The Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast

Kaley Olson:
Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to The Proverbs 31 Ministries Podcast, where we share biblical Truth for any girl in any season. I'm your host, Kaley Olson, and I'm here with my co-host, in a cute black jumpsuit that I wish you guys could see, Meredith Brock.

Meredith Brock:
I do look a little bit like I might change your [inaudible] today. I'm into it. I'm leaning in hard. I'm even wearing platform Converse. I'm going all in on this, guys. Mom fit too.

Kaley Olson:
It's great.

Meredith Brock:
You can get anything on it, and I would never know.

Kaley Olson:
I appreciate that.

Meredith Brock:
You're welcome.

Kaley Olson:
It is a good mom fit.

Meredith Brock:
Well, Kaley, I am really, really excited about our show today. It's a really personal one for me because it's something that I have had to work through and wrestle through on a very personal level. We're going to hear from our friend Kia Stephens, and she's going to be sharing about her experience with father wounds. And, y'all, I don't know if you knew this, but she has taught us that one in four women experience some kind of a father wound.

Kaley Olson:
That's a lot.

Meredith Brock:
It is a lot. It really is a lot. That's 25% of the population out there, and honestly, Kaley, I would guess that it might be more depending upon how you define “father wound.” And we're going to talk about that a little bit today. Today Kia's going to talk about what is a father wound. And on the back end, I share a little bit about the father wounds in my life, how they played out, and how I may be made some not so great decisions in trying to get some needs met. And I'm going to guess that we've got some listeners today who need to hear this message.

Kaley Olson:
Absolutely. It was very hopeful and full of truth but also very practical, I think, and that makes a great message. And, guys, if you're listening today and walking through something and you need just something to hold on to right now, we have linked a free download in the show notes for you below that you can grab right now called “Three Truths You Need To Process Your Pain.” We're also going to mention Kia's book, which is a very helpful resource as well. But you'll hear more about that at the end of the show. But for now, let's go hear from Kia.

Meredith Brock:
Well, all right friends, we are here with our friend
Kia Stephens. Welcome to the podcast, Kia.

Kia Stephens:
Hey, it's great to be here.

Kaley Olson:
Kia, remind me where you're joining us from.

Kia Stephens:
Atlanta, Georgia.

Kaley Olson:
That's not too far.

Meredith Brock:
We love Atlanta.

Kaley Olson:
I love Atlanta.

Meredith Brock:
Go Braves.

Kaley Olson:
Yes.

Kia Stephens:
Go Braves and Falcons and Hawks.

Meredith Brock:
There's lots of animal teams down there.

Kaley Olson:
That shows how much you know sports.

Meredith Brock:
I know. I'm not really [inaudible].

Kaley Olson:
I tried to stop at the Braves. Anyways. Well, Meredith, there's a lot of other things that you're good at besides naming sports teams.

Meredith Brock:
Sports isn’t one of them.

Kaley Olson:
Well, Kia, who knows way more about sports than we do ... Kia, you're a longtime friend of Proverbs 31 Ministries. And I'm so glad you're here because not only do we love reading what you share with us through our Encouragement for Today devotions that you write for; we know we've heard you share your wisdom with our She Speaks Conference audience of Christian communicators, but you've got years of experience as an author, a speaker, a podcaster, and you're no stranger to the show actually. We had you on a few years ago to share with us, and it's one of our most popular episodes. I think it keeps circulating and rising up. So go dig through our archive and find that. But we're so excited to have you back with us today.

Meredith Brock:
Absolutely. And one of the things the Lord has specifically called Kia to that I think is just so powerful and so needed is for her to use her testimony to help women heal from what she calls, what I call, a “father wound.” She does this through her podcast show called Hope for Women with Father Wounds and shares even more in her new book, Overcoming Father Wounds. Today we have her on the show to talk with our audience specifically about what it looks like to exchange the wounds of your past with God's love. Kia, we can't wait to hear your message. Why don't you take it away?

