Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
302. Discovering the Radical Love of God
“Intense love does not measure; it just gives.”
-Mother Teresa
Have you ever wondered how embracing vulnerability can lead to transformative healing? Join us as we chat with Russell Joyce, the insightful author of "His Face Like Mine," who shares his personal journey of receiving God's deep love and radical acceptance. Russell bravely recounts the pivotal moment when his wife Anna helped him confront insecurities stemming from Goldenhar Syndrome. Her symbolic act of kissing his scars is a powerful testament to the healing potential of being fully seen and loved by another.
Visit Russell Joyce's website: RUSSELL JOYCE
Order "A Face Like Mine"
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Thank you, pure place on earth. Learn how you can donate and support the podcast at heartliftcentralcom. Now settle in for today's remarkable conversation with Janelle. Wherever you find yourself today, may these words help you become stronger in every way.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to today's Heart Lift with Janelle. I am sitting here with someone who I've been trying to have on this show for a while now, and we made it happen.
Speaker 3:Pastor can.
Speaker 2:I still call you Pastor. Or I'll just call you Russell.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Russell, thank you so much for being here. Your book His Face Like Mine is. It is something. It's deep, it's what we need, and your story is remarkable. So welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me, Janelle.
Speaker 2:You are just astounding. I love the word remarkable, it's one of my favorite words. Remarkable is one of my favorite words and you are remarking. Remarking in this book, many things the power of God, the power of a parent's prayer Talk about your daddy and his prayers but also your now wife.
Speaker 2:So I had to crack up when I started reading this book, so we're going to start with this because I had to stop. And so it starts with the God who kisses our wounds. One night years back, my fiance Anna and I were making out.
Speaker 3:I, you know, with that line, I went back and forth. I was like all right, do I? You know I? With that line, I went back and forth. I was like all right, do I, do I make it? Do I soften it? Do I say we were embracing? I was like there's just no way around it. You know, we're engaged, we're swooning over each other.
Speaker 2:Right, you are getting in need to be married.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, all of that is coming.
Speaker 2:We need to be married woman. Yes, yes, all of that is coming.
Speaker 1:We need to be married woman.
Speaker 2:I know You're right. She lived with six other women in a house in Portland Oregon and we found ourselves all alone Dangerous which didn't happen often. Thank God, we decided to take advantage of the privacy, or privacy as our cross the pond say. We were in our mid-twenties, had been together for a year, were recently engaged and swimming over each other. It was a happy season. In the middle of a moment, she suddenly pulled back. Fill us in. Why didn't she pull back, russell?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I mean, I was learning in real time as well, you were.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, she pulled back and she was kind of like stop that. Yeah, so she pulled back and she was kind of like stop that. And I had no idea what she was referencing. As I say in the book, I hoped it wasn't my kissing Though I don't say this in the book, but I joke about it. Due to all my surgeries, I have no feeling in my lower lip. So we joke that our first kiss was Anna's worst first kiss ever. The reason why is because she was going for my. You know how you can't go just two lips, you have to go like a bottom lip or an upper lip.
Speaker 2:Kisser, yeah you gotta choose that my bottom lip.
Speaker 3:But I have to go for the bottom lip, otherwise I can't feel. So she got my bottom lip so I couldn't feel anything. So I was like a fish just flopping on the dock, you know Wow.
Speaker 2:So you know and uh, so anyway, that's intense though that's a, that's a behind the scenes of the the journey. So you will have to do a course on the journey of kissing yeah, the theology of kissing, the theology of kissing oh my god, I love that, you know, I love that so much. At least an article relevant come on I love it.
Speaker 3:so she pulls back and she goes stop that. And I had no idea what she was referencing. And she goes do you do? You know you always do that? And again no idea. So she reveals to me that, um so with with my golden heart syndrome, which is what I was born with, I had a lot of brokenness on the left side of my face, a lot of scars, a lot of surgeriesness on the left side of my face, a lot of scars, a lot of surgeries and a lot of shame, a lot of shame. That's really like the core emotion and so he goes every time.
Speaker 3:I try and kiss the left side of your face. You don't let me. I either this was all subconscious to me, I either was, you know, redirecting her lips back onto my lips, or I would just praise her. I'd be like, oh, I love you, you're so beautiful, I couldn't just receive a kiss, couldn't receive a kiss there. And she goes. And she got so frustrated. At that point she was like do you not think I see you, like all of you? Do you not think I love all of you? Let me kiss you. And again, that was was I mean, I still say those words and I'm just stunned, like I'm frozen, like it was such a powerful, just puncture, just totally cut through all my facade, cut through all my pretense and expose the vulnerable heart within of of what I, you know, didn't realize at the time but I gained the language for later is no, I didn't think she saw all of me and I thought that if she did see all of me, she wouldn't love all of me.
