HOW PAIN AND DOUBT CAN BE INSTRUMENTAL FOR YOUR FAITH

[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, welcome back. Thanks for listening to Faith Fringes Podcast. If you’ve been listening for a while, you have heard of kind of my pillars of why I’m doing this podcast and if you’re new, feel free to go back and listen to the other four pillars. Today I am actually realizing I saved this one for last because of a few reasons. One is, it’s probably the main reason I’m getting into this podcast and two, it is so, it’s kind of deep. So today we are going to talk about how pain, how hurt, how doubt has affected our faith journey and how it’s affected even our connection with God, the way we view religion, the way we view spirituality, the way we interact and view life. And I realized as I have been recording, I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but I’ve recorded over the last couple months and kind of geared up to launch the podcast that I kept putting off this podcast, because I want to share my own personal story.

I have never shared it publicly in this format. I’ve shared bits and pieces with people and even with friends or have shared in a speaking engagement, bits and pieces, but I’ve never actually shared it all in one place. And it is kind of vulnerable and I’ve had to like seek friends to support me, seek mentors, and consulting, and just really walk through what does it mean to share my story publicly? But I think it’s so important because I have seen firsthand personally, I have also, I mean, my job is walking with clients in their stories of pain, hurt, doubt, and it’s one of my most honored times; is to sit with someone and just be there for them and hear their story and hear their doubt and their pain and their hurts. And actually my favorite type is when they are questioning God.

I welcome that. I love that because, guess what? The only people who are uncomfortable with questioning God are people, ourselves or others judging us. But guess what? God is not uncomfortable with that. In fact, I think He values that because He knows no matter what, where we end up, that journey of doubting and that journey of digging into our pain and questioning Him, I believe He shows up there. He’s big enough to handle it and He loves that because we actually decide for ourselves what we want to believe and He gets to show up and we get to decide what we want to believe about Him and I think it makes a richer relationship, a deeper, authentic relationship. God can handle anything. So if you’re there out there today, listening, and you are afraid to share your anger, your disappointment, your grief over what you feel has been part of God in your life, I want to let you know it’s okay. It is okay to let Him in on all the feels, all the thoughts, all the negative, anything. He can handle it. He’s God.

So I want to just kind of jump in to yes, my own journey. I grew up in a Christian home. At least I became a Christian at the age of five. For those of you who are used to the terms and the lingo, I said the prayer at age five and it was actually my dad who sat down and talked to me about God. I grew up, I was actually the first born of five kids, actually six kids, I want to say, but at age three, my parents had a baby who died 45 minutes after birth. And that really impacted me. I didn’t know it till way later, but that really impacted me and my family. It actually impacted both my parents because at that point, my parents didn’t really have, my dad didn’t really have a faith journey. He grew up more Catholic. My mom grew up in a Christian home, but she would be what we say in the Christianese culture have fallen away from God.

So she really didn’t have an ongoing relationship with God but when my sister died, both my parents, it really impact their spiritual journey. My dad up to that point had been an alcoholic and he has told this story and I’ve asked his permission to tell the story in case some of you are like, “Oh no, she’s sharing her dad’s story.” But he shares this story as part of his testimony and his life is that when my sister died, he stopped drinking cold, which is really unusual. I don’t see that much. I see people usually struggling to work with their alcoholism or their addiction to give it up. But he says what he had is like a conversion moment at church. Like where you go to the alter and say, “I’m not drinking again and I’m giving my life to God.” That’s what happened and it was all because my baby sister had died.

I mean, of course it really impacted them and it was so tragic, but he became a Christian and my mom, they started going back to church, but I think what happened is they jumped in as often new Christians do with such fervor and such commitment that they, I believe went kind of to the legalistics side. And like, I remember us being in church three times a week, at least like morning and night on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. And we kind of went that route, and then after, I would say two years later, my mom had my sister, my next sister. So then, and then kids every two years. So there was five of us and so I personally grew up, I feel, we talk about this now as a family, I grew up more in that legalistic, conservative realm. Like we couldn’t listen to certain types of music. It only had to be Christian music.

