Welcome Home - A Heart Fully Alive: A Journey from Brokenness to Whole Hearted Living

Hello everybody, welcome to the Whole Heart of Woman Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Ray, and I'm so glad you're here. I don't mean that in a rehearsed podcaster kind of way. I mean it from the bottom of my heart. If you found this podcast, I don't think that was an accident. So welcome. Pull up a chair. This is your heart. A place where you don't have to have it all together, where your story is safe, your pain is welcome, and healing is not just possible, it's the whole reason we're here. This isn't a performance space, not for me and not for you. So you can exhale. Whatever you carried in with you today, the heaviness, the questions, the quiet ache you haven't quite been able to name, you can set it all down right here. This is a judgment-free, shame-free, pretending-free zone. And I say that as someone who has spent most of her life doing all three. Let's dig in. I want to start by sharing with you a little bit about how I got here because I think it matters, and because I promised myself that in this space I wouldn't hide. It was one of the most difficult moments of my life. I was 22 in college because I was told I had to go to college, but I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea who I even was. I was broken in ways I didn't have words for yet. I grew up in a home that was not safe. My first experiences of life was insecurity, fear, and pain that nobody talked about. We kept secrets. We kept up appearances, we kept going. We were survivors no matter the cost. And then at 22, I was in a hospital because I didn't want to live anymore. Not because I wanted to die, but because the pain had become louder than any hope I could find. She told me she didn't want to die. She just wanted the pain to stop. And when I hear that, something in me recognizes it immediately. My antennas go off because I know exactly how she feels. I've been in that very same place. If that's you today, if that's the quiet secret place you are sitting in right now, I want you to hear me say this to you. You are not alone. You are not beyond repair, and you're not too far gone. God sees you. He knows your pain, not from a distance. He is closer to you right now than you even realize. Closer than you may even be able to feel right now. I can tell you, standing from the other side of that darkness, there is hope beyond pain. Real hope. Not the kind that asks you to pretend you're okay. The kind that meets you exactly where you are and says, I see you, I am not going anywhere. I used to think I didn't have a testimony. Everyone else had a testimony in church. I didn't think I did because of the pain I was feeling. Our minds can so easily prevent us from seeing the truth, can't they? During that dark time, the Lord told me, my testimony is that I'm still standing, and that it was a testimony we're sharing. I hope that encourages someone to hear that. That is the God we are going to talk about in this space, and that is the journey we are about to take together. So going back to the moment in the hospital, in that moment laying there shattered and completely broken, do you know what my mind was racing with? Not my own pain, not what I needed. I was thinking about what my parents would think, how they would react, what my neighbors would say, and what my friends would think. Even at my lowest moment, I was still managing everyone else's feelings, still performing, still keeping the secret of how broken I really was. I grew up in a hard-working family where what others thought of you mattered deeply. You had to be good, you were proper, you had to keep things inside, and I had kept so much inside for so long that it was going nowhere, and it had nowhere left to go. I was wondering and worrying about what I was going to do. Would my parents be angry? Would they be ashamed of me? So many thoughts were racing through my mind, a mind that was already exhausted from years of trying to hold everything together. It felt messy and confusing and complicated, and it was, it really was. But that moment, that hospital room, was not the end of my story. It was the beginning of it, and that is why I'm here sitting at this microphone talking to you today. So before I go any further, I want to say something honest because honesty is going to be the heartbeat of everything we do here. I started this podcast earlier this year with a real calling and a genuine heart. But if I'm being truthful, I was also hiding. Not intentionally. I was leading with teaching when I should have been leading with my story. I was sharing knowledge when what you actually needed, what I actually needed, was for me to be real with you. I was doing what I've done most of my life, staying a little bit behind the curtain, offering the lesson instead of the testimony. And God recently, in his gentle and persistent way, tapped me on the shoulder and said, Go deeper, be you, stop performing and start showing up. So that's what this is. This new season, a heart fully alive, a journey from brokenness to wholehearted living is me showing up. Really showing up. No curtain, no hiding behind the knowledge of scripture or my framework or my credentials. Just me. Little me, just Chris. The real one, though. The one who is still on some mornings that shy, timid, insecure girl who isn't sure she belongs at the microphone. And if you know that girl, if she lives in you too, then you are exactly where you need to be. I don't know your story. I don't know what you've walked through. I don't know what's been done to you or what was said over you when you were too young and too tender to defend yourself. But I know this. Something was spoken over you, something happened to you, and somewhere along the way, quietly, without even realizing it, you started to believe it. Maybe it sounded like you're too sensitive, or you're too much, or you're not enough, you're not good enough. You'll never amount to anything. Love is something you have to earn, not something you're simply given. Keep it all together. Don't let anyone see you fall apart. Don't let them see you cry. Don't be a baby, whatever it is, or maybe it wasn't words at all. Maybe it was a father who wasn't present, a mother who couldn't give what she didn't have, a friendship that shattered you, a season so dark you still don't talk about it. Whatever it was, it shaped you. It formed patterns in your heart. It formed patterns of the way you love, the way you hide, the way you perform, the way you shrink, the way you desperately give yourself away, hoping that this time, finally, someone will stay. I know those patterns. I lived them for decades. And here is what I want you to hear. Maybe for the very first time, or maybe as a reminder. What was spoken over you is not the truth about you. What happened to you is not who you are. There is a difference between a wound and an identity. And learning that difference, really learning it in the deep places of your heart, that's the journey we're going to take together. This season, this podcast becomes the living companion to my book, Heartfully Alive, From Brokenness to Wholeness, a journey into the heart of God. Each episode is going to walk a chapter of that journey. I'm not going to read the book to you, but it's going to come alive. It's going to take you into the real moments behind the words. The dark ones, the searching ones, the ones where I tried drinking from every well I could find and came away thirsty every single time. And the ones where God finally showed up in the most unexpected, unpolished, unreligious moments and changed everything. We're going to talk about pain, about rejection and shame and the survival patterns we developed just to get through another day. We're going to talk about the long road of searching for healing through therapy, self-help, spirituality, and what it means to finally encounter Jesus, not as a distant religious figure, but as the living healer who is not afraid of your mess. We're going to talk about identity, about what it means to guard your heart. Not by closing it off or in building walls, but letting God heal it so completely that it becomes a source of life for the people around you. This is the journey from brokenness to wholehearted living. And I'm not leading it from a healed, distant place, looking back at you from the other side. I am walking it with you, still learning, still growing, still some mornings having to preach to myself before I can preach it to anyone else. So here's my invitation to you today. If you have a journal, bring it with you each week. There will be moments worth writing down, not because I'm giving you homework, but because God has a way of speaking into the spaces between words. And I want you to have somewhere to catch what he says to you. And if you know a woman who is quietly carrying something too heavy, someone who loves God but is struggling to believe that her struggle isn't somehow a failure of faith, would you share this with her? You might be the reason she finds her way to this heart room and a wholehearted journey of living. Next week, we begin the journey. We're going back to the moment when the pain became too much. And I'm going to tell you the truth about that season and what it felt like from the inside. No filters, no polish. I think it's going to be very familiar to some of you. Until then, I want you to know something. You are safe, you are not too broken, and healing is not just for other people and other women. It's for you too. I love you, and I'll see you next week. Bye.