Speaker 3:Because how could she? Cause I was full of so much shame about this place, so she proceeded to essentially go to she, she made me just sit there and she kissed the left side of my face. Can I read it?
Speaker 2:Can I read it? Sure, yeah. She made me just sit there and she kissed the left side of my face. Can I read it? Sure, yeah, it's so good. Okay, she wasn't repulsed by my wounds, she wasn't overlooking them. She saw them for what they were and she knew there would be no me without them and the stories they told of my life. So she loved them Because they made the real me and she loved the real me. She's something.
Speaker 3:She is. You want to have her on the podcast.
Speaker 2:I do want to have her on, and your mother and maybe your dad too, and everyone as she tenderly kissed this is just so well written.
Speaker 2:I can tell you've probably written a thousand sermons in your life as she tenderly kissed every inch of wounded flesh on my face, every mark that carried the tragic baggage of all the rejections I had ever experienced, all the stares that's the thing I had ever garnered all the teasing I had been subject to. It just breaks my heart and I know, I know, I just can't imagine all my self-loathing. The shock and rage in my body began to give way. This is so critical, russell. It melted within me. What replaced that rage was an emotion without a name. There's another thing to write about. The closest thing I can call it is grief, deep grief. Yet it transcended even that. I think it was a death, something was dying. In that moment I began to wail. Tell me about that moment, because the way that you wrote this and we'll come back to this I will use forever in my work with others, because you define embodied.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you give a very difficult concept flesh and bone and heart and marrow. So you begin to cry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it was, it was so visceral. So when? Yeah, yeah, it was, it was so visceral. So, um, when, when she first started kissing and just forcing me to receive her kisses on my, my reconstructed ear and my scars, rage exploded in me. I had so much rage and I write to scream. I wanted to push her away. I wanted to. I originally, I think like my cynicism wanted to spit, like I was so angry because I'd never been touched so vulnerably in this space before. I was terrified. I was terrified.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Okay, that's it.
Speaker 3:She kept joining me and as she joined me in that place and, like I said, the shock and the rage began to give way and I realized, like I felt my soul felt what she wanted to communicate, which is that she loved me. She saw me, she saw every part of the parts of me that I thought I'd been hiding from everyone, hiding from myself. She saw me and she chose me and as that realization just welled up in my body, the shock and rage gave way and what replaced it was this deep grief and I just I mean it was the types of tears I pray people only have like once or twice in their life, Like it was yeah, just gave me chills.
Speaker 2:I felt it. I just felt it last week, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:No, no, it was it's. This is kind of what I want. I don't. I won't interrupt here. I'll add my story later. Yeah, yeah yeah, because you can't embody God's love, like what she did to you was walk you through a thousand years of therapy. Number one yes. I mean because your body had what we call somaticized. All the bullying, all the stares, like you had been touched by a thousand doctors. I have no doubt in my mind your face had been touched a thousand million times.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I think what was so significant about this beautiful work of your wife, it hadn't been touched like this and and I'd write about this I said, like even my, what was different about Anna was that we weren't flesh and blood Like in my subconscious, my, I had said well, my parent, my, my parents, had touched me like that.
Speaker 2:I mean not that deep, not intimately not intimately parents had touched me like that. Of course I mean not that deep of a fact Not intimately, not intimately.
Speaker 3:Correct, but they had touched me like that. But my subconscious was well, they're forced to. You know, I was born into the family. They were forced to receive me. So here was something different, because here was a woman who did not have to choose me. She was choosing me and she was choosing me, and she was choosing me in the precise place that I felt was most worthy of condemnation, and that if her love was there so that's where, like I cried so hard, the tears wouldn't even come like I, just like, almost convulsed, I convulsed. I convulsed with just so much singular grief.
Speaker 3:All the years were just pouring out all the years all, the all, the all the baggage yeah and she just kept kissing, she just kept staying. It was, it was so powerful. It's one of those moments you look back, I'm getting emotions, thinking you should.
Speaker 2:I've got chills everywhere and I'm thinking who is this woman like? Who is this woman who? Was created for you.
Speaker 3:You know. So even that I forget. If I ended up, I think I do put it in another chapter. It's interesting how the Lord just orchestrates our lives. Her dad was born two years before the polio vaccine, so he contracted polio as an infant. So he has his own story. So he always his entire life he had a leg it's like a little bit of a limp. He has scoliosis in his spine. So the first man that she ever loved had very visible physical imperfections. So like when she met me, it kind of fit her experience in so many ways that's amazing.
Speaker 3:So it is interesting how the Lord does those things.
