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Have you ever looked at a situation you’re facing in utter disbelief and thought, "How will I ever get over this?" Lysa TerKeurst understands. After years of heartbreak and emotional trauma, she realized it’s not about just getting over hard circumstances but learning how to work through what she has walked through. Now, she wants to help you do the same. That’s why Lysa teamed up with her personal, licensed professional counselor, Jim Cress, alongside the Director of Theological Research at Proverbs 31 Ministries, Dr. Joel Muddamalle, to bring you "Therapy & Theology." While Lysa, Jim and Joel do tackle some really hard topics, you’ll soon find they're just three friends having a great conversation and learning from each other along the way.
Shae Hill: Hi friends, welcome back to the Therapy and Theology podcast brought to you by Proverbs 31 Ministries where we help you work through what you walk through. I'm your host Shay Hill and I'm so grateful that you're tuning in today. This season we've been diving into honest conversations about the painful heartbreaking reality of divorce. And each conversation has been inspired by the new book that Lysa TerKeurst, Dr. Joel Muddamalle and Jim Cress wrote called Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. We have another great episode planned for you today where we're going to learn about acceptance and the role acceptance can play in healing, but also learning to accept the life that we never imagined for ourselves, whether you've been affected by divorce personally or you have had another life circumstance, wreck your normal. I pray that today's conversation will speak to you personally. Also remember you can subscribe to receive all new episodes straight to your inbox. So just visit the link in our show notes and we'll send those over to your email. Okay guys, are you ready for episode five of season 10? Here we go.
Lysa TerKeurst: Welcome to episode five of this series called, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. And of course I'm here with Dr. Joel Muddamalle and Jim Cress. You know, recently I was out to lunch with some friends and one of them asked me, what was the number one thing you did that helped your healing? And at first I rambled a bit and then I landed on one powerful word, acceptance. So, I replied back to her, I have finally accepted my life. Now, this was not a resignation, not at all. It was a declaration that I've made the decision to love my imperfect, messy, unpredictable, sometimes unfair, and sometimes unbelievably good life. I have decided that I am making peace with the fact that there will be very odd things about my reality. And I am not living the cookie cutter norm. And a big part of that is because of the unwanted divorce I walked through. But it is time. And I think I've gotten there where I'm making peace with what is now really hard because of this divorce. I'm making peace with the fact that I may never get some answers to some really important questions. I'm making peace with what is, what isn't, and what I don't know about my future. And this acceptance was hard fought for. You know, I remember one time I was talking to my oldest daughter and I was just saying, I just want life to be normal again. I just wanna feel that peace again. And she very quickly said, mom, you might need to redefine what normal is and what peace is in this season of your life. And I felt like that was such profound advice. And as we've talked so many times, Jim, acceptance is a really important part as you walk through the stages of grief. I really felt like this episode was so crucial in this series, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, because you will do a lot of grieving. I did a lot of grieving. And honestly, because I wasn't grieving the kind of loss where a person passed away. I was grieving a loss because someone walked away. I didn't know how to grieve this. And also, when you get a divorce, people, if someone dies in your family, people know what to do. Like they bring a casserole, they come and sit with you, they attend a funeral. And there's a protocol that kind of marks this very hard event in your life.
Well, I've often called my divorce, the death of my marriage, but nobody's bringing me casseroles. The world doesn't pause when you go through a divorce. And a lot of times people don't know what to do. So there was not only grief of the divorce, but it was also grief of what losses happened in other relationships. There was a ripple effect that went out and it was, there was a lot of grief to deal with. So. Jim, I want you to go through the five stages of grief and let's talk about those.
