“Wherever you go, there you are.”
That simple, yet profound, quote is one of my favorites. It plainly illustrates the truth that you can’t outrun your problems. No matter how far you go or how hard you try. Wherever you go, you will be there and until you deal with you, your problems won’t go away.
When I was working on my book, I had a vision for the second half to be a collection of stories from other people who had also been through what I called a “Now What? Moment”. A moment when everything in your life comes crashing down around you and you stare hopelessly at the sky asking, “Now What?”
My mind went to work right away, I could think of dozens of people in my life who had been through life-altering, dream-shattering circumstances like I had. I am beginning to believe almost every person on earth has been through something like this. So, the challenge wasn’t finding someone who had been through, but finding people who had faced those challenges head on instead of running. People who had – maybe even reluctantly like me – invited the redeeming, restorative power of God’s grace into those circumstances and come out healed and whole on the other side.
As I looked around me, I saw most people were just….running.
Filling their lives with things and activities and accomplishments and people to try and cover up or forget about what they had been through. I watched people bounce from relationship to relationship, job to job or even move across the country to try and “start fresh”.
Of course I thought about doing that too after my divorce, but that quote haunted me on repeat in my mind, “wherever you go, there you are”. I realized it wouldn’t do me any good to be anywhere else, or be with anyone else, if I wasn’t willing to face the mess inside of me.
So I did.
It was slow and painful and challenging. It looked like professional therapy and non-professional therapy sessions with friends. It looked like diving into books that radically changed the way I looked at and thought about the world. About relationships. About marriage. About God. Most of all, it looked like stopping the running, the grasping, and the pretending.
Pretending like everything was fine when it wasn’t. Pretending like I was over it, when I was certainly not. Pretending like there were no residual effects from the picture I held of my whole life being shattering to pieces.
Thankfully, I did find some other people who had been down this road, people who had wrestled with grit and grace themselves, and come out renewed on the other side. And I was able to tell their stories in my book. Their stories are wonderful and powerful and have impacted many lives already!
I met another person recently who has an incredible “Now What?” story. Her name is Kimberly Dewberry, and I’d like to introduce her to you now. Kimberly writes and speaks to help other people deal with the fallout of living with alcoholic family members. Having grown up with an alcoholic father and married to an alcoholic husband, she’s no stranger to this pain and predicament herself. And she’s well-familiar with the mess that comes out of running, rather than facing, the issue.
Here is her story:
I’ve never been the athletic type. I’m the type of person who enjoys lazy Sunday afternoon naps after church. I love sitting at my desk as my fingernails click away at the keys. I’m perfectly content sleeping in on Saturdays. Plopping down on my end of the couch after a long day at the office and watching American Pickers is my idea of bliss. I’m not an extreme exerciser. I’m not into playing volleyball on a co-ed team at church. I’m not one of those people who goes for a run in the early morning. However, I once could be called an expert in running of a different sort.
The first time I made the decision to run came soon after my Dad began drinking again after years of sobriety. At 16, I couldn’t take the uncertainty of living in a home with an alcoholic. Too many days and nights of walking on eggshells, being ignored, or having yelling matches became too much for me. I decided to run away from home.
It didn’t last long, eventually I went back. So I dealt with the life of being a child of an alcoholic the best way I knew how. I told myself I only had one year left of school and then I could escape and have a peaceful life.
During my last year of high school, I dated different boys, looking for some sort of stability and love I felt I lacked. And at 18, I married one of those boys. I found my escape. Or so I thought.
In truth, I had run away from one unstable situation into more chaos than I could ever imagined. I quickly had two babies and a life far less than I had dreamed.
I found out that running from one bad situation into another didn’t help my state of mind. The next eleven years brought heartache, depression, and thoughts of suicide. If it were not for the grace of God, I would have made a permanent escape.
The darkness of the night I almost took my own life couldn’t compare to the darkness I had in my heart. On my way to the bathroom, where I walked to search for some pills that would do the trick, I looked on my dresser and there laid a pamphlet I had received at work that day. A phone number was listed beneath the words, “Need help?” I knew I needed help. I stopped and stared at it for a short while. Thoughts spinning in my mind. Suddenly, I felt my heart flutter. I grabbed the cordless phone, picked up the pamphlet and walked into the bathroom closing the door behind me. God’s love interceded and I called a suicide hotline.
In my selfish desperation to run away, I hadn’t thought about the consequences for the children I would be leaving behind. It wasn’t my time. God had work to do in me.
I accepted God’s healing that night, I found salvation the following Sunday, but my walk with Him was short lived. When things became too difficult again, I ran—from my life and God.
I divorced my first husband and remarried. And seven years into that second marriage, the running shoes came out again. I went my own way. I could handle things on my own. I didn’t need anyone’s help. Besides, I thought God wouldn’t want anything to do with someone like me. Someone who couldn’t even stay married. Someone who seemed to fail at everything.
