Proverbs 31 Ministries President and best-selling author Lysa Terkeurst shares her personal experience with rejection and offers strategies to overcome.
Read Transcript
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.