 I hope you're having a great day so far. God is good. He's on the throne. No matter what your day has been like so far, God has got something for you today. I'm Tom Hollis. Welcome to Hope Today. By the way, I'm here with Sydney Goldman and Amanda Brocker. And we have got a great show for you. Amanda, tell us about our guests. All right. Well, I just have a question to ask you. Would you like to learn how to turn the traumas of your past into treasures for your future? And stay tuned because we have a special guest, Ike Miller. And he wrote this book, Good Baggage. I like that it has this ticket. Did you ever think that baggage could possibly be good? Well, it can be. So stay tuned. You have to pay for that baggage. I was going to say like this is, I think, it's such an important topic because I know a lot of us have walked through things. A lot of us have things that are like deeply embedded within us, whether it's childhood trauma or different things that we've walked through and we've been through. And the one thing that I have seen God do time and time again is that he turns our pain into our purpose. And so we just want to encourage you today, whatever you're dealing with, whatever is in your heart, like first of all, Jesus wants to heal it. Jesus wants to go deep down into it and the Holy Spirit wants to do. He's doing so much in this season, I believe. Tom and Amanda is healing and deliverance. I was part of Prayers Over Pittsburgh this weekend on Saturday. And let me tell you there was a mass breakout just through the power of prayer where people got set free, delivered, healed from pain of certain things. And that's what God is doing is that I just truly believe that's where his eye is on. And we have to be willing to be like, you know what? I'm laying myself on the altar. I am going to allow you, Holy Spirit, to consume me, to burn up, to purify everything because of what we walk through, because of our baggage, then we're able to go and testify of the goodness of the Lord. We overcome by the blood of the Lamb of Jesus and the word of our testimony. So this is like one of my favorite topics because I've had a lot of trauma. I've had a lot of healing, but it's just amazing how God is using that now. It's like, all right, I'm like, let's go. Let's go to the next generation. I appreciate that so much. As a parent, I found out one thing. When I became a parent and now a grandparent, it's like, I would love to do everything I can to just keep my kids in a protected bubble, but life isn't like that. And things happen and things need to be healed and God is glorified. Think of the man at the pool of Bethesda and how he was, God was glorified by healing him. That was exactly what it says in the Scriptures. And so God gets the glory. Now, you may need prayer today. If you need prayer and you want to call our prayer partners, we always have someone standing by. It's just there just to pray for you. And so the number is there on the screen and you can have them pray with you. But, you know, prayer plus the word, plus the Holy Spirit working, that's where all this happens. Yeah, that's right. We can't do anything apart from God. And I encourage you right now that before we even get into this interview, that you'll prepare yourself that you will ask the Lord to reveal to you, because I think sometimes we can go through life blindly, maybe suppress down, like ignore, like it never happened. And it's not a fruitful place to be. And I love the topic today. I really believe that we're all going to walk away with the good baggage. We're going to say thank you, Lord, for situations in my life, not that God brought them on, but how God turns around what the enemy means for evil, for his good. And we want you to walk that out. I know we want to walk that out here and allow God's purposes to flourish in our lives. Well, our next guest has to deal with his own fair share of baggage over the years and growing up in a difficult childhood was not easy. But it did help him to grow and make him stronger as a person. Ike Miller is a pastor and author and he's written a book called Good Baggage. He joins us now to share how we can stop letting our past dictate what God has for us in the present. Pastor Ike, welcome to Hope Today. Amanda, Tom, Sydney, thank you so much for having me. I have been so looking forward to our conversation. Amen. Well, if you could paint a picture for us, maybe of your past, your story and that moment of where you realized there was a problem. Yeah. So just to tell you a little bit about my story, I grew up in a context where my father had what we would clinically call an alcohol use disorder, more well known as kind of alcoholism or being an alcoholic. And obviously and quite naturally that led to lots of chaos in my family home and ultimately to my parents' divorce. There was some abuse towards us as children or to myself that I honestly did not acknowledge until the last few years. I think because the sort of idea of abuse that I saw whether it was portrayed on TV or whatever, it seemed so much more extreme than what I experienced that I didn't really name it that until I started sharing it with others and they were like, yeah, that is most certainly abuse. And so a lot of my journey has been also just coming to a deeper understanding of what exactly happened to me and how it shaped me and formed me. But how I started this journey, it's kind of a funny story. I got married in August of 2009 and Sharon grew up kind of going to Disney World and so she was kind of like, if you're going to be married to me you need to understand my love for Disney. And so we went on a trip and the funny part of it is we get on the plane and she's just grinning ear to ear and I kind of turned to her and I was like, you're more excited about this than you were our honeymoon. And she was like, it's a different kind of excitement. So it wasn't even no, it's a different kind of excitement. But we get on this trip and they always say Disney is the happiest place on earth and get four or five days into this trip and I just realized I'm not very happy and I'm quite melancholy and it just seems like something's off and for the first time in my life just really began to realize that maybe there's some stuff that I need to dig into to understand why I can be in such a wonderful environment and yet struggle to find peace, to be content. And so that was kind of my first time of really beginning to see a counselor and to ask some questions around how it did my childhood impact me as an adult. And honestly the biggest thing, kind of the big revelation for me was realizing that in that lens I was diagnosed with depression and in that lens just realizing that it's almost like kind of being below water where you