I remember one time, I think I was in junior high and they were saying how certain types of music, if you played it backwards on a tape, which is aging me for sure, on an audio cassette tape that playing it backwards, it had satanic sayings. And I remember hearing it freaking out. So just to give you a background, that’s the kind of house I was raised in. However, just side note, my parents are no longer like that very much. They are more realistic and more loving and more, I mean, it’s been what, 40 some years that they’ve had to really work and shape how they do their faith journey. So I’m just explaining how I grew up more elementary, middle school, high school. And then a lot of my churches, we moved around a lot just based on my dad’s job and a lot of the churches I went to were kind of in the Bible Belt, the Midwest, so conservative, some fundamental.

And I remember even one youth group, we were sitting in youth group and the pastor, the youth pastor got up and said, “Did you guys do your devotions today? If not, I want you to open your journals and write in big capital letters. God is not important to me today.” And when you hear that, I’m sure some of you cringed, but like, as I hear that, now I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it was so, such shaming way to talk about the shoulds and the should nots on how we do our relationship with God. And so that is how I was raised, but being the personality that I am and being the first born, I don’t know how many of you listening are firstborns, but I do have a Type A personality, and I do have a firstborn Enneagram three, wing two personality. So I did what they said. I was perfect, not really perfect, but I tried for perfection. I excelled in school, I joined sports teams, I joined youth group, I excelled in leadership. I tried to be the best because that’s what you’re supposed to do as a good little Christian girl.

And, and that was, that kept on going with youth group. And not all youth groups are bad. I had some amazing experience in youth group. In fact, I had some amazing mentors in youth group that were life-changing to me and they were real and authentic and I clung to them and I loved them. So I’m not saying it’s all one person or one church or one youth group. I’m just trying to explain my faith journey and how I interpreted it internally of I have to be this perfect Christian girl.

So let’s fast forward into college. I went to a Christian college on a leadership scholarship, which means I had to continue in that leadership role and doing everything right in my head, trying to do everything right. And I ended up, I was pretty naive, I would say, going to college. I mean, my parents were still together after all those years and in our age and place where a lot of people are getting divorced, my parents were together. I grew up, I feel like was sheltered because I didn’t really rebel or do anything. I just went into college. just excited to be in college, excited to be away and learning. I was 17 when I went to college and about my junior year, I met someone and we actually got engaged and married right out of college. And I had, I dated like a little bit here and there in high school, but not really a lot. So this was probably, I dated in college, a long-term relationship, and then after breaking up, I went and actually ended up marrying this person at age 21. So I was super young, at least in my opinion now, and first year in our marriage, I found out he was cheating on me and I did not know what to do.

I felt so embarrassed, so ashamed. I didn’t even, I didn’t tell anyone except one best friend, that’s it. I couldn’t handle that. I didn’t even tell my parents. I didn’t tell my family. I felt so much shame and I didn’t realize that then, but I started to develop panic attacks because now looking back, it makes sense, but I wasn’t aware of what happened, but I started having panic attacks and realized I mean, because I was living one way, trying to look perfect and do everything perfect, but inside this horrible pain and shame that I was hiding. I decided at that time to stay with him, but within the next two years, the cheating did not stop and I do remember going to one pastor to talk about it. And the one pastor, we didn’t go to counseling or anything, which I don’t recommend.

I recommend going to counseling, working on it, but we just went to one pastor once and he basically read a verse from the Bible about how you need to look to your own wife and nobody else and was basically like, “Are you good? Okay, don’t do it again. Thank you for telling me you were brave. You were honest.” And that was it. That was the only other person we told and it was just so sad that I didn’t feel like I could share it with anyone in church. I could, I shared it with the pastor and that’s the only advice we got and it was sad. So fast forward, two years later, almost two years later, I found out he was cheating again. And this time I realized I can’t do this and I felt like I was going to be sinning by getting a divorce.

I remember when I found out I went home to visit, I went to my parents’ house in Wisconsin, and I remember just taking a week and I read everything I could in the Bible about divorce. I prayed, and this is what I want to share. This is where my faith deconstruction started to happen. And again, it’s about pain. It’s about hurt, and I started saying, “God, I can’t live like this. And I will, if you want me to, but I just don’t think this is right and I believe that when you say you’re supposed to be committed and not be cheating on one another, that it’s okay to get divorced.” And I remember feeling, God say, “Go get divorced. This is my grace. Go and get divorced. You need to be free. This is not right. I don’t want you living in this.”

I just remember feeling so strongly that I had heard from God. I remember getting up from the floor on the basement where I was reading and praying and I went and I filed for divorce and then started the long process of going back and doing that. But in the middle, I felt so strong with my connection with God that I was okay yet the church and people in the community, it was a small community in the Midwest where everyone knew everyone, they were not okay with it because divorce is a sin. And even if they knew the story, it was like, I don’t know if it was any of their business to hear the whole story, but people had to hear the whole story so they could decide if my divorce was okay. And that’s where I was like, “This is not okay.” Like, I just felt no support from the church. People would like come and leave a book for me at work that was called The Power of a Praying Wife, like assuming that I didn’t pray about my marriage and they would ask me, “Well, who filed first?” And I would be like, “I did.”

And that was another judgment there. So it was just so much hurt from people in the church and their judgment. And this was 20 something years ago, but I remember realizing the people who took me in during that time, I actually lived with a woman who wasn’t married, but living with another man. And in that day and age, that was judged right. And then the other person who was a really good friend to me was a gay man. And 20 years ago, that was not as acceptable as it is now and I felt, I remember thinking, “This is not okay. These two people are kinder and compassionate and loving to me and they’re not part of my church. They’re not part of the church, big C church or little C church and they are kinder, more loving and more compassionate than my churches.” And that’s when I realized something’s wrong, something’s different.

I started deconstructing my faith of everything I learned, everything I knew. This is not okay. And so that’s when I realized I need to figure out what my relationship with God looks like, regardless of what anyone else says. Now, does that mean it was easy? No, not at all. I mean, I do feel like I have the freedom with God to wrestle and to grapple and fight it out with him. I remember screaming, cursing, yelling, crying just everything. And I felt safe with. Him, but yet I did have to deal with what other people thought of me and that’s what hurt me the most. And so I wanted to, I’m sharing this because that is what I want to encourage you, that your relationship with God can be different than your hurt from the past from other people or from the church or from religion. You can still have a deep relationship with God and that’s what I want to encourage you to do.

It’s not going to look the same. It’s going to be up and down. Mine has been up and down. So as I worked through this, I even had, six months after my divorce, I actually applied for an amazing university that I worked at, but as I was applying, the college I had went to, they were very against, like, I couldn’t work at that college because I was divorced, no matter the reason. And then, so when I was interviewing for this other university, it was another Christian, and I had to share with them like, “Hey, I want you to know I’m divorced.” Like I’m a second class citizen type of conversation and I remember the person interviewing me. He was the vice president of the college or the university and he said, “I don’t see a problem with that. We want to welcome you with open arms. We want to love on you, invite you into community and we’ll work with it. We love your story. We think you’ll be a great impact to our residents here.”

And it was so healing to hear that and the next three years that I worked at that university were probably some of the best in my life because I was just that supported, community, healing. I was able to engage with people on such a deep level, and I was able to be around men who were healthy and safe and helped me bridge that hole in my heart and really learn. I got to watch some marriages that were amazing, and I got to see what true marriage can be like, and a healthy marriage. And so I’m very grateful for that, just to see the differences in how two different churches or universities respond to someone going through that.

After that, I actually went to grad school and spent, it took me five years because I did it alongside when I was working in the residence hall, and I took five years to get my master’s degree and then moved to Colorado with a bunch of friends who we wanted to do house church with. And we just really believed in living community together. And during that first year, actually the first few months I met the man who is now my husband and I just really experienced amazing, personal redemption. And I feel like God very specifically put him in my life to have healing and redemption on the whole marriage thing.

And we talk about it now a lot, how God can be so personal in our life. I’m just giving you the short version, of course. There was a lot of ups and downs, a lot of roller coasters, a lot of working through it, even to the point of when my husband, I would go to church here in Colorado, I couldn’t sit there. I would have PTSD symptoms. For those of you don’t know what that is, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. So I would start shaking physically, I’d start sweating, my anxiety would rise, my heart would race. I’d start sweating in church and I realized, I’m not feeling so safe in a church. Like I connect to God more outside of church. Since then I’ve worked through that. I’ve gotten therapy and I’ve worked through it with a safe person to kind of work through church.

I do enjoy church, as long as I feel like they’re being real and authentic, but all that to say is I still to this state connect to God outside of church. I connect to Him on a trail, in the mountains. Most definitely, that’s my number one way. And I just want to say, all this to say is, I think deconstructing your faith is actually so important. And so you can reconstruct it on what is really true and what is true for you and what you are hearing from God and what, and keeping everyone else out of it between you and God. What do you hear from. Him? And how can you connect to Him? And so one of my favorite quotes, I’m going to read it. It’s from C. S. Lewis and he wrote it, his book, The Problem of Pain, and this is his quote. “We can ignore even pleasure, but pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscious, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to arouse a deaf world.”

I love that. I do feel like God can talk to us in pain if we allow Him and if we can keep the noise of everyone else out of our heads. I believe He is there for us and can hold us. And that is some of the only ways I’ve made it through some of the darkest moments of my life. Going through a divorce was one dark moment. I’ve had a few other majorly, dark moments and I do feel like that is a way to laser focus my need for God, my attention to Him.

Now this could, might be another episode, but I don’t like that God speaks through pain often. I mean, sometimes I get mad at Him for that. Like I was scared, like, “Oh my gosh, does that mean I just have to wait for pain to connect with God?” I’ve had to work on that too. So if you’re thinking that just know you’re not alone. I think that sometimes too, and I’ve had to really work on, “Can I connect with God in joy?” And yes. I’ve had to actually embrace that, allow that to happen and talk through that, but I do think a lot of people don’t have a problem connecting with God in joy or thanking Him for that. I think a lot of people have a problem connecting with Him in pain. They either blame Him, blame somebody else, or it’s too painful to even look at it. So they ignore it. And a lot of times what I see is people trying to stuff their pain, avoid their pain, ignore their pain and their hurt and cover it up.

And we cover it up with all sorts of behaviors that aren’t okay, that lead to unhealthy decisions and unhealthy lifestyles. So my hope for you is that you can dive into it, whether it’s with a friend, whether it’s with a counselor, whether it’s with a partner, somebody to dive into and say, “Let’s dive in. Let’s talk about it.” I think it’s so important to talk about. I think it’s important to give voice to. I do think pain and joy go hand in hand. Another C. S. Lewis quote I love, it’s called, in his book, A Grief Observed, he says “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” I’m just letting you think about that for a minute. The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.

When I realized that and when I read that and heard that, I actually heard it in the movie Shadowlands, which is about C. S. Lewis’ life, I realized, okay. Because sometimes we want to shut ourselves off. Like I was like, “Oh, I’m never getting married again. That sucked in a big way.” But I realized, no, I have to keep myself open to joy and to love because that’s why I feel pain. And that’s okay and I’m so glad I did it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be with my amazing husband, Chris now, and I wouldn’t have the relationship we have now, if I didn’t keep myself open, knowing that yes, he could hurt me. And we’ve often talked about that and there’s times I go back and, it’s actually one of our biggest fights when I get super independent and I put my wall up, like you’re not going to get to me. You’re not going to get to the deep places. I’m not going to be vulnerable with you. I’m not getting hurt like that again.

We’ve had to work on that and heal on that because guess what, for Chris and I to have the best love we can have, I have to open myself to the possibility that he might hurt me. And guess what? We each hurt each other in little ways every day because we’re human and that’s okay if our heart and our trust and our connection is still good if we can commit to each other. That’s not our goal, to hurt one another, but we are going to love as much as we can. And yes, that means the pain I might feel later is the happiness I’m feeling now.

So all that to say is, I want to create space for you to think through pain, doubt, hurt. I want you to name it. It’s so powerful naming stuff. As I’m talking with people about this podcast, as I’m interviewing people and the guests in the show, so much coming up is some religious trauma. And I think we need to give voice to that. I think we need to talk about that so that people can separate, my religious trauma is actually not from God. It’s from humans. It’s from people. It’s from a system. It is not from God. So that is my deepest desire. That is the main reason I have created Faith Fringes, a space for us to be real, dive into this together. And I hope as you hear my story, other people’s stories, that you feel that you are not alone and that you have the courage to speak out, to name your pain, to create space for your story and to connect with God on a totally different level than you have before.

It’s my deepest desire. Thanks so much for listening today. If you have questions or thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Drop me an email, dawn@faithfringes.com. If this podcast means something to you, share it with your friends, rate, review on wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe to Faith Fringes so that other people can not be afraid to jump in and talk about their story. Thanks so much.

Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com, to sign up.

Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com. Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.