Hi. This is Natalie Hoffman of Flyingfreenow.com, and you’re listening to the Flying Free Podcast, a support resource for women of faith looking for hope and healing from hidden emotional and spiritual abuse.
NATALIE: Welcome to Episode 79 of the Flying Free Podcast! I got an email today from one of the members of the Flying Higher group. She was telling me how much she appreciated this one segment of one of the coaching calls that I did with the members of that group. She said I really needed to share this with people because it was so helpful to her, and she really thought it would help a lot of other people.
I thought for this episode that I would share that audio clip with you of a concept that I was teaching the members of that group. We were talking about how important it is to manage our brain space, to manage the thoughts that we have, and to manage our emotions from a place of emotional adulthood rather than a place of emotional childhood. I was trying to explain to them that this is the key to growing up in the fullness of our stature in Christ Jesus. Jesus Christ was the one person who lived on this planet who was fully able to manage His brain space and His emotional space without being impacted by other people in a way that would change the way He was managing His space.
What I mean by that is that other people could share their opinions with Him, they could make fun of Him, they could call Him “the son of the devil” and all kinds of other things, they could want to kill Him, and yet it didn’t stop Him from living out of His true identity the way it does for many of us. We are such people pleasers. At least I know I am. I just want people to like me. I’ve spent my whole life living from this place of thinking that I had to do whatever people wanted me to do. I had to figure out what it was that makes them happy and then do those things so they would want me around, so they would accept me, and so they would like me.
I’ve learned by experience that when I don’t do what other people want me to do, if I have a different opinion and I dare to express it, or if I do something different that it gets me unaccepted, unloved, and rejected. The ultimate for me was that it got me excommunicated. I think some of us believe way down deep inside that this is reality, that our destiny is just to live this way, and that we can’t survive the feelings of devastation that we might have if people reject us. So in this clip I give an example from the life of Jesus of how people basically excommunicated Him and what He did in the face of that excommunication. So I offer to you this little clip from Flying Higher:
“Remember when Jesus was starting His earthly ministry and He went to the synagogue? He stood up and He read this passage from Isaiah that was a prophecy about the Messiah coming: “I have come to set the captives free, to proclaim liberty to the captives,” et cetera. I can’t remember and I don’t have my Bible open right now. But He reads that passage from Isaiah and then He says to the people… By the way, this synagogue was in Nazareth. He had already been visiting other synagogues and speaking like this. But He goes to Nazareth, His hometown, and says it. Then He says this: “I say to you, these words are now being fulfilled in your presence.”
So these guys who all know Him as Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, they all know that He was a bastard child, they all know this about Him. He’s a poor carpenter… Well, maybe carpenters weren’t that poor back then. But He was a carpenter’s son and He was a carpenter Himself by trade. He stands up and reads a prophecy about the Messiah coming and then says, “That’s me.” The Bible says that they were filled with wrath because they had already identified Him. They already had Him pegged in their certain box, just like many of you were already pegged in your box by your family of origin, your church, or your husband.
When He stood up into His true identity, they were filled with wrath and they chased Him out of the synagogue to the edge of the hill that Nazareth was built on, and they were going to throw Him off the cliff and kill Him. Now that is hatred. I was telling the ladies yesterday that this was like excommunication! I mean, talk about excommunication. They chased Him out of the synagogue. He didn’t go back into synagogues after that. He preached on the hillsides. He got excommunicated! So if any of you have been excommunicated, you’re in good company.
A lot of us got excommunicated because we stood up and said, “I guess I’m not that person you guys all say I am. I’m different, and I want to be me now. I want to show up in my full color. I want to be who God made me to be. Will you love me for me, or do I have to be someone different?” They said, “You will NOT be someone different than we have already decided that you are. If you do that, we’re going to chase you out of the synagogue and hate on you.” (They don’t throw you off a cliff.)
Here’s the thing that Jesus did, though. First, the Bible doesn’t say how Jesus felt, but do you really think that Jesus was feeling neutral at that point? Do you think that Jesus was feeling like, “This is so awesome! I just love it. Feeling good. I’m the Son of God. I’m having the time of my life down here on planet Earth.” No! These are the people He grew up with. This was His home church. Think about your home church that you grew up in, especially if you have been in one your whole life. These were the people who knew Him and His family. This was where all His social life was. This was His support system. This was His community. And they are wanting to kill Him? You can believe that He had feelings about that, and they weren’t good ones. Social interactions are going to affect you.
The other thing I said yesterday is that He walked through the crowd. I never thought about that before, but He just walked through the crowd. He had to walk through and past all these jeering, angry people to get to the other side, and then He was free. Sometimes that is what God is calling us to do. We must walk through the crowds of people who are pigeonholing us and saying who we need to be, and we must walk through that crowd in our own identity of who God created us to be in order to be free.
So your social interactions are always going to impact you because that’s part of being a human being. Jesus was 100% God, but He was also in the flesh. What we are doing with this is stepping back and recognizing how those social interactions are impacting us, because if we can see what our brain is doing on autopilot when we are having specific social interactions with people, then we can make some changes in our brain. It doesn’t mean that our social interactions will be cut off as far as our brain is never going to react to them. Of course it’s going to react. But we can learn to interrupt its normal reaction and redirect it in a new direction so that we don’t walk away debilitated.
