For You From Eve
244: How to Grow in Your Faith & What Changes When You Do
(upbeat music) Hello everybody and welcome. It's another episode of For You from E of My Name is Olivia and I'm back with another episode of Welcome or Welcome Back. If you are new here, I started this podcast about three years ago now, maybe almost four years ago. And I create content all about wellness, lifestyle and becoming the best version of your yesterday self. So each topic that I have on, each guest that I have on, everything that I post about really does represent a different factor to becoming a better version of yourself. I love self growth, I love self improvement and I love self love. And I've learned so much about myself. I'm 24, I just turned 24 actually last month. So I'm in my early to mid 20s and I feel like I'm just learning so much about myself and about my environment, about the people that I surround myself with and about my potential, my heart, my mind. And I think you just really learned so much about yourself in your 20s. And so I'm kind of in the middle of discovering all of that and I love to talk about it on my show. Personal, we get deep. We talk about all the things that you guys wanna hear and I'm so blessed to have a community where you guys tell me the things you want me to talk about which is obviously super helpful because I wanna create content that resonates with you guys. And I'm very excited for today's episode because we're gonna be talking about, actually a trouble thinking of what to, I guess, title this episode because we're gonna be talking a lot about kind of growing in your faith but then also what growing in my faith has done for me, the mindset shifts I've made, the physical, the emotional, all the different shifts that I've made just from growing in my faith. And I really wanna talk about that with you guys because I feel like it's just so much changes for you when you shift your perspective, when you shift your mindset and it's not an easy thing to do. And in the past year, I would say I've done the most amount of healing, but in the past six months, I have done an extreme amount of healing. So I've gone through a lot of things in my life as we all have and no one's here to compare what we've gone through, but in the past year I've learned so much about myself as a woman and just as a woman of God and just a woman in general. And I've just had so much self improvement and self growth in my journey. And I'm so excited to share it with you guys because there's so many different tips that I share with you guys, so many different topics throughout my episodes. And I'm really excited about today's episode specifically because this was the biggest thing of all when it came to my self improvement, my self growth and my self love journey. So just a little background about my religion and my culture and what I come from. So I grew up in a Assyrian Orthodox background. So I have a Christian household and I grew up with Middle Eastern roots. So my mom was born in Turkey, my dad was born in Syria and we come from an Assyrian background. So we speak Aramaic, which is like a super old language and I love my culture and I love everything that comes with it. So I am blessed to be born into a home that has those beliefs. And as I've gotten older, I've kind of learned more about my faith myself because even though I was born with these beliefs, there were a lot of times in my life where I didn't practice the beliefs, I didn't know anything about it. And I would walk around being like, yeah, I believe in God, yeah, I believe in God, but I didn't know anything about God. I didn't know anything about the relationship I would have with Jesus, nothing. I knew nothing about anything, but I would go around preaching that I believed in God and that I believed in Jesus, even though I didn't even really know where my feet stood. And so I really just spent these past five, six months focusing on my faith. And when I started to focus on my faith and I started to focus on my relationship with Jesus and I started to focus on strengthening myself with my faith, I started to focus on who I was as a woman and I started to grow as a woman. So I began to grow emotionally and mentally and physically because I was growing spiritually and because I was growing religiously. So I'm excited to share these tips with you on kind of ways that I've transformed my mindset and my life to live a more faithful-based life and how that improved my life in general. Because I think that these are tips that everybody can use when it comes to their faith and you will have such a transformation in your life. So the first tip that I have and this is something I struggled with a lot, was I would get super, super anxious about the future. I would get so much anxiety about the future, what's gonna happen next? Am I gonna make it in this part of my life? Is my career gonna make it? Is my love life gonna make it? Am I gonna get married? Am I gonna have children? Am I gonna have the same group of friends? Am I gonna get this job? Am I gonna have this much money? Yada yada yada. All the things you'd stress about with your future, I would stress about. And I heard a quote on TikTok. She, I think the girl who posted on TikTok heard it from her therapist and it says, "When you are stressed about things in the future, when you are stressed about things that haven't even happened yet, you are predicting that God is going to fail. You are predicting that God is going to mess up your plan." And when I heard that I was like, "Wow, I need to have more trust in God." Forget about trusting myself. Let me trust God. Because in moments where we have trouble trusting ourselves, in moments where it's hard for us to trust ourselves, trust God. When you can't look back at yourself, when you can't stand on your own two feet, when you don't have a