The Daughter of An Angry Father

God Hears Her Podcast 

Episode 192 – The Daughter of an Angry Father with Lisa-Jo Baker 

Eryn Adkins & Vivian Mabuni with Lisa-Jo Baker 

[Music] 

Lisa-Jo: This is the thing about the Lord: He will take you slowly, step by step, and here’s the thing, He will do the work: He will initiate, He will invite, He will orchestrate. It will be in His timing. I am not telling you you need to somehow have some big come-to-Jesus moment with your dad. That is the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m simply saying let the Lord lead you. 

[Music] 

Elisa: You are listening to God Hears Her, a podcast for women, where we explore this stunning truth that God hears you. Join our community of encouraging one another and learning to lean on God through Scripture, story, and conversation at godhearsher.org, God hears her. Seek and she will find. 

Eryn: This Father’s Day we want to speak to the women that may have had a hard or traumatic relationship with their dad. We’re talking to Lisa-Jo Baker about her father’s emotionally abusive habits and angry outbursts. Lisa-Jo will share the restorative healing journey they’ve experienced in recent years, but for those who have experienced the same thing, or struggle with your dad, or don’t have a relationship with your earthly father, we see you. We love you, and this Father’s Day you are not alone.  

Vivian: Welcome to God Hears Her. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this conversation. It’s been long in coming, but it’s going to be so worthwhile. Before we jump in, I want to introduce to you our guest. She is a bestselling author, she has a law degree and practiced law in her former life, but currently is an acquisitions editor for Harper Collins. She’s written several books, but the book that I am most familiar with, which has been critically acclaimed, is a memoir called It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping. I honestly have not recommended a book more than this author’s book in a long time. I mean, it’s just been one of those, it’s kind of like when you find a really great restaurant and you just have to tell everyone about it, that’s how I felt about our author’s book. So, she’s the co-host of Out of the Ordinary podcast, originally from South Africa, so, you’re going to hear her accent here, but we have the privilege of interviewing the incredible Lisa-Jo Baker, and so welcome to God Hears Her, Lisa-Jo, thank you for being on our show. 

Eryn: Yes. 

Lisa-Jo: Oh, you guys, I feel so honored. Talk about long time coming, Vivian, I feel like we’ve been having this conversation over voice notes for months. I’m so excited to have it with you in studio. 

Vivian: Oh gosh, it’s great. 

Eryn: Lisa-Jo, would you share with us, like, where are you coming from, where do you live now? 

Lisa-Jo: Ah, origin stories, anyone who’s fans of superheroes, these are the best, right? 

Eryn: Yep. 

Lisa-Jo: Currently I live just outside of Baltimore, in between Baltimore and Washington, DC. We have three… I was going to say teenagers, but one of them is about to turn twenty, so, how did that happen to me…? We’re in that sweet season of big kids, which honestly I wish more people would say how great it is because we are loving it. 

Eryn: That’s awesome. So maybe peel back, where were you when you were seven or ten years old?  

Lisa-Jo: Yeah, I was born in Zululand in South Africa, which is one of the… the African homelands. I lived there until I was three. When I was around three or four we actually moved to the States for a few years and lived in Philadelphia where my dad was getting his degree in theology, a seminary degree. And then… when I was around seven, we moved back to South Africa.  

Vivian: Hmm. You started your book describing your relationship with your son and this blowout fight that you had with him and just this realization that an un… unhealthy relating was taking place, and I would love for you to kind of just bring us to that place and maybe describe what was happening and what was happening inside you. 

Lisa-Jo: Yeah, I mean, we inherit things and then we pass them on if we don’t deal with it. I think often about when you go to the doctor’s office and they ask you to fill out that long form of, like, physical conditions that you may or may not have inherited from either side of your family, and it’s because we know, like, those are real, like, they impact our health today and what I came to learn as I became a parent is that there are things I had inherited emotionally and spiritually from my family line that I then, on this particular day, watched myself pass on to my son. So, we had just moved into a new house in Maryland, we’re sitting at the dining room table, I can, like, vividly picture the scene, like, the dark chocolate of the dining room table. My middle son was about ten at the time, and he just as that kid who could… he’s been pushing hard against me since the day he was born. Like, he came into the world hard and it has not stopped. 

Vivian: Yup. 

Eryn: Yup. 