Jim Cress: I had a thought a moment ago in all seriousness. I wish your husband, my friend and brother, our friend and brother Chaz was here. He's such a powerful 12-stepper and they're so good. And of course, in the 12 steps, we have many good things. And the big one is the serenity prayer. God grant me so it's not coming. from other people or just within me. God grant me the serenity. And when I pray that, I often will pray like this, God grant me, and I pray it a lot, God grant me the serenity. I do that motion, peace. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And there ought to be a seal off from the Psalms, there are pause, a breath. The courage, I don't need to peace and serenity here, I need courage on this one. The courage to change the things I can change. I wanna be mindful, what can I do? Forgiveness, as we've talked about, is something I can work on and change. But then I need the wisdom to know the difference. Another version of that is God grant me the serenity, the peace, to accept the people I cannot change. The courage to change the person I can change, and the wisdom from God to know the only one I can change is me. So in the stages of grief and just a bit of a disclaimer, which we do from time to time on the podcast, is when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross came out with the classic stages of grief, mighty good work, and people would talk about nine months to a year or whatever, and these were categories to think in versus just locking down some rigorous doctrine, categories to think in. Okay, nine months and I should be on. Well guess what's the problem with nine months? The versaries, as we call them, you know an anniversary once a year. You've not gone through the first just on a calendar of everything. So to work through that and the cycling around a healthy cycle that if grief comes back around in a different thing and a trigger or an activation point out there on the news or a friend or something, to not be surprised but to say to yourself, oh yeah, yeah, I'm just probably going through the cycle again as we've said before. Grief is our friend, not our enemy. It's like a canoe in the river. guiding us through will land on acceptance. Should I run through just the kind of classic stages of grief?
Lysa TerKeurst: That sounds great. And I do wanna say, right before we jump into this as well, that it's not just grieving the loss of relationships, like the loss of the relationship, the marriage, um and then the friendships that change, but it's grieving other things as well. You know, it's, and you don't even recognize all the things that you're gonna have to grieve. You know, you may grieve uh practical things like who's gonna mow the yard? Who's gonna help me carry heavy furniture? Who's gonna help me with the kids on a daily basis? You know, so there's all of these things, there's macro changes, you're no longer married, but there's so many micro changes about life that you'll also grieve.
Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, I think for me, and Lys, we had process through some of this for another book project, but it's the grief of the future that you thought you were going to have, that you didn't realize you put so much weight and stock in that. Like, this is how the relationship was, and this is how your kids were gonna react to them. This is how, and you kind of... built this picture of what the beautiful future was going to be and then the reality hits and you're like, oh, how do I grieve my anticipation for a future that hasn't even happened?
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, and how do I now live in uncertainty? Because, you know, I was married nearly 30 years to my first husband and I pretty much felt like I could look into the future and I didn't know every detail. that I pretty much could see how my future was gonna play out. Then all of a sudden, now I'm divorced, I look into the future and I have no idea. There's great uncertainty and it's really hard to walk toward an uncertain future. It's really hard to walk toward a future that you never envisioned, you never wanted, you never asked for. And so yeah, there was a lot of grief around that as well.
Jim Cress: One of the lines we use in the book from my friend Nate Larkin. The new book on on Surviving an Unwanted Divorce what happens in vagueness stays in vagueness. So looking backwards or looking your current life You really don't want to have a lot of vagueness like you want to get clarity you want to be able God's not the author of confusion That's proper but in the stages of grief there will be some vagueness and to give yourself permission again I said it a moment ago as you go. Oh, yeah. Why of course I knew this could happen and a new trigger point or an activation point. And what it does, I'm gonna be very clinical for a moment, you're not gonna sit and just shock your body with what in the world you have to do. Self-talk, again, Nehemiah 5:7, take counsel with yourself and go, and if you could learn these, go back, pause, rewind the tape or the video part of this, and it's in the new book coming out on surviving and want a divorce, and go, where might I be? Talk to yourself, even preach the gospel to yourself, where might I be in the stages of grief? The first is, Denial. What I don't like about that word is it has been corrupted. That this person's just in denial over there and it's like another, it's like a river in Africa, know, the river denial. You know, there's a lot of stuff we're doing, including.
Joel Muddamalle: Why can't it be in India?
Jim Cress: Yeah, well wherever it is, know, wherever, excuse the geography. But it's interesting because what people will do is they're misusing a word because often what's going on in sin and in addiction and in toxic behavior is rationalization. I'm rationalizing, I wanna respect the stages of grief here. That person's not in denial. You're dealing with in your life, they're in rationalization. And the idea is there's a shattered dream, there's a shattered reality. You deserve to have a shock and awe like, whoa, this can't, they're gonna walk through the door again. Or maybe literally you wake up from a dream and give yourself permission. Or just wake up from a night's sleep where you don't think you dreamed and think, am I really divorced? You might check your finger. or the death of someone, right? So denial is very common. It's not an issue to run away from.
