Lost and Found: Finding Hope in the Detours of Life (16 page)

I struggled with accepting that they were happy, because I wanted to believe that they would reap what they’d sown. Have you ever wondered when the ones who hurt you were going to pay for what they did? I was bitter because I seemed to be the only one broken in the whole situation. They were discussing the nursery and how we’d split the cost. Yet there was very little focus on his personal responsibility for yet another child he had helped to create. There was no shame between them, as if what they were doing was just part of life, one of those milestones everyone experiences.

Realizing I had to own my own choices, I decided to join their party. Choosing to be bitter doesn’t hurt the other person. It only hurts those who come around you. You can’t punish them by becoming spiteful and expect God to have any room. Sure, I wasn’t ramming cars, but still I let my character suffer because of my attitude. Until you accept that you have no power over when someone will reap what they’ve sown, you’ll always be staring at the ground waiting for their harvest and missing your own.

So I bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothing and needs for the baby’s arrival. I sent her pictures of things I wanted to have framed. I signed the gifts from Makenzie so she would know that I was ready to make her child a part of our family. And every time I felt the temptation to be nasty, I bought something else. I would not let their mistakes determine my happiness.

The baby was born two days after my birthday. She didn’t want me there, so he didn’t go, and that was okay. I was growing stronger.

My friends who knew about the situation took me to dinner. They told me I should start a blog, where I could express the emotion without defining the situation. So I did. I isolated the emotions that I felt and attributed them to someone else’s story. Occasionally, I would include one that was genuinely mine. To this day, I’ve never identified which stories were my own and which were borrowed from someone else’s journey. Our pain, disappointment, fear, shame, hope, and desire to live again are all the same.

Robert had his baby, but I had my blog.

I had found this place where it was okay to be broken. Somehow, the words I bled onto the screen reached hearts on the other side, and we became better. I wrote the prayers I whispered myself. I imagined what words could’ve saved me and put them at the end of each entry.

It would soon be time for Robert to start training camp again. Fresh off his injury, he needed to show that he was healed. But before the movers could even take our things from Texas, Robert was released from the Redskins.

And I blogged.

I blogged about new opportunities. I was glad to say good-bye to the place that had burned me alive. Robert’s being released meant I wouldn’t have to worry about the woman and her child showing up at our doorstep while my children were sleeping. I returned to work for the ministry. I started traveling and assisting my mom with her book tour. I found a life worth living again.

It felt like every time I gave someone the smallest bit of hope, God poured back into me. I used my pain and gave it purpose. I let others know they weren’t alone. I talked about the shame, regret, and scorching tears. I was garnering quite the audience, too. No marketing, no gimmicks, just people telling other people about the girl who was willing to keep it so unapologetically real. The more my transparency helped others see themselves in a better light, the more I vowed to tell my truth.

You see, I know what it’s like to be drowning. I know what it’s like to feel agony. I know what it’s like to scan the faces for just one set of eyes that understands your pain.

For me, telling my truth was being that set of eyes.

So what if your past isn’t pretty? So what if you gave up more than a few times? You’re still here. You have another chance to take your destiny into your hands. Refuse to be ashamed of your truth. It’s a part of who you are, helped make you so unbelievably incredible. Scarred? Yes. Wounded? For sure. Afraid? Without a doubt. But you’re still here, and that means you can do more than survive. You can live again. You can smile again. And you don’t have to be afraid anymore. God doesn’t give us the spirit of fear, so if fear is present in your life, it can’t be from Him.

———

While I was on my mother’s book tour and meeting people who had read my little blog, I knew I couldn’t go back to being that other person. I didn’t want a love that made the earth shatter. I wanted a love that made this world better. For some reason, I felt like I could love myself enough to overflow for those still searching.

Having caught wind of my growing audience, the conference staff asked if I would be willing to introduce my dad at our Woman Thou Art Loosed conference. They were only expecting 20,000 women! I didn’t want to do it. I was shy. I don’t feel like I can speak like a preacher. I’m not even sure that I could say anything that would truly prepare those in attendance for a ministry as dynamic as my father’s. But I said yes. I wanted God to know I was willing to stretch myself.

I had stretched so many times for Robert, stretched until I was torn.

Surely, I could stretch to be healed.