Soon after my second divorce, I reunited with my high school sweetheart and we married in the Fall. My expertise in running away from my problems seemed to have finally worked! This was like a fairytale!
It wasn’t long before I realized the love of my life, my high school sweetheart, was in fact an alcoholic too. I had only run in a circle.
Over the first five years of our marriage we went from being inseparable to living separate lives under the same roof. I had settled into a mundane existence because I was tired of running. I couldn’t face the idea of yet another failed marriage. I was determined to stay married regardless of how awful it was.
During my life of running my Mom and Dad had separated. Mom moved in with me while Dad floated between different family members and eventually became homeless. He lived under bridges and in various homeless shelters. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
Then God decided to put an end to my running. Without any inclination or warning, my aunt called us to let us know Dad had been found in a local hospital with a broken hip and terminal stomach cancer. He somehow remembered her phone number and reached out to her. The doctor’s gave him a month to live, which he would spend in my home on hospice care.
God used the last three weeks of Dad’s life to teach me about his healing grace, mercy, and forgiveness. I had run from the chaos, but I could no longer run from God. He opened my eyes to my husband’s alcoholism. Patrick’s drinking had intensified over the five years of our marriage, but I thought I could fix it. God opened my eyes to my co-dependency and controlling behavior. At 16, when my Dad’s drinking started again, I felt out of control so controlling people, situations, and outcomes became my way of life.
God used the pain and grief of losing Dad to make me see that the only way to truly live is to be fully connected to a gracious, loving, merciful Heavenly Father. God is not like an earthly father, with faults and failings that you can run from. His love and timing are perfect, patiently waiting for us to grow weary of running from his open arms.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Thankfully, God not only saved me, but He saved my husband, too.
A few weeks after my Dad died, I was yet again nudged by God. This time, though, He nudged me to confront Patrick about his alcoholism. My husband immediately stopped drinking but after a few weeks, he made comments to me insinuating it was a temporary situation. Again, God’s nudging persisted. I followed His lead and asked my husband to leave.
God had very important work to do and we were getting in His way. Only God knew we needed to be apart and alone so we could rely fully on Him. We both did just that.
As a result, Patrick and I rededicated our lives to Christ. We each committed our lives to God on the same day, within hours. Neither of us knew it until a few days later when we agreed to meet to talk. I am amazed by God’s handiwork in our marriage! I give Him all the glory for saving not only each of us but our marriage too.
Out of all of this, I have taken on an entirely new identity. Despite the shortcomings of my earthly father, I am a child of God. I no longer have the need to control others because I no longer need other people to make me happy or feel satisfied. I have turned my life over to the care of my Heavenly Father. I no longer run away from problems that arise, instead I run to the One who saves me.
Jesus is my comforter.
He always has been and always will be.
And when life gets hard, I don’t have to run to anyone or anything but Him anymore.
A Little More About Kimberly:
Obviously, you can’t fight about everything, every day. That gets exhausting for both of you and it wears at the emotional connection/closeness you have. Making it harder for you to enjoy the good times/days you do have together.
After learning this the hard way in my first marriage, there are countless, needless arguments I have prevented in my marriage with Barry. Even if he has criticized me about something that doesn’t matter or said something I interpreted as hurtful, I have learned not to react because I know it will only start a fight.
If Barry says something to me that’s hurtful, I try not to react in that moment, taking the bait to start an argument. But if it’s still bothering me a day or two later and we’re in a good place, I might say, “Hey, the other night you said this to me and that hurt. That’s something I’m self conscious about….”
“There is a time to speak and a time not to speak, and happy is the man whose wife can discern between the two.” Stormie Omartian says in the opening chapter of her book The Power of a Praying Wife. “Anyone who has been married for any length of time realizes that there are things that are better left unsaid. A wife has the ability to hurt her husband more deeply than anyone else can, and he can do the same to her. No matter how much apology the words can not be erased. They can only be forgiven and that is not always easy.”
And when he didn’t, hurt, anger, bitterness, resentment set in. Criticism raged, and in time, I was disgusted by him. Instead of seeing his potential, I only felt contempt when I looked at who I saw. (It’s funny… I never really stopped to ask God what I could do to change the situation, because I knew, clearly, it was all his fault.) Eventually, all of this surmounted into hopelessness – about our marriage, about our future. I couldn’t see any way it would ever get better.
In fact, I kind of learned to let go of expectations all together.
My husband and I chose to open our wedding ceremony with the same quote because it is such a paradigm shift on how to look for a marriage partner. When you begin with this foundational building block in mind – that we are all flawed – then you seek a spouse and maintain your relationship with an unprecedented level of grace. Knowing that no one is going to be perfect, when your partner misses the mark, it’s ok. It does not mean they are defect and you must now walk away, or if already married, live with the miserable knowledge that you chose the “wrong one”.
To put the gravity of this in perspective, here’s the Introduction to “Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts”:
