Connecting the Dots
WHEN I WROTE THE last chapter, I called a friend so I could read it out loud to her. I wanted to hear her reaction and see if it stirred memories from her own childhood. And stir, it did. She said, “Wow, that’s going to make for some messy conversations at Bible study. But good. And necessary.”
I agree. It is messy. And it is good. It is both.
That’s part of what we need to do when taking the parts of our story that emerged in the last chapter and start connecting the dots. This messy and good part of the process should help us see that, while the situations we walked through seemed like isolated events from the past, they aren’t so far removed from us now. What we experience all throughout life impacts the perceptions we carry. The longer we carry those perceptions, the more they become the truths we believe, live by, operate under, and use to help us navigate life today.
It’s important to start making these connections between what happened in our growing-up years and the reasons we do some of the things we do, say some of the things we say, and believe some of the things we believe right now. And it’s not just processing for the sake of understanding ourselves better. It’s processing what still needs to be forgiven so we can truly move forward in healthy ways. The things marking us from yesterday are still part of the making of us today.
My friend told me she planned to hang up the phone and pull out her journal. The big journal with lots of room to write in—not her small journal for taking notes. That made me smile. If the chapter was big-journal worthy to my friend, maybe it would prompt others to put pen to paper as well.
The things marking us from yesterday are still part of the making of us today.
What I didn’t know as I was talking to her was that Art was also listening to me read the chapter. He was getting ready for the day, walking in and out of the room, and didn’t appear to be tuned in to my chapter at all.
But he was.
And he came to sit beside me after I hung up the phone. He had tears in his eyes. “The chapter was really good, Lysa.”
My words had moved him. He was tender and empathetic. He wanted to listen and was willing to share. He was making connections himself, and together those connections started to tell me the story behind our story. It was important not just for our healing but also for my journey to forgive the impact of what had happened. Remember, our decision to forgive happens in a marked moment like the one I had with the 3×5 cards. But there’s also a process of forgiving the impact that all this had on me that will unfold for years to come. These connections we were making became so very crucial for me to understand what had happened . . . not “why” but “what.” To verbalize forgiveness, we have to verbalize what we are forgiving.
Five years ago, Art being this open would have shocked me. In the years before what we now refer to as “the tunnel of chaos,” I only saw Art cry four times. Those times are deeply etched into my memory, because they were so rare.
Art was raised with the belief that emotion was intensely private and better kept to oneself. Performance was rewarded. So performance was preferred, even if that meant pretending. Being taught to stuff feelings early in life can sometimes mean you never learn how to properly understand feelings later in life. Feelings serve a purpose. Feelings inform us of issues that need to be addressed. They also help us empathize with others, bond with others, and know when we need to give and receive emotional support.
We don’t need to be ruled by our feelings. But we also don’t want to be actors playing out scripts that perform with emotion just when it is required or potentially rewarded. This is void of true relationship with those around us.
I had never made the connection before that Art and I were good at playing our roles and doing what was expected but we lacked the kind of depth needed for real emotional intimacy. He grew up in a house where feelings weren’t expressed. So he learned to keep secrets. I grew up in a house where every feeling was not just expressed but declared loudly and processed loudly. Secrets were kept, but they always found their way out in moments of emotional explosions and bold declarations. I couldn’t understand why he was so quiet. He couldn’t understand why I was so loud. We were just two people crying for more emotional depth but had not a clue how to get there.
Love is a thing of depth. When forced to stay on the surface, it flounders about like a fish out of water. A fish can’t live on the surface, because it can’t breathe. It breathes oxygen but not from the surface air. Fish pull water through their gills, which dissolve the oxygen from the water and dispense it into their bodies. If they don’t get below the surface, they will be starved of what gives them life. Love is a bit like that.
Love needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive.
When starved of depth, it flounders. When deprived of honesty, it shrivels. And when trust is broken, love is paralyzed.
Art and I have been through all of that. But, strangely, I found the floundering years to be the most confusing of all. Those were the years I questioned my sanity again and again.
Those were the years when the right things were said to me but seemed strangely absent of true feelings. Loving words should land in your heart like a pocketful of feathers fluttering about but then settle you as the truth of love settles in. But when words land with more of a thud, you wonder, Is this true? Do you mean what you’re saying?
Over time that confusion made me wonder, Am I sane? Are you sane? What I’m hearing from you should make me feel so loved and safe. But what I’m feeling on the inside feels more like fear. A strange, strangling fear like what you might feel when walking too close to the edge of a terrifying cliff. Why is that?
I’ve heard it said that people fall in love. I wish the expression was more like, “We found love, and then we chose it over and over together.” I much prefer that to falling.
So, for me, ours was a confusing love. But since his performance was so convincing, I truly thought 100 percent of the problem was me.
With a childhood like mine, I swatted away any consideration that something was off with Art. After all, I was the one abused, abandoned, and bullied. I truly thought our issues were my issues alone. I didn’t know how to address what I couldn’t figure out. I wasn’t making the connection that Art was crying out for more as well. I just thought he grew up in a quiet house. And quiet means perfect, since people aren’t yelling at each other. Since Art didn’t yell, I thought he was fine. I never made the connection that people who are quiet are sometimes the ones in the most pain. It’s just that their screams are silent. Or, they are acting out in secret. My pain was never undercover, so it was easier to attach the issues to me than to try and question things I didn’t understand.
Have you ever had your smoke detector start chirping, telling you the batteries need to be replaced for things to work properly? But when you can’t figure out how to replace the batteries, you just unhook it from the ceiling so the annoying sound goes away? I guess that’s what I did. I just accepted the issues as my own to make the confusion less alarming. Little did I know that in doing so I would miss the warnings of a fire that would soon destroy so much. In essence, I betrayed myself long before Art ever did.
I remember wishing I could dig down beneath the surface of his very confident and buttoned-up exterior. I wanted more. Though I couldn’t have described before now what the “more” was.
I would have fumbled my answer back then. I might have said more emotion. But that wasn’t truly it. I might have said more heart connection. But that wasn’t really it either. And because I wouldn’t have been able to define it, I would have just said, “Never mind. I’m happy. Forget I said anything.” And then I’d lie in bed at night listening to his steady breathing and I’d cry. I wonder how many midnight hours I spent praying about something I couldn’t even name.
I now know what the “more” was that seemed missing.
I now know it, because we now have it.
Vulnerability.
We have to be vulnerable to look at the realities of our life and make some of the connections we’re talking about. But we also gain even more vulnerability as a result of increased self-awareness. It becomes hard to pretend with others when we can no longer pretend with ourselves. And, sister, if that’s one of the only connections and corrections we make in these chapters, it was well worth the work.
The one who pretends will never be the one who realizes how desperately they need to be forgiven. So forgiving others will always seem more like another thing they have to do rather than a freeing process they can participate in. In our story, I had to make the connection that Art and I both needed grace. We both needed healing. We both needed forgiveness.
And though it’s been excruciatingly painful to learn this kind of vulnerability, it’s been the most life-giving part of our healing. Isn’t it strange that sometimes it’s the very thing we fear the most that winds up paving a road to freedom?
We’ve been stripped bare for all the world to see. And, as horrific as the truth was that came out, for the first time in a long while we were both forced below the surface where our love found oxygen.
The world defines vulnerability as exposing oneself in such a way as to risk exposure to harm.
And I think that’s sad. I understand it. After all, I’ve certainly experienced it. But I’ve seen another reality of vulnerability. A beautiful side. Instead of vulnerability meaning “I expose myself to harm,” what if it can be “opening myself to know and love other people while also allowing them to know and love me”?
And what if I could do this without fearing rejection, because I’m already utterly convinced that I’m accepted and acceptable?
And here’s where I made another connection. Art was quietly keeping secrets because he didn’t feel acceptable. I was always pushing for conversations he didn’t know how to have, because I was so desperate to hear words other men never said to me. I wanted to know I was accepted. Acceptable and accepted were both feelings we wanted, but the way we went about pursuing those tore us apart instead of bringing us together.
The secret to having healthy vulnerability doesn’t start with me feeling safe with Art. Safety is important, for sure. But it doesn’t start with others. It has so much more to do with me being safe with me. And Art being safe with Art. It was only when my most honest opinion of myself was also an honoring opinion of myself that I could stand vulnerable before Art without fear. Without walls of pretension. Or curtains that were only opened when we performed. Without little lies to cover things we couldn’t bear to be revealed . . . without piercing judgments of each other’s frailties.
Art had to believe he was acceptable.
I had to believe I was accepted.
These weren’t feelings to find inside our relationship. These were truths to be lived out because God had already helped us believe them as individuals first. Then, in moments of vulnerability, we could simply remind each other what we already knew to be true.
Now raw honesty can spill out without the other jumping in to quickly mop it all up. Or without personalizing unfiltered emotion as an attack. Now our conversations are more like “Just say what you need to say. I am listening. You are safe. I will remember who you are in light of how God created you. Together, we’ll fight the shame threatening to bully its way into your mind. I will not add to your shame. I will speak the truth but always with the goal of helping you and helping us to stay healthy. I will not reduce you to being a sum total of your struggles. I will speak life by reminding you who you really are in Christ.”
The secret is, we can help each other remember who we really are. But we can’t fix each other. We can’t control each other. We can’t keep each other healthy. We can speak life. We can be vulnerable. We can pray. We can battle the enemy. We can lift up all concerns to the Lord, and we can navigate concerns with each other. But we must not let the destructive force of shame into any part of our relationship. It is returning to what God always intended relationships to be.
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). They were vulnerable . . . not at risk of being exposed but so very open to being loved. They didn’t feel ashamed of themselves. They didn’t shame each other. They didn’t act shamefully in any way. I’ve often said this was because “they had no other opinions to contend with but the absolute love of God.”1 This is true.
But I also now see more to unpack here.
They knew they were made by God, fully and wonderfully special, even though the actual ingredients God used to make them were seemingly so very humble and basic. Dust and broken-off bone don’t seem like the most promising of beginnings. Those ingredients are seemingly void of any potential. When we think of dust, we often think of what’s left behind after something gets broken or what needs to be wiped away after too much neglect. And an exposed rib bone is one of twenty-four others like it, hidden under flesh and not seen until life no longer exists and decay has done its work.
Left on their own, these ingredients would amount to nothing. Insignificant. Unacceptable.
But chosen by God and then breathed on and touched by God, they became the only part of creation made in the image of God. They were nothing turned into the most glorious something. They were made to be a reflection of the image of God. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). These image bearers made an invisible God’s image visible.
What made them glorious wasn’t how they started off as dust and bone, but who they were made by: God Himself. They accepted who they were based on, who they knew God to be. I see no evidence they were displeased in how they were made before the fall.
They were both naked and felt no shame.
As I realized this, tears dripped like rain onto my journal. The words I’d written in ink started to swirl in liquid smudges. I started to make the connection of how desperately Art needs to hear me speak these life-giving words over him, reminding him over and over that he’s more than dust. He’s more than what he’s done. He’s so much more than the mistakes he’s made. He’s the very breath of God—so very acceptable. And when I look at him like that, his real identity emerges. This doesn’t deny the issues we both still need to work on. But it does shift the foundation from shame to the hope we have in Christ. The affair, while it is a reality, is not his true identity. He’s a child of God whom I can forgive.
I let this sit on me, and it started to soften my heart more and more. My pen kept writing. My tears kept flowing. My heart kept softening. Making these connections was so very eye-opening. I realized my tears weren’t just because I was making connections but also because there was grief attached to these revelations.
This word grief kept emerging in what I was journaling. Though I was forgiving, I was still grieving over all the hurt. I was still grieving over wrongs not yet made right. I was still grieving over choices I didn’t agree with. Grieving is often a long process that holds hands with forgiveness. We will talk about the part that loss plays in later chapters, but I want to show you another connection I made.
Even as a small child I felt the unfair sting of loss and how awful it is when people’s actions cost us deep emotion. I never knew how much this made me afraid of people taking advantage of me. I didn’t know how to get a better perspective on this. But reading through Genesis, I experienced another fresh revelation.
God expressed before the woman was created that it wasn’t good for the man to be alone. I always assumed that was because something was missing with Adam. But rereading it carefully helped me see created Adam was not incomplete. After all, when God made the man fall asleep, he didn’t redo, remake, add to, or renovate the man at all. He actually took from him. But though it cost Adam some bone, God gave back something so much better than what was taken. Any sacrifice placed in the hand of God, God can bring good from.
And maybe that’s the first lesson for what makes vulnerability so complicated. If we risk being open, we risk being hurt. We risk the other person taking something from us. And we know to fear this pain, because, unlike Adam and Eve, we’ve experienced this pain. So we pull back and we get bitter and we become more and more easily offended and less and less willing to be vulnerable.
I understand this.
I know how to describe this, because I am so prone to thinking like this.
Like I said, I feel so incredibly violated when anything is taken from me. And there’s absolutely nothing in my natural being that wants to be okay with some of what I’ve lost. I still weep over the affair. I still have an ache over my baby sister Haley gone way too soon. I still miss friends who are no longer part of our lives. I still hope my dad will one day come home.
There are other things taken that aren’t nearly as hard to process. Money stolen, rude comments given, or other things stripped away aren’t on the same level as the loss of people I’ve loved so deeply. It’s a different kind of pain, but it’s still a pain that can make me not want to risk being taken from again.
But what if, instead of fearing what might be taken from us, we decided that everything lost makes us more complete, not less? Not by the world’s economy. In this world, loss makes us grieve as it should. But this isn’t the whole story.
At the very same time we grieve a loss, we gain more and more awareness of an eternal perspective. Grieving is such a deep work and a long process, it feels like we might not survive it. But eventually we do. And even though we still may never agree on this side of eternity that the trade the good God gave us is worth what we’ve lost, we hold on to hope by trusting God.
Everything lost that we place in the hands of God isn’t a forever loss.
Martin Luther said, “I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.”2
God took Adam’s bone. He gave him back the gift of a woman.
Not everything that’s been taken from us was by the hand of God. But when I mentally place each and every loss in His hands, it can be redeemed. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 ESV).
Loss is never the end of the story. This was so clear with my friend Colette as she did the work of processing her past and looking for connections. One thing she noticed was that she had a complete dread of sunrises and sunsets. For most of us, these are inspiring. But not for Colette. She didn’t want to sit and watch the sun rise or feel the glorious close to a day with a sunset walk. Her family knew this, but they didn’t know why.
It actually made her family sad that she wouldn’t enjoy sunrises and sunsets with them.
But as she wrote her story, the dots she collected suddenly started helping her connect that as a child morning and night were times when she felt threatened and afraid because of circumstances beyond her control. So her belief system that formed as a child was that these two times of the day were to be avoided, not enjoyed.
All this time later, she still avoided sunrises and sunsets, though she’d not been threatened at those times of day in more than thirty years. Her circumstances had dramatically changed. But her thought processes around sunrises and sunsets never changed as she grew, matured, and went on with her life. So, as she connected these dots, she realized she needed to correct her belief about sunrises and sunsets.
The week we talked about all this, she saw these glorious displays of color in the sky as never before.
Since she was having this experience while visiting a different state, she at first thought the skies were suddenly so magnificent to her because they were different in that part of the country. But another friend assured her that’s the way they looked in her hometown as well. And that’s when she saw that correcting the dots of her story helped her see beauty again. Expansive splendor and glory burst into flaming colors before her, and she saw it! She finally saw it. And I believe she’ll see it now for the rest of her life.
It’s not because her past changed. It’s because what she now believes is possible for her has changed. Now early mornings are not dismal, and the sky giving way to darkness isn’t dreadful. They are displays of glory and splendor and beauty she 100 percent has permission to enjoy. Her choice. My choice. Your choice.
