Happy 14th Birthday Abigail

Abigail Grace is 14. We've had two little "birthday parties" for her this year. Normally, we try not to do parties. We try to do a family experience. But this year. I don't know. Maybe it's all I'm learning about being a Mama. I just wanted her to have a party. 

So on Monday, she had a party with her girlfriends.  Here are two pictures of our Monday: 

This is the whole group (above). From left: Ella, Lily, Baylee (cousin), Zoey (Reagan's little sister), Abigail, Charleigh (cousin), Lily, and Regan. 

Here are some videos from her party:

Birthday 1 

Birthday 2 

Birthday 3 

Today we just had some friends/family over. Grama made ice cream cake, and we sang and opened a few presents. Cousin Russ helped Abigail blow out her candles! Thank you to my parents, John's parents, brother-in-law Eddie and his two kiddos, Aunt Hannah and Theo, and Anni. 

Fun day! 

 

The illusion of control

There's a new layer coming off of me. 

I thought the layers were done. 

They are not. 

(And that sucks.)

(I mean, it doesn't suck, because it's good I'm growing. But it does suck because that growth hurts A LOT.) 

This one is people-pleasing. 

And it isn't just people-pleasing, but the idea that somehow, I am capable of controlling people. 

If I hustle hard enough, they'll like me. 

If I repair hard enough, they'll forgive me. 

If I keep my mouth shut and never speak truth, then I can't say anything wrong. 

If I don't tell them what I really think, we will be okay. 

I've lived my life this way. With an intimate few I've dove in. I've given them access to my truth thoughts and spoke without edits. 

But if you aren't in that intimate circle? 

If you are one step removed? 

Then I've lived in PANIC. 

And honestly, I've done a pretty good job keeping everyone liking me. 

There are a few people I've lost. A few relationships I couldn't salvage. But our military/moving lifestyle allowed me to remove myself from it. And I medicated the feelings away with an anti-depressant. 

And that worked. 

Until it didn't. 

I canNOT keep everyone happy.

Someone will, no matter what I do, get mad at me. 

The control I thought I had is fake. It doesn't exist. 

I must, instead, find my worth in Jesus alone. He must be enough. Sure, I can also entrust my heart to some very close humans that I don't think will hurt me. But even those humans are ... human. And pain could ensue. 

That reality has smacked me upside the face. God is FORCING me to look this in the face and finally, after 48-years, put it behind me. 

He's asking me: "Wendi, will you continue to fear man to such a degree that you don't speak words of truth? Or will you speak the words and trust the outcome to me? Trust that I am God."

He's saying: "Wendi, you are a human. You will make mistakes. It is inevitable. Someone will not like you. Are you okay letting that someone's opinion just float away and instead live for me?"

The answer is: I am not. 

I currently am willing ... but my body can't follow suit. 

And so, I'm tearing it apart. Layer by layer. 

In 2024 I spent six months battling my past and my hurts and I survived. I, naively, thought that all of that was behind me. I did it! I'm victorious! I'll never feel that way again. 

Ummm ....

Here I am. 

I am not as low. But I am low. It was something Kim told me would happen. It's how healing worked. I thought the rings of healing were what I was traveling through in the eight months of depression I faced in 2024. But, alas, that was ONE RING of the journey. I'm now on ring two. 

Egads ...

I want Wendi back. I miss the Wendi of the end of 2024 and first half of 2025 that was healing but getting it and sort of frolicking in her freedom. 

She'll be back. 

But the only way through is through. 

THROUGH ... is so, so hard.  

Being Brave

You've been hurt. But you don't have to LIVE hurt! Lysa TerKeurst

Being brave is not always something you feel. It’s something you do.

You do it in the face of fear and unknown outcomes and risks you don’t really want to take.

You do it when your enemy is staring you down with taunting statements of defeat. You do it not to prove there’s something great inside of you. You do it because if you don’t something will die inside of you.

You do brave things because it’s time to rise up and speak up and let truth find its freedom with your voice.

What knocked you down won’t keep you down. What happened was wrong. Acknowledge it. Speak it. Cry over it.

But don’t die over it. You’ve been hurt but you don’t have to live hurt.

You do brave things because you were made to connect. Not with all people but with that right people.

Take the right risks. Take it slow. But don’t stop. Don’t withdraw. Don’t disappear.

You do brave things because you are a woman who can kneel humbly and rise intentionally. You will find good people and good people will find you.

And you’ll do brave until you become brave.

You’ll know love again.

You’ll know laughter again.

And you’ll know deep in your bones that you won’t waste all that you’ve learned. Those spilled tears? Every one of them was you letting go of the pain to make room for possibility.

Your life is not a tragedy. It’s a testimony that God is your Rock and your Redeemer. And if your hands are shaking let it be only because you’re pointing at the devil who picked the wrong girl to mess with this time.

