Episode Transcript:

Well, hey, friends, welcome to the Life Renovation Podcast.
We're your hosts, Glendie Loranger and Elizabeth Morrison.
And together, we're breaking down the walls that divide us through meaningful conversations around faith, family and sexuality.
Morning, Elizabeth.
Good morning.
It's a great morning.
Yes.
Yeah, and if you've listened to the last two of our podcasts, you know that we're starting with sharing our stories because we know that one way that you can learn about us and learn to kind of trust us with some of these hard conversations that we're having around faith, family and sexuality is to hear our stories.
Yeah.
So I shared mine, and today Glendie is going to share hers.
So if you have not listened to last week's episode, I just want to ask you to maybe pause this one and go back.
Elizabeth's story is so rich about divorce and the church and just a place that you really hadn't expected to find yourself in your twenties.
So pause that and then jump back into this.
But what we really want to do in this next 20 minutes is help you take a look at an area of your life that maybe you've been ignoring for a while.
You know, we call this podcast Life Renovation, really because it's not like a home renovation.
We're not talking DIY stuff.
We want to do renovation of those areas in our life where we want transformation.
You know, so often we want transformation, and yet we're not willing to do the hard work of renovation.
And it's much like a DIY, right, where we see a big old spot on the wall.
Maybe there's a hole that got punched in the wall accidentally by the door, right?
And we walk by it, and we go, oh, I need to fix that.
And we walk by it on Tuesday, and we go, oh, I need to fix that.
And we walk by it on Saturday, and oh, and we do that with so many of these hard areas in our lives in faith, family, and sexuality, where we need to address them, do a bit of renovation.
And so that's the purpose of this podcast, is to maybe give you a little kickstart and help you consider some of those areas that you might want to address in your life, especially in the areas of faith, family, and sexuality.
Yeah, there are areas that are easy to ignore because they hurt, and they take a lot of tools to try and fix and energy.
And so our heart is to give you the tools so that you know how to step into these areas of healing.
Yeah, so most of our podcasts, we'll try to hit around 20 to 30 minutes, if this is your first time joining us, we'll have lots of guest speakers coming up, different people and experts in the area.
But the other thing that we just want to mention is Elizabeth and I are both on staff at an organization called Life Services Spokane.
And we are the ones who sponsor this Life Renovation Podcast because we truly believe that life is valuable and that Jesus Christ is the author of life.
And so here we go.
Glendie, can you just kind of give us a picture of what your childhood looked like?
You faced some things early in your teens, but tell us kind of what it was like growing up for you.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's dive in.
Here we go.
Childhood, I, on the outside, I was a pretty normal little girl.
Although I was super geeky.
So geeky.
I was desperately wanting to be popular, but like I had the big buck teeth and was tall and skinny, like no waist, no butt.
Like I was quite a looker.
So elementary years, you know, my dad was a leader in our community.
And where was that?
I was in Montana, Great Falls, Montana.
She's a Montana girl.
Go Montana.
So grew up in Great Falls.
And it was wonderful.
We had a wonderful neighborhood that I remember just running around with a bunch of kids in our neighborhood all night.
And it was, I lived in that era where you could run around all day, and then you'd hear somebody's mom calling out the door, Glendie, come home.
And so we'd come home.
And who's we?
My sister and I, and then all the neighborhood kids.
There were probably about 10 to 12 of us that ran around together.
But during those elementary years, I also had some tough stuff going on.
My aunt and her new husband and her kiddos moved in with us for a while, and I experienced some things that little girls should never have to experience at the hand of my uncle.
That just created in me almost a hypersexuality.
So I'll just name it.
There's a lot of sexual trauma there, and it was very hidden.
My parents didn't know about it, and my parents know now about it, but that created in me a pretty big turmoil of trust and attention-getting.
So it was a weird dynamic where healthy childhood from the outside looking in, some really dark stuff happening on the inside.
And that probably led you into an interesting, you know, teen years, right?
Because you had, you were taught some things that weren't right when you were a child.
Yeah.
I've read this about people who have experienced sexual trauma is in many ways we have to normalize it in our brains in order to survive it.
And much of what I experienced was repressed, meaning that stuffed away in a part of my brain that I didn't actively or consciously remember.
And so, yeah, I learned early on the thing I believed was that I was most valuable for my body.
