Counting the Cost

by Jill Duggar

“I’m Muscogee Creek,” he said, midway through our first session, “so I’m going to talk about arrows.” “Um, okay,” we said, not really knowing what else to say. “You’ve been in a battle for a long time. You’ve taken a lot of arrows, and there are more coming. Occasionally, back in the day, when someone would get shot with an arrow, the arrowhead might get lost inside them, and anytime that area got bumped it would be extremely painful. You’ve got a lot of different wounds on you. Some are old, some are new. And I don’t think many of those wounds have healed right.” The room stopped. My breath grew shallow. Cry or run, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I just sat and listened. “That’s why it hurts so bad so much of the time, Jill. Even when people do the slightest thing—maybe Derick says or does something dumb—but it bumps one of those arrowheads and triggers all that old pain. So, no, you don’t need a mediation meeting with your parents right now. You don’t need to go back into battle. You need to heal. Really heal.”