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Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
00:09
Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant story work counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the Restorey Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the Restorey Podcast.
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One of the extremely sad things that we've had to face is here in Colorado, the reality of the fires.
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that we've had and last year they were really bad and there was even one day, if you remember this day that we went, um, we went out and it was so, the smoke was so bad and the ash was so bad that the street lights actually came on. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The street lights came on and we're walking around this parking lot in the middle of the afternoon and it looked like nighttime. You remember that day? Oh, I remember it was the apocalyptic summer of 2020. It was awful.
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awful. And then ash was falling down on our cars. It was, we had to clean off the cars. It was awful. And I think a lot of us here in Colorado and across the country are experiencing that again with fires here in 2021 and always looking to the sky, like, is it going to get hazy again? Is it going to be smoky? What's our air quality and all that? And it's so sad when we go up to some of our favorite places in the mountains and it'll be turned away because the forests are closed.
01:50
that the gates are down and you can't get in, rightfully so because they're now, you know, the danger of dead trees falling over on you and the scorch is just, it's just tremendous and so sad to see. And then the other part that's also true that has made these fires so bad is that just the drought that we're living in, everything is so dry that when the, it's just a tinderbox to it.
02:17
in the forest for those things to come along. Right. So the other negative outfall of that in Colorado is that we all love camping and yet you can't have a campfire because one stray spark could set the whole forest ablaze. And Coloradans are like pretty crazy about that right now. Right. Everyone is on the fire police. If there's anybody that talks about lighting a candle outside or anything, everybody's like turn, you know, blow that out. So I bring that because looking at the
02:47
was so stark for me when we first went up to the forest and looked to see the devastation that had that was just everywhere and it made me think about the the reality of what we experience in our lives and in our stories that so many of us have scorch so many of us have burned earth
03:13
that has just devastated some of the places where, where we were designed to be and meant to be alive and flourishing and this, you know, beautiful space of mountains and trees and rivers and leaves and all the things where something has come along and with the blaze and violence of a fire has decimated our lives. And last week we talked about big T traumas.
03:42
That's what I'm talking about. Where there's big T traumas that are violent in nature, that have come against us, and where life was meant to live, now it has scorched the earth. And it almost feels like in people that I work with that have significant traumas, and a lot of us have significant traumas, it almost feels as if nothing else can grow in this earth anymore. That there's ashes that are just on the ground that prevent
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more green from growing in that place. And then the other thing we have is in Colorado, we just had this, is that because of the scorched earth, now there's mudslides.
04:21
And now there's, you know, the erosion is just, the earth just can't, there's no roots to hold the earth together anymore. And so the ramifications of the scorched earth continue. And I feel like that's what a lot of people live with, is this feeling of, I could never love again. I can never trust again. I can't be in relationship again. You know, in areas of sexual abuse, I could never be intimate with someone again.
04:51
scorched area in our lives and our stories. And so that's the big T kind of trauma experience that I think a lot of people have. The other is, on the flip side, and I mentioned it, it's the drought. It's the drought. And so we experience trauma both from fire and from drought. And what I mean by drought is that something that was meant to be offered...
05:20
something good in order to sustain life in our world and in our lives and in our hearts and our bodies, our psyches, something that was meant to be offered wasn't. And that there's, in many of our stories, there's enough of that soul water that has been offered to keep us alive, but if we're really honest, in some ways, maybe it was just barely.
05:48
Maybe it was just barely. And so the drought is also as devastating as the fire. But it's harder to see and it's harder to name because a fire will come through and it will be a moment. It will be something that happened and sustained fire happens as well, but it will have come through. They were the fires of 2020.
06:11
They weren't the fires of the last hundred years. They were the fires of 2020. They came, they burned, and they decimated. The drought happens over decades, over years. And so it becomes this like normal experience of that ecosystem, that geography to be in drought. We're just in drought. And, and we learn how to survive. And we find the little Oasis that are out there.
06:41
there for us to go to, we pick up, you know, if I want to shift metaphors, we pick up the little breadcrumbs that are offered from, you know, maybe it was a coach, maybe it was a teacher, maybe it was a pastor, that we pick up that isn't in our family because we have a drought family, but then someone else offers, but it's never really enough to fully allow us to come back alive to who we were meant to be.
07:06
Then the other challenge of that is that predators, unfortunately, are out there who notice the, the droughted hearts. And so maybe that coach or that youth pastor.
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or that friend noticed that you're living in a drought in your home and offered you enough of the goodness of that water to make you kind of warm towards them or feel cared for by them or comforted by them. And then they bring their fire. And so it's this trauma experience that we have because we don't live in Eden.
07:44
We live in this broken and fallen world that we have to some degree fire and drought in almost all of our lives. And that's so hard for us to name. It feels heartbreaking. Yeah. And, you know, it's hard to name for us as individuals. And then compounded is the isolation because it's harder to be noticed.
08:14
It's, you know, on the outside, like all of our people, the people in our lives also recognize scorched earth. We also can see the ramification of trauma. We see it oozing out often, right? But it is harder to look in to a friend or a family member and see the effect of long-term drought. And I just, like, I want...
08:43
us to be able to go in. I'm picturing a desert and to be able to go in and find the person just traipsing through the desert and be able to see them and offer water and what happens when someone's thirst is quenched and like.
09:06
how they come back to themselves. But when we can't see that, when it's just so hard to actually notice long-term drought, it just seems extra evil.
09:20
the isolation and loneliness of that space. Mm-hmm. And I feel like that is the ultimate facade, right? That is how we, as a people in general, have come to live outside of Eden, because we put up these, everything is fine. I've come to survive. I've come to do well. I've come to find a way through, and I'm going to settle for the water that I currently have.
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and I'm going to learn how to survive on that. When in reality God actually designed for us to be...
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in a land flowing with milk and honey. And the whole idea, all the biblical metaphors are the fullness of the garden and from you will spring waters of living water, right? That, you know, this, they come to the well and drink deeply and the river of life and like all the things. There's so many water metaphors in the scriptures that he actually designed us to live with and yet we've come to understand that we just don't, we don't have it, we don't deserve it, it's not available.
10:24
And so we live with these facades. And I think one of the things that we as a people generally need to do better is to have in mind that everybody is living a story of drought and fire. And if we can have that perspective, how can we then come to them?
10:41
Like you said, finding people to then offer water to them and offer presence to them and just kind of know that we're all living in some level of survival. Yeah. And so part of.
10:57
part of what it means to enter into those places. And we've talked about this a couple episodes ago, so why would I even start to do this? Because is there even any hope of anything changing? And that is where I go back to, it is the story of God to bring restoration to the world.
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And that bringing restoration to the world includes you, and it includes me, includes all of us. And so the hope for us to re-story is to not find a way to better survive the current landscape that we find ourselves in, but to return to the landscape that he originally designed for us. And to re-story that process along with what the water that he brings, and the generosity and his kindness and the goodness, to come back to a re-imagination
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actually, actually I wasn't, I wasn't designed to live here. This is not where I should be. There is more for me and what he has in life for me than I ever imagined. And that is the hope of what restoration actually brings. And that is why we do this Restory process, because there's more for us than we've settled for.
12:09
Alright friends, thanks for listening. If you haven't left a rating on iTunes, we'd love for you to do that real quick. And here's the thing with our name change. We're trying to offer more cohesion to all the things we do with restoration. We've got counseling and stuff for marriages and dads and moms and the list goes on and on. One of the ways we started talking about it recently is to, rather humorously and affectionately, refer to it all as the ReStory universe. Doesn't that sound interesting?
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Well, if you want to learn more, just head over to RestoreUniverse.com to see what we're up to. And we'll see you same time, same place, next week.