In this episode Gina welcomes back Bruce Smith & Justin Hoeppner to have a conversation about the redefinition, redemption and restoration of family. We were made for relationship, first with God and then others, but all of those relationship become fractured, broken and distorted in this fallen world. Bruce and Justin share candidly how God brings about healing when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with God and each other.
Redefinition of Family
Gina:
So fun to have all of us in the same room! Bruce, you live in Oregon, and you come down once a quarter to hang out with us. Bruce is Justin’s mentor and mine. Justin was so kind to share him with me several years back as well as many others. There’s a lot of people that you walk with, but it’s fun to be in relationship together and to have seen what God’s doing in both your lives and how He is using you.
Bruce, you and I talked a bit about the podcast and just conversations and the people that you’re walking with. You walk with people all over the country and pastors and leaders, and a lot of different areas and a lot of different stages in their growth, their leadership in their ministry. You see themes, you see things that come up regularly, you see things that are common and you see a lot of redemption and healing.
One of the areas that you have talked a lot about is family. It’s the redefinition of family and the restoration of family. Justin and I have different stories, but similar brokenness in our history with our families. I can say for myself, part of when I came to the Lord was finding a place that I belonged. Jesus, and then the church became a substitute for my family and a place that was able to step into the gaps where my family wasn’t able to.
Everything from a couple that I met on a mission trip when I was 18, Terry and Robin Sartain, who became my first spiritual parents. There was a home fellowship in their house and I led worship there and just watching them and being in their presence was such a significant thing for me and brought so much healing and balance to my life in a lot of ways. I know Justin, you have a lot of stories of that too.
But in some of that, it’s easy to make those people a substitute for the Lord too, so there’s interesting balances in that. Justin, I’d love to hear your thoughts too, in wrestling through how to love your family, your biological family, your broken family, and all of the complications that’s there. How much do you engage and not? How do you have healthy boundaries?
Justin:
One of the important things to acknowledge, so this conversation hits more people than less, is that regardless of the background you came from, whether you find it as broken, or you define it as healthy, every single individual was separated from God due to sin. When they come to Jesus, they’re born into something, born again into something that is defined by these words: spiritual family.
In some way, shape or form it’s at that point that you realize, that what you grew up around, reflects that relationship accurately that you have now with God or is congruent with that relationship that you now have with God. The conversations are much wider than just identifying through the lens of “My background was so heavy, broken and messed up.” Every person, regardless of their background, has to redefine.
Redefinition has to happen to everybody. Once they come to Christ, they have to redefine, even down to simple things. In Scripture, you see the reference to those who didn’t know each other, that now call each other brothers or sisters. That’s part of a redefinition because when you accepted Jesus and when I accepted Jesus, we now have a great Heavenly Father.
That great Heavenly Father, isn’t just my father, He’s your father, and that makes you my sister. That makes me your brother immediately. You see, there’s a redefinition of family that has to take place all the way around. I would argue that spiritual family does run deeper than blood family, but blood family is where most of us have been formed into who we are. There’s this dichotomy.
Gina:
So much of the healing and barriers to receiving God as The Father, come from our family of origin, not to necessarily place blame. We can get into that place of finger pointing and everything, but it’s more awareness so that we can step into a healthier understanding. It’s shedding the old so that we can receive fully what God has for us. As we mature, learning how to then go back and stand in that place with our family of origin and love them well and demonstrate the Kingdom and how we respond and how we act, how we react or not, in all those ways.
Previously, on this podcast, I interviewed Brian and Linda Sites who shared their story of being un-equally yoked for seven years. She knew Jesus, and he didn’t. Brian said something really powerful at some point where he said, “It felt like she was having an affair, but it wasn’t with another person. It was with church. It was with God.” Even in our finding this healing and renewal and this new definition of family, and suddenly a larger family, and a spiritual family, maybe a family that understands us and gets us and relates to us like no one else ever has.
How do you then not alienate your family of origin? How do you love them well in the middle of all that? While, if you come from a very broken place, like you and I do, being healthy with boundaries and not allowing yourself to be in a place of pain, if that makes sense?
Bruce:
It does. But there’s foundational elements to family. Life experience will alter how we look at those things, those elements that we don’t realize. We don’t get exposed to those, and we don’t understand the depth of those, until we get to the place of having our Heavenly Father showing us what family is and what family is not. Having Him showing us what it means to be a son or a daughter, and what it is not. What it means to be a father or a mother, what it is not.
If we’re able to, and when we are able to, be released from the earthly definitions to the heavenly definitions. What was shown in Scripture, what was shown by our time with our Heavenly Father, we’re able to then release and be able to provide that to all people. Whether it’s our biological family, it’s our friends, it’s those people that are within the church environment or outside, it’s all people.
When I mentor, I say to those people, “You’re now part of my family.” And by that, I mean that they’re in a place where I will treat them as sons or daughters or brothers or sisters in everything that I do, and the way that I approach and the investment of my time and my heart and the openness and all the elements of what it means to be family. When we stay in the earthly definition, we control.
Intimacy: The Foundation of Family
Bruce:
When we control, we hide, we think it’s safe, but we hide, to the extent that we don’t release control. Then we always have fragments of the earthly definition of allowing us to get into that place of intimacy. And intimacy is the foundation of family.
It’s the foundation of love and allowing yourself to be released. Allows you to fully realize the depth of love, therefore the depth of intimacy. Therefore, the depth of family that God has shown us and says, “I love you in this way. You are part of my family. I want you now to be a vessel to share that with others.”
Gina:
You brought up the word “intimacy”, which is such an interesting word right now. It’s been hijacked. There’s a lot of people that are very scared of that word, and have a very distorted understanding of what that means. If we’re going to receive fully what Jesus died for, that’s intimacy with Him. First of all, Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden, were naked, literally and figuratively before God, and walked with Him every morning, and they were exposed.
But they were content and they were safe and they felt loved and they were covered. As soon as the Fall happened, suddenly that exposure was a dangerous place. Suddenly they started to fear, and they started to doubt, doubt themselves, doubt God’s character. Humanity has been on this journey of fighting intimacy in general.
As believers, what does it look like to allow ourselves to be exposed first with God, The Father, Jesus and The Holy Spirit, then with ourselves? Allow ourselves to be exposed, allow ourselves to face the things that we see that we don’t like, that we do like, or allow God to show us how He sees us, then to be able to turn to each other, your spouse, your kids, your friends, your parents, and be able to have that level of trust and exposure in those relationships, in a healthy way.
Bruce:
The greatest, and the purest example of intimacy is exactly what you said, and ultimately, can we achieve that? No, we cannot. But we have the example, and we have the foundation that we can build as close to that perfect intimacy that we’ve been shown. If we control, if we allow things to be held and hidden, then ultimately those will manifest themselves into lies, into raw emotions that are negative, that will block our ability to ever enter into intimacy at the level that is needed for true love and true definition of family to be realized.
It’s the belief in, and it’s the releasing of those things. It’s in this difficult walk that we have to allow our hearts to be open to the place that allows truth and the joy of emotional intimacy, to release all aspects of our lives. It’s a scary place.
Gina:
It is a scary place. I would love to hear this on a personal level, whether it’s just personal experience or with people that you have poured into, either of you.
How do we see this distortion and lack of understanding of intimacy? How do we see that? How do we see that ripping things off? What’s been your personal experience? What have you seen other people experience?
Justin:
Something that’s really important in the process is recognizing that, like I said earlier, that all of us have to go through a redefinition of family. It’s as the Scripture says that the Spirit drew you to The Father.
And there was a moment where you had this, “woe is me”, where all of a sudden the light of who Jesus is, is shown on you in the darkness of where you were in your separation from God. In that moment, through God exposing the darkness in you and through the exposure to His love and the process of it, you were willing to confess with your mouth and believe in your heart and turn from those things towards Him.
Not just turn away from those things, but turn towards Him. Now you’re partnered in this relationship with Him that came through Jesus, but now you have a Father. That came through exposure, through being exposed and being intimately sought and touched by God, The Father on the heart and soul level. At what point do we in our journey believe that our spiritual growth should not happen like that anymore?
A lot of our salvation story, for all of us, and whatever our conversion experience entailed for all of us, it entailed this: “I was found, and I was found out, that I was separate from Him. Then I found out that I was separate from Him, and I turned to Him through being exposed by truth and relationship with Him – that brought me into intimate connection with Him.” Now I’m told to boldly come into that. I’m told to run to Him, through Jesus. That’s the connection I have.
The question for me is “How willing are we to continue the process in our spiritual growth of the exposure process?” I would just say it comes down to those two words “to know” and “be known.” That’s what intimacy is, know and be known. It started in your relationship with God The Father, when the Spirit drew you and you recognize “Woe is me. I’m known, I am a ruin.”
Isaiah, in Isaiah 6, when he saw the Lord, his response to being exposed to that picture of heaven, and the person of God was “Woe is me.” I think that was the beginning of intimacy where he then said, “I’m known. And I know what I am known for before this God, but I’m here, and I’m a man of unclean lips.” And we all have that experience.
I don’t want to get stuck in the Isaiah narrative too much, but I think where we get lost in our spiritual journey, is that we forget that the way we bought into the family was through being known by God, and now we sought to know Him out of that. We don’t actively expose ourselves to one another so that we can be known to others because of fear and darkness and shame in those things.
Because of that, are we truly being known? Are we leaning into the people of God? Are we leaning into my brothers and sisters, as well as God, so that we can grow? The degree to which we do those things, I believe, is connected to the degree to which we grow. The degree to which we don’t connect with the Father to be exposed and seen by Him fully, and put our hearts before Him, and before others, limits the potential of our growth. It all comes down to know and be known in intimacy, because that’s how it all started.
Gina:
How did that play out in your life? Would you be up for sharing a little bit about that process?
Justin:
I was coming off the back of a pretty radical moment of almost losing my son, that triggered a lot in me that I was not able to define. As a result of that, it was crippling me and a lot of my relationships that God had surrounded me with for my good.
I was resisting those relationships because I didn’t want to have “too many chefs in the kitchen” while I was processing something new. I was protecting myself, and by protecting myself, I was resisting the things that God had surrounded me with. To finally tilt the scales, God sent someone of incredible significance into my life, so that the scales could be tipped for me to recognize, “I’m just trying to keep myself from having too many people working on what God’s trying to cook inside of me.”
I was keeping people at bay, and once I found that, I saw it bright as day, and for whatever reason, God’s always had me turn quickly when I’ve seen something. That was my relationship with Bruce, that God used as a crowbar to open me up the rest of the way.
Little did I know that we were going through the process, but God was using me as a mirror for him to rediscover who he was as a spiritual leader, in so many ways, things he had always done in corporate world for everybody. I think he was starting to find out, “Oh my gosh, these aren’t just like mentoring people in the office. This is connected to something much greater.”
Bruce got to see, and I got to see, the blessing just pour out in my life and in his life, through us being in moment by moment intimacy with the Father through everything we were processing together. That was a massive piece of my development. It came through just another level of intimacy.
Bruce:
But it took Justin a while to trust and to feel safe. And that’s a thing that God has given me as a gift, that when he brings people alongside me, that he releases their hearts to trust and to feel safe and knowing that the Father is there and loving them. It’s a safe place to disclose. As Justin said, disclosure and declaration is so critical. You need to speak the words. You need to hear yourself speak the words, or you need to write them down and you need to declare them to someone, because you can’t be released until there’s declaration.
Declaration isn’t just, “I declare that this is what has happened in the past or how my family was defined or what took place.” Declaration needs to be releasing that space and filling it with God and His love. It’s a process of releasing control, once you release control, you allow God to fill that space, and that’s where you do redefinition.
Gina:
Can you share an example of that? Some of this feels deep in the philosophical world, but could you share a story? A circumstance where you either walked with someone or you yourself walked through something where you saw this played out, that door was closed and then that safety and that trust was built and then that brought about that declaration and that release?
Bruce:
It happens every time. God is always there in orchestrating that, but a great e xample is that most people will come and say, “I really need this.”
They’ll say, “What’s the process and all?” All I will say is, “God will show up and He’ll show us what you need, and He’ll show you how to release yourself, to be able to share, declare, and move forward.” An individual will connect and they will say they need these things. Let’s say, I need to move my career forward or I need something and God will put them in a place where they’re able to go back through layers and layers of things that have happened in their lives that they’ve not declared anybody else, they’ve not shared, or they didn’t see them or don’t remember what took place, and God unpacks those things.
He unpacks those layers of things that have been accumulating on the identity of these individuals. Therefore, they have been steering in both the direction of their lives, as well as their ability to be intimate in its true form. Once those layers are eliminated, one by one, as Justin said, once the light of God shines on the darkness, and each layer comes off, then we’re able to say, “My heart has been molded this way because of my relationships have been defined by this.”
It took place with God’s forgiveness and His loving heart. Those things become lies, they don’t become part of your identity. They peel off in what you hold as a definition of love and relationship and family. It puts people in a place of being able to intimately say, first, “This is my relationship with God. This is who He is. This is who I am. I love who I am. I love who God has created me to be.”
If intimacy is the foundation of love, and love is the foundation of family, and family is the foundation of relationship, then you start building these blocks and it allows people to do that redefinition. It’s a redefinition by how God shows us what it means to be intimate, what love really means, what family really means. It happens a hundred percent of the time. I’ve never seen where God has not done that, but it’s that opening.
With Justin, he had so many things in his life that had him and he’d been blessed by having a lot of people around him that had walked with him for a period of time. But there was inherent fear of fully opening up and trusting. The blessing that we were given was that the journey, for us to be in that place of safety, that place of trusting, that place of sharing, was very short.
Then we started looking into his journal to which were expressions of what was going through his heart, that he was capturing in words and pictures and things like that. With God we started breaking them down, and declaring them to either be “This is what God is trying to show you” or “This is a lie, and it’s a lie that’s no longer going to have control over you.” “This is who you are, Justin. This is what you’re supposed to be doing. This is how God designed you.”
We went through one or two years where Justin would bring his journal and we would sit down and we would talk through what God was showing with this. We would knock down the lies and we would lift up the truths. When we would lift up the truth and knock down the lies, Justin got a clearer and clearer vision and understanding, and love of the unique and incredible creation that God had in him, and to show him what was possible, and what God had in front of him.
That released him to realize the greatness and the breath of being a son first, and then being a father, which released him to understand the incredible greatness of genuine family. That released him to go beyond biological, to be able to really bring in, in the most genuine way, not controlling any aspect, all the people around him to be part of his family. That was a real breakthrough that was inside of him, but it was behind so many walls.
I remember we’d say we knocked down a wall and I loved the visual he gave. Justin said, “You can look at a negative and you can see the image, and then you put another negative on it and you can kind of see the image, or maybe you see two images. By the time you put 10 images on top off of each other, it’s dark and you can’t see any of those images and you can’t understand them.” We really peeled off one of those negatives. We looked at the image and we said, “This is what God is showing.”
That’s intimacy. It’s opening your heart to allow God to show you the truth with no control. Releasing belief and knowing that it’s true about who God has created. I’ve just seen him blossom. I’ve seen it blossom his wonderful relationship he already had, with love that he had with his wife and his kids. You can see it in his sons. You can see him as a blossomed father and as a husband and as a friend. It’s just beautiful. That’s intimacy.
Justin:
Looking back it’s crazy when you say things like “We started looking at Justin’s journals.” A little context, I started journaling when I was 13 years old. Every day about everything. I still have almost all of them in my possession. For so many years, it was a place where I went to hammer out my identity, so I could understand myself. And over the years, God broke through that picture, and I was understanding God and myself.
Then I thought that’s all I ever needed is that I could just walk alone as a warrior, just me and God, look how strong I am, world. I need nobody else and nothing else, and no one needs to break into this thing. Then God sent me someone that asked questions of me in a really powerful way. Through Bruce, here I was sharing those journals with him, totally unashamed, because it was just me and God. And I didn’t realize that I was welcoming someone from this world to the table of my process.
God was gradually revealing Himself, pursuing me from when I was 13. I was getting to know myself when I was 13 to 19, I was getting to know the Father from 19 until 27 years old, 28 years old. I was getting to know, not just myself and The Father, but I was getting to know who I was through someone else in the body of Christ. They were helping me peel back more layers. Nobody’s any different than that. We’re all the same. We all wrestle with all of those things. There was a power in the long process to learn to receive.
Justin is the worship pastor of New Community Church in Vista, CA
Check the rest of this conversation From Fear to Family
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