Lisa-Jo: And he was just pushing all my buttons, and it was… it’s kind of like a reverse hostage situation, you know, as a parent where you just want to escape from your children so badly, but you can’t, they’re holding you hostage… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … and I just, I could, like, feel all of my reasonableness just slip through my fingers, and I remember at the time finally just giving into that rage, that… there’s like a boiling up and out of your body, like a kettle that’s about to explode and just letting rip I… I screamed so hard and so long that day that my vocal cords hurt for, like, days afterwards. And it really felt like an out of body experience. Like, as I was screaming at him, it was like watching a mirror reflection of my own childhood. Like his terror, how small he made himself, how afraid he looked, how he was trying not to cry cause he didn’t know if that would upset me more. And, like, ice cold in my veins, like this boiling temperature and then this ice cold realization of oh, I am my father. Like, right now, I am doing what happened to me my whole childhood, and then this terrible moment where you can choose to stop or to keep screaming and I just kept going. And that moment was so pivotal for me, that I realized we’re at a crossroads. Like, I’m going to have to choose who am I going to be as a parent? Like, am I going to pass this on…?  

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … Like, are we going to continue this into the next generation or is something going to change?  

Eryn: First off, I just want to thank you for your vulnerability and… and sharing how raw of an emotion you had in that moment, and to the detail that your throat was hoarse. I think a lot of us that could be listening right now could have shame to the response of that, to not want to share with anybody, and so, for you to just share that I would imagine… gives a little bit of freedom to walk into the next step, which is facing it, and understanding why you felt that way. At what point did you start to recognize that that was in your dad? 

Lisa-Jo: Yeah. First, I just want to say it’s so important to recognize that, like, our parents are neither all hero or all villain, right? Like, they’re human people… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … like us, so, they’re a mix of things. So, my dad was always… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … this incredibly larger than life hero of my childhood, just in a fascinating man. Like, he got his degree in medicine, he studied under Dr. Chris Barnard, who did the first open heart surgery in the world. Like, my dad was one of his residents. He moved to Zululand and worked in a remote, rural mission hospital as the… one of the only doctors there. He’s always been the guy who just sort of… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … charges forward with excitement, and a desire to serve, and a passion for the Lord. But also… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … he grew out of a family where I talk a lot about how when we grow up in families, when you’re learning the language English, you’re not conscious that you’re learning it. You’re a native speaker, right? You don’t think to yourself, I am learning English. And if you learn it in the deep south, you don’t realize you have a deep southern accent compared to if you… you learn it here in the northeast. Or if you’re living overseas learning it in South Africa like I was and you have a strong South African accent, which I recognize I do not have anymore, but you’re not cognizant of learning a language. In my experience, the habits we pick up, the patterns we pick up from our families of origin are like a language that you are learning subconsciously all of the time. And one of the languages that was fluently spoken in our house was violence. So, it wasn’t something that I would’ve even thought as strange at the time. I think it took me well into my parenting years to even recognize that, like, losing your temper was not a normal response to being frustrated. Like, not just losing your temper, losing your temper and screaming and punching a wall, like, these were all baseline for me, like, normal experiences. They were scary, I didn’t like them, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to say this isn’t normal, or to expect something different from another family. So, for me it was a baseline language I spoke from a very early age, and I realized in that moment with my son, oh, I am teaching my kid the language of violence. So, I had absorbed it subconsciously, and I was teaching it just as subconsciously. We can only change the patterns once we recognize them, and for me it was that moment. It was like, oh, I see a pattern. I have to choose, am I going to teach him this language or not?  

Vivian: Wow. Overall, I mean, how would you describe your relationship with your father? Did you have a time when you just wanted to shut him out of your life or was there just a longing to have a closeness that was unsustainable? Like, what… how would you describe what it was like?  

