How does GRACE WORK when... DIVORCE HURTS KIDS [S3.E10]
Let's dive into the emotional rollercoaster that is navigating divorce and the impact it has on the family, especially the kids. We had some deep chats about grace and how it plays a role in these painful situations. One of the big thoughts we tackled was how a parent can find freedom even when estranged from their children. Imagine trying to wrap your head around the idea that you can live fully without that connection. It sounds wild, but we explored how it's not just about moving on but finding a way to be okay in the midst of the heartache. We also shared some gut-wrenching stories from our own lives, highlighting the reality of grief and loss that comes with divorce. The pain of not having those family ties can feel like a living death, and we talked about how important it is to keep those lines of communication open. It’s like getting a glimpse into a dark tunnel; you can’t see the end, but you know you need to keep walking through it. We gave practical advice on how to approach these situations with honesty and openness, which can be a lifeline for parents struggling to reconnect with their kids. At the heart of it all, we emphasized that while life may never be the same, there’s still hope for healing and restoration. So grab a snack and tune in as we navigate these heavy topics with a sprinkle of humor and a whole lot of heart!
Chapters:
- 00:27 - Understanding Grace in Difficult Times
- 01:36 - Understanding the Pain of Estrangement
- 10:32 - The Impact of Choices on Family Relationships
- 14:59 - Reflections on Parental Relationships
- 16:56 - The Burden of Divorce: Understanding Children's Perspectives
Takeaways:
- In this episode, we tackled the heavy topic of divorce and its impact on parent-child relationships, which is a real heart-wrencher.
- We discussed how finding freedom often means learning to live without certain relationships, which sounds easier than it actually is, trust me!
- The pain of losing contact with kids after a divorce can feel like a death, and we totally get that it’s a struggle to navigate.
- Keeping communication lines open with your kids, no matter what, is super crucial, even when the going gets tough.
- It’s important to own up to your part in the situation without blaming the other parent; accountability is key in healing.
- Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and with time, relationships can heal, but it takes patience and understanding.
Transcript
You're listening to the Misfit preachers, talian Chavigian, Jean LaRue and Byron Yan from ProdigalPodcast.com we're plagiarizing Jesus one podcast at a time.
Speaker A:Now here are the misfits.
Speaker B:This is Misfit Preachers.
Speaker B:We're having a very serious discussion here, and it's a heavy discussion.
Speaker B:We want to do part two on how does grace work in the midst of a divorce.
Speaker B:And we touched on something and Tollean, you said something that, if I'm honest with you, is very difficult for me to get my head around and be very difficult for anyone else to get their head around if they lose their relationship with their children in this.
Speaker B:And you said, freedom is coming to the place where you don't need the relationship with your children to live and be free.
Speaker B:That hits so hard.
Speaker B:It seems like a wall that cannot be scaled and is so paradoxical to our instincts.
Speaker B:But I.
Speaker B:I know is true.
Speaker B:It is possible to live there.
Speaker B:So we want to address.
Speaker B:And then I'll toss it to you guys, the individual husband or wife, because I know a wife in this context who has no contact with her children as a result of a divorce as well.
Speaker B:How do.
Speaker B:How do parents of children who have lost contact with them because of something they did or a divorce, how do they find this life that's being described?
Speaker C:As a pastor, I see this and encounter this all the time with people at the sanctuary.
Speaker C:Men and women, older men, older women who haven't had contact with their kids in decades because the woman left their father or the man left their mother.
Speaker C:This is a real deep and profound pain.
Speaker C:Losing my first marriage via divorce and that relationship was incredibly painful.
Speaker C:Incredibly painful.
Speaker C:Especially in light of the fact that I was a significant contributing factor to the end of my first marriage.
Speaker C:I failed my first wife.
Speaker C:Across the board.
Speaker C:Losing a relationship with your kids is something I.
Speaker C:I can't imagine.
Speaker C:My kids, by the grace of God, never blinked.
Speaker C:They were hurt.
Speaker C:They shared their heart.
Speaker C:They let me have it.
Speaker C:We had the hard conversations, but they never blinked.
Speaker C:They never disconnected from me.
Speaker C:They never stopped talking to me.
Speaker C:They never stopped me from talking to them and their mother.