Kia Stephens:
Sure. Several years ago, my mom and I, we traveled to Thomaston, Georgia, to attend a church service, and the minister stood on this podium, and he said, "How many of you have never heard your biological father say, ‘I love you’?" Now, granted my mom and I, we've never been to this church before. I don't know anybody, so I'm thinking, "This is a little bit personal for my first time at your church." But I sheepishly and cautiously raised my right hand only to discover a sea of other hands raised in the audience. And then I turned to my left, which is where my mom was sitting, and I see her hand is raised too, and I was shocked. My grandfather was a great man. He was the Baptist pastor at the church where I grew up, but he wasn't an affectionate father. And that subject never came up between my mother and me in 30 years. And why would it? It's not really something that women typically talk about. It doesn't come up at the salon or when you're having a girlfriend day at Starbucks or at the play date. It doesn't really come up.

Sometimes, maybe around Father's Day, it might prompt us to reflect on what our father did or did not do or what our father said or did not say. But God began to initiate this conversation with me back in 2015, and that's when I decided I'm going to start a blog to help women exchange their father wounds for the love of God the Father. And when I began to announce this to my friends, they responded initially with widened eyes and turned heads and a barely audible "hmm," which signaled to me that maybe they had a father wound. And then they spoke, confirming my suspicion. These are some of the things that I heard. "I just met my father yesterday." "I don't know who my father is." "My father was an alcoholic." "I heard my father call my mother a heifer," and, "My dad introduced me as his boy." I want to be clear with you about what a father wound is, just in case you're thinking, "Maybe do I have one?"

A father wound is synonymous with father absenteeism. And we can know father absenteeism for a myriad of reasons: either by way of divorce, abandonment, abuse, incarceration, drug addiction, alcoholism, an affair, a premature death, or physically present but emotionally absent father. All of these things have the potential to leave a wound in the heart of a woman. And when I began to delve deeper into my own father wounds, I saw them everywhere. I saw them in women at Walmart and Target. I saw them in women at church. I saw them in the faces of the young girls that I taught when I was an elementary school teacher. And I saw them in the pages of Scripture. And so today I'm going to tell you about one of those women that I saw in the Bible that had a father wound. Her name is Leah. You may be familiar with her story. Often she's seen in the shadows of her younger sister, Rachel. And her story is found in Genesis.
And what you need to know about Leah, just as we dive into her story, is that she was the eldest daughter of Laban, who found herself trapped, literally trapped in a loveless, polygamous marriage. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about her story. It begins with Jacob. He was one of the patriarchs. He's the youngest son of Isaac. And his mother and his father, they sent him off to Paddan Aram to find a wife from Rebecca's family. And so Jacob sets off to find this wife. And his first destination is a well where all these shepherds were hanging out, waiting for all the sheep to get there so they could water the sheep. And Jacob says to the men that were there at that well, "Do you know Laban? Is he well?" And they said, "Yeah. And in fact, here comes his daughter." And so I imagine this was love at first sight ... he sees her from a far off, her hair is flowing in the wind, and the music is flowing, the birds are chirping, and Jacob is smitten immediately.

So immediately he goes, he rolls the large covering off of the well, [and] he waters all of the sheep. He kisses her hand. He's crying; he is emotional because he believes, "This is my wife. I found her immediately. God has been faithful to me." And so then he travels with Rachel to go and meet Laban, and he stays there for a month. And Laban even affirms who he is: "You're my blood." And so he stays there for about a month. He's working for Laban. And then Laban says, "Even though you're family, you don't have to work for me for free. Tell me what your wages should be." And this is where Jacob says, "I'll work for you for seven years in exchange for your daughter Rachel." And the Word of God tells us that seven years felt like just a few days. I imagine he was making goo-goo eyes at her, and he was looking lovingly at her. And it was evident to everybody that was there: Jacob loves Rachel and Rachel loves Jacob.
But once that seven-year period had hit the mark and it was time for him to consummate this union, he says, "Give me my wife. I want to make love to her." Even though it was very well known that Jacob wanted Rachel, Laban gave him his oldest daughter Leah instead. And I imagine the shock and the horror that Jacob had when he woke up and discovered it was not Rachel that he slept with, but it was Leah instead. And then can you imagine the humiliation and the shame and the regret and the embarrassment that Leah must have felt? Now I just want to make sure and acknowledge that Leah was at fault. She did put on the wedding, the wedding clothing. She did disguise herself as her sister Rachel. She did participate in this scheme that her father created. But I'm struck by the words in Genesis 29:23 that says, "He took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob" (ESV) to deceive Jacob. Those verbs took and brought indicate that this was not happenstance or an accident or an oops. This was intentional.
These were intentional actions by Laban to deceive Jacob. He used his daughter as a pawn in his scheme. And it wouldn't be so bad, but we know what fathers should be in the lives of their daughters. We know that fathers should protect their daughters. They should look out for their best interest. They should affirm their daughters. They should interrogate the male suitors. And that's not what Laban did in this situation. And we also know that fathers should be aware of how their daughters are feeling. Scripture tells us in Genesis 29 that Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely. She had a lovely figure and she was beautiful. All of Leah's life, she lived in the shadows of her younger sister. Laban of all people should have known what it would've done to his daughter to have her husband be tricked into marrying her when he really wanted her younger sister. Leah may have questioned, How could he place me in that situation? She may have wondered, Why didn't he tell Jacob he had to wait until I was married?

She may have been ashamed that her father resorted to tricking Jacob into marrying her, communicating his doubt that she would ever get married on her own. And I imagine as women are listening, as you're listening today, some of you may identify there may be something that your father did that you regret, something that he did that has impacted your life today. Maybe he doesn't even know about it. Maybe he did an intentional act. We are going to talk about some things, some lessons that we can glean from Leah's life that will help us, too, as we process our own father wounds if we have them. Now as a result of this situation, Leah suffered in a polygamous union for years. Now this is an extreme example of a father wound. Many of us may not ever experience it, but there are wounds that we have experienced from our own fathers. We may never have heard our father say we're beautiful. We may never have heard him say that we are loved, that we are wanted, that we are special, that we are unique. And we can have feelings of abandonment, rejection, shame and guilt.

Often, like Leah, we may be attempting to cope with the ramifications of the father wound alone. And the question becomes, "How do we heal? How do we exchange our pain for God's perfect love?" I believe we can extract some lessons from Leah's life. Now, I do want to point out that even though Leah had wounds, her wounds didn't just impact her. They impacted her children as well. And sometimes we may reason that it's better to ignore our wounds or dismiss or deny them. But even if we don't address our wounds, it doesn't mean that they're not impacting us, as we see in Leah's motherhood. In Genesis 29, she became pregnant with Reuben and said, "It is because the Lᴏʀᴅ has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now" (NIV). Reuben sounds like the Hebrew name for “He has seen my misery.” The name means “see a son.” And then in Genesis 29:33, she gave birth to Simeon. That was her second-born son. And she said, "Because the Lᴏʀᴅ heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too." Simeon likely means “one who hears.”

And then in Genesis 29:34, she gave birth to Levi. And she said, "Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons" (NIV). Levi's name likely means “attached.” And so out of her wounded state, she's mothering her children, hoping that she can manipulate and get Jacob to finally love her. But when she has her fourth son, Judah, something clicks in her. She seems to have a moment of clarity where she says, "Even though I'm not loved, even though I've had all these sons, even though life has not been the way that I long for it to be, this time ..." She says in Genesis 29:35, "This time I will praise the Lᴏʀᴅ" (NIV). And this is where I believe she models a lesson for all of us who are living life with wounds that have not been healed or wounds that have not been addressed or fathers that have never said, "I'm sorry" or "I love you" or "I want you or "You're beautiful" or "You're worthy" or "You're chosen."