support system behind you, when you don't have family that supports you or friends that supports you and you can't even support yourself in those moments, let God do it. Stop trying to do it. Stop trying to support yourself. Let God support you. When I heard that it just made a lot of things click for me because I was kind of just like, wow, like when I'm stressing about this future and when I'm anxious about the future, I'm predicting that God is going to fail me and that God is going to fail my life. And that's not possible because God is God. He's going to work it out for you, but you also have to put in that work, right? It's not like you can wake up every morning and be like, I'm not going to work today and I'm not going to work tomorrow and you quit your job. And you're like, well, God's plan for me is great. So I'm gonna quit my job because God will take care of me. No, God gives us the resources. It's what we do with the resources, right? God gives me the podcast. God gives me the laptop. God gives me the opportunities to purchase the things that I need for my podcast. And God gives me that passion. God gives me that hope and that dream in my heart for a reason. God gives me all of that. What am I going to do with that? What am I going to do with this dream? What am I going to do with these resources? What am I going to do with this opportunity? God provides everything that we need. Let's say you want to make a lemon cake and I provide you all the ingredients from the lemon to the flour to the sugar, whatever it is. I provide you everything you need for that lemon cake, the oven, I preheat the oven for you. Let's say I even preheat the oven for you and I walk out of the kitchen and you're standing there and I say, hey, can you make me this lemon cake? You're standing there. You want to make the lemon cake. You have all the ingredients. The oven's already preheated for you, but you're just not doing it and you just walk away from the kitchen. Now you don't have a lemon cake 'cause you're not using your resources. You're not using your opportunity. You had it all in front of you, but you didn't utilize it. I even left you a sheet on steps and instructions and directions on how to make the lemon cake and you've still chose not to do it. So it really is just one of those things where if you are stressing about the future, you are stressing about God. And if you're like, no, God's got me, but then you're lacking self trust. And when you lack self trust, you lack self love. So when you're anxious, when you're stressed about the things that haven't happened yet, you need to remind yourself there is someone with way higher power that is controlling this. You just have to do what you can do today. Whatever it is that you can do today, whether it's waking up early and working out and eating a healthy meal and planning your week out and going grocery shopping, whatever it is that you can do today to become a better version of yourself, to become a happier version, to become a more successful version, do that today and God will take care of the rest. Do that today, do it tomorrow, do it the next day and keep doing it every single day and God will reward you. Everything will be put into place. One Peter 5'7 says, give all your worries and cares to God for he cares for you. When you go to God and you cry because you're stressed and you don't think you can do it, God's not laughing at you. God's not happy that you feel this way. There might be people in your life that when they see you getting knocked down, when they see you struggling, a part of them might enjoy it. And that's a very sad and sickening thing to say that someone might enjoy your pain. And I'm not saying that's necessarily true for everybody, I'm not saying it's necessarily true at all. I'm just saying that I've seen the people that are quiet when I talk about things that make me happy and things that I've excelled in and things that I've succeeded in. And I've seen people talk very loudly if I'm talking about things that I've failed in or if people are speaking about failures that I've done. So I think it's very important to pay attention to people's intentions around you and their energy around you, which brings me to my next point. Shut out the people who make you flirt with sin. If there are people in your life who are constantly making you feel negative about yourself, make you feel negative about the world, they make you want to gossip all the time when you're around them, it's just gossip, gossip, gossip. Maybe they make you want to do things you don't want to do. You shouldn't have to apologize for wanting to shut them out. You shouldn't have to apologize for wanting to step away from people who don't make you feel good about yourself. If you know yourself, you know your intentions, you know your heart, you know what it is that you want from somebody and what it is that you're thinking when you speak to somebody when you know all these things and that person is trying to point you out to somebody that you don't want to be and somebody that you don't feel like you are, why do you feel a need to keep them in your life? If you know you've had nothing but good intentions towards somebody and they are making it seem like you only have negative intentions with them, why would you want to continue the cycle with them? Why would you want to keep them in your life? You shouldn't want that because now you're going to have those thoughts about yourself or you're gonna be sitting across this person thinking this person thinks I don't even like them or this person thinks I've done this to them or that I've done that to them. If there are people in your life who are making you feel that way, who are making you flirt with gossip, who are making you flirt with sin, who are making you flirt with doing bad activities that you don't want