Speaker C:My first wife didn't try to sort of sequester them away from me either.
Speaker C:So I don't know existentially what that feels like.
Speaker C:I cannot imagine the pain.
Speaker C:Honestly, it's.
Speaker C:It's almost like dealing with the death of your child while they're still alive.
Speaker C:And that is the death of a child is the worst pain in this life that I can imagine, I can't imagine a worse pain.
Speaker C:So this is a very real, very live, very deep issue that plagues tons of people that I personally know, that I talk to, people of all ages.
Speaker C:So this.
Speaker C:This topic is uber important, in my opinion, in terms of where do those people find the light to keep going on?
Speaker C:I mean, you know, it's different for everybody, I would.
Speaker C:I would suppose.
Speaker C:But I think the statement I meant I made in the previous episode that you alluded to stands, which is it is possible because I've seen it happen with people that I know.
Speaker C:It's possible to go on living without that relationship in the same way that it is possible to go on living if you lose a limb.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:I think the analogy or the way that you described it, it's.
Speaker B:It's a death that continues to live in indicates to me that what a person is really dealing with and really needs to process is.
Speaker B:Is similar to grief, processing grief in order to come to terms with.
Speaker B:With a real, tangible loss.
Speaker B:And I think a lot of people who are estranged from their children, banned from their children, have no access to their children because of whatever circumstance, may not even realize that that's what they're.
Speaker D:Experiencing, that the pain they're feeling is that loss.
Speaker B:It's grief, the grief of you're enduring.
Speaker C:A death, a real death.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And that validates the pain and the feeling and the torture of that circumstance.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:The real question we're asking is how does grace, the gospel, Christ, allow us, show us a pathway to come to terms with it.
Speaker B:We're going to walk with a limp the rest of our life, but how does it allow us to come to terms with that reality?
Speaker B:Life is never going to be the same.
Speaker D:Well, I think when Tullian said previously, he said it gets you to the place where you don't need it.
Speaker D:I would nuance that and say the gospel brings you to the place where you don't have to demand it to.
Speaker B:Be okay, but it doesn't eliminate the need to.
Speaker D:We may want it, you may desire it, but to demand it, knowing the pain you've inflicted and hurt, you don't have to demand it because you can find some measure of ability to park in the blue space and walk in with the limp.
Speaker D:You don't have to demand wholeness in that sense.
Speaker D:And it hurts like hell.
Speaker D:I had the same experience you had.
Speaker D:Kids let me have it.
Speaker D:My son wrote me the letter that to this day I haven't read again, because it was so right and so true and so painful to hear from his lips.
Speaker D:And those relationships being intact, I can't imagine a day.
Speaker D:And that was said in the context of love.
Speaker D:There was never an unanswered phone call, never an unresponded text.
Speaker D:And so that pain is there.
Speaker B:On my 50th birthday, all this had gone down.
Speaker C:10 years ago.
Speaker C:15.
Speaker B:Well played.
Speaker B:It was my birthday.
Speaker B:I was in Nashville, and I was alone, and my children refused to come to my birthday party.
Speaker B:And my daughter, who is this combination of grace and strength, showed up.
Speaker B:I'll meet you here.
Speaker B:We met at a ramen restaurant in Nashville, and I was grateful that she showed up, but two thirds were missing.
Speaker B:So it was.
Speaker B:It was obvious, the jaggedness of this encounter.
Speaker B:And it came up, and I was defensive, even.
Speaker B:Even in the presence of my daughter, Lauren.
Speaker B:And in.
Speaker B:In the conversation, I remember saying to her, and we've rehearsed this many times, and I have a great relationship with her.
Speaker B:I said, lauren, look around this room.
Speaker B:Every 50% of the people you see in this room are divorced and remarried.
Speaker B:Do you think those people have endured what I've had to endure?
Speaker B:Going through a divorce with your mother?
Speaker B:Which sounded like a great justification.
Speaker B:And my daughter looked at me and she goes, but you are my dad.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker B:You are my father.
Speaker B:There were.
Speaker B:There were realities that I thought about you that I just discovered the hard way that are not true.
Speaker B:And if they are true, they're buried so deep in your selfishness that they can't be found anymore.
