Episode Transcript
Hey, friends, welcome to the Life Renovation Podcast.
We're your hosts, Glendie Loranger and Elizabeth Morrison.
And together, we're breaking down the walls that divide us through meaningful conversations around faith, family and sexuality.
Today, we are just going to do a quick debrief on Joanna Hyatt's interview.
That was a power pack interview.
Yeah, if you haven't listened to that, you can hear from Joanna.
She is just amazing.
She's funny.
She's vulnerable.
In this episode, Glendie and I just kind of wanted to talk about what stuck out to us, what challenged us, just kind of give us a place to land after that.
So Glendie, what stuck out to you?
She covered so much.
I just loved Joanna in the first place.
She's a dear friend, such a dynamo.
Her energy to be in the room with her, feeding off of her energy and her passion.
Of course, what stuck out to me was the last thing she shared.
But I think it was the most memorable because I just have such a high value for God's Word, and I believe it's living inactive.
And when we were asking her, okay, what do we do with all this information about sexuality?
And she's quoted 2 Timothy 1 7.
She said, God didn't give us a spirit of fear, but a power and love and self-control.
We're going to unpack a little bit more of Joanna's interview, but we don't have to be afraid.
There's so much going on in the world, and there's so many ways that sex has been twisted and molded into something that God never designed it to be.
But we don't have to be fearful.
God's still on the throne.
He's still in control, and He gives us that spirit of love and power and sound mind.
And so that was mine.
I don't know.
What about you?
What stuck out to you, Elizabeth?
Her focus was the state of sexuality.
Sexuality.
Yes, which is not often what you'd hear about in a podcast, but we went there.
So I think what stuck out to me was the role that sexuality plays.
You know, she gave us that biblical view of sexuality and kind of took us through the Bible of how God created it.
She said something that was so funny.
She said, no one dies by not having sex.
It was so funny.
And it's OK.
And if you're out there and you think that you might, you won't.
Yeah, we promise.
Yeah, she compared it to water.
Like, we know when we need to drink water, right?
But no one dies from not having sex.
And so it's central to our identity.
That's why we feel like we have to go get it.
And what it did for me was to say, you're right.
Like, we feel like we're entitled to have sex.
If we can't get it from a person, you know, our spouse, we might go to someone else.
If we can't find the correct person to have it with, we go to the next person.
And if we can't find any person, we start looking at porn or we start fantasizing or we start reading about it.
And it's just this need that we feel like we are entitled to and we can't live without it.
And that's not true.
It's such a lie, isn't it?
Yeah, this whole idea that we've just centralized sexuality, yeah.
There were so many pieces and parts where she highlighted some of the lies that we're believing in our society about sexuality and when I hear stuff like that, I automatically go personal.
Like, what am I believing?
And so I know I'm just going to get a little vulnerable.
Sexuality for me was not a healthy or a happy thing.
I experienced and I've shared this in previous podcasts.
You can go back and listen to my story.
But having been traumatized sexually from the time I was two through my teen years by an extended family member and how that twisted sexuality.
And so for me, the lie was that my only value was in my body and what I had to offer any other person had to do with my body to the point that I couldn't have friendship with girls because I wouldn't go there and all my friends were guys.
And so I automatically went there because that's all I knew to do.
I know a lot of what she was sharing brought that up for me, that that was a lie that really fed my sexuality.
I don't know, you want to go there?
We're getting a little risky here.
We are, yeah, but that's okay.
That's why we're here, right?
It was really challenging to me when she talked about if people don't heal from things, they're just going to continue to be further broken by it.
Like it's just this narrative that continues.
And I think what it did for me personally, since you brought up what it did for you, is the question of I'll always be broken.
That's the lie.
I'll always be broken in this intimacy.
If you haven't heard my story, I grew up in the church, saved myself from marriage, was in a really, really unhealthy marriage, and intimately, it was terrible.
And so I am now divorced and living a single life.
And I'm still kind of healing from all of the trauma in the marriage.
It wasn't sexually abusive, but it just wasn't healthy.
It wasn't a healthy biblical view of marriage.
And as someone who grew up in the purity culture and kind of had this other lie that, oh, if you save yourself, it's just gonna be beautiful.
And it was so not beautiful.
It's like, God, what the heck?
Like, I protected this and I got here to this marriage and we were both Christians and we both loved you.
And it was still so broken and so much shame surrounding that.
So am I ever gonna heal from that even if I do get married again?
And how do I heal from that in my singleness when I don't have someone else to help me navigate sexuality?
You're still fleshing this out.
I am, yeah.
You're in the middle of this.
Yeah, so if you're wondering who the heck are Elizabeth and Glendie, go back, we've shared our stories pretty vulnerably in previous episodes.
And why are we even sharing the lies that we believe right now is really what we want to do is help you realize you're not alone and that there are avenues that you can heal.
And sometimes that takes longer than others.
But it's why we're bringing up these really awkward conversations around faith, family and sexuality and today's about sexuality.
So Elizabeth, thank you for sharing that and just the fact that you're kind of still in the middle of this.
I know I spent six years in counseling and prayer ministry really to heal from the trauma that I had.
And so you may be out there asking, maybe you identify more with Elizabeth or with me, like how the heck do I do I heal?
We just want to recommend, pray first and foremost.
If you know the Lord, pray and ask for His direction.
But we know that there's healthy life coaches out there who can help you find some next steps.
We recommend, I personally recommend after six years on the couch of therapy, counseling, a healthy Christian counselor, and then healing groups.
We know that there's healing groups across the country.
And we're looking forward to here at Life Services, bringing forward a healing group that will address sexual trauma.
And we'll be bringing that forward later on this year.
Wow, we kind of covered what challenged us.
Personally, Elizabeth, Joanna talked just a little bit about what she's doing in her profession.
I don't, had you ever heard about Life on Belay?
I hadn't, no.
You've heard of live action?
I've heard of live action, yeah.
Yeah, I love that she gave us a little, she used to work for live action.
Joanna had actually gone undercover for live action.
And one of the things that she was trying to do was expose late term abortion and infants born alive.
She was 26 weeks pregnant when she was doing that work.
So we'll link live action in the podcast.
She talked about just really how bold of an approach that they bring.
So live actions work is really educating people about the value of life.
And they do that through videos and content about life and about what happens in abortion.
And so they're pretty bold.
But Life on Belay, here's what I found.
Just copied off the website.
That's okay.
That's what it's there for.
This is this is my cliff notes for life on belay.
You can check it out.
They stand for authentic relationships.
Does that sound like that sounds like us?
Local leadership or a local ministry, thriving families, community initiatives and intentional growth.
And so a couple of the pieces that their work is focused on our housing for moms who experience an unplanned pregnancy and choose to carry their baby and they need housing, which I think is amazing.
We're sitting in the middle of life services, maternity home.
Yeah.
And then the second thing that they do is analyze the success metrics of pro life organizations, which as the gal who does all our metrics, I don't know how that strikes you.
It's awesome to know that there's more people out there that are doing what we're doing, that we're not alone in that.
Just encouraging to know that there's other people that have that same heart.
And I think what I really see is those wraparound services that we talk about here at life services.
It's not just about making sure that baby gets to the delivery room.
It's supporting the mother and the father and the baby through their life and giving them the resources and the tools and the empowerment to step into being a family so that they're set up for success.
That's what I see there.
Yeah, love that.
So go ahead and check out those resources.
We'll link those again.
Joanna Hyatt, just again, so much to say on the area of sexuality.
We talked about what struck us and what was challenging.
What encouraged you?
Yeah, I love her vulnerability and I love her point.
Kind of at the end, she talked about how we don't have to live in fear.
And you gave that verse at the beginning.
But God is good.
And when we can't find the good and what he's asking us to do, you know, as a single woman, I'm like, OK, Lord, like, what are we doing here?
What's my future looking like?
When I have those questions of like, God, why would you say that sex only has to be within marriage?
We can go looking for it in the Bible.
We can ask the Holy Spirit to like show us what God's intention of that is, because we know that, like Joanna said, he's not trying to limit us.
He's actually trying to give us freedom in that limitation.
Love to that point.
I know you grew up in the purity culture.
It wasn't anything that I ever experienced, but I could totally relate to her from the parental standpoint and her openness with talking about sex and that it was really sown into her from her mom early on.
And she was like, I don't want to talk about this.
And then it ends up being the thing that she talks about the most.
What did she say?
She said she was known as like the sex lady.
The sex lady.
When she would come on the campuses to talk and they'd be like, the sex lady is here.
And her husband's like, please, please, no.
So sorry, Andrew Hyatt.
We just had to share with the world how your wife is known.
I could really identify with with that.
That there's there's this spirit in me in overcoming my own trauma and working so hard to do that.
It actually sowed in me this this desire to pour into my voice that sex is a gift.
Yeah, yes, it has boundaries.
It has guardrails.
I love that she talked about guardrails versus boundaries, and it made me think of like bowling.
Yeah, they put up those.
I'm terrible at bowling.
Yeah, well, when our kids are little, they need the bumper rails, right?
That's what they're there for.
And so I love that we can portray that and that sex is beautiful.
The sex is something that God created and that we can celebrate from the time that they're little.
She talked about having her four girls and a little boy and just celebrating how God made their bodies and that that is actually setting up your kids for further conversations about their sexuality in really healthy, healthy ways.
Loved that piece.
Yeah, and like we said, in Joanna's podcast, we know that she covered a lot.
And so we are going to have episodes on purity culture.
We're going to have episodes on porn.
We're going to break some of these things down.
This state of sexuality is just to kind of give our listeners and everybody interested this 30,000 foot view of like where are we starting from, right, kind of a foundation.
Yeah.
Where are we starting from with sexuality so that we know what we can do with it as we try to live a biblically based life.
Okay, Glendie, so we've talked about kind of our challenges, what stuck out to us.
Land the plane, if you will.
Do you have a funny parenting story?
You have two boys.
Do you have a funny story about trying to teach them healthy sexuality?
I do.
So I talked about my counseling and all that.
Well, in that same period of time, I was leading Bible studies in our church and intimate issues, 21 Questions Christian Women Ask About Sex.
And so I was doing a ton of research just on healthy sexuality from a biblical worldview.
And I read this book by Pastor Jack Hayford, and he talked about being a pastor, having done premarital counseling for all of these couples over all these years.
And some saved themselves for marriage and some of them did not.
And so he had gone back to several, like several dozen of those couples and said, what was the turning point for you in which you went there and you ended up having sex?
And by and large, they all said it was when we started French kissing, when we really started getting heavy and making out.
He said, I have no scientific proof, but that was what those couples were saying.
So I'm reading this book and my son is about middle school age, and I just happened to share that with him.
Gosh, Reed, this is a really cool correlation that this pastor came up with.
And Reed's like, yeah, whatever, Mom.
But later on, I think he was like in eighth grade, and he's going out to a movie with a bunch of his friends, and I used to have just checking questions like, hey, dude, how's your boundaries today?
And so I said one of those as he's going out the door and he goes, Mom, I know French kissing leads to sex.
And I was like, oh, okay, we'll just, we're going to just let, we're going to roll with that one.
We'll correct that later.
Yeah, please tell me you corrected that.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
Yeah, when he was 22.
No, before that, she just called him before the podcast started.
Well, thanks for tuning in everyone for our debrief.
The state of sexuality we will be back on soon is our state of the family.
And so hope that you'll tune in for that podcast.
As always, we're just glad that you joined us.
We'll see you next time.
See you.
Bye.
Life Renovation is sponsored by Life Services Spokane in Spokane, Washington, the Christ centered organization offering professional medical care, truth and support to anyone impacted by unplanned pregnancy.
Life Services Spokane has been bringing hope to life since 1991.
Find out more at lifeservices.org.
That's lifeservices.org.