(dis)Graced: How God Redeems and Restores the Broken: Teresa Whiting

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(dis)Graced: How God Redeems and Restores the Broken

Guest:Teresa Whiting

From the series:Overcoming Shame(Day 1 of 2)

Air date:October 10, 2024

Teresa: She left that well. She ran into town telling everybody, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.” They knew all she ever did. They were probably talking about all she ever did, and yet she’s done. The shame is gone.

Shelby: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com.

Ann: This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave: So I was thinking about what I would believe is the bravest moment of your life publicly.

Ann: Wait, what?

Dave: And you have no idea.

Ann: No, I didn’t even know we were going to start here.

Dave: Well, I didn’t put it in the notes because I wanted to surprise you.

Ann: Okay. What do you think it is?

Dave: I would say it’s when you told our church about your sexual abuse.

Ann: Yeah, because there weren’t many people talking about it back then.

Dave: This would’ve been 1990s, early 90s.

Ann: Yeah, early 90s and I was petrified.

Dave: Tell everybody what the woman came up and said to you afterwards.

Ann: It was great because there were some people that lined up and wanted to talk about it and never told anyone. But I thought, “Oh, okay, Lord, that’s good.” But then I got a letter from a woman, a little note. She handed it to me. It was a woman I knew and respected in our church, and the note said, “You glorified Satan today.” And it took my breath away. What? And I was—

Dave: Oh, it crushed you.

Ann: —absolutely devastated. I went home, I cried, and then I stayed in my house for a couple days and I was hiding because I felt such shame because when you share a story of your past that’s ugly and broken, but God has healed. I talked about that, but God has done, the grace that He’s given, but it still rocked me, and it made me think, “I don’t know if I should ever share that again.” So today’s going to be a good day.

Dave: Yeah. We’ve got Teresa Whiting in the studio, and you can hear her going “Mmhmm,” because Teresa, welcome to FamilyLife. You’ve sort of got a little bit of a similar story, right?

Teresa: I do.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, we’re going to talk about your book, which I love this title (dis)Graced—

Ann: But the dis—

Dave: —dis is crossed out.

Ann: And so it’s called Graced.

Teresa: Yes.

Dave: How God Redeems and Restores the Broken.

Ann: And it’s a Bible study.

Teresa: It is.

Ann: Yeah. I like that.

Dave: Six sort of scandalous women in the line of Christ, pretty interesting.

Teresa: Yes.

Ann: Well, they have kind of broken pasts too.

Teresa: They do. They do.

Ann: Why these women?

Teresa: Because they resonate. They resonate with me.

Ann: Me too.

Teresa: We all come to scripture with our own lens. And for people like you and me who have a sexually broken past, you read scripture, and you think, at least for me, I always thought the Bible was full of all these holy, perfect people. And then as I read and I got to know these women, I was like, “Oh, wow, this one had this happen. This one was raped. This one was abused.” And you see it over and over and over and not just these little hidden stories that are in the background somewhere. These are stories that God is shining a spotlight on women that God called into His family, that Jesus went out of His way to meet and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute. These women are not like discardable.” And it just, their lives made an impact on my life. And so that’s why I chose them for the study.

Ann: They’re some of my favorite characters in the Bible because it gives you hope. If God can use them, if Jesus sees them even in the New Testament, then it gives me hope that he can use me and my past.

Teresa: Exactly.

Ann: Yeah.

Dave: Tell our listeners what you do. I mean, you write, you podcast, you’re a pastor’s wife, you got multiple twin kids. I don’t know. Tell us.

Teresa: Yeah, so I am married to Greg. We’ve been married for 30 years this year.

Ann: Congrats.

Teresa: He’s been a pastor our whole marriage.

Dave: The whole time.

Teresa: Yep.

Dave: Yeah, we’ve had the same experience. Let me ask you, what’s it like being a pastor’s wife?

Teresa: It’s got its ups and its downs. There’s a lot of blessings and a lot of heartache. It’s real life, and you get to see the beauty of God’s grace in people’s lives, and you get to see the underside of people’s lives and it’s hard. I think I wouldn’t want him to do anything else. I think I do love it, love it.

Dave: How many kids, five kids?

Teresa: Five kids.

Ann: Okay, you have to share this part. Two sets of—

Teresa: Two sets of twins. So I’ll give you the abbreviated story. When Greg and I got married, we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility. And so we really believe God was leading us to adopt. So we adopted a set of twins from Romania. They were two years old, Alex and Isabella. And we had had them for a year and a half. And I got pregnant with my daughter, Brie. And when she was eight months old, I got pregnant with twins, Caleb and Gabrielle. So we went from zero to five in three and a half years. It was insane. And I always tell people I lost so many brain cells, and I never got them back.