Lisa-Jo: I think it’s both and for all of us, right? Like, this is tension, of course you want to be close to your father, like, you want him to love you, and you want to be seen and understood. But if we have unhealthy patterns in our childhood, there’s also this sense of resistance, like, how do I make space? How do I breathe? How do I feel safe? And at twenty years old, when I was sort of at this apex of recognizing it’s scary for me to interact with my dad; he’s really great, but at the same time, this is really stressful. The most polite way that my subconscious could think of to run away from home was to go to college in another country. And at the time I would’ve told you it’s just fun. It’s an adventure. Like, I’m going to America… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … but, like, twenty something years later, I can tell you yes and also, like, I was like how far away can I go? Like, let me put an ocean between you and me and we will be safer that way. I would never have described it that way at the time. I missed him terribly when I was gone, and it was also very stressful to be home for the vacations cause it felt constantly, I describe myself as feeling a bit like a teenage munitions expert. Like my job was to kind of walk on the road and see where there were landmines planted before one went off, cause you just never knew, like, what would set him off. So, it was… it was a constant state of stress in our household because you just never knew. So… one moment, it’s this exciting, passionate father who’s taking you horse riding and you’re out in the farm and it’s so exciting. You’re on an adventure. And the next moment that same dad is literally punching his horse. Like it was like, what is happening right now? So, it was the tension between those two people, and you never knew which one was going to show up. So, in my twenties, I tried to put as much distance between us as possible, and I would never even then have verbalized why. I would’ve said to you, I’m excited to study overseas and it’s… it is an adventure. And it was all of those things, and at the same time, it was me trying to create space to catch my breath and my mom passed away when I was young, so there wasn’t anybody there to help be a bridge between my dad and I. And so I… I ran. I just ran away as… as fast and as far as I could and… and left my brothers behind. 

Eryn: Would you say that that experience with your son was the first time you addressed that you maybe had started running away when… in your twenties, or when did that moment come of awareness?  

Lisa-Jo: So, with my son was the first time there was an awareness that I had inherited my father’s temper, but there were two moments after that. The first was that in our marriage it was creating some conflict too. And so, after twenty years of marriage, we were in marriage therapy and I was describing to the therapist some of my stories from my childhood. And I would say things like, but I mean, you know, everybody has bad memories or parents get mad or lose their temper. It’s just normal. And I would say that all the time, like it wasn’t a big deal. And then she, my therapist, said this to me, and it was the first time I’d ever heard it, she said, that’s not normal. What you’re describing isn’t normal. We call that abuse. And I said, no, what? Like, no, my dad never hit me like he was passionate, and she was like, he was verbally abusive, and I said, no. And so, it was the very first time somebody else had reframed my childhood as having some form of dysfunction and it was a very shocking experience. The second thing that happened is I was invited by… MOPs, the Mothers of Preschoolers, for years, I had spoke at their big convention on the topic of anger as a mom and how to deal with it. I had done it for a long time, I had shared a lot about my own struggles with anger, I had talked a lot about what I did to help handle it, how I was learning not to lose my temper, but I never… I only spoke about me. Like, it was like from me down generationally. And I remember they invited me… 

Eryn: Yeah, yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … to come and speak again this time, like, from the main stage, do a big keynote to like four thousand women on the topic of anger. And I’ll never forget, I’m standing… this was in 2019, I remember exactly where I was, 2019, I’m standing in the bathroom and I’m brushing my teeth and I’m thinking about this invitation and I’m thinking sort of out loud to myself, like, I don’t know, like there’s really nothing more for me to say on this topic. I don’t know how much more I can talk about, like, being an angry mom, and like, I had talked about it so much that I kid you not, I’ve been at soccer matches and I’ll sometimes meet people out in public who recognize me, and I had this mom come up to me at a soccer match, something you really want to happen in public, and she kind of like grabbed my arm, we’re around all these people… 

Eryn: Right. 

Lisa-Jo:… and she’s like, oh my gosh. It’s you, you’re the angry mom. And I’m just like, oh no, that’s who I am. So, I was… I had told the story a lot is what I’m saying. And as I was standing there, I’m brushing my teeth, and a voice drops into my consciousness that is… the idea is so outside of myself that all I can say is the thought had to come from the Holy Spirit because it… it felt so completely foreign to something I would ever think, and the thought that dropped into my head was, you should speak about what it was like to be the child of an angry parent. And it was so shocking to me cause I’ve never described myself that way. I wouldn’t identify that way. I actually took the toothbrush out of my mouth, and I had, like, all this foaming toothpaste and, like, spoke out loud and was just, like, oh, never. I will never, ever talk about that. And I, like, felt that I was going to throw up, like, I had a visceral reaction because what I realized in that moment was… 

Elisa: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … Oh, if I talk about this, I have to talk to my dad about this. And he and I had never had that conversation… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … Like, he knew I talk and wrote about being an angry parent myself, but if I was going to get on stage and talk about being the child of an angry parent, A, I would have to acknowledge that that’s what I was, and B, I would have to talk to my dad about how I was going to do that, which means I would have to tell him I thought he was an angry parent, and I just… I thought I was going to throw up… 

Eryn: Right, right.  

