Podcast

Forgiving the Unforgiveable. Paige McLemore

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Unshakable Hope Podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kellie Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions, such as how do I trust God’s heart when His ways and delays are breaking mine? We’ll hear from people just like you and me who have experienced God’s faithfulness when life didn’t unfold as they expected.

My prayer is that God would renew our hope in His Word and His love through these conversations. And

Kelly: Hey guys, today I am going to introduce you to Paige McLemore.

She’s talking to us about forgiving the unforgivable. She experienced the sudden and tragic loss of her dear sister and best friend when they were young adults. She’s going to share how the Lord graciously rescued her from many years of bitterness, anger toward the man who took her life, and eventually [00:01:00] walked her into a place of forgiveness and freedom.

,Paige loves to share her story so that others can understand the importance of forgiveness and they too can know the freedom that only God’s grace can provide. Paige is a middle school principal at Augusta Christian Schools. So, oh wow, that just makes me want to just pray for grace for you every single day of the year.

She and her husband Steve live with their 18 year old son in South Carolina and that’s important because you’re about to be blessed with her lovely Southern accent.

Paige’s first book is Remembering Lee. The subtitle is The Noblest Revenge is to Forgive.

So Paige, thanks so much for joining me today.

Paige: Thank you so much, Kelly. It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Kelly: You walked through a very profound loss when you were a young adult.

And I’d like for you to just walk us through that story. I know it had devastating effects on you – far reaching effects. So could you just walk [00:02:00] us into that story and you can start anywhere you like.

Paige: Okay. Well, thank you so much for having me on Kelly. I really do appreciate it. And you’re right.

I do love to talk about . God’s gifts of grace and forgiveness in our lives. So my story begins when I was 18 years old. I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, which is right across the river from where I live now in South Carolina. And my sister Lee and I were 14 months apart in 1988.

I was 18 and finishing up my last year of high school. She was 19 and finishing up her 1st year at the local college here. We were extremely close mistaken for twins. Most of the time, I shared a room, although we didn’t have to share a room. We slept in the same bed at night. We share the same friends and we just did everything together.

So, after college classes, we would ride in the same car and go home [00:03:00] for lunch and after lunch. She would drop me off at my part time job, and she would go to hers. And so, , wonderful family, love the Lord great parents. October 26th, 1988, it was a normal day.

She dropped me off at my job and went to hers. And then. A couple of hours later we heard over the radio that her store that she worked at had been robbed a felon came in with a gun and he robbed the store and left. But then decided to come back in and shot my sister and her coworker. So, after that chaos ensued, as you can imagine we scramble together went to the hospital and we spent the night at the hospital hanging on to every hope that Lee would make it through the surgeries. The next day

the news was not what we wanted, and the doctors [00:04:00] told my parents. Of course, I was 18 at the time, so I wasn’t in on those conversations, but, basically told my parents that, she was on life support and would never make it so they had to make the horrible decision to take her off life support.

And just like that, she was gone. It was horrific, heartbreaking, tragic. We have tons of friends in town. Everybody crowded at the hospital and it was just I can’t really put it into words how heartbreaking of a time it was. I know that other people that have lost loved ones tragically.

We’ll understand what I’m saying. So after that, all the friends and families in our town. And like you said, in the southern town, they gather and they loved on us as much as they possibly could. But, after everything settles down, then you have to get back to life. And now that I have a son that’s 18 and thinks he knows [00:05:00] everything I thought I knew everything at 18 too.

And we know that is not true. So, after the initial impact of the event, then we had the trial, which was horrific. When people ask me to describe the trial, all I can think of is hate. That’s the only word that comes to my mind. Satan was present in that courtroom as clear as the nose on my face.

They hated us. We hated them. It was terrible. The lawyers, the judge, it was just horrific. He was sentenced to life in prison and is still there today. And so after that. Basically we just had to get on with our life and just get on with it. And I tried, I dropped out of college. I couldn’t do it.

We shared the same college classes. I remember walking into that classroom where she sat beside me and I literally just got up and left and never returned. I couldn’t [00:06:00] do my life without Lee. I didn’t know how to do it. I was mad at the man that murdered my sister. More importantly, I was mad at God.