Dave: And you have a little bit of history of FamilyLife.

Teresa: Yes. Okay. I had to tell this story because if I tell my salvation story, you’ll hear me say that I went to camp and that’s where I became a Christian. But what’s behind that is my dad’s coworker had asked my dad repeatedly, “Will you come to Bible study? Come to Bible study.” It was a FamilyLife® home group study in his house. And he was inviting my dad to go to church and my dad didn’t want to go. And finally he did. And then my dad went to, I don’t know if it was called Weekend to Remember back then.

Dave: I think it was.

Teresa: This is back in 1985.

Ann: I think it was called FamilyLife marriage conferences.

Teresa: Maybe that’s what it was.

Dave: We went to one in 80.

Teresa: So my dad got saved, and I went to camp with the daughter of this guy who was leading the family life ministry in our church. I was thinking about that the other day. I can almost link the trail back to how I came to Christ was through this coworker of my dad. And then it’s an amazing story.

Ann: I love this coworker’s boldness because I would ask once and then I’d probably be like, “I’m not going to bug him again.” But he kept pursuing him.

Teresa: He did.

Ann: And your dad did it probably like, “I’m going to get this guy off my back.”

Teresa: That’s exactly what he said. He said, “I’m going to go, so you’ll stop asking me.” And then he went and came to Christ, and I went to camp with his daughter, and that’s where I came to Christ and my whole family subsequently came to Christ.

Dave: So your dad came to Christ at a Weekend to Remember?

Teresa: I believe so, yes. Yes. And that changed his entire life. He was in his fifties at that point.

Dave: Was he really?

Teresa: Yeah.

Dave: And so it changed your life.

Teresa: Oh yeah. It’s amazing.

Dave: And I would just say if you’re listening and you’ve never been to a Weekend to Remember, or if you’ve already been to one, or you know someone, sign up right now. Just go to FamilyLife Today and sign up for a Weekend to Remember anywhere in the country you can go. They’re all over the place. They’re a fabulous weekend.

Ann: And I’ll even plug this: we keep hearing from couples that are there, young couples, and it was gifted to them. The FamilyLife conference was gifted to them as a wedding present. And that’s a great idea, isn’t it?

Teresa: Yes. My daughter, her in-laws, every year, they pay for my daughter and son-in-law to go to Weekend to Remember. And they watch the kids because they live close by.

Ann: What a great idea.

Well, let me ask you, as we get into this book, Graced, disgraced marked out, and How God Redeems and Restores the Broken, let me ask you, how did you come about deciding we need a Bible study? I’d love to create something for women to go to.

Dave: We got to hear your story.

Ann: Yeah.

Teresa: So I always love to ask people if you’ve ever seen my big Fat Greek wedding?

Ann: Yes.

Teresa: Okay. That’s basically my life on the big screen, except we were Italian and not Greek. And so I grew up in a big fat Italian family, and I’m the youngest of six kids. So my parents had five kids in six years, and then I came seven years later. So as I was growing up when I was a little kid, I was watching all of my siblings. They were teenagers and they were all experimenting with drugs and sex and alcohol. And my parents were very religious. We were Catholic, but we didn’t know Jesus personally.

So it was a very religious, very strict household. And all of my siblings were rebellious, and I as a young person knew they were going to spend a really long time in purgatory. So I was like, “I’m making a plan for my life. I am going to sin as much as possible as a child and a young person, and then I’m going to get old and become a nun so I can go to heaven someday.”

Ann: This is your plan.

Teresa: That was my life plan as maybe a 6-year-old. I don’t know. I thought it made sense.

Dave: I think a lot of people have that plan.

Teresa: Yeah. I thought it made sense.

Dave: And they’re not six years old.

Teresa: So I’d say I grew up in a relatively normal household, suburban household, but when I was in second grade, I came home from school, and I was in the care of a male teenage relative, and by the end of the day, my innocence had been taken. I remember being terrified. I don’t know what to do with this. I wanted to tell somebody. I didn’t know who to tell, and I thought, “I know, I’m going to go tell my neighbor. She’s a big fifth grader and she’ll know what to do with this.”

I went across the street; right next to her house was some woods, and we sat down. I told her the story and she didn’t really say anything. She was just looking at me. I think back now I’m like, she was 10 years old, and she didn’t say anything. But the next week I got on the school bus and the kids were laughing and pointing and saying all these nasty things because she had told them my secret. And for me, that was the moment—

Ann: —absolute shame,

Teresa: —when I made myself a promise, “I will never tell anyone again.” That was it. I was like, “I’m never telling anyone this again.” And so then that started a six-year cycle of abuse and secrecy and fear and shame, and anger. I became really angry, which I think is just the flip side of fear. It’s just a way to manifest that fear.

