Episode 8: Coffee with Gabi! Living Fully Alive
In 2008 I was living in China. It was supposed to be a dream come true, but instead I found myself feeling numb to everything.
I had been through back-to-back hardships and found that I had shut down. Have you ever felt this way before? Have you ever found yourself feeling numb and wondering how on earth to find your way back to light, to aliveness, to yourself?
In this episode I’ll share my story and some practical tips for coming back to life.
“The glory of God is man fully Alive.” - Saint Irenaeus
“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me wo wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous - how well I know it.” Psalm 139:13-14 NLT
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Connect with Gabi:
Instagram - @gabiruth
Website - GabiRuth.com
(TRANSCRIPT) Episode 8: Coffee with Gabi! Living Fully Alive
Coffee with Gabi Nov 18
Gabi: Hello, sweet friends. I'm so glad to have you back on Pain to Passion Live, and I have another Coffee with Gabi episode for you today, and I'm just really excited to spend these next few minutes sitting here with you. Hopefully you've grabbed your coffee or your tea and you're sitting somewhere cozy and we can have a nice little conversation together.
Today I wanted to share with you one of my all-time favorite quotes. This is a quote that I have used and thought of for probably over 15 years at this point, and that quote is, “The glory of God is man fully alive” by Saint Irenaeus. Now, of course, sometimes I switch it up and say the glory of God is woman fully alive, but you know what I mean.
It's basically saying that when we embody our full aliveness, we bring God glory. And I was gonna tell you a little story about a time in my life when I, for a fact that I was not fully alive and I was really struggling. So let me take you back in time to about, I'd say early 2008, I was actually living in China.
Yes, China. So, long story short, I had had China in my heart for a very long time, and after a couple of trips I found myself living in China with a couple of friends, going to school full time and just doing what I felt like God had called me to do. So there I was living in China and a lot of difficult things had happened the first six or seven months that I was living there.
I was really sick. I was having migraines every day. I was having really challenging relationship experiences with my teammates, and ultimately I ended up living in a little studio apartment by myself and just kind of found myself slogging through the day, day by day, just doing what had to be done, doing school, eating, sleeping, but feeling really numb and dead on the inside.
Have you ever found yourself there? I'm sure you have cuz listen, life hits us hard and honestly, we could go deep into this, but this kind of over and over again hardship that just hits you and it keeps coming can often send your system into like a freeze mode, which in polyvagal theory lingo if you like that kind of thing, is called dorsal vagal.
So I didn't know that then, but what I did understand at the time was that I felt, I felt so numb on the inside. I couldn't feel happiness. I couldn't feel sadness. I didn't feel any kind of aliveness or joy for the fact that I was here, living in China, doing what I had always dreamed of doing. I was just kind of moving through my day in a haze.
Have you ever been there? Gosh, you guys, I wish, it's something that I could say only happens once in your life, but if you're anything like me, you know that it can happen again and again and again, especially when we get hit with hard stuff. But on this particular day, I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed just pondering how numb I was feeling on the inside and feeling like, what is the point of this?
Like what is the point of living like this? And I, I cried out to God. Again, God had been my one steadfast, my one constant in my life and I'm so grateful for that. But I cried out to God and I just said, God, I feel dead on the inside. I don't know what to do. I need you to help me wake up again. If it's true what that quote says, the glory of God is man fully alive, then I most certainly am not bringing you glory right now cuz I feel nothing.
God in his incredible mercy and his amazing, unfathomable love just whispered something to my heart. “Gabi, go to the stationery store.” I know, I know it sounds super random, but listen, in China and all over Asia, they have little stores full of stationery supplies and we're not talking like boring Office Depot kind of stuff.
We're talking super cute, like lots of bright colors, all these different kinds of pens. Even ones with like little things dangling off of them. I loved the stationery store. Something about that place just always made me smile and made me so happy. To this day, I love colorful stuff. If you don't know, I have purple hair and I love like all the colorful stuff.
So that whisper, it made sense to me. It was like “go to the stationery store. Grab yourself some new pens and a notebook and come back.” So I did. I put my shoes on and I walked down the street to my favorite little stationery store. And the people who worked there, they kind of knew me. So they said hello, and I said, hello, and I smiled and I got myself a notebook and some cute pens and came back to my apartment and sat back on the edge of the bed and was like, okay, what now? And I felt in my heart what God wanted me to do next was just write a list of the things that brought life to my heart. Anything, like from small to big, really anything. So that's what I did. I just started writing a list and some of the things on that list were really silly, like having pink hair.
I had pink hair at the time, or high top shoes. I loved high top shoes or serious stuff like international politics or deep stuff, like creating friends with people from all over the world. I made this whole list. I thought through them and I thought through why these things made me feel happy and made me feel alive.
And then God said to me like, “Gabi, look at the list. Look at this list.” So I looked at it. “This is who you are. This is who I've created you to be, and I want you to press into these things with no shame and go after those things. Even the little things like the pink hair, even the big things like creating friends with people from all over the world, all of these things. I want you to pursue those things because these are the things that I have put in you that are unique. These are the things that I put in you for a specific purpose so that you would live fully alive.” And I had never really thought of it like that before, and I, I know that I had spent so much of my life, and I continued after this time, I had spent so much of my life up until that point comparing myself to other people and trying to live up to other people's expectations that I had kind of forgotten like who Gabi was. I had forgotten the special and unique things about me. I had kind of started to think that I had no real unique giftings in and of myself.
I was just trying to be what everyone else expected me to be and what they wanted me to be. But in that moment, I remembered like God put special and unique things inside of me, and that's what I want you to remember today too, my friends. Maybe you can also go get a notebook and a pen and sit down for a little bit and think about those things that make your heart come alive.
What are those things? Did you know that they're different than the person next to you? Listen, I have an identical twin. True story. Her list is gonna look completely different from my list because we are different people and God has woven us in different ways. You do not have to be the person sitting next to you.
You need to be you, and there's this special and unique relationship with God that you will encounter when you partner with him in getting to know yourself. I wanted you to, I wanted to read this verse to you that I'm sure all of you have heard, but it's from Psalm 139. This is the New Living Translation, and it says, “You made all the delicate inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex. Your workmanship is marvelous. How well I know it.” That's Psalm 139, 13 through 14. I want you to think about how wonderfully complex you are and how God knit you together in a specific way inside your mother's womb like, He knew what he was weaving inside of you.
Maybe that is your love for nature. Maybe it is your love for sewing. Maybe it is the personality that you have that draws people to you. All these different things. You're so wonderfully complex and God wove those things inside of you. I know a lot of us are searching for a purpose right now. The very first place for you to start is to get to know yourself, partner with God in getting to know you, who he made you to be, and start pressing into those things and start shedding the things that don't belong to you that have come on you because of comparison that have that you've taken on because you felt like you had to in order to show up in a certain way to please other people.
Shed those things from your life and start remembering who you are because I promise you, the giftings on your life are exactly what the world around you needs. And if you're trying to be someone else, then we're missing out on the marvel and the wonder and the purpose of who you were created to be. So remember this, friends, the glory of God is man fully alive.
The glory of God is woman fully alive. Get the healing that you need. Press into getting to know who you are and come back to life. Okay? This is gonna be a huge step towards you embracing your purpose and realizing who God has created you to be. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I absolutely love spending this time with you.
If you're enjoying this podcast, will you please, please, please rate and review? It will help a lot in getting the word out to other people, to give them this safe space to be encouraged and to know that they're not alone and to dream again, and to hear stories and to heal. So please go to the podcast, um, platform that you're on, and rate and review this podcast.
It will mean so much. I thank you and I can't wait to chat with you next time. Bye friends.