My husband, Cubbie, for your unconditional love for me, for being my best friend for life and also the most amazing husband and father! I praise God for the answer to prayer that you are!
My daughter, Gemma. You are a daily inspiration, little girl! Your smiles, laughter, and snuggles delight your mama’s heart to no end! You are our treasure!
And to Jesus, our reason for writing and the inspiration behind the words. How we love You! May this book do Your work and fulfill Your purpose.
Special thanks from Nancy to:
The Reverend Craig O’Brien, St. John’s Church, Savannah, Georgia. He isn’t Ned Kregg, but he definitely inspired the character with his gentle interest and quiet twinkle.
Toby Aldrich, docent of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, who gave me my first overview of Savannah.
Jennifer M. Silva, author of Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood In an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013), who helped me understand Wendy’s world.
Michael John Cusick, author of Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle (Thomas Nelson, 2012), and Fred and Brenda Stoeker with Mike Yorkey, authors of Every Heart Restored: A Wife’s Guide to Healing in the Wake of a Husband’s Sexual Sin (WaterBrook Press, 2010), whose works were invaluable in providing me with insights on why men seek pornography.
Julianne Cusick, Shannon Ethridge, and Fred Stoeker, who all gave up precious time to talk with me and answer questions about Tara and Seth and their tragedy.
Dr. Dale McElhinney, who walked me through all the hard scenes, just as he has so many, many times in my writing journey.
John Painter, N.P., who shared the necessary knowledge to take Seth’s attempted suicide beyond what I might have seen on House.
The lovely people of Savannah, Georgia, who opened their doors and arms to me as they shared their beautiful city.
Our editors, Amanda Bostic, Jamie Chavez, and Jodi Hughes, without whom we’d pretty much look lame.
Our agents, Andrea Heineke, the late Lee Hough, and Joel Kneedler, who made the acquisition and the continuing of all three of our books not only possible but satisfying.
And the members of The Café Nudge blog, who gave their honest opinions as the very New Women we write for. You can join us at www.tweenyouandme.typepad.com/the_nudge.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS AND RESOURCES FOR ONE LAST THING
Although we want girls and women who have experience with loved ones addicted to pornography to find hope in Tara’s story, we don’t think you have to have been there personally to relate to her and find a door to healing for whatever it is you are dealing with—and everybody is dealing with something, right, especially when it comes to relationships and discovering who you are. As you consider our reflection questions, just apply them to your own situation and see what happens. We’ve got your back in prayer.
Blessings,
Rebecca and Nancy
Questions to ponder:
1. Just to get you focused on you, what part of Tara’s story did you relate to the most? What made you go, “Oh, I hear that!” She is certainly wealthier than most of us, but hopefully there were things in her life that resonated with you.
2. Right now are you living for dreams? Dreams that you haven’t questioned or really looked at all the way through, the way Tara dreamed only of her wedding and not the marriage itself?
3. Seth wasn’t the only dream Tara “got wrong” as she puts it. Her vision of becoming a film director got lost. Have any of your visions for your life been put aside or thwarted by someone else (even someone well-meaning, like Tara’s dad)?
4. Tara’s “Bridesmaids” were her friends from high school and they seemed to stay together more out of tradition than real connection. Take a look at the people you currently hang out with. Are they guys and girls who see and accept the real you? Have similar values? Are there any you don’t fully appreciate, as with Tara and Lexy? Do you leave yourself open to unexpected friendships, like Tara and Wendy?
5. Tara’s “Watch of Women” came together organically, a God-thing to be sure. Do you have mentors? Women older than you who have some life on them and serve as allies? If not, what relationship could you cultivate? How is this different from friendships with your peers?
6. Tara turns away from the church she grew up in and finds spiritual direction in Ned Kregg. Do you think she was right to do that? Is there anything about your current church situation (or lack of one!) that isn’t serving your needs right now? Are you open to looking at other Christian resources, even if their practices aren’t familiar to you?
7. Savannah is almost another character in the story because it figures so strongly not only into Tara’s past but her healing. Do you have such a place? It doesn’t have to be your entire town or even your own neighborhood. It might be a certain section of town where you like to go for coffee and take your journal with you—your own Piebald. We all need a Third Place—not our home and not our workplace. What’s yours?
8. Do you think Tara makes the right decision about Seth? Is there a relationship you need to look at in much the same way she did hers? Do you have her courage, her allies, her spiritual direction?
9. Our resources for this book have told us that even in a Christian college it’s hard to find a guy who doesn’t at least look at porn. It’s out there in a pervasive way. Have you taken anything away from One Last Thing that may be helpful to you in dealing with this issue if/when it comes up for you or a friend?
10. Finally, the question we always ask: Picture a free, secure, whole life for yourself, the kind God intends for each of us. Write it down, maybe in a journal. Now consider: What keeps you from living in that place?