Lisa-Jo: I couldn’t even imagine having those conversations.  

Vivian: Well, so I would love to kind of explore some of that because I’m sure there are people listening that don’t have the same experience, but there was a work… 

Lisa-Jo: Right. 

Vivian: … that God was doing in your own heart, and I would love for you to share what was happening for you personally. And then this conversation that you needed to have with your father… 

Lisa-Jo: Yeah. 

Vivian: … and how he responded and what’s come of that.  

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: I think I want to just say to the listener right now who’s listening and, like, kind of has that feeling in their stomach that I had, like, the… the… even the idea of having some kind of conversation with your dad, like, you feel nauseous and stressed out, and yet you know that there are things that have been difficult and it’s like you don’t even… I used to describe it, it’s almost like there’s a room in your house that’s like the junk closet that you just shove things in emotionally and, like, close the door, but nobody is supposed to ever open that cupboard… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … cause everything will come crashing down… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … The thing about the Lord I want to encourage you about is He is not Marie Kondo. He’s not like, hey, you need to, in one day, open up that closet and take out everything. That is not how He works at all. He is so stealth. He’s what I call, like, a loving stealth agent, because He is going to just ask you for one tiny, tiny thing. And this is how it started with me. I felt like, in that moment in the bathroom, all He was saying to me is, hey, can you just acknowledge the closet exists? That’s it. And, like, that was so overwhelming I thought I was going to die. Like I… I had, like, visceral… like I thought I was going to vomit I was so stressed. But it was the first time, and I, at the time, was… you guys, I was, like, in my forties the first time I made eye contact and I was like, yeah, there is a closet that I never, ever open that has everything to do with me and my dad in, and I never look at it. And that’s it. The Holy Spirit was like, you did it! You acknowledged the closet! 

Eryn: Right, right. 

Lisa-Jo: That was it for a week, right? All I did was, like, acknowledge… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … that the closet existed and then I was like, oh, I’m not dying. I’m okay. Like, I acknowledged it. And then I felt like, this is the thing about the Lord: He will take you slowly, step by step, and here’s the thing, He will do the work: He will initiate, He will invite, He will orchestrate. It will be in His timing… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … I am not telling you you need to somehow have some big come-to-Jesus moment with your dad. That is the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m simply saying let the Lord lead you. And for me that week passed and I started to think, like, okay, maybe that is something I should talk about. And it was that slow you guys. So, then I spent, like, a week, thinking what would I say, what would I talk… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … Then I finally got, like, three or four weeks later, like, okay, well if I’m going to talk about this, cause suddenly I had all these thoughts of things I could say, I will have to talk to my dad first. Like, I have to get his permission before I’m going to do this, and I will back up and say this. At that time, he and I had a pretty healthy relationship. We had never talked about my childhood or how I felt about him, but he had been on his own healing journey. The Lord had done a lot with him, so he was in a healthy place, and I think that’s what the Lord knew, like timing wise, it was safe to have these conversations. I will say though, I didn’t even have the courage to call him. I left him a voice message about how I had been invited to speak on the stage about being the child of an angry parent. Would that be okay with him? Then I thought I was going to die, like, I was going to vomit until I heard back from him. It was so stressful. But, and this is my point about the Lord’s timing, He knew where dad was at. He knew where I was at… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … And when the message came back, you guys, it was so beautiful that I saved it and actually played it as part of my talk on the stage, cause he said, I don’t know that there’s anything in my life worth sharing, but if there’s something that will help somebody else see what God can do, you have my permission to share. Like, whatever it is. And… and that was the beginning of… of Jesus so sneakily getting me to write this book… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … cause I thought the hard thing was giving that talk… 

Eryn: Yeah, yeah. [chuckling] 

Lisa-Jo: … It was just, like, the door He cracked open, and He was like, oh, we’ve opened the door in the closet, all right... 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … and then five years passed. Like, it took… 

Vivian: Wow. 

Lisa-Jo: … five years. That’s how slowly He moved in each conversation I had with my dad, with each thought that became this book, each of the stories we unpacked, He is glacial in His timing with such tenderness and such love. And so, my encouragement to the listener is that you don’t have to be afraid. And my hope with the book is that this is my closet. Like, I was willing to look at it, and my hope is, like, by looking at my closet and seeing what happened when we started to unpack it, that the Holy Spirit will just… will just say to you, okay, are you ready to look at your closet? And then you can trust Him with, like, what comes next. 

