Biography
Joyce Landorf Heatherley is a uniquely gifted woman whose personal and painful struggles have enabled her to bring a message of hope and God's healing love to very broken people who live in our complicated world today. Joyce has authored more than 20 books, including such bestsellers as Mourning Song, Silent September, and Balcony People. She is a gifted singer and songwriter and maintains a very active speaking schedule. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Inheritance" 
Since we're going to be talking about the inheritance, I am reminded of the scripture in Genesis where Jacob is dying. He gathers all of his 12 sons around his death bed, and he gives them his blessing, or his inheritance as it were, and he says these words -- it's just beautiful -- he gets through all of his sons and he gets to Joseph and at the end he says:

"Joseph is a fruitful tree beside a fountain. His branches shade the wall. He has been severely injured by those who shot at him and persecuted him, but their weapons were shattered by the mighty one of Jacob the shepherd, the Rock of Israel. May the God of your fathers, the Almighty, bless you with blessings of Heaven above and of earth beneath, blessings of beasts and womb, blessings of the grain and flowers, blessings reaching to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills. These shall be the blessing on the head of Joseph who was exiled from his brothers."

It's sort of the "happy ending." It's an old Jewish custom, to bless and lay on the mantle of your family, the patriarch, who in this case was Jacob.

We do have an inheritance. Sometimes, though, the world is pretty cruel, the pain is pretty bad and we say, "No. Not for me anymore. There's no inheritance." And yet that's exactly what I'd like to talk to you about.

I don't know how many of you have experienced the next thing I'm going to talk about. I suspect, from talking to audiences all over the country, that a great many of you have had this experience. It's the one where you lose somebody very, very precious. Somebody dies and you either receive a phone call, or you receive a letter and someone in the family says, "Could you come to the house and take care of so-and-so's things?"

My mother died a number of years ago and for many months after her death my father would call me and we'd talk about whatever sermon he had preached that Sunday -- he was a pastor. Or we would talk small talk -- we would talk about the weather. And then I always knew that somewhere in the conversation it was going to get down to the point where he would say to me, "Now, Joyce, I have to talk to you about something." I knew what it would be. He would say the familiar line, "Could you come over and take care of Mother's things?"

I don't know how many of you have "taken care of someone's things" after they have died. It's an earth-shaking experience. It's one that, although my mother died many, many years ago, is still very vital and very real in my heart. I put off taking care of Mother's things for probably three or four months. And finally the day came when I went over.

She had died of lung and breast cancer. She had had a mastectomy three years before, and was in intensive care at UCLA Medical Hospital the last seven weeks before she died. We watched her die -- that awful, awful experience, that hard time -- the last three months of her life. But I was with her most of that time in the hospital. And then coming to the home after it was all over, so many months later, I walked into the room where she had been for the last year of her life. It was a den. It had a double door closet on one side of the wall. I remember going into the room very, very reluctantly, having put this off for so many months, and opening the double doors into the closet. Out came the fragrance of "White Shoulders" perfume, which she always wore. It was so overpowering and I thought, "Maybe she's in there." I knew she wasn't, but I was hoping I would see her in there. I opened the door and she wasn't there, of course, but there were all her clothes, all of her things, all of her personal treasures. I stood there weeping, as you would have done, I'm sure, and standing there looking, thinking, "I'm not up to this task, just not up to this task."

I began taking her clothes out and took off her PTA pins and her Christian Sorority pin -- she was the advisor for Dale Evans' wonderful Christian Sorority. I began systematically taking out all of her things from the closet putting them in three little cardboard boxes. When I got through, at the end of the day, I had just those three boxes. One was to the Goodwill, one was to a friend, one was to my Aunt Grace. I sat down, I was exhausted. It had taken me all day long. I sat down and looked at the three boxes and I thought, "How could this be? She was a wonderful, incredible, vivacious woman. She was 57 years of age." That's my exact age right now. "She was in the prime of her life," as I feel I am in the prime of my life. "She was here and when it's all said and done, when it's all over, when we box up all the things that belong to her, I have three crummy boxes! Three boxes!" And I began to get very, very angry with God.

My mother was the Pastor's wife. My mother had been the joy, the inspiration, of my life. She was my "Balcony Person," she was always cheering me on, she was always telling me that I could do something. She was very real, she was a very down-to-earth woman, she was Hungarian, she was very out-spoken, she was a wonderful woman, she was my best friend. Now she was gone and all I had left were three boxes, only three. I sat there getting very angry at God and I said, "Is this all that is left? Is this all that there is to this wonderful, wonderful woman?" I was sobbing and crying and getting very, very angry at God and it seemed as if God in His own, very precious way just spoke to my heart and said, "Oh no, Joyce. She's left you with far more than these three boxes. She's left you gifts. She's left you an inheritance. She's left you some incredible gifts, some wonderful riches."

I sat there thinking, "Sure she has. Tell me about them." And God is not threatened by our anger. His shoulders are big enough to take our angry statements, our pounding on His chest, our saying, "Why did you do this?" God is big enough to handle that. In His gracious spirit of grace and joy and forgiveness and that unconditional love that He has, He began putting into my heart the things that my mother had left me. It's my inheritance. It's my gift from my mother.

I'd like to wrap them all up in boxes and give you the gift. It's a give-away gift, it's something that you can give away to somebody else. I'd like to tell you about some of the things that I heard that day.

I know that one of the best gifts that she left me, one of the most fun gifts that she left me is the Gift of the Sense of Humor. She taught me about the sense of humor not in that she was good at telling jokes, because she wasn't. She couldn't tell a joke. In fact, she couldn't understand a joke and she would always ask me later, "What did they mean when they said..." and then she would repeat the punch line and I would try to explain it to her. She was not an "Erma Bombeck" writer -- she couldn't write humorously, she wasn't a "Phyllis Diller" one-liner lady. She didn't tell jokes well. But she taught me at a very early age that having a sense of humor was extremely important in life because it meant not taking yourself quite so seriously -- not so seriously that when you fell, when you hurt yourself, the U.N. was going to convene and have a special meeting about it! She taught me that life is full of pitfalls, life is full of embarrassing moments, life is full of tragedies, life is full of all of those awful things. But what we need to do is find the humor in the situation, find some joy in it and not take ourselves too seriously.

She taught me this best not by writing on a blackboard somewhere. She taught me this best by the fact that every single time I took her to any of the Bible Study classes that she taught -- and she taught a number of them with many, many women attending them -- she would get out of the car, and I don't know how she managed it, but she always ran her hose. In all the years of taking her to a study -- she didn't drive -- I never heard her say, "Ah! That's the fourth pair this week.

I can't believe it! Pantyhose are so expensive." She would just get out and at some time before we got to the big auditorium where she was speaking, she would look at me, lift her skirt up ever so slightly, and say, "Have you noticed how they're wearing them these days?" And she would look down and say, "Isn't that clever? I have one that matches on the other side." She was saying, "Yes I know I'm going in to speak to 400 women, yes I know I'm going on to a tall platform and everybody is going to see the runs in my hose, but it really doesn't matter that much." That kind of preparation, that kind of sense of humor, prepares you for when the really big things come.

In the last four years I have known that without the sense of humor I would not have been able to exist. My life was dramatically changed four years ago. My life-style, everything, was changed about my whole life. I was divorced and that in itself, for a Christian woman, is totally unacceptable, unexplainable, an "unworld" thing. It's an unbelievable thing, it's something that I thought never, never in a million years would have happened to me. I needed desperately my sense of humor. Over the years it came back to me and I thought, "I was prepared all of my childhood with this gift of humor that my mother left me," which said, "Don't take yourself so seriously."

One of the best examples of that is this. Just a year or so ago I was not very welcome in a great many churches and so I just stopped going to church. I stopped going because of the rejection, due to my divorce and remarriage. One night I said to my husband, Francis Heatherley, "You know, I'm lonely for God and I really want to go to church." So he came up with this cute little plan. We were living in Texas and he said, "Let's get up early Sunday morning. Let's go out and find a tiny Texas town and let's go into a church after it's already started. If they ask us who we are, we'll just say Francis and Joyce, and we'll just let them figure out who's who and we won't mention your other name, we won't talk about writing, or who you are. We'll just go in after the service has started and then leave before it's finished."

So we got up and we drove and we drove until we found this little tiny place. And it was just darling. We walked in and sat down and soon the pastor stopped the whole service and said, "Oh! I see we have a lot of visitors here today." There were only about 50 people there. He said, "I see we have visitors and there's two of them right back there." We didn't say anything. Then he pointed to the little lady sitting next to me and he said, "Flora, introduce us to your friends." Flora, who was 86 or so, and who had nothing to lose and said what she felt and had no inhibitions whatsoever, looked me over, looked Francis over, and then said back up to the Pastor, "They're not my friends." I laughed. I fell off the bench laughing because it was the story of my life. I wasn't finding many friends. The sense of humor which my mother gave me said, "Don't take yourself too seriously." When she did that so many years ago, she had no idea how much I would need it.

The Gift of Humor, the gift of being able to laugh at yourself, to be able to see the joys, see the humor, see the fun, even in some of life's tragic situations, has been one of the most precious gifts of my inheritance that I've ever had.

