Hey everybody, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the busy mom podcast today is Monday, May 28th.

It's Memorial Day. I hope you guys are taking a day off. I'm not. I'm recording a podcast for you. And I know you're going to really be encouraged today because my friend,

Trisha Goyer is back on the show with me today and we are going to answer a question, a very tender topic from a question who had once some council about her post-abortive experience. So stick around. I think you're going to be encouraged.

All right. So hope you guys are having a great Monday. I hope you guys are barbecuing and getting some family time in our family is really excited because our son Skyler has just come back from six months away with YWAM.

He was in Thailand for about a couple of months and then he was in Ukraine and now he's home on US soil. So we're enjoying him today and just hanging out with our family just encouraging to me just to watch our kids and that's something I love about Trisha to watch our kids walk in with the Lord and it really does take the sacrifice of parents and the willingness of parents to shepherd and love their kids through the teenage years and beyond.

So I hope you guys have been encouraged by Trisha and her what she said to us last Friday in the podcast. Trisha is a prolific author. We talked about that last Friday. One of her favorite books. There's several actually that she has written that I have just loved and will be mainstays in our family library. But her latest book is called Walk It Out. And in that book she talks about what it means to basically follow God like the radical cost of following Jesus and living out his word one step one decision at a time.

So I had a question come from a listener I've actually got this question several times and I asked Trisha she'd be willing to address it and she said she would so Trisha goyer thank you for coming back on the show today.

Of course I always love talking to you how do you always love listening to your podcast to your my laundry buddy when I'm holding laundry I listen to everybody needs a laundry right now the laundry would just fold itself would be in even better shape right.

Yeah. I love.

All right so you and I have known each other mutual friend like the the demaz is I've got a connection there in in Little Rock which is where you live right now and there are pastors so we love them so much.

Right on I love how God how God works and I one of the things I love about you is you're absolutely unafraid to talk about what the hard places that we find ourselves in in this life and today's question is really kind of a hard place.

I spoke to a mom in in my little beach South Carolina and I was telling you before the show and I'll just bring our listeners up to speed on our little off off show conversations.

But I was just in my little beach and I was doing a mom's night out there so the weekend before last I guess and I was talking about things that quiet our witness things that really take us off of the battlefield and sort of bench us and

if you guys been listening my podcast very long you know it's my sort of mantra is sort of get off the bench like get on to the battlefield there's like foster kids need you there kids that need homes there are broken marriages there's so that we live in such a broken world.

And the enemy uses things in our lives often to quiet us and we don't even realize that that's what's happening so I listed things like protocol children you know oftentimes moms will think well my I homeschooled my kid I did everything right.

Then they walked away from the Lord so I got I got nothing I don't have anything to offer anybody which is a lie from the enemy I I hear from people who have suffered from abuse or they walked through the pain of a divorce and as I was talking about the list of these list of things that quite your witness when it was over this young mom came up to me and she said hey Heidi would you please add shame.

I'm a tier list and I I hadn't thought about adding shame but obviously it's a really big one and she said that she had experienced an abortion when she was 18 years old and that had taken her years and years she said she had no idea the emotional aftermath that that would that that would hurt her that badly.

And the shame that she felt and she said it took her almost 15 years and I struggle in her marriage all these things to really come to the place where she really is not only had God forgiven her but he wanted to use it and so I wanted to I Trisha actually wrote about her abortion and walk it out and so I asked Trisha she would help me sort of answer this mom's question about how do we walk through the shame and the pain of a post abart of life and what kind of healing God can bring so Trisha.

Thanks for coming back on the show today. Yeah, I'm so glad to be here and this is such a hard topic and if you would have told me when I was you know 15 16 so I mean all those years that I would be willing to share about this.

There is no way because that shame is such a heavy burden you know when I was 15 I went to a plan parenthood and and you know I said 15 year old you used to listen to adults and this earth is like it's just a blob of tissue or just going to scrape away a few cells.

You don't have to think about it tomorrow and as a scared teenager who didn't want her friends finding out her teacher's finding out her grandma finding out that she had been sexually active.

You know that seemed like a really good answer to me until the next day when I woke up and realized what have I done and it was the reality that you know there was there's not going to be a child there.

...