There are two kinds of conversations you have over drinks with friends.

The first kind is easy. You catch up on work, the kids, vacations, the latest neighborhood gossip, and who’s dating whom.

The second kind begins with someone lowering their voice in the middle of a crowded restaurant like they’re about to ask where you buried the body.

This was the second kind.

After getting the kids settled and our drinks finally arriving, she leaned across the table and said, almost in a whisper,

“So…it’s been a while, and I wanted to check on your…” she glanced around before finishing quietly, “...situation.“

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh…that.” I took a sip of my drink, buying myself a few extra seconds before answering.

“It’s about as cleared up as it’s going to get.”

As I said the words, the last several months replayed in my mind. “I didn’t exactly get my freedom back,” I said with a crooked smile. “And apparently I’m so ugly that someone can’t even stomach looking at me. So that’s fun.”

Humor has always been one of my favorite coping mechanisms – to help ease the other person! If I can make you laugh, maybe neither of us has to sit in the discomfort of the situations that cross my path….for quite so long. 

She gave me the sympathetic look I’ve become all too familiar with. “Oh…“

“It’s okay,” I shrugged. “Out of all of them, this was actually the first one I hired an attorney for.“

Her eyebrows shot up. “The first one?” I could hear the next question forming before she even asked it.

“Yeah,” I said. “This one makes four.” 

She blinked. “Four?” she repeated. “Joni…I’ve never even known anyone with one.” She paused, searching for words. “That’s…quite the number.“

And there it was.

Not cruelty.

Not condemnation.

Just the natural conclusion most people would draw from hearing a number without hearing the story.

And honestly…

I get it.

I really do.

I took another long sip of my drink as I steadied myself for sharing what has become the most important part of my story – the biggest life lesson I have ever learned. 

Context.

Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed

If I wanted to tell you the frightening highlight reel, I could.

I could tell you, in detail, about the explosive rage that seemed to come out of nowhere. Furniture destroyed. Holes punched through walls. A steering wheel nearly ripped from its column.

I could tell you about the manipulation. The random lies. The reckless sexual choices. The complete inability to accept responsibility. The attempts to isolate people, destroy relationships, and rewrite reality until everyone else questioned themselves.

I could tell you about the inappropriate family dynamics that eventually became impossible to ignore. The betrayal that reached into my own life. The underlying fear that slowly became normal. The realization that danger was lurking as it became clear that there was something that couldn’t be fully named….that lived inside of her. 

If that was all I told you, you’d probably ask the same question everyone else does.

“How did you not see it?”

Because none of that happened first.

What happened first was a woman who seemed lonely.

I had been working at the hospital for almost a year when she drifted into my life. Somewhere along the way, I had unintentionally become the unofficial therapist of the floor. Coworkers trusted me with their stories. They told me about struggling marriages, difficult children, addictions, heartbreak, and fears they weren’t sharing with anyone else. My desk was constantly busy. 

I also noticed something else. Most people kept their distance from her. I never stopped to ask why.

Years in ministry had shaped my instincts. If someone was standing alone, I didn’t see someone to avoid- I saw someone who needed to be welcomed. My response wasn’t to back away.

It was to pull up another chair.

So I did what I had done countless times before. I invited her into conversations. Into my circle. Eventually, into my life. Looking back, that decision seemed like an obvious choice.

Living through it, it wasn’t.

Because the people who eventually hurt us rarely introduce themselves as the people we’re afraid of.

They often introduce themselves as the people who need us.

The relationship didn’t change overnight. It changed through hundreds of small moments. Tiny compromises. Little shifts that seemed insignificant on their own but slowly blurred the line between compassion and control.

That’s why hindsight is so deceptive.

Once you know the ending, every warning sign seems obvious.

But when you’re living it one ordinary day at a time, you’re simply trying to love another human being well.

That’s what context gives us.

It doesn’t excuse harmful behavior.

It doesn’t erase accountability.

It simply helps us understand why good people sometimes stay far longer than anyone watching from the outside believes they should.

The second story is much different.

In many ways, it’s the easiest one for me to talk about because I don’t have to defend myself from it.

I made choices.

Not my best choices.

And those choices came with consequences.

I’ve never been someone who hides from that.

The public record is there. People can make assumptions if they’d like. I understand why they do. But once again…

Context matters.

Landon and I had been friends for over fifteen years.

What happened between us wasn’t a random mistake between strangers. It was the culmination of years of friendship, complicated circumstances, poor decisions, and consequences that neither of us could fully anticipate.

When everything came to light, he was carrying an enormous burden. Emotionally. Spiritually. Mentally. His world was unraveling, and regardless of how much he wanted to shield me from the fallout, there came a point where he had to make a choice to protect his own family and begin repairing what had been broken.

I don’t fault him for that. In fact, I never have.

If I truly cared about him, then I also had to care about the people who would forever be affected by our choices.

That piece of paper became one of those consequences.

It is a consequence I still carry today. Not privately. Publicly.

People can see it.

People can judge it.

People can reduce an entire chapter of my life to a single line on a piece of paper.

What they can’t see is everything that came before it.

They don’t see the years of friendship.

They don’t see the impossible conversations.

They don’t see the pressure, the shame, the heartbreak, or the impossible position he found himself in.

If all someone ever reads is the highlight reel, they walk away believing they know the story.

But they don’t.

The same is true if we only tell the sensational parts.

We could talk about the manipulation surrounding the situation. The relentless messages. The blurred boundaries. The misuse of power. The emotional and spiritual pressure that affected more than just the two of us.

Those details matter.

Not because they excuse what happened.

But because they explain why the ending looked the way it did.

Context doesn’t erase consequences.

I still carry mine.

It simply reminds us that consequences rarely tell the entire story.

One of the things I’m most grateful for today is that nearly twenty-five years of friendship survived something that easily could have destroyed it forever.

Neither of us can rewrite the past.

But we can continue making choices that protect one another instead of hurting one another.

To me, that’s what healing looks like.

Not pretending it never happened.

Not demanding that the consequence disappear.

But accepting responsibility, extending grace where it’s deserved, and allowing two imperfect people to move forward with honesty.

Because context doesn’t change the facts.

It changes how we understand them.

The third story was always one in the making. And by the time I received the paperwork on that one – it felt like a breath of fresh air. 

Ironically, Stephanie and Shasta couldn’t stand each other.

Looking back, it’s almost surreal that two of the most volatile relationships in my life existed at the same time. They each seemed to recognize something dangerous in the other, and somehow I found myself standing in the middle, trying to show love and kindness to both of them.

That was my pattern. When other people backed away, I moved closer.

Stephanie’s struggles were different. They weren’t hidden beneath charm. They were visible. Some days she was full of energy and hope. Other days, simply getting through the day felt impossible. Jobs came and went. Relationships unraveled. Alcohol became part of the picture. Crisis had a way of finding her, and more often than not, my phone would ring because she needed someone.

So I answered.

I listened.

I talked her through arguments.

I sat with her during the darkest moments.

I tried to be the steady person she could lean on.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just being a friend.

I had quietly become her rescuer.

The friendship spanned some of the most significant seasons of my life. She was there after my friendship with Shasta blew up. She was there after Shawn left. She was there during my pregnancies and losses.

That’s what makes these stories so difficult to explain.

People are rarely all good or all bad.

Eventually, though, the situation became impossible to ignore.

The combination of addiction, deteriorating mental health, and the environment surrounding her children reached a point where I believed someone had to intervene. Reporting my concerns wasn’t an act of revenge.

It was an act of protection. Especially for a child.

The response became the third out of four.

If I’m honest…

I wasn’t surprised.

I was relieved.

That probably sounds strange to someone who has never lived through a relationship they couldn’t bring themselves to end.

But the paperwork wasn’t the painful part. The relationship had been.

The legalities simply established a boundary I had been emotionally incapable of creating for myself.

For years, I believed loving someone meant staying one more day.

Helping one more time.

Giving one more chance.

Instead, what I discovered was something I never expected. Sometimes the kindest boundary isn’t the one we choose. It’s the one we’re finally forced to accept.

For Stephanie- and before her, for Shasta- the legalities weren’t something I celebrated.

It was something much quieter.

It was permission to lay down a weight I had been carrying for far too long.

And we are back to the original “situation” that my friend was asking about. And to be honest, this one is different for one simple reason.

I’m still living it.

I don’t know how the story ends.

There are conversations that haven’t happened yet. Details I still don’t know. Pieces that haven’t fallen into place. Experience has taught me to recognize patterns long before I fully understand them, but patterns are not proof, and educated guesses are not the same as truth.

So this chapter remains unfinished.

At first, I carried this one with an enormous amount of shame.

My immediate thought was, How did I end up here again?

I wondered if I had learned nothing. If all the lessons from the previous relationships had somehow failed to change me.

But as more information slowly surfaced, something inside me shifted.

Not into certainty. But willingness to know that being curious is the best option. 

I’ve lived enough life to know that the first version of a story is rarely the whole story. Context has a way of changing not only what happened, but how we understand what happened.

That’s why this particular blog matters so much to me.

When people hear, “four” they naturally begin filling in the blanks.

It’s human nature. 

Yet every time I tell the complete story- the relationships, the choices, the consequences, the lessons- the response is almost always the same.

“Joni…you really need better friends.”

We laugh.

But there’s truth hidden inside the joke.

For reasons I’m still trying to understand, I have repeatedly found myself drawn toward people whose pain eventually spilled over onto everyone around them.

That’s not an excuse.

It’s a pattern. And patterns are invitations to learn, not reasons to hide.

What I know today is this:

I’m no longer carrying the shame I felt in the beginning.

I’m carrying questions instead.

Questions usually lead to growth.

Shame rarely does.

Maybe one day I’ll come back and write the ending to this chapter.

For now, all I can honestly offer is the context I have today- and the humility to admit that tomorrow may reveal something I still cannot see.

When I finished giving her context to four very difficult seasons in my life, she sat quietly for a long moment.

Finally she asked the question I think most people are really asking.

“So…how do you keep ending up here?”

It’s a fair question.

For a long time, I asked it myself. Allllll the time!

At first, I assumed the lesson was about me. I wondered if I hadn’t learned enough. If I had somehow missed the warning signs. If I simply kept choosing the wrong people.

But time has a way of revealing things we can’t see while we’re living them.

As I stopped defining my life by numbers and started looking at it as four very different relationships, I realized something.

The legalities were never the lesson. The collateral damage was.

A few months ago, I found myself sitting across from a friend as we worked through what had quickly become an emergency response to a situation I had quietly watched unfolding for months.

Months earlier, I had tried to explain what I was seeing. I pointed out the patterns. I explained why seemingly insignificant interactions mattered. I warned him that he wasn’t dealing with someone who interpreted their relationship the way he did.

He listened. He nodded. But he didn’t really believe me. Not until everything unraveled.

Afterward, I asked gently, “You didn’t really believe me when I told you this was how she felt…did you?”

He paused. “I didn’t. I really didn’t.”

I smiled- not because I had been right, but because I understood.

I hadn’t believed it the first time either.

None of us do.

We want to believe that love, patience, honesty, and good communication can solve every relationship problem.

Most of the time, they can. Sometimes, they can’t.

As we continued talking, he asked another question.

“Has this ever happened to you? Has someone ever accused you of things that weren’t true- not just professionally, but personally?”

Recognizing that my life sometimes is measured in numbers; “Yes,” I answered. “More than once.”

That’s when I realized there is a conversation we rarely have.

We’ve become much better at talking about mental health. We encourage people to ask for help. We work to reduce stigma. We remind one another that compassion matters.

I HOPE WE NEVER STOP HAVING THOSE CONVERSATIONS.

But there is another side of the story that often goes unspoken.

What happens to the spouse trying to hold a family together?

The friend who answers every late-night phone call?

The coworker constantly managing someone else’s emotional volatility?

The supervisor trying to balance compassion with accountability?

The child growing up believing chaos is normal?

What happens to the people who slowly lose pieces of themselves while trying to save someone else?

That’s the collateral damage. The ones that help friends and family build faith and hope. 

I’ve realized that what I’ve struggled with most isn’t the legalities.

It’s reconciling my heart with what they’ve taught me.

Everything in me wants to move toward people who are hurting. For most of my life, I believed that was one of my greatest strengths. If someone was lonely, struggling, misunderstood, or in crisis, my instinct wasn’t to walk away.

It was to stay.

To help.

To love them well.

But somewhere along the way, I had to face a painful truth.

Compassion and boundaries are not opposites.

Understanding someone’s pain does not require accepting behavior that causes harm.

Empathy does not make me responsible for someone else’s healing.

Sometimes the cost of collateral damage becomes too high.

BUT protecting myself has often felt like abandoning someone else.

Yet protecting myself has also become necessary.

The hardest part is that context comes with its own burden.

To explain my story often means telling pieces of someone else’s.

Their struggles. Their pain. Their diagnoses. Their trauma. None of that feels good.

So I often find myself caught between two impossible choices.

I can remain silent and allow people to create a story about me that isn’t true.

Or I can share enough context for people to understand, knowing that someone else’s private pain becomes part of the explanation.

Neither option feels like a victory.

What I do know is this.

I’ve accepted responsibility where responsibility belonged to me.

I’ve apologized where I needed to apologize.

I’ve learned from the choices I regret.

And I’ve also learned that not every ending belongs entirely to me.

When I share these stories with people who have earned the right to hear them, the response is almost always the same.

“Joni…You really need better friends.”

We usually laugh.

But underneath the laughter is something much bigger.

When people hear the number four- they think they know me.

I hear four names.

Four relationships.

Four people I genuinely cared about.

Four stories that taught me different lessons about accountability, manipulation, consequences, compassion, boundaries, and the painful reality that love alone cannot heal every wound.

That’s the difference between judgment and understanding.

Judgment counts the number.

CONTEXT TELLS THE STORY.

j