can't hear things, you can't see things quite accurately. Everything seems darker than it really is and what counseling did for me and what medication did for me is just to help me bring me up above the surface so I can kind of get to even ground and start seeing things clearly again and so that was where my journey began. I praise God for your journey and for how he's using you now but you know I'm sure that going through this and I believe our viewing audience would have this question you know why did God allow this in my life and was he the author of this? Yeah, you know that was a question even from in my childhood I remember being in middle school and high school and wondering that question of God why did this happen and ultimately at the end of the day I had to come to a place where I could accept I may never know why I had the childhood I did or why that I went through what I did what I did know is that God could take that and use it and that no one could help someone else going through what I went through like someone who had been through it and so from pretty early on God was very gracious to me and giving me that perspective on my parents divorce my father's alcoholism to say okay I may not know why this happened but God can still use it to help others heal from this and recover from this but one of the things I do talk about in the book is sometimes we do get really caught up in why did God allow this or a particular notion that God allows us to go through those things so that then we can experience the healing of them or God causes us there's that famous saying that everything happens for a reason and the issue with that is sometimes it makes God the author of some pretty horrible things especially in dysfunctional families whether that's abuse or incest or sexual abuse of some sort and I just don't think that God is the author of those kinds of things that happened because of evil and sin in the world it happens because we are broken humans and we act out of our brokenness towards one another but the beauty of redemption is that none of that is lost none of that is wasted God can take all of those broken pieces and make something beautiful out of them Wow that is so beautifully said and I'm just thinking here you are as an adult and one thing that you mention is how you were connected to the feelings now but it was what happened in your past and like how does a person or what does a person do in those moments of where you're having these feelings but it's nothing happening in your realm right now it was from the past yeah you know that's where a lot of learning has to take place because we have these feelings now that are connected to things that happened in our childhood but we don't know how they're connected or why they're connected and so it's been really interesting to just learn on a brain chemistry level the way that our environment shapes us and shapes the way that we see our context so for example when we grow up in a chaotic context maybe there's some abuse of some sort we kind of become accustomed to being in a place of volatility and chaos and so that's kind of our normal and now I'm in a place where there's peace and it's quiet and everything's okay and I'm actually anxious because I'm not used to it I need the chaos to feel like things are normal and so some of it is just doing the work to learn kind of how does our environment shape us as children so that we can kind of read those things off of our experiences now now one thing I will say and this is what I encourage everyone to do that the work begins with us paying attention to our pain what are the things that are causing consistent pain in your life now are they aren't random chances are pain in your life comes from consistent places whether that is typical relational patterns that you see or types of disappointment that you experience or things that you go to find your identity and your value and it keeps disappointing you that is pain on the surface that's connected to something rooted deep inside of us so paying attention to our pain is the first step to getting at where is this connected to the deep inside of me I wanted to ask you about a proper theology of God you sort of already mentioned some of that about that God is not the author of the certain things the evil things that have happened to us but where does a proper understanding about God how does that help us to heal from our childhood trauma yeah you know I think when I look at the stories like the story of Joseph and you see that Joseph has moments where God is clearly doing something in his life and then you have these moments where someone acts against him whether it is his brothers selling him into slavery or when the cupbearer forgets about him and he ends up staying in prison for longer or Potiphar's wife acts against him we have moments where the fall and the brokenness of humanity works against us but we see in Joseph's story God is always working towards his purposes and so in spite of those moments where his brothers work against him or Potiphar's wife is against him there's still these moments where he gets connected with Potiphar in the first place and Potiphar takes him into his household and gives him responsibility and then the cupbearer finally does remember him and tells the pharaoh to have him come and interpret his dream and then he becomes second in command in Egypt and so there's moments where we see good and evil in God's world and God is against one another but God is always working towards his purposes and we see ultimately at the end the way that God ultimately brings security and safety to his people through Joseph in his story in spite of the things that happened against him You know, Pastor Reich, like with this conversation I think it is so important in talking about the purposes of God and I want to go back to something because I really feel that the Holy Spirit was getting us to a place of you're talking about triggers when you're walking through things that you'll have like certain things like just like you were talking about your Disney World experience or certain things where you're just like how in the world am I responding and I don't know what's happening so can you talk to us about even your own experience of just the triggers and how God even in the midst of that pain just started, you know highlighting and revealing to you, okay we got to deal with this and to go in deeper Yeah You know, so a big season for me to open my eyes to all of this on a new level was the pandemic and being in the pandemic leading a church it was just one of those seasons where whether you are a pastor or leading some organization of some sort, you're making decisions for other people decisions that no matter what you decide