Woman Evolve with Sarah Jakes Roberts - Best of Hope Ep. 1 - Hope For New Connection

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

The hope for new connections can sound scary. It requires a new level of vulnerability and maybe even truth that has yet to be spoken. Sis, we’re evolving over here and it takes all of that and all of you! Lean into trusting yourself so you can learn to trust others with you too. SJR and Andrea Merkyl discuss what new connections require and how they benefit us.   Preorder Pastor Sarah's new book "All Hope Is Found" here: https://www.thomasnelson.com/p/all-hope-is-found/

Hey you, we're back this week with another drop of hope. An anticipation of my new book All Hope Is Found, I am sharing some hope notes that have been radically transformative for me on my journey of discovering hope in every new experience and encounter. You can order the new book All Hope Is Found, rediscovering the joy of expectation wherever books are sold. But for today, let's get into the podcast. Have you ever considered that your inability to connect with others is rooted in a lack of self-trust?

Just think about it before you get upset. How could you have the capacity to go deep with others without first understanding and having an awareness of yourself? I've been there. This is not the pot calling the kettle black. Or maybe it is. I don't know, but let me tell you this. Your hopes and dreams for deep connection are still valid, but a self inventory is required.

Let's talk more about it with my friend Andrea Merkel. When you get hungry for hope, not only will you learn to trust again, but you'll have a newfound awareness of how to connect with yourself, others, and God. I urge you to remain open and stay curious. The hope for new connections is always just around the corner. But I don't think it's possible to talk about hope for new connections without acknowledging that we have to have hope in our ability to make quality connections, hope in our ability to have new experiences and that comes down to trusting not necessarily other people

but being able to trust ourselves to trust ourselves to make decisions, to trust ourselves, to make the appropriate choices. How, like, I need to understand what is self-trust and like, how is it for it? So I think it's getting to know yourself. It's about recognizing you're taking accountability for your life so that another person's actions aren't what's making you feel those emotions. Those emotions are coming from within you. And so when you're able to connect to those emotions you can view it as an experience happening. I think self-trust is also by cultivating your own worth so not getting

validation from outside sources but building that within yourself. So speaking how do you speak to yourself? I think it's a whole overall assessment of like how do I actually connect myself to I spend time alone like what are what do I like like I found myself even going through like I don't even know what like close I would pick out now or like I don't even understand what my hopes and dreams are now because it all kind of fell away so I think that the self-trust comes from building your own self-worth, cultivating your own self-validation, and spending time alone with yourself to kind of get to know yourself. And I think part of it was I couldn't actually feel a lot of emotions. I was dissociated from a childhood trauma. So I didn't connect well with who I was. Like I he did but subconsciously that interconnection it

it wasn't there because it was broken early on. I was just going to ask you is there a connection between self-trust and our nuclear family or the nuclear origin of our younger selves and if that is not formulated properly do we even have the well I know we all have the ability to then develop self-trust, but is there some inner work that we have to experience or some childhood reckoning that we need to acknowledge before we can really begin to build self-trust? I think so. And I think that's why in therapy, there are lots of therapists focused on cultivating

that relationship with your inner child because I think we all had parents that were trying to do their best, but when you're young and you're not you're not getting what you need or you're self-abandoning to you know stay safe and be connected to your nuclear family, you become just connected to who you. And so I think that developing like a self identity starts at a really young age. And if it's also not modeled to by a parent, say like a parent for my example, maybe was emotionally unavailable because of anxiety,

I never really got to see. Like I was always looking to like outside sources to say, who am I? I had a poster with my name on it, Andrea. And it's like, she warms the world, her smile like the sun, carrying for all this kindhearted, womanly one. And I was like, is that who I am?

So it was really, and I mean, I grew up Catholic and I always believed in God, but I never had this closeness and relationship to also develop that self identity with God too. Yeah. Okay, so that's an interesting thing that you bring up because I was just thinking like where does faith fit into this conversation. I think a lot of people take issue with forms of faith that are very self-centered and it's like you know faith needs to be focused on God and your relationship with God and you as a pastor,

that's what you need to be talking about. And I believe that part of what I am called to do is to help us understand ourselves in relationship with God so that we can become more open and ultimately obedient to God's vision, to trust God's vision for our lives. I'm just wondering like at what point do we begin to, I don't know, I don't know how to ask what I'm asking, but I feel like it's a really great question, because if you just wait for it, it's gonna blow you away.

But I feel like I wanna understand in the journey of regaining self-trust, in the journey of forgiveness, and this may be something where every journey is unique. So I'm going to ask you specific to you. Do you think that you needed to acknowledge, know, and connect with yourself before venturing into connection with God? Yeah, because I don't know.

I think for some people, they like spiritually override sometimes, and it's like, I'm just going to go straight for God and ignore me. But you have trauma and the trauma-ficture relationships, and you have issues in who you are showing up as may not necessarily be the most powerful version of who God created. So if you are willing to take inventory within yourself, then maybe you can experience the breakthrough that you desire

But I want to know that that's that's super interesting. I think that It happened a bit simultaneously because I just discovered this through going through this experience where When I would develop myself and my connection to myself would grow with therapy and reading and doing this work. I was also growing close to God. So I saw it in like this symbiotic relationship where as I grew closer to God, I grew closer to the connection within myself. But I think both of those things had to happen where I was like learning, developing, and diving deep in therapy, and also the faith aspect of learning, developing, and diving deep in therapy and also the faith aspect of learning developing and diving deep

in faith in like doing devotionals and prayer spending time meditation or with God. So I noticed within me it was that they were playing off each other. And I think I had this sense of self-hatred that came from this childhood trauma which blocked a lot of my connection to God. I would say, child to trauma which blocked a lot of my connection to God. I would say yeah. And I felt when that started to grow and like heal, then I was closer and I felt that connection. Yeah. That's so interesting because it is hard to trust everything that everyone says about God. If you don't believe that you're worthy, if you don't believe that it applies to you, if you don't believe that there's anything redeemable or loving or fearfully and wonderfully made about you.

If your thoughts are, I messed up, all I ever will do is mess up. I'm damaged, good, no one will want me. Then you can quote as many scriptures as you want to, but it's not really gonna take root in your life because you don't have a healthy view of yourself. So no matter what God says about you or anyone else says about you,

if you don't believe it for yourself, then you cannot experience the power, the peace, the restoration that I think is available to us all. I'm really intrigued by this because I will tell you this, I grew up in church. And like I knew God, like I knew where he lived But like we went like I know He's far away

Sitting beside me. Yeah, like yes, he's for everyone else like it Black in my bud Purple and I think the more that I feel like my, I think that, I think there's a couple of things. I think that I got hungry. And I think the more that I got hungry for something deeper and more meaningful and less shakeable, the more curious I became about God,

but I do believe this, the more that I became curious about God, the more God showed me myself. The more that God showed me myself, I dug deeper into God because I wanted to know more about what God could see that I couldn't see. And I think that that showed up in gifts and talents that I didn't know existed, but also in pain and trauma and patterns that weren't healthy for me. And so I think that if your relationship with God is exclusively about who God is and never about who you are in God and who you were before God and who you are without God, then you could run the risk of becoming religious when we're called

to be transformation. That's so perfect. to be a chance for Macy. That is so perfect.