Speaker 2:Well, he fashioned her. He says, I mean, say skeptics, whatever you want to say, I believe God fashioned me for my husband and he fashioned my husband for me. And you know the last sentence of that section in the book, of where you write the God who kisses our wounds. I can't even get beyond that. I don't even know if we'll get beyond that, because you wrote and I encountered God like never before. Yeah, that's what to me, this book, yes, it is your remarkable story and it goes so deep and you've been able to, like I said a few minutes ago, tangibly put into words processes that are really difficult, even as a therapist sitting across from somebody, like the final work of trauma healing is embodiment, like come home to your body, fill your body, don. Come home to your body, fill your body, don't try to escape it, you know. And consolidate all the wounds.
Speaker 3:Okay, Well, this right here was. I mean, this was the start of the journey, is what?
Speaker 2:this was Talk to me.
Speaker 3:This was. This was 2013 when I had this moment, or 2014. I remember.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you've been married almost 10 years, or 10 years, yep, 10 years, that's a big one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so yeah. This was the start of the journey where it was like the conception of realizing how out of touch with my soul I actually was. And this was just so remarkable because I was an intern at the time. I was in the like, I was training to be a pastor. There were layers of my soul that I believed the gospel, but there were other, just as real, deep layers of my soul which I had not allowed the love of God anywhere close to, which was this.
Speaker 3:And so that was like the start of the journey of the embodiment I love the way you said it of like coming back home to our body. My book basically tells that story. It does. God is bringing me back home to my body, which is ultimately to Jesus's body.
Speaker 2:You can't divorce the two. It's so integrated we are spirit, soul and body. That's what we see in 1.
Speaker 3:Thessalonians. He tells us that 523.
Speaker 2:It's like 100%. Right.
Speaker 3:And that's really like why I think even I felt so compelled and I felt like the Lord asked me to write this book. And that's even you know, the St Athanasius line God became like us, that we might become like him. There were levels of my human condition that I would say, oh yeah, god became like that. But there were other deep levels of our human experience and each of our individual stories, which for me was housed within the stories in my face, which I subconsciously did not believe that God embodied, that Jesus did not identify with. And this book is the realization of like no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:When Athanasius says God became like us, god became like you, he means that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, experienced every precise embodied experience you have in your life, the good you have in your life, the good, the bad and especially the ugly, that he's identified, entered and knows it intimately, that deep pain, that deep wound, just as you.
Speaker 3:And when we realize that and that's the journey that the Lord took me on in this book, that I share in my prayers, that through this story people have the courage to let God into their deep wounds too, that when we realize that he has entered an experience, the precisely same things, the things that I don't even want to look at anymore, like I want to push so far down and be like, no, no way God will save me, but not that part. No, I think the message is that God saves us through that part of us that we haven't met the living God until we've met him in the places of our souls that we think are so full of shame, so ugly, so broken, that there's no possible way that God would choose us there. When we realize that God actually has chosen us there in Jesus, and specifically Jesus on the cross, that is a game changer. That just changes everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:Sorry, you got me preaching now.
Speaker 2:I want you to preach.
Speaker 2:I'm sitting here going, please preach. This is the message of the spirit right now. I feel it so deeply and am so now I know why. This has been obstacle after obstacle to get this here, but there's just so, so much there. Let me say this Okay, let me get clarify. You couldn't have known. You tell me if I'm on the right page here. I am going through something personally as well. Where I left a neurologist office, I went into the bathroom in the office and I just got in the stall and it became a prayer closet and I was just like okay, I don't know. I don't know how to make these changes. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't even know. She's telling me I better stop doing this work. I won't be alive next year. Like my body's keeping the score Okay, swirl, right. But I think you did not know when Anna started to caress and intimately kiss your wounds. I don't think you knew because it was so lodged in your subconscious. That's what I wrote here.
Speaker 2:It was so deeply buried, it was so deeply buried, the subtle, inherent childhood wounds, like the leper. You write about the leper in Matthew 8. You write about make me whole. Jesus, make me whole. That was your father's prayer, but I had done everything I knew how to do to be whole. And so then the prayer becomes just send me somebody, send me something. And I feel like you didn't even pray, that you're just making out with your girl, as engaged couples do. And God just bestowed is the word endowed, mm-hmm, the deepest healing that I promise you. A million years of trauma therapy, I'm not sure would have gotten you there.
Speaker 3:No, no, it wouldn't have. No it was such an embodied moment, it was such a gift it was, and it also just, you know, reminds me that, like that, god created this for relationship. Yes, I mean, it's what? What does that say? That no one hurts you like family, but also no one heals you like family either? You know, there's this sense, that it's beautiful.
Speaker 3:There is this. This, like this moment with Anna, was a moment with the Lord, but it was also a moment with Anna. It was a moment with a, with a human being, with another human Flesh, blood, tenderness, empathy connection Broken too, has her own brokenness, her own trauma. Of course, you know just such a beautiful, like almost Trinitarian image. In a sense we're being swept up in the Trinity of what he longed to do Preach.
Speaker 2:Come on, what does it?
Speaker 3:mean to love God and love our neighbor.