This is where Leah models for us how we all can behave when we have a wound or a pain that has not healed. She says, "This time I will praise the Lᴏʀᴅ." She models a response that we all can adopt when we're processing through our wounds and the circumstances that resulted because of them. She didn't dismiss, she didn't deny, she didn't justify, she didn't excuse, [or] she didn't mask away her pain. She acknowledged it and cried out to God for help and found a reason to rejoice. Which brings me to the first lesson that we can extract from our sister Leah, and that is to acknowledge. We too must acknowledge the facts of our own wounds. It may be difficult because this is our father and we don't want to rock the family boat, but sometimes we can get alone in our own prayer closet and say, I'm hurting. God, I was wounded by my father when he did this, when I was two, when I was five, when I was 17, when I was 26. God, I'm hurting.

We can say it alone to a heavenly Father who has the capacity and the strength and the sovereignty to handle the weight of our wounds. And in John 8:32 it says this, "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (NIV). But, sisters, I want to submit to you, how can we know freedom if we never acknowledge our truth? It could be that our reluctance to acknowledge how we were wounded and how we are hurting may be the primary barrier that keeps us from experiencing genuine and total and complete freedom in Christ Jesus. I remember this happened for me my freshman year of college. I was in a dorm room with a friend, and I remember she said, "I built this bookshelf with my dad." And I don't know what it was about the bookshelf. Maybe it was that I was 18 or I was in college. I don't know. But it was essentially like someone had ripped the bandage off of my father wounds.

And in that moment, I was flooded with tears and with emotions, and it was all I could do to get out of her room so I could have a really good ugly cry, because I realized that I wanted what she had. I wanted a relationship. I wanted to look back and be able to say I spent time with my father, not just visitations at court-order visitations and not just gifts left on the front porch of my grandparents' home. I wanted a relationship with my father. And so that was my initial acknowledgment of my father wounds. And then another lesson that we learn from Leah is: to exchange our pain for God's perfect love. Once we identify the pain, we can't do anything with it. We have to lay that pain at the foot of the cross ... sometimes one time, two times, three times over and over again as many times as it surfaces in our mind and in our heart. We have to give that pain to God and exchange it with Him for His extravagant, audacious, undeserving, lavish love. This requires a relinquishing and exchanging.

Leah did this when she had that brief moment of sobriety and clarity when she said, "This time [with Judah] I will praise the Lᴏʀᴅ." And we know it is from Judah's line that we received our savior. And it's reminding me of Psalm 147:3 that says, "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" (NIV). Sometimes our hearts feel like they have been broken into tiny little pieces beyond repair and they cannot be put back together. But here in Psalms 147:3, we are reminded that this is what God specializes in. He specializes in tiny pieces of hearts, and He's able to put them back together and make them whole. And then the latter part of this scripture says He “binds up their wounds.” Binding is often associated with the physical wound, where you clean the wound and you put on the healing balm and you bandage it and you rinse and repeat. But what men may do in the natural, God does in the supernatural: He does that to our hearts. He supernaturally binds up our mental sorrows and our troubled spirits and those places that cannot be seen by the human eye.

Those wounds that we carry with us from relationship to relationship, those wounds that impact our parenting and impact our marriages and impact what we say to ourselves when we look in the mirror, those are the same wounds that God binds up. Now in the Scripture, He is specifically talking to the exiles of Israel, but I believe that this applies to women with father wounds. God heals the wounds that no one can see, to include but not be limited to love wounds and affirmation wounds and trust wounds and acceptance wounds and physical wounds and sexual abuse wounds and provision wounds. Wherever you have been wounded today, God, your heavenly Father, is capable of healing and binding up your wounds. I remember this happened for me when a counselor suggested that I write a forgiveness letter to my father. I thought she was crazy. I didn't grow up with my father. Why should I have to write him a forgiveness letter? There's nothing to forgive. But I want to submit to you that when I sat down to write that forgiveness letter, I could barely get through it.

It initiated this exchange with me of pulling up everything, every expectation I had of my father, everything I wanted him to do and wanted him to be in my life. Everything I wanted him to say. That forgiveness letter helped me to exchange my wounds for God's perfect love. Which brings me to the final lesson that I learned from Leah: Choose to see God, God's goodness, in the midst of difficult circumstances. Leah was in a horrible situation. There is no possible way of seeing that looking good for the rest of her life. She was in a loveless marriage for the rest of her life. She was in a polygamous situation, a tit-for-tat situation with her sister Rachel. Scripture went on to say that at the end of Leah's bridal week, Jacob went on to marry Rachel. And after he consummated the marriage with Rachel, Scripture says he loved her more. Leah had to live with the reality that Jacob loved her sister more than he would ever love her. But even in the midst of that, she found a reason to praise God.

And I believe God is saying that to us today too. Yes, father wounds are horrible. They are difficult. They are painful. They are unfair. It's not what any woman, any daughter, should ever receive. But in the midst of our pain, I believe that we can find a reason to praise God. Has God sustained us? Yes. Has God healed us? Has God comforted us? Has God provided for us? Has God been a father for us? Has God affirmed us? Has God lavishly heaped love upon us? And the answer, I believe, to at least one of those if not all of them, for every single person listening to the sound of my voice is yes, yes, yes, He has. And if for no other reason than the fact that He died on the cross and He's giving us access to God as our heavenly Father, that we don't have to walk through this life alone with our wound, we can walk this road with him. That is a reason to say, "This day I choose to praise God." And just like Leah, we too can find a reason to rejoice.

Meredith Brock:
Amen, Kia. Amen. My goodness, this message is so needed. I'm sitting here reflecting on my own. We were chatting before we started recording that I am a child of an absent father for lots of reasons. He spent some time in jail. He was addicted to multiple substances, chose to be absent from us, for the most part was around here and there. As you were talking, I was remembering this moment as a little girl. I was probably in grade school. I'm not totally sure how old I was, maybe second grade, and he was home. He had just done a long stint in jail and had gotten out, and he was working on his car. We didn't have a driveway. Our house was like ... you parked on the street to get to our house. And so my dad was working on the car in the street, and I really just wanted to spend time with him. And obviously I hadn't seen him in a long time. He'd been in jail for a while. And so I was trying to be his little helper working on his car, and it was his radiator.

And so I would run in and go get water from the hose with a pitcher, and I would bring it back out to him so he could fill the radiator up. And I remember at one point, he said, "Hey, sweetheart, I'm going to go ..." and I want to be really clear: My dad was never mean; he just wasn't there. And so he said, "Hey, sweetheart, I'm going to take it for a quick test drive to see if this worked. I'll be right back." And I sat down and he left. And he never came back. And I don't know if it was days, but I realized within quite some time, "Oh, he's not coming back," and went inside. And I have many of those stories of how he just wasn't there. He didn't give me ... I longed for his attention and his commitment to me, and I never received it from him. And so I'll fast-forward.

The reason I'm telling you this story is, fast-forward, you can't just — like you were saying, Kia — you cannot pretend like that pain and that wound is not there because it will show itself in other ways in your life if you do not come to our Heavenly Father with it. And for me, what that ended up looking like unfortunately was, when I got into high school and college, even a little bit ... boys were my ... boys filled that void of attention that I longed for. The affection that I didn't get from my father, I found in other men. And really, they weren't even men at the time; they were children because I was in high school and I was in college. And so they were incapable. Any other human is incapable of healing that wound. And as you were telling this story of Leah and her response to this scenario, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, was she filling that wound with children?"

And so Kia, here's my question for you because ... and I can tell you the rest of my journey, long story short, it was the Holy Spirit and a major intervention in my life where I realized that's what I was doing and I had not dealt with the wound in my life. And so I went to therapy, and I really told myself I cannot have any more boyfriends because I am using that as a pain reliever. It was a pain reliever for me. It was my anesthesia for the wound that I was unwilling to deal with. And so I had to say, "OK, no more pain reliever. I got to look this thing in the face." And so I would love to hear from you, Kia; maybe there's a listener right now who is recognizing, "Wow, I do have a father wound, and I haven't dealt with it." What's the first step, Kia? Where do you go? What do you do when you've seen it? Or maybe they're realizing ...
I don't know, maybe there is a Leah listening who's realized they got into a loveless marriage; they married a guy because maybe they had hoped that would make the hurt go away, and it didn't. And then they started having kids. And who knows, there's so many ways that this fleshes out. Kia, what should they do? What's the next step?

Kia Stephens:
Sure. I just want to number myself with whoever's listening if you feel that way, because the time to discover this ... it would be advantageous to do it prior to getting married; that wasn't my story. I was married and trying to wrestle with my father wounds and grapple with the way I behaved in middle school and in high school and in college — Meredith, as you mentioned — turning to boys and looking to them to derive your needs, get your needs met. I want to say that, and I want to say not to condemn yourself; don't condemn yourself ... When you know better, you do better to the best of your ability. But definitely acknowledgment is the first step. And it could be the sovereignty of God that He has you listening to this podcast today to help you finally acknowledge that you have been wounded.

And then the next step, which is a step that you don't need a counselor for, and that is just to get on your knees in private and invite the Holy Spirit who is a wonderful counselor into your healing journey. Invite Him to take the wheel and to steer you in the direction that you need to go. For some of us, that is counseling, that is a licensed professional Christian therapist, consistently over time ... for years or a month or two months. For some of us, that is purchasing this book, and I'm not doing a shameless plug, but the book, the way I wrote, it's my story. It's what I walked through, and it has questions at the end of each chapter. For some of us, it's joining a small group or joining group therapy or it's having an honest conversation with our spouse. Or for some of us, it's saying we're not going to have sex outside of marriage anymore. For some of us, it's saying we need to go see a marital therapist together. For some of us, it's just being honest. Being honest, that's where the journey really begins.

And the Holy Spirit is so faithful. He is so faithful. He will put things in our path, either via a podcast or a radio show or television or a friend or a book or some sort of resource that will push us along on this healing journey.

Kaley Olson:
That's really helpful, too, and a lot of good ideas because I think it's not cut and dry, the same initial spot, the starting point for everybody. But I remember in Therapy & Theology — the other podcast we have — one of the things that they'll say consistently is what you keep concealed ... you can't heal what isn't revealed. And so I think just starting there and actually taking a first step as a way to un-hide the things that might be causing you shame. That was really helpful, Kia. But a question that I have for you is, one of the things I heard you say earlier was, you were talking about the Holy Spirit. And I know that we can know God by so many different names in the Bible, but one of the ways that we know God is as God the Father. And so specifically to your journey in healing from your father wounds, how did you see redemption in your relationship with Him as God the Father before you addressed these wounds? Maybe what was it like before in your relationship with Him versus what is it like now?

Kia Stephens:
It wasn't cute; let me say that it wasn't cute. And in fact, several years ago, I had discovered this quote in the Washington Times that says it's common for people to perceive that God is like their father or the fatherly figures in their lives. Now, I was not a PK, but I was a GPK. My grandfather was a Baptist pastor. I was in church all the time. I knew church. I didn't know God, but I definitely knew church, and I began to evolve in my relationship with the Lord. But when I was in my early 20s, I remember feeling like part of this gospel that I heard was a little bit of a farce. These quotes that I heard, "God is a Father to the fatherless" ... I was just so angry. It was like, Well, prove it then. And exactly how are You going to do that? You're invisible. I can't hear You. I can't see You. Just how are You supposed to be a Father to the fatherless? It doesn't make any sense.

I was angry. I was livid with God. I still was going to church and hallelujah and blessed and highly favored and the whole nine [yards]. But I was mad. I was mad at God, and I was mad at the fact that He didn't give me the father I longed for. Because I felt like if He's sovereign and He's omniscient, omnipotent, He has total power to make sure every single woman has a wonderful father. And why wouldn't He do that? I was just so mad. And so I really had a wilderness experience with God, where I had to wrestle like Jacob did and accept the reality that just because God allows bad things in our lives, it doesn't negate the nature of who God is. God is still who He says He is in the Word. He's still compassionate. He's still loving; He's still holy. He's still intimately concerned about the things that concern us (1 Peter 5:7). He is still good. He is still loving and intentional in my life, even though this is what He allowed.

He allowed it for a purpose. (i.e., fast-forward, I wrote a book about it and I have a podcast on it) but I didn't see that then. Then I was mad and I was angry. But it took me wrestling with who God is and accepting what He allows. That's the Serenity Prayer: God help me to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. That's what that is right there. That's all of Christianity for me. Just accepting and knowing what I have the courage to change and what I can't, and trusting that in the midst of that God is sovereign. And so I would say, where I am now is ... I still wrestle. I don't want to give the impression that I don't wrestle with God and the things that He allowed in my life, but I'm quicker to get there now. I'm not so angry. Well, I don't think I'm angry at all. I'm quicker to accept and to trust that if there are things in my life I can't change, there is a sovereign plan and purpose.
God doesn't do anything happenstance. He's an intentional, holy, righteous, just, loving, good God. And those things are unwavering for me. The attributes of God are unwavering for me, even when I don't understand what He allows and what happens in my life sometimes. I know who God is. I know who God is.

Meredith Brock:
Gosh, can I relate to that, Kia? I remember going through the same phase of just being angry like, Why, God, did You put me in a family where this would be my father? And then I remember as I became a believer and started processing through this, I also got really angry about the fact that I had this need, that God created in me this need, that I couldn't make it go away. And the solutions that seemed obvious to me were not making the problem go away either. And so I became really angry. I felt very ... like I couldn't solve the problem. I learned, over the period of time, over therapy, over honestly the Holy Spirit's intervention in my life of ... that's kind of the point, is that it brings you to this place of dependency and such deep intimacy with God because you have nowhere else to turn. And I want to leave our listeners with this. And this is something that I held on to for a really, really long time.

Two things that I still to this day ... I go back to, whether it's wrestling with my own past of father wounds ... I mean the list goes on and on of things that I wrestle with. But this is something that I have come back to many, many times. And that is, God promises in His Word that He is the Author and Perfecter of our faith. He calls Himself that. He says, "I am the Author and the Perfecter. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end." He is everything for us. And that's a promise. And so even with your father wounds, whatever it is you may be facing, that is a promise that God has given to you: that you can hold on to that He is going to meet you in that need. He may not give you a father, but He is going to fulfill that need. And I love to say this to myself all the time; I preach it to myself all the time, "If God breaks one promise ever to me, He can no longer be God."

And so, listeners, hold on to that today. I don't know what you are facing, I don't know if it is a father wound and you're realizing that some of the poor choices that you have made over your lifetime are stemming from that. Hold on. He's not done with you yet. He wants to heal you. And I think for many of our listeners today, the first step is going out and getting Kia's book. Because Kia, I can hear from your own journey, man, you have wrestled through this, and you have wrestled through it well. So thank you for being one of the brave ones to step out, to talk about this, to write the book, to come on our podcast today, to have your own podcast about this because, my goodness, I think so many of the things that we see, the brokenness that we see in women's lives, stem from this place of not healing this wound.
If you're listening today, this is resonating with you and you're like, my goodness, I need to get ahold of this book, Overcoming Father Wounds by Kia Stephens; that's the name of it. You can get [the link] in our show notes, but also run on over to her website. She's got all kinds of different resources you can connect with. It's Kia — K-I-A — Stephens.com [kiastephens.com]. Make sure you go check that out.

Kaley Olson:
Absolutely. And lastly, we've linked one of our free resources below in the show notes for you, titled “Three Truths You Need To Process Your Pain”; it's something you can grab right now. And our prayer is that the scriptures in this resource will bring you comfort today as you work through whatever circumstances you're facing, whether that's father wounds or maybe some other kind of hurt that this podcast conversation maybe revealed. We equip you guys with free biblical resources like this podcast and additional content in the show notes, all because at Proverbs 31 Ministries, we believe when you know the Truth and live the Truth, it changes everything. We'll see you next time.