COMMENTATOR: Lysa TerKeurst was a little girl

when her father drove away in his car and never came back.

That rejection was something she would deal with for many years.

Rejection-- it isn't just a complicated emotion.

It's an utter devastation of what we thought

was real and safe and secure.

COMMENTATOR: In her book, Uninvited, Lysa

shares how she dealt with that devastation,

and offers advice on moving past these setbacks in our lives.

Lysa joins us now.

And we welcome you back to the show.

It's great to have you here.

Thank you.

It's always fun to be with you, Terry.

This book is so powerful.

And I want to talk about rejection,

but I just, first, want to ask you--

you've gone through a recent health

issue that really was out of the blue and life threatening.

Are you OK now?

I am.

I woke up on a Monday morning at 5:00 AM,

had been feeling just fine.

But then on this Monday morning, I was in excruciating pain.

And what we didn't know then, but, of course, we now know--

and it took them five days to figure it out--

but the right side of my colon had ripped away from

the abdominal wall, flipped over to the left side,

wrapped around, cutting off the blood flow--

Good grief.

And by the time they figured out what was going on,

they had to rush me into emergency surgery.

So I look like I've been bitten by a shark.

It's like this big vertical scar right here.

You need to have zipper marks tattooed on that.

Yeah, I could make up all kinds of fabulous stories.

But my daughter said, but, mom, you're not

wearing bikinis right now anyway,

so nobody's going to see.

That's right.

I'm with you on that one.

So, but I'm fine now.

No lasting changes.

Well, praise God for that.

Yeah, so huge praise.

But I did just hear-- over the weekend,

I posted just a little bit about it on social media--

and there was a lady that came up to one of my staff members,

and said, my mom just went into the hospital.

She showed the doctors your Instagram post and said,

I think I have what she has.

It wound up that she had exactly what I had,

and because the doctors could act quickly, it saved her life.

So, you know, it's just amazing how

God can take things that are really hard and awful

and turn them around.

It's also a picture, I think, of how you can just

be cruising along wonderfully in life,

and out of the blue, bam-- what you write about in your book

though is really that things can happen to you that you can kind

of tuck away, hide, harbor, and at just

the right moment, later in your life,

can do the same thing-- kind of kick your feet out

from under you.

You really opened up about some painful childhood memories

in the book.

What made you decide to do that?

Well, I decided that it was time

for the Lord to really address the source of my pain.

I think sometimes-- just like when I was in the hospital

and I had physical pain-- I kept begging God,

take away the pain, take away the pain.

Had he taken away the pain, I would have gone home

and died, because something was really, really wrong

that needed to be fixed.

More than numbing the pain, something inside of me

needed to be fixed.

And so the pain, because I had pain,

it forced me to stay in the hospital.

It forced me to allow the doctors to cut me open, fix me.

And now I can continue living.

Emotional pain is very similar to that.

Sometimes we beg God, take away these feelings

that I'm having, but the feelings

are indicators that there's something going on.

And I was having emotional pain, but I just

kept-- I just kept thinking, if I'm busy enough,

if I'm successful enough, or it'll just fix itself.

Well, it's not fun to go in and evaluate all of that.

It's not fun.

My staff was like, let's don't write another book

like this one, because this has been painful.

But here's the great side.

On the other side of this, this is what I've learned.

A deep profound sense of God's love.

And even more important than understanding God's love,

I finally understand that God's love is not based on me.

It's simply placed on me.

And it's so hard to accept.

It is.

Oh my goodness.

Everything else in life is performance.

It is.

To just receive that God loves us, just loves us.

We don't have to do anything.

I mean, that's hard for us to accept, don't you think?

It is.

But I believe that, while it's not based on us,

God's love is placed on us.

And is the place from which we should live.

Yeah.

Like it's not the success of our life or the lack

or the abundance of our life, but it's that profound knowing,

God loves me.

And then I can walk into every day carrying that sense of I

am loved.

And then, when you come to the other side of that,

it's a little bit about like the report

that the woman took to her doctor.

Now you get to take that brokenness made whole,

and turn around, and pass the truth of that

off to other people.

And it's like multiplying scenario,

where people just keep being redeemed and set free.

Well, that's my hope really, because while the book,

Uninvited, is about rejection, that's just the starting place.

Where I really want to get people to

is from that can spring this amazing revelation of God.

I've learned that from desperation often times

we'll get our greatest revelations.

And that's what happened to me when I was writing Uninvited.

Terry, I wrote Uninvited because I thought,

OK, I'm going to deal with these rejections,

not really dealing with any rejections in my current life,

but it's going to be just fine.

But I'm telling you, God, through the writing and editing

of this book, ministered to me so deeply.

It gave me a different sense of appreciation

for this message, because I realized

I needed it most of all.

This all started with your dad walking away

when you were a child.

And you know lots of times when something happens

in our childhood, we go through many years,

and we come to a place where we think, I've dealt with that.

Right.

Tell me about the Garden of Gethsemane.

Many, many years later, here you are

in Israel, and in that garden, of all places, what happened?

Well, I had read about the Garden of Gethsemane

in the Bible.

And I pictured it very differently

than what it actually looked like.

It literally is just a series of olive trees.

And so as I was standing there in the Garden of Gethsemane,

thinking about this is where Jesus

was in his moment, where the Bible says-- describes

Jesus in that moment of being in the garden,

that when he was praying, realizing,

I'm about to go to the cross and fulfill the destiny that God

set forth for me.

I thought to myself, Jesus was there

when God created this scene.

And so, and we know that from John, Chapter One.

So Jesus was there.

Why the olive tree?

So I did a little research.

Like, why would Jesus pick the olive tree

to be the thing that he would sit in the shade of when

he was desperate?

My soul is overwhelmed to the point of sorrowful death,

is what Jesus was saying.

Why the olive tree?

Well, I did a little research, and there's fascinating facts

about the olive tree.

The olive tree- it takes both the east winds

and the west winds blowing on the olive tree for it

to produce fruit.

The harsh winds of the East represent,

I think in our life, the devastating times,

the hard times.

Yeah.

And then there's the refreshing winds of the West.

But that tree will not produce fruit if it only

has the refreshing winds.

It takes the hard times and good times

in order to produce fruit.

And I believe we're the same way.

And as I sat there-- and there were other truths

about the olive tree that I learned-- I was so profoundly

impacted realizing that I'm standing on this ground

where Jesus stood, in this same scene.

And it was in that moment I wanted my tears to become part

of that ground, because I had to just

let the realities envelope me.

And it was in that moment I realized,

I'm not the child of a broken parent.

I'm a child of the Almighty God.

The yes-- the yes to the healing.

The yes to the cross is what took place in Gethsemane.

Absolutely.

The yes to your healing is part of what happened in you.

Boy, it's a powerful book.

We have just skimmed the surface.

It's like all of Lysa's books.

It's a must read.

It's called Uninvited.

And it's available wherever books are sold.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you, Terry.

Just a tip of something you want to get a hold of.

Bless you.

Thank you.