Let me be honest

In the inaugural episode of the 'Get Honest' podcast, Christy shares her journey of seeking authenticity and acceptance throughout her life. From childhood experiences that shaped her desire for approval to navigating family challenges and the impact of legalism on her faith, Christy reflects on the struggles of being honest with herself and others - including God. She emphasizes the importance of finding acceptance in Christ and living authentically, free from the fear of judgment. The episode invites listeners to embrace their true selves and cultivate a life of honesty and grace.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to Get Honest, the podcast designed to help you cultivate a simple yet authentic life of faith. In every episode, I'm gonna talk about real life topics. So it's bound to get messy sometimes. But we're gonna do our best to navigate those times and topics with grace and with truth. It's time to dive deep and find out who you really are. It's time to live in the freedom that God meant for you to live in. Thank you for joining me today. It's time to get honest. So it's episode one, and I figured there's no better way than to start off with me getting honest with you about who I am and what created the idea for this podcast. So today it's time for me to be honest. It's very ironic that this podcast is called Get Honest, because if you interviewed people from when I was growing up, they would have a probably a lot of descriptive words about me, but honest might not be one of them. And I don't know, I was probably pretty good at making you think I was being honest, but I think of like a little story whenever I was, I was just a young girl, probably six or seven years old. And way back then, this is going to date myself a bit, but way back then, it wasn't super uncommon to have some iodine in your medicine cabinet. And of course, it's the orangish-yellow liquid that they put on you before surgeries and different things like that. We had some iodine up in our cabinet. And I don't know why or where this came from, but we used to call it monkey blood. And I'm I again, I heard that terminology somewhere. I didn't create that as a child, but it was just called monkey blood. And so I was fascinated with it. I don't know if I was just fascinated with the it's kind of like little kids that want to have a band-aid. Can I put, oh, I he fell down and I hurt my finger. And snow bleeding, nothing like that. And it's like, oh, but you need a band-aid? Okay, you need a band-aid. And so I would um I I just loved the monkey blood and I wanted to put it on because I just thought it was, you know, neat and the way it colored my skin. And so one day I crawled up on the toilet and got in the cabinet and got out the iodine, and I was getting sun to put on my finger, and I spilled, I spilled the iodine, and it went kind of all over and it was bright orangish yellow. And so I did the best my seven-year-old self could do in cleaning it up and put the lid back on, and I'm sure I didn't even wipe off the bottle. You know, I mean, I was pretty young, and I put it back up in there and say to her mom comes out and she's like, Who got into the iodine? Clearly, it had been spilled, and I did not do a very good job of cleaning it up. And I, well, it wasn't me, you know. I didn't, I didn't do it. I don't even know which iodine. What are you talking about? I still had some on my hands. So the evidence, you know, she didn't have to look very far to figure out which one of her two children did this. And so it's just interesting as I think about the title of this, Get Honest. As a child, I mean, I just wanted my parents' approval so bad that I would have said or done anything that I thought would win their approval. And it isn't like I had really hard to please parents or something, but I did, I guess when I was three, my sister was diagnosed with leukemia. And um it was a very big deal. It was just a very, you know, it was a big, scary thing to hear leukemia with your five-year-old child. I mean, that just it's very scary. And so what my mom told me is that I would I began began being really jealous because of how much time they were spending with her. Now they were going to the hospital, you know, they were going to hospital, which was five hours away from where we lived, and several times a week they would have to fly up to the hospital in Houston and be treated. I think they were both going in the beginning, and then my mom noticed that I was struggling with the fact that I was feeling left out. And so, because at three, you don't really understand your sister's sick. It's not that we love her more, she's just ill. I think that's probably why I started saying what I thought they wanted to hear instead of just being myself. And there were plenty of other incidents like gum. My dad would always have gum, and sometimes I would go get a piece. But one time I went and I got a piece, and I was coming out of their bedroom holding that piece of gum in my hand, and I literally was going to ask permission. Like, this is one time, just really gonna do it right this time. And I get to my, I guess I round the corner and I run into, I can't even remember if it was my mom or my dad, and I'm holding that gum, and I kind of got in trouble because they were like, you weren't gonna ask. And I was like, no, it was coming to ask. And at that point, I had lost all credibility because there were so many times that I, you know, it wasn't me with the monkey blood, you know. So that's my early years, just not being very honest. And then I grew up and we were, we grew up in the church, and our youth group at the time was a pretty um, I'm gonna use the word legalistic because I I really believe this is back in the 80s, early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. And I think if someone would have come and they would have had at that time pink hair or tattoos, probably the people in the church would have asked them to leave, which looking back on that, I just think that's just crazy because that Jesus would have never asked them to leave, especially not based on some kind of outward appearance. I I personally do have a couple of tattoos and I love them. And when I was younger, that was kind of the model that was out there for me, was much more focused on outward appearance than it was on the person inside. I learned very quickly how to put on that church mask. And I'd been in church since I was tiny. I knew we did Bible drills, and that's where you they call out a book of the Bible, and your first one there, whatever, gets a sticker or I don't know, gets a big wahoo, well done. I mean, I could, I could nail it on the Bible drills. So there was a lot of I had a lot of head knowledge of the Bible, of the books of the Bible, even of scripture. I mean, we memorized scripture and it was from the King James Version, and so it was the these and the thou's, and I've hidden thy word in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Those were the things that I memorized, and I love it because I can tell the ones that I actually memorized as a child, because even in my head, they are still in the King James Version. So it kind of gives me a little bit of a chuckle, but it's dear to me. At the same time, I learned very quickly how to like I could always say the right answer. And I believed it. It wasn't that I wasn't genuine in my faith or my belief or what I was saying. I really believed the words I was saying. But the breakdown was that my life, it had no power to change how I was living my life. And this is primarily more when I was an early teen. So as a child, I mean, I struggled with telling the truth, but um generally I wanted to please my parents. And so I was a pretty good kid. I really didn't do too many naughty things. And then my parents got a divorce, and that was pretty traumatizing. And as a child, I actually watched my dad walk out the door with his suitcase in his hand, and I remember just wrapping myself around his legs and begging him not to go. So, in order to actually be able to walk out the door, he had to peel me off of his legs. That moment, as an eight and a half, nine-year-old girl, it really felt like the whole world was falling apart. And after that, I started, I guess it just shifted some things in my pretty secure world. And then as I became a teenager, I was seeking approval from guys in many ways, but just wanted to get that approval from especially guys and my friends. I really wanted the approval of the friends around me as well. Um, I really am thankful I had some very good girlfriends and through my elementary on up into high school years, but the way that I lived at high school and outside of church looked very different than the way that I talked in church. And I did bring church into my outside relationships. I talked with my friends often, actually, about God and Jesus. So again, it wasn't like this total Jeklyn Hyde person. There was an aspect of who I really was in both places. But I had a line of thinking that if the people at church knew I participated in this particular activity, they would probably ask me not to come back. And it just created a thing in me where I couldn't be sincerely who I was really in either place, because you can't be out here doing all these activities just like everybody else while bringing Jesus into it. Except for that's exactly what I was doing. I um I just really couldn't, I couldn't be authentically who I was in either place because I really, really, really did love Jesus, really. And I really, really, really was caught in the same temptations and sin patterns as many of the people who didn't go to church. And that brokenness in us creates a desire to have it filled, and we're gonna look for any kind of way, healthy or unhealthy, you know. So all the music I was listening to, none of those lyrics were wholesome and uplifting. My mom would always listen to Christian music, but the music that I put in my brain primarily was country music or even the pop songs back then in the late 80s, early 90s. The lyrics are were just not what you want to be retraining your brain to think all the time. For whatever reason, I just couldn't be myself in either space. And so I got very good at being church girl Christie with all the right answers, and being friend Christie that knew how to act like you and blend in and fit in and throw a little Jesus in here and there. Honestly, I was doing the best I could at the time, but coming from that legalistic background, I just felt like God was always grumpy at me. Like I just had to be the biggest disappointment. And I don't really remember anybody ever saying God is disappointed in you. It was more make sure that you're living in a way that God can bless you because you know, it directly tied my behavior to whether or not God would bless me or could be pleased with me. So that's a whole nother, we got a whole episode coming on that thinking. But just to let you know, that's kind of that was my background. So I got very good at not being authentically me. And it's very hard to live that way when you are living to please people because you're constantly kind of having to shift who you are. And but you're not really shifting who you are, you're just shifting how people perceive you. And then this dialogue came in