Season 1//Episode 1: My Story, Part 1
Hi friends, and welcome to the Fullness of Joy podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Mathisen. Here at the Fullness of Joy, we talk about hard things in light of the Gospel. We encourage our hearts by reminding ourselves of the truth, day in and day out. I pray this encourages your heart and that you’re challenged to know Christ more deeply as a result. I’m so glad you’re here.
Well friends, I wanted to start by sharing my story with you. Perhaps you are a family member or close friend listening to this — shoutout to my husband! Or maybe you’re someone who’s followed along on Instagram for a little while. However you got here, thank you for being here. I am so excited to be able to share with you all through podcasting.Over the last several years, the Lord has greatly blessed me through being mentored from afar by listening to several different podcasts. I have felt like I was sitting across from a close friend as I listened to various women talk about the Word and their experiences with wisdom and vulnerability, and it has truly challenged and encouraged my faith and helped me learn and grow. I wanted to offer that to you as well. Even though I am fairly young—I’m almost 35–God has given me many different experiences throughout my life that have offered me perspective and given me a deeper walk with Him than I would have had otherwise.
So let’s start from the beginning. Why would I want to create a podcast for women about the fullness of God’s joy? Well, I have always been seen as a joyful person, and many people regarded me as one who “lights up a room” or is bubbly and fun-loving, always ready for a good time. But there are some very hard things that I have walked through that have threatened to steal my joy. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
My parents were married in 1982, and I came along 6 years later. They walked through a few years of infertility and were so grateful that the Lord opened my mom’s womb after many many prayers. Both of them grew up in the church but didn’t necessarily know and understand the Gospel—it was more of a cultural Christianity situation for them both. My mom came to the Lord in 1983 and my dad followed suit a year later. That being said, I was in the church while in the womb. We were there when the doors were open—Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night.
My sister and I were both born in Nashville, TN. She is three years younger than me and it is just the two of us. Growing up, I loved church and loved learning about Jesus, and when I was six years old, my mom led me in the prayer of salvation. However, as a young girl, I was a pretty typical older child and very attached to rule-following (which was pretty much legalism) and believed that Christianity was all about what I didn’t do. I began to have a better understanding of the Gospel when I was finally in the “cool youth group” as a middle school student. This was the time when the importance of having a quiet time with Jesus was pounded into our heads. I remember being so excited to get my little trapper keeper like journal and writing down my notes from the Bible as I read each day.
The Word began to truly get into my heart, and as I read, I realized I actually really had a need for Jesus. I remember resonating so deeply with the apostle Paul when he said in Romans 7 “I do not do what I want to do, and what I don’t want to do, I do.” Now, I’ve alluded to some hard things as a child—when I was 5 years old, just about a month shy of my 6th birthday, we moved from Nashville to Indianapolis, IN. This was a huge shift for me as a social butterfly who loved school and our life in TN. Then after 3 years of living in the cold tundra of Indy, we moved back down south to the metro-Atlanta area. My parents had lived there as young marrieds before having us and moving to TN, so for them it felt like coming home.
But for me, I hated the change that I wasn’t in control of. I ended up doing just fine, but it was hard being the new girl. Then one summer when I was about 10 years old, I experienced a situation with sexual abuse. This caused a lot of shame and hiding in my life, and I didn’t feel safe to share this with anyone for nearly 5 or 6 more years.
School was a place I loved to be, even when I was the nerd or odd one out. I enjoyed being around people and looked for ways to help others. I definitely had some tough times and some rough days with bullies and people making fun of me for my appearance or my faith, but overall I enjoyed the school experience. The values of hard work and studying were very important to my family, and I usually did well in school. I will say that high school math and science just about did me in, but I made it through.
As a young girl, I could usually be found with my head in a book, writing a story, looking at magazines, or listening to music. I was very creative. However as I grew older, I also loved working with kids. All of my jobs were with children—I never worked retail or in a restaurant, even though I tried! When it came time to graduate high school, I applied to one school. I applied early and hoped that I would get in, but knew that I could come up with some other options if it didn’t work out. That school was the University of Georgia. I had visited Athens on a field trip for a desktop publishing competition in my sophomore year with the Future Business Leaders of America club and had this feeling that I was going to live there one day.
Turns out that feeling was from the Lord, and when I was accepted to UGA, I declared Early Childhood Education as my major. Now, attending UGA was a dream come true, but I was so naive and felt like a little fish in a big pond, even as an extrovert. Learning how to live on my own and without the safety net of home threw me for a loop. However, as I got involved on campus at the Baptist Collegiate Ministries, I was able to find my place and my people. Some of the people I met during this season are still some of my dearest friends today.
During high school I had made a pledge to the Lord not to date. It wasn’t like I was throwing all of the boys off of me; I didn’t have many suitors. But it was during the purity movement, and I also felt like if the point of dating was to eventually get married, what were the odds that I would find that person in high school? During this time, my philosophy on dating was heavily influenced by my thoughts about the future. I wondered if I began dating someone in high school whether or not that person would matter to me in 10 years. Would we even be friends? If marriage was my end goal, would dating in high school actually help me meet that goal? When I considered these questions, I realized that for most people, they don't meet their future spouse in high school. I believed high school to be a time when I needed to focus on my schoolwork so I could be accepted to the best college possible, so I made the decision to not date until I went to college. Now, when I say that I "made the decision," you have to understand that there were not a ton of propositions I was refusing, so it was not a huge sacrifice on my part at the time. But it was my way of saying to the Lord, "I'm Yours. This life isn't my own. I trust You with the results."
As I moved through the years at school, a lot of my friends were still single, but that number was beginning to decrease. My major was Early Childhood Education, so most of my classes during my junior and senior year were female dominated. In the South, some people call this degree an "M.R.S. degree," which means you're going to college just to have a degree on hand that you may or may not need — your Plan A is to get married! But how was I going to meet someone if I was always around girls? It became clear to me that my plan of marrying my college sweetheart was obviously not going to come to fruition.
When I graduated from UGA in May 2010, I was a bridesmaid in a wedding the following month, and I also had invitations to two others on the same day. At this point, the wedding fever had only just begun. I've lost count, but I'm sure I attended at least 20, maybe 30 weddings before my own. My dream was to get married after graduating, or at least be dating someone during my senior year who I would eventually marry. But there was no one knocking at my door or calling me on the phone who could have fulfilled these dreams.
After graduating from UGA in 2010, I went to live in Mexico for 2 years as a teacher to students whose parents were missionaries. When I was 15, I traveled to Mexico on a short term mission trip with my church. I had completely fallen in love with the people and the culture, and I knew I wanted to return. I wanted to come back and teach kids. That dream went to the back burner for several years, but when I was a senior at UGA, I was in a Bible study with my pastor’s wife. She is an incredible woman of God who spent years pouring into college girls in her home on Wednesday nights. During that time, we read the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan. As I read about people who were doing radical things for Christ, I realized that I had forgotten about the dream of that 15 year old girl. It was not just a sweet little dream but rather a God-given desire. I came home that Thanksgiving and crushed my parents hearts by telling them that I would not in fact be going to grad school but instead was going to live in Mexico.
The two years I spent in Mexico were formative for me in that I learned how to interact with various cultures, believers from different denominations and backgrounds, and also my Spanish finally went past conversational to fluent! I loved my time there and wouldn’t trade it. However, as I lived and worked there, I was the youngest on the field and was surrounded by families. I yearned for a spouse and the hope of having children of my own one day. This desire was only strengthened by the many families I saw there who lived and worked together for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I returned to the States in 2012, tired and ready for a fresh start. However it was quite the shock coming back to a place that was so different from the country I had come to know and love over the past two years. I remember going to the grocery store and being overwhelmed by the amount of choices I had! It was also hard for me to figure out how to make friends as a single twenty something. At this time, I moved back to Athens because I wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids who didn’t know Jesus. As I taught in Mexico, I was challenged by the amazing knowledge my kids had of the Bible as they grew up in Christian homes that were obviously very intentional with their at home discipleship. But I also thought about the kids in my student teaching class who didn’t know the Lord and were also living in not great situations. Who would share the hope of Christ with them? I got a job at the school where I student taught and was to teach third grade.
At this time, I was attending the church I had attended while in college, and I was meeting some new people but having a hard time breaking through to have good new relationships. I missed my friends in Mexico and I also missed the way things had been when I was in college. However, as time went on, I was able to make new friends and settled into a routine.
After being a bridesmaid many times and continuing to pray through my singleness, I took a step back and realized I had some false beliefs. I said that I believed in my omnipotent God to provide, but I was unwilling to do much or take many risks that would allow Him to show up in an unexpected way. I had a thought in the back of my mind that said I should try online dating, because by this point I had a few friends who had successful experiences with it. But I just wasn't ready. However, in the spring of 2014, I read a book entitled How to Get a Date Worth Keeping: Be Dating in Six Months or Your Money Back. I stumbled upon it one night on Amazon and was admittedly embarrassed to buy it. I mean, the title was soooo cheesy. But the authors were the same men who wrote the Boundaries books, so I figured I would give it a fair shot.
In May 2014, I celebrated my 26th birthday. I had a running joke with some of my friends that if I did not marry by 25, I would join eHarmony. Well friends, year 25 came and went with no real prospects. I went on a couple dates, but nothing ever came of those, and it just wasn't quite right. So in June, I decided to put on my big girl panties and create a profile on eHarmony. I anxiously waited to see what would happen. Friends who have not tried online dating (which may be a small number of you with how popular it is now) please know — online dating is an interesting world. I had little to no experience when I signed up for eHarmony, and I was basically hoping that my $99 would be well invested. It was easy to get sucked into that world — I found myself checking my messages constantly and looking to see who viewed my profile. Within in a couple weeks, I ended up deleting the app from my phone in order to keep myself from going insane.
The summer of 2014 proved to be not at all what I expected. I traveled through most of the summer on mission trips and vacations. I had the privilege of traveling to Uganda on a mission trip with my church in May, which was incredible. For months and years prior, Uganda was on my heart. I didn't quite know why, but God kept placing stories from this country in my path, and I wanted to go and see it for myself. While in Uganda, I had the privilege of meeting some amazing men and women. We visited with and encouraged several different village churches and beheld faces full of the joy of the Lord. And it was good. So good. The journey to Uganda was so clearly marked by the Lord, and even though I knew I was supposed to go, I wasn't sure why I went.
On one of our last days in Gulu, the Lord gave me the opportunity to share with a group of women who called themselves the Daughters of Destiny. This group was comprised of adult women who were there to mentor and be mentored. As I sat and shared with these women what the Lord had given me to bring them that day — the importance of a woman of God knowing and understanding her identity in Christ — my heart literally burned within me. I knew that I had come to Uganda for that purpose. It was there that the Lord called me to women’s ministry. I didn’t know what it would look like, but I knew that was what He wanted me to do.
Just two months later in July, I was given the opportunity to go to Kenya. And when I say given, I mean it. This trip was completely unplanned, at least on my side of things. God knew exactly what He was doing, though. One of my dearest friends, Elissa, called me one day and said, "Do you want to go to Kenya with me in four days?" When Elissa called me that afternoon as I wandered aimlessly around Target, contemplating how I was going to pay for another international trip, she shared with me the one fact that made me say yes. Upon my return from Uganda, Elissa was one of the first people I connected with. We sat down to lunch at The Fickle Pickle, a fun local restaurant, and when I told her about my desire to return to Uganda, she told me all about her friend Jennifer, who is the founder and director of True Identity Ministries — a ministry dedicated to helping men and women find their identity in Christ. Jennifer has done several retreats in the United States and also in Kenya, and she, too was going on this trip and would host a day for women at a pastoral training center just outside of Nairobi. I knew I had to be a part of it. And because God is a God of unspeakable joy and incomprehensible fun, I said yes. He provided all the funds I needed, and I found myself getting myself ready to travel to Africa for the second time in the span of one summer.
The Lord and I had a lot to process through together that summer. In May I had said goodbye to my friends at the public school I taught at and I was on my way to my dream job at a private Christian school for the inner city kids of Athens. When I was in Kenya, the summer was beginning to wind down, and I was thinking about all that the fall might entail. I hoped my new surroundings at the school would afford me the chance to meet that man I had been waiting for.
My "tent buddy" or roommate for the week was Jennifer, the True Identity Ministries founder, and we hit it off. We were able to share with one another, and she shared her story with me. I remember her saying she had married in her late twenties and she probably could have waited even longer. I was appalled at the thought of a happily married woman saying that she would have extended her singleness. Wasn't marriage the best thing ever? Why would she ever want to go back to singleness?
As we walked through that week in Kenya, the Lord continued to show me over and over again just how much He loved me by sending me to Africa again in order to know Him more. I watched with delight as women's entire countenances changed after being a part of the True Identity one day conference. These women were set free when they learned of the Father's love, and nothing else mattered to them but His great grace. I wanted their ease of confidence in Christ, and when I returned home, God continued to help me know that He indeed is trustworthy.
SHOW NOTES:
Crazy Love by Francis Chan
How to Get a Date Worth Keeping
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