What if we've been looking for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places? This episode takes you through a thought-provoking conversation with Martha Gano who bravely shares her journey from the hustle and bustle of a career-driven life to the seemingly quiet life of a stay-at-home mom. Listen as she opens up about her struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness, her unexpected visit to a chronically ill man, and the eye-opening realizations that changed her perspective on life, identity, and value.
Martha takes us along her spiritual journey to a small, secluded house nestled in the mountains of Northeast Tennessee, where she had a life-altering encounter with God. Hear about her deep introspection into the concept of "severe mercy," and how she embarked on a transformative process to uncover her misplaced sources of value and identity. She challenges the notion of deriving significance from worldly achievements and shares her profound insights on finding joy in the present moment and drawing life from being God's beloved child. Tune in as Martha's heartfelt revelations will surely prompt you to reassess where you find your own satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
What if we've been looking for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places? This episode takes you through a thought-provoking conversation with Martha Gano who bravely shares her journey from the hustle and bustle of a career-driven life to the seemingly quiet life of a stay-at-home mom. Listen as she opens up about her struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness, her unexpected visit to a chronically ill man, and the eye-opening realizations that changed her perspective on life, identity, and value.
Martha takes us along her spiritual journey to a small, secluded house nestled in the mountains of Northeast Tennessee, where she had a life-altering encounter with God. Hear about her deep introspection into the concept of "severe mercy," and how she embarked on a transformative process to uncover her misplaced sources of value and identity. She challenges the notion of deriving significance from worldly achievements and shares her profound insights on finding joy in the present moment and drawing life from being God's beloved child. Tune in as Martha's heartfelt revelations will surely prompt you to reassess where you find your own satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
Martha Gano:
Do you ever feel like life can get too complicated and maybe even overwhelming? Yeah, me too. And it's okay. My name's Martha Gano, and in this podcast we're going to talk about life, love, faith, family, relationships, all kinds of things, and we're going to drink from what God wants to pour into us, one small sip at a time, because when it's the fountain of living water, small sips make all the difference, because it'll be just you and me. Sometimes we'll have a friend join us. If we could have lunch together today, this is what I'd want to talk about. Well, hey, hey, hey. Everybody, so excited that you're here with me today, so looking forward to spending some time with you. And it's episode one. So today we're going to just jump right into how this podcast even came to be, what we're going to be doing here, what we're going to be talking about. So let's just jump right into it.
Martha Gano:
I don't know if you've ever been somewhere where you wanted something so badly that you just had to have it. You know it was going to be what would make you happy, and the longer you didn't get it, the bigger it became in your mind. The more important it was, the more absolutely necessary that you got it. And then maybe you got the thing, whatever you were longing for, and you discovered that, even though it was as amazing as it could be, it or they or whatever your thing was, it could just never live up to what you thought it was going to be to you or to what you decided it needed to be for you. Well, I had always wanted to be a mom, to be a wife and have a husband and a family, and after waiting for years and really enjoying being a teacher, which was my first career that first precious baby finally arrived, and we were so grateful that I got to stay home as her mommy. Well, that's when this whole idea first hit me, because what happened for me was what I had decided was my regular dose of significance immediately got shut off, almost like a big valve had been switched. I had been around 120 plus people every day and being around people energizes me and I went from that to being pretty much just with one sweet baby girl and her dad when he got home from work, and eventually that baby girl would talk a lot she is my child, after all. But in those early days it was this strange mixture of loving and being grateful, but also being overwhelmed, kind of bored with the mundane tasks and a lot of being isolated and alone. I was not prepared for that part, and as sweet as the time was, it just wasn't what I expected.
Martha Gano:
Recently I read a quote by Dr Robert Holden in his book Authentic Success where he says Beware of destination addiction, the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job or even with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are. Well, about that time a friend of mine called and asked me if I'd like to go visit someone who had a chronic illness. She had never met this man, but she felt called to go and pray for him. I was desperate to get out of the house, and I'm always up for an adventure, so I said yes. Well, when we pulled into the driveway of this house, oh my word, I knew I was in for something big.