As I sit here reflecting, connecting my dots and thinking about Art’s and Colette’s, I realize there’s more to every story. There are hurts and losses we’ve experienced in our past that feed wrong beliefs and unhealthy tendencies, holding us back in the present. Colette lost years of not only enjoying sunrises and sunsets but also enjoying experiences with her family. Art and I lost years of being able to have hard conversations without personalizing unfiltered emotion as an attack. We also lost the intimacy this would have fostered. Yes, loss is certainly part of what shapes us. But it doesn’t have to all be detrimental. Loss can also shape us in wonderful ways if we will let it.
If we become more self-aware of how we are processing our thoughts and perceptions and redirect those in more life-giving ways, then inside every loss, a more wise, empathetic, understanding, discerning, compassionate person of strength and humility has the potential to arise within us.
So I walk back through my story and call her to arise. I developed beliefs about life, myself, other people, God, and forgiveness as a child. And those beliefs were often most deeply ingrained in me when I was hurt as a child. This is what formed my processing system through which my thoughts and experiences pass even to this day.
I think it’s time to revisit my belief system. I don’t want to forever process hard situations using perceptions formed by my most hurtful or traumatic seasons. This is a slow process and not one to rush, but let’s also not be afraid to start the healing process. And that begins with finding the connections.
Here are some things to consider as you look for the connections in your story:
•Are there times of the day or seasons of the year that you should enjoy but you avoid? For example, with me, I have always loved October and November. Fall has always been such a special time of the year for me. But now I find myself bracing for these fall months, because it’s when a significant trauma happened with Art. Once I made this connection, I intentionally worked to reclaim these months for good. Reclaiming is so much more empowering than avoiding.
•Are there places you should enjoy, but you find yourself not wanting to go there?
•Are there types of people you avoid or find yourself feeling especially anxious around?
•Are there certain words or phrases that trigger more emotion than you feel they should?
•Are there life events that when the memories are talked about, you find yourself wanting to escape the conversation?
As you consider categories of who, what, when, and where . . . look for the why. Pay attention to physical responses your body has, such as increased heart rate, anxious feelings, grimacing expressions, or just a general feeling of resistance you know shouldn’t be there.
We can’t change what we have experienced, but we can choose how the experiences change us.
I promise you it’s worth it. I see it today in the miracle of how far God has brought Art and me. We both still have so far to go. But we aren’t where we used to be.
There is vulnerability. There’s no performing. There are no secrets. And if I cry in the midnight hours, he wakes up. Literally.
This is a safety we never had before. Emotion. Tears. Honesty. Freedom to discover what’s inside without worrying it will label us with issues or scare the other one away. Just plain humanity set before another who is fully aware of their own frailties.
We are free to just be with each other without the pressure of needing to fix each other. It’s not that I don’t bring up concerns, but I don’t take Art’s issues on as mine to fix. And Art doesn’t take on mine either. We work on them with our counselors, and we box out our frustrations in prayer with God. It’s not all tidy. It’s actually sometimes quite messy . . . but it’s good. And that frees us to just do the living and the loving together.
Now, back to the story from the beginning of this chapter. I stared at Art that day, as he shared the connections he was making in response to the ones I’d made. This man with tears brought on by something I’d written. A piece of me had moved his heart and stirred his interest to just sit with me.
How can it be that this man who broke me on the deepest of levels now knows how to love me in the greatest of ways? It’s a mystery. Like so much of my story—such a mix of God sometimes moving and then sometimes, well, I can’t understand where God was and I can’t see evidence of what He was doing. But maybe that’s the part called faith. My trust gets built when I see God’s work with my human eyes. But what builds my faith is when I can’t see or understand what He does. Instead, I choose to place my trust in who He is and declare Him good in the midst of all the unknowns.
My dad never did come home to our family, and now it’s been nearly thirty years since I’ve even heard his voice. I forgave him and I told him I loved him, but he still doesn’t call.
One man returned.
One man never did.
And yet God’s redemption is there over it all. It’s a mystery so painful and so beautiful all at the very same time.