Giraffes on Ice, Part 5: Five Questions To Identify Unfinished Business

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. And one of the litmus tests you can you can ask yourself of if where is my unfinished bills business showing up? It's where your children can't laugh at you. Like, when you're acting like a buffoon and they're not able to laugh at you, and the like, that you know you're in a place of unfinished business. A few weeks ago, I was, having a conversation with one of my sons and Heather in the kitchen. And we were going round and round, and Elijah said to me, because you only listen when you're talking. Thank you, Beth. And I turned to Heather, and I said, is that true? And she goes, that's kinda true. And we had a big old laugh about it. Right? Big old laugh. It still hurt. It still stings. Like weeks later, it stings. Right? Well, good. I've got that that business finished. But there are some things that are still not permissible to laugh at dad about in our family. There's some stories they know to skirt around, and that's more to do with where I grew up than it is my relation with my children. Because I have a pretty open relation with my kids. We do a lot of truth telling, a lot of confrontation, a lot of lot of making up. You know, a lot of seeking of forgiveness with each other. But if the places where they can't laugh with me are the places where I'm still needing to grow and heal. Places I've still not surrendered to God. Places that I've said are my territory to deal with God. I don't want you there, because I really don't trust the story you wrote. Right? So a way to kind of identify these for yourself, you can ask yourself five questions. One is, what are my 10 most painful or shameful life events? And if you're over 18 old, you've got 10. And if you've never made that list, I encourage you to go faith go face in your faith, the author of your story, or the author of life, because you've got 10. I'll put shameful too. Painful and shameful life events. Second question would be, how did those each affect me? So this is this is really hard right here, by the way. Okay. And you'll run off like two or three. You know? And then you'll get to like four or five and you'll go you'll usually put people say themselves that didn't hurt that bad. And they'll judge themselves for putting it on the list. I shouldn't be putting that on the list. You know? And then now you know you're in the territory of your unfinished business. Okay? Second so the second question is how do how do each of those affect me? The third question is, what vows did I make about those events? See, we have when these things happen, we often make vows against how God's made us. I won't let that happen again. No one's ever gonna get to me. I remember being in seventh grade. There's a little girl I liked in seventh grade named Jenny Stallard. And we were talk talk around the school was that I like Jenny and Jenny like me. Right? And so we were just doing seventh grade stuff. And I see Jenny coming down the hall. So I do it every good seventh grade boy does. I stick my head in my locker. And I'm just gonna wait till she passes. So she's coming this way. My locker's open, and I'm like, act like you're doing something in the locker. Yeah. You just go after. I'm rummaging around, and I feel this presence kinda stop right behind me. And I'm going, oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god. And then I feel my pants come down. Because she liked me. So what is she supposed to do? But pull my pants down in the middle of the main hall. And so, I turn around with books in my hand, and I go, oh. What's the vow I made? I will never like anybody again. I will let, like, I will never let anybody know I like them again. But like that vow, like, and think, like, this is a little seventh grade story. Right? I don't even know that that would make my 10 most painful life events. Right? That's awful. That's terrible. Right? And so so that question of where the vows I made, and then what have I had to do to maintain those vows? Like, what are the activities that I've had to keep? What are the what are the That's a question. That's a question. What have I had to do to keep these vows? Right? And so what we're talking about here is the structure. Right? I turn from God. I make a vow to something other than God to maintain the status quo, and that thing ends up owning me. It's called addiction. Right? You know? And so what have I done to keep the vows? And then the the last question is, what has this cost me? And so if you want to to do the hard work of beginning to name your unfinished business, this is a great list to spend time time talking to your with yourself about, talking to God about. And God is faithful to show you these things if you ask. And God is so gracious too. He won't give you memories of things you're not ready to deal with. You know? And so there's a memory lurking back there that you know is there that you don't wanna face. And because you know there's a lot more that goes with it. My experience that God is very faithful to only give you what you need to have in order to grow, in order to heal. This is a great path to begin to deal with the unfinished business so that you can show up with your child in the reality, which is the next chapter chapter that life is tragic. Their life is gonna be tragic. No matter what you do, no matter how good of a parent you are, something's gonna happen to take their innocence. Even if Chip had never let's tell you another story about that. Because he's a man that would deal with those stories with his son, and he's one of my closest friends. When I'm coaching my son in, he's probably in third grade soccer, fourth grade soccer. Whatever it is the year before travel. Right? And I was a college soccer player. Like, division one college soccer player. I got a lot of my identity from from playing soccer. I coached professionally for a few years. Like, I love soccer. So when I had my kids, they're gonna play some soccer. Right? So my oldest son, he's playing and his and I was the new coach to the league, so they gave me all the other kids. Right. All the kids with the single parents. All the kids that like could barely get there on time. Like, it was it was the motley crew inside this neighborhood of all these kids that have been together since birth. Right? So guess how many games we were gonna win? None. Right? And I've got this competitive son. And he's trying to, like, who wants to win? And he's a good player. And so we had my son that played defense, and we had this kid that didn't speak English play offense, a little Hispanic kid. He was our he was two years younger than everybody else on the team. He's tried to score goals and my son tried to stop them. Right? And so about five games into the season, my son is fed up. And he walks off the field during the game and says, I quit. And I'm like, one, I'm the coach. You can't quit. Get out there. Right? And he got got back out there, finished the game, and we had it out in the car. And I'm going by my code. You can't quit till the season's over. You've made a commitment. You gotta follow through. What kind of person is this gonna mean when you're growing up? These are good rules. Right? So I called Chip and I say, He's like, hey, Stephen, calm down. And I'm like, Chip, like, let me let me tell you what I did. Let me tell you how I did it. And he said, hey, can can I give you some feedback? Which basically means I'm about to give you some feedback. And he said he goes, he's eight and it sucks. What would you think about him quitting if he wants to quit? And I would go, no. He can't quit. He made a commitment. He said, he he said, no, Stephen. You're the grown up. You made the commitment. You have to finish this season. Right? And and what we got to is, like, that's right. And mom's working on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and now we got practice. So he's gotta come with me to practice anyway. Alright. He didn't have to play. I would I didn't wanna coach. These were terrible soccer players that did not wanna listen, and their moms would, like, pull them out to give them extra water because they didn't want their children to sweat. Right? It was that kind of team. Right? No. He's my little son's, like, sweating. It's called soccer. Right? It but as I so I went back to Elijah and said, hey, buddy. I talked to talked to doctor Dodd and, you know, it's okay if you wanna quit. But I've gotta go coach and mom's working, so you have to go with me. But it's you can go play on the playground. You can do what you wanna do. And he goes, no. I'll finish this. I'll finish it. No. Really, son. You it's don't finish the season because I said so. And he goes, no. I really wanna finish it. Team sucks. And I'm never gonna play soccer again. Okay. But if I hadn't dealt with my grief of my own coaching and been around a man who dealt with his grief, I swear my son would still be playing soccer. I I swear he'd still be playing soccer to try to do something to make me okay. But because I let him quit soccer, my 14 old son and I are taking pilot lessons together. Like, we're we're we're do we're learning to do something neither one of us know how to do together, which I which blows my mind. Right? But it was his willingness to deal with how he screwed his kids up, which allowed me to, like, engage my kids in a different way and and deal with my unfinished business out loud with them. Like, that's the payoff. Because even if I had screwed that up, and I'm glad I didn't because there's lots of other things I did, life's gonna happen and life is tragic. You know? We I I said at the beginning of the night, four years ago, my son fell in a fire pit. It was awful. We were it was the, we sent him to some friend's house for a birthday party. And Heather did all the right things. Right? She called the house, and she talked to the mom and said, hey. You know, our sons never come out never come out there to play. Do y'all have guns in the house? Right? And we we have guns in our house, but she's calling to see we know our guns are biometrically locked down. She called, hey. Do y'all have guns in the house? No. And then she did this thing that was so brave. She said, do y'all have pornography in your home? Which talking about a woman calling another wife asking that question. I don't think the woman can tell the truth or not. But that Heather had the courage to fight through that and ask the question, like, and the mom said, no. No. No. Thank you for asking that. You know, the kids the computers don't have kids aren't gonna have access to computers. They're gonna be in the backyard playing. Like, she did all the due diligence beyond what a mother would do. But because we live in reality, she we didn't know this family. She made those phone calls, which I thought was so brave. And then she took our daughter, out, is she was 13. Like, a mother daughter date. Right? Because there's her birthday was April 3. This is April 11. They went out, like, on a year old mother daughter date. I took our twins to see a movie, and then the phone rings about ten minutes into the movie, and you get the call you never expect you don't wanna hear, which, hey. Can you meet us at the hospital? Right? So Heather and I raced from different directions to the hospital, and we walk in. And I don't wanna describe the the site. It was horrific. And to see my son and to know there's nothing I can do. Like, he's in terrible pain. There's nothing I can do. And that was the easy part because the two weeks in the burn unit was the hard part. And we didn't do anything wrong. And we stayed with them in it. Like, the whole time stayed with them in it. And friends came, and we prayed. I slept by his side, and then he slept in our bed for, like, a year trying to recover. Right? And we would take turns who's sleeping in the bed. And his innocence was shattered. His life happened. You know, it's so sad. It's so sad. And I remember him. He had to walk around the burn unit twice for us to go home. And the when you get a burn, it's not the burn that hurts. It's the skin graft they take, where they basically take a human sod off your leg or off your back, and they transplant it to the places that are trying to grow new skin. And so he he had a squadron of sod take taken off his leg, and he had to walk two laps around it. And there's nothing we could do to help him except encourage him and be there literally every step of the way. And he's like, I wanna go home, you know, and just go around that thing. And the first day, he made it halfway around. And the second day, he made one lap. And the third day, he made five laps. It was kinda because he was so pissed at the doctors. But at that point, he's like, I'm going home today. You know? But the cost of him to find that place in him to go home was the giving help of his own innocence. So life is tragic. And if and our ability to stay with our children in the tragedy as opposed to try to fix their tragedy is is the difference maker's parents, which means we've got to deal with our own tragedy. We gotta be really good at doing our own feelings well, and we need the support of lots of people in order to do that. It it like, the idea that takes a village is true, but it really takes like like a whole platoon of other parents that are of like hearted parents. Because the thing that got me through the two weeks in the hospital were Chip and Phil come into the hospital after work and sitting there. Couple other friends come and bring an ice cream at night and sitting there. Like, those are the things that got me through, where other men who I could cry with and pray with and, and be with in the pain of how terrifying it is to not know how your son's life is gonna be altered forever and ever and ever for no one's fault, except the fact that, like, life is tragic. But the rest of the story is also really good. God is faithful. Right? And the Jewish idea of faithfulness is not like God is good. The word faith in Hebrew means to build out of wood. So we say life is tragic. God is faithful. What we're saying is life is tragic, but God is building something in it. That the tragedy doesn't take away the faithfulness of God. The fact that God is recreating over and over again his kingdom. But we've have to know the recreation in our own stories in order to really believe that in our children's stories or we're gonna do things like like pad their rooms so they don't get cuts. Like, not let them risk so their hearts don't get broken. You know, not encourage them to try something that we know is gonna be pretty embarrassing in the end. You know? And so if we know that life is tragic and know how to walk through the tragedy with them, we'll be with them too. Because we can't keep them from it at all. And if they know we're that kind of person, they'll show up to us with it. If they're if we're not that kind of person, they'll go somewhere else. And sometimes those places aren't good. Sometimes they have played people to go to. For me, teachers and youth directors and coaches got me through my childhood. Thank God. God put them in my life. Right? But other things that I'm not so proud of also got me through my childhood. You know? And and so, like, they've gotta have us dealing with our tragedy so we can be with them dealing with their tragedy so that we get to experience the faithfulness of God. This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sometimes in life, we get stuck or blocked or reach an impasse. At times like these, an intensive short term therapy could help you overcome what's keeping you from the growth and changes you desire. At Sage Hill Counseling, we offer therapeutic incentives to help couples gain new momentum in their recovery process. If you wanna find out more, please visit sagehillcounseling.com.