Eryn: Yeah, so beautiful. 

Vivian: Yeah. Now I’ve heard often that people describe how our relationship with our earthly father can influence our relationship with our Heavenly Father. Do you see that in your own relationship with the Lord? Similar, different… how has that informed your process even? 

Lisa-Jo: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I grew up thinking that it was very easy to make God angry. That God would be angry at you easily. Like, and I also grew up inside a church tradition that believed that. So, there was a lot of this message… God is really angry at you. You have to earn His favor. You’re going to be in trouble. You’re constantly going to be in trouble was kind of the narrative of my childhood with both my dad and my idea of God. Like, somehow you can offend Him or make Him mad really easily, and then you have to earn your way back. Like, you have to then be really good. So, in my household, you have to be really quiet, really polite, really love whatever dad loves, passionate about whatever he’s passionate about. Like, you have to show, like, I’m for you, and… and then you can hope that he will love you back. But also, like, my dad was a huge believer in me, in my dreams, and anything I set out to accomplish. So, I have that too, right? Like, that God has your back and He’s there for you. But it… it is that weird thing where the truth of who He is gets braided together with the truth of who your earthly father is, and then sort of the work of our adult lives is separating out, like, what is real and what isn’t. And I think that’s what God does when He lets us look at the closet that we’ve slammed closed, and He gently, in His incredible patience and love, is like, let’s start to separate out here. But the truth of it is when that happens in your life is dependent on so many things. Like, in the early years of motherhood, I was just surviving being a mom, you know? 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Vivian: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … Like, I worked full time, I was exhausted. Like, I didn’t have capacity to figure out. Like. my childhood baggage. I think… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … that there are certain key milestones that happen in a life, and then the Holy Spirit is quick to, like, come in alongside those moments. And the truth of it is I wish I could give you a checklist. I wish I could be like, here’s the ten-step plan I used… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … but nobody has three months to just check out of life and, like, fix themselves… 

Eryn: Right. 

Lisa-Jo: … That’s not how it works. Like, it’s in between defrosting the chicken and doing the carpool… 

Vivian: That’s right. 

Lisa-Jo: … that you’re, like, thinking, and working, and praying through. I think as a writer it’s really special because God is… you’re actually invited to come out of your everyday life, and carve out time, and write it down, and I think that’s the gift I hope the book is to people who maybe aren’t writers who can say, all right, but can you carve out like an hour to come sit with this story and let it connect with your story? Because I really believe, I mean, I have to because I told God all the time why are you making me do this? Like, I don’t want to, like, this is terrible. And I really feel like the Holy Spirit said to me, Lisa-Jo, if you will come and unpack your closet in public, I, God, can do it gently and in private with the people who read. And He, I just want the listener to know, like, He loves you so much that He asked me to write this story because He actually wants to meet you in your story, and I hope that this might be one of the doors He uses.  

Eryn: Gosh. That’s so beautiful. Lisa, you know, how did you develop compassion towards your father? 

Lisa-Jo: Ooh, that’s good. Yeah, I was angry for a very long time, and I think I… 

Eryn: Yeah, okay. 

Lisa-Jo: … didn’t even realize I was angry because in my house I wasn’t… I didn’t have permission to be angry toward my dad… 

Eryn: Right. 

Lisa-Jo: … And so, my anger came out in all other ways. My husband is the exact opposite of my dad, and it’s so interesting cause my dad’s name is Peter and my husband’s name is Peter as well. And my name is Lisa-Jo, and my mom’s name was Jo. It’s so weird. But my Peter is the exact opposite of my dad in every possible way: gentle, quiet, soft, slow to be angry. But, like, my anger would come out toward Pete or, you know, in this scene, with my own children. And so, I realized, gosh, I’m so angry. Like, and then I would be like, where’s this anger coming from? Like, I don’t understand. And I remember when I was talking to my dad about this book, and there were so many conversations over the years, and you should know my dad has read every word of this book before it came out. He read the manuscript… 

Eryn: That’s cool. 