I thought I had to have Robert at any cost, and he took more than I had to give. I’d give God whatever I had left. Two weeks before Woman Thou Art Loosed, I insisted we get a paternity test for the baby. I’m not sure why at that point I finally demanded something factual and scientific, but it suddenly seemed important. Part of it was just being practical. We had been sending clothes, diapers, and
money regularly. It seemed only responsible to know the truth about the paternity.

I was flying home from Chicago when I found out the baby wasn’t his. My mother and I shouted all throughout the airport. God was there all along; He just needed me out of the way.

Robert was upset by her betrayal. I didn’t even have the time to address the irony of that.

It was over and we were moving on.

———

That October 2011, I took the stage at Woman Thou Art Loosed, stronger because I had been broken but survived. I gave the last ounce of my pain a voice and talked about how shame had been handcuffing my ability to dream. My father’s ministry saved my soul, and I wanted him to know that he hadn’t spent his entire life trying to help the world while losing his own daughter.

The message went viral. Women and men alike were applauding me for my courage and commitment to freeing those who didn’t have a picture-perfect past. I didn’t mean for it to become something so many would see, but that’s what happens when you move yourself out of the way. God has more than enough room to blow your mind!

Are you trusting Him with every part of you?

Ironically enough, Robert was in the audience cheering me on. The roles had been reversed, and he would have to stop focusing on his issues long enough to see my gift. People were inviting me to come and share my story all over the world. In February we went to London for my first solo speaking engagement.

Soon I was sharing my story all the time, through my tweets, blogs, speaking engagements, and long hugs with familiar strangers who related to my message. I found a piece of me everywhere I went. And before I knew it, I felt just as strong as people said I was. I didn’t feel
weak anymore. God’s love strengthened me. The support of those yet finding the courage to tell their story encouraged me.

I worked at the church during the day while Robert stayed home at my parents’ house playing video games. When I came home from work, he went to play basketball. This was our routine for months and months. In May, I discovered he was playing with more than just video games. The new girl was a student at TCU.

Kenzie was playing on his iPad when the woman’s message came through; evidently they were going to meet up while I went to my brother’s graduation.

Robert was resting after a long day on the basketball court. I brought the iPad into the room and set it on the nightstand. He knew when he saw my face that things weren’t going to end well. I didn’t scream, didn’t cause a scene; I just asked him to leave.

The thirty-fifth anniversary of my father’s ministry was just a couple weeks away. We had been planning a very elaborate celebration, which I didn’t want to ruin with the news of another woman. So Robert came back and we attended the celebration. I never treated him any differently. We hugged and smiled for the cameras. Robert thought he was getting another chance. But I knew I was telling him good-bye.

For the last time.

AS THIS BOOK
reaches bookstores, it will have been almost two years since I made the decision to end my marriage. The culmination of all the things that have happened in my young life have taught me so much about who I am.

I learned to fight. For myself. For the truth. For a love greater than my own need.

I learned that when you have a baby at fourteen, it’s hard. Sounds silly, huh? I should’ve assumed that, but until you’ve been there, you don’t know how hard it is. All I wanted was for people to see my son and me as better. We were more than what the birth certificate and statistic said about us. I became so consumed with planning a better tomorrow for us that I never truly checked to see how everything had truly affected me.

Why did I feel the need to fit in so badly? Why did I need validation from people who were wandering just like me? The fact that
I didn’t have a noticeable “church” talent made me more insecure than I wanted to admit.

To this day, one of the first questions people ask me when they find out my father is a pastor is whether I can sing. It’s actually amusing, because my singing is terrible. Still, the first thing people want to know is how you fit. I’ve always used my shyness as an excuse. While that is true to some extent, even if I weren’t shy, I wasn’t sure what I had to offer.

Having my son made me more defensive. It became my sole mission to protect my son and me. But from what? We weren’t in any immediate danger, and even if we were, any threat would have to get past a few dozen people before getting to us. The truth is, I wasn’t defensive because of them; I became that way because I was afraid of what came next.

My own insecurity affected how I thought the world would view me. I called myself every name in the book, just so that I could get used to hearing them. Everything from a ho to a black sheep, I tried to train myself to take the abuse.

I thought that beating others to the punch would lessen the blow. I cried for my son. He was so beautiful and innocent, born to someone who didn’t know if she could give him the life he deserved. I didn’t give myself permission to not have the answers. By college, when my rush to recover started failing, I didn’t retreat or lighten my load. I quit. I gave up and tried to create a new plan.

I attracted insecurity to myself. It comforted me until it broke me.

