The Hopeful Perspective
Welcome to "The Hopeful Perspective" a podcast discussing what it entails to transform from a personal position of suffering, pain, loss and HOPELESSNESS toward a renewed perspective of security, perseverance, love and HOPE. I am your host, Jason Hopkins, a long time victim and survivor who has personally been impacted by the Lord to be a victor and a thriver! In each podcast episode you can expect to find authentic dialog from a Biblical and experiential perspective—that is, BEYOND mere religious anecdotes and simple academic exercise—though all used together engage how to find the HOPE that is essential in moving from a victim to victory. Survivor to thriver. Hopeless to hopeful.
Please download, share, subscribe and stay tuned for this journey with me. Leave a review to support and spread awareness for the Hopeful Perspective. As a man who has lived, studied and who truly understands the definition of not only 'surviving' trauma, but authentically thriving as a renewed creation amidst a broken and hurting world, I am humbled to share this platform with you. Prepare to be a critical thinker, a passionate responder and ultimately to be inspired towards The Hopeful Perspective. I would be honored to eventually earn your trust, and welcome you as a part of the 'Hopeful' family.
The Hopeful Perspective
Jar of Clay Part 2: Healing through Community and Joy
Have you ever wondered why true healing and discipleship feels so elusive in today's fast-paced world? This episode of the Hopeful Perspective Podcast promises to guide you through the transformative power of living authentically within a supportive community. Inspired by my personal journey through childhood trauma, abuse, and severe health challenges, we unravel how God's power can shine brightest in our weakest moments. We ponder the critical decline of genuine, caring communities, exacerbated by excessive screen time and the geographic divide among loved ones, and share insights from the impactful book "Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You."
In our second segment, we delve into the deep scars left by childhood trauma and the void created by the absence of nurturing environments essential for emotional growth. Discover the pivotal role of joy in early childhood development and how its neurological impact fosters emotional resilience. Drawing from both personal experiences and biblical truths, we explore the journey to recovery, the importance of joy in relationships, and the life-altering impact of Christ-centered therapy. This isn’t just a podcast episode; it’s a heartfelt invitation to spiritually reflect and deepen your faith while embracing the redemptive power of a caring community.
Are you inspired by what you hear today? Jason deeply appreciates his listeners taking their time to listening, downloading, and sharing The Hopeful Perspective Podcast. Please help me spread 'hope' to others by writing a review for the podcast making it reachable for all who need to be inspired, encouraged, and changed by hoping once again. Further, understand that downloading the podcast is a surefire way to help increase the algorithm thus the reach of The Hopeful Perspective, even if you delete the episode after listening so as to not affect your data storage. I have also provided a (Support the Show) link DIRECTLY ABOVE THIS PARAGRAPH to click on for those who have shared with me they are "all in" and feel called to financially support the mission and vision of The Hopeful Perspective. A special thank you to those who have made this humble step to financially support the podcast. Without you, there is no US!
Jason Hopkins can also be reached on Facebook as well as Instagram and Threads (jayhop9953). You can also follow 'The Hopeful Perspective' FB page; where you can find more information as well as learn about upcoming news and episodes on the The Hopeful Perspective Podcast.
Welcome to the Hopeful Perspective Podcast. I am your host, jason Hopkins. This podcast has been designed to give you a perspective of hope that impacts your daily life in an authentic and tangible way. I opened the first six episodes of the podcast, where we learned how my life story illustrates God's glory. Through my own experiences overcoming child abuse and trauma, 26 foster homes and institutions, various diagnoses affecting me throughout my life and an eventual brain tumor resulting in multiple brain surgeries on my brain stem. I have moved from merely a surviving former victim to a faithful and godly, thriving victor who has moved to help others discover hope. Though my past was full of pain and suffering, I've been restored with purpose and sanctification. I have been redeemed. I have also been called to follow Christ in my redemption, and I want to thank you for listening and taking the time to download our episodes, as when you download, along with rating our podcast with an honest response, you help the algorithm immensely to spread in our reach. Our stats demonstrate to us that, while thousands listen and stream the hopeful perspective, less than 10% of you actually download the episodes. We also have provided a few other options to either contact our show with your direct feedback, as well as to support the podcast financially if you are called to partner with us in bringing hope to a hurting world.