Lisa-Jo: … He approved it. But before it came out, one of the things my dad said to me is, I’m afraid the book is going to put me in a box and label me. That was actually his fear, and I was able to say to him, actually, writing the book has been what took you out of the box. And I used that image… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … at the end of the book. I… I felt like my dad lived in a box in the back shelf of my mind, and I just shoved it back there and tried to ignore that it existed. But as he and I worked through so much of my childhood and his parenting, it was like taking the box down, taking the things out, deconstructing the box and recycling it. But I will tell you this, the early chapters, the way the book works is it’s… it tells my story. So, there… you kind of come with me through childhood, but it flashes back and tells parts of my dad’s story that are in parallel with mine, like, how he was raised, his experiences. When I went back and I was writing these sections of the book, even though I had worked through a lot with my dad, I was so angry, like, reliving… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … these stories, rewriting them, I felt, like, so full of rage, and anger, and sort of justified anger… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … but part of the power of sitting in those memories, and so, for a writer, we write them down, but everybody has to do that. Like, the… it’s the opening the closet door, looking at the memories… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … acknowledging they happened. Part of the process of that is when you invite the Holy Spirit into it with you He does begin sort of a sacred process of, I… I describe it this way, of bearing witness to what happened, and it’s like having somebody in the room with you saying, that shouldn’t have happened, that was wrong. That was terrible. A lot of the reasons I think we slam these memories and hide them in a closet is we’re worried, at least I was, what if, like, your worst thing isn’t that my dad would get mad, it’s that he would say it didn’t happen or that it wasn’t a big deal, or that it was your fault that it happened. But when we sit first with the Holy Spirit, way before we talk to our parents, when the Holy Spirit is in those memories with us, He is able to tell you, ten-year-old you, that should never have happened to you. That is so terrible. That is not how our Father behaves. And He’s able to give you all these passages from Scripture that show, this is how I love you. This is how our Father behaves. And so, for me… 

Eryn: Yeah, yeah. 

Lisa-Jo: … it was this process of moving from really angry forward. And the power of believing in the kind of God we do, who is not constrained by time, is that God in fact is able to move in and out of your timeline. So, here’s what I’m trying to say: ten-year-old me had suffered a terrible wound that, like, fifty-year-old me was still, like, bleeding from. But when I bring that to the Holy Spirit, to Jesus, when I sit there and I share with Him what happened, it is as if He time travels back to that age, to that exact moment inside the room with me, and when He bears witness, when He says it shouldn’t have happened, when He says to you, like, that you can give Me all that pain, Lisa-Jo, like, I can take it, there is a transaction that is actually happening in my past that heals me in my present, [music] and that has been the experience throughout this journey. For me, it… it bore a book, but everybody can go through that process of bringing those times in our life to the Lord at a time when you feel safe, when He invites it, when it’s, you know, in your timeline of your day and your life where it’s just that moment where He meets you in that memory and heals it. And I think it’s why Eryn, today, I… I feel all this compassion because I truly feel, like, I stopped bleeding, like, in the past, and I’m, like, healed here in the present… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Vivian: Yes. 

Lisa-Jo: … thanks to our time traveling God. 

Vivian: God is so good in how He steps into our stories. If you’re feeling heavy this Father’s Day, please know that we love you and God is with you. Like Lisa-Jo, we hope you can explore the healing you need with the Lord.  

Eryn: Yes, Vivian. This Father’s Day, we can all reflect on the relationship with our dads and how that impacts us now, good or bad.  

Vivian: Exactly, Eryn. Well, friends, we would love to hear from you. After listening to an episode of God Hears Her, take a moment to share what stood out to you. What did you learn? How did it speak to your heart, or how has it impacted your journey? Is there something you wish we had explored further or a question you wish we had asked? Maybe there’s a topic you’re hoping we’ll dive into in a future episode or a guest that we will invite to join us. Your reflections, questions and insights help us to grow together as a community of women seeking God’s presence in every part of our lives. You can find the link to share all of that with us in our show notes. Thank you for sharing your voice and your heart with us.  

Eryn: Before we go, we are so excited to let you know that now we have a God Hears Her YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to watch the video version of the podcast. You can find the link in our show notes where there will also be a link for Lisa-Jo’s book It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping. You can find that and more godhearsher.org. That’s godhearsher.org.  

Vivian: Thank you for joining us and don’t forget God hears you, He sees you, and He loves you because you are His.  

[Music] 

Eryn: Today’s episode was engineered by Anne Stevens and produced by Jade Gustman and Mary Jo Clark. We also want to thank Nichole and Melissa for all their help and support. Thanks everyone. 

Vivian: Our Daily Bread Ministries is a donor-supported, nonprofit ministry dedicated to making the life changing wisdom and stories of the Bible come alive for all people around the world. 

[Music] 

Vivian: God Hears Her is a production of Our Daily Bread Ministries.