Martha Gano:
I was nestled in the mountains of Northeast Tennessee and the house set right on a hilltop high above the mountain pass, the road that I had driven every day to school. In fact, every day I looked for the big picture window that sometimes the blinds were open and I could see that a person was sitting in a hospital bed, perched on top of that amazing view, right next to that window, so they could see the whole view. Some days, though, that blind was down, and I would really pray on those days. You guys, we were sitting in the driveway of that house. I could not believe it. We went in, we met the couple who lived there. It was the husband that had that chronic disease. We prayed for them, visited, and then we left. It was the first time for me personally that I remember God speaking so clearly to me that I looked around to see if it was audible. It was not. So you can keep listening to this podcast, okay, but what he said to me in my heart was Martha, if your entire life was just living in a hospital bed and all you had was me, would I be enough for you Without hesitation? I remember responding absolutely not Side note, who says that to God, I don't know, but I just remember saying Lord, I have to do great things for you, I have to make an impact for you. It's a broken world, and you clearly put me here to help you fix it. I have to do things, and again I could almost hear the Lord sighing out loud oh right, okay, well, we're going to get to work on that.
Martha Gano:
One of my favorite books of all time is called A Severe Mercy by a guy named Sheldon Van Alken. Side note, he actually began writing letters to see us Lewis about faith, about Christianity, and Lewis eventually led him to Christ and they became great friends. It's a fabulous read, but prepare yourself, you'll probably message me like what did you give me into with this book? Because that phrase, severe mercy, is such a great way to describe the process that the Lord was starting with me. So it was the beginning of the end of so much, the death of so many things I thought I had to have, and it was the start of the Lord beginning to bring me what I actually need.
Martha Gano:
Jeremiah 2, 13 says this for my people have committed two evils They've forsaken me the fountain of living waters and they've honed for themselves sisters, broken sisters, that can hold no water. Now it would take me a long time to fully connect that afternoon and that small house in the mountains of Northeast Tennessee with this verse in Jeremiah. It's an interesting concept, though it's really fascinating actually. In ancient Israel, of course, drought was not uncommon, and you know there are so many scriptures about praying for rain and lack of rain. And to make preparations for this, people would dig out something like a holding tank for water underneath their homes. Fun fact, and these times the streets were often literally the sewer trash of all kinds waste. I'm not going to go into detail here, but I think you know what I mean. All kinds of things just got tossed out the nearest door or window so that when it rained, all of that would get washed into the cisterns dug out to hold their emergency water. So let's translate this verse to things of the heart.
Martha Gano:
For me, that season of loneliness and isolation is where the Lord started this process of exposing the cisterns in my heart, places where I was drinking from things other than Him, and this first sister and he was going to tell me all about was performing for Him like serving Him. I know this sounds crazy, you guys, but I felt like I had traded off purpose and significance in the lives of so many students, lots of kiddos, for the impact on just one little one, and to me that meant I wasn't as valuable. I know that sounds crazy, but there also may be something in you going, um yeah, totally get it. So let's talk about that. So a cistern in my heart is anything that I form for myself in the hope that it will be able to hold what I need to draw my life from. So when I find value or significance, or maybe my identity or purpose, in anything except being a daughter of God, or, if you're a guy, in being a son of God, then I am drinking sewer water.
Martha Gano:
Isn't that fabulous? And it can be literally anything, you guys. It can be a successful career, it can be a clean house, it can be a great financial portfolio, and there's nothing wrong with these things in themselves. It's about what I do with those things, the position they hold in my heart. It can be well-behaved children, a great marriage or how about a picture perfect body. It can even be super awesome things like a ministry or my health. Literally, as humans, we have this crazy capacity to turn anything into an idol or, in this case, a cistern of sewer water that we're constantly drinking from, trying to figure out why our souls are sick and why we seem to never be able to get enough.