Speaker 2:I don't know, so yeah, you're exactly right love God and love our neighbor. I don't know, so yeah you're exactly right.
Speaker 3:A thousand years of of of trauma counseling couldn't have done such a that deep work that that moment had with Anna for sure.
Speaker 2:So then, pastor Russell, how I put like how then? Because one of the major themes of this book, which is just amazing, I'm going to read this you write whatever wound was inflicted upon your soul. You find yourself feeling painfully, less than whole, and I will just say painfully less than you do address it. What's worse, these wounds calcify this is our mojo here what we do on this in this community. These wounds calcify that word well done into beliefs and attitudes that form habits and lifestyles that only make the pain worse, the unique pain you carry subconsciously deep down in that place you have put over here and said don't touch.
Speaker 2:You know, as internal family systems say, we've got guardians inside, you know we've got protectors and they're like not going there. But Anna pierced them, anna, anna wooed out, as we would say in internal family systems exile. Come on back to me, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, I'm finished Leads you to inflict then painful wounds onto others too, even if unintentionally. This is what I love. That rejection may lead you to reject yourself and others. That abuse may lead you to abuse yourself and others, and that's where I put red flags. That gruesome word spoken over you has spun a web of lies so thick in your mind and heart you can't even begin to cut through it. This is so well-written To see the sun shining on anyone's face, much less your own, and I love that you say the sun shining on anyone's face, because your face has been your journey. It grows deeper, darker, lonelier, wider, making you feel like there's no way out. Lord, would you make me whole? Holy moly, moly, so let's fast forward. From Anna Holy moly, moly, so let's fast forward from Anna.
Speaker 2:Sorry, it's just I want to link everything back, every part of your story, just for our conversation today about embodiment, if you don't mind, yeah, absolutely for concept journey in our faith and in our lives, mentally and emotionally, to come home to fully inhabit our story yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:I agree, that's been my experience and you're helping, like this is a book for such a time as this, your story. Obviously god, obviously God is so wise, he knew we would need this story. He knew we would need you to really help us. Because I'm here in my breathing room, this is where I just flesh out on this floor. You know, like I don't think I know your love for me, yeah, yeah. And first john four tells me I can only know you by knowing your love and I. There's no punishment in love, but I'm still punishing myself. Okay, right, so flash forward to your time as a church planner in brooklyn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're married by now we are, yes, we're married, so you're kissing the heck out of each other.
Speaker 2:I love it. Okay, and you're in brooklyn, which is one of I just love that city from 2015 to 2021. And you write I was 27 years old at the start of that journey and in many ways, I was like trying to ride a bike while putting it together. So how did this time lead you to this? You said it led me to healing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, start with Anna's kiss.
Speaker 2:You're coming unfurled. You go through the rage, you go through getting out all of the layers that have protected you.
Speaker 3:Okay, it's also, as you're well aware, like I wish. I wish I could say for myself or any human being I just have to learn a lesson once, and then I got out of my body oh no, right, sanctification exactly exactly so. That moment with anna was almost like the conception of something, like something happened inside of me that I was aware had never happened inside of me. There was a, there was a healing that took place.
Speaker 2:There was a revelation, an awakening, yeah An awakening, but I wasn't fully awoken yet, no.
Speaker 3:So then forward, and there's years of me still believing the old lies about myself. Oh, people, don't you know what I mean. I have moments like I'm learning to believe the truth, but there was also still the realization that there were deep wounds in my soul that stem from this deep wound, which I call it my central wound, and I think we all, but we all have certain central wounds, certain central stories, certain like moments that we keep playing yes, pivots, okay, yep.
Speaker 3:So for me, my central wound related to my face and that was reinforced by being stared at, that was reinforced by the moments of rejection, that was reinforced by being a sixth grade boy and playing spin the bottle and when the bottle landed on me and the girl screamed ooh and ran away laughing, laughing, like those are the moments, oh my god, oh my god. Those are where it reinforces. So I have this moment with anna, which is beautiful and so awakening and also like now I'm testing it out in my life like is it true? Is this actually? Is this the truth or is this the lie? You know what?
Speaker 2:I mean, oh, it's cognitive dissonance, you're gonna do your brain's going. Wait a minute. Everything's rutted and rigid.
Speaker 3:You know, these are neural pathways that have been rigidly putting my entire lived experience has been the opposite and now I have this moment like well, I mean just confusing very candid, like even just realizing. I mean there was, there was a time in high school, and high school I mean high, mean high school is high school right High school is high school.
Speaker 3:But there was a girl who I was good friends with and we were really good friends and I learned that she had a crush on me. And when I learned she had a crush on me, this is really tragic. Like talk about our trauma when I learned she had a crush on me. That actually lowered my respect for her in my eyes, cause I could not believe. I was like if you have a, if you find me attractive, then I don't trust your discernment on anything. How could you find me attractive? Isn't that so horrible? Like that was my second.
Speaker 2:Oh, I just want to dig into it, but it's not a counseling session.
Speaker 3:But just the way, this idea of like like. You're saying that I'm attractive, but that's not my lived experience at all, so you must be delusional. That's not what I get from anyone else, you know.
Speaker 2:Sure, because you think you're repulsive.
Speaker 3:Am.
Speaker 2:I right, deep down that anger that all that comes from the repulsion.
Speaker 3:That's why I say, even in that line that you read of like, we have these core wounds that calcify into beliefs, narratives, which I believe so much of. The gospel is learning to believe our new identity, learning to trust God's word, of who's my new identity.
Speaker 2:Bingo. You just said what I was going to say. Yeah, why is?
Speaker 3:she more trustworthy than anyone else who has stared at me with repulsion? Why is she like the trustworthy voice that tells me who I really am in the world? Oh my God, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I just want everyone listening to know what you mean. You know what I mean? Oh no, I just want everyone listening to know what you mean, because that is layer upon layer upon layer of those core wounds, those central wounds. Is we? It has calcified.
Speaker 3:In church planting. What was revealed to me? I had a friend who was a church planter. I think ministry does this, but I think it's all of us, wherever we find ourselves. We can trust that the Lord has put us in those places for a reason and I heard someone say in ministry, with planting a church, he goes.
Speaker 3:at first I thought God called me to plant this church because he wanted to save people through this church. And then I realized, three years in, god called me to plant this church because he wanted to save me. You know, and I think it's both, and Like he puts us in situations where he wants to use us for his purposes for others, but also he's using that situation for us. So coming and planting a church where you're so helpless, like it's such a vulnerable experience to start something from scratch. What happened? What I recount in the chapters, which are very human, it's not about church planting, but it's about how church planting revealed my soul's wounds that were like where I needed people's approval or I had shame over my sense of how do I enter a place or my relationship. So I have a chapter about Anna's and my marriage and it's not as lovey-dovey.
Speaker 2:It's not like the first story, right.
Speaker 3:Not like the first story, and because there was wounds that the Lord was getting to the root of. So what I say is you know, I follow this trope. In chapter one I develop what I think is the biblical model, the gospel of wound, kiss, scar. I think we have deep wound, raw salt, the love of God kisses them and then he heals them, turns them into scars. And what I think is the whole point of the gospel is that we're supposed to boast in our scars. That's why Jesus comes out of the tomb with scars. That's what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 12. Like I will boast, because when I'm weak then I'm strong. I think the actual, the proof that the gospel is true and the hope we have for the world is when we hold up our scars of what once were embarrassing wounds and the world might laugh, might stare, but they have their own wounds that they're hiding, and we actually show them our scars and say, hey, you can be healed too.
Speaker 2:I love that. I've really never heard it said that way. It's just blowing my mind.
Speaker 3:That's like the model, and so each chapter, through the church plant, I talk about different wounds in my own soul that were being exposed, being kissed by the love of God and being turned to the scars. But really one chapter, chapter seven, is like the climax of the book. That's where I get into my core wound and really the narrative, because I think we all have I forget what you said earlier, but we all have a core belief about ourselves. We do, and my core belief, my core belief no one ever said this to me, but a thousand million different experiences calcified to this core belief at the depth of me. I am ugly. That was my core belief that was my core belief.
Speaker 3:What do you?
Speaker 2:mean.
Speaker 1:What was the?
Speaker 2:day that you went. Oh my God, that's my core, Like there's usually an aha moment.
Speaker 3:It was well, I kind of I'm not sure if I should give it away or not, but it was from that chapter.
Speaker 2:Okay, now don't give it away. You've got to get the book.
Speaker 3:It was a counseling exercise. It was a counseling exercise with my Christian counselor. She had me walk through my earliest memory of the hospital Because she goes. Anna and I we went in just for some couples counseling and this is what you know if anyone's ever done this. You're like you're going in and you want couples counseling but you really want them to say problem, right, not my problem and we get there and she goes Russ.
Speaker 3:I don't think you've really processed your face that much and I remember when she said that and I was so angry I was like are you kidding me? Are you kidding? But she was exactly right, I had it, I hadn't processed. Even though I've had that embodied moment with Anna, I still didn't want to process my pain. I wanted to get over it, I wanted to overcome it, but I didn't want to process it.
Speaker 1:No, who does? So she had me go back. Who does?
Speaker 3:Exactly, she had me go back to my earliest memory of the hospital.
Speaker 3:Okay, we'll read about it and she took me to this exercise and the Holy Spirit just did some deep work. I encountered Jesus in a profound way and really what happened is I realized what my core narrative was about myself, and Jesus broke that narrative. He said that's not true. I have a new one for you and from that moment I can share yeah. So basically I had this moment with Jesus in this scene, where Jesus well, essentially so, I was a six-year-old boy sitting on the hospital bed and I was in the scene. And she goes what do you want to say to that boy? Which?
Speaker 1:is me.
Speaker 3:It's the six-year-old me, yes, and I couldn't think of anything to say to him, like I didn't have anything, but I was like, well, he couldn't understand it. He doesn't know what he's about to experience, he just has to live through it. Oh yeah, when the scene, I mean, how powerful is this, is the holy spirit. What I did is I walk over to him and I just hug him, I just embrace him, you embody him.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to know him.
Speaker 3:Bring him close and I'm not going anywhere. And then and then it wells up in me I know what I want to say. And so I look in his eyes and I go my boy, it's true, you were broken, more broken than you can possibly imagine.
Speaker 2:But I need you to hear me.
Speaker 3:I go, but I need you to hear me. You are not ugly and there's a difference. You're broken but you're not ugly. And that's when she goes and where's Jesus? And I realized and I won't go through all of- it.
Speaker 2:No, no, no. I want everyone to use it as their own healing experience by reading through it. That's right In a quiet place.
Speaker 3:I, the older version of me, was playing the role of Jesus, the one who was once in the bed, the one who also experienced what it's like to be broken, but not ugly. And what Jesus was communicating to me in that moment is brokenness is objective. Yes, we were born into a sinful world. We're broken, more broken than we can imagine. He's not denying that. Yes, that's true. No, but ugliness is subjective. Ugliness is subjective. And God looks at us and says you're broken, that's true, but you're not ugly. That's a subjective interpretation and I reject that. You are beautiful and I am going to be with you and I'm going to heal you and I'm going to stay with you and I'm going to take you with me to my home. And that changed everything. Oh, my God, coming out of this, my new narrative, my deep narrative, is I knew it in a deep way I'm not ugly, like that's not who I am. That's not true. I'm broken.
Speaker 3:It's not true, I'm broken, but I'm not ugly. I have been seen for the depths of who I am, and God has chosen me and loved me there, and Anna has too, and that just changed everything. I also may have just been so jacked up and had never done counseling that I was in prime. I was just ready for it.
Speaker 2:I think it was Kairos time. What I've been saying lately it's an Eastern quote is when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
Speaker 3:That's really good.
Speaker 2:And when the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear. And I think you know, whether buddhist or whatever it is, I feel like got that just from jesus himself, because wasn't that the truth? When this person was ready, the man by the pool, the woman at the well, you know, you know, we could go on and on and on he appeared and I used to probably early theology years of my life believe it's when I would deserve it or when I've been good enough, or when I've done the right things. But I'm old enough now to know.
Speaker 3:I don't know that. Am I right?
Speaker 2:Oh, 100%. Okay, it is kairos time, it's kairos time.
Speaker 3:You can't look back and say well, this, this was the algorithm that gave rise to this moment. It's so non-cooptable. Like you can't do that at all, it's just oh good, thank you the sovereign election of the timing of god is like's, like. Now's the moment. Now, why am I ready in this moment, who knows? But now's the moment.
Speaker 2:But you were and you went in for marriage counseling and just had a divine Emmaus Road experience with the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 3:And it changed everything. It felt like and I talk about how going from that place, like I had been having a reoccurring, just like hard dream, and that dream stopped from that moment on.
Speaker 2:Just stopped. Like a nightmare dream, not a good dream.
Speaker 3:Not a good dream, not a good dream, yeah, just stopped. There was a sense.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Father.
Speaker 3:I just started sleeping deeper, and it's not like I could look at circumstantial shifts in my life, because there were still elements where I was struggling. Of course, it felt like there was a and I talk about the chapter after which felt like a resurrection chapter. There was a deep death and healing that happened at the deepest, like most core place in me, and it started to work its way out. It started to transform everything. It started to move into my past. It started to transform everything. It started to move into the past because I looked at old experiences and I could look at the russell and those experiences and say, well, he's, he's just broken, but not ugly, he's not ugly. Like it changed everything. It was like a new light you just got it.
Speaker 3:You know like that you got it and then it also started changing the future of how I was living into, because, because I was living in a new way now. So it just changed. It was like this light that dawned and just started to saturate the way.
Speaker 2:That's what I say If you do this work, if you even do this work and all you say every morning when you wake up and this is my prayer every day send me the teacher I need today, because I don't know what I don't know, I don't know. I have done every therapy, I've done everything. I'm doing, so obviously I'm missing something and it's because of this whole. I feel like that's why Jesus in John 17 says I'm leaving you. I'm leaving you. I think it's 16 or 17. I'm leaving you. I have to leave, because if I don't, I can't send you the comforter, and he is, she is, whatever you believe is the true healer. Yeah, yeah, like I can spend millions of dollars on a million programs, listen to all kinds of healing podcasts, but it's going to be on this floor, it's going to be when I'm walking. It's just all of a sudden it comes and you can't rush.
Speaker 2:You can't rush it. I can't even know what to expect. I don't know what to anticipate. I just don't. I'm just like this.
Speaker 3:Yep, that's right.
Speaker 2:And then that's why I like to call it an endowment right, a bestowed upon you because of his deep love for you. Russell, russ, whatever Russ, it's because of his deep, deep, deep love.
Speaker 3:I answered both of them yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's his deep love. I answered to both of them yeah, okay, yeah, it's his deep love. It's like show me your love, god, because I'm not getting it. And you know, and you, it's safe to say you were imaged God's love by your father. You write a lot about your father's prayer, your father's journey what an image, you even had the image of it. Your father's journey, what an image. You even had the image of it. But it has to become your own. So we talk a lot, you know, in this community, about secure attachment, insecure attachment. Well, you're just showing us that it doesn't matter. We can embody the deep love of God and that went so deep in you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that deep, secure attachment, that narrative of like body, the deep love of God and that went so deep in you. Yeah, that deep, secure attachment, that narrative of like I'm broken but I'm not ugly that was mine. But what I talk about in this chapter is that we each have ours. That is found at the cross. So that was like kind of my Golgotha moment.
Speaker 3:That was my cross moment yes for sure, the power of the cross, and the cross that says Paul is where we start. It's the starting place. That's the gospel, it's the starting place. But the power of the cross is we see a Jesus that has experienced our deepest, darkest wounds. So, for example, let's say that you were abandoned by your parents as a child. So your deep wound is I am inherently abandonable. If that's a word, sure, I am worthy to be abandoned. Right, that's my deep wound.
Speaker 2:Yep, I'm not lovable.
Speaker 3:Right, if you will meet Jesus at the cross, at your cross and his, what will you find? Well, jesus is the abandoned one.
Speaker 2:Yes, he was abandoned by his followers.
Speaker 3:He knows precisely what it feels like to be abandoned. He even feels like he was abandoned by his father.
Speaker 2:His father turned his face away. He allowed that to happen.
Speaker 3:Who else knows what it's like to be abandoned by their parents? But Jesus, Maybe you experienced some abuse. You think I'm the abused one.
Speaker 2:Well, who is Jesus at the?
Speaker 3:cross Right. Who's Jesus at the cross? He was abused by everyone. They were struck, he was flogged, he was put up on the cross. He didn't deserve that, and yet he knows exactly what it's like. So what I contend is the power of the gospel, is the power of the cross. But it's not just Jesus's cross, it's ours too. It's beautiful.
Speaker 3:We have our own crucifixion wounds and moments and deep narratives we have like if the story, if the story of the gospels, is also the human story, well then we know what it's like in a metaphorical sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To to be in a world that puts people on crosses, to have those. And if we're willing to not just say that, because here's what I was willing to say, here's what I thought. I thought Jesus loved me despite my wounds.
Speaker 3:What I didn't is that he loved me through them, and that was the precise mechanism that God was using to reveal the depths of God's love. The place where we most clearly see the depths of God's love is the cross. It is it's the place of our deepest weakness Not just His, but ours. So it's not just meeting Jesus at His cross. If we're courageous enough and if we're ready for true healing, we're going to have to meet him at our cross too, and that's going to look different for each one of us. For me it was my face. For me it was I'm ugly. That was the narrative it took. But when he met me in there, then it totally broke every power of sin, darkness.
Speaker 2:And shame. Like that's the shame goes. It's just gone.
Speaker 3:Gone, gone. All of that was out Gone. The foothold was gone Shut the door foots out. Disarmed the powers, disarmed all the powers.
Speaker 2:I like that. Yeah, Disarming is is the key.
Speaker 3:And that was, that was so, that's like really just reveals my very human wounds where the Lord was trying to meet me in those places. But it was the cross, my cross and his cross, where the final power, the final battle was fought and he won and he won my soul forever.
Speaker 2:He always will, he always will. And is that where you felt and then we'll close? Is that where you felt kissed by God?
Speaker 3:I mean all of those had been. That's where the the biggest kiss took place. Yes, the biggest, like all of the chapters were saying there's moments where god's love met me. Oh sure, little little hugs yes, little little, but it was like little little skirmishes in a larger war, so to speak. That was the moment and that scene where the counselor had me go back and play some of the the core like mythology around my deepest wound, my deepest like that I love saying mythology and recognizing that jesus was there and as I'll talk, as I talk about and I won't no, no, the god who went first, that jesus had actually gone first.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he had a face like yours. I love that.
Speaker 2:I mean a face like mine. It's just unbelievable that you that's what it is.
Speaker 3:And he had that face before I had that face which is just powerful. He was the God who went first so that I could follow after him and know that I'll never be alone, that it won't get the last word over me, that his love is stronger than every hour and force of death. And when I experienced that kiss, the kiss not just in my life, but the kiss in my death, that's what the cross is.
