Stepping Stones: Turning Challenges into Triumphs in Relationships

Transcript – Teachable Woman Podcast

Relationship Series

Steppingstones with Reverends Diana P. Cherry and Michele Owes

Rev. Michele Owes: [00:00:00] Welcome back. We are so excited to be with you. I am Reverend Michele Owes. I am with Reverend Mrs. Deanna P. Cherry, author extraordinaire, and we're going to be continuing our discussion on relationships. We are not here as experts. We are here as two women who love God, who love our husbands, and who love our families.

Rev. Michele Owes: We want to share with you some of our experiences and how the word of God brought us through each of those challenges. Our last podcast was about whether we are ready for a relationship as women. We talked about the fact that it is important to be one with ourselves, if you will, to love ourselves.

Rev. Michele Owes: Do we care for ourselves and treat ourselves well? We [00:01:00] should before we draw someone else into the relationship. We said that if we're already married and we're challenged in this area, we need to spend more time alone with the Lord and allow him to nurture us and direct us.

Rev. Michele Owes: Don’t allow us to put ourselves in a position where we're fussing, fighting, and cursing at one another. But know that when we disagree, we've not yet reached God's best answer. That means more prayer time. That means more time and fellowship with the Lord so that he can direct both of us. Ultimately we want peace in the home when we are in a married state.

Rev. Michele Owes: Rev. Cherry shared that being single, or being unmarried, is also a blessed state. You have no lack. She said, when you eat your whole family eats which I thought was cute. But what we were sharing with you as the ultimate goal is to be in a good place with God, whether you are single or whether you are married, yet in a good place with God through his son, Jesus Christ, allow the Holy Spirit to lead guide and direct us in the way that he would have us to go.

Rev. Michele Owes: We talked about how amazing it is that we can be angry about a thing, but if we get on our knees and go to God before we speak to our mate, God can fix our hearts. God can change things for us such that when we have a conversation it's a productive one. So today, we're going to talk about relationships, but we want to talk about the impact of the family on relationships.

Rev. Michele Owes: Before we start, we're going to let Ms. Cherry say hello.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Hello to all. I pray that you're having a great day, and I pray that you are excited because I think Reverend Owes and I stay excited, and we are especially excited because God has given us an opportunity to share [00:03:00] our hearts with you. As she said, we're not perfect. We're just striving towards perfection. We've made our mistakes. We've had our ups. We've had our downs. We're just human beings. We're two women of God who were married to two great men of God. Now, our true desire in life is to share with you and to give you that which we have freely received from God so that you might be blessed. Be blessed by the things that we have experienced and learned and what we have done in our lives and our ministries. So be blessed as you listen to us, and always remember to love you. We are striving that all of our teachings would be a guilt-free zone, a judgment-free zone, and we're just here to minister to you and do the best that we can do to be a blessing [00:04:00] to you.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen. The scriptures say that we're blessed to be a blessing. We have been blessed and our desire is to be a blessing to you. Today, we're going to talk about family relationships and family traditions, or what we've experienced in our lifetime can affect the relationships that we currently have.

Rev. Michele Owes: Whether we are looking at a wonderful manifestation of God's creative ability and we're hopeful, or whether we are in a married relationship, the past can be brought into the future, whether it is in a positive or not so positive light and how that can affect us. If mom and dad didn't stay together or were never together, or if one stepped out of the relationship and had a relationship outside of the marriage, or we saw our uncles carry on in certain [00:05:00] ways, or even our aunts, whatever we saw, whatever we were exposed to, and now that can cause us to have our antennas up in anything that we think is similar.

Rev. Michele Owes: You know we're ready to pounce because I've seen this before. Those things can affect our relationship. Mrs. Cherry, help us out.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Well, you know, I was sharing with Sister Owes. I did not have a traditional family life, as we think of traditional. But remember, now I'm 80 years old. I grew up in a very, very segregated Virginia. I had an inferior education, an inferior home life, and an inferior upbringing. There was nothing about my life, in my opinion, that would be desired by any. I'm in the process of writing my autobiography and the thing that I've come to know very clearly [00:06:00] is that the circumstances of our birth, the things that we've experienced in life, have very little to do with the outcome of our lives.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen. Amen. Amen.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Regardless of what our lives were like, God can take whatever is that we've been exposed to, and he can turn that around and make it work for good. I've come to realize that things that could have been stumbling blocks to my success, I realized that they're really steppingstones to my victory in life. I have always been able to internalize things. When I have been taught good, I innately want it to be good. When I was taught how to mingle and [00:07:00] intermingle in high school and elementary school, it just helped me to be a better person. I don't think I'm different from anybody else. My family life, it would be almost impossible for anybody to have one as inadequate as mine was. But God can take whatever it is that we have in us, and in the master's hand, he can touch it. He can make the most insignificant life, a big difference in the lives of many. I share this to say to you that perhaps your upbringing wasn't the best, perhaps you didn't have the, I'm going to really date myself, the Ozzie and Harriet type family life, or the Walton's, or one of those shows on TV, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter. The important [00:08:00] thing, once we're grown, is not to allow ourselves to be guided by what was. Make a determination to live in what is and to make our lives make a difference right now.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: If you didn't have a good life, then be very careful not to have a family that's not on a firm foundation because you don't want to repeat what you went through. Although I probably had a very inferior education, I was educated in a one-room school with five grades being taught by one teacher in that one room. For the first five years of my life, that was my academic background. It is impossible for you to have a good educational background in a setting like that. For a few years later in my life, I had an opportunity to go to a Catholic school and I lived with a Catholic family. For the first time in [00:09:00] my life, I had a touch of what it was like to be in a family. The things that I learned in Catholic school and the things that I learned in that Catholic family inspired and encouraged me to want more than what I had been brought up with. Whatever your experience is, it doesn't have to tear you down. It can build you up. It doesn't matter what happens in your life. Things hurt you and stuff like that, but it doesn't have to determine who you are. Things that happen to you absolutely don't dictate the outcome of your life. When I was a little girl, Daddy used to tell me, girl, if your mouth doesn't kill you, you're going to live to be a hundred, because I had an opinion about everything. I put my little [00:10:00] nosy mouth into grownups' business all the time. When I was writing the other night, I said, Daddy, my mouth hasn't killed me yet, and I'm 80 years old.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: I want you to know that that the same mouth that was in so many people's business, God has used that mouth to speak life to people all over the world.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: You know, just be encouraged.

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: I had a good marriage and family. But the thing I want to say to you is just be encouraged. Be encouraged and remember that things that might look like stumbling blocks to your success are actually steppingstones to your victory if we view them differently.

Rev. Michele Owes: That is absolutely beautiful, absolutely beautiful. [00:11:00] Stumbling blocks into stepping stones. I love that. I love that.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Yeah,

Rev. Michele Owes: My father was in the military. And so much of my family life was him being stationed somewhere and we were without him. And then there were times that we were stationed stateside.

Rev. Michele Owes: My father spent much time in other countries, and my mom did not always want us to go because there were seven of us, and we were at varying grade levels. She didn't want them to be subject to having to learn a foreign language before they graduated if it was their high school year. If the family went with the military person, the orders were a year longer.

Rev. Michele Owes: And so that meant at a minimum two years wherever we were going to go. So that was her reasoning. But our family life was. Mom was more of a nurturer, but my father was very disciplined and very strict. [00:12:00] Mom could yell all day, do this, do that, you know. But when my Daddy put his foot on the steps, we knew Dad was home, and we got in order.

Rev. Michele Owes: You know, because he did not play around. My father was also from a very large family where there were a lot of men. There were 10 men in my father's family, 10 brothers, right? There was a lot happening in the family. I may not have spoken about everything, but I heard about everything.

Rev. Michele Owes: So, I have my own ideas about how men conducted themselves and what they did. What was wrong with this and wrong about that? And so, going into a relationship, I had my thoughts. Interestingly enough, when my husband and I finally talked about it, his father's family was very [00:13:00] similar to mine.

Rev. Michele Owes: We shared and swapped family stories. There was no shame in our game. We said this happened and this happened. But Mrs. Cherry is absolutely right. God allows us to see and experience things for a reason and it's not for our detriment. It's for our betterment that at some point in time, even if what happened was not a good thing, if we will allow God to heal us of whatever that was, then we can be a mouthpiece for the Lord in that same plane and help someone else.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Right.

Rev. Michele Owes: It can be a stepping stone. We don't want anybody's past to dictate their future. We don't want you to allow it to destroy your existing marriage if you are in a marriage or to destroy what may be a marriage. If we're hopeful, in, or in the stage talking about getting married, we [00:14:00] want you to know that only God can fix it for you.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Yeah.

Rev. Michele Owes: No person cannot fix the issues of your life. Only God can fix it for you. When Mrs. Cherry talks about the time that she spent in Catholicism, she shares that she learned good morals there. There are things that God wants us to learn from every experience that we have. It's not always about fault, or whose fault it is.

Rev. Michele Owes: It's about what God wants us to know so that we can be His witnesses and share with others in a way that can help free them.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Yes.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen. That is true. I remember sitting in a service,

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: According to Romans, all things do work together for the good to those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. So [00:15:00] things that happened to me, to Reverend Owes, to all of us, they might not at that point, have been good in our opinion, but they're working together for good now. I think one of the reasons why, in the last session, we wanted you to focus on your relationship with God, making sure that that was very pristine and in optimal condition. I think the reason we spent so much time is that we want you to know, regardless of what your upbringing was, if you get yourself perfected right now with God and make loving God and having a proper relationship with God your first priority, trust me all things will work together for good. It might not seem good at the time, but that's where faith [00:16:00] comes in. And you just have to believe if you put Him first,

He's going to take care of you. He's going to strengthen you. You're going to have the sufficiency of his grace to carry on. You're going to have his loving kindness and his tender mercies. And you can make your life, make a difference. Nobody's life could have been much worse than mine, but I didn't let that determine who I became. I didn't let the fact that people called me frisky make me frisky. I determined that I was not going to be frisky because they thought I was frisky. So just turn things around and make them work together for good.

Rev. Michele Owes: And hearing that reminds me of learning that God was not going to ask me, when I got to heaven, how my father or any member of my family treated me, He was going to ask me what kind of daughter or sister [00:17:00] or aunt that I was. In other words, I was completely responsible for who I became in the relationship. And when I heard that in that message, and I thought, hmm, I've not been the most responsive daughter. I'm almost excommunicating. If you will, we don't have to talk that much. We checked in on the major holidays, but when I learned that God would ask me what kind of daughter I was, not what kind of father I had. I changed how I responded to my father, and I realized that once I changed, he changed, and we ended up with a beautiful relationship.

Rev. Michele Owes: Excuse me. My father always wanted to hear what either [00:18:00] my husband and I were teaching. He would check in every Sunday evening. Whenever he got the package, he would listen to the messages right away. He was really involved in the calls on both of our lines. He would share his thoughts. Once I took a ride with a friend and spent Veterans Day with my father because he was a veteran. Much of how he handled his personal life was a result of war and a result of the things that he had seen and experienced.

Rev. Michele Owes: He went in one way but came out another, and we didn't, we didn't have a term for some of the things that used to happen with my father. We didn't have PTSD. We didn't have that term. We just used to say that sometimes he's crazy. I had one sister who had no fear of him whatsoever, and the rest of us did, but the sister who had no fear of him, taking care of [00:19:00] everything, you know, for everybody, you know, she would go in his pocket and get what we needed for lunch money.

Rev. Michele Owes: She would, she would get what we needed. Because she did not fear him. And there were those moments when we didn't quite understand what he was thinking. When you woke my father up, he woke up ready to attack because he was in war mode all the time. When I began to pray about being a better daughter, my Heavenly Father allowed me to see things about my father that I could not know with my natural mind and could not understand.

Rev. Michele Owes: Then my father began to share things with me about his childhood and began to share things about what he experienced in war. One day that Veterans Day, we spent the whole day sitting at the table going through [00:20:00] the Bible and exchanging stories and things that we knew, and God knit our hearts together.

Rev. Michele Owes: I remember when I went to visit him once, my brother and I drove to see him. Everybody in his neighborhood knew him because he was that kind of guy. He was very friendly and very handsome, but nobody knew he had children. When you walked into his apartment, all of our pictures were all over the wall, but because we had not been there, people didn't know he had children.

Rev. Michele Owes: And that, that broke my heart. That was the indictment of what kind of daughter I had been. There was such a great expectation of what kind of father he should have been. But I did not know the details of his life until later, which helped to explain who he was. It caused me to have a tender [00:21:00] heart and compassion toward him.

Rev. Michele Owes: And I became a much better daughter, but I couldn't become a better daughter until my Heavenly Father taught me how to be one. In becoming a better daughter, he became a better father to me.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Yes, yes.

Rev. Michele Owes: When he passed us, he left me responsible for the affairs of his life. When we were cleaning out his home, my sisters said to me, I was embarrassed, and it broke my heart when I found all these letters that you wrote him.

Rev. Michele Owes: I found all this communication between the two of you. I felt like I could have done better. I explained to her, listen, God really got on my case about doing better. The thing that happened to make our relationship a mature one that God could be pleased with was His work. It caused me to [00:22:00] not be so quick to judge anyone after having judged my father for so many years.

Rev. Michele Owes: God helped me see a real picture of his life. It fixed my heart. We judge so quickly, but we really don't know anything. My dad and I'll share this quickly: I was in Vietnam. His best friend was a Jewish young man whom he had met from New York. My dad went into the military at the age of 15.

Rev. Michele Owes: He was a boy; he went to war as a boy. His friend's body was hit by a landmine, but my father carried his body back to base. And so when the family had his service, and his body was flown home, they wanted to know who the man was who cared enough about their son to carry him back to [00:23:00] base.

Rev. Michele Owes: And they wanted my father to come and speak at the funeral, but he wouldn't. He said it was it was just too much pain. It was too traumatic for him.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Mmm

Rev. Michele Owes: They always contacted him because they were a wealthy family. What can we do for you? We understand what you did for our son. What can we do for you?

Rev. Michele Owes: And my father said nothing. him being my friend was enough.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: My, my.

Rev. Michele Owes: To imagine that kind of trauma and that trauma shaped his relationships. He didn't want to be too close to anybody after that because of the fear of loss. But it took a holy God to help me see that.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Yeah. You know, I always like to teach that in life we can't change anyone. Only God can. We can change ourselves and allow God to change us. And the change in us can effect a change in others.

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes, it can.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: That's a good thing to remember in all relationships. [00:24:00] You and I can't change anyone. We can allow God to change us, and the change in us will affect a change in others.

Rev. Michele Owes: I like the stepping stones. That became a stepping stone for me. To be able to take a person as they were. I think it helped prepare me for ministry because I could just receive a person the way that they were. That's the way God wants us to receive people the way that they are without all of the extra judgment of what we think they could be, or should be, or could have been, or didn't do, or could have done.

Rev. Michele Owes: And I think that will help us in our personal relationships. Uh, not only with our spouse, if we're married if we're hopeful in a relationship [00:25:00] to be. Even with our siblings, sometimes we just have such great expectations of our siblings and how they could have, would have, but we don't really know where they are.

Rev. Michele Owes: We just expect because of what we think.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: and our children and our grandchildren

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: our great grandchildren for me.

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: was oftentimes have unrealistic expectations of them. to realize that the world in which they live is absolutely, totally different from the one I lived in. As the world likes to say, cut them some slack.

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes. Amen.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Love them.

Rev. Michele Owes: Yes.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Change us, change our perspective of them. That oftentimes will effect a change in them.

Rev. Michele Owes: Amen. That is a beautiful note on which we will end. Let's just love, love, and listen, and listen, and let God be glorified. Let's allow [00:26:00] that love and the traumas of our lives to be stepping stones to our future. We're not going to let those things from our past dictate our future. We're going to allow the Word of God to heal us so that we can be a living witness of the goodness of God.

Rev. Michele Owes: Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you being a part of our podcast community. We're excited about the retreat. We hope to see you in 21 days. Oh, my goodness 21 days. Now, I just want to say that if you registered for the retreat, make sure you registered for the hotel if that's where you will stay.

Rev. Michele Owes: If you registered for the hotel, ensure you registered for the retreat. Okay,

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Amen.

Rev. Michele Owes: We will see you there. We love you, and we thank you for [00:27:00] giving us an opportunity to share. Bye now.

Rev. Diana P. Cherry: Bye-bye.