my head. If these guys in the youth group that I thought were cute or charming or whatever knew the girl that lived, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, because I always went to church on Wednesdays too. So Sunday and Wednesday, Christy was very different than the rest of the week, Christy. And if they knew the rest of the week, Christy, they would not be interested because I was tainted. And that was kind of my thought on it. Immediately, I even changed who I was looking for as a boyfriend to be later husband, partner, because I was looking for somebody that was at least as tainted as I was, so that they would not want to reject me. There was just a real fear of rejection. I think that's a lot of times where that dishonesty starts or that inauthentic authentic, inauthentic life comes in, is it's not like you're really trying to be inauthentic, but you just don't believe you're good enough as you are for anybody to accept you there. And the truth in that is if somebody doesn't accept you as you truly are, like those aren't your people. That isn't the person you want to be with anyway. So I have there's a whole episode on relationships. Also, that's gonna be in the future. Um probably February, since that's a month. We'll talk about um abusive relationships. We're gonna talk about a lot of different things. Yeah, how to recognize it and and that kind of thing. But primarily the point here is I was in an unhealthy space, not being myself, because I just didn't think anybody would accept me as I was. So, how did I end up here doing a podcast called Get Honest? Well, after almost 50 years of life, I want to say I was probably in my early 40s before I really took on the attitude, let them let them think what they're gonna think. And I had made a pretty big dumpster fire of my life. We'll get into all kinds of stories about how that happened, but really, I looked back at my life, I would had a lot of shame over the decisions I made and still battling with that God's probably up there looking down on me, just shaking his head, just good grief. Was I ever gonna get it together? You know, that was my thinking. And then something happened in my 40s, where my very early 40s, where I was having an experience in life, and it was a pretty terrible experience. And the people around me made it clear that they did not accept me where I was and for who I was. And I it was a really hard season of learning who my people are and who are not my people. And it was really sad because I feel like really at that time I failed the church and the church failed me. That's how I'm gonna say it. During that season, the people on the outside making judgments about my life, they thought they knew things about me, but they didn't. They always were saying things that just were not true. Um, God continued to show me how he sees me and he knows my heart. Even the small motivations I don't know about, he knows. He just continually showered what people would call his blessings over me, and he wasn't using these people to do it. And the reason he wasn't using those people is because they had taken themselves out of my life, and instead of compassion and help, they offered judgment and ridicule. And I'm sure more than a few of them thought I didn't really ever love God to begin with, or I'm not really sure what goes through people's minds, but I had been through a devastating season. I think just when people haven't walked a season, it's a lot easier to make some kind of a judgment than it is if you've actually been through something similar. So during that time, the Lord showed me he saw me exactly as I was. And he loved me right there, which is the same thing he showed me as a five-year-old, which drew me to him in the beginning. I knew as a five-year-old I could not walk in that elementary school without him in my heart. I knew I had to have Jesus because I was terrified to go in the school without him with me. And I made my mom, like literally first day of kindergarten, we parked in the parking spot. I've got my big, you know, paper trash bag full of my books for my first day of school. And I'm terrified. And I said, Mom, I want to accept Christ. I have to accept Christ before I go in this building. And she, being the most loving, precious mom ever, but also was probably late for work and I was probably almost late for school, says, Oh my gosh, baby, this is so exciting! I can't wait to talk to you about this, but we're gonna need to do it after school because we really need to get you to class. And I was like, You don't understand. I'm not going in. My my way of accepting Christ was an act of complete defiance. I am not going in that building. You don't get it. And I locked the car doors. At that time, you know, we did not have automatic locks. So I reached over and I locked both of the car doors and I said, I'm not getting out of here until I have Christ in my heart. And the funniest part of that is if that's how I was feeling and communicating, I already had Christ in my heart. He didn't need me to say some magic prayer. He knew my heart already and he already was there. And so it's just, it's precious to me to look back at it now, at that five-year-old little girl that was knew she was desperate for Jesus. Well, then I became a 42-year-old woman that knew she was desperate for Jesus, and I hadn't, I hadn't not been desperate for Jesus. But to the outside world, it looked like I had utterly turned away from him. And that's just because my behavior did not match their expectations of what a believer's behavior should look like. But I was really trapped. And um, that is when the Lord just, I mean, I can't explain to you the beauty that he surrounded me with in that time. And coming out of something really difficult, he just showered his blessings on me. And that's when it was like he was saying to me, Do you understand this? I love you and I see you right where you are. You don't need to clean yourself up. You didn't need to clean yourself up then, you couldn't, utterly incapable of cleaning yourself up then, and you don't need to clean yourself up now. You still come to me. What does it say about Adam and Eve in the garden, right? They were naked and ashamed. And I think we think when we get some years behind us of some good decisions, and we've had our little daily quiet time, and we sing nothing but worship music and blah, blah, blah. We start feeling like we have got it. We've really earned this place of favor before the Lord. And the truth is we're more naked and ashamed in that moment than we are the first moment we realized we were naked and ashamed, because now we really aren't understanding that we're always exposed like that. Jesus did not go die on a cross because we were almost there, but we needed a hand up. Jesus died on the cross because we were utterly incapable of getting there on our own. There was nothing we could do, there was nothing we could bring to the table. And God just revealed to me, we forget that. And anytime that we think it's Jesus plus some of my good works, we have completely negated the cross because Jesus took the full wrath of God in my place. And after that, when God looks at me, when I'm in Christ, he sees his son that he loves. There was just a lot of healing the Lord did coming out of a really broken time, a very lonely time, and was not surrounded by a lot of people. Um, but there were a few people in my life that still knew who I was in my heart. They still knew I hadn't just completely gone off the rails and was not loving Jesus. I was just really in a place of desperation. And it was so easy in that spot to recognize how much I needed Christ. And it's it was beautiful in a lot of ways. And uh, that's actually the season of my life that the Lord brought my husband. And we'll get into this stuff later, but while we're being honest, this was my third husband. Never did I think I would utter those words. Um when I was a little girl, I knew I was gonna get married and I was gonna be married forever. And here I was in my third marriage. And um, well, actually, we weren't even, I guess we weren't even married yet at that point, but we were dating and actually dating again. So that's a fun story, but we won't share that here either. We dated whenever we were teenagers and then reconnected later on. And tomorrow, actually, we celebrate our seventh anniversary, which is just really it's a very special day and a very special anniversary. And I just have so much gratitude in my heart for my husband, who the Lord brought to me in that season where he was showering me with blessings as always that were undeserved. I think sometimes we feel like we deserve his blessing just because of the way we hear live in such a way, you can get his blessing. We feel like, oh, we've earned it, we deserve it. And the truth is it's unmerited favor. It's his grace and it's his mercy that we have anything. And around that season, thankfully, my husband, knowing I had been married twice before, the failures as we would see it, uh, failures in the faith, failures just as a human, and he looked past all of those things and looked to my heart. And that in and of itself was just such a gift because that's the very thing that Christ does. He he doesn't look at all the stuff that's going on on the outside, he looks at the movements of our heart and he knows the movements of our heart. The Bible says that our heart can be so deceitful, deceitful more than all things, and that we're to guard it because it's the wellspring of life. And my husband helped me to start guarding my heart, and it's just a really cool thing because it gave me the freedom then to be honest, to get honest with myself, with him, and to know that I wasn't gonna face rejection for me just being who I was in process, because we're all in process. And I'm 49 now. I was five when I accepted Christ. So I've been walking in the faith for 44 years. There's a lot of stuff that I would look at my life and go, really, this is how far you've gotten in 45 years of walking with Christ? Like, okay. But that's not when Jesus looks at me, that's not what he sees. He's not going, well, I can't wait till she gets it together. No, he knew I was never gonna get it together. I'm gonna be in process until I see him coming in the clouds to get me and take me home, or until my time on earth is done. It's just beautiful to really be able to be yourself. And that's that's the gift I want to give to you in this podcast is I want to invite you into a space that says, you bring you just how you are. And it's a safe place to just be you because God did create you and it wasn't on accident. He never did anything on accident. He's so intentional and he's so good. You're here and you're here created with a purpose, and God is gonna help you figure out what that purpose is. And the the general generic purpose that we all have is he has given us the call first to love him and then to love each other. And if we love him, we don't love him because we're good enough to love him. The only way we can love him is by receiving and understanding his love for us. And we're never gonna fully comprehend his love for us on the earth, but he loved us first. That's how we get to love him, is that he loved us first. And so it's by receiving that gift of love from him and turning back around and offering him our love. And then he helps us to love people that are beside us, even the people that really hurt us, the people that he's used in our life to refine us. And that's kind of how I look at it now. You never know when God brings someone into your life. For one season, they may be the most encouraging person in your life. And then in the next season, they may be the person that brings you the most pain. And he walked that same life. I mean, he was there with his 12 disciples, and one of those disciples betrayed him and betrayed him utterly to death, which we know was God's plan. Somebody didn't trick Jesus into going to the cross. But Jesus was a real human with real feelings and real emotions, and he loved in a way that none of us have ever loved another human. He loved so purely, and yet he was betrayed, and that betrayal still stung. It still stung. I just feel like he's inviting us constantly to be refined by the people that are around us. And it's always an invitation to love. And sometimes it's really difficult, you know, to love somebody that's causing you a lot of pain. And I'm not suggesting that all people we need to leave right close in our life because I think there are seasons where we have to cut off toxic people. But I think sometimes if we can face our fears when it comes to the people that are hurting us, and we cannot get any identity from that, it is so much easier to actually love them. Um, again, doesn't mean you need to surround yourself with them all the time. There are boundaries are good and boundaries are healthy. But honestly, I can't think of anyone right now that I would just flat refuse to sit with and have a conversation. And I can't think of anyone right now that I think in my heart, I just don't like them. And I think I can only say that because God is showing me that his love. There's my eyes have never seen another person walking the earth that God doesn't love. And he really loves all people, he really is inviting all people to himself. And so he's given me the job, right? It's it talks about this in the word that we are his ambassadors because Christ is no longer on earth, but I am. And so the call on my life is to love people like he loved people. And um, yeah, it'll be a that'll be a work in progress until I am here no more. But it's easier when you understand you can really be who you are before God. He already sees it, he already knows it anyway, and he accepts you right there. There's nobody that will come to him that he'll say, You're too dirty. I can't I can't have you. You're never gonna find that. You're never gonna find that. I think that's where I probably want to end it today, but honestly, I started out as quite a bit of a liar. And even like I said, well, into my late 30s, I would still tell people what I thought they wanted to hear. Not quite as much as I did when I was seven. There was some growth between seven and you know, late thirties. But But my first marriage, I spent 17 years recreating myself every day into somebody I thought my husband would want. And in all of that, I lost who I really was for a season for quite a while. And um after 17 years of trying to trying to please every single day and always coming up short, I the the Lord really had um to get to the root of it, and that took some time. That's honestly where this all came from was the freedom I've had in walking in the way that I really am, and not perfectly. I mean, I love to say I don't want the approval of man or there's no fear of man in me. That would not be honest. I still find situations that I'll have a thought and I'll be like, golly, I'm I'm still right back there trying to please people. And in Galatians, it talks about that am I still trying to please people or am I trying to please God? Like what am I doing? And so I really am headed forward towards just worrying about what does God think? Because that's the thing that matters. That's where the life is for me. And there really is freedom. And I think it's interesting because it does talk about where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And then he talks about, you know, knowing the truth and the truth will set you free. And I think there's part of that that's like being truthful also sets you free. Because when there is no falsehood and you're not concerned about somebody defining who you are, there's just so much freedom in life. And that's what I want to invite you into is the freedom that being honest brings. But it really does start with being honest with yourself first about what you're really feeling, about what you're really thinking, and then having that conversation. It's just a conversation with God. And being honest with God, it's He already sees it anyway. God's never up there going, geez, that, yeah, that really catches me off guard. He's never like that. He is not surprised by anything you bring to him. And he's fully capable of having us go, I know your word says this, but right now I don't feel like that's true. And just having that conversation and then going back to look at why? Why don't I feel what's the fear in me that causes me to not take God at His Word? And being able to work that through in a conversation, gosh, it's just a freedom, unlike anything that the world has to offer. So I'm glad you've been with me today. Thank you so much for joining. We just want to cultivate a really authentic life so that you can walk in the freedom and the purpose that God created you for. All right, guys. Take care and maybe look back at your life and get honest with yourself about the places that you're not living. Honest. See you next week. Somehow, you know you love me to say.