’s tactic. He wants us to feel like it’s too soon to forgive until it’s too late to forgive. It just never seems to be the right time. But the perfect time to forgive is when we decide we want to heal. Forgiveness isn’t even for the other person. We can’t attach our healing to someone else’s choices they may or may not ever make. If I wait for Art to say he’s sorry or suffer as badly as I did or make right what was so wrong, then I was attaching my healing on choices I couldn’t control. Today is the day we can decide to sever the suffering by saying, “you’ve suffered long enough because of what other people have done to you.” The only way to sever with suffering is through the power of forgiveness. My counselor said, “Lysa, just go card by card by card and say, I forgive Art for this pain.” That was a great idea but my feelings would not sign up for that idea. He said, “Lysa, making the decision to forgive is not based on your determination or that you’re ready, it’s simply your cooperation with what God has already done. As God’s forgiveness has flowed to you, just let it flow through you and cooperate with that process.” Whatever your feelings won’t allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover it. Jesus’ blood is the symbol of God’s forgiveness to us that can then flow through us. That’s what I did. I went card by card by card and forgave Art and said, “whatever my feelings will not allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover it.”
What I love about what you’re saying Lysa is I don’t think we’ve been trained in this. You nailed it with that story of how you grew up. We just think forgiveness is a light switch we should be able to flip on. But in doing that, we bypass the real issues and all of our hurt. We never deal with it, so the forgiveness never feels real. We don’t know why it’s not fleshing out in our hearts and our lives, and it’s because we never addressed the hurt that caused it.
The other thing that makes this complicated Jennie is sometimes we say, okay, I do forgive this person. But then a week or month later, something happens and we get triggered in that pain. Every time someone hurts us, there is a fact of what happened, and then there’s the emotional impact. What happens is we misunderstand that forgiveness is both a decision and a process. We make the decision to forgive for the facts of what happened, that is in a moment in time and no one can take that away from us. That is being biblically obedient to God. He tell us to forgive, so when we’ve forgiven for the fact of what happened, we can check off that box. But later, when we get triggered from our pain and those feelings of bitterness, resentment, and pain come back on us, that’s not an indication that our forgiveness wasn’t sincere or that we are a forgiveness failure. What that means is now we are recognizing the impact that the whole event had on us, and it’s time for another marked moment of forgiveness. That’s how you make the decision to forgive AND you walk through the process. It’s really both.
I am so grateful for this book and that God has gifted you with the ability to put words around aches and difficulties that we all face in a way that translates to us actually finding healing. You’re saving us a lot of money in counseling!
It’s funny that you say that, because when I finished writing Forgiving You Can’t Forget, it was 60,000 words. So I turned it in and started going through the editing process. When the editor sent back notes, there was a part in the book early on that she said, “I feel like you need something else here. Another story or example or something.” I opened up this file of all the words I threw away in the writing process - extra words I didn’t think I needed. My extra file of extra words on forgiveness was 30,000 words. That’s almost a whole other book! I started reading some of these things in the extra file, and my team was like, “you can not throw away those words! We need to use those words.” So, I gave them to my editor and we did another book that’s going to come out at the exact same time. But this is the journal. It’s full of full-color pictures and places to write all the things I told people in the book to process.
It’s the counseling part!
It is! So there’s the book with the Bible study, and then there’s the forgiveness journal. It really is like having a counselor in the book.
The book comes out November 17th! I can’t wait. If there’s one thing you want to say to people that are listening to this that are really hurt, and they are hanging onto every word you’re saying because they’re in that dark place, what would you say to them?
I would say this: sometimes people say time heals all wounds. I do think time is a beautiful thing that can unfold, but it feels very brutal when you’re hurting. Time doesn’t naturally heal all wounds. It’s what you do with that time that determines whether you will point your life in the direction of healing or continued hurting. Like I said earlier, I truly believe you deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to you. Today is the day you can trade all of that drama for an upgrade, and that upgrade is peace. Your life can still be beautiful. You can discover beauty again! There is a redemption story that is waiting to be forgiven with the pieces and parts of what has been broken in your life. But if you want to point your life toward all of this healing, hope, peace, possibility, and beauty, it goes only by the pathway of forgiveness. Choose that! Choose the pathway of healing and forgiveness. Don’t sit in the hurt any longer.
