Introduction to the Hopeful Perspective Podcast

This brief introductory 'promo' serves to explore what "The Hopeful Perspective Podcast" is all about and shares how adding this to your library will impact the way you define hope, thriving, and learning to persevere and helping to answer the complicated questions surrounding the subject of pain and suffering, trials and tribulation.  Jason Hopkins, longtime pastor, Christian counselor, yet more impressively a multiple time real life survivor of severe trauma briefly introduces himself and invites you onto the voyage of becoming a person that can begin to see life and its challenges through a lens of the Hopeful Perspective.    Jason has spent the past couple decades encouraging, inspiring, counseling, and motivating people from a multitude of world views and various walks of life to move from victim to victor, survivor to thriver, and from hopeless to a confidence Hope that is found in healing and restoration as he shares from his own unbelievable testimony of finding hope in the darkness.  Does you or someone you know need to hear this message today?  Like, share, subscribe, and please review this podcast upon listening to it and share this introductory video about the journey that is "the Hopeful Perspective."  Jason is grateful for your subscription, your time, and your sharing a review as this will help the multitudes in learning about what how, and Who is the source of true Hope.

*The intro and outro music is entitled "Lite Saturation" composed by 'Epic,' utilized from the source Free Music Archive (FMA) and licensed for commercial and person use (CC BY-ND

Chapters

• 0:00 Finding Hope in Pain and Suffering
• 8:48 Hopeful Perspectives With Jesus

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Hopeful Perspective Podcast with your host, jason Hopkins. There's something wrong with the world today. I don't know what it is. Something's wrong with our eyes. We're seeing things in a different way, and God knows it ain't His. It sure ain't no surprise. These poignant words from a popular Aerosmith song you probably recognize from the 90s could easily be sung by Steven Tyler regarding the state of our world today. There is something wrong with this world. I won't pretend to know what all is wrong, yet I am seeing things happening that God knows ain't his way.

Speaker 1: 0:44

Hi, my name is Jason Hopkins, your host, and I want to tell you about my podcast, the Hopeful Perspective, which will be debuting on all platforms that you usually seek out your favorite podcasts. Now, I've been pressed to write a book or start a podcast for a while now, and I'm excited to finally take the jump five million other Americans have made. So what distinguishes this podcast from any other? To start with, let's look through the eyes of the lyrics we just heard and examine what's wrong with our world today. I want you, for a moment, to hear these questions, whoever you are, whatever your worldview, your politics, your religious faith, your denomination, if at all, and how would you answer the following questions?

Speaker 1: 1:29

Your coworker comes up to you and inquires about why we are more divided as a nation, socially and politically, than at any other time in our history since the Civil War. What do you say to them? What do you say to them? Your best friend asks you what to do with her failing marriage that she's put everything into and doesn't want to become just another sad statistic of divorce that kills so many marriages today. What do you say to her? Your kid comes home from school breaking down because they just learned that a student in their school took their own life due to the online bullying. That was finally too much. What do you say to them? You keep having flashbacks from your childhood, when your mom's boyfriend began sexually abusing you and you were thrust back into the sickness and the emotions that you felt then. What do you tell yourself? Your wife comes back from her primary care physician and tells you that she's been referred to a clinical psychologist for her depression and intense anxiety. You know she had a rough go in all those foster homes in her childhood, but you just do not know how to support her at all. So what do you say? You see, every single scenario above has been taken from my experiences as both a survivor of personal trauma as well as a longtime pastor and trauma addiction counselor working with those who've experienced the pain of really just living life the pain of suffering. If you're listening today, you recognize that you cannot functionally even live without encountering suffering at a variable degree, either in your own life or the lives of those you love. These are just the facts. So where do we go with all of our questions about how to walk through the vulnerable depths of our pain and our suffering?

Speaker 1: 3:29

Perhaps you have sought out counselors, therapists and even psychologists where you've made progress in your life, yet you still feel like they just don't quite get you because, though they've studied in their field, you're just unable to fully trust them. They know about it academically, but are limited by their access, and really only to what they have studied, and you're left lacking. You want more. Maybe you've attempted to go to your church leadership elders or pastor. You've been offered prayer for your mind to be changed into the ways of God and the counsel that as long as you read your Bible more, pray harder, your issues and behaviors will begin to change.