That is when my life came to a fork in the road. Would I be willing to let an insecurity haunt me for the rest of my life?

Like me, you will have to decide how you let your insecurities affect you. Will you settle for heartbreak because you’ve already been broken? No matter how many times I tried to adjust to a life of recurring pain, I heard this whisper inside of me insisting there
was more. I tried countless times to drown the sound of that voice in my head, but I couldn’t. It was with me at the end of every night and the beginning of each day: “
God, please help me
.”

———

After my divorce, I ran across an anonymous quote online that spoke to my wounded heart and has stayed with me: “No matter what, once in your life, someone will hurt you. That someone will take all that you are and rip it into pieces, and they won’t even watch where the pieces land. But through the breakdown, you’ll learn something about yourself. You’ll learn that you’re strong and, no matter how hard they try to destroy you, you can conquer anyone.”

Even yourself, I would add.

I stayed in my marriage until I felt like leaving wouldn’t break me. There was a part of me holding on to the treatment because I felt like it was all I deserved. When that was no longer the case, it became about my children. Maybe I could learn to turn this into an agreement where Robert and I only stayed together for them. I didn’t want to hurt both of my children by upsetting their lives just because I was bleeding.

When you love your children, really love them, their hearts come before your own. If I couldn’t have my fairy tale, at least I could try to give them one. We would look like the perfect little family, and I would learn to deal with the pain for them.

There’s this thing about family that I should’ve remembered from
when my stomach started growing with life the first time. When one bleeds, we all bleed. I was bleeding on them and didn’t know it. Children have the most accurate radar of happiness. I thought I was making them happy. I didn’t realize that my own happiness ultimately set the tone.

My mother had asked me to start working for the ministry before I knew about the first affair. The moment I started working, I gained back a little bit of myself. It wasn’t the money or having something to do, either. It was that I was learning that I could still be used.

In the end, the ministry I tried to outrun most of my life is what saved me. I wasn’t sure if the team of ladies my mother trusted me to support, organize, and lead would respect me. I brought my heart for my mother and the need to create something beautiful to the women’s ministry of our church. Each day, I went to the place where I first felt like an outcast and carved a space for me.

Every other Saturday, a group of women gathered in the main sanctuary of our church for our life-enrichment program. The ages for the course ranged from eighteen to ninety years old. Together we all had one desire: We wanted to believe that life still had something great for us. My first year helping my mother with the ministry, I did everything from the background—booking the speakers, creating the schedule, managing the budget, creating exercises to help stretch the ladies, and more. As long as I didn’t have to make any announcements or do anything that brought attention to myself, I was fine.

No one knew how bad my marriage was, and in the safety of those walls it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that each Saturday I gave the women in our church a Christ-centered program that would make them better. I wanted the girls in our debutante program to avoid the insecurities that left me trapped.

For the women, I wanted them to take a chance on themselves. Then I wondered what I was waiting for. My blog was my taking
a chance on myself. It was my daring to believe in the message I was orchestrating for them. When my first class graduated from the program, I cried because I was proud of them. I cried because I was one of them.

I truly can’t say that I ended my marriage because of the cheating, the lies, or the betrayal. The moment it hit me that I would never be able to accept a counterfeit of real love, I knew our relationship had a countdown.

I wanted to turn the other cheek and pretend that it didn’t hurt. I had tried everything to make it better. I got angry. I lost my mind. I went to counseling. I left. I cried. I cussed. I never mastered the art of accepting it, though. I felt like I was weak, but there was a part of me that I evidently had no control over. That part of me wasn’t willing to lie down and die.

———

A week before my eighteenth birthday, Robert and I had gotten tattoos. I never thought about getting one before then. But I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t down to have fun. I tried to pick something that I wouldn’t regret in three weeks. I settled on a Chinese symbol on my right shoulder. “What does it mean?” Robert asked me when I sat down.

“Grace,” I said.

Once the tattoo healed, I honestly forgot it was there. I got it before I knew how badly I would need it. All along when I felt the most alone, grace was still with me. When I was ramming cars and fighting to be free, grace was right there on my shoulder. When I cried for the little girl I lost along the way, grace was under my skin. I didn’t even realize, until I took the time to write this book and tell you about finding my way, just how much grace was with me all along. Grace is not the absence of the struggle; it is the presence of protection.

My life hasn’t been perfect at all. This isn’t a fairy tale, but it is a story of restoration and amazing grace. I constantly tried to give grace in my marriage, but I was unable to accept the grace that God was giving me. The moment I started to tap into that grace, I became better.