Don’t wait until you feel brave. Go be brave. Remember, if God is for you there is nothing that can stand against you.   

 

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #6

 Rupture and Repair: The greatest longing of your partner's heart and how to get there 

Adam Young

Tune in later for notes on this one :)

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #5

 Decriminalizing Action Tendencies

Adam Young

In the dance of our marriage, we tend to either be the Pursuer or the Withdrawer. These tendencies to either pursue or withdraw are called action tendencies. The action tendencies that each of you do need to be decriminalized. Your task is to get a PhD in your spouse's wounding. 

Your partner gets mad because YOU are the most important person in the world to them.  When your partner withdraws, you must remind yourself that they are acting with FEAR. They are afraid. 

If my partner is afraid, why don't they just stop yelling at me? Well, because of their wounds. And your brain is wounded very differently than your spouse's wounds. We have to an inflow of compassionate understanding for why we do what we do and why your spouse does what they do.  

How do you dance differently?  

1. Bless your neediness. You have to understand compassionately why you feel needy the way that you do. You name is as good, reasonable, understandable, even holy. 

2. Bless your partner's attachment style and action tendencies, as well as your own. Call it good. Even if it has negative consequences for relationships, it is very good that it developed because it allowed you to neurobiologically make it. 

3. Risk sharing primary emotion. You have to bless your neediness. How would your life look different if you stopped hating how needy you are. What if you called it GOOD the way you need your partner emotionally. Most of us believe that a "healthy adult" is not supposed to need emotional connection and soothing from your spouse. And even if you don't cognitively agree with that, it is the sense inside of like "I shouldn't need this much from him. I should be more independent. I should be more self-reliant." Can you turn to your spouse and say, "I really need you to hold me right now? I really need you to comfort me right now?" Many feel they can't do that because you shouldn't need that. Are you still at war with the way God made you? Sometimes we need another person to regulate you and soothe you. If we hate our own frailty, then we can't reach out to our partner and let them know what we need. 

If you are an avoidantly attached withdrawer, do you understand why your spouse gets frustrated/angry and can you bless why they do that? What would it look like if you validated your spouse's anger. "I know your anger tells me something important here that you need me to know." Just a version of that to your partner will help regulate them. That is ATTUNEMENT. 

For the spouse of an avoider: do you understand what it is like for your partner when there is a conflict? They probably have no idea what they are feeling because no one ever cared what they felt. This will change the dynamic of the interaction. "You probably want to leave the room right now because I'm so big and amped up. That would make sense to me if you want to leave." You must risk reaching. "Anytime we finally talk it's because I reached out and brought something out." That is packaged longing within an anger sandwich.  

As you leave here, I hope your goal is not, "I want to be a better spouse." Rather, I hope the goal is: "I want to repair more often." 

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #4

 Owning Your Story: Navigating our Attachment Wounds (middle age)

Pascale Wright 

"Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity, and love. What seems non-adaptive and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through." -- Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction 

Let's talk about mid-life and marriage right now. Kids are gone. Now what? The connection they desire feels insufficient to calm them. If we are not connected to our primary emotions, what we will do is we will demand that our wives soothe our secondary emotions. And that becomes overwhelming to your partner. Because what they begin to sus out in mid-life is something greater is going on. 

1. The places where attunement and attachment got us is good. We needed to enter marriage and have a re-do of sorts. We needed to be cared for in the hands of our partner. The younger self needed something of that to help us grow. But there is something in you that needs to be soothed yourself before you can reattach from your partner. Somewhere in mid-life, we have to connect with our vulnerability and ourself apart from our partner's soothing on our own. Yes with our partner by our side but primarily with ourselves. 

To be continued ....  

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #3

How attachment styles play out in your marriage

One reason that you are having so much trouble in your marriage is because of how important you are to each other. Most of the dance moves you and your spouse make are variations on the theme of "Pursue/Withdraw." Anxiously attached people tend to do more of the pursuing.  Ambivalently attached people tend to do more of the withdrawing. Let's look at an exchange: 

Alex: "I was hurt by what you said last night." 

Bethany: "Okay." (Getting quiet, with an expressionless look on her face. She's withdrawing.)

Alex: "Do you have anything to say about how hurtful your words were? Did you even hear what I just said?" 

Bethany: (Turns her head slightly down toward the floor.) "Yes, I heard you."  

Some notes: 

Bethany is responding to his facial expression and tone of voice FIRST.  And if in phone or via text, you are imagining it even more. You respond to tone of voice in 1/10 of a second. You aren't even hearing words yet. She is afraid. Does she know she is afraid? No, because the portions of her brain that say "you are afraid right now," have not yet come online. She's avoidantly attached so she goes to her typical response which is to withdraw.