Jesus had all the feelings, but He did not walk through that crowd and go on His way to freedom and go fulfill the next three years of His life of ministry on earth as a debilitated man in a crumpled heap on the grass. That wasn’t what He did. That is not our destiny either. That is the enemy’s destiny for every single Christian woman who has ever been abused in her life. Almost everybody has been through some kind of abuse or another. Satan is trying to neutralize the human race and specifically women because we are the bearers of children. We are extremely powerful in this world. We don’t even know the power of a woman because our world and our history… Satan has used so many tools to crush us down into the ground.
That’s why I think that this work on our own personal lives is so critical to our world. We may not see the full impact of the work that we do on our personal lives, but I guarantee that it is not going to be for nothing. The model that you will be for other people when you get strong, for your kids, or for your grandkids (maybe not even for them but for other people) is going to reverberate into eternity. I think this is the start of something. God is doing something powerful in the world right now that we are a part of. But we are pioneers. This is the beginning of a turning point, and we are exploring new territory and are taking old territory back. So this is pretty important.”
That’s the end of that clip. Before we go, for those of you who are new to this podcast or new to me, the things that I do and my work… Or even if you aren’t new, you might not be aware of what Flying Higher even is. It’s a Beta group. Right now there are one-hundred and twenty-three women in that Beta group, and we are developing a program for divorced women of faith. We started at the beginning of June. We’re going to be making this program available to the public in January of 2021. You can’t get into this program until then. [Flying Higher is now available to the public! Apply today at joinflyinghigher.com]
But it’s amazing! It’s going to get even more amazing. The first twelve weeks of the course that I’m building right now is all about how to stop abusing yourself. Some of us who are divorced get away from abuse in our home, but we still have these residual messages going through our brains. Those messages continue to beat us up and abuse us, and they limit our potential for what we can do in the future and how we can fly higher.
The second course that we will be starting soon at the time of this recording is a weight loss course. That might seem confusing. “What, weight loss? I thought this was about divorced women.” Here’s the thing: when it comes to weight loss, it requires extreme management of your brain space and your emotional space to lose weight. It requires learning how to sit with uncomfortable feelings and understanding that they aren’t going to kill you. It requires emotional adulthood. It requires making decisions in advance, making decisions with purpose and meaning. It requires building a trusting relationship with your past self and your future self. There are so many things that we’re going to be learning in this course on weight loss.
Everyone who joins Flying Higher in January will have immediate access to all the content and the courses that we are creating right now this year as well as all the future ones that we’ll be creating all of next year and into the future. I’m absolutely having a blast doing this, and the women in the group right now are experiencing a lot of changes in their own lives. [Flying Higher is now available to the public! Apply today at joinflyinghigher.com]
We call it Flying Higher because I have another group that you are maybe more familiar with called Flying Free. That group is for women of faith who are still in their abusive relationships or are in the process of getting out. Maybe they are just waking up to realize, “I think my relationship could be abusive. How do I know for sure?” That group deals with healing from trauma, understanding what emotional abuse is and its effect on our lives, healing our relationship with God, unraveling the spiritual abuse we’ve experienced, and all that. It systematically takes women from A to Z.
Flying Higher… I think that’s a great name for it. Flying Free takes you from being a caterpillar through that cocoon phase where you are in so much pain as you turn into a pile of goo in a cocoon to coming out with your wings dry. You are ready to take flight. You take your first flight and have your first taste of freedom. Flying Higher takes you to the next level where we learn how to fly even higher. Here’s the thing. sIn case you are thinking, “I can’t get out of my abusive relationship for different reasons,” that is totally okay! I still encourage you to go through Flying Free.
You can still learn all the skills you need to manage your brain space so that you can live and breathe and walk the way Jesus Christ did when He was on this earth, because He certainly wasn’t surrounded by all friends. He still had to endure a lot of emotional and sometimes physical abuse from the people around Him. How did He do that? How did He stay in His identity? This is what we are learning in Flying Free and learning even more about in Flying Higher so that you can move forward in your life. That’s just a little about that in case anyone is confused.
Finally, I just want to say, I get feedback on this podcast all the time. There are hundreds and hundreds of listeners now, and it’s amazing how this podcast has grown. Here’s the thing. Apple Podcasts will show this podcast to more people if its algorithms reveal that people are really interested in it. The only way it knows people are interested in it is if they go in and leave a rating and a review on iTunes. If you have time to do that and you haven’t already, you don’t have to give your name. You can pick whatever name you want to.
You can leave a rating. That helps. But a review even helps more, just a couple of brief sentences about how this podcast has helped you. Or maybe a few brief sentences about how you think this podcast could help someone else. Then Apple iTunes will pick up on the algorithms of the kind of person you are and show this podcast to other people who are kind of like you and who match the things you like and are reading, looking at, and listening to on their iTunes program. That’s how you can help this podcast and get it into the eardrums of more women just like you. That would be awesome! Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, fly free!