Resources for those who face pornography issues in a relationship or want to help someone who does. These are all from a Christian perspective:
• Every Heart Restored by Fred and Brenda Stoeker with Mike Yorkey (WaterBrook Press, 2010)
• Restoring the Soul program and website http://restoringthesoul.com
• Somebody’s Daughter, a documentary film available on DVD through www.visionvideo.com
• Surfing for God by Michael John Cusick (Thomas Nelson, 2012)
• YouTube video with Michael John Cusick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJuvDArya0
AN EXCERPT FROM
The Merciful Scar
REBECCA ST. JAMES AND NANCY RUE
Part
ONE
He . . . went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die.
1 KINGS 19:4 (NRSV)
Chapter
ONE
It was the only real fight Wes and I had ever had. Actually it was the only fight I’d ever had with anyone. That’s probably why I wasn’t very good at it.
Now discussions . . . We’d had those, and that’s how it started out that night. Another conversation about Wes moving in with me.
I should have known that was where we were headed when he tugged at the back of my shirt and pulled me against his lean self and said, “You know what I love about your couch?”
“That you never have to get off of it from the minute you walk in the door?” I said.
He let his blue eyes droop at the corners until they teased at his cheekbones. That was Wes pretending to be hurt. “Are you saying I’m a couch potato?”
“I’m saying I wait on you like you’re the couch prince.” I leaned forward and picked up the all-but-licked-clean plate from my IKEA coffee table. “More quesadillas, your highness?”
Wes scooped me into him, plate and all. “It wouldn’t be that way if I wasn’t a guest, Kirsty.”
Yeah, there it was. Again.
“First of all,” I said, “you know I hate it when you call me that. It makes me feel like I’m on a Jenny Craig commercial.”
“Huh?”
“Kirstie Alley. She was their poster girl before Valerie Bertinelli—”
“You’re gett
ing off topic.”
“What topic?”
Wes scooted himself sideways so he could face me without letting go. He knew as well as I did that I was about to wriggle away and go do . . . something. Anything to not have this discussion for the ninety-sixth time.
“Come on, babe. You know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t make any sense for me to get an apartment for the summer when you’ve got room here.”
“I have one bedroom.” Which, may I just add, was incredibly difficult to say with his long-fingered hands holding my face and his nose headed for mine for that irresistible pre-kiss thing he did. “And I need my other room for my studio—”
“I know.”
“And you also know where I am on this.”
“I do. You’ve been there for three years, six months, two weeks, four days, and . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes.”
He let his lips bounce off my nose and onto my mouth but I talked right through the kiss.
“It’s going to be another however long,” I said, “so get over it.”
This was the part where he was supposed to say, You’re killin’ me, Kirsten. Killin’ me. And then I would let him kiss me one time and then I’d get up and make another batch of quesadillas. That was how this déjà vu conversation was supposed to go.
But Wes stiffened all six foot two of himself and took me by both shoulders and set me away from him like he was stacking a folding chair. I watched him step over the coffee table and shove his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts and pace to the back window where he stopped, rod-necked and tight-lipped, his blondness standing stiff on his head. It wasn’t a pose I’d ever seen him take. That’s when my skin started to burn.
“What does ‘however long’ mean, Kirsten?” he said.
Until we’re married. That was the answer, stuck in my throat where it had been for three years, six months, two weeks, four days, and twenty-seven minutes. I just closed my eyes and crossed my arms so I could rub both shoulders. The burning kept on.
Wes faced me now, muscles working in his square jaw. “Do you know how hard it is to love you and not be able to . . . love you?”
I attempted a wry look. “Uh, yeah, I do.”
“Then what the—” He crossed to the coffee table and sat on it. “Look, I think I’ve been way more patient than any other guy would be.”
“Good thing I don’t want any other guy,” I said.
“Stop it, okay? Just stop it.”
“Stop wh—”
“The cute remarks and the little dance you always do. I want to talk about this. Now.”
I pressed myself into the couch. “We’ve talked about it a thousand times, Wes. We’ve worn it out.”
“So you just want to keep on dating forever?”
I swallowed, hard. “Way back when we first started dating, we both agreed that neither one of us wanted to have sex outside of marriage.”
Wes let his mouth soften and took both my hands. “How old were we then, babe? Eighteen? Nineteen? I think we were pretty naïve.”
We’d never gotten this far into the discussion. If we had, I might have come up with a retort to get us out of it. Something along the lines of No, naïve is when you think you can lose ten pounds before Christmas. But here we were, and my determination that I wasn’t going to be the first one to say it seethed under my skin.
“I thought we were being true to the faith that, if you’ll recall, you introduced me to,” I said.
“I’m not buying it,” Wes said. “We haven’t been to Faith House since you started grad school. What’s that, nine months? When was the last time we went to church, either one of us?”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t still believe—”
“Nuh-uh.” Wes let go of my hands and waved his palm like he was erasing my words. “That’s not what this is about. You want me to marry you, don’t you?”
