On Forgiveness | Sarah Markley

Emotional Martyrdom

March 25, 2013 by Sarah Markley 25 Comments

A few years I fractured my left foot. I dropped a five pound dumbbell on it from about nose height. Don’t ask.

If you don’t understand how a teeny-tiny little dumbbell could do much harm you I dare you to drop one on your bare foot. Needless to explain, the pain was so intense I could no longer stand.

Fetal position, big tears like I was five-years-old, and there was cursing. Oh, was there was cursing. And then I called my husband.

“Drive yourself to the ER,” he told me.

“I can’t actually stand right now,” I said. “When you come home from work I’ll go to the urgent care.”

I hung up and shoved my foot in a bucket of ice.

That whole day I hobbled around in wild pain. I did end up going to the Urgent Care later that night. It wasn’t fractured badly enough for anything more than a “boot” but I wasn’t able to put any weight on it for a week without pain.

I didn’t say,

Oh no big deal. I’m a martyr. I can handle it.

Because we usually don’t do that with physical injuries. My husband said to go to the doctor. He was right and I listened to him. I got my injury looked at and cared for. I got help for my pain.

But we do that so easily with emotional pain. We say that it’s no big deal. It doesn’t hurt that bad. I can heal on my own. I don’t need help.

I can speak from personal experience when I say, what-a-load-of-crap.

We do need help. Whether we actually need professional help or simply help from friends and people who support us, we do need help. Gone should be the martyr mentality for emotional and spiritual struggle. Yet so many of us neglect this part of our lives.

When I wrote about our house loss a few weeks ago I talked about the idea of the disparity between what I felt and what I thought I should feel. A part of me really didn’t think my house loss was that big of a loss so I really shouldn’t need help.

It’s like my foot. I hurt my foot but I could still drive the kids to school and I got by on some 2 or 3 or 4 extra strength Tylenol. When I consider someone down the road who might be recovering from a broken leg, the rational part of me says that my pain is no big deal.

Not only can she not go to work but she can’t drive or exercise or vacuum her floors. She is seriously handicapped by her injury, way more than me, and it takes a lot longer than me to heal. We are both in pain but maybe hers is more than mine.

But, does her injury negate mine? Not at all. My foot still must heal and there is legitimate pain involved with an injury, even like that.

Does her injury make mine any less important? No. Not at all.

Our injuries, whether physical or emotional, are not connected beyond the fact that we are asked to bear one another’s burdens and help carry the loads of others in our life.

But here’s what I’m learning. We must care for our injuries, however small, because when we don’t we cannot carry the burdens of others. And further, when we neglect our emotional or spiritual pain, we are legitimately neglecting a part of us that needs real types of care and real healing.

Go to a therapist.

Get your girls around you to talk.

Ask your spouse or mother for support.

But do something. Be honest with someone about your emotional or spiritual pain and then move toward healing. We only hurt ourselves more when we don’t get help.

What do you think? Do you neglect or care for yourself spiritually or emotionally? What kind of help have you gotten in this area? Why are we prone to care for ourselves physically but not emotionally?

Filed Under: on forgiveness, On Freedom, on grace, on honesty, Uncategorized

Patience

February 25, 2013 by Sarah Markley 20 Comments

And then there’s the time when you run into that one person you didn’t want to see at Target on a Thursday morning. She’s the one who hurt you. And she’s the one of the ones it hurts to even think about it.

You see her at the checkout lane and you hope to God she hasn’t seen you.

You finish and then you think you’re walking out ahead of her. You dare not look over your left shoulder so you square your jaw and pick up your step.

It’s been over two years and she doesn’t look at all different. You wonder if you do. You try to adjust your jeans as you push your cart past the rows of white and blue and silver minivans.

When you get to your car you see her across the parking lot. She’s made it out before you somehow and as you are moving plastic spoons and orange juice and the replacement curling iron from your cart to the trunk you wonder if you should go and talk to her. Maybe you should break the problem wide open over you knee. Right there on a weekday morning crash niceties to the ground.

Or maybe you should just say “hello” and she would be kind, no doubt. We would all act like there is nothing. And then that would be that.

Usually you listen to the voice that tells you to talk to someone, that divulges secrets and whispers to you to make the 50 yard walk between the minivans to speak to her. Whether it’s God or your own conscience it doesn’t matter because today you ignore it.

And you apologize to Jesus as you finish putting the bread and the milk into your car and you shake your head as you return the cart to the appropriate spot like a good citizen and you apologize again as you swing your purse across and climb into the drivers seat.

You put your hands on the steering wheel and just sit.

Is it that you don’t forgive? You begin to feel bad and wonder if it really is that. You wonder if it’s too late.

But then that same smallish voice whispers grace into your ear. It whispers things like it’s-okay and when-you’re-ready-there-will-still-be-grace.

“I’m not ready.” I say it out loud.

And there it is again. Grace. Grace is love and patience and forgiveness wrapped up in a paradoxical package.

You call your husband as your drive toward home because you don’t know what else to do and over the distress in your voice he speaks the same grace as you heard a few seconds earlier.

“When you’re ready, Sarah.”

Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace

Breakfast for Dinner

December 10, 2012 by Sarah Markley 19 Comments

It happened in the kitchen.

Around a skillet of cheesy eggs and another one full of turkey bacon. Breakfast for dinner only happens when Daddy is home late from work.

Everything else in my life has been calling so loudly. The children’s homework. The house that does not clean itself. The laundry baskets and Christmas trip-planning, the holiday parties that need wrapped hostess gifts and the school programs. The other job I do each day even when I don’t have time.

It all screams so big and loud so that even my own brain cannot fix itself on anything for more than a moment.

And I must write. I must. Not for my blog or my {unwritten} book or for anyone else. But for my own sanity.

And there hasn’t been a stitch of time. Each stolen minute is filled with the loud calls from everything else in my life.

I sat for an hour with a blinking cursor while I answered everyone else’s calls except the ones that would calm the urgency inside.

Tonight I lost all sense of adulthood and crumpled once again into a folded mess of a cardigan, jeans and boots in the dining room. It was then I decided that breakfast for dinner was just as good as anything.

I asked the ten year old to make the eggs and the six year old to empty the dishwasher. And they sensed I was needy. I’d already apologized forty-five-thousand times in the last hour. So they obeyed with wide, empathetic eyes.

I pulled the bacon out of the refrigerator and retrieved the skillets from where I’d hidden them inside the oven.

“Maybe you need a few minutes by yourself, Mama.” The oldest said as she swept crumbs from the counter. “I can make dinner.”

My heart. My grief at my own brokenness. My whole spirit begging not to be a failure as a mother.

It was all that it took to break my sense of urgency and mania.

“No. Let’s do it together.” Burners on. Skillets hot. Bacon dropped onto the heat.

And we moved in the kitchen together. All three of us, two generations of sensitivity and womanhood and youth as we worked together to create a simple meal. She beat the eggs.

“Like this, Mama?” She used a fork instead of a whisk.

“Yes, now add a bit of milk.”

The six-year-old found a step stool to reach the high cabinet. She put the glasses away while her little voice sang a happy song she’d heard on the way to school this morning.

“The princess and the frog…” she sang while her sister poured eggs into the skillet.

There was peace in the making, in the creating and even in the working tonight, beauty in the simplicity of a meal made and a meal eaten together. There was redemption in the whisking of yolk and white and in the sizzling of meat on a stovetop. There was grace in the teaching and in the praise and in the song.

And these girls teach me over and over again what it means to be a woman.

Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace, on parenting

Five Steps to Forgiving Ourselves

December 5, 2012 by Sarah Markley 2 Comments

Forgiving ourselves might be one of the hardest things about failing. There is always something about not living up to the standards we set for our own selves that is harder to get by than when someone else doesn’t live up to what we expect.

I’m writing about that today on {in}courage. And about how we really can forgive ourselves when we really do fail.

Five Steps to Forgiving Yourself

“I’m just so stupid!!” One of my daughters face-palms herself after a mistake she’s made. And I’ll admit, it’s a big one.

“No you aren’t. You just made a poor choice.” I go to her, gather her and do my best to infuse truth into her heart and somehow layer it over the lies that have begun to reside there.

I have never told her she is stupid or bad or unlovable. To the contrary. I try to combat those outside influences each day of their lives.

You know you’re amazing.

You are so smart.

You’ve done your best, that’s all you can do!

But even my girls are prime examples of just how hard we are on ourselves…

To read the rest, click here.

Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace, Uncategorized

For the Times We Don’t Have Any Idea What We Are Doing

June 27, 2012 by Sarah Markley 23 Comments

She got frustrated and I got frustrated yesterday morning. So I threw down the hairbrush and it bounced on the kitchen floor.

Not my best moment, I know.

My oldest daughter is ten-and-a-half and quickly heading toward preteen-ish-ness and I’m quickly heading toward being the mother of a preteen-ish girl.

I have no idea what I’m doing. In fact, I think neither neither she nor I know what we are doing.

There are manuals for getting babies to sleep through the night and books about getting toddlers to eat green veges. There are myriads of parenting seminars and classes one can take about how to be a better disciplinarian but there is no manual for this. Not for this: For the on-the-ground, we-are-both-crying, leave-me-alone times. For the times when we look at each other as mother and daughter and we don’t know how this is supposed to work.

Hair brushing is small compared to the issues we will be dealing with in short years but regardless the issue, it’s all new territory. But there are a few things that aren’t new:

It’s about love {it’s always been about love} and it’s about reconciliation. It’s about grace and it’s about forgiving the major and minor parts of our personalities that will never be easy.

It’s about me gathering her sixty seconds later and apologizing for my unpredictable behavior and telling her she didn’t deserve that.

It’s about her obeying me and then asking for forgiveness with sincerity.

It’s about both of us recognizing that we were wrong.

And it’s about reconciliation.

My hope for my daughters is that they would grow up to be responsible individuals who love God and others and are good stewards of their resources. But they may, no will, have a few hiccups along the way.

They might leave the Church or fall in love with the wrong guy, they might screw everything up, but if in the end of it, we are reconciled to one another the journey to that redemption is of lesser importance than the redemption itself.

We took our girls to see Brave the other day and, unlike other Princess movies {even Tangled}, Brave is not about a prince falling in love with a girl. And it’s not about finding your “true” self or following your heart. Brave is about redemption. It’s about reconciliation. It’s about the broken relationship between a mother and a daughter and how the courage to forgive and be forgiven heals it.

As silly as it sounds, as I held my daughter in the kitchen yesterday morning I thought about that movie and I thought about us and about our willingness as parents to be molded and shaped by our own children. I thought about my own failings as a person and a parent and how we must be brave enough to forgive one another.

That’s right.

When we don’t know what to do, forgive. When we don’t know how to move forward, love. When we don’t know how to fix it, seek to reconcile and redeem.

Lord, help us to have the courage to forgive today and help us to have the bravery to admit our own faults. Give us an appropriate understanding of our own failings but help us to reconcile and redeem the broken things of this world. Continue to bring reconciliation into our families and lives in ways only You can dream up.

Do you ever feel like you need a “manual” for this stage of life? Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you are doing? Does it take a lot of courage to forgive?

Filed Under: on family, on forgiveness, on grace, on parenting, Uncategorized Tagged With: on forgiveness

I’m Not Ashamed Anymore

August 31, 2009 by Sarah Markley 81 Comments

“My New Name” Conclusion from Sarah Markley on Vimeo.

This is who we are.

If you saw me at the park with my girls, you’d see me trying to find a spot in the shade and making sure my three-year-old doesn’t squeeze all the juice out of her juice box unintentionally. You would never know that I was a woman who committed adultery over six years ago.

If you saw Chad and me in our daily lives, you’d watch us get along much more than fight and see that we can get frustrated with each other for silly things, but that we always, always try to work it out. It wouldn’t be obvious that we almost walked away from each other one Sunday afternoon.

So why did I do this? Why did I invite the anger and misunderstanding that I assumed would come with telling my story? Why did I share private things with (essentially) the entire world?

Because God did such a mighty work in me, that I cannot, will not, be ashamed of it.

I’m ashamed of the grief and heartache I caused. Still, I am.

And I still apologize to God. To Chad.

But I will never be ashamed of the clarifying, beautifying work of the Holy Spirit in my life and in my marriage. I know that even though I committed crimes against God, He is using it for glory even now in ways I will never understand.

I can never be ashamed of the grace.

So look around. There are other people like me who’ve behaved poorly in the past. There are others who have done shameful things and now they are new and different. They show no signs of the past on their faces.

Extend grace to them. Grace has been extended to you.

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