I didn’t understand why he would do such a thing. She was a great person. Always said she was prettier than me. Smarter than me all of that. So it was hard and after everything settled down, I quit college, and then I went on a path of self destruction. For years, I tell people I did everything wrong, just everything wrong that you can imagine for 18, 19 20, 21 and on girl to do, life of the party.

Seeking attention where I shouldn’t have been seeking it. just masking my pain and my hurt. Nobody understood. None of my friends had, sisters or brothers that were murdered. ,

Kelly: you probably didn’t have even counseling available to you back then. Right? That probably wasn’t even a thing.

Paige: we raised ourself in the 80s. my mom [00:07:00] went to counseling, but I had I’m totally opposite today. Thank you. Jesus for the transformation of my heart. But I was the girl that had it all together. Don’t mess with me. I was prickly. , I was a thorn, if you tried to console me, I’m fine.

don’t get in my business. I was shut off and just very very confrontational. So that, those struggles of mine, and I say 10 to 15, but I’m just being generous. It was a long time. I had. Failed marriage, tons of terrible relationships. My insecurities grew deeper. Then came the shame and the guilt of the things that I had done wrong that I knew were wrong, but I just had the attitude of

what do I have to live for? what would be the point? So I might as well just keep on keeping on. [00:08:00]

Kelly: Right.

Well, I would imagine that as you were, you mentioned you had shame, guilt, lies. There were a lot of insecurities that you dealt with and because you weren’t allowed to. Or you didn’t even know how, even if you had been given a counselor, it doesn’t sound like you would have been able to process that grief.

So there was a lot of woundedness that you were walking through and a lot of insecurities. So you were masking the pain, and then you were trying to meet your needs through relationships with other people and. It wasn’t working.

Paige: No, it wasn’t working. I always point people when I speak at events and retreats and things, I try to, point to James 1: 6,

it says that make sure that your faith is in God alone and you cannot let your faith waiver back and forth. And what that means is you can’t be in the world and of God, because if you are, James goes on to say that you’re going to be like waves tossed in the sea. Some versions say like wind [00:09:00] blowing.

And that was me. 1 foot in the world doing the wrong thing just tossed around. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything is the old country song. And so I didn’t know enough to stand on what God wanted from me at that time.

Mostly because. Of the social pressure, I just was all about, the peer pressure and doing what the crowd was doing. So I could just fit in because I felt so insecure about.

Everything about me. I was insecure in my childhood, like most girls are, but I feel like maybe I was more so than most. I still am insecure. But now I have Jesus as my rock. So it doesn’t, I can overcome all of those things,

Kelly: Well, let’s jump ahead in your story. But before I set up this next portion, I just want to emphasize the point, and you talk about this in your book, that you were still deeply wounded. You had not fully grieved the loss of your sister. And because of that, not only was there unprocessed grief, [00:10:00] but you also had a lot of suppressed anger and some bitterness, which you weren’t even aware of and didn’t understand.

So your marriage ended, but you went back to college, completed your degree. And in an unlikely way, you met a pastor who prayed with you. And that prayer changed your life. You learned something about prayer and about God.

So could you tell us about that?

Paige: So, I was working in an elementary school.

I had kind of gotten my life together met my husband that I have now Steve and we were young married couple. I was finally happy and settled. Steve loved me for who I was and I didn’t have to put on airs for him. He’s just a good country boy that exactly what God wanted me to have. And so we were we were just living our little married life in the woods and in South Carolina.

But we were having issues getting pregnant. So, 1 day, I walked into the school that I was working at, and the school was being painted. the painters are [00:11:00] there for months, they have to pick 1 classroom at a time and you move your classroom around. So he was a familiar face and his name was Gerald.

1 morning, he looked at me and he said. Well, Miss McLemore, you look like you have something on your mind. And for some reason, I mean, I know it was God, but I just blurted out. I’m trying to have a baby with my husband and I can’t get pregnant. And he looked at me as clear as bail and looked at me and said, well, ma’am, have you prayed about it?

And I said, no, it was just like this. Board just hit me in the forehead and he said, well, let’s do that. And I said, okay. And so we had an empty broom closet across the room for my school. And I usually don’t go into empty broom closets with painters. The Lord told me to go, and I trusted this man.

So he said, step in here and let’s pray. And I didn’t know this, but Gerald was a preacher on the side, but so he asked me, well, what do [00:12:00] you want? And I gave him the proverbial Southern answer. Well, I just want a healthy baby and he said, no, you don’t, what you want. Do you want a girl or a boy?

And I said, I want a boy and I want a boy that looks just like his daddy has a heart like his daddy and loves to hunt and fish. And so he said, well, that’s what we’re going to pray for. And that man grabbed my hands and he prayed a prayer that I have never heard before or will never have here sense. And I get choked up thinking about Gerald because.

That prayer changed my life. It changed my life and in a few different ways. Well, the 1st way it changed my life is I really believed in that moment that man knew God and I wanted to be like that man, like, Abraham, we talk about Abraham knew the Lord. And I thought, oh, That man knows God. I want to know him like he knows him. And it was like, like he was talking to his friend. And I was [00:13:00] such a young Christian at the time. I had no idea. Also the next month I got pregnant. And so. That’s an amazing turning point in my life, and I’m so glad that you brought that up.

Because I’ve never been asked about that specific thing in a podcast or really, I’ve only talked about it a few times when I’ve spoke, but it is such a powerful time in my life. And just a little side note that every time I pray to God for Gerald, because I still pray for him He shows up last time I prayed.

I said, Lord, let me see Gerald. And I’m down the aisle at Kroger in the sugar section. And I look up and lo and behold, there was Gerald. . And I just gush over him. Just the sweetest man, but just made such an impact on my life. That is. The power of God in our lives, and that is the power of you never know.

When you pray for someone, how it will impact your life, right? When people ask me to pray now, [00:14:00] I don’t say, okay, darling, I’ll pray for you when I get home. I grab their hands right then. And we pray. We don’t go on a broom closet. We’ll do it in the middle of Kroger in the middle of parking lot in the middle of my school anywhere because you never know how you’re going to impact that person’s life through God.

Kelly: Yeah. So what you described is even though your life was coming together , this was a very impactful moment where God invited you in many ways into a deeper, more authentic relationship with him. Right?

Paige: Yes. I love that. Nobody’s put it like that before.

That’s an amazing insight on that. Yes

Kelly: yeah. And then I thought it was really cool that the next major turning point in your life was when you started noticing anger being presented in your relationship with Steve and you didn’t know what the cause of it was.

So you’re asking the question, why am I so angry? What is wrong with me? But the way God rescued you, and I know it’s quite a big story, [00:15:00] but one of the ways he rescued you was you started reading the Bible and God’s word came alive like never before.

 

Paige: Yeah, when you get in fights with your husband or your wife and then it turns into something else and then it turns into something else. And Steve and I were newly married and to the outside world, we looked perfect. But my heart was still tore up inside. I just I was, I cried the day of our wedding silently because I wanted Lee there.

We were having our son and I wanted Lee there. So I was still grieving my sister. And still didn’t understand the why. I didn’t understand the why and I am, I’ve got to understand the why girl. John 10, 10 is a verse and everybody that is listening needs to know that verse by heart because it says that the devil comes to steal and kill.

There’s a 2nd part of that. It says, but God comes to give you life abundantly. Satan wants to steal your testimony. He wants to steal your life from you.

So. Those fights were getting really ugly and [00:16:00] Steve was saying, what is wrong? And so we were in church in our town that we live in now.

And a pastor that was very kind and not judgmental. Said he noticed that there was something wrong. He could tell, on Sundays, I would get upset. So mostly because I was mad at God. , well, every time I would ask him a question, well, why did God kill my sister?

He said. Well, 1st of all, God didn’t kill your sister and you need to read the Bible and he was very straightforward and that’s what I need in my life. So he said, I’m going to dare you. You need to read the Bible. And I said, I ain’t reading that Bible. And he said, I need you to trust me and I need you to do it.

So I picked it up and I read through the entire Bible and it changed my life. It did. It changed everything about me. Those old songs that my grandmother used to sing in church. I never would have believed that the chains could be [00:17:00] broken. I never believed that God gives you a new heart until I had it happen to me myself.

And reading that Bible did a million things for me, but the most important thing is it made me fall in love with Jesus Christ. It made my heart, break into a million pieces, and it put it back together the way Jesus wanted it to. Ezekiel 36, 26. I’m terrible with numbers. It’s either 26:36 or 36:26 in Ezekiel says that the Lord restores your heart.

It takes, he takes out that hard heart of stone and replaces it with a tender heart. And that’s exactly what he did. And it changed my life. And every time you’re asking me right now, and I’m all excited because I just love God’s word and it changed me. . And also, I got the answers to my why questions that no man would have given me because I wouldn’t have believed him.

Deuteronomy 29, 29, the Lord has [00:18:00] secrets that no one knows. Well, that’s the answer to my why, because I don’t know why God allowed it, but I’ve read Job. And I know how the devil works. I know things that I know now because of God’s word, but I know that God has secrets known to no one. And if my father in heaven doesn’t want to tell me today why he took Lee from us so soon, or why he allowed her to come on home to him so soon, I can wait until I get to heaven and ask him.

I doubt I’m going to want to ask him when I get there because I’m going to be so excited to see Lee and my savior. But, I trust God and so that’s why people struggle with forgiveness so much is because they want to handle it on their own and they don’t trust God. And I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I trust my father.

I accept that no matter if I know the reason or not.

Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. That’s huge. There’s a lot of questions. We’re not going to have answered this [00:19:00] side of heaven. A lot of us walk through suffering that goes on and on and our stories are not resolved and they’re not tied up with a pretty bow.

And we continue to look to heaven for the time when things are going to be resolved and those wounds in our heart will be healed. And so we have to just wrestle with the Lord in these places where our hearts are broken. And I think one of the sweetest things that he does is he meets us right there in the middle of the wrestling and he gives us himself.

He may not answer our questions in the way we want them answered, but he fills us up with himself. He meets us with himself in a way that. Answers our deepest question, and we are just we experienced that peace. It’s beautiful.

Paige: Absolutely. And I’ve just finished a Bible study of of Joseph.

And there’s a quote, and I don’t know where it is in the story of Joseph, but it says, Joseph said, thank you, Lord, because you [00:20:00] allowed me to forget. And so the Lord allowed Joseph to forget that his 12 brothers threw him in a pit. And left him for dead and he forgave them, I identify with Joseph.

He’s my man. And so he is. And so, the Lord, now, I’m not going to sit here and lie and say, I totally forget about it, but the Lord has allowed me to put that in the back of my mind so that I can live out Romans 8:28. For all things that you go through all things. And when God says all it’s all things can be used for good according to his purpose and for his good and for his will and in turn, it fills us up and that’s why God wrote that verse because he knows if we allow him to take whatever we’ve got and everybody’s got something to allow him to take it and just let him like you said, let Jesus fill you with him.

Yeah, then use it for [00:21:00] good and you just but that’s the thing is people come to me all the time and they say, I can’t and I said, well, we do have choices, but you have to let him have it. You can’t snatch it back. And I’m not going to lie when I look at in the mirror in the mornings, I wonder what least would look like, it’s been without me more than she was with me on this earth.

I wonder what she would look like. My son doesn’t have cousins, I don’t have a shopping buddy. I don’t have a sister to help me with my elderly parents. Well, I do have a half sister. So I shouldn’t say that so I do snatch it back from him every now. And then so it’s a daily thing every morning. Okay, Lord, you got it. I’m going to do this. I’m not going to stay bitter because like I told you before we got on, I’m an emotional wreck right now because my son’s graduating from high school.

Kelly: Yeah.

Paige: Would I love for my sister to be there. Absolutely. And so I can crawl in a corner in my bedroom right now and cry for about four days, but [00:22:00] that’s not going to do me any good. And then it’ll take away what I can do for God in those four days. So we just have to live for the Lord.

Kelly: Well, and I would say too, that you, it’s not that you ever forget the grief. You continue to experience grief and each new milestone in your life, you experience a different depth of grief, but you also experience a fresh dimension of Jesus in that place. And I just can remember so many times raising three children with special needs.

There’s so many levels of sorrow and grief that you walk through. And there were times that the sorrow was paralyzing. And then there were times when Jesus would heal me of that newest sorrow and lift it up so that I could breathe again. So that I could walk forward in faith and he continues to heal us for the rest of our lives on this earth.

And I just love that he’s so gracious to do that.

Paige: Yes. Amen. Absolutely. Every single day he’s there [00:23:00] to meet our needs.

Kelly: Every single day.

Paige: Thank you. Lord.

Kelly: I wanted to ask you to walk us through the story of forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard and it’s a process and there are many different layers to forgiveness.

And I, there’s this quote, I wonder if you’ve ever heard this. It’s by Lewis Smedes and it says to forgive is to set a prisoner free and discovered that the prisoner is you.

Paige: Yes I’ve heard that quote before. I’ve heard, that it’s like, you you drink and poison and expecting the other person to die.

So , the bitterness and the unforgiveness, you’re just doing it to yourself. So, Colossians 3:13 says to make allowances for everybody who offends you in any other. Other person’s faults. Yeah. There’s tons of verses about forgiveness in the Bible.

So I just did a post the other day and my real said that, there’s no exceptions in the Bible. God didn’t [00:24:00] say page. You don’t have to forgive because you’re hurt is too much. I know how much you love your sister. I know that you are hurting. So I’m going to give you a hard pass on my commands in the Bible.

He did not say that and he’s not saying it to anybody. And so the more I read God’s word, forgiveness would come up. Songs that I was listening to because now after I read the Bible, now all of a sudden I’m listening to Christian music. And I’m going to church more and I’m in Bible study and forgiveness was popping up everywhere.

So it was undeniable what God needed me to do. Now, little did I know that he needed me to forgive myself 1st, if you go back to the arguing with Steve, that was what I had to do to get over that in my marriage is I had to forgive myself. For all the stupid mistakes that I had made. I was ashamed. I was living with shame.

And now I know that there’s no condemnation in Christ. I tell my son that all the time when he says he feels bad about something and I say, well, did you ask [00:25:00] Jesus to forgive you? And he says, yes, ma’am. And I said, well, there’s no condemnation in Christ move forward. So, I didn’t know that. All of these verses about forgiveness were for me first.

And that’s what God does. If you want to forgive somebody or you want revenge on somebody, God is going to tell you to look at your heart first every single time. So, I had to examine my heart. I had to get right with God. I had to accept His forgiveness. And then God moved me into the next stage of my forgiveness process.

And that was to forgive the man that murdered my sister. The bitter and anger and rage that was in my heart was not good. The more we focus on our bitter, the bitterness, the more we focus on our unforgiveness, our rage, our anger, our envy, our whatever you want to put in that blank, the more we focus on that, the less focused we are on God.

What we’re thinking about all the time. I always say. [00:26:00] That unforgiveness was like that picture on my mantle. I was staring at it all day and I had to take that picture down and put up Jesus. So I eventually after wrestle, as you said, wrestling with God and I wrestled with God and I write about that a lot in my book.

I wrestled with him for a year, for a long time. I don’t, I’m not going to say it was a year. It might’ve not been that long. I’m not sure how long it was, but I wrestled with him a long time. And I told him, no, I wasn’t going to do it. And finally, I just said, you know what, Lord, I’m going to do what you’ve asked me to do, and I don’t know why you want me to do it because I still didn’t understand all that.

But when I did, when I forgave the man that murdered my sister, I did it at church one day to myself, didn’t tell anybody the weight of the world came off my shoulders. I did not have to carry that hurt anymore. It was an immediate release of. I am [00:27:00] free because there is freedom in Christ and it was an amazing and an amazing act obedience To God..

Kelly: Wow. It’s so amazing that you experienced that immediate freedom when you finally made the choice. So God had been inviting you to forgive him for quite a long time and you were wrestling. But the moment you made the choice to actually do it and it was in a church service, you felt that weight lifted off immediately.

Paige: I did. It was like, you just take this deep breath and I forgave him and I told the Lord and it just released a bunch of mess. That was in my heart that needed to get out. Of course, there were tears. Of course, that day I was just kind of. Thinking about it and struggling with it.

And what do I do now? Lord? So it was, I went right back into my Bible and I wrote and I’m a big journaler. So I write out [00:28:00] everything and I wrote to the Lord. Okay. Kind of like a spoiled brat. I was like, okay, I did it. Now what, what are you going to do with this Lord? I mean, what, what’s going to happen now?

And so, after that act of obedience. To the Lord and by the way, we all have to obey God in all of his word. If we take 1 thing out of the Bible, we might as well throw the whole thing away because everything matters to us. It’s in there for a reason. And so after that, immediately Satan swooped in because that’s what he does.

And my husband and I started going through a rough patch. It was rough. My husband didn’t understand why I would forgive the man that murdered my sister. He had never met Lee, but he loved me so much. And he is a good country boy that, he’s a little rough around the edges. I might say he loves Jesus.

He’s rough around the edges. And he was like, you’re crazy Paige. You are. We are not doing that. If that was my child, I wouldn’t forgive. So we went [00:29:00] through all that for a long time but God, right there, like you said, he was right there with me. And I said to the Lord, I am going to stand with you because I know that you told me to do this.

And I know you’re not going to up and leave me now. I know you’re not, I know you’re not going to, my marriage is not going to be destroyed. I am going to hang on to you, Jesus, right now. And I clung to him like there’s nobody’s business. And I clung to him for about six months where it was rough. Again, I wanted to start telling people, but I was scared because what are people going to think?

I’ve wrote about my book that my parents, I thought my parents were going to be so mad at me. Like, I was, dishonoring my sister’s memory. . I need somebody to hear this today that if you forgive somebody. It doesn’t mean that they’ve gotten off from doing it, right?

Excuse what that man did. I don’t want to be his best friend. People have said, well, are are you going to be, you’re going to call him now? [00:30:00] No, I don’t want to be his best friend. It was for me, not him. It was for me. I had to obey Jesus. Yeah, we have to obey God. Right? It was for me, not him and I did it and I finally started telling people and it was amazing.

Everybody was some people didn’t understand, but everybody was proud of me. And it was undeniable. People were coming up to me going, what has changed about you page? You are, you have changed. They said I look different. My, my mannerisms were different. All those old habits, I just heard a story the other night on the news about a guy that was in a gang and he accepted Jesus and all of his bad habits just disappeared.

And I’m like, yeah, me too, buddy. I was just like that. All of my bad habits disappeared. I stopped getting invited to some things, which was a good thing. It was [00:31:00] fun. I like being at home. I just, my husband. Was a little further behind me in his walk. So that caused some tension in our relationship.

But again, I knew God wasn’t going to leave us. And so I just continued to listen to God and he has brought us so far. It’s just been an amazing experience.

Kelly: Yeah, that’s beautiful. It’s so amazing. The transformation that occurred in you was so huge that for a while your husband, he was grieving the wife he married.

Like he felt like, who are you? And he thought about leaving you. And there is quite a part in your book that talked about that, that you continue to just press into the Lord and trust him that God would work all of this out as heartbreaking as it was.

Paige: Oh, it was such a hard time and I remember those days and our son was little and I just remember and my husband’s got the biggest green eyes you’ve ever seen.

And I can just see his eyes right now with that water and I’m [00:32:00] crying and he, he just he was, you’re right. He was grieving the life that he had with me before. But I knew this. I knew that God had a plan for Steve too. And if it, and I was in God’s plan, he needed me to change first and then he was going to work on Steve.

And I love Steve enough to let him stomp and fuss. And let him get over that grieving process. And I knew that God, like I said, I knew God wasn’t gonna up and leave us. . And if I was not in the Lord at that time, I would have told Steve to pack his bags and leave, or I would have left.

Now, he did leave for a short period of time. But no divorce was ever discussed. So I know that if I wasn’t in God and that’s how marriages end you just, you just say, this is too hard. I’m not going to work on it anymore. However, I didn’t do that. We came to an agreement. Was it [00:33:00] great for about a year after that?

No, but we. We promised each other we were going to work on things and we did and slowly, but surely the Lord worked on us as a married couple because I, and I will be very honest at this time, because I think some people might need to hear this. And I’ve never said this publicly before either. But, I got a little haughty with my Christianity.

that’s what happens sometimes, you get a little full of pride and I needed to soften up a little bit, too, and quit telling him to go read his Bible and leave me alone. That was not helping at all. So, we both had some work to do and we did it. And, might I say today that my husband is a deacon in our church.

Paige: He is the spiritual leader of our home. We are more in love than ever right now. We better be because my son’s fixing to leave us. It just a precious love story between me and Steven. God. It’s just a beautiful love story. And it’s about the [00:34:00] 3 strand cord that always works better than 2.

And so, that God was in our marriage from the start. And that he’s still in it now and he’s even stronger than ever. Absolutely.

Kelly: Amen. It’s a, I love redemptive stories like this, and I love that you so honestly shared the wrestling and the trauma and how difficult it was to, it wasn’t just a one and done kind of thing.

It took a lot of time to process this y’all. You had to just keep leaning into Jesus. And then your husband was leaning into Jesus. It was very long. You had to learn about prayer. You had to learn about reading the Bible. You had to learn that the source of all of your anger and insecurities had, it just had so much to do with the loss of your sister.

And so you had to heal from all of that. And then the forgiveness piece that was huge. So I love that you invite people into this. Story [00:35:00] because it’s just a beautiful God story. It’s full of redemption and it’s, it never it just doesn’t make it seem like it’s a one and done kind of thing, which I very much appreciate about this story.

So I’m wondering if, as we close, if there are just any other words that of encouragement that you would like to offer for our listeners today.

Paige: Yeah, and just to piggyback on what you just said, it’s not a one and done thing. And I don’t want any of your listeners to think that this was easy for me.

This started in 1988 and we’re in 2024. Yeah, so, and we’re still going, we’re still working on it. It’s every single day and there’s so many things that Satan wants to do to steal and kill our stories and our testimonies.

And so the Christian walk and those act of obedience. They’re a daily thing. I have to obey God every day to re forgive if I have to or, [00:36:00] forgive my neighbor or forgive the lady that hit my car with a grocery cart or forgive a coworker or forgive my mom or my dad. And there’s a quote that I love to say when I speak to people that. When you obey God, that 1 act of obedience, it’s like it’s like a firecracker goes off and the Holy Spirit is going to take that where he wants to take it. And you never know. I didn’t know that though, that 1 act of obedience all those years ago was going to land me on a podcast today.

So. I just obeyed and God has done an amazing work in my life. So since then, we’ve, I did a video at church, a testimonial video at church, and it’s been shared over 80, 000 times on social media from that. I started speaking at area churches. Teaching Sunday school that has grown into this full blown ministry that I’ve prayed for, [00:37:00] before my goals and dreams were one thing, but since I obeyed God, he’s changed my dreams.

I just did a big speech at a church about the impossibilities of God and how he can change your dreams. And he does, he changes, he changed my dream, like nobody’s business. So now my dream is to speak to. Millions of people and talk about Jesus and his redemption story and his forgiveness and grace and just share truths from his word with other women and men, if they’ll listen, I’ve spoke to men groups too, because men need forgiveness as well.

And so, this ministry that God has created, nothing that I’ve done is just an amazing. Surprise story in my life, and it just makes me smile every time I get to speak to people, whether podcast or in person, it’s just an amazing thing. And that after speaking, people would say, well, you need to write a book.

And so I did, and I never knew I was a writer. [00:38:00] God just said, right, girl, I love to journal. I was a literacy specialist in a former life. So I know the nuts and bolts of literacy and writing. And so I just started typing and I asked the Lord for time. And then lo and behold, COVID happened. And I said, well, I’m sitting on my couch.

I might as well finish. And so I did, I finished writing the book and. Got a publisher and published it and, we’re just growing and going from there and it’s just been an amazing ride. And I know God’s not done with me yet because he’s brought me this far for a reason and I just hope I can continue and talk to groups and speak and just, Do the work that Jesus has called me to do.

Kelly: Beautiful. Well, I’m so grateful that the one inside of us is greater than the one in the world. I just want to thank you for sharing your story today, Paige. It was just beautiful. Thank you for following Jesus into this new adventure. And I look [00:39:00] forward to hopefully seeing you sometime in person.

Paige: I would love that. And if anybody’s that’s listening today, if you want to know more about my ministry, if you could please just go to PaigeMaclemore. com, I’m sure Kelly will put it with our podcast and.

Just check out my website you can submit a request to have me speak. We’ll travel for Jesus and just looking forward to seeing, where the Lord takes my special little ministry with my special story. And, the funny thing about all of this is. Is that I honor God, but I get to talk about my sister and that just makes me happy.

And the world gets to know Lee through the eyes of Jesus. And that is a special thing. And that just honors her memory better than anything I could ever think of. Absolutely much for having me. I really do appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.

Kelly: That’s so healing. I wanted to mention that I will put all the links in the show notes.

So people will be able to find you. They’ll be able to find your book as [00:40:00] well. So thanks again.

Paige: Thank you.

If you were encouraged in your faith today, it’d be great if you’d help get the word out by subscribing, sharing with a friend or leaving a review. I’d love to hear from you. You can reach out through my website, kellyhall. org and pick up some free resources while you’re there. Thanks for listening to the Unshakable Hope Podcast.