Ep 105: Have you met her yet?

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Have you met her yet? The real you, not the one that shows up capable and composed and ready for whatever the day has in store for you. Not the one who knows exactly what to say when she walks into a room, how to present herself. Not the one who has held it all together when the situations that have happened would have flattened anyone else.

No, the one underneath all of those. Have you met her? Because here’s what I’ve noticed after 25 years of coaching women who are faithful, capable, and deeply committed to God and the people that they love. Most of us know ourselves primarily through other people’s eyes, through what we do, how we show up.

We know who we are when we’re needed. We know who we are when we’re performing. We know who we are when we’re at our Sunday best. Heck, we even know who we are when the kids are on our last nerve, and when somebody has forgotten to take the trash to the curb for the third week in a row. Pew, right? But ask her what she really feels, not what she thinks she should feel, not what others think she should feel or saying she should feel.

What she really feels. Ask her what she wants, not what makes sense for the season, not what is practical, not what her family wants, or what’s even best for her family or business. Ask her what she believes about herself when no one else is looking. Oftentimes, she’ll go quiet. This episode is all about that quiet and what God wants to do inside that quiet space

Hey there. Welcome to Mom to Mom Mentoring. This podcast exists because I believe that Christian moms deserve more than inspiration that fades by Thursday. You deserve something that goes all the way down and stays there, real wisdom that meets you right in the middle of your actual life, not the highlight reel version of it.

Every week, we gather here for real conversation, soul-nourishing truth, and the kind of grace that doesn’t ask you to have it all together before you show up. Hey, I’m your host, Misty Hughes. I’m a ICF certified life coach. I’m a mentor, an international ministry leader. I’m founder of The Single Mom KC, and mom of four adult children that I have raised and launched, and we all made it out alive, which remains one of the greatest miracles of my life.

For over 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside of Christian women who are high capacity, deeply faithful, and quietly aching for something they can’t always name. I help these women move from overwhelm into peace, from performing their lives into actually living them. I do this through what I call the rhythm of life framework.

I don’t teach theory, [00:04:00] I equip women through the knowledge and wisdom that I have gleaned through what I’ve lived, And today, I’m going to share something that most of the personal of that… And today I’m gonna share some of the most personal parts of that story with you

before we go on, if you’re new here, or even if you’ve been here all along, I want to let you know that today’s episode is actually part three of a little series that we’ve been in together. I’ve been calling it The Known Series. I’ve not made a big announcement about it. It just kind of evolved or grew into this little series.

That’s usually the way things happen, and the best way to do things. Episode 103 was called Still Waiting? Give It 20 Years, Mama. It was about the gap between God’s calling on your life and the season that you’re actually in, about the dreams of your heart that feel like they’ve been lost somewhere, and you wonder, “Was that ever really God in the first place?”

You’ve wondered, “Have I missed you, God? Is there a reason for all the waiting?” Well, that episode is for you. Episode 104 was called The Woman Nobody Sees. It was about being surrounded by people who love you and still feeling profoundly unknown. We talked about the friendship audit, the difference between being known for, being known as, and being truly known, and what it means to be seen first by God,

If you missed either one of those, I’d love for you to go back and take a listen. The links are in the show notes. They’ll be waiting there for you. And today, we’re gonna dive deeper still, because there’s a question that neither of those episodes fully answered before we dive into today’s conversation, I wanna make sure you know about something that is completely free, and I think it will serve you beautifully alongside everything that we’ve been talking about in this short series.

It’s called My Rhythms of Renewal Mini Guide. It’s the first step into the rhythm of life framework, and it will help give you language for what you’ve been living, and you might not have had a name for it before. Language for the waiting, for the unknown, for the quiet ache of not quite knowing who you are underneath it all.

You can grab it for free at mistyhughes.com/resources. I’ll put the link for that in the show notes as well. It won’t take you long to get it and download, and it might open something up for you to discover about yourself. Okay. Are you ready? Let’s go.

I wanna tell you about the first time I really asked God to show me, me. I was pretty terrified about it. I was fairly new at this idea of hearing from God in a personal way, that He would actually speak to me, to Misty, not just the collective church or through a pastor or a verse in a devotional, that He spoke, and He spoke to me through pictures or images, sometimes color.

Things would [00:08:00] form in my mind’s eye, and I’d get a sense, um, a knowing of what He wanted me to understand, or they were invitations for me to begin to dialogue and get curious so that He could open up new spaces of my soul to speak to me and heal me. I learned through time to trust that, slowly, carefully, but I learned.

So one day, I asked Him to show me, me. I was terrified because what if what He showed me confirmed everything I thought about myself in the first place? What if the image He gave me was worse than what I already knew?

 what I saw, it wasn’t pretty at all. It was a burnt stub, It was charcoal and black, the kind of thing that’s left after everything else has burned away, fried, scorched, like something had once been alive there, and it had been through something so consuming, so dreadful, and that was all that remained.

But in that, I sensed, hmm, there’s still something alive in that scorched stump. Something in me knew life was still there. It was faint, but it was there. God spoke to my heart in that moment. It wasn’t words. It was more just a sense of knowing about His hope, His dream for me. He wasn’t showing me, “This is the verdict.

This is who you are.” He was revealing to me the project, His project. He was saying, “Misty, beloved, I see what you’ve been through. I see what is left. I see how you feel underneath all the facade, and I’m not done

a short time later, I found myself in Isaiah 61:3. “Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for a spirit of mourning, a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” It was like, “Oh, I get it, God.” It wasn’t a new idea, but it was more a recognition. I remembered. He’d already told me this. It was around 1996, ’97.

He’d shown me that in a picture. Through that charcoal stub, he’d already said, “I’m going to make something beautiful out of what’s left.” A few years later, life got harder before it got better. My husband left. Divorce came. The ashes became literal in a way I could have never anticipated in 1996. And in that season, alone, rebuilding, definitely not sure who I was anymore without the marriage that I had believed in, I began a long, deep study of the Song of Solomon.

And beloved, God kept meeting me there. He kept showing me the truth [00:12:00] of my own heart. Not to shame me, not to expose me to condemnation, but to speak kindly and tenderly and gently to me. Hosea 2:14 says it this way, “Therefore, I’m going to allure her. I will lead her into the wilderness and I will speak tenderly to her.”

I was in the wilderness of my very own soul. He was alluring me. and in that charred desert place, dry, despairing, and alone, He began to speak kindly to me, to show me what he saw

 take a moment and read through the pages of the Song of Solomon and just pretend that you’re the Shulamite and the king or the bridegroom, pretend that’s Jesus. Just read it from that perspective, and what you will find is not once, not in her divided heart, not in her compromise, not once does he speak any way to her but kindly and tenderly.

 in Song of Solomon 1:5, she declares, “I’m dark but lovely, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.” Dark. It doesn’t say, “I’m dark and unlovable.” Not lovely once the dark is cleaned up, but it’s both at once, dark and lovely. I learned that God wasn’t waiting for me to get myself cleaned up, to put on my Sunday best before He called me lovely.

 He looked at that charred stub of my identity, the ashes, the wounded, the, the broken, the bruised, the performing unknown woman that I was, and He called me lovely. He had a dream for what He was going to do with that me, and He wasn’t going to stop until He accomplished it, His plan for me.

You see, asking God to show me myself was probably one of the most terrifying prayers that I had ever prayed, and I still pray it today, because it became one of the most sacred, one of the most beautiful places to meet God. What He showed me was His invitation to become the beautiful me He created me to be

In the last episode, The Woman Nobody Sees, we ended with a invitation. I said, “Go let someone else see you.” It was an invitation to open up to others, to allow yourself to be seen by others. But here’s something I didn’t talk about. There is a prerequisite You can’t invite someone into that room of your heart if you’ve never entered there.

You can’t show someone a self that you’ve never met. real vulnerability, requires that you first know what you’re bringing to the table.

And the woman who’s been [00:16:00] performing her life for 20 years, and she doesn’t know herself, not because she’s shallow, not because she doesn’t care, but because she has been so busy trying to be what everyone else needs that she’s never stopped long enough to even ask who she really is.

The woman who knows that she’s needed, how she’s needed, when she’s needed. She knows who she is when she’s producing something worthy of admiration, but alone in the quiet with nothing to do and no one to be, she doesn’t really know what’s there. I’ve been her. I knew myself through other people’s eyes for such a long time.

I knew who I was on the stage. I knew who I was in the ministry. I knew who I was as a mom. I knew who I was as a leader, as the strong one. But ask me what I really wanted, what I actually felt when no one was asking me to be anything in particular, I’d get quiet. I’d get reflective. I’d turn inward because I didn’t have an answer.

Here’s a question. Perhaps you’ve never sat with this question, or maybe it’s been a while since you have. Ask, what is true of me right now when no one is watching and nothing is required?

Now, I want to push back ever so gently because I think there’s something that holds a lot of us back. There’s a belief. It’s quiet. You may not even know it’s there, but it’s persistent. It’s this belief that looking inward is self-indulgent, that spending time getting to know yourself is a luxury at best and vanity at worst, that a truly devoted Christian woman should be focused outward on God, on her family, on her calling, on serving, and that turning the lens inward to herself is somewhat less holy than turning it outward on everything else.

But here’s the kicker. The Psalms do not agree with that. David, the man after God’s own heart, didn’t just receive Psalm 139:1 as comfort. It was his prayer. He took what God said about knowing him, and he said,

Psalm 139:23 and 24 says, “Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” See, David asked God to show him himself, not so he could wallow in shame, not to perform self-examination for its own sake, but because he understood something important.

The path forward, the way to everlasting, runs through honest self-knowledge illuminated by God.

So the examined life is not self-absorption. It is stewardship of the soul that God knit together

 So the world’s way of self-assessment is as a performance review. What’s working? What’s not? How do I optimize? What do I need to fix? The holy way: self-knowledge as [00:20:00] collaboration. You and God together, looking at what He made and what life has done to His creation, and what He intends to do next.

 it’s a conversation.

 that’s the holy way of knowing yourself. Not you alone reflecting in a mirror, you and your maker looking together. So what does it actually look like to begin knowing yourself, not in a performance way, not in a review way, not in a self-help kind of way, in the holy collaboration way?

There’s three things I’d like to walk you through. One, solitude. Solitude is the space. It’s the container. You can’t hear yourself amidst all the noise. The woman who’s always busy, always needed, always producing, she never has to sit with herself long enough to find out who’s there. Silence is not emptiness.

It’s the space where the real self finally gets a word in edgewise. I have learned I’m kind of afraid of the quiet, and I’ve learned I desperately need the quiet. Both are true, because the quiet is where I meet parts of me that I’ve been trying to outrun. Start small, five minutes, 10 minutes. No phone, no podcast, no prayer list, no worship music, just you and God with the question, ” Father, search me.

 What’s actually here right now?”

The s- second step, feeling versus managing. You see, high-capacity women like you are masterful at managing emotions. We curate, we contextualize, we reframe. We’re really good at turning raw feelings into something useful or presentable, but management is not the same as knowing. There’s a difference between processing your emotions efficiently and actually allowing yourself to feel them.

The high-capacity woman, has learned to manage what she feels. If this is you, I would like to invite you to begin to learn about yourself. Notice the feeling. Sit with it. Instead of pushing it away, ask, “What is this feeling telling me that’s true about me right now?”

 and I do have a free resource. It’s called Notice, Name, Feel, and Free Your Feelings. you might just wanna use part of it. There’s a feelings wheel in there that can help you identify and name what you’re feeling as you sit with that question in that space of silence.

You’re not trying to figure out what you should do about it. You’re not trying to move through it quickly. You’re just trying to allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling And number three, the desert. It’s a gift. Hosea 2, “Therefore, I’m going to allure her. I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.”

That desert season, that space of silence that you’ve resisted or you’ve rushed [00:24:00] through, you’ve tried to escape, these are seasons that God uses to show you you. Not because He’s trying to be cruel, but because the noise finally stops, the roles fall off, and the things you usually hide behind get stripped back.

In the silence of the wilderness, you find what you’re actually made of. The charred stub was a desert image. My divorce was a desert season, and it was in the desert, in the Song of Solomon, in the silence, in the ashes, that I found out, girl, I was still alive, that God was speaking, and that He called me lovely.

Isaiah 35 says, “The desert will blossom profusely,” and that is what God intends to do in our hearts during these seasons. Beloved, don’t waste your wilderness. Don’t rush out of it. It might be exactly where you finally meet the woman that you’ve been too busy to know So I wanna bring these threads all together because they belong together.

Episode 103, we planted the image of the oak tree, Isaiah 61, “They will be called oaks of righteousness, We talked about how oaks take such a long time, and how the root system goes down deep before the tree grows up.

 the most important work is taking place underground, invisible, forming

Isaiah 61:3, “To bestow on them,” that would be you, “a crown of beauty instead of ashes,” that would be me, “the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. Then they will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor.” Oh, doesn’t that sound so exciting?

A crown of beauty instead of ashes, the charred stub, the burnt, not-quite-dead remains For a woman who had been through more than she knew how to name. God looked at that and He said, “Ah, I’m gonna make a mighty oak out of this.” Not despite the ashes, not once I got myself all cleaned up out of the ashes.

The ashes were the material. The dark is often where God does His best work, and that’s why Song of Solomon 1:5 is not just a comfort verse, it’s a theological statement about how God works I am dark and lovely

There is darkness. That’s real. Ashes. They’re real. Burnt places, wounded places, the parts that have been through things that left marks. Beloved, that’s real, and you are lovely. Not in spite of it, not once it’s all cleaned up and resolved, right now in the middle of it, with dark still dark, God says, “Hey, you are lovely.”

The same God who knit you together in your mother’s womb, He sees the stub. He sees the ashes. He sees everything you’ve tried to hide and everything you don’t even know about yourself yet, [00:28:00] and He calls you His, known, loved.

He calls you beautiful we’ve been on this journey together over these last few episodes.

And today, we asked the question, we stood in silence to look underneath it all. Have you met her yet, the woman God made? The one underneath the roles and the performance, the waiting, the giving, the serving? Oh, she’s not a project to be fixed. She’s not a mess to be managed. She is dark and lovely, and made of ashes, and being slowly, tenderly, faithfully grown into a mighty oak of righteousness.

She’s worth getting to know, and she is really already fully and completely known by the one who made her. So the one thing I want you to carry with you into the week, the thing that stays and goes deep, Ask God to show you yourself.

Not because what he shows you is easy to look at, but because he is making an invitation for you to become the beautiful woman of God that he’s created you to be. He wants to show you you because he has a dream for what he’s going to bring forth with what’s already there. He showed me that charred stub, and he saw an oak.

He showed me ashes, and he already had the crown in his hand for me. He’s not waiting for you to clean up the ashes. He’s already planning what to build from them. So this week, one thing, beloved, find that five or 10 minutes of silence, not to be productive, not to make a list or process something, just to sit and ask him the question, “God, what do you want to show me about me right now?”

Then wait. See what comes. It might be an image. It might be a word. It might be a feeling that you’ve been managing for months that finally gets the opportunity to breathe and to surface when you stop long enough to let it. Whatever it is, don’t run from it.

He’s not showing you to shame you. He’s showing you because he’s working on something, and You’re His most beloved prized possession. If you want a framework to help you start, a real practical first step into this kind of intentional God-aligned rhythm of self-knowledge and renewal, I’ve created the Rhythms of Renewal mini guide just for you.

It’s completely free, and it is the first step in this rhythm of life framework. It’s designed for the woman who’s ready to stop running and start listening to herself, but more to God, to the life that He’s been trying to give her. You can grab it at mistyhughes.com/resources. The link, it’s in the show notes.

Okay. I’d love to invite you to subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already. It’s the easiest way to make sure you don’t miss what’s coming. In the next few [00:32:00] episodes are some powerhouse mom mentors that I’ve had the privilege of sitting in the podcast space to interview and hear their story, and you’re gonna want to glean from the wisdom that they’ve gained over their years

And share this episode or the whole series with that one woman who has been performing her life for so long that she’s forgotten what’s underneath, the woman who’s still waiting, the woman that nobody sees, the woman that hasn’t met herself yet. You know who she is. Send it to her.

You don’t need a long message. Just say, “Hey, this is for you.”

You know how I always close if you’ve listened, and today I’m gonna do it a little different than I’ve done before. Isaiah 61 says that God bestows on you a crown of beauty instead of ashes, and that you will be called an oak of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor, for the display of His splendor. That’s what your shining is. It’s not performance. It’s not a platform. It’s not having yourself together. It’s the beauty that He made from the ashes, His light radiating through a life that He’s tended, that He’s growing, and that He calls lovely.

When you shine, when you let Him be seen in you and through you, you give every woman watching permission to believe that He can do the same thing with her ashes. When you shine, you give permission for others to shine, too. The beauty from your ashes is meant to shine, beloved, so don’t keep it in the dark.

I’m Misty Hughes. You’ve been listening to Mom To Mom Mentoring. Now, go shine.

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LINKS FOR PODCAST EPISODES IN THE KNOWN SERIES
🎙️ EP 103: Still Waiting? Give it 20 years, Mamma.
🎙️EP 104: The Woman Nobody Sees