Is Bethany really unmoved? No. But on the outside it looks like she is unmoved. Her inside experience is "I'm on high alert, and I'm working very hard to get smaller so this is not worse." She is hyper-aroused, but she is withdrawing so she doesn't make it worse. So why is her face without expression? Because her nervous system is freaking out. The way her brain has learned to respond to hyperarousal is by withdrawing. She knows if she says anything, the conflict is going to get worse. Alex is already upset. So she has to not make anything worse. 

Ultimately, Bethany's amygdalia is afraid that Alex will leave. That's what her amygdalia's job is to do. You may think that they aren't afraid of that. But they are afraid of that! They have experiences of disconnection when they needed someone. Your partner's amygdalia is on the lookout for relational disconnection or abandonment. 

We are attachment creatures thru-and-thru. The deepest need we have is to know that the person we are married to is going to be there for me when I need them. Your left brain may say that you are afraid of that. But your right brain is afraid of that. 

Bethany looks like she is shut-down but she is going nuts inside. They are responding this way because you are super important to them. 

The way your spouse responds to you may not be because they are indifferent.

The pursuer often feels to their partner like they are an attacker. 

Secondary emotions like anger are an attempt to cope with the primary emotion.  

The emotional part of your brain comes online before the thinking part of your brain. 

We keep fighting about the same thing over and over again because we aren't really getting at the primary emotion of fear, sorrow, alone. We are dealing in the secondary emotion. Why. not? Why don't we just say THIS IS WHAT I AM FEELING. Because ... feeling primary emotions like fear connects you to very young and wounded parts of yourself. 

1. DYSREGULATION caused by connecting to parts of yourself that are very young and very wounded.

2. MISINTERPRETING what's going on inside your spouse. Misinterpreting their response to you. 

3. REFUSING TO SHARE PRIMARY EMOTION -- i.e. not eltting yoru partner know what is actually happening internally.

The greatest gift a man can give his wife is SELF-AWARENESS. More self-aware and less defensive especially as we reach mid-life. Women spend the bulk of their years attuning and raising their children. We've done so much work to attune and be responsive to our children. And we get to mid-life and there is a gap with a lot of men where that same growth point hasn't been reached yet. For most men, this ability has atrophied. 

The single greatest gift for your marriage is SELF-AWARENESS. You can't have a candid discussion with another person if they aren't candid and vulnerable with you.  

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #2

 Attachment: the Foundation for Romantic Relationships

Adam Young

You are relational at your very core. Marriage is the adult relationship. It is about the emotional connection. It is about the perception that your partner is not there for you emotionally. Most marital fights are protests over emotional disconnection. 

 Underneath the content of the fight, you are asking your spouse: Can I count on you? Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? 

[Book suggestion: Hold me tight]

The strength of emotional connection: 

1. Your spouse's attunement to your needs and desires.  

2. Their responsiveness to your needs and desires.

3. Their engagement to your needs and desires. 

We have an innate need to be seen, taken seriously, and responded to. Do you feel like your spouse sees you? Do you feel that they knows about your needs and desires and wants to respond to them? 

If they aren't available, you are going to feel aloneness and helplessness. The AMYGDALIA fires when emotional connection with your partner is lost. 

Why do marriages fail? It is NOT because of conflict. It is because of decreasing emotional responsiveness.  

Attachment is a BIG Deal in marriages: 

1. Avoidant Attachment: When your caregiver is often unavailable, dismissive, or rejecting of you. You were forced to calm yourself and regulate your own emotions despite being unable to do it. The child's needs are frequently not met and communicating their needs will have no effect on caregiver. This is terrible for a child. Children need interactive regulation. They need comfort. Child becomes deeply self-reliant. They don't need anyone. Others aren't available. This child does not avoid closeness. It is not a menu item for them. There is no one there for them. "If I don't ask for help, they can't reject me. If I don't ask for help, it will go better." Since his needs and wants rarely seem to need, he soon stops even expressing his needs and wants. So, in marriage ...

1. More comfortable with emotional distance than connectedness. 

2. Their bodies have been trained to not need a human to regulate them. 

3. They tend to feel needed but not wanted. True mutuality is foreign to them.  

2. Anxious Attachment: A child will develop this attachment when caregiver is inconsistent or intrusive. Caregiver may or may not be available. Sometimes mom is there. But often they are to into their own issues. Never knowing what to expect, this girl develops a sense of anxiety, uncertainty, about whether she can depend upon mom or not. This develops an uncertainty of all other people being safe for me. For a child, inconsistency is absolute terror because children are utterly dependent upon their caregivers. 