Speaker 1:Last week we began our new series entitled Jar of Clay. Why Jar of Clay, you may ask? Well, in Scripture we, as God's people, are often described as jars of clay to illustrate our fragility and our weakness. Yet the Bible also uses the metaphor to show that God's power belongs to him, not to us, and that his power shines through us broken jars of clay. This is also a series based on the healing source, a book entitled Living from the Heart Jesus Gave you, one that has deeply impacted my personal journey as a broken jar of clay living with dissociative identity disorder, and how this book helped me to live and even lead when I battled this rare and intense personality disorder. So everything you hear in this series is extracted directly from the book. Consider this a sort of works cited to that measure. I strongly urge you to grab the book Living from the Heart Jesus Gave you, written by Wilder, friesen, kopke, berling and Poole, if you want to learn more about trusting Him with your past wounds, so you too can move into your future promises. Though it is a quick read, it is a treasure chest of biblical nuggets for anyone who needs to move from past grief to future glory in Christ. Before we get started today, as always, I want to compel you to grab your favorite snack, hot or cold beverage. Get comfortable and come on this journey with me as we explore more of the treasure chests found in Living From the Heart that Jesus gave you.
Speaker 1:Last time, we left off discussing how we, as people, were meant to experience life as a community. We, as people, were meant to experience life as a community, and how healing works best when we belong to a healthy community where our lives are being nurtured. More and more we see, in our Western world, community disintegrating around us, though, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to create a caring environment that is authentic and mature, and when this fails, more than often one's therapy and healing will fail as a result. We all thrive when we are able to be in community with people who can be real together and who can be authentic with one another another. To live authentically is to honestly discuss our blessings, but to also address the challenges that we face, since we all know that we are also a broken people. We are all, at times, wounded, divided, isolated and broken jars of clay.
Speaker 1:Let's identify up front today why families and communities are failing at an alarming rate. In today's cultures, as identified and living from the heart that Jesus gave you, hours and hours are spent in front of a television set or on the smartphone and the computer. Close friends and family are moving away at alarming rates. Neighbors remain strangers and not friends. Churches call themselves family, yet oftentimes are not acting like it. Nobody drops by to share moments of unexpected joy, nobody helps with crisis, families eat separately and food is being gulped down, with precious little time to relate to one another. There's urgency to get things done and right away, allowing no free time, and parents are feeling overwhelmed time and parents are feeling overwhelmed, being overcommitted in their daily lives. These are but a few of the reasons the book identifies as why we are losing a caring community, and this has created a nationwide identity crisis. It's in the absence of life-giving community relationships promoted by God-centered community that people continue to search for their community.
Speaker 1:You see, we can extract from this that we need each other to recover. We have been called to heal from our past wounds, as I have been doing my entire life and as I have discussed in past episodes. Scripture tells us that we are to love God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind and all of our strength. We see that in Matthew 22, 37. Ecclesiastes tells us in chapter 11, verse 9, that the heart is the eyes for seeing spiritual truth or reality, literally the eyes and ears that know God. As the authors of our book note, living from the heart Jesus gave you means that we are being the people or the persons he specifically designed us to be. Living this way integrates our soul where our feelings are and the mind where our reasoning takes place.
Speaker 1:If you have been working in your own therapy, or perhaps have been blessed with working in the field with others for any length of time, you know that restoration is often a process. It has often been said that God is not the great magician. He is the great physician. I would add that if he wanted to glorify himself to do things with immediacy or urgency, well then that is certainly his prerogative. Yet I have found in my own case that I have often learned much more about God's heart and my own through the process of healing that he often has set out for me.
Speaker 1:I typically seek the quickest way out of pain, as do most people, which is oftentimes understandable. Pain demands our attention. The most mature response, though, is to seek God's redemption in the middle of the pain, asking him to bring healing into our wounds, which is so often a slower process than we desire. This takes not only maturity, but patience, perseverance, tenacity and character building on our part. As Romans 5 tells us, we cannot miss the caveat of our healing process, that is, that the good news of the gospel is that God desires to be with us in the middle of our struggles. This is where he shows us his greatest power, through us as broken jars of clay To the one who has been severely wounded. His work in us is to bring hope, healing and redemption to all of the trauma that has broken us down, and our work is to strive for maturity as we progress to being whole.
Speaker 1:Living from the heart Jesus gave you declares that the biblical understanding of wholeness is described in James 1, when we are instructed to consider it pure joy when we are in the middle of suffering, because that will lead us to wholeness. While we are on this subject of wholeness, and we are discussing what the Bible tells us, let's chat a second about what it does not say. Nowhere will you read forget about your pain in order to move into your future. While we all agree it is good to find resolution, putting pain behind us is not what the third chapter, philippians, is discussing. When Paul says to put the past behind us and we know this because of all the passages and the books that Paul puts into writing on the subject Christians are being urged in the strongest of languages to let nothing hinder them from knowing Christ, and this includes our sufferings.
