8 -Forgiveness & Restoration

There’s nowhere better to start talking about forgiveness than maybe in a place where it is sometimes the hardest to face and that is with the people closest to us. I n this episode, I have a conversation with my mom, Erin Ruddell, and we share our story and what we went through in our relationship when things were really hard in both of our lives and we had to learn what relationship and forgiveness and moving forward with God and one another really looked like. My mom begins by sharing how this season all started, with the death of both of her parents, my grandparents and how that sent her, especially into a tailspin. It was a hard time of losing both parents seven months apart all the while my brother and I got married and started our families, my sister graduated from high school, my youngest brother struggled to get through high school and my dad retired, talk about transition. As she struggled with her own dark season of loss, I became a mother and was hit with postpartum but didn’t know I had. This mix of feelings and pain was a set up for disaster. As I walked through my postpartum the Lord began to show me the why’s behind my pain. I wanted my mom to be able to fix it for me like parents do, but this was one area that it had to get ugly with just me and the Lord, so He could show me who my true Savior was, and it wasn’t my mom. She also shares that the Lord showed her that He needed to do this with just He and I and that she was to let go, but the more she let go, the more it hurt me and so, even though God had good plans the pain continued on for years. I resented my mother because I had so many expectations of what I thought a mother should do, should be, should act like with her daughter who just had her first baby and because she wasn’t doing any of those things, I decided to blame all the pain I was experiencing on her. She was in her own version of trying to escape pain, all ways that seemed to hurt me even more and this resulted in fights and cold shoulders for years to come. I held onto my unforgiveness for my mom because I was convinced that she owed me for the pain I felt she caused. In the meantime, my harshness with her continued to hurt her and she struggled with her own battle of forgiveness with me. We would fight and cry and pray and then it would all stay the same. What was God doing? A much deeper inner work. Digging up old roots, exposing lies and bad beliefs is not a one-time healing process. For both of us, it took many months and years of us both trying to obey the Lord, deal with our own relationship with Him and our own brokenness as God began to heal us and set us free. SHOW NOTES: https://www.ashleymorganjackson.com/podcast/2019/10/14/podcast-ep8-forgiveness-amp-restoration-a-conversation-with-my-mom-erin-ruddell Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/called-to-build/donations