1. She is a 40-year-old woman who experiences franticness when there is relational distress.  

2. And then they have great difficulty regulating that franticness and anxiety. 

3. They believe that unless they dramatically express their pain, it is unlikely their partner will respond. 

4. They are plagued by a deep fear that they are going to be abandoned. 

5. They habitually ask for proof / reassurance that they are connected. 

6. Anxiously attached adults anticipate relational failure. THEY ARE ALLERGIC TO HOPE. 

7. Anxiously attached adults feel too needy. They don't deserved to be loved the way they want. 

8. They often make misapraisals of partner's feelings and intentions. 

EVERYTHING CONNECTS BACK TO YOUR FAMILY OF ORIGIN! The limbic brain registers harm more deeply than everything else. How do you know what you got? Look at the BIG 6! (And remember: parents only had/have to get it right 33% of the time to get a secure attachment.)

Where you miss those six things is where you are going to struggle with your spouse!!! Whatever is missing above creates a HUGE HOLE in them and now they are desperately looking for that from their husband. 

If you couldn't say OUCH with your parent, can you say it with your OUCH with your spouse! You need repeated experiences of repair to feel secure.   

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #1

 

How the past brought us together and the present can heal it

Pascale Wright 

"All relationships begin and end in separation." -- James Hollis, The Eden Project 

We come into the world looking for someone looking for us. We are ejected from the womb and then, if we are given "good enough" connection by our parents, we can handle these minor rejections. If we grow up in a home, however, that is not "good enough" with connection, we begin a journey of protecting our vulnerability. 

Most of us emerge into adulthood making a decision a long time ago to never be vulnerable again. Before we met our partner, we decided "I will not be vulnerable again." You vow to never ask for what you need, never open up your heart fully, never trust fully, and never be totally present. 

The trouble is: that decision, the defense, is running your life today with vigilance. When you reach for your partner, you wake up thinking you are in danger and it puts a stop to it. You are scared to be hurt. 

Think about the stories in your life that set in motion this protection. Where were you meant to be seen and attuned to and it wasn't available to you? What feeling of terror did it illicit in you a long time ago that you are protecting yourself from?  Did you make a specific vow or was it not intuitive? 

It happens in micro ways! Just him missing something you need can make you react. Maybe a season in your life, you are tired and your wife is critical and you have nothing more to give and you feel inadequate. But you guard against inadequacies because part of you was cursed as a child, even in micro-ways. So you avoid this. This keeps us disconnected in not offering us the most vulnerable parts of each other. 

In your marriage and your disconnection, there are usually two terrified younger selves that inhabit the bodies of you and your partner. And they are both terrified of being hurt. And this pre-dates your marriage. This idea that there are younger selves in pain, is not a way to excuse the fact that your partner has inflicted wounds in you and that you have also done the same. 

Yes you hurt one another. But we need to go back in time! You will never stop hurting your partner. But can we offer more vulnerable parts of ourselves to withstand that rupture? 

Think of the last argument you had with your partner. You are frustrated, angry, or numb. Those are not the truest parts of you. And because of that, they are not available for connection. The truest part of you is the part that feels alone and inadequate or incompetent. Those are the parts that have the greatest ability to connect the two of you. 

1. You have to know the identify feelings that live within you. What is the bigger feeling you are protecting? You need to do the hard work of slowing down and connecting with the more vulnerable feelings inside you. And guess which ones you need to focus on? Your triggers! They point you back to what is triggered inside you.

2. There has to be a place to share this with your partner. Your partner has to know the words that trigger your defense and the stories that trigger that defense. Most of us have THREE vulnerable feelings that trigger something that takes us off-line. You don't have to locate every story and every feeling in your body. There are three. And knowing those stories is so important. They will often come up with a very guarded defense structure. STORY allows softness to be present within you. You have to know your vulnerable words that trigger your defense and offer them to your partner. Most people don't know what they are feeling at any given moment OR more importantly, these words are so vulnerable and the person doesn't feel safe bringing them. If your story is used against you, you won't want to bring vulnerable stories to your partner. 

Safety:

1. Is my partner accessible at this moment to hear this story? Can they be present at this moment? If it is not the case, then find another time. 

2. When I bring a vulnerable thing, can I trust you to respond to me emotionally? 

3. Will you stay close to me? Or will you withdraw or get big? 

Vulnerability is the capacity to be wounded. It is not the risk of being wounded. It takes a level of strength that will wound me but won't take me off my feet! This is the only method toward growth. Growth requires that you are wounded. 

We often expect our marriage partner to be what our parent wasn't. And inevitably, we will recreate what we didn't have from our parents. 

We are on an epic journey for connection. All relationships begin and end in a state of separation. We are meant to grow through that. Marriage, apart from finding your partner, is designed to develop our wholeness through vulnerability through the process of pain and repair.  

This epic journey begins with our parents, it moves to our partners, and it is meant to culminate in us connecting deeper to ourselves. Experiencing pain, moving through the pain, and being able to connect and grow into wholeness is the goal. And that is hard to unpack! 

