FamilyLife Today®

Yana Jenay Conner: For me the game changer was the parable of the unforgiving servant. It seems like he just runs into somebody who owes him a lesser debt. There’s this phrase, "fellow servant," that Jesus uses when he tells the parable. For me, the Lord was like, "Hey, your dad is a sinner in need of grace. He is your fellow servant. He is living in the reality of a broken and fallen world right alongside you."

Dave Wilson: Welcome to *FamilyLife Today*, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I’m Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is *FamilyLife Today*. Every single person listening to this has dealt with this and needs to deal with it.

Dave Wilson: What is this? I see this book and I’m like, "We’re going to talk about offense today." I’m a quarterback. I love offense. Let’s talk about football and offense. *Living Beyond Offense*. How about offense?

Ann Wilson: Because he played football, that’s all he can think about.

Dave Wilson: It always comes back to football somehow. Oh, I get it. *Living Beyond Offense: Doing the Hard Work of Forgiveness God’s Way*. Yana Conner is with us.

Ann Wilson: Have you ever been introduced talking about football?

Yana Jenay Conner: I haven't. This is it. But I’m excited. But we’re not talking about offense.

Ann Wilson: That’s why I tried to weave us back into forgiveness. Offense is fun to talk about. Offense is not fun.

Dave Wilson: Define it. How would you define offense?

Yana Jenay Conner: I’ll actually quote one pastor, John Bevere, when he talks about how there are two kinds of offended people: there are people who have been offended and then there are people who think that they have been offended. We will all suffer the reality of offense because we live in a broken and fallen world, but there are times when we are offended by something that someone did and it’s not necessarily sinful. In the book, I talk about how offense needs to find its definition in the commandments of scripture.

Did this person actually sin against me or was it a failure to communicate? Is this a matter of sin or is it actually a matter of their humanity and their weakness? There are times where I’m in relationship with people and I’m offended because they’re not showing up in my life in the ways in which I want them to. They’re not meeting my reasonable or unreasonable expectations. So then I walk away feeling offended and confront them about how they’re not showing up in my life in the way that I want them to, but they haven’t actually done anything sinful.

Ann Wilson: And that person can be like, "What’s your problem? What are you talking about?"

Dave Wilson: That sounds like our marriage right here. This has happened many times both ways.

Ann Wilson: Every single person has dealt with that. But I like that distinction, too. It may not even be sin.

Dave Wilson: Would you agree with this statement? Because I’ve said this in a sermon. I’m hoping I say exactly what I said, but I think I said it this way: offense is normal, offended is a choice. Is that true?

Yana Jenay Conner: I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Offense is going to happen, but how you respond to it, how you internalize what that person did, even if what they did was sinful, how you internalize it, that’s going to impact the degree to which you are offended. I’m often asking the Lord to increase my capacity to be patient, to increase my capacity to be other-centered, to be humble, so that in the event that I am offended, I’m not so impacted by it that I’m not able to still obey Jesus’s command to be gracious, to be loving, and to forgive.

I do think we have a choice in that. But I do wonder if we can take that principle to the extreme, to the point where we try to become undefendable, and in doing so, we negate the reality of the pain that’s caused. So it’s like we just turn it off because we’re like, "Well, I’m not going to be offended by anybody. I can’t be touched." In that sense, we’re probably closing ourselves off from real relationships.

Dave Wilson: Now, I did that.

Ann Wilson: I was going to say, and it feels like denial in a way. So you stuff it. And Dave, you totally did that.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, I did that. If you wrote a book on offense, you must have had a situation in your life. I did. My dad and divorce and alcohol and adultery and all that when I was a little boy. But I walked into marriage, and even Ann said, "I think you need to forgive your dad." I’m like, "I’m good." And it was all denial. I was hurt, I was offended, I carried it for 30-some years, and I never really looked at it and said, "Okay, I need to take a journey." Forgiveness for me was a journey. So what’s your story? I’m guessing there’s a story there.

Yana Jenay Conner: There is a story there. The first line in the book is, "My dad was my first teacher in forgiveness." My biological father was an alcoholic, and when he was sober, he was present and he was a really great dad. And when he wasn’t sober, he was absent, and I didn’t know why he wasn’t there. It was very confusing.

Then I remember there was a stint where he was sober, but then he got a new family. So he got married, he had another child, and that was just really painful. I felt really replaced by this new woman and by this new child that he had. Then I remember in college, coming to faith in Christ and knowing pretty quickly that one of the things I needed to do was forgive my dad. I knew it. I grew up in church, so I know what Christians are supposed to do.

But it was an 11-year journey for me. I think the first part of it was me acknowledging the pain, acknowledging what his absence meant for me, how it was impacting my life, how it was creating in me this bitterness and this distrust. So I had to sit with that for a while. But because I was a young Christian and also a zealous one, I was still trying to forgive.

Ann Wilson: How old were you then?

Yana Jenay Conner: I was in my early 20s. I was actually here in Orlando, Florida, doing ministry here.

Ann Wilson: But you’re trying to be this obedient young woman who’s following Jesus. You know that you’re supposed to forgive, so you’re working at it.