Lysa TerKeurst: I know for me, denial became a resistance toward walking toward that uncertain future. And it was so hard for me to even say the word divorce. And it definitely was this brutal thing of taking my ring off and then checking the box of divorced on marital status. And then people asking, know, are you married? Are you single? Or at a restaurant, you know, like, are you waiting on someone? No, I'm actually out to dinner by myself, you know? And there were just so many things like that, that denial for me was me resisting, me pushing back. I'm just not ready to take my ring off yet. I'm just not ready to, you know, cooperate. with the statement of divorce. I'm just not ready to check that box yet. And it was hard.
Jim Cress: You know I love about that? uh I'm sure we've talked about it even personally. I love when a person says, have you noticed anything? I go, I don't know, help me here. I'm fairly observant. And that was taken off. And it took them months, and sadly people, why are you still wearing your rings? Like, that's abusive. And when they were ready, and almost it's like they woke up and said, I can't even tell you empirically why, but I'm ready for that to come off. And the world will always be a trigger-rich environment, post-divorce, post-death, because people don't often mean harm, but they're like, oh, are you waiting for someone? So to go in and, and that's where we get into that. Association versus dissociation. means disconnect. It's like literally putting that ring on of associated and saying, yeah, I never know today when it will be, but some issue may come up of me wanting to go into denial or thinking not again, and it's gonna happen. After that, and by the way, great book, of which there are many, It's Not Supposed To Be This Way. That's when we first really connected. And to say that that's not denial is to say, no, it's. kind of not supposed to be this way, what level it is, right? And then anger, let's do a couple of things on anger. Anger turned outward, that's just, you could be mad at God, by the way God can take it. Read Joel, the imprecatory Psalms, and anger then at people and the injustice of it all. I want people to move through those murky waters with the canoe and say, I'm just mad. Give yourself permission to be mad about that, to be angry. And then anger turned inward, not dealt with as known as: depression.
I will just literally suppress and when I suppress will later be expressed when I submerge is later going to emerge So anger turned inward two aspects of anger. Bargaining, which is really good. I don't know if there's a person I've ever met that didn't maybe they got, I feel a pain or something and God if you'll just get me through this I promise to eat better we do a lot of bargaining and that's okay, but here
Joel Muddamalle: Can be the thought be about that I did that with fantasy football.
Jim Cress: Well, that's or that's a category, okay? But no, really, and part of that is, is there can be a sense, God, is there just a way, or could you change, especially around divorce, would you change, I've had women, especially my talk radio days, where they would call in and say, my husband's divorced, listen, he's already married to someone new, but I pray in Jesus' name, God, would you please let them divorce, or let that new spouse die and he come back to me. I didn't judge or make fun of them, but mental health is a commitment to reality at all costs. At all costs.
Joel Muddamalle: I do love that, and I know I made a joke about it, but on a real level, that whole bargaining thing, it's actually rooted in an Old Testament context of retributational theology. You know, if I do this and this is gonna happen. So then you start to feel like, if my morality just lines up, then good things should happen to me, and we wanna justify things like, oh, they were immoral, and so that's why all these bad things happened. And in the midst of that, it's almost like you're trying to play chess with God.
Jim Cress: Well, I think you are.
Joel Muddamalle: You know, and you're trying to odd maneuver the Lord in order to get the thing that you want. And yet sometimes if we got all the things that we wanted, my goodness, right? Like life would not be as hopeful and beautiful because we need an omniscient, all-knowing God to be able to give us not what we want, but what we actually need.
Jim Cress: And if God didn't give me what I want, all of a sudden I'll feel he, following the metaphor, he checkmates me and now I'm angry at God.
Joel Muddamalle: That's right.
Jim Cress: Not a healthy anger.
Lysa TerKeurst: You know, I think the thing that's so hard about bargaining is that often we're doing it for what we perceive as a very good thing. You know, we don't want to be divorced. You know, we don't want to see our family broken. You know, we don't want to like suddenly be single. You know, for me, I was 50, I was single. I was just... I mean, as I listened to these statements, I was knee deep in denial and then textbook, knee deep in anger and really feeling, not only was I betrayed by my ex-husband, but I felt betrayed by God. And then knee deep in bargaining. Like my prayer life was all bargaining. Like, God, if you would just do this, know, God, can't you see? Just make it a redemption story. And so... I want to be so tender here with bargaining because you're not bargaining out of selfish desires. You're bargaining because you wanted your marriage to stay together or you wanted your life to look differently. So it's not always bargaining because you're being selfish. It's bargaining because... It was a good thing that got broken and it hurts.
Joel Muddamalle: I think but sometimes what you're bargaining, that's so good Lisa, and sometimes what you're bargaining if we do a self-assessment on it is you're bargaining with things that are outside of your control.
