Escape Hatch: What to do when you feel trapped, limited, or stuck

By Donna Whitten

"Am I done or is there more?"

We all have dreams and goals. However, life circumstances or other people can shut a door or raise a roadblock, leaving us feeling trapped or stuck. When we encounter these delays and detours, we believe there's nothing we can do. We just want out. And while we want to find the nearest escape hatch, God has a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Sep 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647730918

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Escape Hatch

What to Do When You Feel Trapped, Limited, or Stuck

Donna Whitten

Escape Hatch

Trilogy Christian Publishers A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

2442 Michelle Drive Tustin, CA 92780

Copyright © 2020 by Donna L. Whitten

All scripture quotations are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without written permission from the author. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

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Trilogy Disclaimer: The views and content expressed in this book are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views and doctrine of Trilogy Christian Publishing or the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64773-090-1

E-ISBN: 978-1-64773-091-8

Acknowledgments

To those listed below and the countless others listed in my heart, thank you for being on this journey with me. And a special thanks to my family and closest friends who make some captivity bearable and other captivity a party!

My husband, Michael, who reminds me every day what unconditional love looks like.

My daughter, Ashleigh, who is the light of my life (aka, my sunshine, my only sunshine).

My writing partner, Marie, whose honesty, perspective, and deer sightings kept me going.

My small group friends, Lisa, Karen, Tracy, and Julie, whose encouragement, laughter, tears, faith, and wisdom has been my joy and fuel for life’s journey.

Your love has made me a better person.

A Letter to the Limited

Dear Friend,

Let’s start off with a little confession. I’m weird. I’m a writer, but not a huge reader. I’m a writer, but don’t know much about the writing craft. I love books, but rarely read introductions. Everyone has opinions about them; they should lay out the book so people know where you’re going. You should give people an idea of who you are. You should tell them why you wrote the book. I like what my friend, Marie, said best, Just talk to them. Ah, that I can do. I can give you a peek at my heart and the passion I poured out on these pages.

What I learned in this past season is if you’re not dead, you’re not done. God has more in store for you. We’ve all felt some form of captivity in our daily life; we feel trapped, stuck, limited, or confined in some way. We’ve felt like something is holding us back or hemming us in. What is that for you? Perhaps you feel stifled in a dead-end career. Maybe you’re a single mom at the end of herself. Or perhaps you are battling through crippling loneliness. You could be in a new or long-term marriage, asking yourself, is this all there is?

What I’ve learned is my wounded self is tempted to fight back or shrink back, perhaps you can relate. But what God asks me to do is to rise up and fill the space I’m in. It’s how He grows everything, in an egg, a womb, an acorn pressed down in the dirt.

Why is it that God chooses to use our personal prisons as a process? Perhaps because He knows to become who He created us to be, we have to reframe our limitations and start treating what seems to be incarceration as incubation.

I want to challenge your perceptions about where you are in life and what you can do about it. When it comes to being limited, trapped, or stuck (I call them everyday captivities), there are no quick ways out. To escape, you must hatch. To hatch, you must grow. And to grow, you must master the practices of availability, generosity, creativity, and tenacity.

As I share bits and pieces of my story, I hope a little light goes on. That light is hope. Something resonates.

I learned something about resonance lately. Did you know that if you put two guitars facing each other and pluck the string on one guitar, the other guitar (the one you didn’t pluck) will make a sound? Pretty cool. It’s what I hope God does with the words on these pages. I hope He will pluck a string with a word, a phrase, or a story that will resonate with you and give you hope.

My hope is that we’ll share a few laughs and tears and learn together. I’m just me, and I write like I talk, so let’s jump in and keep the conversation going.

Get Me the Shell out of Here!

Recently I became aware of a local establishment near my home. An ad popped up on my computer, and the description promised the ultimate experience of fun and adventure! A stimulating experience that leaves you eager for more! What great testimonials! Okay, you’ve totally reeled me in like a largemouth bass. Now tell me. What is it? What is this adventure?

It’s called the Mystery Room (called Escape Rooms in some cities—go figure). They trap you in a room, and you have forty-five minutes to solve the mystery and escape. I’m hyperventilating just writing about it!

First of all, my idea of fun and adventure is a cruise. And a stimulating experience is the massage chair while I’m getting a pedicure. It is not being trapped in a room. That is more like all of the horror movies I’ve ever seen rolled into one. The hockey-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding murderer is pursuing the terrified girl, and a perfectly good knob won’t turn, or it somehow got locked. She tugs at the knob. She pulls the key out of her pocket with her shaking hands, and it falls on the floor. The shrieking music escalates as she takes her last attempt trying to claw her way out with her bright-pink acrylic nails. Bzzz…plop!

Sorry, Mystery Room, being trapped is not entertainment to me. But it does seem a lot like life. One of the most frustrating places I’ve been in life is on the wrong side of something I desire with my whole heart—the wrong side of the door, so to speak. I’ve tugged on my share of proverbial doorknobs. I’ve even tried to claw my way out. And while I haven’t lost my head to a chainsaw, I have, at times, lost my mind and my will from feeling trapped.

How about you? Have you ever felt trapped? Have you ever felt like you were on your way to your dreams, your future, and someone or something put up a roadblock or shut a door in your face? If you have, then you have felt captive and desperately wanted out! But all the wants in the world won’t change your reality.

Captivity is one of those words that, based on your background, may evoke a particular feeling, memory, or connection. Someone may have locked you in a closet as a prank when you were a child. You may have ancestors who were trapped in a concentration camp or bound by slavery.

In this book, captivity is a word I use to refer to those times when we feel limited, trapped, or stuck. It paints a picture of undesired confinement, hopelessness, or desperation. And when faced with captivity, we cry out for an escape route.

So let me draw a picture of what captivity can look like in our everyday life, and then I’ll tell you a couple of stories. Get your pencil out and draw your own.

You.This is you. (Feel free to draw in your own hair.)

Dreams. You have dreams, goals, a life you are pursuing.

Roadblock. On the way, people or life circumstances lock a door or put up a roadblock. Someone or something stops you (a divorce, job loss or limits, death of a dream, or a health challenge).

Limits. You feel stuck or trapped by physical and/or emotional limitations. You don’t know what to do or where to go.

Response. When we are in trapped, our tendency is to fight or shrink. When we fight, we play the human form of Whack-A-Mole. We fight to the point of exhaustion and injury, only doing damage to ourselves and not making any progress toward getting out. When we shrink, we lose confidence and hope. We believe the worst of others and ourselves. Our world, our dreams, our outlook and lives become small, leaving us in…

Captivity.

A Tale of Two Captivities. These are my captivities. We’ll call the first tale Rick.

This is me. See the cute earrings and the curly hair (bad perm victim circa 1980s)?

I had a dreamto get married, have a family and a career. I married my high school sweetheart, Rick, and we had a beautiful baby girl, Ashleigh.

One day after a huge fight, Rick said he didn’t want to be married anymore. He wanted a divorce. The love of my life was done with me. He slammed a door between us. He slammed it hard literally and figuratively.

I felt trapped. There was nothing I could do. Satan used my worst thoughts, fears, and lies to erect wallsaround me. I was financially insecure. Well, let’s call it what it was—broke! There was the guilt and the lonely responsibility of being a single mother! I had sworn I would never do that to my child because I came from a broken home. I felt unloved, rejected…again.

As these walls closed in on me, I responded by shrinking, getting smaller and smaller. I’m done, I thought. Done at twenty-five! After all, who will want a fat, freckled-faced, college dropout, bitter, angry, damaged, divorced, single mother?

Life was over. I was in captivity.

There were times when I gathered my strength to fight. I’ll do whatever it takes to make us work! I begged. If you ever want to try again, I’m ready, I offered. But my Whack-A-Mole scenarios played out as fruitless pleas for reconciliation. Rick eventually just fell off the map. No communication with me. No connection with our daughter. He didn’t want me, he didn’t want us, and he didn’t want to be found.

For twenty-five years, my mind and heart wrestled and wondered what I could have done better. What did I do wrong? How could I have been so clueless? Did I miss signs he was unhappy? Oppressed by a sense of guilt, I apologized to my daughter many times for not fighting harder, for making her daddy so angry, he took it out on her by abandoning us.

As a young adult, Ashleigh sought out her father, hoping to connect. Finally, a vague reference from one of Rick’s family members put us on the right track. In 2011, Ashleigh found her father, or should I say she found her father’s obituary. Rick died four years prior. No one told us. He had lived the entire time less than an hour from us. It was heartbreaking to know he had been so close and so far away. As Ashleigh read the obituary to me over the phone, she ended with a soul-crushing statement, He is survived by his partner, Todd.

Do you feel better, Mommy, knowing there was nothing you could’ve done? she asked.

It felt like I would imagine an innocent man feels after he’s been imprisoned for twenty-five years and is released. I’m not sure I would use the word better. For weeks after, I was overwhelmed. And eventually I realized that what I thought was soul-crushing news was really walls crashing down. Did it heal the pain or return the lost years? No. I had been incarcerated by shame, guilt, and false beliefs. I had sat feeling helpless in my cell waiting for Rick to release me when the keys to my captivity were in my hands