Colleen and Nikki talk about how they cope with the whole family being together in the midst of isolation and the pandemic. Podcast was published April 20, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Hi, and welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And here we are again, separated by miles and united by Zoom [laughter].
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes.
Nikki: How are you doing, Colleen?
Colleen: It seems like the weeks are running together.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The days are running together, and Richard asked me a couple times this week for sure what day it was. I’m okay, but I feel a little shut down.
Nikki: Yeah, me too.
Colleen: And I didn’t even realize it until we were chatting before this podcast. You know, to be honest, the way I’m feeling is a little flat, and it takes me back in my head – this is a surprise to me, actually – to my early days as a stepmother when I felt overwhelmed with something I couldn’t control but had to live through and manage.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And had to honor God in the process. And I remember sublimating a lot of my anxiety because I couldn’t take the next step if I was living in my anxiety, and the Lord was faithful; He carried me through it. And I know He’s being faithful here and doing more than I can see, and I know that I can trust Him, but it is interesting that the way I feel, kind of flat and shut down, reminds me of the way I coped in those early days of being a stepmom. That’s just interesting.
Nikki: That’s really interesting.
Colleen: How are you?
Nikki: I guess I would say similar. As long as I stay busy and I feel like I have goals that I’m achieving, then I move through the day almost imagining that everything’s fine and I’ve decided this for myself. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: But really, it does kind of – it does take me to a place of just being flat when I don’t have much going on around me.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And it’s familiar to me as well, and I have actually thought a lot about the fact that I think a lot of people are dealing with that. I see it online. I see people talking about it. I know that being in a situation that you don’t have control over brings up stuff that people have not dealt with.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And when you have dealt with it, then you can recognize what you’re feeling –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and that’s very, very helpful in preventing taking it out on the people around you, but when you’re not aware of it, sometimes you don’t know how to move through your day or your interactions with people because you just feel agitated.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: So I see that. I see it on Facebook. I see people joking about it. I saw a really funny video this week that a friend of ours shared of a woman hiding in her closet with a flashlight just griping about her husband. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: I think five weeks is a long time, you know?
Colleen: It is, yeah.
Nikki: At least here in California, it’s been five weeks, and it brings stuff up. It does.
Colleen: I think for me it does remind me, in a sort of subliminal way – I mean, just realizing that the way I feel reminds of how I coped in my early days of being a stepmother. I think it brings up a lot of my kind of habitual, lifelong fears that I only matter if I’m helping somebody feel better. And if it doesn’t seem like that’s helping or if I’m doing that, then do I really have value? That’s a false view of myself.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And having worked through that with being a stepmom, I’m aware, when I feel myself feeling flat, that I know my identity is secure in Jesus, and I don’t feel as hopeless as I did back then. I don’t feel as much like there’s no end to this, I will just die in my misery. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So I recognize the feeling, and I know God is faithful. I’m so thankful He’s brought me through some stuff like so that I’m not completely blindsided by this.
Nikki: Yeah. You know, one of the things that has been a surprise to me, and I don’t know if this sounds bad, but in some ways a relief to me, has been to realize how many other people who have left Adventism, how many of them have shared that they had it pretty rough at home.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: That’s not uncommon.
Colleen: No. It’s more common than not.
Nikki: People who have grown up in Adventist homes, very often they won’t share what’s going on in their home because –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – part of the social norm is circling the wagons around the family, the family loyalty.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: But a lot of people have been through a lot of stuff, and they’ve been hurt.
Colleen: Yeah, deeply.
Nikki: Please don’t hear me say people leave Adventism because they’ve been hurt.
Colleen: Oh, no!
Nikki: That’s not what I’m saying.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: But when you grow up in a false system, inevitably you’re going to get hurt.
Colleen: Yeah, because reality is redefined.
Nikki: And feelings are not always acceptable.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And accountability? Let’s not even get started on that.
Colleen: Go there.
Nikki: So yeah, so a lot of our Former Adventist conferences we’ve had people who have shared what they’ve walked through. A lot of people who have worked through it and who have found their identity in Christ and who have come out on the other side of it and who can really speak to that, what that’s like. You know, rooting your identity in Christ and moving past the emotional hurdles that we will often leave Adventism with. And you know, we have a lot of new people leaving, actually.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s been surprising to me to see a lot of new people, a lot of younger people leaving.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And I know that we often don’t deal with our past right at first.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: You know, we’re unpacking the doctrines, we’re excited about the gospel, but give it some time and suddenly other things will often start to come up for people.