Lysa TerKeurst: That's right.
Joel Muddamalle: Right, and that is a devastating scenario to be in because you desperately want the right thing, but sometimes what you desire is actually very contingent on that other person and that other person's willingness to change, other person's repentance, other person's... you know, stepping into discipleship, wholeness and health. And it's like, you're here trying to bargain with the Lord, but your bargaining chips, in some sense, some of them don't even belong to you. Like, you can't control that part of it. And so I think we just have to be careful with that.
Lysa TerKeurst: And also, bargaining for me was also attaching my hope to things I had no control over. You know, attaching my hope for a future that looked like I thought it was gonna look like, you know, and I kept hoping, you know, maybe one more conference, one more book, one more time that I forgive them, one more conversation with the pastor, one more counseling session. And I kept attaching my hope for the future to decisions that I had no say so over. And the Bible makes it really clear, hope deferred makes the heart sick. And it was like a carrot being dangled in front of me that actually I had... hung on the thing that I was chasing, you know? It's like I'd taken my hope and put it right here on this other person, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, my heart was getting sicker and sicker and sicker because I felt like I was sinking.
Jim Cress: Well, one of you may have been, can I do Jimbo's take on bargaining and anger? It's the chicken and the egg for me at 63 years old and working with so many people and in my own life, and that is, The idea would be in the stages of grief you would see anger coming in, bargaining coming in, and I'm not worried about which one comes first, because I believe I have found, even in my own life, a dance that I'm angry, that I'm bargaining, that I'm angry because I didn't get what I, you know, I'm not going to God's ultimate garage sale with God being the head of the garage sale. Bargaining, can I reduce this? Those, you do not want to get locked into these stages of grief and make them so linear, because they will. flow in and out, and you might be back in denial, you thought, did I even hit acceptance yet? Which is the next one, and it's the final part of this, all what we often call finally true grief. And there's a release that happened again, you may go back through this again several times, but the acceptance, and that's where I go back to that serenity prayer, and I really find a surrender there, y'all, of just saying God, I... Not my will, how many times have we talked about, but thy will be done. We close all of our Haven Place retreats with our friend Hillary Scott, thy will, and thy will be done. But just a sense of more and more, and I believe about maybe second, third, fifth time through the stages of grief can be, and which are also mirroring the stages of healing, can be, Lord, I think in a newer way, I think I'm finally letting this go, and there's an acceptance. That's where that mental health and spiritual health is a commitment to reality at all costs. It'll cost you to grieve, and that's okay. It will really cost you to not grieve.
Lysa TerKeurst: So for the note takers that are listening, of course, all of this is in our new book, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. But let me just give you those stages of grief one more time. Denial, anger turned, outward, or anger turned inward, which is depression. So those can be very interchangeable. So denial. anger, depression, bargaining, and then finally acceptance.
Jim Cress: And again, in my own life and the many people I've worked with said it a moment ago, I'm gonna be locked down with these stages of grief, because I know that dance of bargaining, anger in, anger out, bargaining, like that. That's that middle piece of this thing, it's a little merry-go-round that I find with people I work with, which makes sense in my own journey, will be I'll stay in those and I'm on a sidebar off the canoe. the river of grief and I'm cycling around over here, that's not a bad thing. The way out, Robert Frost, poet said, the way out is through, so you keep moving through. Don't be surprised. I feel stuck over here. You may not be stuck. You may just be in movement over here, right? Not stuck.
Lysa TerKeurst: I think one part of acceptance that's really important for us to deal with too is it's not just accepting that I was gonna be a divorced woman. It was also accepting what happened in the past and not traveling mentally back into my past and rewriting things to be better than they actually were, which just compounded the grief that I was in. I really had to work hard on this. So I just kept making mental notes. Like Lysa, don't go back and romanticize the past and think like, wow, I just want to return to that. That's a very biblical thing. Just like the children of Israel, they went out to the desert and they were delivered from Egypt. God did this miraculous thing they'd been crying out to God to do. They get delivered, they're out in the desert, and then what?
Joel Muddamalle: And then they go, well, why are we here? Moses, did you bring us out here to die? Send us back to Egypt. We had meat and we had fish. And I think Moses was probably about to lose his mind. There is a reason why he struck that rock eventually. And it's because the people have, they have tricked him for the last time, Lysa. Like it is just too much. And the irony of it all is I think if I were Moses, I'd be like, no, y'all are gaslighting. Cause you know who was eating all that good stuff? Me. I was eating it cause I was in the palace. Y'all were slaves. You're servants. You were not eating all that good stuff. I was eating that good stuff. But to your point, I do think that there's this way that we can go back and we can glorify and romanticize a past. That is honestly not even true.
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, and we can like I said travel mentally back and maximize like little scraps of love.
Jim Cress: You're often is good stuff people don't wipe it all out like we had a couple of moments at Disney or on a vacation I don't be bright it takes sometimes years later But they can go or see a family album with your ex in it or whatever and say there were a few moments just myopic black and white stuff doesn't there were some moments along the way that were peaceful, and that's a good memory. I think to go there early in a revisionist's history, just searching for it, not just shopping for pain we've talked about, but shopping for this pleasure, that it can't be all bad, just give yourself time to sort through. But after a while, person says, there are a few good moments.
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, yeah. And for me, there were years that felt good, decades actually, you know? But, you know, in the 10 years of trauma, I had such a temptation to maximize what was good, these little scraps of love, and minimize the real hurt and heartbreak in the experiences that I had.
Jim Cress: Until you didn't.
Lysa TerKeurst: Until I didn't. And that was part of acceptance too.
Joel Muddamalle: And part of, think, when they didn't is when the things that you couldn't no longer deny started to come crashing down. And so in some sense, it's like we have a tendency to hang way too much hope on these isolated moments and my son Levi, he plays lacrosse and you know those little 3M hanger things that you have that can only hold a certain amount of weight? Well, he's got them up to hold his hats in his room, but this kid decided to hang up all of his lacrosse stuff on it and then he came down was so angry because all of them fell off and we're like, bro, those are not designed to hang all your lacrosse stuff on that and so I think there is even a sense where like you've got these memories, but you're trying to hang all of your hope on these memories that were honest and they were good for that moment, but were inflating them and now they come crashing down and you're now left dealing with the chaos of it.
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah. I was having a conversation with a friend recently and she's trying to survive an unwanted divorce. She's going through it. She's in the thick of the hurt and the pain and all of that. And she called me one day and she was sitting in her car outside of her office sobbing. And she just said, I got so triggered and caught off guard this morning because I opened up the bathroom cabinet and it used to be full of towels that were folded by my husband and he folds them in such a distinctive way. And as I watched those towels being used, it was like my life being married to him was disappearing right before my very eyes and she said, I'm down to two towels.
Jim Cress: Wow, that’s a picture.
Lysa TerKeurst: And so I sat there and I listened to her and I totally just said, man, I understand that, that's so hard. And then based on some really good therapy that I've done with you, Jim, I asked her a question, are you open to a thought? And I said, I think we need to make sure that we keep introducing doses of reality into that towel scenario. And what I mean by that is, you know, the towels that he was folding at that time, he was having an affair. And so, you know, it's easy to take out that fact and see, you know, this was like a loving act, like this is evidence of something good he did, you know? But when we introduce doses of reality into that scenario, you know, I said very gently, very lovingly. I just said, you know, it may be that he was folding those towels, putting them in your cabinet while he was on the phone with his mistress. Super hard to think about.
Jim Cress: I wanna honor that. That feels, I'm gonna use a word here, generically, so to speak, but that feels prophetic to me and full of gravitas and weight. You knew the friend enough, of course you used that door opening thing of are you open to a thought. That's not just therapy technique. The human brain's wired to say, you know, I believe I am. So you invited yourself in, mirroring Jesus in Revelation 3, stood at the door and knocked and I come in. And the person had then, a friend had some buy-in and then say, then to speak reality over that versus walking in, hey, how you doing? Let me just tell you about those towels. You got towel trauma and I'm gonna write, no, no, no, you didn't do that, nor would you. But you walked in deeply and may we continue, especially with the word of God and all that we have, but to speak reality over people and say. Are you open to this? And that's what you did. What happened next though?
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, and so, you know, I said to her, or he could have even been over at her house and her cabinet could be full of towels. And again, not to compound my friend's hurt, but to sort of bring her back into reality that, you know, you can't look at those towels and romanticize, you know, the relationship that you had at the end because it was pretty devastating, you know? And then I said, but here's the good news. When you finish using those towels, it's gonna be time for you to decide and you get to decide how you want those towels folded next. Like you could decide you want your towels rolled up. You could decide that you want your towels folded in a square. You could say you want your towels folded over like a rectangle.
