S2E1: Is a Sense of Home Difficult for You to Find?
Welcome to Season 2 of Pain to Passion Live!!!
What does "HOME" mean to you? Maybe it's a place, or a relationship, or a sense of security. As humans, I think all of us are on a constant search for a sense of safety and homeostasis in a world that is filled with unpredictability and chaos. No matter what we do or how much we think we can control, the truth is that everything is temporary and we can get blindsided by grief, loss, or disaster in the blink of an eye.
So what do we do to maintain a sense of HOME, even if our world is turned upside down? Is it even possible?
This is what I want to chat with you all about today, and I'm sharing some of my most precious personal memories as part of this episode. I truly hope it encourages, inspires, strengthens, and grounds you. You can find HOME, my friend. You are loved and you are worth it.
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(TRANSCRIPT) S2E1: Is a Sense of Home Difficult for You to Find?
Note: Transcript is created by AI. Please excuse any errors.
Gabi: [00:00:00] Hello, beautiful people. Oh my goodness. I cannot believe how amazing season one of this podcast was. First, I just wanna thank all of you who have been listening for the past. Oh gosh. It's been six months. Wow. That's incredible. Six months and 45 episodes later. Here we are at season two, so let me officially welcome you to season two of Pain two.
Passion Live Season one was chock full of the most incredible guests. Interviews and topics. I hope that if you haven't had the chance to catch up on all of them, you will go back. I also put on my Instagram last week a post about the top 10 most downloaded episodes. So if you're not following me on Instagram, Go ahead and pop [00:01:00] over there.
My handle is Gabi Ruth, g a b i r u t h, and go see what those top 10 are and that will give you a great starting place, um, if you wanna catch up on the highlights of season one. But here we are at season two. It's the beginning of May, 2023. I can hardly believe it. Summer is on its way. You guys, we made it.
If any of you live up here in the p n w where I live, I live in Spokane, Washington. Winter felt like it lasted forever and I really can't complain because I love winter and I love to ski. But I did start to get really tired of the cold and now we've had a couple days that were close to 90. Right now it's rainy and in the sixties, but it's going to get up in the high eighties again this week.
And I am like, oh my gosh, summer is here. It's kind of unbelievable. So new season of life and new season of this podcast, and I wanted to welcome [00:02:00] you with a solo episode. But let me tell you my friends, we have some incredible guests lined up for the next few weeks, few months. And you're not gonna wanna miss a thing.
So mark your calendars because every Tuesday and every Friday, you will see a new episode of Pain to Passion live dropping, and it's gonna be a really, really awesome season. So today what I wanted to talk to you about is kind of like this concept of home. It really has struck me in the last week with some things that I've been going through that having a feeling of being home is like so important, but what does that actually mean to us?
What does it mean to have a sense of home? What does it that makes us feel at home? Because I know that a lot of us, we grew up in situations where home [00:03:00] was chaos. Home was. A place that we associated with having to perform in a certain way in order to be loved or having to achieve certain things in order to be safe, or a place where chaos reigned.
If you're anything like me, you had to learn early how to control as much as possible, just so that you could feel safe and secure in your own skin, in your own home. And even with all the effort that we put in as children, which we never should have been responsible to put in, we still found times when home just didn't feel like home should, but how are we supposed to know that?
Like home was home, right. I still remember as a kid, my first few sleepovers, even as like an 11 and 12 year old, I would get so homesick and I look [00:04:00] back on that now and I see a lot of toxicity wrapped up in that just because. I didn't really know how to function outside of my family system because that's the way that it was designed.
So being separated from the place where I lived and um, the people that I understood as toxic as they were, it was really, really jarring for me. And I just would cry and cry and often call my parents to come and pick me up and take me home. Um, But that's what I learned home to be. And as an adult, I've realized I get to decide what home actually is.
And I have a couple stories that I wanna share with you, which hopefully will make this a little more. Um, I. Tangible relevant to you because we all are searching for home all the time. I think we're all searching for a sense of security at all times, and there is a space where we really [00:05:00] can feel like we can breathe like this is home.
So the first story that I wanna tell you, and I know I've talked about this a little bit before, but it's about the earthquake in China that I lived through in 2008. The anniversary of this earthquake, the 15th anniversary, is actually coming up here in just a couple of days after this podcast release on May 12th.
That will be 15 years since that earthquake, which is crazy. But anyway. I remember living through this earthquake, which there, there's another episode about, it was one of the most disruptive experiences of my life, which I know that everyone can understand this to an extent of situations that just disrupt your life and all of a sudden you don't know like which way is up because you're just blindsided by tragedy.
But here I was, this. [00:06:00] Young, early twenties girl who is living in China. I live in an apartment by myself, was walking home from class one day and this 8.0 magnitude earthquake hits. Um, I was standing in the middle of the street with a bunch of other people. You may have heard this story and. It was just crazy.
But it didn't stop after the earthquake stopped. As you know, earthquakes always have aftershocks. So we had aftershocks for, you know, months following that, and some of them were bigger than others. Nothing was as big or as bad as the original earthquake, but it's like we had shaking every single day. Um, my apartment that I lived in there were cracks up and down the walls.
From floor to ceiling. I didn't actually know if it was safe to stay there. So I had an uncle who was an engineer, a structural engineer, and I sent him a bunch of pictures and [00:07:00] he said, I think you're good. So I stayed in my apartment, but needless to say, this city of millions and millions of people was just gripped in fear.
And a lot of people had the same experience as me where they weren't sure they felt safe to live at home. So literally in every open space in the city, tent cities popped up. So these people, these families who had. Homes and apartments to go back to, wouldn't go home. Instead, they bought tents or they brought the tents out from their closets and set them up in the parks and they lived in their tents because to them that felt safer than living at home.
And this was really like, I don't know, I was so young and I was. Constantly just leaning on the Lord for strength. To be honest. I had a lot of really [00:08:00] hard things going on at that time and a lot of loneliness, but my experience at that time was just the nearness of God, but I remember. Walking down these streets that are like tiled with these octagonal tiles all put together like a puzzle piece.
And sometimes you'd step on a loose one and this muddy water would shoot up your leg. It's like one of my memories from China that's so vivid. I was walking down one of those tiled sidewalks. And looking at this large park full of tents with people living in their tents, and I popped out my camera, you know, there weren't really smartphones at the time.
I had like a little digital camera and I just started filming. As I walked, I filmed this video of this tent city and. In my headphones, I had an iPod in my pocket. I [00:09:00] was listening to Switchfoot song. This is home. And the two of those things combined just brought tears to my eyes. If you know that song, hopefully, uh, on the podcast here, I will be able to actually play the song since I use Spotify's podcasting platform.
Um, but for those of you watching on YouTube, the song by Switchfoot is says, this is home. I have finally found where I belong. After all my searching, after all my questions, I finally found my home and I'm gonna call it home.
That's basically,[00:10:00]
Were actually out of their homes living in tents because of fear. In my heart, even though I was in the same situation, and this isn't a judgment on anyone, it's not even really a pat on my own back. It's really just evidence of the reality of God to me. I was in the same situation as these people. I didn't have a tent.
I was living at home in my apartment with the cracks, um, running down the stairs every time there was an aftershock, but in my heart, It was so interesting in that most chaotic uprooting time. I felt so much at Homeness. I felt so much [00:11:00] nearness to the divine. Something about the fact that I literally could not control this situation at all and had to fully lean on and rely on the grace of God and the love of God to help me through, made me feel more at home inside of my soul than I had ever felt before.
And if you've ever seen, I'm a huge Narnia fan, and if you've ever seen the movie Prince Caspian, this song actually plays in Prince Caspian. And it's a reflection of like, the earth is not my home. The the normal world is not my home. Narnia is my home, which is supposed to be kind of a reflection of earth and heaven or.
Your ideas of your life compared to God's ideas of your life, and [00:12:00] that really, really resonates with me that ultimately this place, this planet and my ability to control things and the things that I can see and the situations that I live in, those are not my home. The only place where I can truly find home is with God.
And with trusting that he loves me, that he sees me, that he protects me, that he is my father, and he's a good one at that. Now listen, I understand if any of you are listening and this is not the space you're in, it's okay. Even if you're not a Christian, that's okay too cuz you know what? I get it guys. I get it with.
The way that so much Christianity is being portrayed in people's lives these days. I so understand. My heart is to come back to the reality of who Jesus is because he's not [00:13:00] hateful. He's not exclusive, he's not unkind. He is kind and loving and inclusive, and that's, that's who he really is. And that's the experience I've had of him.
And I know for me, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be alive today if that wasn't true because there were seasons, long seasons of my life where he was literally the only thing that I could turn to. But all that being said, in that moment, I felt that in my spirit, like okay. I'm home because God is with me.
And the cool thing about that is that no matter where you are, who you're with or what you're going to, you can be home. And someday, someday, oh, I cannot wait. We will get to actually go home and see it with our eyes and feel that sense of home constantly. So this past week I had a, I had an experience that felt like an earthquake.
I [00:14:00] can't go into detail, um, but I can tell you that I had a conversation, a situation happen in my life that just shook me. It shook me to my core. It felt like the security that I stand on was ripped out from under me. And I screamed. I cried. My body shook all of the things. And then that night I slept.
And then in the morning, guess what I felt, I felt a sense of home. Nothing had changed. The situation was still real. I was still raw, but I sat in my big papasan chair in the corner like I always do every morning. And I had this thought of like, I feel like I'm home, even though my whole world just got flipped upside down.
I [00:15:00] feel like I'm home and I knew, I knew it could only be because God was with me and he was reminding me, like I've said in a previous episode too, like when everything else is shaken, you will know the unshakeable. And he is the unshakeable. Eternity is the unshakeable. He is the hope. And I know a lot of us are going through things that are just rocking our worlds right now.
I feel like everywhere I turn, a friend is going through something devastating or I'm experiencing something myself, and I think this is. What it means to experience that everything that can be shaken will be shaken. Like it says in Hebrews 13, or maybe it's Hebrews 12. Hebrews 12, but then when you can sit in a chair in the corner [00:16:00] when everything has been shaken or walk down a street where people are literally living in fear, intense and feel.
Home inside of your heart like that is a miracle and that is something that is so hard to describe. You just have to experience it. And if you listened at all to last season of Pain to Passion Live, you will hear story after story of people who lived through things that were unimaginable, tragic, horrible, awful grievous, and yet somehow they've made it out to the other side.
Hopeful, bright, joyous. And I truly believe that it's because they have [00:17:00] found home, they have found that home is not a place, it's not a person, it's not a thing. It is literally the miracle of the grace of God in their lives. So that's what I wanted to share with all of us today. Please know that nothing is for nothing.
God does not create tragedy, but he does turn it into something beautiful because he is so good like that. So whatever you're facing in this season, as you walk into the summer, I know even some of you are special needs parents and you're looking at a summer where you're not sure how you're gonna make it through with your kids home.
You love them, but it's so hard. It's gonna be okay because the grace of God is with you. You will endure this and you will find home within yourself [00:18:00] as you just look to heaven and say, God, I need you. I need you in this moment. So I love you friends. I am so excited about this season. I think we're all going to grow.
We're all going to go deeper into our faith. We're all going to hear stories of. People who are doing extraordinary things, we're gonna be moved to tears, and we're going to rejoice. We're going to be encouraged in our own stories, and I cannot wait. I can't wait to experience this with all of you. It will be such a joy.
Um, once again, I want to make sure to let you know I have a few coaching spots available, um, for one-on-one coaching. If you are looking for a coach, I. To help you push past the blockages in your God-given dreams to help you work through your stories [00:19:00] from the past, to help you move through dysregulation caused by your past trauma.
I would love to be your guide and to help you through. So go ahead and check out my website. Copy ruth.com and click on the one-on-one coaching page. We can get on a free call to connect and see if this might be a good fit for you. It would be such a joy and honor to work with you through your stories and to help you find home inside of yourself as well.
Have an amazing day. I will be back again on Friday for a Coffee with Gabby episode and next Tuesday with our very first guest of Paint to Passion Live. You are not gonna wanna miss it. I love you all and I'll see you next time.