PRIMARY EMOTION: When you are talking about sharing vulnerability with your partner, that is an invitation to share primary emotion. That means it happens first neurobiologically, but we don't even have access to it. We have access to a secondary emotion. Like anger.  

We have to know our stories of harm that are getting re-inacted in your marriage: "triggered." Do you know the stories from your growing up years where those big feelings were also at play. There is no way to tease apart the past from the present. You need to get a PhD in how your spouse is wounded. Do you know some of your partner's stories of wounding? 

Vulnerability comes from the Latin VULNERO: to wound. Growth requires at some level that we are wounded ... woah. We are all in the process of becoming whole. And we lose sight of that. Our relationship and connection to partner becomes so large. We lose sight of the idea that the journey we are on is toward healing fragmentation and becoming whole. Becoming what we were meant to be from the Garden. It requires the pain of going back into spaces where you begin to diverge from who you were meant to be and to feel the pain of those experiences in order to integrate them without them ruling your life. There is nothing like pain to be able to facilitate that. 

Thank God that we get triggered! It is meant to lead us back to the explosive parts of us that were formed in childhood. The trigger that happened isn't your partner's fault. If there wasn't something that was explosive inside of you, you can't be triggered. You have to go back to the pain from a long time ago and tolerate it and move through it. 

Although your young self lives in you, your young self has you as a guide and you are stronger than you think to be able to tolerate pain today. Can I go back and reconnect to that part and tolerate that pain? There is an order to things and we are meant to grow in that order. 

A lot of Christians are taught that to be connected to ourselves is unholy. We were created to be human -- not to be spiritual. Our Creator decided we should be human. Why don't we embrace the humanity instead of the spirituality? Not connecting to the self actually produces selfishness.  

 

Hummingbird Story

Via JB: My son found a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird stuck in the front of my truck today. 

I think my wife must have hit the poor guy about an hour earlier, and he got wedged between the bumper and the license plate. 

He was too weak to fly, so we brought him in and fed him some hummingbird nectar. At first he wouldn’t eat, but after a few minutes, his tongue started lapping up the nectar. 

We left him to rest and feed for the next few hours, and when we checked on him again, he seemed to be doing much better.

We took him outside, and he took off like a shot! 

Little sucker left without even saying thank you!

Huisman visit

Friday Funnies: Flashbacks

Gentle Reminders

I am gently being reminded of a lot of things. I'm learning some really powerful things. And learning things is painful. A friend shared with me recently about her post-knee-surgery recovery. The doctor is encouraging her to lean in to the pain. Use the knee that is bad and hurting more. Ooomph.

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."  

Notice David's approach -- he doesn't try to figure everything out on his own. Instead, he invites God into the process of self-examination. This invitation to God's searching presence creates a unique space for honest reflection. Unlike human judgment, which often triggers shame and defensive responses, God's presence provides safety for genuine self-examination. In this space, we can begin to recognize our emotional triggers without condemnation. We can start to understand why certain relationship dynamics affect us so deeply.

C25K

I am working to run a C25K. This means Couch-2-5K. It starts you slow and gets you from not running at all to a 5K (3.2 miles) in about a month. Abigail and I are doing it together. John has joined in. Hannah and Genevive joined us today, but they were NOT fans of future participation.

Tuesday Truth

Matt and Kelsey

Kelsey and I go wayyyy back. We became friends back in Rochester, Minnesota in 2003. We traveled to Africa together and have been there for each other in many ways and in many places and in hard things over the last 20+ years.

 

Back in December of 2023, Kelsey and Matt got married! We hadn't really gotten to spend much time with them as the only time we met Matt was at their wedding. But they were taking a vacation in the Pigeon Forge area and stopped by the farm for the day. 

 

What a day! We had such a good time. We went to Yoders and John made lamb burgers for dinner. Lots of fun. They didn't get to see Abigail as she was at a youth camp, but the rest of the kiddos were here.  

Can you do it?

Let’s talk about people-pleasing

Not as a flaw. Not as a weakness. But as a strategy your younger self may have learned to survive.
People-pleasing is often rooted in early childhood experiences where being agreeable, kind, or easygoing wasn’t just encouraged, it became the condition for love, safety, or connection.

Maybe you were praised for always being “so good,” “so helpful,” “so mature for your age.” You learned that being thoughtful or accommodating made others happy and so it felt like your job to keep the peace.

Or maybe your environment felt unpredictable or emotionally unsafe. Maybe conflict led to withdrawal, yelling, or rejection. You learned to avoid disappointment at all costs. You became attuned to other people’s moods, reactions, and needs—while disconnecting from your own.