Speaker 1: 4:07

In either of these cases, you still feel stuck, maybe neglected and alone. You feel hopeless. Who can understand you? And how can you once and for all move past the issues of pain and suffering that overwhelm? You See, friends, the problem of the world today is one that every one of us has pain caused from some degree or another, and if you've been fortunate enough to avoid significant trials or adversity, I can tell you that eventually and unfortunately, you will experience them at some point. The result is what I have found to be stifling. I've lived without food for upwards of almost two weeks, I've gone without water for a few days and I've had relationships come and go, so I would say I've lost love, but none of these have compared to when I felt without hope. I see hope as the full tank that helps us to have joy and peace and, I'd even say, to actually experience love. I have found that hope is the fuel that the Lord has given us, by the Holy Spirit, to not only work through our pain, but to also be that which we work toward when we have truly overcome the suffering itself. Anyone who has felt the dread of hopelessness at one point or another can tell you that they would exchange that for just about anything in return.

Speaker 1: 5:25

As a survivor of trauma in my own life, as well as addictions and even medical psychological diagnosis that helped me to cope with that trauma, I'm here to say that, though suffering and pain is what is wrong with the world, I do think there's also an answer. There is hope, and we can truly be overcomers of any trial, any tribulation involving our pain and suffering. Hope has a name, and his name is Jesus Christ. When no one else had the answers for my pain, I came to find out that he did. He understands my suffering and hasn't willed me to be stuck in the pain of it. He has a purpose for me that would supersede anything that has been set up against me to fail. He changed my perspective of pain and suffering, as well as healing. Christ gave me a hopeful perspective, and so here we are today. What is the Hopeful Perspective Podcast? Together with me as your hosts, we will be exploring the problem with pain and suffering from as authentically and vulnerably a place as you've ever experienced. We will discuss how to find this hope and change our perspective together.

Speaker 1: 6:34

In a world that has questions and often no one and nothing that the world has to offer is actually fulfilling the answers, but who am I to host such a tremendous honor of walking through this subject at all? What authority or expertise do I have to offer? Sure, I can tell you that I have been a pastor for over 20 years, as well as have worked with hundreds of cases of pain and suffering as a biblical counselor of addiction and trauma. I am a husband, and I have been married 20 years and a father of three teens. Anyone with teenagers can back me up in saying that there's a different kind of suffering that happens in your home, as a parent and even a spouse.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Next time, though, we will learn what uniquely qualifies me above all of this. I will be sharing my raw, vulnerable and true story of what it was like to overcome the challenges of things like satanic ritual abuse as a child, sexual abuse, rape, torture and all the physical, emotional and mental abuse that occurred in the first nine years of my own life, which actually became a part of one of the most prominent child abuse cases in Oregon in the 1990s. I will share what it was like to come out of that home and be shuffled between 26 foster homes, group homes, institutions and diagnosed with one of the most severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder clinically found in an adolescent. I will share what all of this trauma did to inform me and be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition that I have lived with most of my life, and I will be doing all of this as raw and unedited as I can. You see, I found hope in Jesus as a 17-year-old living in my final foster home. I didn't understand him, his plan for me, nor the healing and restoration available to me. For a few years later, and even when I finally thought I understood hope and healing and lived in a place of stability, I was later diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 38 years old and had subsequent life-altering brain surgeries that cause me today to live with severe physical pain, as well as limiting my mental capacity to communicate as clearly and effectively as before.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Nevertheless, I am challenged by my understanding and perspective of hope, and I am excited to risk and share this journey with you. I promise you will want to come along for this ride and you will not be disappointed. My hope is that you will learn as I am learning, grow as I am growing and become acquainted and intimate with Jesus as I have, as I have learned in my own struggles, in my own suffering, trials and my tribulations. We are more than conquerors. Neither life nor death, nor any principality nor power can hold us down when we're centered into the hope of Jesus Christ. So join me next time as we begin our journey on what it means to have the hopeful perspective. Until then, please help me by getting the word out to anyone and everyone you know who could use this hopeful perspective in their life. Help me by liking this, sharing this, subscribing to this podcast, and I look forward to seeing you then as part of the hopeful fam.