E14 A Thousand Little Things: Jen’s Story of Freedom, Identity and Purpose

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Jennifer Cudmore (00:58)
Hey there, welcome back. It’s Jennifer again. I wanted to share a little bit more of my story and how God has changed my life, specifically around freedom, identity, and purpose, which is the focus of the podcast. So I’ve shared so many bits and pieces here and there, but I wanted to sit down and sort of map out what the journey looked like for me. And I hadn’t…

gotten around to doing that and so finally I spent some time working on that and it’s hard sometimes to pick and choose like what bits of your story fit into what section and how to kind of make it all flow together ⁓ because I didn’t have any like major crisis or traumatic event that I had to overcome like a lot of people I mean I was just at a women’s event the other night and this poor woman had

battled three years of cancer. And I just thought, you know, that’s not what my story looks like. My story is just normal, ordinary, everyday life and how a thousand little things ⁓ had put me in a place of a small, safe life where I was stuck in self-sabotage, where I lived under tons of lies, labels and limitations, but it felt normal to me. So I didn’t recognize it. And so I think

That’s where a lot of women fall is just ordinary day to day life. And so because there’s no big traumatic event or some sort of dramatic story, we don’t always recognize that there are things holding us back, that there are hindrances, that we’ve got blind spots because everything just feels normal. So I wanted to just share some of what I went through and how God began to develop awareness in me.

in all these small areas that were lumping together into this giant mess of keeping me stuck and holding me back. And so little by little, as I began to work through all those things, my quality of life began to get better. so let me just share some of who Jen is and what I’ve gone through. Life for me, I loved my childhood. My parents,

built a little cabin in the woods when I was five or six years old. And so we lived out in this place ⁓ kind of by ourselves where I could just run around free in the woods and I loved it. Me and my siblings would play outside a lot.

It wasn’t until I was probably in my late 20s that I began to recognize that my life wasn’t quite as perfect in childhood as I thought it was. As a child, you ⁓ try to make the most of your situation and your brain tries to ⁓ process what’s happening and frame it for you. As ⁓ a kid, you just do the best you can. Again, nothing really bad happened to me. ⁓ I thought I was having a pretty decent life.

growing up in the woods, was simple and I liked it. But there were some challenges in that we didn’t have electricity, so no phone, no TV. I didn’t even know what a mall was until I was 12, honestly, which is kind of odd. ⁓ I liked my small, simple life. We enjoyed it. My dad had a garden for several years. We had pets and… ⁓

Occasionally just some different wild animals like deer and so we I just really enjoyed growing up that way And honestly, I don’t know that I really noticed that we were very poor we kind of ⁓ lived in a lower-class Situation, I guess you could call it but my needs were met, you know, I always had food always had clothes so

⁓ It worked for me. It never really bothered me that much. ⁓ But there were obvious clues that I didn’t pick up on. For example, I was always the last person picked for the team. know, when we’re talking like playing in P.E., ⁓ I wasn’t well liked, but I didn’t necessarily

recognize it wasn’t super forefront in my mind. was like, yeah, it’s kind of a bummer that I’m always the last person picked, but whatever, and I would kind go on with life. So ⁓ you grow up, I went on to college, I got married, I had kids. I really thought I just had a normal life. I thought my life was fine, but I did recognize kind of in the back of my mind that life wasn’t

quite what I wanted, but then I didn’t actually know what I wanted. I didn’t really have a sense of purpose. I didn’t have really a full understanding of my identity or my gifts or any of that, which I think is common for most people up into their 20s. ⁓ And another thing, too, like

I didn’t have very many friends and I didn’t think that was a big deal. In high school, I had this really amazing best friend named Rachel and we would pal around together a lot. But other than that, I mean, I had a couple friends through our church group. ⁓ Our student ministry was super small, I think.

We averaged about five kids and half of it was my family. it was ⁓ just, I just lived a small life. I didn’t have a lot of friends. My world kind of revolved around my family and that was fine. ⁓ But I didn’t recognize or I didn’t learn how to go after more in life and I didn’t really understand the value of ⁓ learning who I was.