Joel Muddamalle: Maybe you don't want your towels folded in.
Lysa TerKeurst: Maybe you don't want your towels folded. You can put them in a pile and-
Jim Cress: Or take them to Goodwill.
Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, or maybe take them to Goodwill. Or you can fold them like the cruise ships into little animals. The point is, now let's take some agency here. And agency means what can I do? Like not being so paralyzed, but what I can't do, but what can I do? And let's step into what is gonna be part of the future now and you get to decide how your towels will be folded. And in that moment, I could hear the hope. She stopped crying and she said, I needed this this morning. Thank you so much. And we got off the phone. Well, I was at the airport when we're having this conversation. She was in her car outside of her office. And when we hung up the phone, I started packing up my things and they called, you know, that it was time for me to board. So I'm walking down the aisle at the airport and there was a man sitting at the end of the aisle and he reached out and tapped me as I walked by. And he said, I am so sorry to admit that I was completely listening in on the conversation you were having. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but what you said has profoundly impacted me in the best way today. And so then I got on the plane and I thought, okay, you know, this... This is an important part of acceptance, is making sure that we do have a commitment to reality at all costs. I don't mean shopping for pain. I don't mean a friend berating you with these kind of things. I mean in a tender, loving way, can we just in our minds make sure that we don't maximize the good from the past, minimize what was so hurtful from the past, and let's stay... in reality, I think that's really crucial for acceptance.
Jim Cress: I just gotta say real quick, and I told you today, you may not remember it, I said, no buddy, you're also a therapist. This thing of therapy, which I get being professionalized, fully understand that I'm in the tribe of that, but what I heard was, is how beautiful with Paul, with Timothy, you will teach those who will teach others who will teach others, you were in flat out, without my design, you were in a therapy session with her. I mean when you look at that, therapeutic, we've talked about even the healer in us. So for you all tuning in today, listening or watching is, most people are not going to the therapist, so you know, statistically. They're darn sure not gonna go do a counseling intensive, statistically. So the idea of coffee cup counseling and friendship counseling, and I love that you've done that. I think your narrative, not only the guy on the plane, but to listeners and viewers to be able to understand. they can be on the front lines, and that also came out of your own personal work to your credit that you did. You weren't just speaking from your head. You talked about part of the path that you had walked.
Lysa TerKeurst: And it was an exercise that helped me. The Bible does instruct that we are to take the comfort that we have received and use it to comfort other people, and I think that's really important. Joel, any final thoughts?
Joel Muddamalle: I mean, I think you guys really summed it up really well, and so I... No, I think that was really good.
Lysa TerKeurst: I want to read you one last thing that I wrote in our new book that's coming out, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. The cure for grief is not time. Although time helps with the intensity and frequency of the pain, it's not what will finally close the chapters of your life. The cure is acceptance. It's a futile exercise to hope that by resisting reality, the grief will dissipate. It won't. It will only twist your life into a chokehold of hopelessness. So my encouragement for you today is even when the facts are really, really hard. And I wanna keep reminding you that I walked through this. I'm in a different season now and I'm so thankful that I was able to go through. these stages of grief. And to be honest, sometimes I get triggered and I'm right back in the stages of grief. Even though I have fully accepted what was in the past, I've moved on now. And after years of saying, I'll never get into another relationship, I met and eventually married my husband, Chaz. And I'm able to see what a beautiful marriage is supposed to look like. And experiencing that has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Even still, I don't hang my hope on Chaz. I hang my hope. The only safe place that it can be, and that is on the Lord Jesus, who already stands in our future. He already knows it may be uncertain to us, but it is definitely not uncertain to him. So no matter where you're at in your journey toward healing, I just want to say thank you for tuning in to Therapy and Theology, and we pray with everything in our heart, that not only this episode has been helpful, but this entire season.
Shae Hill: Thanks for tuning in to today's conversation. Here's a few things I don't want you to miss. First, we want to hear from you and would be so honored if you took the survey you can find by accessing the link in our show notes. Your feedback is crucial for shaping future therapy and theology conversations and experiences. Also, make sure you secure your copy of Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, co-written by Lysa, Dr. Joel and Jim. You can find that link by visiting the show notes as well. Therapy and Theology is brought to you by Proverbs 31 Ministries, where we believe if you know the truth and live the truth, it changes everything. We'll see you next time.