Martha Gano:
And then I actually became really good at acting like my cisterns were fountains, that they were the real thing. I realized that somewhere along the way I had decided that I had to give God a good show. I had to prove to him that he did a good thing when he made me. I had to earn the air I was breathing. I had to leave the world a better place than I found it. Doesn't that sound so noble? I'm even gonna say it sounds godly. In fact, if you were raised with some of the same messaging I was raised with and I say that with all the love and gratitude in my heart for the faith culture that raised me, along with permission to have not been perfect, because nobody's perfect unless you're Jesus, and then you're perfect so all of the gratitude, but also being honest about the messaging that we received and how I interpreted it. So you, if you were like me, you may be saying to yourself yeah, what's wrong with that? Like, of course, that's how you should roll with your life. We will dive into that more later, but trust me, god doesn't need me. His name, after all, is God. He wanted me, he wants me.
Martha Gano:
I did not get that, though. I was steeped in performance because of the way I'd interpreted life from the time I was a little girl. I mean, I was a girl scout. I don't know if you grew up like me, southern Baptist, but I was a GA girls in action. I had so many scout things going on. Maybe I was a little too confident and powerful, I don't know. But I was ready. I was confident, I was ready to take the bull by the horns, kind of with this attitude toward God, like hey, thanks for, like the talents and the gifts and the abilities, the mix that you gave me. And now my job is to take those things and if you'll just step aside, I'll take it from here. Like that just makes me want to crawl under a rock.
Martha Gano:
I feel so awkward saying that out loud, but I can't get past the feeling that it's a come from for a lot of us, especially for us ruggedly independent American Christians that still, whether we admit it or not, value the self-made man so much. Well, I knew that day, the day I told God that he alone would never be enough for me, that something was wrong. I had no idea what it was, but I could feel him shaking things up. And you know why he was because he loves me so much, because of that great faithfulness that we sing about. And over the course of my life, starting with this incident, as far as my understanding goes, he would begin, one cistern at a time, to start taking me away from them, and let me say this because I felt like so important. Almost every time I thought he was killing me, because whenever we're in the process of losing the thing that we think gives us life, we think we're dying. But the truth is, when he was taking me away from each sewer water tank I had dug in my life, when it felt like he was killing me, he was actually removing me from the things that were slowly or sometimes not so slowly poisoning me, the things that were keeping me from drinking deeply from that fountain of living water that Jeremiah was talking about and later that Jesus called himself.
Martha Gano:
I just had no idea that I could actually live in a way that I was satisfied in the deep parts of who I was, that I wasn't always trying to do better, strive for more, figure out the next way to prove myself, trying to perform, trying to be the top. I'd been raised knowing that God loved me, but it wasn't deep in me that I was, literally the whole time, fully accepted, fully loved for all parts of me, because I was not in charge of that acceptance and love. Jesus was, and he did a thorough job. I had no idea that I could just sink into that love and drink from that love and all the acceptance that I ever wanted without performing for it. That is what it means to drink deeply from that clean living and always fresh water that fills us up all the way, even when my circumstances are terrible. It surges life into all parts of me my mind, my spirit, my body, my heart.
Martha Gano:
I was just beginning to learn that, when I thought he was killing me, he was actually saving me, and he didn't just save me once. Trust me, I need saving from lots of things. Savior is who he is. It's what he does again and again and again. And there you have it. I hope that this bless you today. You guys, I don't know if it resonated with you at all, but I'm just praying that the Lord is stirring in your heart today to know in a more deep way, to know that you don't have to perform for him, that you're already fully loved and fully accepted. And I'd love to hear about it If you have heard something today that you'd love to share.
Martha Gano:
You can drop me an email at sipsfromthefountain at gmailcom or message me on social media. I think God's about to do some really great things in your life because he drew you to listen to this message and that's how he rolls. So I can't wait to keep talking with you about this and to see what God's going to do in both of our lives as we take sips from that fountain together. So that's episode one. That's how we got here, that's the kind of thing we're going to talk about, and even more, and I just thank you so much for hanging out with me and I'm looking forward to next time already.
Martha Gano:
Okay, bye guys. Hey, you guys, thanks for hanging out with us today. I hope you've got some refreshment from this sip from the fountain. If you're curious to hear more or if you like what you've heard, you can go ahead and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to yours, or follow our Instagram account, sips From the Fountain, or our Facebook page by the same name. Special thanks for cover our photography to thee, sarah D Harper, and I can't wait to hang out with you guys next time. Thanks so much. Love y'all.