to do, why do they have to be in your life? They don't, they don't. You can't change the people around you but you could change people around you. You might not, you know the people that are in your circle, you can't change their mindset, their beliefs, their morals, their values. They're not going to change unless they want to unless they have the desire to. But you do have the power to not be around those people. You do have the power to shut those people out and decide you don't want a part of them. So it's so important to just realize that and remember that even though you can't change people around you, you can change people around you. So if there are people around you that are making you do things you don't want to do or their lifestyle just doesn't align with yours, like let's say you're on this self-improvement, self-growth, self-love journey, but your best friends go out every single night, they're always drinking, they're hooking up with a bunch of people, they're getting home late, they're waking up hungover, they eat bad, they don't work out, they don't focus on a career, they do all these things and you're hanging out with them. Even if you're not indulging in those activities every single day that they are and you're only doing it once a week or only doing it twice a week, whatever it might be, even surrounding yourself with that is going to impact your growth. It is going to shrink you because you are going to think that what you're doing is enough. So if your friends don't work, your friends don't work or they work a job that's not that great or whatever it might be, and you're doing the most minimal thing and you're also doing that, you're going to think you're doing okay because the people around you are doing the same. Or if people are doing less than you, you're going to think you're doing okay because people around you are doing less than you. So you're going to say, "Oh, I'm excelling in what I'm doing, "I'm doing great doing this," and blah, blah, blah. However, if you surround yourself with people who are excelling above you, if you surround yourself with people who are doing way better than you're doing and are more successful than you and more rich than you and more happy and healthier than you, you're going to say, "Oh my God, I'm not doing enough, "I have to get on to their level." Are you surrounding yourself with people who believe in God, who people that follow their faith, who people who gossip, people who talk to positive thoughts, who are you surrounding yourself with because who you are surrounding yourself with is also what you're going to indulge in and what you're going to spend your energy and time on. And I'm kind of at a point in my life where if there's a person or there's a situation that no longer serves me, I don't want a part of it and I don't want to hear about it. If there's somebody that has hurt me, who has done me dirty, who has done me wrong, whatever it might be, I can make the decision to not have that person in my life. I can make the decision to walk away from that person. The next tip, which kind of goes along with the last tip, is to find people who also practice your faith and find people who have the same beliefs and values and morals as you because we just talked about you're the sum of your five closest friends. So if you're five closest friends are people who don't have any work ethic, who aren't healthy, who aren't people that take care of themselves, aren't people that practice their faith, you are going to fall into that or you're going to just be limited on your potential. You don't have that ambition, who don't have that power and that fire within them. Something I want to talk about today is crossover. So you guys have seen me post about crossover and this goes right in with the tip about being with people who also practice your faith. I know that it is a struggle to find people who align with your morals, your values, your beliefs and I'm lucky where I actually grew up in a community where I kind of grew up with my church and now that I'm looking around, I realize a lot of people don't have that and I get a lot of DMs from you guys who are like, I want to practice my faith and I want to get close to God but I don't know anybody who does it. I don't know anyone who also practices their faith and who I could talk to about this stuff, who I could do Bible studies with, who I could go to church with. And it's not easy to do those things alone the first few times. I think the first few times it's normal to do things alone and to get into habit alone. But I understand that that's not an easy thing to do at all. Meeting people who share the same faith as you really will heal you in spots that you didn't even know that you needed healing. So crossover, I'm gonna link it in the description. It's an online digital platform. All you do, it's super easy. I just posted it on my TikTok on my Instagram if you need a visual representation. But all you do is you create an account with the link that I'm gonna have in the show notes description and it connects you with a local church, with local people who share the same faith as you. So you'll get a text right away and you'll be connected with somebody that helps you to find a local church near you. And this way, when you go to the local church, you're gonna be able to find people who are not going to judge you. Like, I understand it's hard and it's not easy to go into places alone, but you are going into a place of love. And I think about this because I remember I was watching a girl's gone Bible interview. And in the girls gone Bible interview, the girls had said that they will talk to a guy and a guy will wanna approach a woman, a woman of God, but they're like scared to get rejected. And the girls were basically explaining, if you are approaching a woman of God, she will not let you