Speaker 1:Much more reason for us to recover from our trauma and why it is the essential task of our therapy. Be so as it may, let's take a look at two types of trauma. Type A traumas are the absences of the good things that we all need, producing troubles in relationships. Hence recovery requires loving relationships to heal a type A trauma wound. Type B traumas are the bad events that should never happen. That creates fear. The bad events must be revisited so that the fear can be deactivated and then life can proceed. We will discuss trauma recovery in more detail and depth in later episodes, but for now, know that for both types of trauma, the emphasis is on resolution and not on the speed of recovery, loving relationships and reworking of bad events, along with God's guidance and power, help trauma recovery in both types of trauma as well. With God's guidance and power, helped trauma recovery in both types of trauma as well.
Speaker 1:I have found that my relationship with my wife, her family, my closest friendships, my Christian therapist they all provided a network that I could begin dealing with both types of trauma in my own life. As a matter of fact, as I've discussed in my episode where I divulged having dissociative identity disorder, my specific personalities were made to feel safe coming out around my family because I had a safe and loving environment for the first time in my life. Prior to this, their job was to stay hidden and to keep me safe within their roles and their positions for the duration of my life. Prior to that point, I have done everything in my power to ensure that my three kids, now teenagers and my oldest, who has recently turned 20, have an upbringing that far exceeded the life of my own. I'd like to think that my wife and I succeeded for the most part, as they know that they have two parents that love them deeply and that stayed together despite the most severe challenges of our own, and that their needs were, for the most part, met.
Speaker 1:Yet, as any family goes, we live in a fallen and broken world that is engaged in a spiritual war between the prince of fallen angels and our creator, and these battles are frequent and widespread, and none of us, regardless of how spiritual we are, can escape the effects of the spiritual warfare In our family. My kids grew up with a father dealing with a severe personality disorder that was extremely demonic, and though they were very protected in ways that can only be explained as supernatural and of God, they were still affected traumatically and have had to seek trauma counseling as a result. Even the most careful of parents cannot keep their children completely shielded out of harm's way Most of the time, as I have found in my counseling office, people spend much of their adult lives trying to overcome the effects of earlier traumas, though they don't recognize it as such, as it takes for the battling and struggling through life and relationships, addictions or, as Celebrate Recovery puts it, battling the habits, hurts and hang-ups. Many people are trying to change the effects of trauma without actually changing the trauma that caused the effects. I have been grateful as a parent to protect my children from much of the pain from what I have gone through, protect my children from much of the pain from what I have gone through, but the statistics around us are still clear.
Speaker 1:One third of us have been through physical or sexual abuse as children, and many more suffer from the absence of the good things that we discussed earlier needed for emotional maturity, as in my own story. You will see the effects of one who has gone through these traumas, because they will struggle with their own social behavior in school. They will battle depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and bullying. These were but a few in my own case. Other behaviors that were not in my case, though, include school failures, chronic physical illness, violent behavior or even disturbing sexual urges. These kids need nothing more but for people to love and encourage them, to find from where their trauma is coming and to journey with them on their path to recovery. Without a healthy community around them, then the one-third that these kids are grow up as hurting and unhealthy adults who carry with them generational curses, being equipped to wound the next generation around us.
Speaker 1:This is one of the most devious and destructive weapons of warfare waged by the enemies of our soul. Weapons of warfare waged by the enemies of our soul. Yet I am so grateful that our Lord is still sovereign and that he is the one with the last word in the story of salvation. And he's also the one who created us, after all. And he created us with the drive to withstand the world's assaults and to ultimately become the people we were intended to be. How so? He created us with minds that automatically seek to be whole, and this quest for wholeness is boosted by joy during early childhood.
Speaker 1:You see, in a child's first two years, the desire to experience joy in loving relationships is the most powerful force in life. Some neurologists even say that the most basic human need is to be the sparkle in one's eye. I can remember this adamant joy in my toddler's faces as they would run to me when I'd return from work, their sheer happiness just to see me and their trust that I was just as overjoyed to greet them that I was just as overjoyed to greet them. When this joy is in their heart, life makes sense to them because they can look forward to moments they can reconnect to being with their beloved. And since joy is relational, it is a contagious experience. Living from the heart Jesus gave you describes this experience saying, and I quote Joy is produced when someone is glad to see me, which stirs up a bit of joy in me. Then my joy is returned and the giver's joy is increased as well. This experience goes back and forth at amazingly fast rates, six cycles per second in a non-verbal face-to-face exchange, all the time growing stronger joy between both people, unquote. We should note that this joy also comes from the Lord, as the scriptures and our own lives testify. A powerful joy comes from God, as he knows all there is about me, from the very best to the deepest and darkest, and he still longs to be with us. So when biblical authors and 21st century neuroscientists both agree that joy comes through relationships, we can know that there is something to be learned from this for our own healing and our own value. This truth was vital in my own healing. When functioning properly, the family and the community are designed to assist the brain in its job of protection and repair.