I was a little bit of a bully. I remember being in, when I was in fifth grade riding my bike over to a classmates’ house and I was going to beat her up and her parents came out and said, I’m going to call juvie if you don’t get off our property. And so then I eventually turned that anger in on myself, and I just would beat myself up with all the things. You’re not good enough. You’re not smart enough, pretty enough athletic enough, whatever. Whatever it was, never, never enough.

Fast forward about six years, when I was going into eighth grade, my parents came to me and they said, “Do you want to go to camp this summer?” And I was like, “Will there be boys?” Because I had become pretty promiscuous at a very young age. I just had kind of started down this path of like, well, I guess boys just use your body. So that’s what they do, and I like boys, and I like attention. And so they’re like, “Yeah, there’ll be boys.” And so I was like, “I’m going to camp,” and I went, and I had a great week.

The very last night we were in our teepee. We had stayed in this little part of the camp called Teepee Town, and we’re sitting cross-legged in a circle in this teepee and our counselor says, I just want to ask you a question. I want you to write yes or no on this little piece of paper. Have you ever asked Jesus to be your Savior? And I wrote, “No,” and I handed it to her. I leaned over to my friend, and I was like, “What did you write?” She said, “Yes,” and I was like, “Oh.” And literally, last night of camp, I started listening.

I mean, I’ve been there the whole week. I had not heard one word, not one chapel service. The songs were foreign to me. It was all so foreign. But the very last night I started listening and our counselor was saying that we were all sinners. And my life plan, as you know, was sin as much as possible. I knew I was a sinner. Nobody had to tell me that. And she was explaining that Jesus died on the cross. And being Catholic, we had crucifixes in every room. I knew Jesus died on the cross. But that was the first time in my life that I realized that he died for me. I was such a needy, promiscuous, foul mouth little teenager, and I realized the God of the universe wants a relationship with me.

I never told my counselor, but that night I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag and you could see out of the top of the tepee. There was the hole in the top, and I remember looking at the stars and just saying this stumbling prayer of, “Jesus, I want you to take over my life.” And that’s when my whole life changed. I mean, that is my defining moment right there. That’s what defines me is coming to Christ.

I always love to say He rescued me on so many levels. I was on this path of self-destruction, and I felt like He just reached down and rescued me. He gave me courage to stand up to my abuser. I went back and I said, “You are never going to touch me again,” and he didn’t. I mean just all these things that God did so much in my life, and that’s the summer—this is so crazy—three of my brothers and both of my parents got saved that same summer of 1985.

Ann: Come on.

Teresa: It’s just amazing. And then both of my sisters later—

Dave: So your whole family came to Christ eventually.

Teresa: Yes, yes, it’s such an amazing story. And then we started going to a church that really taught the Bible, and I got involved in a youth group. I went to Bible college, and I married a pastor and served in ministry and yet shame just still held its grip on me. It was like still whispering those things of, “If only they knew,” “You still don’t belong,” “You’re still not good enough.” And honestly, it was through these women. It was through studying their stories that I felt like that shame began to loosen its grip on me.

And the reason I wrote the study is because I know, you and I know, that when you look out at a church congregation or anywhere you’re out in public, one in three women have experienced either abuse or—I like to define sexual brokenness as either things that have been done to you or things that have been done by you and the consequences that linger. And that’s pretty much all of us. I mean, there’s just a slim few people that would say, “That’s not my story.”

Ann: Even when I look out too, I think of all the people that sit with shame and never talk about it, never deal with it, don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if you know this, but Dave and I have a team at FamilyLife Today ready to pray for you. It an incredible honor and privilege just to lift your name up to God. So if you need prayer, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Dave: And here’s an easy way to do it. You can text us and we will pray for you. Here’s how you do it. Text “FLT” to 80542, and we will send you an immediate text back to let you know that we’ve connected. And then you can respond to our text with your prayer request. Again, text “FLT” to 80542. And when you receive that immediate text back, respond with your prayer request and we will pray for you. Text “FLT” to 80542.

Well you both have talked about shame, define it. If somebody’s listening and going, “Am I carrying shame?” how would they know?

Teresa: I think part of it is those voices we hear in our head, those things that we tell ourselves: “That we’re not good enough,” “That we don’t measure up.” And it’s that feeling of needing to hide. I think of the garden, I think of immediately the result of the fall was shame. That was the first thing. I mean, they ate the fruit, and they saw that they were naked. A couple verses earlier, it says they were naked and not ashamed. I think that’s so interesting that the last words of Genesis 2, they felt no shame.

And then immediately they ate the fruit and there’s this sense of “We need to hide,” “We need to cover.” Oh, I love this passage where it says—I mean, I don’t love it. It’s horrible, but it says that they hid from the presence of the Lord and that word presence means face. They did not want to be face to face with God anymore. And that’s what shame does. It says, “I don’t want you to see my face. I’m going to keep my face down. I’m going to stay hidden. I’m going to go in the shadows.” I think Genesis 3 is the definition of shame.

Ann: I remember we were in seminary, and I forget who did this day, but it’s the first time somebody walked through this kind of visual prayer. They had said, “I want you to close your eyes and picture Jesus being in front of you.” And so I picture that. I’ve never done that before. I picture that and I couldn’t get close. I was on my face. I had my head on the ground, my face down on the ground.

And then they said, “What do you think Jesus is thinking?” And I remember thinking, “He’s thinking, ‘How could you? Look at what you’ve done.’” Because I didn’t understand the grace of the gospel at that point and His acceptance. And maybe I understood it in my head, biblically, I just couldn’t get it into my heart. I couldn’t face Jesus, face to face, because of my shame. Do you think that’s typical?

Teresa: Oh, so typical. I think so many women in church, out of church, everywhere. Men too, I’m sure.

Ann: Yes.

Teresa: Just have that “How could you” that “I don’t want to be face-to-face,” “I’m not worthy to approach God,” “He wouldn’t want me anyway,” all those things, even believers, I feel like we have this notion of shame that we carry around.

Ann: I think for a listener, as you’re thinking through this, take a second just to review that in your head, what do you think God thinks of you? And when you approach Him, what are your feelings inside? Because that could be a giveaway of what you’re feeling and if you’re still holding onto shame,

Dave: And so what do you do with that? What’s the journey out of that? I mean, yours is how God redeems and restores. Walk us through that journey. I mean, you’re both talking about shame and you’re not shameful anymore. I’m not saying you don’t have thoughts of that, but you’ve been on a journey and there’s somebody listening, going, “I’m resonating with the shame part. I’m not resonating with the restoration part. How do I get there?”

Teresa: Yes. I would say we’re never there. We’re never fully arrived. I’m not at the end of the road like, “Woo, look at me.” No, it’s a journey. It’s still there.

Ann: And He usually heals in pieces. He can heal all at once where you feel like total freedom, but generally, don’t you feel that?

Teresa: Yes, it’s a process. It’s two steps forward, one step back. It’s not a linear path.

I just was speaking at an event, and I titled my talk From Shame to Shining because it’s from Psalm 34:5; “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” That word radiant means to sparkle and to shine like a bubbling brook. I just absolutely love that picture, and it’s when we turn our faces to him. But I use the woman at the well as a story whose life literally was transformed from shame to shining when she met Jesus. And it started with her going to the well in the afternoon, middle of the day, the heat of the sun because she couldn’t go in the morning because she was ashamed. She didn’t belong with all those other women, the perfect ones. That’s when they would go.

So she would go in the middle of the day all by herself, and she encounters Jesus. They start this conversation; they start on common ground, “Give me a drink.” And she’s like, “If you only knew who I was, you would not be asking me for a drink.” And I love it in John 4, I think it’s in the NLT. Jesus says, “If you only knew who I was or who’s asking you for a drink, you would’ve asked me, and I would’ve given you living water.” She’s saying, “Who am I? I’m a woman filled with shame.”

And then He goes even deeper, and He says, “Go call your husband and come here.” It’s like He rips open her deepest wound. He puts a finger on her shame and makes her speak it out loud. She says out loud, “I have no husband.” I can just imagine what happened to her in her posture, in her body, in her heart when she said, “I have no husband.” And then Jesus goes in, he starts telling, yeah, you’ve had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband. And he’s laying out her whole story of shame. And then he offers himself as living water. And she says, “I know the Messiah is coming.” And he says, and that’s who I am.

It makes me think of Hebrews 4 where it says that the word of God is living and powerful and it’s like a two-edged sword, and it pierces to the division of soul and spirit and joints and marrow. And it’s like Jesus takes his word, his scalpel, and he goes to the deepest, deepest places and cuts us open. And then he says, and here you’re going to find grace and mercy to help you in your time of need. And he offered himself, he identified himself to this woman of all the people. John the Baptist was like, are you the Messiah? His disciples asked him. The religious leaders asked him. Everybody was asking him if he’s the Messiah. And here to this shame filled woman, he says, I am the Messiah. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for, the one you’ve been looking for.

