What does it look like moving forward from the ashes of 2020? We believe that God will redeem everything. Gina and her husband Norm Stockton welcome you to Season 3 of The Sacred Space Podcast.
Uprooting Unhealthy Dependence
Gina:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to season three of the sacred space podcast. My name is Gina Stockton and I have Norm, my husband, in the house. We are so excited to be back with you guys. We’re excited about this season in the middle of what has become the craziest year that none of us saw coming.
Norm:
Yes, we are. We are looking forward to normal times once again.
Gina:
Yes, if there is such a thing coming. It’s been a crazy year. We’re recording this on the evening of November 3rd, Election night. A lot is going on, a lot of anxiety and fear, and a lot of division in the world. We were just talking, before we started recording, about how you’re going to go visit your mom in Hawaii, and the COVID test that is getting sent to the house, and they want to see you – on video, swab your nose before you can get on that plane, and before Hawaii will let you in. And my dad is in memory care, he has Alzheimer’s, and we haven’t seen him in person since February.
Norm:
Except through a glass. No hugs allowed.
Gina:
No hugs. It’s been gnarly. We’ve had friends who have lost family members to COVID. We have friends who have lost jobs. We’ve been through great things and excruciating things and everything in between just like everybody else.
Norm:
And that’s just last week.
Gina:
Seriously though. So much disruption starts to expose things. It exposes things globally and politically and relationally. It also exposes things spiritually and a lot is being exposed right now.
Norm:
We were talking just the other day about how there are too many people for it to just be a coincidence. Almost everybody that I know is going through something gnarly, and not just “normal gnarly, but “huge gnarly”. I’m not sure about my theology in terms of if God is bringing this on to shake us up. That’s certainly a possibility, but He’s certainly allowing things to happen to create a dependency on Him in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen. It’s not over-speaking to say that we haven’t seen it certainly in most of our lifetimes.
Gina:
God is God. God is on the throne. I wouldn’t say it is His will. Horrible things happen, and we live in a broken world, but God is a Redeemer and He uses all those things to get our attention. He doesn’t waste anything. Especially as believers, we are getting a wake-up call.
There’s a lot of exposure to our dependence being placed on other things, when it was always meant to be on Jesus. Instead, we’ve placed it on our organizations, our leaders, our pastors, our Bible study that we went to every week, or our thing that we did on Sunday. And suddenly when those things aren’t there, we have to be faced with what we really believe and where our relationship with the Lord is.
Norm:
I was talking to somebody recently where, there’s all these things that are good things, but it’s easy for those to kind of take the place of our security.
Gina:
Absolutely. Idols are being unearthed under beds, and altars that were in the corners and decorated to look really nice to blend in – they are being dismantled. But it’s interesting because in season two, I ended up cutting short a little bit, because I got to a place where I felt like, “You know what? I need to step back. I want to be quick to listen and slow to speak. I want to examine my heart.”
I want to go be with Jesus and go “Lord, what are you saying to me? What are the things that I’ve allowed to have precedence in my heart that shouldn’t have been? What are the things that I’ve allowed my dependence to be rooted in?
Embracing Humility and Love
Gina:
So we can sit here with so much division and judgment going on right now, even in the church, a lot of finger pointing, a lot of things. Social media is just a cesspool of accusation and judgment.
And 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” And I feel like we can hear a verse like that, and immediately in our mind list everybody we have a problem with.
Norm:
Really, there’s somebody that needs to repent and be humble.
Gina:
There’s people that need to repent. But, no, that needs to start with me. That needs to start with us. The sons and daughters of God. He loves us too much to let us go unchecked. This is an opportunity in this season to come back to Him, and then to pray Psalm 139, “Search me, Lord, know my heart, try me and know my thoughts.”
So that’s been the place I’ve certainly been in. It just felt like it’s time to re engage. It’s time to step into season three, because the Lord is speaking and He is moving and He is doing things. And one of the things that has come along with COVID is zoom meetings and everything being done remotely.
And I’ve just started last night, teaching prayer class on zoom. I have a couple people in different states that are joining me. And the first week we talk all about connection. It’s all about relationship.
We were designed for relationship with God, Father, Son, and Spirit; and for relationship with other people. “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” But we all have dysfunctional relationships, both with God and with each other.
It seems like the Lord kind of puts together a theme for each of these seasons. And the theme for this season seems to be relationships, family, and restoring relationships. What does that look like? What does it look like to get those dysfunctions and those distortions out of our relationships, and to heal those relationships both with God and with other people?
And so I’m really excited about this season. There’s some fun interviews with the theme of spiritual family, restoration of family, the rebuilding of family, and the redefinition really of what family is.
Norm:
That’s super cool by the way, because I think it’s much easier when conflict or dysfunctionality arises – to just bail.
Gina:
Yeah, absolutely.
Norm:
And you know, I think it is investing and putting your faith in action – to actively work on restoration, reconciliation, and getting relationships healthy.
Gina:
What did Jesus say in John 13? “By this all men will know that you’re my disciples – by your love for one another.” Right? So those relationships being restored and healed are going to be a demonstration to the world, which is broken and hurting and desperate for love and for understanding. There’s so many people so scared right now.
So our prayer is that this season would be a resource for you, that it would be a place of encouragement, that it might be a vehicle for some healing and restoration for you. And then we have a lot of other exciting things coming Norm. You were just working on Dwell, scripture meditations, which has become way bigger of a project than either of us expected it to be. So it’s coming together.
Guard Your Heart
I know you guys have been hearing me talk about it for a long time, but it actually is coming and we are so excited. So there’s a lot of exciting things coming, but we just wanted to hop on and say, “Hi”. We wanted to say, “We’re with you, and we’re in the trenches with you.” And we want this to be a safe place where you can explore the things that you’re experiencing, the things that you’re feeling.
Like I said, that you could experience maybe some encouragement and some healing. As we launched this season, I just wanted to encourage you. I was reading this today in Proverbs 4, and this is the Passion Translation, starting at verse 23, and it just says, “Above all, guard the affections of your heart for they affect all that you are.
Pay attention to the welfare of your innermost being, for from there flows the well springs of life. Avoid dishonest speech and pretentious words, be free from using perverse words. No matter what, set your gaze on the path before you with a fixed purpose, looking straight ahead.
Ignore life’s distractions, watch where you’re going, stick to the path of truth and the road will be safe and smooth before you. Don’t allow yourself to be sidetracked even for a moment or take a detour that leads to darkness.” This Proverb has a lot of wisdom.
There’s a lot of distraction, and there’s a lot of temptation to take a detour. There’s a lot of temptation to be pulled into dark places, to be pulled into isolation, to be pulled into isolation away from God. One of the enemies oldest tricks in the book, is if he can get you isolated, if he can get you cornered and hidden, and start to feed you with doubt about God’s goodness and kindness that He’s on the throne.
You know, God certainly won the battle. And we’re here to just encourage you, to say, “God has not left the building.” He is still on the throne. You are enormously loved, pursued and surrounded, and He is with you. He is for you. He will not abandon you.
Promised Suffering and Prosperity
Norm:
And if I can just quickly add to that too, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Romans 8 recently. There’s all these passages that are really familiar, and I didn’t realize how many of them – either within them, or directly adjacent to the real popular verses – are all these verses that talk about suffering.
Romans 8:17, “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” And that second part of that, you don’t hear that quoted as much, you know? I started going through and the scriptures are replete with real assurances that in this life we are going to suffer.
We’re certainly living an abundant life. I was talking to my buddy Lincoln Brewster last week, and he said, “We’ve been assured this abundant life.” So there’s this interesting kind of tension with the abundant life and suffering, and Lincoln said something super profound. He said, “You can even really make an argument that you can’t have an abundant life without suffering.“
Gina:
Absolutely.
Norm:
Oh man.
Gina:
We are in a season like no other, that is a very vivid demonstration of that tension of God’s grace and His love and His presence within the midst of difficulty and pain and tension and no resolution, and potentially no resolution in the near future. What does it look like to be sons and daughters? What does it look like to be the church right now? And to lay down our agendas and our weapons?
Norm:
And to lay down our expectations?
Gina:
And know that we don’t war in the flesh, we war in the spirit and we are representatives of the Kingdom. And what does that actually look like? And how do we surrender and humble ourselves and lean in. God bless you guys.
Let me just pray for you right now. “Father, God, we come before you, and we right now, we just acknowledge that you are on the throne Father, that you are the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. You are the Alpha, the Omega, the Beginning, and the End, you are the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth. You put the stars in their place. You told the sea where to stop.
You knit us together, but you’re also the lover of our souls. And you know the number of hairs on our head, you know everything we’re gonna say before we say it, you know, everything we’re going to think before we think it, there’s no place that we can go that your arm is not long enough to reach us. There’s no place too far that we can flee from your Spirit.
Gina:
There’s no place so dark that you aren’t with us in the middle. So Father, in Jesus name, I just pray for everyone listening right now. I pray for peace that passes understanding to guard hearts and minds in Jesus name. We take authority over the spirit of fear and anxiety in Jesus’ name. And we just say, be silent.
We take authority over darkness, witchcraft, deception, the things of the enemy, the snares he’s laying to try to trap us and deceive us and to pit us against one another in division. We just take authority over that in Jesus name.
And Lord, I pray for your kingdom to come, and your will to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Would you start with us? Would you start with me? Lord, would you examine my heart? Search me Lord, and try me, know my thoughts and Father, fill us a-fresh with your Spirit, give his eyes to see You, ears to hear Your voice. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Check out some of our favorite conversations from Season 3: Finding God’s Kindness, The Redemption of Family, God Loves Boundaries & What is Abuse?
Check out the Dwell Meditations