Speaker B:And she told me, dad, your sons are not here because their lives have been so disoriented by your choices.
Speaker B:I cannot tell you in retrospect how thankful at this stage I was for that conversation with my child.
Speaker B:It took such courage.
Speaker B:Because what it showed me in that moment is something that we don't consider.
Speaker B:But what does this look like?
Speaker B:What does this feel like from that child's perspective?
Speaker B:Which is something we never consider when we're climbing into bed with the wrong person.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:She brought me right back to that decision and said point blank, you did not think about anyone but yourself, including your children.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And if.
Speaker C:If I were to get practical right now, because of the conversations I have with people, I get asked on a regular basis by men and women who have lost relationship with their children, what do we do?
Speaker C:What do I do here?
Speaker C:And the practical advice I give them is don't ever shut off the communication lines.
Speaker C:Ever.
Speaker C:I was sitting with a guy six or seven years ago who had an affair, got a divorce, and had virtually no relationship with his three kids at all.
Speaker C:And they were all adults.
Speaker C:And he was really, really angry about it.
Speaker C:Like, I mean, my gosh, I mean, it's been 10 years already.
Speaker C:And do they not understand that there's more to it than meets the eye?
Speaker C:And why aren't they forgiving me?
Speaker C:And, you know, their mother wasn't this great wife in the first place.
Speaker C:And.
Speaker C:And so he just stopped talking to him, just stopped completely.
Speaker C:And I looked at him and just said, man, you are enslaved to self justification.
Speaker C:You want to know what your kids probably need to hear more than anything?
Speaker C:No rationalization, no excuses.
Speaker C:You look at him in the eye and you say, I am so sorry that I cheated on your mom.
Speaker C:She did not deserve that.
Speaker C:I promised to love her and protect her and keep her, and I failed.
Speaker C:And I didn't just fail her in failing that way, I failed you.
Speaker C:I hurt you.
Speaker C:I injured your heart.
Speaker C:I have no excuses.
Speaker C:I am sorry.
Speaker C:Full stop.
Speaker C:Don't try to explain the bigger context.
Speaker C:Don't try to.
Speaker C:Which, my God, people do this all the time.
Speaker C:I did in the beginning.
Speaker C:Like, you know, mom was like this and mom was like that.
Speaker C:And so, yeah, I, I just, I would say keep the communication lines open.
Speaker C:Own 100% of your part without even mentioning, do not even mention to your kids one thing about the way in which their mother or father failed you.
Speaker D:100% agree.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:With what you're saying.
Speaker D:And, and that obligation, I think, falls on us when, when we first started this podcast, we each talked about our stories that were stories of failure, stories of hardship things.
Speaker D:Self inflicted wounds around the table.
Speaker D:My daughter, Hannah Gray said to me, she said, I love you and I can't listen.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:We have never not traded texts.
Speaker D:We have never not called each other.
Speaker D:We have never missed a birthday.
Speaker D:We have never done it.
Speaker D:There's never been any moment ever of separation between us.
Speaker D:Always eye to eye, always lockstep with love.
Speaker D:To even know that I hurt her so bad.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:That she can't hear the story.
Speaker D:And we were fine.
Speaker D:We're still fine.
Speaker D:But I knew one person couldn't bear to hear it.
Speaker B:Yeah, it still hurts.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Hell yeah, I would.
Speaker C:Hell yeah, man.
Speaker B:There is a.
Speaker B:There's a piece of advice that's ubiquitous out there as it concerns divorce and children, adult children, young children, whatever.
Speaker B:And the advice is don't pull them in.
Speaker B:Don't involve, don't incriminate the other spouse, husband or wife in the process.
Speaker B:And I can't tell you on the one hand how Important it is to heed that advice and how hard it is to heed that advice at the same time.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:To practice it.
Speaker B:And there are some circumstances that are out there and some parents who don't have access to their children because one spouse violated the inviolable principle.
Speaker B:And I can say to the husband or the wife that is engaged in that, the long term fallout of that is not worth the current victory you feel in it.
Speaker B:It is just not worth it.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:When.
Speaker B:When my biological parents divorced when I was three, my biological father drove from Texas about six months later to where I was living in Jackson and wanted to see me.
Speaker B:And I have this image in my head when I was about.
Speaker B:I'm about three and a half, four years old, of policemen in yellow raincoats in my living room and my biological father standing there.
Speaker B:They escorted him out.
Speaker B:We basically drove him to the edge of town.
Speaker B:I found out later that my adoptive father Victor cut a check to my biological father and said, get out of town, never come back.
Speaker B:He was gone.
Speaker B:I grew up thinking that the reason that my biological father never communicated with me is because he didn't love me and he was an asshole.
Speaker B:That wasn't the case at all.
Speaker B:He had been shut out from his two children.
Speaker B:Shut out forcibly, legally.
Speaker B:Years later, when I went through briefly the same experience, the instantaneous sensation was sympathy for him.
Speaker B:Sure, I saw him in a completely different context.
Speaker B:He used to call me every single year on my birthday, sobbing, sobbing.
Speaker B:In offering all of these regrets, I didn't really understand what was happening.
Speaker B:But my perception of him flipped so greatly.
Speaker B:And I came to the realization that divorces don't happen because one person does one thing.
Speaker C:And from the vantage point of the kids who are disappointed, that was Jenna's thing.
Speaker C:She was 13 when Kim and I got divorced.
Speaker C:And because of the circumstances of infidelity surrounding our divorce, when I asked her, what was the hardest part about that for you?
Speaker C:She's 23 now and she will still say to this day, I thought my mom and dad were one thing and they turned out to be another thing.
Speaker C:And it was like I was living amongst strangers who happened to be my parents.
Speaker C:The pain is deep.
Speaker C:It is real.
Speaker C:And when I talk to parents whose children haven't talked to them because of divorce for many years, in some cases I'll say, give it time.
Speaker C:Keep the communication lines open.
Speaker C:Give it time.
Speaker C:That relationship may be restored.
Speaker C:It may not be restored in this life.
Speaker C:It will be restored one day.
Speaker C:But that's not a promise reserved for this world.
Speaker C:But for the next.
Speaker C:But I will.
Speaker C:But what I've seen time and time again is when the kids like you just described go through something in their life as they get older, when the.
Speaker C:When the complexity of life and the dysfunction of their own hearts begin to express themselves in a marriage context, maybe one day they will have a child who goes off the deep end and doesn't talk to them.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:All of a sudden, light bulbs start to go off.
Speaker C:So it may take decades for their perspective on you to change.
Speaker C:But life has a way of showing us that we are all basically the same.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I would say with regard to pulling the kids in to this conversation, maligning the character of parents, that's a sprint.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Life is a marathon.
Speaker B:And eventually children come to the realization that people are human, things happen, and in a broad way, no one's really to blame.
Speaker C:Then they will end up resenting the spouse that bad talks the other spouse.
Speaker C:They will.
Speaker C:As they get older, they'll be like, you know, like, you know, you just said they will end up.
Speaker C:I've seen it time and time again.
Speaker C:They will end up.
Speaker C:They might side with the spouse that's spinning the narrative and.
Speaker C:But they will end up siding with the spouse who refuses to say a negative word about their mother or father.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:It's what you always say.
Speaker D:You drink the poison expecting it to kill the other person.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker D:And it's killing you.
Speaker D:I sat with a guy one time who was talking about trying to reconnect with his children after this exact same kind of scenario.
Speaker D:And he said to me, he said, I just think it's too late.
Speaker D:And I said, you just wrote the first sentence of your letter.
Speaker D:This letter is too late.
Speaker D:Because where grace really comes home in this, it allows us to stand there like you said, and say, I did it.
Speaker D:I was the one.
Speaker D:I participated.
Speaker D:I did sign the paperwork.
Speaker D:It doesn't matter who filed.
Speaker D:I signed.
Speaker D:This is where it ended.
Speaker D:And Jesus found me there.
Speaker D:So I can now put myself here.
Speaker B:That's a great.
Speaker B:That's a great place to end it, man.
Speaker B:I don't know that that can be improved.
Speaker B:And again, heavy subject but necessary conversation.
Speaker B:So we hope it's helpful.
Speaker A:You've been listening to the misfit preachers like subscribe and share more grace centered resources@prodigalpodcasts.com that's produced prodigal P R O D I G A L podcasts with an S Com.