He gave me the grace to protect my children even in the midst of a hurricane love affair. God gave me the grace to avoid completely losing myself to a crime of passion or life-threatening disease. I found the grace to admit that I needed to come home. All along, right there on my shoulder, out of sight but with me all the time was grace.

When will you trust that you’ve got the grace to go past survival and collide with destiny? Are you willing to believe that grace rests on your shoulders as well?

———

I didn’t know if my heart could be mended. I didn’t know if my future could be restored. I’m not even sure I felt redemption was possible, but I trusted grace wouldn’t leave me just because my marriage was over. Not even six months after my divorce was final, I sat outside on the patio of the home grace helped me purchase. I needed to go inside so that I could write the book you’re reading right now, but I stayed a little longer and that’s when I saw the Big Dipper. Just like grace, it’s been there waiting for me to recognize it.

The result of all these beautiful, tragic moments in my life once made me so hungry for forgiveness. But they were never meant to make me feel like I was less than; they were meant to show me His
grace. We try to make our mistakes about
us
, but maybe God wants to know if we can give Him every part of us.

We don’t get to determine which pieces of us He can use. Though He can and will use what we give Him, His strength is made perfect when we give Him our weakness. At Woman Thou Art Loosed, I gave Him the last drop of shame from my pregnancy. I no longer wanted to be bound. I told my father I wanted to tell the world before the world tried to use it against me. For me, divorce wasn’t about trying to teach Robert a lesson; it was me choosing me. I always felt the most weak when I was with him. I had trusted him with my insecurity, but then I gave it to God.

I learned too much about myself to continue to accept punishment for a crime that had been washed with the blood of Christ.

Accepting my imperfections and God’s undeniable love for me has been the most life-changing thing I’ve ever experienced. I wasn’t afraid to let Him have His way; I just doubted that I could be of use to Him. I’m not telling my story so it can be criticized, though I know it will be. A part of me is afraid to let the world know even a fraction of what I shared. The more I meet people and remember my own lost moments, the more I truly believe that the message is more important than my shame, my ego, or their criticism.

This is for you. For me. For us.

This is a reminder that one detour doesn’t cancel our destination. These words are for the whispers that haunt us and tell us life is over. This book is for your shattered pieces.

You have been beautifully wounded.

———

As I shared earlier, a few months before my twenty-fifth birthday, I learned that my father was going to Australia for the Hillsong Conference right around my birthday. I begged him to let me go with him and experience the friendly people and natural beauty of
Down Under as well as the powerful worship and teaching at the conference. My first night in attendance, the worship leader led us in a song so powerful, I didn’t even have to write it down to remember it: “Glorious Ruins.”

What an oxymoron!

How can something that’s been ruined be glorious? Then I looked at my life and remembered when I was most devastated, and how now at twenty-five, I had inspired thousands of people. Could it be that our sin is not in being ruined, but in not letting Him find the glory in our pieces?

I don’t know what your story is, but I gave you the worst parts of mine so that you could know that someone else hit rock bottom, too. You’re not alone. We are not alone. We have to embrace these ugly truths about ourselves, or we’ll spend a lifetime never maximizing the ever-present grace surrounding us.

Each day, I wake up feeling like I’m living a dream. I didn’t know that happiness like this could exist. I still have hard days. My relationships with people still go through tremendous ups and downs. My life isn’t perfect by any means, but it has been kissed by grace and I am surrounded by joy.

I don’t know if you’re lost right now or finding your way. But if the sun rises tomorrow, you have a chance to test the limits of God’s grace. He’s capable of making you better. He can take every moment you thought was wasted and use it to create a story that helps someone else believe. You have to try to trust Him with the parts of you that still hurt. He’s not expecting perfection.

All He needs is a yes.

And not a yes that is contingent on whether or not He does what you want. It wasn’t that I was never going to say yes to Him, because I honestly think I would have found my way back. I just wanted to present a perfect life for Him to use. He just wanted
me
. God gave me the desires of my heart, and then He gave me what He desired for me. His plan was much better than my own.

If you aren’t careful, you’ll let your past talk you out of your destiny.

I don’t know what’s next for me. This could be the last book I ever write, or it could be the beginning of something huge, but I’m not afraid. And maybe I had to live with fear for so long that it lost its bite, because now I feel like I can do anything with God on my side.

So can you.