feel embarrassment of the rejection. Obviously, when you walk into a place alone and everyone's in crowds or like you trip, you're gonna be embarrassed. If you're rejected, you're gonna be embarrassed. If you do something clumsy, you're gonna be embarrassed. That's just a natural human reaction. But those people around you who are God loving Jesus loving people, they're not going to let you feed, they're not gonna feed onto the embarrassment, right? Like mean people might just stare at you weirdly until you feel even more uncomfortable. If a girl, if you approach a girl, if you're a godly man and you approach a girl who's a godly woman and you go up to her and you say, "Hey, I really wanna ask you out." She's not gonna be like, "Ew, get away from me." She's gonna be like, "I really appreciate that. "I'm just not looking to get to know anybody right now "or I'm seeing somebody already or whatever it might be." That is how a godly woman will approach that situation. She won't let you feel embarrassed, action that you just took. So I think it's so important to meet people and to approach people who are in that field because it's just so important to be aligned with people who have the same moral beliefs and values of you 'cause that's where you will grow and that's where your mindset will start to shift to more important things. And part of you that you didn't even know needed healing are going to be healed. My next little tip, this isn't really a tip but it's kind of just a reminder. It's okay to shut off and shut down for a little bit. So just remind yourself that it's okay if you need to take a break from people in your life. It's okay if you need to take a break from your routine, from your current habits to just work on yourself and work on building something else, creating a safe space for yourself, creating a relationship with Jesus and yourself for a few months actually. And this was when everything in my life started to come together was, I had a lot of rough times with my mental health and just my self-love and my self-growth and just my life in general, the people around me and myself and everything throughout the past two years. And in the past year, I really went through it where I was like, I need to make a change in my life. I need to make a change with the people around me who I'm surrounding myself with, who I'm giving my energy to, what I'm giving my energy to, what am I doing, am I fulfilling my purpose? Yada, yada, yada. It was like one thought after another of kind of just that reassurance to my self, reassuring, reassuring, I don't even know the word, to myself of it's okay to just block everybody off and shut everybody down to just focus on you. So in the past, I wanna say five, six months ago, I was like, I want to make a change in my life, I wanna become a better version of myself and I really wanna focus on my faith because I had focused on the going to the gym, creating a good career for myself, I had focused on all these things, but I didn't have a strong relationship with God and I was like, I need to build this back up because I haven't had a strong relationship with God in a long time and I wanna build that back up for myself. After I was in this like dark period, I was like, I wanna come out of this and for about like two, three months, I just kind of shut everything off. Like, I've done this a few times in the past where I've just shut off and I've just focused on me, but at this point I was like in love with it, it didn't feel like something that I didn't wanna do or something that I was dreading, it was something that I actually kind of loved and it was something that I enjoyed and that I kind of looked forward to. So for example, once I had gone through this mindset and through this period of I wanna just shut down, my phone was always on Do Not Disturb, I was very inactive on my social media and like no one knew what I was really up to. I was waking up in the mornings, I was going to the gym at 5.36 o'clock in the morning, I would spend all day working, I would go on a walk at night and I would be in bed early, wake up early, Monday nights, I would go to Bible study Sundays, I was at church and then I was in the Sunday, like the Sunday school program with the kids. So I was constantly just doing things for myself, I would spend time with like family members but that was really it, I wasn't going out, I wasn't meeting people, I wasn't going on dates, I wasn't doing anything unless it was something to grow and improve myself. And I never felt guilty because I didn't, I don't think I had anybody in my life that made me feel guilty for it. I think that I have a very supportive group of friends that kind of understood like, okay, when if Liv's shutting off, it's because she's just going through something and she wants to work on her relationship with God and I had people that supported that and understood that, which I do think is a huge testament to also the people around you that are going to be supportive of that, but you shouldn't feel guilty or feel bad for wanting to shut people off and just build a relationship with God and just have it be you and Jesus for a little bit. And I had that and that's when a lot of things started to shift for me and I feel like that's also when a lot of life started to come together for me and started to make sense for me. So just remind yourself, it's okay if you want to delete your social media or deactivate it for a little bit or delete the apps and just focus on you. So let's say you delete the social media apps, your phones on, do not disturb a lot. Maybe you let the people that are really closer to life know, like I'm just like, if I'm being a little bit MIA, it's not because I'm trying to come off like me and I'm not trying to be a bad friend or unsupportive. You know, I love you and I support you and I'm always here if you're going to text or call me. I'm not completely going MIA, but I just want to spend some more time to myself. So I don't really want to go out on the weekends. I don't want to drink. I don't want to partake in these activities because right now I'm just working on growing myself and self improvement and self growth and self love. So I think once you also make that clear and make that known, it does change a lot of things up as well. So doing that and focusing on your relationship with Jesus as well does make a really big difference. I would say too, when it comes to kind of shutting yourself off and just focusing on that time with just you and God, which brings me to my last tip is growing in your faith means falling in love with Jesus and how do you fall in love with Jesus? You get to know him. So the ways that I got to know Jesus was number one, pray like you're talking to a friend. So I pray to God every single night before I sleep, I have to do the Lord's prayer. It's just something I've been doing since I was kid. It's how I'll raise my kids. It's just always something I've done. So praying like you're having a conversation. So I start my prayer off and my prayer off the same way, but that middle part is really just like a venting session between me and God because I always say when you're praying, just remember there's always two people listening, right? Sometimes I don't speak a lot of my things out loud because I just like God to know it. So I keep those things within and when you speak out loud, obviously, you know, there's two people listening at all times. So you have to be careful what you pray for, but praying like you're having a conversation with them. Number two, read your Bible just to learn more about Jesus. So whenever I would try to read my Bible, I would always get super overwhelmed with it and I would get very just like, not oversimilated, but I just like, I didn't understand that. I don't understand that, I'm googling this and this and that. I just started to read in the New Testament instead of the Old Testament to start off with. So I will read the Old Testament, but I'm right now starting in the New Testament because I wanna learn more about Jesus and his life and him and the villages and him like in all the places. So starting in the New Testament will help you to learn about Jesus's life, which will help you to learn more about him. That helped me to learn a lot about God, attending Bible studies helped me to learn so much about religion and just people's aspects of things and their viewpoints and it just helps you so much with life lessons. I saw a quote the other day that said, I've read like so many self-help books about self growth, about business, about health, about wellness, about finances and there's nothing that taught me more than the Bible. Every single life lesson that you need is in that Bible. So reading your Bible and notating your Bible, don't just read it and skim through it. Really, really read it. Attend Bible studies if you have them. There's some online, there's some on TikTok that will help you. I have a Bible study book that I purchased. It's actually in my TikTok shop and I think in my Amazon storefront as well. It is an amazing Bible studies, absolutely amazing. I will link my TikTok shop down below for you guys to find it. This isn't like a sponsored episode. It's just like, it was an amazing Bible study. It helps you learn the stories so well, so beautifully, so easy to learn. It has prayers in it. It's an amazing way to connect with your faith and then something else that I did to learn about Jesus, which is kind of like sounds silly, but watching the chosen, people would talk about how good it was and I'd be like, yeah, like I'm sure it's good. Guys, it's absolutely amazing. It is so good. It's such a good show. It helps you learn and literally, you fall in love with Jesus when you watch it because you see him. You see that he's just a human. You see the things that he does, the way that he speaks. When you think about it, Jesus was a human. Jesus had a favorite food. Jesus had a favorite color. That's crazy for me to think about. So it's like in that show, you'll see him. You'll see him talking about how his favorite food is bred. And it's like, it really makes you fall in love with him. And so I think when you fall in love with God, your faith is just captured for the rest of your life because you have that love for God now. We all know what it's like to fall in love with somebody and to have eternal love like we have for our family, for our partner, for our friend. And when you feel that with Jesus, that will never go away. Just like it doesn't go away with the people in your life. It won't go away with Jesus. Jesus will never betray you. He'll never leave you. He'll never forsake you as long as you accept him and you love him and you let him into your life because he wants to be in your life. Jesus wants to be a part of your life. So growing in your faith, this is exciting. Even you clicking onto this episode. He's happy about it. He's excited, he's smiling. So that's how I want to end off today's episode. I want to thank all of you so much for listening. I'm so proud of you. If you are starting in your faith journey or you're continuing it or you just want to strengthen it, I'm so, so proud of you. I want to thank all of you so much for listening to today's episode. You guys are my biggest supporters and I'm so grateful for each and every one of you. I hope you guys have an amazing weekend and amazing rest of your week. And of course, we will be back next Friday for another episode. So definitely stay tuned. Follow me on all my socials linked down below. Give me a good rating and review on this show. It helps me so much, you guys. And I love all of you so much. Mwah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]