someone's going to be upset with you right and so I found myself constantly trying to figure out okay how do I keep the people of our church happy with me and that just became crushing and overwhelming to look into that I realized a big part of growing in the context growing up in the context I did was walking into a room and always trying to assess where is my father emotionally is he angry is he happy, is it safe to be here do I need to find a way out and what I discovered is that is a common experience for adults of these contexts is we now walk into every room and we're assessing the emotional climate of the room is it safe to be here, is everybody okay happy with me and happy with me and when someone is not okay with us then we it kind of triggers those that sense of well how do I make it okay how do I fix it in some context we don't even have to know that they're upset with us we just see the emotional and their faiths and we're like I've got to fix this I've got to make this better and so that's the trigger that's kind of the moment where we're reenacting our childhood in a different relationship but where this began to turn for me it began to realize you know this ability to read people is actually a strength like to be able to walk into a room and to read people and their emotion and their body language if I can step back from taking responsibility for everybody's emotions that's a powerful tool for me as a pastor to be able to come and meet people where they are to empathize to say it seems like something's off today can we talk about that or to with my team to kind of be able to tap into what's going on or with my wife and kids to tap into where they are emotionally and realizing my childhood gave me this ability to read people and it does work against me at times but if I can disarm that I can use that tool for good now Amen this is so good I like in your book how you compare that to a superpower so it's truly looking at the thing in the past and it becomes truly a treasure in your future that was amazing that was a light ball moment for me and I appreciate that but you talk about many children of dysfunctional families and they become hopeless romantics and I'm like I need you to break this down for me because I like Hallmark you and my wife both all about it all about it so kind of the way that this works out and granted we have to recognize that not everybody who grew up in this context responds exactly the same way but for some of us who grew up in this context you know especially where we saw our parents divorce or we saw a lot of fighting and arguing between our parents we knew that we wanted something different from that for our own relationships and we saw the the romantic comedies on TV we saw the stories of people just falling head over heels in love with one another and just how good it could be and we said okay that's what I want that's what I want for my relationships is this crazy feeling of being in love and granted this idea of being a hopeless romantic obviously what we see on TV is not always true maybe rarely true when it comes to what romance looks like but we didn't know any different we hadn't seen any different and so we just said okay at the end of the day to experience those feelings of love that's what it's going to be all about and we have to learn on our own journey some of the ways that that can hurt us that that can work against us it means that we treasure love against everything else meaning we're willing to be mistreated if we can hold on to hope for that relationship to be what we saw on TV we ignore red flags in a relationship those kinds of things but we want that experience of love because we want it to be different than what we experienced in our childhoods such good content I'm so excited to be writing this book I know you were inspired by the Lord would you mind just taking a moment we have like a minute left and just praying over our audience you know I'm sure there are many out there they may be just beginning this journey to freedom from traumas of the past and the Lord really turning those traumas into treasures yes absolutely let's pray God I just want to lift up this program right now who is listening to this conversation and I pray God for just a willingness in them to be open to the healing that you want to bring to their life God maybe some of us have been led to believe that because of what we experienced in our childhoods we are destined to have bad relationships ourselves and God I just want people to be free from that God that you want to do a healing work in them and yet that healing work sometimes means turning around and acknowledging some painful things some hurtful things that we've been through and God I pray that we wouldn't run from that we wouldn't be afraid of that but God that we would embrace that God that you would step into the middle of that that your Holy Spirit would give us the courage to face it so that we could also experience the joy and the freedom and the hope that only you can bring us and we ask that in Jesus name amen amen well thank you so much for having me I have so enjoyed it I really appreciate it awesome well when we return in 60 seconds we'll discuss what it means to let go of the past and begin to strive for what God wants for us we'll be right back in this month of Thanksgiving we're excited to send you the special daily gratitude journal with your best gift this easy to use journal will encourage you to bookend each day with short personal reviews and each day with short personal reflections that bring insight and intentionality to your busy and always changing life how can six simple questions help you better navigate life's uncertainty best-selling author tish oxenreiter invites you to lean into the rhythms that each morning and evening offers with a twice daily thought exercise focusing on gratitude truth grace and more as you reflect on three key questions near the beginning and end of your day you will be more poised and prepared for whatever God has for you in the hours between request your gratitude journal today when you give call 888-665-4483 or donate online at ctvn.org slash donate thank you for giving to cornerstone television we're so grateful you're joining us on hope today and we just want to thank all of you that do give to cornerstone television network because we're able to have these conversations just like we had when we were talking about good baggage talking about inner healing talking about the work that the Holy Spirit wants to do in us and through us so we can be made whole so that we can walk in the peace of God that shalom of God of nothing damage nothing broken and nothing missing and as we were having our conversation with pastor I got just really started dropping