Another gift that she gave me was the Gift of Honesty. She was Hungarian. She saw things as they really were. Instead of slipping into denial about seeing things and seeing people and seeing experiences as she wished they were, she was honest. She was on the front edge of honesty in that she saw things and she saw people and she saw relationships as they really, really were.

She taught me that there were two kinds of honesty. There was cruel honesty -- the honesty where you tell the truth about yourself, but you tell it as a put-down of someone else. Cruel honesty is also telling the truth about others, but it is destructive to them, it destroys them. She also taught me about kind honesty. Kind honesty was telling the truth about yourself even if someone else said it it might hurt. She was honest, she was open, she did not live in denial like so many of us live -- seeing the world where we want to see it, seeing people as we want to see them, seeing situations as we want to see them.

The Gift of Humor, the Gift of Honesty, and she also gave me the Gift of Acceptance. She accepted herself first, and that's very key. That's very pertinent to what I'm saying. We cannot accept others out there, whether we're trying to accept somebody who's great and good and wonderful, or somebody who's bad and treated us very unfairly, until we first accept ourselves. She accepted her limitations. She accepted the fact that she was good in some areas and lousy in others. She was good at accepting her strengths and her weaknesses, her good points and her bad points, her slow points and her fast points, and she did that first. Then she looked at others, and if she was looking at somebody who was a gifted person, she would look at them and say things like, "I am so proud of you! You sing beautifully." I have sung since I was about three years old and played the piano since I was five. I was a music major in college, so all of my life I have been a musician. I always heard people say, "You're so talented it makes me sick!" I've heard others saying, "How come God gave you all the talent and I can't carry a tune in a bucket?" My mother didn't do that to talented people. To talented people she said, "I'm so thrilled for you. You have a wonderful voice! Sing, the world needs you. Sing, do what ever it is you do." She was an affirmer, she was a "Balcony Person," she was cheering people on. With people's faults, she took Paul's words very much to heart. Paul said, "Making allowances for one another's faults." She made allowances for other people's faults. She accepted them where they were. Who they were didn't matter so much as who they were in their life. She was good at acceptance. She was marvelous at acceptance.
Before she died, she also left me with a letter. Now she always wrote me a letter before she went on a vacation, before she went to the hospital for treatments, even if she thought she was going to come back two days later. When you have lung and breast cancer, you have to have the fluid drained from the chest cavity and if she was going in for that particular procedure, she knew she'd be home in two days. The last time she went into the hospital, she thought that was what was going to happen. Instead of being there for two days, she was there for seven weeks and died. But before she ever went to the hospital or before she ever went on a vacation, her three children got letters from her. The letter was typically her. It was chatty, it was fun, it was just about whatever she wanted to say and my letter that particular time, before she went into the hospital for the very last time, was about two pages long. It was written as she was waiting for Dad to take her to the hospital and so it was in sort of a scribbly kind of a hand. She got down to the end and she signed it, "Your loving Mother, also your greatest fan." She had just found out that I had been offered some book contracts. She died before I wrote my first book, but she knew before she died that I was going to be writing books. So she called herself my most ardent fan. And then, in very firm, very definite handwriting, she wrote the last line. It is significant. It is one of my most treasured gifts. She said, "Keep Faith with God regardless and always."

"Regardless and always." She had no idea what my life would be like in the last four years. She had no idea that I would cling to that so desperately. We are told that our tragedies of life -- the pain or the suffering that we have in life -- either make us bitter or better. As a Christian woman, I didn't want to go the bitter route. I've talked to thousands and thousands of people in a 25 year career in writing and speaking and singing to audiences, I've done thousands and thousands of hours of counseling, and I have talked with many people who have been embittered by the bitter experience that they've had. They haven't been able to come out of it, they haven't been able to forget it, they have been unable to forgive it took to take the bitterness out of the bitter experience, and so I didn't want that. Over and over again I would come back to the phrase, "Keep faith with God regardless and always." Regardless of what happens, regardless of what your circumstances are, regardless of the losses, regardless of the pain, regardless of the suffering, keep faith with God because he can be trusted. He can be trusted! Then keep faith with God, not only regardless, but always, forever, even when it doesn't look right, even when it doesn't feel right, even when God is so silent -- and He is silent to us sometimes.

She gave me many more gifts, these are just a few -- the Gift of Humor, the Gift of Honesty, the Gift of Acceptance and the Gift of Faith. The best one of all, the Gift of Faith, has brought me through, and my only message, really, to you today is that, if He could do it for me, then he could do it for you.

Dear God, You are very precious to me at this moment and I remember the times of going in and boxing up Mother's things. How desperate I was, how lonely I was, how much I was in pain, how much the suffering was enveloping my life and how I felt the brokenness of the moment. I thank You for those gifts that You told me about that day and I thank You about the ones that I have remembered since.

Father, I give these gifts to the people within the sound of my voice to use to do whatever they need to with them. Which ever gift is more needful now, Lord, please help us to hear Your voice through these meager words. Lord, help us to be a little less lonely, a little less desperate, a little less frightened, a little less fearful of the future and we thank You, God, that we can ask for these things in Your Name and that You hear us, and that You love us and that You will give us our inheritance. We thank You God. Amen.

Interview with Joyce Landorf Heathrley
Interviewed by Gunther Knoedler

Gunther Knoedler: I must ask a question about your talk tonight on inheritance from your mother. Betty and I have told our children that our greatest hope and prayer was that we would see them adopt for themselves the values that we consider important and the faith in Christ that we consider imperative in our lives. Now we can't inoculate our children like you inoculate somebody for polio and have it take, but how can we make it easy for them to accept our values and our faith?

Joyce Landorf Heathrley: Well, it's been my experience that kids never learn anything when it's hammered into their head or when it's written on a blackboard per se, but probably the best thing you and Betty ever do for your children, or for us as a matter of fact, is by example. When children see extreme horrible attitudes between mother and father, that's what they pick up. When a kid hears his father talk about how he's cheated on his income taxes, what kind of a message does that give to a kid? If you want your child to have your values then that's probably exactly what you're going to give them. So if you're living the life, and you are living those values out in front of your wife and your children, that's the values they're going to hear. I don't ever remember my mother sitting me down and teaching me these things. It was the example and I got to watch it in action.

Knoedler: Joyce, tonight we enjoyed again your great sense of humor which has come through not only in your speaking, but in your books, many of which I have read. In these books, is there a central theme which seems to run through them?

Landorf: Well, although the central theme is sort of painful, I hope that it is touched by humor and I hope I keep the humor in my life. God has always taken whatever horrible experience I was going through at the time and helping me first to get through it, helping me first to see any humor in it, helping me first to get my balance on it. God has been very precious to me.

Then God shown me how I could take those very painful things that I learned and turn them into some kind of good. I am always running into people who say, "I just had an experience and I learned so much from it." And I will say to them, "What did you learn?" They'll say, "I grew a lot." "Well, how did you grow?" "Well, you know, I just did." I think that the books have been a way for me to be more specific. Books have been the way for me not to say glibly, "Hey, this is what I learned out of this illness, or this is what I learned when my baby died." But to say, "This is where I am now that I have gone through this."

We desperately want to know: How do we deal with death? How do we deal with illness? How do we deal with chronic illness? How do we deal with our neighbor who lost his job yesterday, or our friend who was just diagnosed as having Lupus disease? How do we cope with them, much less how do we cope when it hits our own family and our own self?

Knoedler: Joyce, your latest book has the intriguing title of Unworld People. Tell us something about that. What's the theme of that?

Landorf: Well, "Unworld People" is that place that you and I find ourselves in when the unbelievable thing happens. The thing that could never happen to you, happens. The thing that could never happen to your child or your grandchild, the thing that could never reach out of the darkness and touch you, that unexplainable thing, that unreal thing. The thing that happens on the six o'clock news to somebody else, that tragic automobile accident, or a child overdosing on drugs, or the loss of a home, or the loss of the dearest person in the world to you -- widowhood.

Anything that happens to other people but not to me -- that is the unthinkable, the unbelievable, and that produces tremendous feelings of being unwanted. These are all "unwords."

As I began looking at my life, about 4 years ago, I found that there were a lot of unbelievable things happening, unreal things happening, unacceptable, even unfair, untrue things were being said. You can think of a whole bunch of "unword" things. But the end result was that as I went through the particular traumas that I went through four years ago, I felt unloved, unwanted. I felt abandoned and I felt unnecessary and how do you get through that kind of thing?

I think that there are only two basic -- and this is going to sound terribly simplistic -- but there are two basic ways we get through the "Unworld Tragedy" when it happens to us. One is because we can trust God and the other factor is that God allows some very special people -- his children -- to come and help us through those horrible times. I faced an experience where most of the people that I knew left me, most of my friends have not spoken to me in four years, even to this day. But God was very faithful and raised up one person here, one person here, two people over here, and has carried me through. It is an "Unworld" experience that I've had, but God's faithfulness to us has been unreal and wonderful and unbelievable and you can take all those "unwords" and turn them around. His love has been unfailing.