What we often call “people-pleasing” is really a nervous system doing its best to keep us safe. It’s fawning. It’s self-protection. It’s attachment.

But here’s the good news: Awareness opens the door to healing. You’re not broken—you’re beautifully adaptive. And now, as an adult, you get to explore new ways of being in the world—ones where your voice, your needs, and your truth matter just as much as anyone else’s.

You don’t have to earn your belonging.

You don’t have to shape-shift to be loved.

You are allowed to say no, set boundaries, and disappoint others—and still be safe and deeply worthy.

Healing is not about becoming a different person. It’s about returning to the you that’s always been there, underneath the masks. Let that version of you come home.

Helpful to not feel alone

 

I continue to work HARD on my mental health. Sometimes the journey feels impossible. Will I ever, successfully, get through this. My Aunt told me she'd rather have a root canal without novocaine and then be felt-up by Captain Hook. This made me laugh, but it really is accurate. Trying to work my way through depression and anxiety is HARD. 

So this handout that my friend Stebbs gave me today really resonated with me. In 2024, I was just trying to find my way out of depression and anxiety. But now, I'm not just doing that. I'm actually trying to fix some things that are broken. 

PEOPLE PLEASING is the thing that God is working on me with right now. Who do I live for? Am I afraid to speak truth to people? Do I compromise to keep the peace? 

The answer to all of these things is "YES!" This is how I lived. I lived in desperation to never have someone be upset at me or not like at me. When you really discuss that, you realize how impossible that attempt actually is. It's impossible. Not everyone will like me. And people will get upset with me. Especially if I am living like I am not which is speaking truth instead of pushing things under the rug. 

So here I am: trying to live in that. Trying to allow myself to release things that God has asked me to release. His yoke is EASY! Really? Then why do I feel things are so heavy? Because I don't allow myself to not carry all that extra!

Emotional weight of things I can't control? YES, I HAVE BEEN CARRYING THAT!

The tendency to shrink to make others more comfortable? OH YES. 

The need to over-explain boundaries? OHHHHH BOY. 

The fear of being misunderstood. YEP YEP YEP. 

Wendi is working to not live that way anymore. And you want to know the main reason? Because my CHILDREN deserve to not live with me teaching these things to them. I want them to have the freedom that I am having to work for. I am working HARD to allow them to not be slaves to whether or not people are happy with you. 

I'm working ... 

RYM Camp (Abigail)

Abigail went to a week-long camp in Florida. Here were some pictures we got to share with everyone!

Tuesday Truth

Liberty Camp

 

We are back from Liberty University. I am hoping I can obtain more photos, but I think they are on some Instagram location that I can't figure out how to get access to. Isaac spent a week at Liberty in a musical theatre program, and he had an AMAZING time. 

We were able to stay at our friends, the Yerrington's house. Unfortunately, they were in Spain, but they let us bunk there anyways. That be some good friends. :)

We arrived on Saturday, stopped at Yerrington's to change clothes, had dinner with our friends, Randy & Whitney Belt, and then went to the show. The Belt's daughter was in the camp as well.  In fact, they are the ones who told us about it. I'm so glad they did. Isaac had an amazing time. 

There were 50 girls and 20 guys, and Isaac said he just became friends with all of them. Everyone was nice and kind. There was no drama (outside of actual theatre drama.) They just had a good time together. He got to play numerous roles, but his "biggest" was Kenny Rogers. He did a great job. 

John and I went with just the Pomegranate. Sidge covered the farm, and Abigail was starting her own high school camp in Florida and spent one night with her friend Reagan so they could get her started at camp while we were gone. 

I LOVE LIBERTY. I really hope Isaac can maybe go there for college. It is just four hours away, and it is so nice to see Jesus AND the arts go together. :) 

We Bought a Farm: MORE Stitches

Her Mom has been her twice. Finally her turn! 

#26 goes to Hosea S. Good old Hosea was hit be an electric boat on their pond driven by six-year-old sister. 

Today we do #23

Honestly, stitches around these parts are pretty much just "par for the course." 

To be fair, this time Gabe actually cut his finger at Anni's house. But here is JB, minutes from heading into the ER, doing the thing he does with a needle and thread on our dining room table.

A look at all of our previous stitches on my kiddos and here at the farm:

Stitches #1 (Isaac)

Stitches #2 (Isaac)

Stitches #3 (Sidge)

Stitches #4 (Sidge)

Stitches #5 (Abigail)

Stitches #6 (JB on Himself)

Stitches #7 (Sidge at the ER by JB)

Stitches #8 (Abigail)

Stitches #9 (Hannah)

Stitches #10 (Ana)

Stitches #11 (Gabe)

Stitches #17 (Anonymous Grandparent)

Stitches #18 (Anni ... again!)

Stitches #19 Neighboring Farm Friend Barry

Stitches #20 Gabe has piece of metal fly into leg while mowing at Shane and Linda's

Stitches #21 (Skin glue) Hannah

#22 Eddie's foot

#23 Eoin's face (hit his chin on a chair during ballet)

#24 Zoey's hand (got in the middle of a dog fight :(

#25 Hannah Bowlin in deli-meat fight at little shop

#26 Hosea cuts his ear in a Janessa-boat mishap

#27 Trim falls in grandparents' driveway: 

Also stitched: 

12. Youth Group farm volunteer [chin] (no picture)

13. Karen's husband [head] (no picture)

14. Mr. Jacob [lip] (no picture)

15. Anni [thumb] (no picture)

16. Molly's husband Luke [thumb] (no picture)

Abigail (our future medical gal) got to help take out Anni's stitches. I love that Anni was okay with this! I would have been scared!

Sitting in it

We have to SIT IN THE DISCOMFORT. 

Seriously?

Really?

I've known for most of my life that I was a chronic people-pleaser. I didn't think that was a bad thing. I didn't understand that it was a trauma response. I thought it was a good thing to be a people-pleaser. 

Hard truth: IT IS NOT. 

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to be nice. It's great to be kind. But people-pleasing is NOT being truthful. It is doing EVERYTHING you can to keep peace. This meant I wasn't speaking complete truth to people. I was telling white lies. I was doing anything and everything to make sure there was peace. I would manipulate in order to keep people happy.

For the last year I have been working to heal from chronic and toxic behaviors. I naively thought that I had done it! I had been unable to sit in some discomfort and so I thought that I had conquered it! Bravo Wendi. Time to go on with your life. 

And then, someone actually told me they weren't happy with me, and I felt everything crumble. My counselor told me very early on that my healing journey would be an upward spiral. This meant that I'd never drop as low but that I would have to be stretched and grow over and over again. I, again, naively, thought that I was through this! Ohhhhh, how wrong I was. 

I'm in a low dip. But it is just a dip. But I hate the dips, and I want them to be OVER and DONE WITH. 

Here's the other thing. In the past, if Wendi thought someone was mad at her, she would feverishly and ferociously try to fix the upsetness. Call. Text. Email. Write a letter. Show up. Do something nice. Fix it! Because only through fixing it could she feel better inside. 

OR

Old Wendi also used medication to numb the feelings of someone being mad at her so she could function. (Please don't get me wrong, sometimes meds are needed. No doubt. But I am now at a point where I know numbing the feelings is no longer serving me.) 

New Wendi now sees that those were just hits of heroin. Get everyone not mad, feel better, move on. The next day, do it again. She sees that the desire to please man was NOT A SIN. She wasn't trying to do it. It was hard-wired into her nervous system. She needed to unwind the wires. And that takes a LOT of work. 

In the course of this journey, I have been blessed by some amazing women who are standing alongside me on my path. One of those women was my mother-in-law. She wrote me something beautiful and combined with a phone conversation I had had, opened up my eyes to what was happening. I haven't even shared the story of my pain, but it didn't matter. She was able to encourage me in that. 

My Aunt Jan shared a selection from Mere Christianity: 

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide....

Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the       "wrong" notes. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another.

...decent behavior ...does not mean the behavior that pays...but means things like ...doing school work honestly when it's would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her... telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool. 

"Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason, namely because we care so incomparably more what God thinks.

Imagine yourself as a living house... God comes in to rebuild this house... but He is knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought.  You thought you were going to he made into a decent little cottage. But He is building a palace!

Emotional Safety and Intimacy

It is time for me to LEVEL UP.  For a year I have been working on my mental health. I've come SO far. But now I've reached a new place. And I want to learn even more. I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. And I'd love to take other people along with me. 

One of my BIGGEST stressors is someone being mad at me. Over the last few weeks, we had a family situation that emptied my gas tank. And then, I find out someone is upset at me. So the result is something that looks like this:  

Empty Tank + Stressor = Not good results

FULL Tank + Stressor = Much better results

FULL TANK + NO Stressor = Perfect results 

In the past, I would have ferociously tried to solve the person being angry at me. That was my defense. However, new Wendi knows that isn't the right thing to do. It's a hit of heroin. I think it is the answer. But it's not. It's like someone with medical anxiety going to the doctor and the doctor saying they are fine. They haven't gotten to the bottom of what is going on.  

Okay, so here I am, having to sit in someone being mad at me. I'm there. My "biggest fear" has happened. To be frank: it has happened before. I've had many instances in my life when someone was indeed mad at me. However, I am now realizing that I have been attempting, at all costs, over the last few years, to prevent this from EVER EVER EVER happening. It's my main goal in life. #1: Don't let anyone think you are not an amazing human. 