Colleen: And that’s because when God shows us the truth about Jesus, He can’t bring us into the truth about the gospel without also dragging us into the truth about ourselves. We just can’t live in a partial lie.
Nikki: And when Jesus matters more to you than family loyalty or whatever your previous norms were, you start seeing things. You start seeing that there are expectations that have been placed on you that if you were to meet those expectations you would be stepping out of line for God’s will for your life. Things just start colliding, you know? And I remember when this kind of thing started happening for me, one of the things that I had to learn how to do, with help from other people who have gone through this, is I had to learn to step back from what I was feeling in any given situation and think about when have I felt this way before?
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I was relating to the world around me from emotions that were motivated by things that had happened in the past, and I had to learn how to separate what belonged to reality and what belonged to my past, and I see that kind of thing coming up –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – in the lives of people who are now in quarantine, and now they don’t have all the distractions, and some of them are still even living with Adventist family, and they’re trying to navigate what they know about reality and what they have to live with. What advice would you give to people who are in that situation?
Colleen: First of all, I would want to say: What you’re feeling is real –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and you don’t need to pretend it’s not or try to feel different, but I would say your feelings are not the whole picture. And that was a really big deal for me to learn.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: When I first left and realized how deceived I had been theologically and started seeing the truth about things about my family and my life that I hadn’t recognized, but getting out of the Adventist paradigm made a lot of things look different.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because things I had experienced had been framed within Adventism. And when I started seeing some of those things, I realized, if I have been deceived once, I could be deceived again, because it’s just the way – I was trained in deception. Why would I think that I wouldn’t be tempted with a future deception? So I started praying that the Lord would plant me in truth and reality, and what I realized, as time went on – and I still pray this prayer, I have to say – I learned to interpret reality through a paradigm that came out of Adventism and that came out of ignoring things that were real. Learning to stand in truth meant I had to immerse myself in Scripture so that when things happened around me that threw me off, I could understand what was real by seeing what Scripture said. For example, one of the things I keep coming back to when I talk with people who have left Adventism – and don’t ever hear me saying walk away from your Adventist family just because you’ve walked away from Adventism. I don’t believe that.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: Jesus said that our enemies will be those closest to us when we truly love Him and know the gospel. And if we find that our Adventist family is hostile because of the gospel, we can know we were told this would happen, and we don’t have to try to talk ourselves into believing that we now owe some sort of loyalty to them just because they tell us we do. Our loyalty is to Jesus. I keep thinking of that time when the people told Jesus that His mother and His brothers were looking for Him, and He said, “Well, who are my mother and my brothers?” And He turned to His disciples and pointed to them and said, “These are my mother and brothers. Those who do the will of my Father are my mother and my brothers and my sisters.” Sometimes our closest relatives are the people that the Lord gives us to pray for, to witness to, and that’s a different role from just saying, “I give up my personhood because I’m living with you.” So ultimately, it’s always something hard, and I don’t have a clear answer for every case. I do know this, that in every case we can pray to know what’s real, pray to know what’s true, and ask the Lord to show us how to love these people for Him.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It was really helpful to me back in those days when I became a stepmother when a friend said to me – and I was like out of my league and over my head, not knowing what to do with these little, little boys, who really needed comfort and care and a mother, and I didn’t know what to do with all of that. And this friend said to me, “Just remember, you’re not loving them for your sake, and you’re not even loving them for their sake, you’re loving them for God.” And it completely changed how I related to them, in a sense, because I could stand in front of them, know I didn’t know what to do, in my head ask the Lord to help me to love them for Him, and then to believe that He would answer that prayer, even if I didn’t feel like I had a flash of insight. I could do what He put in front of me to do, and I could trust that what I did, He would use for His glory. He would love those through me, if I was willing to stand there and allow Him to do it. So that’s what I would say. It sounds a little abstract maybe? But it has been a lifesaver and a game-changer for me.
Nikki: And I think it’s worth talking about the fact that loyalty and love aren’t necessarily synonymous. I was always under the impression that a loyal person would love another person the way that person wanted them to love.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And so that sometimes meant living with some cognitive dissonance because I would need to do things that maybe didn’t necessarily feel like the best option in order to keep that person feeling loved. And so when we talk about our Adventist family – I have some people in mind, as we talk about this, who are living with them, who know the truth, one is a minor, another is in her 20s – you can have your supreme loyalty be to God and still love your family for Him. It is not in opposition to each other. One of the ways that we can do this is by refusing to argue with them about things when it gets hostile. Sometimes you’re creating opportunities for them to blaspheme or sin against God.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And you can love them and respect them by protecting them from doing that and by “As far as it is up to you, be at peace with one another,” you know.
Colleen: Yeah, exactly. We had to do that. I remember years ago with Richard’s parents, who recently – within the last year they both died. Richard never lost touch with them, kept in touch with them, but they remained Adventist and hostile to our position to the end, but I do remember when we had to tell them once years ago that we will no longer discuss doctrines of demons in our house, because every time we’d have a discussion and bring out the Bible and talk to them about what the Bible said about a passage, they would actually begin to blaspheme the words of Scripture, and I remember thinking: The more we have these discussions, the more they say horrible things about the Word of God and about the gospel, and I realized why Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” He doesn’t say “Don’t witness,” but He’s saying, “Don’t keep telling them what they fight,” because it ends up making them sin more than if you just drop the subject.
Nikki: We can’t be their Holy Spirit. We can’t convict them. But we can trust God with them, and we can pray for Him to work in them. I know as an Adventist I used to think that I could talk people into getting saved –
Colleen: No [laughter].
Nikki: – and that’s just not – that’s not the way it works [laughter].
Colleen: No.
Nikki: So we can frantically exhaust ourselves trying to correct other people’s worldview and in the process damage relationships and cause people to be hardened to truth.
Colleen: And Ellen White set us up to believe we could talk people into it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because just beginning with kids, she said we were essentially responsible for our children growing up Adventist. I can still remember hearing this quote, that when Jesus comes again if your kids are not Adventist that Jesus will look at you with sadness and go, “Where is thy flock, thy beautiful flock?” Well, you know, we are not the Holy Spirit for anybody. Yes, we are tasked with teaching the gospel to our children. Adventism taught us something that was a twist on that. They said we were responsible if our loved ones weren’t Adventist.
Nikki: The big gospel call is to go win souls. That’s actually not our job.
Colleen: The Holy Spirit is the one that convicts the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, John 16.
Nikki: The fact that Ellen White taught that helps explain some of the frantic hostility that people get from their parents when they’re trying to give them the gospel and their parents are trying to keep them in the fold.
Colleen: Very true.
Nikki: That’s part of what you’re bumping up against, and I know – it was helpful for me at one point in a conversation to just say, “Will you please trust God with me?”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And it kind of ended the argument. I don’t know if it always will, but – [laughter].
Colleen: [Laughter.] It may not! But you know what? Call on the highest authority.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: You are relieved of worrying about my soul. The Lord is in charge of me now, just like you’re relieved of worrying about another person’s soul because God is in charge of them too. And you know, I really do believe that when we’re committed and ask Him to keep us faithful – sometimes I don’t even know what that looks like, to be really honest – I am unable to see the best way to proceed often, but I do pray that the Lord will keep me faithful because I know that I can’t trust myself to keep myself faithful. But when we are trusting Him to keep us faithful, He will do things that we don’t even know are being done through our presence. You know, I’ve thought sometimes about the passage in 1 Corinthians 7 where it talks about a believing spouse remaining married to an unbelieving spouse as long as the unbelieving spouse wants to stay, and he says, “You need to live in peace.” But I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve thought, you know, if an unbelieving spouse wants to stay with a believing spouse, there is something really significant that’s happening there because the believing spouse, the believer in a family, is filled with the Holy Spirit, and it doesn’t matter if you’re living with other believers or not. The Holy Spirit doesn’t leave us when we believe. When He seals us, He’s there. So in a very real sense, even though they aren’t aware of all the details, an unbeliever who wants to stay and live in peace is choosing to stay where the presence of God is actively at work. That’s a wonderful thing. The Lord can work in those situations quite apart from our consciousness. It’s a terrible thing, it’s a terribly hard thing, to be stuck in quarantine with somebody who’s hostile.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But just know, the Lord is not surprised, and the Lord is at work. And if we can trust Him, we can know this will look very different someday. Someday we will step back and see things differently, but right now we have to keep our eyes on Him and know He’s at work, and we can’t stop His purposes.
Nikki: Colleen, what do you say to former Adventist couples who are in quarantine right now and who are – I know not everybody really likes this word, but who are triggering each other’s –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – baggage that they came out of, that they grew up with. What’s some practical advice that you would give them during this quarantine?
Colleen: That’s a really good question. The first thing that comes to my mind is: You can’t fix the other person’s reaction. I realize more and more that I can only deal with my own. I have to come to the point where my prayer to stay in truth and reality is the first thing I do when I feel triggered, and I don’t always do that well. But I have to know that my reactions are not necessarily reflecting the full picture. I have to remember that the Lord has asked me not to give way to fear, 1 Peter 3, that as a wife I’m to remember Sarah. Peter goes through this, that she did not give way to fear, but she submitted to Abraham, calling him lord, and if we do as she did, we will be her daughters. Well, I don’t even know exactly how to explain all of that. What I do know is that my job is to trust that the Lord has put me in this situation, He is with me, and He has the answers, and I have to make my reaction be first to Him, before I react to whatever is triggering me. Now, like I said, I don’t do that perfectly. I can find myself spiraling into shame and guilt very easily because of my past.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I have to know that the Lord has given me an identity that is not shame-based and is not guilt-ridden, but as a redeemed daughter and co-heir with Christ. In that capacity, my job is to love for Him and to trust that He is working in the other people around me. Sometimes I feel so shut down I feel like the Lord’s just going to have to deal with this, and then I remember it’s my job to pray for these people in my household as well, not just pray for myself, but pray that He will comfort them, help them, and help them see what they need to see as well. That would be my first thing, is to trust the Lord, know His Word cannot fail, and know that He will give us His wisdom, His comfort, and His identity to keep us acting in integrity, relating to the Lord first and allowing Him to love the other ones in our households through us, if we trust Him.
Nikki: One of the things that has helped me over the years has been stepping back and gaining more of an eternal perspective and realizing that these are my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Even though my little 11-year-old is my daughter, she’s my little sister in the Lord, and I have a responsibility to her before God as her mother and as her sister.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And the same is true of my son; and my husband is my brother in Christ. It’s not his responsibility to always make me feel heard and understood, but I do have a responsibility as his sister in the Lord to pray for him and, you know, we persevere together. I thank God that I do have a believing husband and –
Colleen: I do the same thing.
Nikki: – I know it changes things when you don’t.
Colleen: And I remember once hearing – years ago we attended a marriage conference at our church, and I remember the speaker saying, “You need to remember, if you are married to a believer, that before God you have to hear Him saying, ‘This is my son'” – as He would say to me, you know, as God would say to me about my husband – “This is my son. You can’t treat my son that way.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that was a helpful thing to remember.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, we heard just yesterday that – we’re recording this on Friday. We heard just yesterday that they are now starting to think about ways to open up the country, so there may be an end in sight for all of this isolation. Although, truth to tell, I’m pretty sure California will not be one of the first states to open.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So just saying, Nikki, we may be here looking at each other on Zoom for a while [laughter].
Nikki: Yeah. I anticipate that.
Colleen: But just know that if you are struggling, you are not alone. We are all in this boat together.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And we are all struggling to learn how to allow the Word of God to transform us and to trust God as we deal with our families, who I know we all love dearly, but they drive us crazy sometimes [laughter].
Nikki: [Laughter.] And I want to say, we can thank God for what He’s doing, not just globally, but in our lives and in our homes.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: And He is definitely sanctifying all of us through this process, and so we can thank Him for what He’s doing that we can’t see or we can’t understand.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I’m just so glad that I get to visit with you and that we get to talk about this.
Colleen: I am too. It’s helpful to me. I always feel encouraged after we do this.
Nikki: Me too. So if you guys would like to add to the conversation, if you have any questions or comments, please write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and don’t forget that you can go to proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly blogs, and you can find past issues of the print magazine there, and please follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and when you leave a review, you help us be more searchable for other people. So join us next time, when we look again at Hebrews.
Colleen: Thanks for joining us again today. Know that we’re praying for all of us, and we’re thankful that we’re in this together.
Nikki: Bye.
Colleen: Bye.
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