Speaker 1:Building joy through life-giving relationships is often the first part of a person's recovery. I also want to quote this bit from Living from the Heart Jesus Gave you. Having enough joy strength is fundamental to a person's well-being. We know that a joy center exists in the right orbital prefrontal cortex of the brain, it has executive control over the entire emotional system. When the joy center has been sufficiently developed, it regulates emotions, pain control and immunity centers. It guides us to act like ourselves. It releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, and it is the only part of the brain that overrides the main drive centers food and sexual impulses, terror and rage. Unquote.
Speaker 1:I have spent many a night, a day and even a moment attempting to recharge or praying for my joy center to be recharged or, as I said before, it's called your joy strength to be rebuilt to my own therapeutic journey. Yet I have also recognized that, like any other aspect, there is no magic stone to rub or special oil nor incense to burn. Recovery and belonging do take a lifetime. We were made to receive and to give life, to overcome the effects of our trauma and to contribute to our communities. Now remember the point of the life model, which is the major paradigm of this book and hence the series that we are in, is not to disavow therapists nor therapy, rather to point out where it is appropriate and where authentic therapists and helpers exist. When coming from a Christ-centered place and from a healthy community and a surrounding environment, this is where people's therapy is most empowering. The life model helps apply biblical truth to what we know about the human condition and it helps us in recovery have productive and realistic solutions within our expectations.
Speaker 1:But maybe some of you are feeling isolated from community. Perhaps you've turned to broadcasting as your way of feeling included or a part of something bigger than yourself. Maybe you're on your own recovery journey or you have paused your own trauma recovery as things became difficult and it's time to pick up the pace again, as you feel the Spirit moving on you today. Perhaps you're feeling called to give back to your community and you need to move closer to the afflicted or the lesser of these in your church, family or in your community. Maybe you're listening and have never made a decision to follow Christ as your Lord and Savior before Any direction. You are sensing the Spirit moving.
Speaker 1:I would be remissed if we left our time today without providing an opportunity for us to respond, and I want to pray for you right now. All of you listening agree with this prayer or lift those up that are interceding right now. Lord Jesus, I repent of my sins and I surrender my life to you. Wash me and cleanse me from all unforgiveness and pride. I believe that you are the Son of God, that you died on the cross for the forgiveness of my sins and that you rose again on the third day for my victory. I believe that in my heart and I make confession with my mouth that you, jesus, are the Lord and you are my Savior, and that your kingdom is forever.
Speaker 1:I want to live my life now according to your terms and I want you to change my reliance from the world and from my own self and on any other earthly vessels I've placed hope in and instead I want to trust your plan and ask for you to put the people and the processes and the models to pursue restoration into my life. I ask for you to reveal to me where I have neglected the needs of those who are broken around me, where I have become indifferent, incapable or have been unable to unprioritize those that need to feel the hope of Christ. Thank you for being a God of mercy, a God of healing and a God of truth. Might I become a beacon of hope to the hurting. Give us the spiritual eyes to see on earth as it is in heaven, and may our priorities begin to reflect your heart and your kingdom, for it's in your name, jesus, that I pray Amen. For it's in your name, jesus, that I pray Amen.
Speaker 1:If you have today agreed with this prayer from the depths of your heart, then I welcome you to the eternal family of God and I commend you in your return to the faith. If that was your prayer, I want to continue as an encouragement to find in the Orthodox, biblical-based faith family who worships the Lord passionately. Also, devote yourself to the reading of the scriptures, as we will continue our series Jar of Play, where we will discuss the concept of maturity and its definition in the context of our healing and restoration. As you can see, there is so much that can be said short of just reading the book to you guys word for word. I hope, believe and pray that this will be transformative for whoever listens, at whatever stage in development you are in. So I'm looking forward to being with you next time on the Hopeful Perspective.
Speaker 1:Until then, I want to thank you for joining me along this journey and, if you'd be so kind, to follow, subscribe and, most importantly, to rate and write a review for others on our platform who may need the hopeful perspective in their life. Did you know that you can contribute monetarily by pressing our support the show link that is embedded on your platform in the episode descriptions. All of your contributions are utilized to grow the podcast, to multiply our equipment, to broaden our reach and to share the hope of Christ. I want to shout out my gratitude to the multiple new donors who already have made this commitment to support the podcast monthly. Without you, it would not be possible to reach as many people with the messages we do or anyone who needs to be reminded that hope is real. So thank you so much in advance and until next time, remember you are loved.
