My Faith Story

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Summary

Want to grow closer to God in 2025? My vision is to help women identify the beliefs and behaviors that keep them from growing in their relationship with God. Join me as I share my vision for 2025 and explain how my faith story is directly linked to my passion for growth in all areas of our lives.

Podcast Transcript

Intro

What is your vision for 2025? Mine is to help women grow in their relationship with Christ. So, if that’s what you want out of this year, stick around. I’m going to be talking about my personal faith journey and how I’m going to help women grow closer to Christ in 2025.

Welcome

Welcome to the first One Spiritual Journey podcast episode of 2025! It is crazy to think that I have already done this for an entire year. So, by the way, this is officially season two. Spotify keeps asking me what season I’m on, so, starting today, this is season two, episode one.

I have a lot planned for this year and also I have a lot not planned for this year. I’m kind of seeing where God takes all of this. I took over a month off to get clarity on my vision. And I want to share some of the things that God showed me with you today.

Vision for 2025

Let’s talk about my vision for 2025. So let me start by saying this:

I think most Christians are not healthy people.

One of the things God has been revealing to me is why I want to do this ministry. Like, why do I want to post content on Instagram and create podcast episodes and create resources for studying the Bible and learning more about yourself and your relationship with God. It’s hard to be a stay-at-home mom and manage all of these things. And I’ve always known that I wanted to do those things, but I have a hard time explaining why. So I’ve been asking God, what is my “why”?, and God is giving me a lot of clarity on my story and how He wants me to use it for His glory.

So, I want to share my faith story with you today. I accepted Christ when I was five-years-old. This was like, a no-brainer. I didn’t realize up until that point that you actually had to say “yes” to God and choose Jesus. And so, I was like, “oh! I have to do that? Yes! Absolutely! I want God in my life.”

Now, I grew up in a strict Christian home, and the church I went to was Baptist. So I experienced a lot of legalism, like, a lot of rules about modesty, relationships and how you had to act to be a good Christian. And just to clarify before I move forward, I’m not pointing fingers or blaming anyone for the struggles that I’ve experienced with my faith. This is a general issue in the church at large. Sometimes we embrace the justice of God without remembering that He is also loving and merciful. And when we forget His grace, His love, His mercy, we start to think, even subconsciously, that we have to EARN His favor.

Legalism

And that is legalism. Legalism is the attempt to earn our own salvation by our works, and usually includes a lot of man-made rules. And this is completely unbiblical. Ephesians 2:8-9 says,

“For it is by GRACE we have been saved by faith and that NOT OF OURSELVES it is a GIFT OF GOD NOT OF WORKS lest any man should boast.”

Sometimes we forget that we are not earning our own salvation. We are just accepting the gift of salvation and then we are living out the truth of who Christ is.

So the legalism that I experienced growing up, it wasn’t overt. Meaning, it wasn’t obvious. It was the subtle ways that people around me lived. A lot of them were living with this subconscious legalism. They had a lot of rules that they believed in that weren’t necessarily from scripture. And I saw how they lived out those rules; why they would choose to do some things and not other things.

Church Hurt

Along with the legalism, I also experienced a lot of church hurt and spiritual abuse. For example, people misusing scripture (especially when it came to mental health). Or other people at church modeling unhealthy behavior and calling it “holy”. Things like that. So over time, my relationship with God became stagnant because it was literally painful to engage with God. I had this picture of Him in my head that wasn’t accurate. And because of that I saw everything in scripture, everything that I learned from every devotional I was reading or whatever passage I was reading, I saw all of those things through this lens of a very harsh, judgemental God. So quiet time was incredibly painful for me and I kind of just avoided spending time with God even though I still believed in Him and I thought I still loved Him. But I just couldn’t understand Who He was. I lived with a lot of self-loathing and guilt and shame, and as an adult, God has slowly been bringing me out of that.

Health in the Church

Something that really stands out to me is that mental/emotional, physical and relational were not modeled well. For example, let’s talk about mental/emotional health. If something was too much for someone. Like, if I was going to church with someone and they couldn’t handle loud noise or a lot of people, or, you know, just basic over-stimulation, the response was usually Philippians 4:19: “God will supply all your needs.” Incredibly unhealthy. We as human beings have limits, and that’s not what that scripture is referring to.

Or physically. I see a lot of overeating and gluttony and a lot of times if you point it out, you’re called a hypocrite. Or you’re told you don’t understand scripture, or you don’t really know what gluttony is, like, “gluttony in scripture is extreme. This isn’t extreme. This is just eating a little too much. But it’s not the same thing.”

Relationally, I saw women who had a problem with another woman in the church and they talked about it with other Christian women rather than talking to that person directly. And they claimed that they were trying to “keep the peace” by not talking to that person who had offended them.

All of these examples are very common and very unbiblical ways that health is not modeled in the church.

The Need for Whole-Person Health

So, back to my vision for 2025. God is increasing my awareness for the need for whole-person health among Christians. To pursue health mind, body, heart and soul. And this is so important because if there is an area of our life that we ignore, that’s an area of our life that is not surrendered to God and it’s an area Satan can use.

For example, we talked about gluttony. A lot of people just refuse to eat healthy. They say “it’s too inconvenient”, they say “God will take care of me”, and then they end up with a bunch of health problems. Like, maybe they have a heart attack or they have a lot of gut-health issues. And that suffering leads to questions about their faith because they think, “well God didn’t care for me! Isn’t He supposed to care for me?”

Another example is not talking to a friend that you’re mad at and then you end up with no friends because you’re not practicing healthy relational communication. And then you end up lonely and that loneliness leads to sin because you’re trying to fill voids that God intended to be filled in community. In friendships. That sounds extreme, but I’ve seen these things happen even in my own life. When we do not surrender all of ourselves to God, we give Satan a foothold and eventually, that will affect our relationship with God.

My Mission

Now, my mission has always been to help women become mature Christ followers. I get that from Colossians 1:28. It’s something I’m really passionate about. I want to see spiritual growth in women. But now I’m seeing the necessity for this to be a whole-person emphasis, not just spiritual. Yes, we are destined for eternity and the things of this world won’t last forever. But we are responsible for caring for our earthly bodies and stewarding our resources well while we are on this Earth. And when we don’t treat our bodies well, and we don’t care for ourselves well, that hurts our relationship with God.

Mind, Body, Heart, and Soul

So throughout this year, I’m going to be talking about different aspects of ourselves, and I’m going to be using my mind, body, heart and soul model. You can find more about this model at brigettehenry.com/mindbodyheartsoul. And if you go to that link, you can download the spiritual self-care worksheet for free that kind of explains the model a little bit better. But essentially, the mind, body, heart, and soul model is a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model. And the reason I use it is that it helps me understand how God has called me to surrender all parts of my life to Him and what that looks like. So I’ll be relying on that model this year as I share the ways God asks us to care for ourselves.

There’s a lot of interaction between the different parts of that model, so I won’t always tell you, like, “today we’re talking about your mind,” or, “today we’re talking about your body.” But I think as we learn together this year, you’ll start to see how God is calling you to give different parts of yourself to Him. And I want to emphasize, this isn’t something He asks us to do all at once. Like, He doesn’t point out all of these areas of unhealthy behavior in your life and say, “OK, now fix all of them right now!” This is a journey. Ironically, it’s a part of our spiritual journey. Part of our spiritual journey is learning how to surrender everything we are to Him. Mind, body, heart and soul.

MBHS Course

Now, I’m currently working on a course called, “Mind, Body, Heart and Soul: How to Care for Who God Made You.” And it’s basically a devotional. I’ll walk you through five ways scripture tells us to care for our minds, our bodies, our hearts and our souls. I should be releasing it at the end of March, so if you want updates on that project when it’s completed, please subscribe to my email list. You can do that at brigettehenry.com/subscribe. You can find that link in the show notes.

So that’s this year so far. That’s my vision. I’m excited about everything God is doing with me and all that I can share with you. I’m also a little nervous, but it’s a good nervous.

Personal Update

Now, I want to give you a quick personal update, and this update is also going to clarify where a lot of my vision came from. I took a break for about a month from content creation because I felt like God was telling me to pause and listen to Him. And during that time, I was diagnosed with ADHD. That diagnosis is helping me realize how God made me and that I have been pushing myself against that grain because I put myself in a specific box and that’s not the box God has for me. That’s just not how He made me.

So, please pray for me as I work through this diagnosis. It 100% makes sense and did not come as a surprise at all, but I am 31 years old. And I have been battling depression and anxiety for 12 years. So finding out that the depression and anxiety are likely due to the ADHD is a little overwhelming. It requires a huge mindset shift. But I feel like I’m in a good place, and like I said, this is giving me a lot of clarity on where God is taking me and how I should invest my time and my energy moving forward, especially with this ministry. So, I’m super excited about it.

Word of the Year Practice

One last thing before I go: I want to talk to you about the Word of the Year practice. I know we’re already, like, a month into 2025, but it is not too late to choose a Word of the Year. So, if you want to choose a Word of the Year, you can get the workbook at brigettehenry.com/wordoftheyear. That will help walk you through the process of choosing your word.

My word for 2025 is “sufficient” and I’m learning a lot about the sufficiency of Christ and how He has given me everything I need to accomplish what He has for me. And I don’t need to accomplish any more than what He has for me. I don’t need to add anything. I just need to rely on Him and He will give me the energy and the strength that I need to do the things that He has called me to do. The Word of the Year practice is really powerful so I encourage you to consider it.

Outro

That’s all I have for today! If you enjoyed this podcast, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Also, if you listen on Spotify, they recently added a comment option, so feel free to comment on this podcast episode any of your thoughts about what I shared today. I would love to hear from you!

You can find me on Instagram @OneSpiritualJourney and if you want to get in contact with me, you can send me an email at brigette@brigettehenry.com. That link is in the show notes. I will be back in two weeks, and I’m going to be talking about some verses that are commonly misused, especially when mental health is involved.

I’m praying for you that this year would be a year of exponential growth in the knowledge and understanding of who God is and who He made you to be. I’ll see you next time. Bye!