Speaker 3:When I realized that this wound is my death and that God goes hey, I love you, even in your death, I'm going to be with you, even in your death. Nothing says Paul can separate you from my love. When I realized that gosh man, satan, is just laughable. What power does he have? He can't do anything, I don't know, but it's so strong, you know, in jesus christ, through that there's nothing, there's no power satan has. So that was the deepest kiss for my, for my deepest wound that healed it and I talk about the next chapter going forward turns it into a scar. Because that's the thing about wounds. That's right when you heal, you can't go back to a pre-wound piece of flesh. It can only go that's.
Speaker 3:That's so good there's healing, but you tell there was a mark there.
Speaker 2:There's a mark, there's a scar, a sacred scar, as my Dr Michelle Bankston would say yes.
Speaker 3:And the scars? What were wounds for Jesus on Friday and objects of shame were scars of boasting and scars of eternal glory on Sunday.
Speaker 2:And proof and belief.
Speaker 3:And become the central, the central mark of our own testimony. They were the central mark of our, our shame. Now they're the central mark of testimony and of God's power, and we must hold them up. And so I say that I go. You know, I thought that that there's no way that Anna would want to kiss my scars because they were the most like unworthy part to me. But little did I know that on the last day it will only be scars that are worthy of kisses. Those scars are the sign that God's love has entered and made whole and redeemed. We'll all be so scarred up in heaven, I think.
Speaker 3:I think and I think, if we could have our eyes, open.
Speaker 2:You know, like I say that all the time, you can't see the scars on the heart, you can't see the scars on the soul you know, they're just not visible.
Speaker 2:They're invisible scars, but they're sacred and they're holy. And so, as our final thought here because I I really thank you, russell, from the deepest parts of my heart for helping us understand how to embody God's love I wish the teacher had appeared for me when I was younger. But it's okay, you know, my journey is my journey and I just now want, because it just feels so good, yeah, I wanted to like, does it? What is that deeply embodying God's love for you? Does it feel like ease? It feels like, yeah, it feels like freedom.
Speaker 2:It feels like freedom. It feels like freedom.
Speaker 3:It feels like I'm trying to think of an analogy that jumps to mind. It's just such a confidence and it's not a confidence. It is a confidence in yourself.
Speaker 2:It's both.
Speaker 3:But it's a confidence in the Lord.
Speaker 2:It's rest.
Speaker 3:I think we know what it's like when we're living out of our wounds and the shame you feel like we're hiding. You feel like we're slouched over, like we're hiding, we're trying, trying to evade. There's parts of us we're trying to turn. Like it's. It's exhausting it's exhausting there it is, and so there is that sense of freedom, of like whoa I can stand tall, yeah, and not feel any shame, and rest and feel the sun on my face.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 3:And know that literally nothing can kill me, nothing, because I already died.
Speaker 2:You did die.
Speaker 3:I already died with him, you did. And if death wasn't enough to steal my life, that if he could love me and resurrect me even in the death. Well, satan is a fangless lion, as augustine says. No, he's all bark, he looks big and menacing no bite can't do anything. So the amount of ease and freedom that you can walk in of knowing my true identity and believing that at the depths of my being is profound. I can't, and that's why I wrote this book, because I realized here I was as a pastor.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Preaching a gospel of freedom? Yes, but there was tears in my soul that hadn't experienced it. How many of us are walking around thinking and truly knowing parts of the gospel and not knowing, though I guess that's my argument.
Speaker 2:Like why am I still tripping? Why like what is it?
Speaker 2:yes I don't know the depths of god's love for me it's the answer it's everything at the end of the journey it's going to be. I know that, I know that, I know how much god loves me. That's it, yeah, that, yeah, that's it. Please preach this no pressure, no pressure, yeah. To the leaders, you know, to the leaders, to the pastors, to the elders, to the leaders, to all of us, so that we can understand and embody that and then call back to those behind us, which is what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 3:Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.
Speaker 2:Imitate me. I know I finally can say that without feeling like who do you think you are?
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:It's confidence in God. Okay, thank you a million times and I will tell everyone how to connect with you and get this book. Order it today and give it to everyone you know and share this message with everyone you know, because it is like you said.
Speaker 2:uh, one of the things I really had down to talk to you about was shifts you know, because I'm all about shifts right now, shifts on perspective, because if we can have a shift like you had a shift in that therapeutic alliance and then your dad had these shifts If we can have these shifts happen from the Holy Spirit, look out, we will advance the kingdom of God like never before. Thanks, shana, all of my heart.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening today. Please meet Janelle over at Heart Lift Central on Substack at Heart Lift Central, where we can keep this remarkable conversation going. Please share today's episode with a friend and invite them to become stronger every day. Heartlifter, always remember this you have value, worth and dignity.