Yana Jenay Conner: I’m working at it, but it’s not coming together. Then fast forward, I’m in seminary, I’m studying with a friend, and she starts to ask me questions about my dad. I start to share about how I’m struggling to forgive, and she said, "It seems like you’ve never actually had a conversation with your dad. You’ve never actually dealt with the pain that you’ve felt." So she challenges me to go home and have a conversation with my dad.

Ann Wilson: How did you feel about that?

Yana Jenay Conner: I was mad because we were just there to study. I’m here to study. I’m not here to talk about my dad. I didn’t ask for accountability. I didn’t ask for your discipleship.

Ann Wilson: You were offended by her.

Yana Jenay Conner: I was so offended by her. What’s crazy is she’s actually the reason why this book even exists. She was the one to reach out to me from Harvest House and said, "Hey, let’s write a book together." So she’s a part of even my forgiveness story. But I go home, and I am supposed to be with my dad. My dad cancels on me because he had a job come up and he had to take it. And my friend was like, "Well, did you reschedule?" And I said, "No, I didn’t reschedule. He didn’t reschedule. He didn’t ask if we could reschedule." And she said, "Call your dad, reschedule."

Dave Wilson: I like this girl.

Ann Wilson: Lindsay. She’s a good friend. I go and I have the conversation with my dad, and for the first time, I tell him how he hurt me.

Ann Wilson: I want to hear the conversation. What did it sound like?

Yana Jenay Conner: It actually started with an apology because he was trying. He was in a season where he was sober and where he was trying to build a relationship with me. He was trying to get to know me. He was calling more. And I was just like—at that point, I was in my 30s—I said, "I don’t need you. I have learned how to live without you and I don’t actually need you in my life."

So I had really stiff-armed all of his efforts to reconcile. So I apologized to him for that and just said, "Hey, that’s not in step with the ways of Jesus. That’s not the kind of person I want to be or how I want to treat you, so please forgive me for that." But then I began to share the pain of him just not being there, and he’s weeping as I’m telling him. He’s literally weeping.

Ann Wilson: What was that like for you? Were you surprised?

Yana Jenay Conner: I was surprised because he was a very jovial kind of guy. He never acknowledged his in and out in my life, his abandonment. He had never confessed those things or even seemed to be bothered by those things. It was like when he would see me, it just would be like that wasn’t a big deal. So to have him there, to see him weep—and my dad, he’s massive. He’s a big guy. He’s tough. He’s a mechanic. Bald head, goatee.

So to see him weep like that was really overwhelming and brought about my own tears. But then he began to express that he was sorry and that he regrets a lot of the decisions that he had made in his life. So it helped me to see his humanity, to see his pain, and he said something to the effect of, "I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life." And it was like, I don’t know what those things even are. You don’t even know him. But he said, "I’ve asked God to forgive me."

And I was like, "Wait a second." So there we were, just sharing that moment together. Then we hugged it out, he gave me a big kiss on my cheek, and it was really sweet. Then it was like, "Okay, now how do we do this? How do we move forward relationally?" And it was awkward and it was weird and it was frustrating and it was hard, but I got my dad back.

For me, it was just a gift that we were in a position to write a different kind of ending to our story. But it was really my friend who helped get me there. It was sermons that helped get me there. It was wrestling with Kay Arthur studies on forgiveness that helped get me there. But it was a really long journey, and I think most of it was because I didn’t actually know what forgiveness was. I’d heard a lot of really good sermons about it. I would be convicted, I would be inspired, but I didn’t know how to actually do it. What does it look like? What does it feel like? And that’s what I’m really trying to answer in this book. It’s not just why do we forgive, but actually how do we do it? And how do we have assurance that we’ve obeyed Jesus’s command to forgive?

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Ann Wilson: Join us. For your friend to say, "Uh-uh, you need to call your dad now. You went to see him, now you need to call him and make sure you get..." But look at your face as you’re sharing that story. I wonder what it would have felt like for you had you never done that. Who would you be had you never had that conversation, even spiritually?

Yana Jenay Conner: The sad part of the story is that my dad unexpectedly died two months after we had that conversation. His appendix ruptured and then he had a pulmonary embolism, and I think his body had just been through way too much and it wasn’t able to sustain that surgery. I will say that was a very confusing time for me. Because it was like, "God, why would you give me my dad back and then you take him away?"

Because I’m grieving, that’s all I can see. I can’t see the, "Man, God, thank you that we were able to have that conversation before he died." If I hadn’t listened to my friend, I would have completely missed that opportunity to have that conversation with my dad. So you’re walking around with a whole different regret, guilt maybe. I was sad and confused, but at least I had something that a lot of people never do. I’m really grateful to that friend. I’m really grateful that I was able to have that conversation with my dad before he passed and that we were able to write a different ending to our story.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t go fishing with him, and maybe one of my biggest regrets is that I wasn’t able to get to a place of forgiving him sooner. And while I know your spiritual journey is what it is and you can only be where you are, and I find great comfort in what Paul says in Philippians, you can only live up to what you’ve obtained, there’s still this semblance of regret. I wish I would have been able to get there sooner, so that one, I would have been able to get to know my dad more and also so that he could have shared fishing with me, which was something that he really loved.

Dave Wilson: That’s so sad. But I’m sitting here thinking, if I would have taken that journey—you were in your 20s. I didn’t take it until my 30s. And my friend told me to do it, too. Her. She was the one. I could see the effects of not forgiving. I was walking around with bitterness and anger that was coming out in my home and with my sons that I couldn’t see. I didn’t know the cord was connected right there.

And there were other things, but that was the big one. So I had to go on a journey. And I sort of thought, "Okay, I’ll do it next weekend." I thought it’d be a quick thing. Ephesians 4:32: "Forgive as you have been forgiven." I know this stuff. I’ve taught it. I know the Word of God. And that’s I underestimated. For me it was about a five-year journey.

It’s interesting when you said your journey, I picked up a book by Lewis Smedes. He’s with the Lord now, but it was written in the '60s, probably, called *Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve*. And he walks you through a four-step process which you literally went through that I had to. He says you’ve got to acknowledge the hurt. I turned them into H's. That was the first thing, is I kept denying that I was hurt. I kept saying, "No, I really wasn't." And I’m not blaming my dad, but I am. When you were saying that, I’m like, "There’s the H." The second one was—I think I called it "hate," but he just said there’s a displeasure that you feel toward that person that you’ve got to acknowledge. And Ann said to me, "Do you realize when your dad calls, you don’t really talk to him? You’re like, 'Yeah, uh-huh, okay, bye.'"

Ann Wilson: Why are you shaking your head about that, Yana?

Yana Jenay Conner: Oh no, that’s totally me. When you’re hurt, you carry that. You disengage. I was a master at getting off the phone. I think we would talk about the weather, we would talk about my car, and then he would try to maybe get to something personal and then I would... I don’t know how I would do it, but I recently did it to someone else that I was walking through something difficult with. I was like, "Man, that’s just in there." This ability to get off the phone with ease. But every time he would call, I would roll my eyes, I would huff and puff. It’s just a phone call, but my anger would immediately rise just at seeing his name on the phone.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, then you have to go through this healing journey. That’s the third step. And for me, again, it was years. It takes a while.

Yana Jenay Conner: It does. And I do think there is this reality that you do have to heal a little bit in order to be in a place to forgive, so that some of that anger gets released, some of that pain, that hurt, and maybe even you’re able to see it a little bit differently. For me the game changer was the parable of the unforgiving servant. There’s this phrase, "fellow servant," that Jesus uses when he tells the parable of how this servant, he has this massive debt and then he’s forgiven of this massive debt and then he goes and finds—it kind of seems like he just runs into—somebody who owes him a lesser debt.

And it refers to this person as his fellow servant. And for me the Lord was like, "Your dad lives in a broken and fallen world, too. Your dad is a sinner in need of grace. He is your fellow servant. He is living in the reality of a broken and fallen world right alongside you." And that just kind of helped open up some compassion in my heart. I only saw my dad through the worst things he ever did. I forgot about the days that he showed up. I forgot about the day that he was the first person at the hospital after I was in a car wreck. I forgot about how when he was sober I had a big sleepover at his house.

All I saw were the days that he didn’t show up. So I just went all bad on him and I couldn’t see the duality of the good and the bad and I couldn’t see his humanity. And so I think that’s a part of the process, too, that really helps you to open up.

Ann Wilson: I had parents that were married 70 years, and they had some great things about them and also not so great, which is every single family. There are some great things but there are some broken things, too. They weren’t believers and I remember in my 20s going through a phase where all I saw was the brokenness. All I saw was, "Well, that messed me up. Well, that’s why I’m like this," because I’m seeing my insecurities in my 20s and I’m thinking, "Where did this come from?" and I’m pointing to my parents like, "Oh, it’s you guys. You guys did this to me."

I remember talking about this with a group of women. I said, "I feel like my 20s is like when you take bacon grease and you pour it into a glass. At first it’s all mixed up." So I felt like that’s growing up years. It’s all mixed up like, "There’s good, there’s bad." And then in my 20s it’s like the fat rose to the top that I couldn’t see underneath that white fat, the solid. I couldn’t see the good underneath it.

And then as you get older, and for me it was walking with God, it was seeing their imperfections, of course. And look at me, I’m right there with you. And now having kids, they’ve got a lot of fat at the top of that jar that they have to kind of remember like, "Oh, there were some good things, too." So I think that that’s really normal and healthy. But I think that’s happening more today. I’m hearing of a lot of kids that have no relationship anymore with their parents. Have you heard of that?

Yana Jenay Conner: Yeah, I have.

Ann Wilson: And you probably get it. I get it and I don’t get it. I understand that people have been through really horrific things with their parents, and if your parent was abusive, be it verbally, physically, spiritually, and they’re still unrepentant, I think that is warranted for boundaries and those kinds of things.

Yana Jenay Conner: For boundaries. And also to hold them accountable for what they did. But I think when it’s like your parent annoys you, or maybe they have unhealth in them that they’re still working out of and it’s not necessarily abusive, it just takes a little bit more effort to communicate. I’m not saying that those aren’t real frustrations.