My throat closed in on itself. At least once a day during those three years and twenty-seven minutes, or whatever it was, I had imagined Wes broaching the subject of marriage. The images went from Wes on one knee amid glimmering candlelight to a proposal tucked into a Big Mac. But none of them had included an accusation in those blue eyes or all my anxiety mobilizing under my flesh.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said. “Why didn’t you just come out and say it?”
“Because I wanted you to say it first!”
The words sliced their way out of me before I could stop them, and they seemed to want to keep on slicing all on their own.
“I don’t want us to be like everybody else—just having sex and living together and then someday deciding we might as well get married. Look at Caleb and Tess. They’re like a pair of reclining chairs. I’m not doing that, Wes. I’m not.”
He was staring at me as if I was a stranger suddenly intruding on the conversation that had long since stopped being a conversation.
“Y’know,” he said, “I’ve been practically begging you for, like, forever to open up with me and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I wanted it to be on yours.” My words had lost their edge. Others spun in my head. Clever, Kirsten, very clever. You picked a fine time to, I don’t know, grow a backbone.
Wes sagged onto the couch beside me. “Look, babe, I’m not in a good place for this. I didn’t graduate—I have to make up the class this summer—I don’t know what I’m gonna do after that.”
“I know all that—”
“But you—you’re set. You always are. That’s why you’re my rock. I just need you to be here for me just a little while longer. Can you do that?”
What does that even mean? I wanted to scream. But I’d done all the slicing I could do for one night. It was more slicing than I’d done my whole life. At least, that kind.
“Okay, look, I’m gonna go,” Wes said.
“Now?”
Nice touch. Pathetic is always good.
“Now.” Wes gave me half of his usual who-loves-ya-baby smile. “Before I get you drunk and take advantage of you.”
My reply was automatic. “Like either one of those things is gonna happen.”
Again, that was his cue to say, You’re killin’ me, babe. But what he said was, “Yeah.” Just yeah.
He pulled me up from the couch and walked ahead of me to the door. Hand on the knob, he turned only slightly toward me. “A bunch of people from my class are hiking the M tomorrow.”
I groaned silently. Hiking the M was a Montana State graduation tradition that entailed making one’s way up a steep trail and a long ridgeline in the brutal Montana sun to get to a huge M made from white rocks, and then partying and turning around and coming back in the now even more brutal Montana sun to party some more. I’d skipped that when I graduated the year before; I would actually rather poke a fork in my eye than have that kind of fun. Since Wes had missed graduating by one class, he hadn’t gotten to have that kind of fun either.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, they want me to go with. What’s three credits? To them I’m there. I just didn’t have to sit through a bunch of speeches in a bathrobe with a board on my head.”
“I don’t even know what to do with that,” I said. “So what time?”
“We’re leaving Caleb and Tess’s at seven.” Wes lifted a sandy eyebrow. “If I can get them out of their reclining chairs.”
Ouch. Bet that gotcha right in the heart.
“You want me to pack a picnic?” I said.
Wes’s gaze shifted away, and he ran a hand over his flattened blond spikes.
“Or we can grab something at the store in the morning,” I said.
“Here’s the deal . . . I think I just need to go single. Most of these people I’ll never see again, which is weirder for me because I’m staying here. I don’t know, it’s just a thing.”
Right in the heart fell far short. I was stung to the bone. I didn’t want to go. I just wanted him to want me to go.
Beyond pathetic. We’ve
moved into pitiful. I mean, way in.
“Okay, so . . . okay,” I said.
“I knew you’d get it.” Wes kissed my neck. “You always do.”
The Nudnik voice didn’t wait until Wes was out the door before she started in. I always thought of it as the Nudnik, which was what my kindergarten teacher used to call us kids when we pestered her to the brink. Nicely done, the Nudnik said now. Ya made everything all right when it clearly isn’t. Another layer of unadulterated bad stuff, right under your skin.
Forget it. I’m not doing it. I haven’t done it for—I don’t know—a long time.
Not since Valentine’s Day when yet again our sweet Wesley didn’t come through with a ring. Or was it Easter? Yeah, you did it on Easter. But then, who’s keeping track?
You are! I wanted to say out loud. But I always stopped short of audibly answering the Nudnik. If I did that, I really would have to admit I was crazy.
But she was right. I’d been holding back for six weeks, since the beginning of April. I promised myself that was the last time because I was so sure Wes would propose when he graduated. And then he didn’t. He’d spent last Saturday hiding out here playing Scrabble with me instead of walking with his class to receive his diploma. It wasn’t a good time for a proposal. Clearly there never was a good time.
The story continues in The Merciful Scar by Rebecca St. James and Nancy Rue
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Author photo by Allister Ann
Rebecca St. James is both a Grammy and multiple Dove Award recipient as well as a bestselling author whose books include Wait for Me and What Is He Thinking?? Her leading role in the pro-life film Sarah’s Choice won critical acclaim. A passionate spokesperson for Compassion International, Rebecca has provided sponsorship to more than 30,000 children through her worldwide concerts.
Author photo by Hatcher and Fell Photography
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