Let’s see, I’m getting off my notes here. Let me go back. What was I going to tell you about? ⁓ All right, so I did all the right things. I was a good little Christian girl. I had gotten baptized when I was five, and so I knew all the things from growing up in church, how to be a good little girl. And that was my focus. Really, my purpose in life up into my 20s was just how can I be a good person? How can I be a good Christian? How can I be a good wife and mom? So I worked hard at…

my job, I showed up at church and served where I was supposed to, those kinds of things. But really in the back of my mind, I always knew that something was off, something was that I was missing something. I could never quite put my finger on it. And I thought, you know, I’ll just eventually get there. I’ll just keep doing all the right things and it’ll fall together. But that’s not how it works. We just assume that

things are gonna just fall into place and it doesn’t work that way. We actually have to put the effort into making things happen, but I didn’t understand that at the time. So small life, safe life, no risk, no adventure and very little ⁓ sense of purpose. So even though I served in church, it was more of an obligation. This is what good Christians do. I have to serve somewhere, but.

Other than that, I really wasn’t making a difference in the world. ⁓ Obviously, with putting effort into trying to raise my kids well, I knew that was important. But other than that, what else is there? And so I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know where I was going. And I didn’t have a tribe that was sort of cheering me on or calling me out or saying, hey, you’ve got potential here or gifts here. Let’s start utilizing it. Basically, I feel like I just existed. I would just wake up every day, put one foot in front of the other.

⁓ I just was letting life happen to me. I wasn’t intentionally doing anything. I just took what came. So where do I start as far as when did God kind of get my attention and say, let’s work through some things. I don’t know that I can fully establish a start time. What I will say is that ⁓ I remember this ⁓ kind of getting into writing and I had published a couple

historical novels, that process did not go the way I wanted it to. And so I was feeling a little bit discouraged and a little bit like a failure. And so at the time, my agent ⁓ suggested to me a book by one of his other clients. And I don’t remember the name of the book. I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t keep it and I don’t know where it is. I’m sure I loaned it to somebody. But all I remember about it was that this woman had gone through a really

difficult time and the Lord just basically showed her about identity and purpose. And so I actually just read it out of obligation because I was trying to be helpful to my agent and support his other clients. But I couldn’t actually relate because her story was about being a single mom and living in a pastor’s family, which neither of which was what my life looked like. So.

I kind of just breeze through it, but I will say the one thing that stood out to me was the concept that ⁓ because she had so much, what is it, like garbage weighing on her and she didn’t know her identity and purpose, God led her to read the scripture of Psalm 139 every single day for a year. And I remember looking at that going, okay, that’s kind of weird. But at the same time, I’m like,

interesting that that would be a good tactic to use because after a year’s time her life totally changed. And so thinking to myself how, how, why is it possible that it would take you a year to fully understand a specific chapter in the Bible? But now in my maturity and I’m a little more, I think I’m a little more wise now. I definitely recognize that.

⁓ meditating on scripture, sitting in a scripture, a verse, a chapter or whatever for a long period of time is extremely beneficial. ⁓ I recognize now how valuable that was for her and could be potentially for me. But here’s the thing. I already thought I knew who I was in Christ. I thought I knew what it meant to be a wife, a mom, a Christian, all the things, but I actually didn’t. And that’s what’s so interesting is we

We tend to think that we know all the things, but we actually don’t know as much as we think that we do. And we have to be willing to accept that there are some things in us that need to be addressed. So, and it wasn’t that I thought I had it all together. It was that I just didn’t, because I grew up in the church, I was always at church. It felt like I knew all the right things to do. So.

I really couldn’t have said at that point in my life, what are my gifts? What are my talents? I mean, I probably could have came up with something. Well, I’m good at this. I’m good at that. Like I’m a pretty good Sunday school teacher. I can carry a tune. So I’m a decent singer. Like I can even do a little bit of harmony, those kinds of things. But that’s not who I was. And so I didn’t understand that there were some things I was missing about gifts and talents and identity and purpose.

Then just like what tends to happen, ⁓ crisis enters our life. And so we’re sort of forced into this situation where we have to choose to make some changes or we’re just going to keep going downhill in a major way. And so what that looked like for me was my marriage ⁓ began to fall apart. And it actually began with me because I would reach this place where I was like, you know what? I’m actually not happy here.

Like this is not the life that I thought that I wanted. You I love being a mom and I love being a wife, but this isn’t working the way I wanted. ⁓ so I really sat in that for a couple of months of why am I not happy? What isn’t working? What’s the issue? And so when I had a few discussions with my husband, it just got worse. Cause of course I came across as if I was blaming him. And at the time I mostly did believe it was his fault. So that’s totally on me.