And so that played out really negatively, early sexual involvement with guys and literally like junior high and high school years were just spent trying to find some guy's attention.
I don't remember a lot about school.
You know, I was an athlete here and there, but not a lot about activities.
I remember more about the guy search and the next party, because partying made it a lot easier.
A lot of promiscuity.
So a lot of promiscuity until summer right after I graduated from high school, and I found that I was 17 and pregnant.
And first words out of my mouth were, I can't have a baby.
So all of our plans from that moment forward were to not have a baby.
We want to dive more into that story, and then we'll come back to that here soon.
Life Renovation is one of many ministries of Life Services Spokane.
When a woman is facing an unplanned pregnancy, her decisions about life and abortion don't have to be navigated alone.
That's where Life Services Clinics comes in.
We offer compassionate, confidential, non-judgmental, expert medical care, all with no cost.
If you or someone you know needs to talk to Life Services about an unplanned pregnancy, we are here with you.
Reach out to us at lifeservices.org.
That's lifeservices.org.
We're back with Glendie's story about her childhood.
You had just told us that you found yourself pregnant when you were 17.
And if you're listening, you just need to know.
There's no condonation.
I know so many women have experienced an unplanned pregnancy.
If you look at pregnancy itself, most people can't really plan that.
Yeah.
But when you're 17 and just headed off to college, it's quite a journey.
So, yeah, I made the decision to have an abortion.
It really, there was no other decision that we talked about.
And when I say we, I told my folks right off the bat, told my mom, and because I had declared, I can't have a baby, we just, we automatically said, well, the only way to not have a baby is to have an abortion.
And did you have a faith background at that time?
I wouldn't consider myself a follower of Christ.
We were creasters, Christmas Eve, Easter Sunday, church goers.
And so faith was absolutely not a consideration in this at all.
It was more just, what's the convenience factor?
You're headed to college, there are certain people we don't want to know, and you can't have a baby.
And so what did you need to hear?
You know, you're facing this unplanned pregnancy, you're looking at abortion.
What did you need to hear as a 17-year-old?
What was your heart looking for?
Well, when I look back, first off, I don't want to condemn my folks.
I love my folks, and they did the best they could with what they had.
But there was no talk of, could we?
Could we have this baby?
Could we make this work?
Could you postpone college for a year?
Could you?
Like, how could we make this work?
What do you think about adoption?
Let's have more conversation tomorrow.
Like, we literally had an abortion appointment made within the hour.
Wow.
So it was just, you know, it was an automatic solution, so let's run with it.
Yeah.
And I really, I felt like it was the only choice that we considered.
So what did I need to hear?
I needed somebody who could say, all right, I think you could do this.
Let's look at all these options.
Right, and to slow down the thinking, probably.
Slow down the thinking.
Yeah.
Now, Elizabeth, you and I both know that when you're in crisis, you only think with about a third of your brain, that fear process.
And so we see that so often in gals that come in, and I know that was exactly where I was at.
Not thinking with my full brain, that's for sure.
Right.
Okay, so you decided on abortion and then had to live with yourself and with that fact afterwards.
So tell us what it was like to carry the weight of that into college and into kind of your adult life.
Well, I had the abortion four days before I left for college, and I came out here to Washington State for college.
So from Montana to Washington.
So I moved out of my family's home, and I was four days later.
Like, I was still feeling the physical effects of it, and I was just emotionally broken.
I wouldn't have said I felt guilty, but I definitely felt shame.
And I just repeated that process, and jumping in from guy to guy to guy.
I mean, out here at Eastern Washington, it was really easy to find a party and find a guy.
And then I would get together with them, and the minute we got intimate, I'd start crying and share the story about the abortion, and I'd watch them run out the door, half the time just putting on their clothes.
I know that's a little graphic, but that was the life.
And so it wasn't until I met in my junior year, met a guy who just had this rock-solid faith, and he became my best friend.
We worked together.
We had the same classes, and we were in our internship together, and he had something I wanted.
I didn't know how to get.
He just had this security about his faith, and he was the first guy who didn't jump on me and use me for my bod.
And so you said you wouldn't say you were a Christian, but then he had a faith, and you weren't turned off by it.
You were actually kind of like drawn in by it.
I was totally drawn to it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would ask him questions.
His name's John.
He became my husband.
So, spoiler alert.
Plot twist.
But I would ask him questions about like praying, and I'd say, so John, you pray, like you talk to God.