I would love for this person to not be mad. But what I am realizing is that I need this person to be mad right now to get my to level-up. Ouch! That is hard to realize. Through my counseling and mental health work, I have been able to handle minor ruptures relatively well. I can know a friend is frustrated or peeved without over-thinking it. But an actual "I don't wan to speak to you," is the next level. 

Here we go Wendi. You got this.  

In my mind this fear makes total sense. People being mad at you is the worst thing ever, right? But when I bring this up to "normal" people, they truly don't get why it would spiral me as it has. 

I have friends dealing with their own anxiety. A few of my friends are dealing with medical anxiety. Anytime they get something abnormal with their body, they believe they are dying. I, personally, think this is crazy. Why would you spend time worrying about something like that? 

I have another friend who has a great fear of bed bugs. I think this is ridiculous (and I've told the friend so). But something in her believes this will kill her. Anytime I start to say that her fear is ridiculous, John will say to me, "You fear is just as ridiculous." 

Seriously? 

It's because I believe someone being mad at me is DEATH. Truly. Isn't that crazy? Yes, it is. But it is what I believe. 

Jesus said: "Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." What is the truth? As I have been healing from bad patterns in my life, I am working to truly see what the truth IS. The truth is that there are patterns that hold me back. I want to break from those patterns and instead anchor myself firmly in the transformative truth of scripture. I have identity in Christ! I have emotional safety in Christ!

We hear the word "trigger" and quite honestly, it has been so overused in our culture that we roll our eyes. However, a "trigger" is something that evokes strong emotional reactions from us. And the truth is, these triggers are often rooted in past experiences and our deeply held emotional beliefs. Therefore, my people-pleasing has to have a root. 

So ... what is that root? 

Proverbs 4:23 says "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." The problem is, when we are young, we don't necessarily know how to do that. Our heart was led to believe things that are just not true (either by watching our parents, being taught by our parents, in our church, our school, or through some sort of traumatic event.) If we can learn what triggers us emotionally, we can respond with wisdom and grace rather than our impulsive feelings. 

Here are ten common relational triggers that can affect our emotional intimacy, trust, and safety. Today, I want to just talk about the first one on the list. But I am sure I will get to others. The ones I am BOLDING are the ones I think I most personally struggle with. 

1. REJECTION -- woah! Did you know that rejection activates the same parts of the brain as physical pain! This is why it hurts so deeply! We can also question our worth and identity in Christ. 

2. Fear of Abandonment 

3. Trust Violations

4. Emotional Unavailability

5. Loneliness

6. Loss of Control

7. Social Media Overuse

8.  Negative Peer Influence

9. Anger

10. Insecurity / Low Self-Esteem 

Tuesday Truth

We Bought a Farm: Lambs in June!

We usually have lambs sometime in December of January. We'd love to have them when it is warmer, but we have a very hands-off approach here on the farm and like to let the sheep go when they go. 

So they went in December and January and then SURPRISE! We have three sets of new twins out there. 

We did some calculations. This means that some of our ladies got pregnant one month after they had just delivered babies. 

No idea if more are coming or not. But for now -- we are enjoying seeing these warm deliveries and twice as much profit for us too!

27th anniversary

On June 20th, John and I celebrated 27 years of marriage. Add our dating years and we have been together for over 30 years! We've lived on three continents and have four children. We've lived in downtown and freezing Minnesota and we've lived on a rural farm in Tennessee. It's been an incredible journey and while we've had difficult things we've encountered together, we have truly always been teammates and best friends. 

We had a special anniversary event planned for Tuesday, but with my mental health tanking just a bit these last few days, we've decided to postpone that for a time that I am feeling better. 

Love you JB! 

Remembering Scrubs

I walked past Scrubs' burial spot today as we were moving sheep and thought Wow, it looks beautiful. But I also thought: How could he have died in April of 2016? Where does time go?

Oh that dog was such a handful. Such a piece of work. So much energy and time. And yet such a part of my life. Such a BIG part of my life. I wished I could have gotten more time with him, but no matter if I did, he wouldn't be here today. 

Today I have three dogs, and I love them all -- especially Arabelle who is my shadow. However, none of them are SCRUBS to me. For my kids, the loss of Ritter will hit everyone hard primarily Sidge. Raven is Abigail's girl. And Arabelle? Everyone will pretend that they don't love her as much as I do, but she is so stinin' smart. 

I also took a picture of the sign our friends the Petersen's gave us -- it occupies the short-cut between our house and the grandparents that we buried Scrubs on. Gramps loved him some Scrubs so he had to be buried in-between our two homes.

This world is HARD. 

The life is HARD. 

But also, so much beauty! 

Zoo!

I took Hannah and Tristan and Theo to the zoo last week. I love Bright’s Zoo. They also have the only spotless giraffe in the world!