And so I think you have to, first of all, you have to speak that shame out loud. You have to name it. And that’s really hard, like you said. And then you have to do that in a safe place because people will shame you or silence you like they did to you, Ann, or to me even. The people will try to say things to silence you, but I think you find a safe place and you speak it out loud and you encounter Jesus there. You meet him there and then you release that. He sets you free from that. It’s not like, “Okay, I’m good.” It’s him. He takes that shame. He washes it away. I mean, she left that well. She ran into town telling everybody, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.” They knew all she ever did. They were probably talking about all she ever did. And yet here she, she’s done. The shame is gone.

Ann: She came out of hiding. I mean, think about that. The people like she’s at the well in the middle of the day because of their disdain and her shame. And then she runs to them proclaiming, come and meet this man. She didn’t care what they thought. She just wants them to encounter the same grace that she just received.

Teresa: And it says, many people from the town came to him and came to because of what she said. And that’s the end of the road is being able to share your story and shine a light on God’s grace. And then other people are like, “Wow, I see that. I want that. I need that.” Which was really what led to the study because I want women to dig into God’s word for themselves. I don’t want them to just read my story, read the stories of these women. I do a little creative retelling at the beginning of each chapter, but I want them to dig in deep to God’s word. And then he speaks to them, and he shares with their own heart.

Ann: And it says in the scripture His word doesn’t return void. Even if you pray, like pull out your Bible, maybe get this Bible study by Teresa, but ask God, “Father, speak to me today. May your word come alive today.” You might read five verses today. You might read a whole chapter. But ask God to let His Word come alive and you all, He changes our lives through the power of His Word, His Spirit, and His grace. This is so good.

Dave: Yeah. And I’m sitting here looking at you two thinking I’m watching two women, and you’re talking about going from shame to shining. I mean literally, obviously the woman at the well is such an amazing story, but I’m sitting here thinking, some people go from shame to I’m a little better. It’s almost like I’m rehabilitated. But no, you’re talking about redemption. You’re talking not just, I’m better. I’m new. I’m clean. I’m actually telling the world my story, which has darkness in it. I don’t hide that. I don’t deny that. It’s a part of what happened to me, but here I am now. I’m restored. I was broken, but I’m redeemed and restored. I mean, it’s powerful. I think there’s people listening, going, “I’m not there. I want to be there.” And you can be there. The grace is what gets you there. You go from disgraced to graced.

Ann: And that Psalm 34 is one of my favorite Psalms. But let me read that and reread what you said. I’ll start with verse 4, “I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.”

Teresa: So powerful.

Shelby: Shame for many of us defines kind of our everyday lives. I know for me as a victim of sexual abuse when I was a kid, shame always looms and kind of threatens to overtake my thoughts and my feelings and even my posture toward God. But what we’ve heard today is about God redeeming and restoring broken people like me who wrestle with shame. He’s in the business of eradicating shame in our lives because Jesus experienced the ultimate shame on the cross. And when we’re in him, shame is destroyed. That’s such good news.

I’m Shelby Abbott, and you’ve been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson with Teresa Whiting on FamilyLife Today. Teresa has written a book called Graced: How God Redeems and Restores the Broken. Graced is really for anyone who’s struggled with shame and brokenness, like me, and wants to discover how God’s grace extends to all people through the transformative stories of women in the Bible who found restoration and dignity in the Lord Jesus Christ. So you can get your copy right now by going online to FamilyLifeToday.com where you could look for our link in the show notes.

Earlier this week, we had on Amberly Neese, who is an author, a speaker, and a comedian. She has put together a five-week video series along with us here at FamilyLife to really address what’s going on in our culture right now, which is essentially a lot of tension and division, both at our family gatherings or even just on social media. And as Psalm 133 tells us, it’s good for believers to live in unity with one another. But the question is, how do we do that practically, especially in the environment we live in right now?

Well, Amberly, like I said, in conjunction with us here at FamilyLife, has put together a five-week video series called “Moving Toward Each Other in the Middle of a Divisive World.” You could sign up to get this free resource from FamilyLife by going to the show notes and clicking on the link there; or heading over to FamilyLife.com/FindingCommonGround. Again, this resource is free, and you can find it in the show notes or get it at FamilyLife.com/FindingCommonGround.

Now, coming up tomorrow, we’re going to talk about how God’s grace restores and redeems women in the Bible who faced shame and trauma. That’s coming up tomorrow because Teresa Whiting will be back again to unpack that for us. We hope you’ll join us.

On behalf of Dave and Ann Wilson, I’m Shelby Abbott. We’ll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

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