Latest / The Voice: Breaking, Believing, Becoming / Season 2 Episode 1 Breaking Open

Transcript

Season 2 Episode 1 Breaking Open · The Voice: Breaking, Believing, Becoming

• 0:10
  Welcome back to The Voice. Gosh, it feels really good to say that again.
• 0:16
  It's been a long off-season. Well, at least it feels that way to me.
• 0:21
  I've been busy putting Season 2 together, and there are so many conversations
• 0:25
  that I'm excited for us to have.
• 0:27
  When I started thinking about where I wanted to begin, I kept coming back to
• 0:32
  something that has been here from the very beginning.
• 0:35
  If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me say
• 0:40
  three words over and over again.
• 0:43
  Breaking, believing, becoming.
• 0:46
  They're right there in the name. And they've been the thread running through
• 0:50
  almost every conversation that we've had.
• 0:53
  But after an entire episode together, I realized we've talked a lot about believing
• 0:59
  and a whole lot about becoming, but we've never really stopped and talked about
• 1:04
  that first word, breaking.
• 1:07
  Maybe there's a reason for that. I mean, breaking isn't exactly the part any of us is signing up for.
• 1:13
  We like the growth and the healing and the healthy relationship and the successful
• 1:17
  business, the peace, the confidence, the stronger faith.
• 1:21
  We love a good before and after story.
• 1:25
  We just don't particularly enjoy what happens between the before and after.
• 1:29
  And yet, so much of who we become begins right there, in the part you probably
• 1:35
  would have skipped if we could have been given the choice.
• 1:39
  You know, the ending, the disappointment, the loss, the failure,
• 1:43
  or that moment when the life we thought we were going to have suddenly looks
• 1:48
  very different from the life standing in front of us. That's the breaking.
• 1:53
  So maybe that's exactly where season two should begin.
• 1:57
  Because I've learned something about breaking. Not everything that breaks is destroyed.
• 2:04
  Today, I want to talk about the very human side of breaking,
• 2:08
  the spiritual side of it, what happens when life takes something we never wanted to lose,
• 2:14
  what happens when we finally choose to put something down ourselves,
• 2:19
  and why being broken is not the same thing as being ruined.
• 2:23
  Welcome to Season 2. Let's talk about breaking.
• 2:29
  What does it actually mean to break? I mean, when we hear the word broken,
• 2:33
  we almost automatically think of something negative, right?
• 2:36
  If something's broken, we assume it needs to be fixed, replaced, or thrown away.
• 2:41
  A broken appliance gets replaced, a broken glass gets swept up and tossed in
• 2:46
  the trash, and when we hear that a relationship is broken, we assume it has ended.
• 2:53
  So when we use that same word to describe ourselves. It can sound almost final. I'm broken.
• 3:00
  As though something about us has been damaged beyond repair.
• 3:05
  But I don't think that's what all breaking means. In fact, I know it's not.
• 3:10
  Sometimes what breaks is a belief we've carried for years, an identity we've
• 3:16
  built around what other people needed us to be,
• 3:19
  a relationship we thought would last forever, a dream, an expectation,
• 3:25
  or simply a version of ourselves that worked for one season but can't come with us into the next.
• 3:32
  When something we've built part of our identity around begins to fall away,
• 3:38
  it can feel as though we're falling apart.
• 3:41
  But maybe what we're really discovering is how much of who we thought we were
• 3:46
  had become attached to the marriage, the career, the title, the role,
• 3:51
  the person we thought would always be there, or the future we were certain we were going to have.
• 3:58
  If you take those things away, you're left with a pretty uncomfortable question. Who am I without them?
• 4:06
  Breaking has a way of revealing what we believe, what we fear,
• 4:10
  what we've been holding on to, what we've been pretending not to know,
• 4:15
  and sometimes what we're actually capable of surviving.
• 4:20
  Of course, you rarely recognize any of that while it's happening.
• 4:24
  I mean, when you're in the middle of a breaking, you're not sitting around analyzing
• 4:28
  your personal transformation.
• 4:30
  You're just trying to get through Tuesday.
• 4:33
  And let's just say I've had plenty of opportunities to test that theory.
• 4:38
  With my breakings, I've been through two divorces that took my breath away in very different ways.
• 4:44
  One came with an affair and a custody battle that lasted three very long years.
• 4:49
  The other came with multiple betrayals, so many that by the end,
• 4:54
  I was trying to understand how so much of the life I thought I was living wasn't
• 4:59
  actually the life I had been living at all.
• 5:02
  There was leaving a career that I had spent years building and starting a business
• 5:07
  when I really didn't know what I was doing, wondering more than once if I had
• 5:10
  completely lost my mind.
• 5:13
  There was motherhood and seasons of feeling like I was doing so much of it wrong
• 5:18
  and so much of it alone, even though I was married.
• 5:23
  And I've had lots of loss. I've watched friendships and relationships end.
• 5:27
  I've watched friends fight cancer.
• 5:30
  I watched my sister endure something so horrific that I never could have imagined
• 5:34
  it happening to someone I love.
• 5:37
  And I lost my father, suddenly and completely unexpectedly.
• 5:42
  And because of the circumstances surrounding his final moments,
• 5:46
  his death required something of me. no daughter, and especially no daughter
• 5:50
  that was a nurse, ever wants to be asked to do.
• 5:55
  So yes, there have been times when I genuinely thought, this is the thing that's going to break me.
• 6:02
  And some of them did, at least for a moment.
• 6:07
  But with enough distance, I can see that those experiences broke things in me
• 6:12
  that I wasn't expecting.
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  They broke expectations, illusions, plans, things that I believed about other
• 6:20
  people, and some things I believed about myself.
• 6:24
  And if I'm being completely truthful, some of them broke my pride and my need to control everything.
• 6:31
  They especially challenged this belief I carried for years, that if I just loved
• 6:36
  someone enough, tried hard enough, prayed hard enough, or behaved perfectly
• 6:41
  enough, I could somehow guarantee the outcome.
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  That's been a hard one for me to let go of. Because sometimes breaking is finally
• 6:52
  admitting that you can't control it.
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  You can't love someone into making different choices or behave perfectly enough
• 6:59
  to keep bad things from happening.
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  And you can't protect everyone you love from pain or control every ending.
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  And for those of us who really enjoy control, God bless us.
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  Before I get into what my faith has taught me about all of this,
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  I want to talk about the part that is just simply human, because I don't want
• 7:22
  to take every painful thing that happens and wrap it in a pretty spiritual bow.
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  Sometimes life sucks. People make terrible choices. Bodies get sick.
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  Relationships end. People die.
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  People disappoint us, and sometimes we disappoint ourselves.
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  Pain is part of being human, regardless of what you believe about God.
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  Thanks to Adam and Eve, by the way.
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  And sometimes those disruptions force us to confront things we might never have questioned otherwise.
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  The relationships we've accepted, the roles we've played, the things we've tolerated,
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  and the stories we've told ourselves about who we are and what our lives are supposed to look like.
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  Because here's the strange thing about being human. Familiar doesn't necessarily mean healthy.
• 8:12
  Sometimes familiar simply means I know how to survive here.
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  There could be a strange kind of security in that. At least we know the rules
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  and we know what to expect.
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  Sometimes that's why we stay long after we know something isn't working.
• 8:27
  We're not always afraid of what we're leaving. Most times we're afraid of who
• 8:31
  we're going to be without it.
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  And that's where I think there's an important distinction in breaking.
• 8:37
  Some breaking happens to us.
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  Some breaking requires something from us. Sometimes we reach a point where we
• 8:46
  simply know, I can't keep living this way.
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  And knowing something is no longer good for you doesn't mean you won't grieve
• 8:53
  it. Knowing it's time to leave doesn't mean leaving won't hurt.
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  And knowing you've outgrown something doesn't erase the fact that it may once
• 9:02
  have been incredibly important to you.
• 9:05
  Sometimes the thing we're breaking away from was also the thing that once made
• 9:09
  us feel safe, needed, loved, valuable, or simply familiar.
• 9:16
  And that kind of breaking can happen so quietly that nobody else even knows it's happening.
• 9:22
  It isn't always the divorce papers or the diagnosis or the funeral or the phone
• 9:27
  call that changes everything.
• 9:29
  Sometimes it's just realizing you're tired of begging someone to see your worth,
• 9:34
  you're finally setting a boundary without apologizing for having one,
• 9:37
  or you're accepting that you're not responsible for everyone else's happiness.
• 9:43
  Sometimes it's letting your adult children make decisions you wouldn't make
• 9:47
  and reminding yourself that loving them doesn't require controlling the outcome.
• 9:53
  And sometimes it's accepting that someone may misunderstand you without writing
• 9:57
  a 12-page dissertation explaining exactly why they've misunderstood you.
• 10:02
  And speaking of 12-page dissertations, it reminds me.
• 10:07
  I can't tell you how many times during my marriage I wrote to my husband.
• 10:11
  Writing has always been how I process and express what I'm feeling,
• 10:15
  and I kept thinking that maybe if I could just find the right words,
• 10:19
  he would finally understand how he was hurting me.
• 10:24
  But when I eventually came out of the fog and began seeing that marriage for
• 10:29
  what it actually was instead of what I had spent so much time trying to make
• 10:34
  it be, I remember thinking,
• 10:37
  I will never waste another word on that man.
• 10:40
  The painful realization was that I hadn't failed to explain myself well enough.
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  One more perfectly written letter wasn't going to make someone hear what I had
• 10:51
  been trying to say all along.
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  And for someone who communicates through words, not writing another one was
• 10:59
  its own kind of breaking.
• 11:01
  Apparently some of us struggle with the whole stop explaining yourself thing more than others.
• 11:07
  But that's quiet breaking. Nobody sends flowers or brings a casserole because
• 11:12
  you finally stopped explaining yourself.
• 11:15
  Sometimes the change happens completely inside you.
• 11:19
  You stop chasing and trying to control the outcome. You stop carrying something
• 11:23
  simply because you've carried it for a long time.
• 11:26
  And eventually you realize you've let it go.
• 11:30
  Sometimes breaking isn't life ripping something away from you.
• 11:34
  It's you finally putting something down.
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  And that brings me to my faith. It doesn't exempt me from breaking,
• 11:43
  and it doesn't mean terrible things won't happen.
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  But faith does change what I believe can happen within the breaking.
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  You know, when I look at Scripture and the Bible, you know, if you believe what
• 11:57
  the Bible says, I see a pattern, not a formula.
• 12:01
  I don't believe every terrible thing that happens is God deliberately trying to break someone.
• 12:07
  I don't believe God caused every betrayal that I've experienced,
• 12:11
  and I certainly don't believe he orchestrated evil simply because something
• 12:14
  meaningful might eventually come from it. It's not how he works.
• 12:20
  Because we live in a fallen world, people have free will, and it's an imperfect world.
• 12:28
  Terrible things happen that I don't think we're always going to understand this side of heaven.
• 12:34
  But I absolutely believe God, if invited, will always meet us there.
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  He could redeem what He didn't cause and take something we never would have
• 12:45
  chosen and somehow use it to change us.
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  And scripture is full of people whose stories look very different when you stop
• 12:53
  reading only the highlight reel,
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  one that i could think of offhand is we love saying pit to palace the story of joseph,
• 13:03
  but we tend to leave out the entire messy middle of joseph he eventually made
• 13:09
  it to the palace but first his brothers discussed killing him threw him into
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  a pit sold him into slavery and convinced their father he was dead.
• 13:18
  Later, he was falsely accused and ended up in prison for doing the right thing.
• 13:23
  Can you imagine what family Thanksgiving must have been?
• 13:28
  And then there's Hannah. She desperately wanted a child and couldn't conceive.
• 13:33
  And another woman in the family taunted her about it. And when Hannah finally
• 13:38
  went to the temple, completely overwhelmed and prayed through her grief,
• 13:42
  the priest saw her moving her lips without making a sound and assumed she was drunk.
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  So she's heartbroken, struggling with infertility, being taunted,
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  and near the priest thinks she's had too much wine.
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  You really can't make this up.
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  Eventually, Hannah becomes Samuel's mother, but before Samuel,
• 14:01
  there was simply a woman crying out to God while nobody around her seemed to
• 14:06
  fully understand what she was carrying.
• 14:09
  And Esther's story looks different as well. We remember the queen,
• 14:13
  but before the famous for such a time as this moment,
• 14:17
  she was a young Jewish orphan who eventually found herself having to decide
• 14:22
  whether to stay quiet and potentially protect herself or reveal who she was
• 14:27
  and risk her life trying to save her people.
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  Her breaking wasn't simply something being taken from her. It was reaching a
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  point when staying hidden was no longer an option.
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  And even Jesus experienced the wilderness immediately after his baptism in this
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  extraordinary moment of affirmation.
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  He doesn't go straight into public ministry. He spends 40 days in the wilderness
• 14:53
  facing fasting, temptation, and isolation before his ministry begins.
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  Those are all different stories, but something keeps showing up. The in-between.
• 15:04
  That place where what you thought was going to happen isn't happening and whatever
• 15:09
  comes next hasn't revealed itself yet.
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  I believe that's where faith becomes more than something we say we have.
• 15:17
  That's where we discover what or who we actually trust when everything else feels uncertain.
• 15:25
  But this is where I want to be careful, because there's a big difference between
• 15:28
  saying God can use our breaking and saying God has to break us in order to use us.
• 15:34
  I ran across a post that originally got me thinking about this.
• 15:38
  It said, before God uses a woman, He breaks her first.
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  I understand what it's trying to say, but I don't want anyone sitting in an
• 15:47
  abusive relationship thinking, God is breaking me because he's preparing me. No.
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  I don't want someone enduring mistreatment because they think suffering makes them holy.
• 15:59
  And I don't want someone who has experienced an unimaginable tragedy believing
• 16:03
  that God deliberately caused it because he needed to teach her something.
• 16:08
  Sometimes we just simply don't know why something happened.
• 16:12
  Faith doesn't require us to have an explanation for everything,
• 16:16
  and it doesn't require us to call something good simply because we believe God
• 16:20
  can eventually bring good from it.
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  Maybe that's the distinction I've come to believe most deeply.
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  God doesn't have to cause the breaking in order to meet us in it.
• 16:31
  I don't have to believe God caused every painful thing that happened to me in
• 16:35
  order to believe He was present in every one of them.
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  And I don't have to call the breaking good to believe that God can still do
• 16:43
  something good with what remains.
• 16:46
  A great example of this is the analogy of the seed.
• 16:50
  A seed can't remain exactly as it is and become what it was created to become.
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  At some point, the shell has to open.
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  If you didn't know what was happening underneath the soil, you might look at
• 17:03
  that seed splitting apart and think something had gone wrong.
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  You might even mistake it for destruction.
• 17:09
  But underneath that same dirt, something is beginning.
• 17:14
  And maybe that's why becoming can be so hard to recognize while we're actually living through it.
• 17:20
  Transformation doesn't always look beautiful in the middle. Sometimes it looks
• 17:24
  like losing, waiting, starting over, letting go of something you spent years
• 17:29
  trying to hold together, or even saying goodbye to something you prayed desperately to keep.
• 17:36
  That's the part we don't usually put on the inspirational quote.
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  Because when you're underneath the dirt, you don't necessarily know whether
• 17:45
  you're falling apart or something new is beginning.
• 17:48
  You just feel buried.
• 17:51
  Sometimes the first evidence that you're becoming someone new is simply realizing
• 17:55
  that the old version of your life doesn't fit anymore.
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  That's what being broken open means. It isn't becoming someone completely different.
• 18:05
  It's making room for something in you that couldn't grow while you were desperately
• 18:09
  trying to keep everything intact.
• 18:12
  When I started this podcast, I thought I knew exactly what breaking,
• 18:17
  believing, becoming meant.
• 18:19
  21 episodes later, I understand those words differently.
• 18:25
  Season 1 may have included conversations about motherhood and marriage,
• 18:29
  divorce, friendship, infidelity, dating, waiting, belonging,
• 18:34
  grief, identity, family, and faith.
• 18:38
  But underneath almost all of them was the same question. Who are we all becoming
• 18:43
  because of what we've been through?
• 18:46
  Not because every painful thing that happened was somehow good.
• 18:51
  But because we're still here, we're still learning, laughing,
• 18:54
  getting things wrong, praying, changing, and becoming.
• 19:00
  I think what I understand now is that the becoming never ends.
• 19:04
  There isn't some finish line where we finally arrive as the perfectly healed,
• 19:08
  perfectly wise, completely put together version of ourselves.
• 19:12
  Thank God, because I'm pretty sure I would have miss the deadline.
• 19:17
  And I don't believe God is standing at some future destination waiting for me
• 19:21
  to finally become the woman I'm supposed to be.
• 19:24
  I believe He's with me while I'm becoming her.
• 19:27
  Becoming isn't about finally arriving at the life God has planned for us.
• 19:31
  To me, it's allowing Him to keep forming us while we're living the life that's already here.
• 19:38
  Breaking, believing, becoming, they aren't three stages we complete.
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  They're a process we may move through again and again because we're never finished.
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  Before we go, maybe there's something in your life right now that feels broken.
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  Maybe it's obvious, maybe nobody knows, or maybe you're standing in the middle
• 20:00
  of something you would give anything to undo.
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  I'm not going to tell you that everything happens for a reason,
• 20:07
  because I don't know that.
• 20:09
  And I'm not going to tell you to be grateful for your pain. Some things hurt,
• 20:13
  some things are unfair, and some things deserve to be grieved.
• 20:18
  But I will tell you what I believe. Broken isn't the same thing as ruined.
• 20:24
  Maybe eventually, when you're ready, the question changes from why is this happening
• 20:29
  to me, to what is this bringing out in me?
• 20:33
  What am I learning? What am I releasing? What am I finally seeing?
• 20:38
  What am I being asked to believe? And who am I becoming?
• 20:43
  Because when I look at my own breaking, I can finally see that I wasn't necessarily,
• 20:48
  being put back together exactly the way I was before.
• 20:53
  In some ways, I was being broken open, open to seeing things differently,
• 20:57
  letting go of things I had spent years trying to hold together,
• 21:01
  accepting that I couldn't control every outcome,
• 21:04
  believing again, and becoming someone I couldn't have become while desperately
• 21:08
  trying to remain who I had always been.
• 21:12
  That's what this podcast has been about all along, breaking, believing, becoming.
• 21:19
  Not three destinations, but a process. And maybe that's why those words have
• 21:24
  always been in that order, because sometimes before we can become,
• 21:28
  something in us has to be willing to break open.
• 21:32
  So, welcome back to The Voice, and welcome to Season 2.
• 21:38
  Till next time, if you're breaking, please keep believing and becoming.
• 21:43
  Well, it's already happening.