But essentially we worked through those things. had to go to a counselor. And what I, what was interesting is that he, the counselor focused a lot on each of our own internal struggles, less on us together as a couple and more of us individually and some different things. So baggage, if you will, that we were bringing to the table that was creating a lot of conflict in our marriage, a lot of wrong expectations.

So the counselor began to challenge me in a lot of areas around shame, feeling inadequate or like low self-esteem. ⁓ One thing that came out of that is he challenged my lack of eye contact. So here I am in my thirties. I had never in my life noticed the fact that I have a tendency to shy away from eye contact and how that is a ⁓

measure of how confident you are in yourself or how much you understand yourself and I was shocked at some of these things that were coming out and recognizing, there I really don’t like myself and why have I not noticed this before, you know, and I don’t want to be this person anymore. I want to be confident. I want to own my identity and purpose and so ⁓

I began to sort of just pull back and with some of his suggestions and since the different resources and books that he gave me, I began to really kind of dig deep and take some look, take a look at some different things. You know, I had read a lot of parenting books, so I felt like I was doing a decent job at being a mom. But if I really pulled back the curtain and looked inside myself, there was still a lot of doubt around, am I doing this right? Are my kids going to turn out well?

I had, like I said, published a couple historical novels, but I didn’t sell very many. And so there was a lot of shame around that feeling like a failure and like it must be my fault. What did I do wrong? ⁓ I thought I was a decent employee because I worked really hard. I was never late. But ⁓ the painful truth really was that I recognized

I am not really, I’m not important to anybody except maybe my family, obviously my kids and my husband, but I didn’t have anybody that was ⁓ really what a true best friend ⁓ by the true definition would look like. And I would rely on my husband, especially for validation. I expected him to meet my needs of feeling worthy.

And if he didn’t behave in certain ways or do certain things, then he wasn’t being a good husband and making me feel good about myself. And that’s not his job. It wasn’t his job to make me feel good about myself. And so I was really ⁓ recognizing that I was kind of in this conundrum of I had a lot of wrong perspectives. I had a ⁓ negative outlook in a lot of areas. And ⁓ I was using like performance and doing really well at certain things.

to assign value to myself. So ⁓ as I began to work through these things and my trying to figure out how to fix our marriage when this was a really long nine months of fighting to figure out how on earth do we move forward and is my husband even gonna stay, right? ⁓ So thankfully we worked it out but I tried really hard to focus on myself and that’s when I was introduced to the concept of inner healing through my friend and mentor at work.

Her name is Joanne and she had gone to an inner healing retreat and she began to teach me a lot of what she learned about addressing heart wounds. And I did not know that I had ⁓ so much baggage. Again, I already said that, but ⁓ she began to teach me more about the spirit realm and being open to learning different ways that God can speak to us, such as through dreams and visions. ⁓

I began to really understand that God doesn’t like it when we’re mistreated. He wants to heal our wounds, but we actually have to be willing to face them and we have to do the work to get the healing and ⁓ work through them. So I read a couple books on healing the heart and I remember, so I began to work through some things that came up and I remember one night I set aside time, I was alone in the house and I was like, okay, God has brought up several, I think there were five painful memories ⁓ and he,

I knew he wanted me to address them and talk them out with him. And I was like, this really sucks. I just do not want to do this. And I was procrastinating for a long time. And finally I was like, I’m alone in the house. I have no excuse. I have to do this. And so I remember turning on the fireplace. I grabbed a paper and a pen. I wrote them out and it was so hard to even just write out one sentence about what happened. And I think I cried for at least an hour just praying through each of those different, ⁓

difficult situations and ⁓ just letting God ⁓ minister to my heart and just really facing the fact that these were super painful and that I had been mistreated and those situations were hurtful. And then once I finally felt like I had worked through whatever it is the Lord wanted me to work through, then I put the paper in the fire. And I will tell you what, I was pretty exhausted when I went to bed, but after that day, I felt such relief.

I felt so much lighter and I thought, okay, this is actually worth it. If I can make myself face these things that are extremely painful and difficult to look at and admit out loud, I can really find some freedom here. And for me, these were memories where I didn’t, they bothered me, but I didn’t recognize the depth of the hurt and the pain that I carried because of them.

And honestly, can’t, I don’t know that I can really remember what they were right now. I’d have to go dig into my old journals and see if I wrote that down. But I just remember they were super painful memories about some different ways that I had been mistreated. again, because they weren’t like necessarily dramatic, ⁓ like crises or ⁓ like I was never assaulted or abused or anything like that. So when I think of getting healing and needing counseling,

I would always think of people who would have these really terrible things happen to them. And because I hadn’t had anything super terrible happen to me, I didn’t need help. I didn’t need counseling. Right. But what I now understand is that all these thousand little things that we endure through our lives add up to a major problem and skew our perspective on life. And so this was just one of the ways where God was like, OK, let’s start dealing with this. Let’s look at that. Let’s get healing from this. You need to admit you had

painful situation here and so that’s what it began to look like for me. So I would say honestly the single most impactful thing about my growth, my healing, my freedom, the most important factor was developing intimacy with God. Because I grew up in church I thought I knew who he was, I thought I knew all the things, but I didn’t ⁓ realize

that it’s possible to get even closer than what I had done over the past 20 years of my life. And so he began to teach me more about who he was, what his names mean, and all of his different character traits, his attributes. ⁓ And he began to teach me who I am. And he started by telling me that I’m an intercessor.

And of course, I didn’t know what that meant. And so I had to kind of dig into that. What does it mean to be an intercessor? And so that was a journey of several years of him teaching me how to pray differently and learning to tap into his heart and learning how to pray what’s on his heart and not just my own ideas, opinions, that was where it started. But then he began to show me other things about myself and about who I am.

So I finally began to feel like I had a bigger purpose. I began to realize I am somebody special. do have, you know, like that scripture says in Jeremiah, it’s escaping me at the moment, but it talks about how God gives us all a hope and a future. He has good plans for us. And while I knew that, I didn’t actually see what that was supposed to look like in my life. And so now I was beginning to see, ⁓ here is my purpose. This is what God wants for me. He wants me to.

to pray over all kinds of situations, not just my family, because pretty much up to that point in my life, the only thing I ever prayed about was getting what I wanted or praying for my family. And so he really expanded my thinking about what it means to be a prayer warrior and what it means to be an intercessor. And so ⁓ that was one piece of my identity ⁓ that he began to really hone into me and give me understanding around. So.

Along with that, I began to develop some deep friendships. I was finally in a place where I recognized that I didn’t have any good, tight, ⁓ healthy relationships. so opportunities opened up for me. People began to see potential in me and call it out. Whereas before I just remained invisible. I really felt ⁓ unseen and like nobody was interested in getting to know me.

And what I didn’t realize is that I was actually kind of projecting that unintentionally, like the energy I was giving off is, ⁓ you don’t need to see me, you don’t need to talk to me, you don’t need to involve me, which ⁓ of course I didn’t do on purpose, but that’s what was coming out ⁓ based on who I thought I was. So anyhow, through all of this, began to ⁓ bring people into my life who saw potential and…

would start supporting me. I began to teach classes every year at the youth conference and I loved it. My first session, remember clearly it was called Beauty Boys and the Bible and my classroom was stuffed, just so full of young ladies. I was shocked. I had like 55 or something crammed in this classroom.

you know, people on the floor, just shoving them in corners. And I remember just feeling so fulfilled ⁓ and realizing not only am I a decent speaker, but I have a lot of things to offer. I have a lot of wisdom and knowledge and experience that I can share with people. And it was through that first class that someone approached me about blogging. And so that’s when… ⁓

I was asked to become part of Alaska Christian Women’s Ministry and become one of their bloggers, which eventually led to me becoming one of their prayer leaders. so it was like all these things began to open up for me because I began to understand who I am and what my giftings are. And it was just, I really felt like I was beginning to blossom. I was beginning to own, okay, this is what life is supposed to look like. This is where God wants me to go. Another piece of that being, I had a close friend named Christy who

had moved into management at a clinic where she was working and ⁓ she started talking to me about, why are you not pursuing management? You have all these leadership skills. You have all this potential. I really think you should consider moving into management at your job. And of course I was like, no, thank you, no, thank you, too much work and whatever. And I’ve already talked about that situation, but I would have never considered moving into management if I did not have this friend constantly pushing me to consider it.

And then when I took that to my husband, he was like all over it. So I had the both of them really pushing me. And so then when the opportunity came up at work and they said, Hey, you should apply. I was like, well, shoot, I guess I’m going to have to. So anyway, that’s how things began to sort of develop for me. Uh, so I’m going to end with this last story. Our heart issues, our negative mindsets affect our physiology. When we

have a lack of healing or when we are living in bondage, when we’re living under the weight of baggage and things that we haven’t dealt with, it affects us physically in different ways.

For years, four years, from the time I moved, you know, became a preteen until into my thirties, I had acne all over my face. It was also a bit on my chest and my back.

And I lived with that for decades. And it was very painful because, not painful like physically, but painful in that it made me feel inadequate and it made me feel like I, what’s the right word here? Like I wasn’t good enough. Like I didn’t measure up because I had this issue. There must be something wrong with me. Okay. Well, all that to say over the span of a year from when I started reading that book ⁓ where the woman,

talked about reading Psalm 139 every single day for a year. ⁓ For about a year or two after reading that book and beginning to delve into some ⁓ personal issues that I didn’t know needed addressing, I began to notice that my skin was clearing up and I thought, this is really interesting. I had stopped using any products at all. I had tried several different products to try to keep my skin clean. None of them worked. I’d even gone to the…

dermatologist and got on some medication for a couple years and I decided that wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to live on medication for the rest of my life. And so I really felt defeated. Like, okay, I guess this is just a problem I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I didn’t notice it at first, but over time I began to notice

Wow, I’m pleasantly surprised that my skin’s looking more and more clear these days. What am I doing differently? I couldn’t pinpoint what it was that I was doing differently to make my skin look different. And I remember one day looking in the mirror and just kind of marveling in a conversation with God and thinking, God, this is really cool. Look at my skin. I never thought that my skin would naturally be able to clear up like this. I thought I was always going to be having blemishes all over my face for the rest of my life. And he said to me,

that my skin was healing because I was finally beginning to understand my true identity and my true purpose that I was finally beginning to embrace who he says I am. And I’m even getting goosebumps right now saying that out loud because that moment will forever be etched in my mind of when we don’t know that we have this baggage, when we don’t know that we have this bondage.

There are so many ways that a thousand little things that we don’t deal with add up to a major problem in our life and can hold us back and create really ⁓ difficult situations. Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying anybody who has acne has self-esteem issues. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that’s how it looked for me. ⁓ you know, I don’t have perfect skin. You know, I still occasionally do get a pimple now and then. ⁓ Blemishes do.

show up. I’m not saying that for the last 10 years I’ve been free of blemishes, but what I’m saying is that we settle for so much. We settle for small safe life. We accept that things have to look a certain way and that because we didn’t have any of these really awful traumatic things happen to us, that this is just the way life is supposed to be and it’s not. And I am so passionate about being able to, I’m trying to not be embarrassed that I’m

⁓ crying a little bit, but you guys, there’s so much more. I guarantee you there’s some things that you’re missing out on because you just don’t know, you just don’t understand. And so I’m really hoping that through this podcast and through all the different things that I feel God is leading me to to build and to share. ⁓ He’s given me so many dreams and so many ideas of different ways I can use my healing and my growth experiences and my newfound freedom.

to help other women look at life differently and be able to say, you know what, change is possible. You know what, I don’t have to settle for this. I don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over, banging my head against the wall and not seeing change, not seeing good things happen in my life. Success and happiness do not have to elude me. I can do some things to create a better life for myself, but it has to be in partnership with God.

We have to let him point things out to us. We have to choose to deal with things and recognize and accept and understand that maybe we don’t understand who we are. Maybe there are some different things that needs to be dealt with to get healing and freedom. So I feel like I could talk forever and ever about this topic. There’s just so many little things that God has done for me where he’s healed me and given me freedom.

I’m going to keep talking about those every time I show up on the podcast. There’ll be something else that God has shown me another area where he’s given me freedom. So thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope that my story has been inspiring and I hope that I have given you some hope over your own situation because it is possible for you to have a better life, a better quality of life, to have more success, more happiness, more of that abundant life that God talks about in

in the scriptures. So please keep coming back every week as I try to share more and more about what God has taught me about freedom and healing, about identity and purpose. ⁓ I would love to be able to help you recognize areas where you can overcome and break free and become a better version of yourself. So let me wrap up there. Love you all. I’ll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye.