Feared Forgiveness
by Lisa Burkhardt Worley

Have you ever battled with fear? What do you think most people are afraid of?

Studies reveal over 40 percent of all people dread speaking in front of a group. Thirty-two percent fear high places, then there is a whole slew of fears that follow: insects, financial problems, deep water, sickness and loneliness.

Growing up, I struggled with three different fears; the first two: snakes and horses.

My fear of snakes materialized in early childhood when I attended my cousins’ swim meet in San Antonio, Texas. My athletic cousins were exceptional swimmers, so it was fun to cheer them on to their countless ribbons. One of them made it as far as the Olympic Trials in the Butterfly.

However, one day, while they were competing, we heard a ruckus going on behind the natatorium. The kids at the meet ran around to the back of the venue, and to our horror, we witnessed men chopping the heads off a bed of baby rattlesnakes. From that point on, I detested snakes, and avoided them at all cost.

Now to horses. The reason I fear horses is because my grandmother, who I nicknamed “Nonnie,” used to repeatedly ask, “You’re not riding horses are you?” Why would Nonnie ask such a bizarre question? Because she worried I’d suffer the same fate as my father if I ever ventured into the saddle.

My father was a doctor, but he also enjoyed playing competitive polo on the weekends. Every Sunday, my dad’s team faced other polo teams from all over the country, and it was a high level of competition.

One Sunday in December, while my expectant mother, half-sister and other family members enjoyed the afternoon polo match, tragedy struck, as my father keeled over, suffering a massive heart attack while on his polo pony. He was dead before he arrived at the hospital, at the age of 39. Two months later, I was born.

Neither my mother nor my fourteen-year-old half-sister, Lori, ever recovered from the trauma of that day. In the scurry and confusion, Lori was left alone at the polo field and had to undergo years of counseling to overcome the shock of losing her beloved dad.

After Lori moved back with her mother in Pennsylvania, my mother and I lived off and on with my grandparents until I was about eight, because she couldn’t handle life after the traumatic day at the polo field. She was heavily medicated on anti-depressants, a chain smoker and for many years, a drinker.

When we weren’t living with my grandparents, my life reminded me of the 1993 movie, Ground Hog Day. In that movie, actor Bill Murray portrays a weatherman on location doing a news story about the groundhog and his shadow. However, it’s not just a one-day scenario. Mysteriously, every day Murray wakes up, it’s Ground Hog Day all over again. Same hotel. Same television crew. Same assignment.

Every day I’d leave for school, my mother would be sitting in a chair, drinking and smoking a cigarette. I’d come home and find her in the same chair, drinking and smoking a cigarette, almost catatonic, and unable to engage with me.

I was a lonely child.

Have you ever been lonely?

I craved love.

Have you ever felt unloved? I can’t remember my mother every hugging me. I was also embarrassed by my mother. I could not understand why she wasn’t like other moms, and I didn’t want friends to come play at my house. Now I’ll share my third fear.

I was afraid of ever being anything like my mother. It’s a fear that drove me throughout childhood and the majority of my adult life.

Perhaps you have the same fear I had. Maybe you had a parent who was not the parent you longed for, and you are still trying to recover from it.

By the time I entered high school, my mom and I lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and I spent as much time away from the apartment as I could. It was saturated with smoke and very depressing. I just wanted to get away. I was also headed down the wrong road, experimenting with alcohol by age thirteen.

But one day, my friend, Leslie, decided to take a bold risk. With five minutes left in our freshman English class, she asked if I wanted to accept Christ as my Lord and Savior. I said, “Why not?” What did I have to lose? I was looking for something new. Becoming a Christian had to be better than the life I was living, and the environment I was living in. So she explained to me that sin was separating me from God, and I needed to confess the things I had done wrong and believe in Jesus Christ to close the gap caused by my sin. I believed “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, so whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

So at that moment, I prayed with my friend, Leslie. I asked Jesus to come into my heart, and things did change for a while.

Instead of traveling down the wrong road in high school, I got involved in positive constructive activities. I exhibited hope and believed I had a future for the first time. My grades improved. My leadership tendencies surfaced as I founded a girls’ Christian organization at school, because at the time, only boys could be members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Frustrated with the lack of girls’ sports at our high school, I also started the girls’ basketball and volleyball teams at our school.

My friend Leslie didn’t stop with leading me to Christ. She and her family took me to church every Sunday and between services, I spent the whole day at their house. I often sat at the feet of Leslie’s mom, studying what a Godly woman looked like. I asked her a million questions and learned a lot about Jesus and His love during those years.

But discovering what a normal mom was like made mine seem much worse, so as soon as I graduated from high school, I was off to college, never planning to return home to my mother. I was a runner, running away from my greatest fear at top speed.

My mother worsened after I left. She tended to stray off the medication that regulated her, and the results weren’t good. Often times, the local authorities were called in because she exhibited socially unacceptable behavior, and most times, she ended up at the state hospital. So my mother was the big secret I didn’t talk about.

Meanwhile I slipped away from the faith. I call the seventeen years after high school, the lost years. I did not spend time in Bible study, sporadically went to church, and wasn’t growing in my faith.

I pursued a career as a television sportscaster before women engaged in that type of profession. When I decided to be a sportscaster, the only females in the business were Miss Americas, so I thought it was time for a woman who played and understood sports to enter the field. Many people tried to talk me out of going down this career road, but I was determined and enjoyed a modicum of success in the business.

I landed my first real job in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I worked three years before being hired at the CBS affiliate in my hometown of San Antonio. Now you ask, why would I go back home when I was running from my mother? I still didn’t have much to do with my mother when I returned. I think God wanted me to meet my husband, whom I met six months after I returned to San Antonio.

I remained somewhat estranged from my mother and loved working in my hometown, but I had a dream of becoming an ESPN SportsCenter anchor, so I hired an agent to help me realize that dream. I finally received a big break when HBO Sports asked to interview me for a correspondent position on the show, “Inside the NFL.” The only problem was, I was seven-and-a half months pregnant with our first son, Kyle. I needed to fly to New York City right away, before I was unable to travel anymore.

I remember that trip well. For the interview I wore a dark slimming dress so I wouldn’t look too pregnant, and I also remember taking my shoes off on the plane and not being able to wear them when I landed because my feet were so swollen. I also thought, I don’t know how they’re going to get past this big belly of mine. But the interview went well. The HBO Executive Producer’s wife had recently given birth to twins, so he understood my oversized body was temporary, and I landed the job. Eight weeks after I gave birth to our 8 lb., 13 oz. baby boy, I was off to Salem, Oregon to do my first HBO story about the Oregon NFL Lottery.

For a year, I kept my job in San Antonio and flew all over the country covering football stories about the NFL. The following year, I had another huge job opportunity to be an anchor and reporter for the Madison Square Garden Network, hosting a show called the MSG Sports Desk. In television, New York City is the top market in the country, so landing this job would mean I made it to the top of my field. It was a great opportunity, and I also thought it was a potential stepping-stone to ESPN.

My husband agreed to follow me to New York City, so I accepted the job, and this Texas girl loved the Big Apple! We lived in New Rochelle, New York and to get to work, I’d catch a cab to the train station, then rode the Metro North train for thirty minutes to Grand Central Station, hopped a subway to Times Square, then grabbed a different subway train to Penn Station. Once at Penn Station, I’d walk up the stairs to Madison Square Garden, and traveled up a number of ramps to my office.

It was especially interesting when the Barnum and Bailey Circus camped at Madison Square Garden for a couple of weeks. I’d head up the ramp to my office, and it was not unusual to see a trainer bathing an elephant on the ramp. It was always a great adventure.

A year before my contract was up, I received a call from the President of ESPN. He wanted to have lunch and talk, so we did, and he expressed an interest in hiring me after my contract expired at MSG. He was throwing around details like a five-year-deal to anchor SportsCenter. He said ESPN hadn’t hired me before because they didn’t know what I could do, but now that they were seeing me on a regular basis, things changed. So I thought I was close to a dream realized.

But a year later, when my contract was almost up at MSG, the bottom dropped out. In the same week, I was not renewed on either the HBO or the MSG contract. HBO was the biggest surprise. I received a call from the Executive Producer of HBO Sports, the same guy who hired me. He phoned from the Wimbledon tennis tournament because HBO had television rights at the time. He said, “We weren’t looking to replace you. We know what kind of work you did, but Mrs. __________ (I won’t say the name) wants to do it.” She was already on a major network, and married to the CBS Morning News anchor, so she was higher profile talent than I was.

I was in shock and hurt by HBO, even though I knew it was just business. I went from six figures to zero overnight.

Have you ever had a financial crash like that? Have you or your spouse ever been laid off from work?

We were overwhelmed with fear and panic because we could no longer afford our home in expensive Westchester County. My husband informed me that we needed to move to Connecticut.

“No! Not that!”

I loved New York. I enjoyed the environment, the Broadway shows, the shopping. I was like Eva Gabor in the old program, Green Acres, who said, “New York is where I’d rather stay. I get allergic smelling hay. I just adore a penthouse view; darling, I love you, but just give me Park Avenue.”

I was also mad at God. After a seventeen-year estrangement, I reconnected by asking Him in anger, “Why did you do this to me?” “Why would You take away my livelihood?”

God didn’t answer my questions immediately. I lost my protest to remain in New York, so we packed up and moved to Connecticut.

During this time, we also searched for a church.

It often takes life turning upside down before we finally look up.

I closed my eyes and randomly pointed to a church in the Yellow Pages, and we tried it out. From the moment we walked in the door, I knew it was the church where God wanted us. A woman immediately reached out to us, introduced me to other women my age, and directed me to a Bible study for young mothers, held weekly. I thought, I’d like to try that. So I joined a group of moms, many of them seekers like myself, and studied the Bible for the first time. It was interesting that the study was on love. It’s what God knew I still needed. Love. His love.

After delving into the Word and praying regularly for about six months, God finally came back to the questions I asked, with attitude, when the bottom fell out of my life.

“Why did you take my career away?” “Why did you take my livelihood away?”

He said, “Lisa, I gave you an incredible national platform to glorify Me and you didn’t do it. I had to take it away to get your attention.”

I was devastated and remorseful. The past seventeen years, full of sinful behavior, flashed before my eyes. With tears rolling down my cheeks, I promised God, “If You give me another opportunity, I will not only give my career to You, I’ll give You my life.” That day, I surrendered all to my Maker.

Not surprising, about a week later, ESPN called my agent, asking if I’d be interested in doing some free-lance reporting for them. My dream resurfaced, and I didn’t think twice about accepting the job.

I reported for ESPN for about six months when I received an offer to return to San Antonio to resume my old anchoring job at the CBS Affiliate. This time God was at the center of my life and my decisions, so I prayed about a job change for the first time ever. Out of His love for me, the Lord provided a taste of reporting at ESPN, and I knew it was not a life conducive to being a mom or a wife. Full-time reporters were sometimes away from home for weeks, traveling from story-to-story-to-story, and I knew that would not work for our family.

The only way I could remain at ESPN would be if they offered me a SportsCenter anchor position, my dream.  Otherwise, I would return to San Antonio. Deep down, I knew I could make more of an impact for the Lord as a big fish in a smaller pond than a small fish in a very big pond.

Not surprising, all ESPN could offer was a full-time reporting job, so I was probably the first and last person in ESPN history to turn down a national television position with the well-respected sports network.

A long-term stint at ESPN wasn’t part of God’s plan, and I was okay with it. The desires of my heart morphed into what God desired for me.

Are you willing to relinquish your dream for God’s plan? So I returned home again, and God’s first assignment wasn’t about slipping back into my old sports anchoring shoes.

While that happened, it wasn’t the main thing.

God asked me to honor my mother, for the first time in my life.

It was time to quit running. I had been running away for a long time. I needed to face my greatest fear, my mother, and honor her despite all those troubled childhood years. By that time, she was living in a group home because she couldn’t handle life on her own. Honoring my mother meant visiting her regularly, taking my son to see her, and providing for her material needs.

It was amazing how Jesus worked in my life.

At some point during this period of time, I also forgave my mother. Through a Bible study, I realized how much of my sin God forgave; so I thought, If God can forgive me for all the wrong I did in my life, who am I not to forgive my mother?

I had reconnected with my mother for about two years when my mom called and said she needed a pair of shoes. I was anxious to buy the pair of shoes for her. I wanted her to have new shoes more than anything. (That’s how far I’d come.) At lunch that day, I ran to a local department store and tried to find the perfect pair. I didn’t know why at the time, but I was in a hurry to buy the shoes. I realized later God was letting me know time was short, because before I could run the shoes over to my mother, I received a call from her caregiver. She told me my mom suffered a massive heart attack, and was rushed to the hospital, where she lay in a coma.

I spent the last week of my mother’s life at her side, stroking her hair and telling her I loved her. After she died, I know I heard the Lord say, “Now you understand what my unconditional love is like.” I made sure my mom wore her new shoes when she was laid to rest.

One of my favorite Bible verses is: “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25).

Have you had a lot of locusts eating at your life over the years?

There were numerous locusts gnawing at me for years, but God restored my life. He was also able to do a much greater work in and through me once I forgave my mother, and I was no longer afraid.

In the late 1990s, God revealed it was time to leave television. I argued with him again. I was growing by leaps and bounds in my faith and using the television platform to glorify Him, speaking about Him whenever I was asked. But I didn’t argue long. I trusted He knew why He wanted me out of the business.

And it became very clear. As a television sports anchor, I couldn’t commit to regular ministry work. I could only teach Sunday school on Sunday morning because that was the only time I knew I had off. Otherwise, I worked nights and weekends covering sporting events. It was a very inconsistent schedule.

I scanned the want ads for the first time ever and landed a job as the Public Relations Manager at San Antonio International Airport. Because I had a day job, God was able to use me far more, and I had additional quality time with my husband and two boys.

In 2003, the Lord called me into full-time ministry and seminary. I think I was the only one in seminary aspiring to be an author and Christian inspirational speaker.

And God directed me to minister to women. I had worked all my life in male dominated professions. It’s just like God to call us to something out of left field that we would have never chosen on our own. He gave me the ministry’s name, Pearls of Promise, to help women overcome past dysfunction. You may know a pearl is formed through irritation in an oyster shell. In the same way, God can make something beautiful out of the irritations in our lives, if we let Him.

He did it for me, a poor fatherless child. He raised my life out of the pit and set me on the right path. He created beautiful pearls out of the hardships and I am forever grateful.

Yes, the television life was very exciting, but I relate to what the Bible says in Philippians 3:8: “What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.”

I’d give up the television career today if it meant not knowing Christ.

Would you give up your career, with all the accolades, if it meant not having a relationship with Christ?

Because, with Jesus in my life, I feel loved again. I am no longer lonely. I am not embarrassed when I’m in the midst of trials. Instead of running away from problems, I run straight to my Father’s arms. I am no longer afraid.

Lisa Burkhardt Worley is an award-winning author of three books, speaker, blogger, and international radio show host. She is the founder of Pearls of Promise Ministries. You can find Lisa at: www.pearlsofpromiseministries.com.