Does he answer you?
Are you hearing voices?
And he would just answer, like just totally deadpan, like, yep, I do hear from God.
Yes, I pray.
And no, I'm not hearing voices.
I'm not crazy.
You should try praying too.
And I would, he'd leave me like with my jaw dropped.
Yeah, that's convicting.
So convicting.
And so he treated you different.
Not only, you know, did he have this faith that you wanted, but he treated you differently than any of the other guys you had met in your life.
Totally treated me different.
In fact, I was the one.
Sorry, John, if you're laughing.
I was the one who pushed for sex, pushed for everything there, because it's what I knew and it's what I thought was expected.
And he wanted my mind and my heart and loved me for the person I was.
And so he did everything that every Christian would have told you not to do and married me, even though I hadn't professed faith in Jesus yet.
And he married me knowing everything about my past and still loving me right there.
So it was two years later.
I always say that John prayed me into the kingdom two years of really rocky marriage before I finally bit my knee to the Lord.
And so you married John, but you still hadn't really dealt with all of the trauma from the past abortion.
No, in fact, I became a high school teacher.
And I remember several times I had students who would come up to me and say, Oh, Mrs. Loranger, I'm pregnant.
And there were every one of them, I told them about my abortion, but it was the last few.
I had become a Christian by then, and I wanted to ask them to reconsider abortion.
I wanted to unpack more options for them.
And I specifically remember it changed when I accepted Christ as my Savior.
But I still wouldn't have gone there with my story.
I would have told you, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
It was just something that happened.
Yeah.
So, OK, so you, you know, you had this abortion at 17.
You met John, you became a Christian, but you still hadn't fully healed from your abortion.
So it took a couple years after you met Christ to start to heal from that.
Is that right?
Sixteen years.
Sixteen years later.
So we'd had, I'd been a high school teacher for almost a decade.
We had our first child, Reed, and that was beautiful and amazing.
I was able to, he's our bio child.
And then our second child, Adam, John wanted to adopt.
And so we just had this beautiful adoption story.
Adam's a whole story in its own.
We'll do a segment on adoption someday and I'll tell his story.
But it was with Adam's adoption that the anger tipped over because I'd had through this whole 16 years, I'd had some really big intimacy issues.
The fact that John has stayed with me is a miracle in itself.
Intimacy issues and anger issues.
And really big control issues.
I didn't have girlfriends.
I didn't know how to be a friend with other girls.
I knew how to flirt with guys.
And so even as a high school teacher, I didn't have great boundaries with the coaches I worked with and the guys I worked with.
I never cheated, but I had horrible boundaries.
Yeah, that's probably all you had learned, right?
Is just how to interact with guys.
So that makes sense.
Yeah, I didn't know how to do that.
So we had Adam, and literally within three weeks, I was over the top and I became a danger to the kids.
And that was with just the emotions that came out and the behavior.
It was the behavior, and it didn't make sense to me, Elizabeth.
It was almost like there was a switch that got flipped and my anger, and I did not know how to turn that switch off.
I would fly into these rages, and John didn't know what to do with that.
We had a toddler at home and a brand new baby that we'd just adopted.
And I could not have told you why I was so angry and why it was coming out at the kids.
I now know that many post-abortive women have a hard time connecting with their kids that come after the abortion, but I didn't know it then.
I had no idea that any of it was related to the abortion.
Yeah, I know that there's some key things that John said to you and that you realized after that, so I want us to get to that, but real quick, we're going to go to a break, and then we'll hear more about how God met Glendie in this space of anger and behavior.
Thanks for joining us today.
It can be hard in our culture to know what you believe about life and abortion, where to go if you were to face this choice, or even how to talk about it.
But at Life Services Spokane, you don't have to walk these paths alone.
Our Unexamined Life Workshop is designed to help you navigate conversations around life, choice and abortion that are all respectful and accurate, equipping you to know what you believe and why.
To find our next free Unexamined Life Workshop, visit lifeservices.org.
That's lifeservices.org.
And we're back with Glendie sharing her story.
And so you had just told us that you had adopted Adam, and you had finally, you know, you had your kids, you had your husband, but you had these anger issues, and you didn't know where they were coming from.
John said something key to you in that.
Yeah, there was a day, Adam was three weeks old, and I crossed a line with him, so much so that I called John home from work, and my husband's a medical provider, so for me to call him home from work was giant, but I said, I'm in trouble.
Yeah.
He came in and realized what the situation was and sat me down and said, I'm not losing these kids because of you.
It's time to get your anger under control.
And I didn't know then what I know now that he had a plan to leave and to take the kids if I didn't choose to get help.
I was that over the top.
So I had a choice to make to either allow the Lord in and allow some healing to come or choose destruction.
I knew I would have lost everybody, both kids and John.
And so you jumped into this healing journey, right?
What did that look like for you?
Was it counseling?
Was it a pastor, friends?
I started with our pastors.
You know, I had accepted the Lord.
I had been growing in my faith, and we'd gotten pretty close with our pastors.
We were in a small town and out on the coast of Washington.
And Diana began meeting with me.
She was our pastor's wife.
And she just asked a simple question of the Holy Spirit.
We went into prayer, and she said, Let's ask the Lord where the anger is coming from.
And so that's all she did.
Lord, would you show us where Glendie's anger is coming from?
We just in prayer.
And immediately, I knew it was the abortion.
Like, it was just the first thing that came to mind, and then I had all these thoughts and this condemning, oppressive feeling.
So I realized that I felt so incredibly guilty because Adam's mom had taken great pains to make sure he had life and then placed him in my arms as his adoptive mama.
Yeah, and you were there when he was born, right?
And I was there when he was born.
And I had not done that with my first son.
I chose an abortion for my first son and my unplanned pregnancy.
And so that unworthiness, the unworthiness that I felt to be Adam's mom was just so incredibly heavy.
And the weirdest part was that it came out against Adam in my actions and my behaviors towards him.
So now we knew what the root was, but I didn't know how to deal with it.
Yeah, that's a huge realization to see.
Oh my gosh, I'm going back, you said 16 years.
16, yeah.
To something that happened before you were a Christian as a teenager.
Yeah, so Diana didn't let me out of that, as most good pastors do.
There were some books and Bible studies I began.
One of the probably the best ones, and we'll link it in the podcast, is Intimacy Issues, 21 Questions Christian Women Ask About Sex.
It's a little older now, but they've revised it.
And in that book, they had a chapter about abortion and how to deal with it, and had one woman's story of how she had talked to a friend about her abortion and just kind of walked back through the day.
So I remember telling Diana that I had read this chapter, and anytime the woman in the chapter tried to talk about a baby, it was like my mind would go blank.
So it was a chapter that just didn't make sense to me.
And so I remember telling Diana that, going, that was just stupid.
Yeah, they talked about the day of the abortion.
I would never do that.
Famous last words.
Yeah, because then she goes, so tell me about your day.
And I swear I wanted to hit her.
Don't think that was appropriate, but it just started.
Yeah, just the memories.
They just started tumbling out.
I couldn't even hold them back.
So I just started telling her everything, everything I remembered about the office, the doctor, the Browns, the 70s furniture, brick building.
And then I got to the end.
And I was telling Diana everything I had experienced, and I told her at the end.
I had started screaming, I killed my baby.
And then I said, Diana, but it wasn't a baby.
It was just 2.2 ounces of tissue, because that's what the nurse had told me.
And that's what I believed all these years.
It wasn't a baby.
And I had the most incredible experience.
I was a fairly new Christian, but I had a vision, and literally a white wall lifting.
And behind it, I saw Jesus.
And I heard Him speak to me, and He said it wasn't just tissue, Glendie, He was a baby.
He's your son, and you'll be with Him in Heaven someday.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
So I have a little boy in Heaven, and I named him Timothy.
Timothy.
And you'll be with Him one day.
I will.
As the tears are flowing, this is really real for you.
And I've heard you, and I've seen you give this story so many times, Glendie, and yet here we are today, and the tears are here.
And so just kind of tell us what you're experiencing, and tell us why we think the tears are coming, because you have something tomorrow night that's pretty powerful.
Yeah, I do.
Yeah, Elizabeth's right.
I've told this in so many different churches, so many different capacities, and yet it's emotional today.
I don't think you ever fully move past.
I'll get to what tomorrow is.
But the crazy thing about abortion is that most of our country and most of everything that you hear in the media tells you to shout your abortion.
To be proud of it.
To move on.
Glendie, you got to go to college.
So one of the things that we're told by the media and by the public is that we're supposed to shout our abortions, that we're supposed to be proud of it.
I got to go to college because I had an abortion.
The problem is that there's a baby there.
Yes, it was my body, but it was Timothy's body as well.
And science has proven that.
But for me as Timothy's mom, there was no place to grieve.
There was no place to actually acknowledge his existence.
In fact, I really think that a lot now on this end, I think that a lot of my turmoil in college, right after the abortion, the jumping from guy to guy, that was really somebody tell me I'm going to be okay.
And it was really that lack of place to grieve.
That was my way to grieve.
And so I love that what we get to do at Life Services is give people a place to bring their shame and their grief.
Because grief buried always leaks.
And that's what happened with me those 16 years.
It was leaking in all those ways.
And so this last eight weeks, I've been walking through with another small group of women an abortion care and recovery class.
And it's been powerful.
It's what we do.
We've been doing this for 32 years at Life Services, but I haven't led one.
And I haven't been in one for many, many years.
I've experienced it myself, but not been through as a facilitator.
And tomorrow night, we have a memorial for our children.
And it's the last week.
It's the last week this week.
And so, of course, it would be fresh.
I think when you grieve somebody, it's beautiful.
If you think about Old Testament times, women would put ashes on their hair, and they would wear black, and they were allowed a period of mourning, right?
When they lost children, when they lost family members.
And so, to take this eight weeks to really explore forgiveness, who was involved with the abortion, who do I hold responsible, who am I offended, to really seek the Lord's forgiveness, and then to remember our children, that they were children.
They were unborn, pre-born, but they were still God's creation.
And so, we get to do that tomorrow night, and it's been incredible to walk this out with these other women.
And here I am this many years out.
My son would be 36 years old, which is older than you, Elizabeth.
And yet, it's crazy how grateful I am that God turned the tragedy of his death through abortion into a testimony of God's goodness.
But it's also crazy how sometimes it can still just land, and the emotions are there.
And God really is our healer.
It's going back through and finding His truth and Him giving you that vision of the wall and of Him holding Timothy and leading you to these healing groups that really brought you to this transformation.
But it still obviously brings tears, and they're good tears.
And they're good tears.
Grief is not a bad thing.
Grief is a freeing thing.
Yeah, it's not an easy process.
And so I guess I just want to speak to you if you're there and you're listening.
And I don't know if you're in your car, or maybe you're in your kitchen, and my story just hit hard because it's your story.
Different details, different circumstance.
You're a different person than I am.
But you find the tears close, and you find the regret and the guilt or the shame right there for you.
You don't have to carry it.
You can put it down, you can give it over to the Lord.
And I just want to encourage you, there are pregnancy centers around the country.
There are organizations like ours that have grief groups and abortion recovery groups that are actually online.
There are grief groups, recovery groups for both men and women.
You know, Elizabeth, you know that a lot of times when I share my story in churches, the first people who come up are not women.
They're men.
They're men in their 40s, 50s and 60s who have paid for or pushed for abortion, and they now are dealing with the regret and the shame and the guilt of that.
And there is healing available.
You don't have to carry that.
Healing and freedom and wholeness is available.
That's what I've experienced.
And you're right, it doesn't happen.
I don't think it happens through secular means.
It is only through Jesus Christ.
Because what we enter into when we agree to abortion is really an agreement to destroy a human life.
And so the only antidote to that kind of decision is grace.
And grace is only offered through the person of Jesus Christ.
And I just want to offer out, I mean, if you're out there and listening and you just need a little bit of personal connection, Elizabeth and I are both available.
I'd love to have an online chat with you and put you in some right directions.
We're going to definitely have some resources linked in the show notes.
And I just also want to thank you for listening to my story.
And thank you, Glendie, for sharing it.
This is the whole point of this podcast, is to get to those things that we ignore because it's easier to ignore it than to address it and to cry and to shed tears in the middle of a workday on a Monday because it's scary to address those things.
And so if that is you, if this struck something in you, please put the dishes down, pull over, give us a call, put it in notes that you would reach out for healing because that's God grabbing your heart and giving you a sign that He hears you and that He's with you and that you do not have to walk this alone.
That's what we say here at Life Services.
We are with you.
And we bring hope to life.
Thank you for joining us, and we will have help in the show notes, and you can always reach out to us if you'd like to talk more about this.
Thanks from both of us, and we'll see you next time.
See you, bye.