Episode 12: From Judgement to Compassion - A Personal Story of Faith, Growth, and Empathy
In this heartfelt episode of FOUND & REFINED, host Amy LeSage shares a deeply personal story about her struggle with materialism and the humbling experience that changed her perspective on judgment. Through the story, Amy explores the importance of compassion, avoiding negative self-talk, and not judging others based on their outward appearances. She emphasizes the significance of understanding and supporting one another, particularly those who face difficult circumstances without the support structures that some may take for granted. Join Amy as she delves into this life lesson and encourages a mindset of empathy and humility.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:09 Shifting Focus: From Negative Self-Talk to Judgment
00:57 A Humbling Experience: Learning About Judgment
02:42 A Personal Story
07:55 The Emotional Impact and Realizations
12:30 Lessons Learned: Compassion and Understanding
18:27 Final Thoughts: Avoiding Judgment
19:36 Conclusion and Farewell
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TRANSCRIPT - EP. 12
Hi friends. Welcome to FOUND & REFINED. I am your host, Amy LeSage. Thank you so much for being here as always. Today, we are going to, um, switch gears a little bit. I have been talking a lot about negative self-talk and getting in front of that, fighting the devil, fighting him with the word, fighting him with your own personal, you know, vengeance, and, like, and with God's strength inside of you, turning it off, saying, I'm not gonna listen to that.
All that kind of stuff. Fighting him by praying to God to take him away, by actually saying in the name of Jesus, get out. So we have really been talking about that stuff and I'm, I'm gonna circle back to it every once in a while, but right now I'm feeling it, um, just heavy on my heart to talk about what was brought up to me two years ago. So judgment... judgment was a huge, huge thing that was pointed out to me even prior to the journey that I was about to enter into. August of 2023 is when I had my conversation, you know, it's just my pivotal moment in life. I keep going back to it 'cause it's when this journey really began of me following God's plan for my life, not my own.
So that was the time when I really surrendered myself to him. Uh, there were a lot of things that led up to that. But earlier that year. He started working on judgments with me and it took a very humbling experience, um, to point some things out that I was doing wrong. Some ways of thinking that were just, I didn't mean to be judging other people.
I wasn't, it wasn't a way of life, but if I saw something in front of me, I might have automatically felt like I knew that meant this, about that person, let's say, even for homeless people or, um, I don't know. I, I mean, homeless is what's sticking out to me right now. Um, because that's where he really pulled on my heartstrings, and pointed some things out.
I think there's a lot to share here. So let's start with a story. Let's start with the actual happenings. In the beginning of 2023 and throughout my life, I've told you guys I was not good with where I prioritized my money. I just wasn't because I was prioritizing and chasing my worth in materialistic things, and so I was constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul on bills and things like that, just to make sure that I was pouring into my own worth, because that otherwise I would've been super depressed, and it was catching me on the back end. So I would be, you know... retail therapy. I don't even, I don't, I never used that word because I knew it wasn't such a simple little like, oh, it's retail therapy to make me feel better.
It was bigger than that. Be careful with that word. Be careful how you use that word and the actuality of what's going on in your life, and if something really does have some control over you, be careful with that. I didn't like it when other people said it because I was like, that's, you might be, um, you might be trying to candy coat an actual problem.
Um, so I'm just gonna throw that in there. Sorry, I don't know why. Um, so anyways. One morning, I get up with my kids, and we're getting ready for school. I look out, and my car is gone. To me. I had no idea. I mean, I started like racking my brain, and I'm like, where?
Where did I park my car? Where did I seriously park my car? I swear I parked my car in my driveway. What? And mind you, my car's name is Gladys, my kids and I have named her. She's a 2011 Toyota Sequoia that is falling apart. She is not a highly sought-after vehicle, but in my mind, I'm like, what in the world happened to my car?
I'm sure your brains are already turning, just how I started this conversation, but this hit me out of the blue. So for me, I had no idea where my car was and I start freaking out. Um, I call my brother, I live around my family. I call my brother, and I'm like, My car is gone. Someone stole my car. I also live, it's comical now, but at the time I
I couldn't even smile about it. I mean, I was just like, what is going on here? What happened to my car?
But I live around people, there is the other side of the road to where I live, is very well off and I'm talking Corvettes and very nice cars. And I'm thinking someone stole Gladys. Someone stole my car. And my brother, who's very rational thinking and, um, smart about these things, has a, has a, has a background in,
Law enforcement and stuff. He's like, Amy, your car is not really, he's trying to be so nice about it. Your car is not really, a high value sought after car. And I'm like, then where is it? If someone didn't steal it, like, where could it be? And he's like, I don't know, let me check my cameras. So he's checking his cameras.
I have cameras at my house now, but I didn't at the time. So he is checking his cameras. He calls me back, and he's like, is there any way that you didn't pay a bill? And I was like,
maybe like for the past month and a half, I probably behind on my my car payment. He's like, sometimes banks like, take it. And I was like, Oh my gosh, did my car get repoed? And he's like, it might have Amy, let me, let me keep looking. So he hangs up, and he's just searching through that whole night to see what happened.
/And my kids are like, where's the car? Who stole the car? You know? 'cause that was my narrative. I was like, who stole our car? Where's our car? So they're all up in arms. I'm frantic. Um, and then I start processing, like, oh my gosh, is, could that actually have happened? I don't even know what happens in those situations.
I am so removed from that kind of life, but yet in it right in my head, I was like, oh, it could never happen to me, but my, the way I was living, absolutely it could happen to me. Um, my brother calls me back and he's like, they took it. A tow truck came and took it at three in the morning and he's like, I'm so sorry, but you need to call your bank.
And at that point I was like a puddle on the ground. I was embarrassed. I was um, horrified. Just horrified like. What am I gonna do? I to get my kids to school. I am luckily surrounded by family. I have supports in place, but I'm just trying to figure what does this process even look like?
I call my bank, and the lady who answers the phone, um, and I won't disclose who the bank was or anything like that. But the lady who answers the phone was just treating me and speaking to me in the exact way that I felt about myself at that time. Like I was the biggest loser, lowest person in the planet.
Like it was like just, you're a delinquent. And she goes on to tell me they have, they did take the car. And if I don't, here's the thing. I, I couldn't even believe this. You guys, and maybe some of you know this, I literally didn't; this isn't, it just isn't something that I am educated about.
And so she says, you have until Friday. It was Monday. You have until Friday to pay off the loan with our company. In order for us to release it to you, I owed almost $12,000 on my car. And I was like, what if I can't do that? And she's like, you can come to the auction. Like you can come to the auction on Friday in five days and try to bid on your car. Otherwise, we keep it and sell it to the highest bidder.
I was a wreck. Everything was running through my mind at this point. Every emotion and every thought just, I was just hit by like a flood of things, feelings, everything. I was distraught. I was crying, I was upset. I got my kids to school. I am struggling with money because of myself, because of my own problem, because of my own addiction, and my chasing my worth in a totally wrong, wrong way.
And now I'm facing that consequence, dead on. It is humiliating. And I start thinking like I luckily had savings in an account to pull from, which takes time. I mean, it was just like these deadlines, this timeframe. I luckily had that, but I started my heart started breaking for people who don't.
I was like, this affects how I get to food. Like how I get food for my kids. This affects how I go to work, to pay, to get food for my kids, and pay for my bills. I now can't get to work. This affects how I get my kids to school. This in a matter of five days; if I didn't have the money, I have no car, and my life is tumbling out of control. My life is on a snowball, fast track, downhill. I, It is going to affect everything in my life if I don't get my car back, and to get my car back, I have to pay for the car, I have to pay off my loan. so I thank God. I had family to support me and to help me, but not everybody does.
And this was such an eye-opening point, it like grabbed the scales off of my eyes and the judgment that I maybe have been giving other people who don't have the family to help them, who've grown up in hard times, who have constantly come up against these types of battles, nonstop.
A fight for this, money over here, robbing Peter to pay Paul so that you can pay your bills, and do your other things, and like, and they're not, there may be even not doing the stupid stuff that I was doing to get myself in that situation. It was eye-opening.
It was every emotion. So then you have to pay off your car, and then you have to go buy your car back from the impound lot. Clearly. I was like how do people do this? Clearly, you didn't have the money to miss your one and a half month payment or whatever. I missed a month. I missed one full month, and I was in the midst of the second month.
I think either way it was, it was no more than two months, but doesn't matter. I shouldn't even been doing it. I'm not giving myself an excuse. I'm just telling you the full story. There are many people, I am sure, who literally don't have it in the back somewhere to grab from and don't have it in the forefront.
So then they lose their car. They lose their transportation. When you lose your transportation, you lose the way to do life. You are now deep in debt. Now you have a whole nother bigger payment. You gotta go buy a car.
These are, you don't stand a chance, is my point. There are people who don't even stand a chance in that situation. I thank God that I did, and that he used that to teach me a very big lesson. But
my heart was breaking. It was just breaking for people who don't have that luxury. I never looked at a homeless, struggling person the same way. I actually I have compassion for them.
We don't know anybody else's story by looking at them, by walking past them; they look like they don't have it together. They look like they just didn't care. They look like they haven't tried. They didn't go try and get a job. They didn't go try to do something about their life. They didn't, whatever. They might have all the cards stacked against them, is what my realization was.
They just seriously might, and who am I? Who are we to ever just judge someone off the cuff like that? We don't know. We don't know people's situations. We don't know 'em.
/What do we think people did when they saw Jesus? How differently could God have brought Jesus into this earth to make him look the actual part and the person that he was for us? He didn't make him look the part that he is.
The savior of the universe, the person who died and saved all of us. He didn't come in there like that. He came into this world in a barn. We don't know. Watch your judgments. Catch yourself in it. Don't judge others. If you seriously sense yourself starting to do it because it's so easy to do. It's so, it's human nature.
It's a, it's like we just start thinking, we know. We know what's going on with that person. We don't. Unless you're friends with that person, and you know them intimately. You don't.
There are people in my life that don't even know the story I just told you. I never wanted to share it. I never wanted to actually talk about it.
I, I couldn't talk. I was so embarrassed. It's an embarrassing story, I know that. But this is about how God is reshaping the way I feel, the way I think, the way I live. I'm not that person anymore. I didn't wanna share it because I was still figuring out how to not be that person. I'm not that person anymore, so I feel comfortable sharing that with you.
Don't judge me. Don't judge me for it. And if you are, then you need to work on what I'm talking about, because we don't know anything about the actual heart of the person that's in that situation. We don't know their struggles. We don't know their battles. We don't know their upbringing. We don't know what brought 'em to that point. We don't know any of their story. We might know one little part.
/ I feel like God really started working on that with me before he started digging even deeper, later. After I started this journey. And he's given a lot more insight as to what to do with that and how to think about it and what to be aware of, um, and I'm gonna share that with you.
I think that's where we're gonna head. Don't judge yourself so harshly. That's the negative self-talk. It's the same type of thing. Don't judge yourself like that. That's the devil talking. When it's super negative, if it's really just like you're an awful person, you're this, you're that. If you really aren't, I don't know how else to say that.
Maybe you are an awful person. You need to think about that a little bit. But you know when you're broken, when you're hurting, when your worth is in the, is in the crapper and you're trying to make it better and it's not, um. When you've gone through hard times and they're starting to break you, that's the thing that I'm talking about with don't judge yourself so harshly.
But also on the flip side of that, be careful. Be careful how you're judging other people. It's important to be mindful of that, as we walk through life, we just don't know. And it's just not our place. It's literally not our place to judge other people, just not. Um, I'm gonna continue on this more , but for now, that's it.
Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye.