Highlights from the Show:

• Mary talks about how growing up in a difficult environment made her wrestle with her question of what she was worth in light of her upbringing.
• Mary shares a little bit about her past. She was raised in a home that she would not want to duplicate later—which made her a very stressed out and anxious parent.
• I ask Mary what she things are some of the main unhealthy things that women tend to do to fill God shaped holes in their lives. Mary says that there are so many things we look for to fill us up and eventually we come to acknowledge that nothing and no one can fill us up except for Jesus. All the lies we run for are incomplete gods and will never ever, ever satisfy us.
• “It gets frustrating for people because they get mad at God for things that don’t satisfy them, but in actuality, they haven’t made that decision to first go to Him for their ultimate satisfaction.” —Mary DeMuth
• I bring up a line from Mary's book that she used to describe herself.  Scared and scarred. She also uses Phillipians 3 sharing how we need to forget what’s behind and strain towards the future. I ask how Mary encourages people to not just get over not the victim mentality, but how to move forward from the past.
• “I think we have become guilty of not letting God be the creative God that He is. We look backward and see the way He has worked and then we pray to Him and prescribe to Him what we want Him to do in the future or the present and it looks a lot like what He did in the past.” —Mary DeMuth
• “You might have a tragedy and it is worth lamenting; you see throughout Scripture that lamenting is important…but eventually, we have to move beyond it and think about our future as this ‘epic to anticipate.’” —Mary DeMuth
• I ask Mary when and where she saw God changing “her storm into a story.” Mary said a lot of her healing came during college when she just cried for 4 years and told people her story—people who were Christians and prayed for her. When her daughter turned 5, the same age that she was herself when she was raped, she fell apart and got more counseling—during which there was more healing. In the past couple of years, Mary says she has been exploring what trauma does to the soul; she went to revisit the place where the violations happened and afterwards she was throwing up for hours and hours; she acknowledges that the trauma is still inside of her.
• “It’s a process and it takes a long time and I know it gets frustrating and that’s okay, it’s normal, but we have to pursue healing. We cannot just sit on the couch and expect God to zap us with healing; we have to want it.” —Mary DeMuth
• “Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘do you want to get well,’ and I think He asks that of us. I think our dysfunction and our pain and our past oftentimes becomes our comfort zone; it’s what we know, even though it’s creepy and terrible and awful.” —Mary DeMuth
• “I think it’s so important for people to see that even when they don’t have a traumatic past, they have a tremendous future if they focus on where God is taking them.” —Kristi Clover
• “Regardless of what your past is, God wants you to do big things.” —Kristi Clover
• I say that in Mary’s book, she targeted 10 lies and replaced them with 10 truths. Being a people pleaser, I think that if I’m not encouraging people, I’m not pleasing them. I ask Mary why she thinks it is that we are so preoccupied in this world with trying to meet other people's’ expectations. Mary says that we bend over backwards to keep conflict at bay and that doing so is fueled by insecurity. A good question to ask ourselves is how we would have lived differently if we knew and believed that we were loved.
• “The more I understand God’s love and the more I grasp how wide, how deep, how high it is, the less I am concerned what people think of me, the less it matters to me.” —Mary DeMuth
• I bring up a part in Mary’s book where she says that God smiles when we rest. Mary says that in the rat race of ministry during the busy days of church planting, her family set aside a day of the week to rest. Even her grown up children know that it’s important to pull away from all the lies and activity that keeps going and stop to listen to our hearts and simply rest in God. I mention that when I first started a blog, it was an activity of rest for me, something I could do to unwind (though now I need to take a break from it for real rest once in a while).
• I ask Mary what she thinks what the most challenging and healing part of writing the book was for her. Mary says the greatest struggle is to understand that God loves her. It’s so easy to say, but it’s another thing to receive it and to live within it. She said part of writing the book was exploring the why behind that. She says she is still a victim of what culture declares is beautiful and that she always needs to remind herself that she is fearfully and wonderfully made and that it’s still hard shaking hands with the person in the mirror.
• “We all waste so much time on all these petty things that the world tells us we’re supposed to be paying attention to.” —Kristi Clover
• I ask Mary what is one message that she hopes women take away from reading her book. Mary replies, “That Christ is sufficient and that He is all you need.”

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