this in my spirit there was like three things is that we have sometimes the triggers those things that you know make us like pop off or things that happen but I truly feel like that's the trigger God wants us to go to a place of transformation and in that in between places what we lay before the father when we allow him to do the deep internal work within us when we go and seek professional help for the healing and for the therapy from that transformation that it's a work it doesn't happen overnight it doesn't happen in 30 days it might happen in three years it might take a process and a time but when we allow ourselves to be prostrate before the Lord even here I'm saying is a lot of people in the church are sick and don't even know it and we cannot expect to go out and heal people if we're dealing with demons and certain things that are inside of us that's we're going to be able to put that on other people and God's like I need to heal the body of Christ right now I need to go deep down within and I need to do a deep internal work so my people are okay we are crying out for revival but the truth of the matter is we first need to be revived we first need to be resuscitated by the power of the Holy Spirit and from that transformation then we begin to see the triumph then we're able to say you know this is my story this is my testimony this is what I've walked through what I've been through and the final thing that I just want to say because God laid it in my spirit in my heart is one of my favorite new stories in the Bible is the story of Hagar when she ran and she fled from the situation with Abraham and Sarah and she's out in the desert and she's like God do you see me and he says Al Roy and there's an angel that appeared to her and say where have you come from and where are you going and sometimes what are you coming from what are the things of the past that you are not dealing and addressing and I need you to go back to that place where you came from I need you to go back to the start of those hard places so I can do the deep work within and to set you free and that is our encouragement and our prayer for you today do the work that is necessary God is calling us as the body of Christ in this season I try I'm seeing it like never before and I'm saying this because I've experienced it and I'm telling you I'm telling you do the deep work to go to the places that are so painful and allow the Holy Spirit to go deep within deep deep within to cry out to scream out to talk to somebody and to deal with it because I'm telling you when you get to that place of breakthrough when you get to that place and you see all the ways that the enemy tried to hold you a bondage and you get set free honey I am telling you it is the greatest chance in your life so today maybe the first step is giving us a call at our prayer line at 888-665-4483 and maybe the other step is call someone to walk you through it to have community because Tom this is such a serious thing that I know God's heart in his eye is on his people and he cares about them so much and I think so often Sydney and I love what you just shared and I love what Pastor Ike was sharing is that we've we've been sort of told to forget these things or just to move on or to still kind of drag behind us you know and we've got to deal with them and but by dealing with them is just to give them to the one who can heal them to bring them to the place where you say look we've had different things some people had problems like Pastor Ike did with his dad or with their mother or with someone in their family or maybe it was external things people at school I know that was a problem for me and certain people that really were a problem for me at school and so those things they do form us they do form us in sometimes really awful ways that God wants to smooth out and straight now and put to right and still use that experience though to touch another person who's going through the same thing God loves you today God cares for you God's passionately crazy about you that he wants to heal and bring that healing so go to him today look it may not happen in the next three minutes here before we close but it will happen as you seek after him Amanda this is taking me back to a moment we all went through the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation but you drew your life like on a timeline and there were highlights and there were lowlights but you put describing words of what those seasons developed within you and to my amazement when we looked at everybody's time you know line and the ups and downs there were words in those valley moments that were actually positive character moments and it is an awe factor that when you go to God with those valley moments he will give you the resilience that you need to persevere to move forward so don't ever allow your past to dictate your future as we said at the opening of the program those traumas moments they can now be treasures for your future God will not disregard the pain and Sidney you said this in the green room that there is no pain that has purpose not attached to it there is very much a very purposeful God who will use every moment of your life to fulfill his plan and purpose so I just encourage you to surrender to him today he's not afraid he knows all about it sometimes in this trauma class the one lady asked well did he watch did he stand and watch the trauma I don't believe he did he cannot look upon sin and God was crying out for you long before you ever cried out for him he desires to rescue you and save you and set you on a firm foundation what a powerful cross for words like right now of just what the Holy Spirit is doing because this is so important in this season that we begin to allow Holy Spirit to do the deep work within and so as we're about to go off the air and Tom I'm gonna throw it over to you take this time to like see kids face absolutely and let me just say that God has this day this moment this word from Pastor Ike from us from the word of God that you would be healed and praying your your everything to God let him go do that work as Cindy said that deep work that's a good visual deep right wants to do a deep work in us to change those things inside of us to say I was not in that but I am in the healing I am in the change that's gonna happen now you will never be the same doesn't matter how long you know the Lord there's newness for you celebrating 20 incredible years of music and ministry Ernie Haas from one of the most beloved quartets in gospel music shares about his new 20 year anniversary project plus we take an exciting look at the band's newest Christmas music video that's tomorrow on hope today cornerstone television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible