WHAT YOU WILL HEAR
My guest for The Happy Hour # 254 is Dr. Andrea Holman. Andrea serves as an Associate Professor of Psychology at Huston-Tillotson University where she teaches, conducts research, and gives talks and trainings around the city about race, racism and privilege and their impact on interpersonal relations. She also uses her expertise to assist foster/adoptive parents pursuing interracial adoption through the local foster agency through which she and her husband are currently licensed foster parents.
Friends, get out the pen and paper now because I'm telling you there are so many things you're going to want to write down from the show today! Andrea and I start off talking about foster care and “naive altruism”. Andrea shares some research findings including what foster/adoptive kids say they needed most in their homes but often didn't receive. We then dive into the subject of beauty, and the value and standard that is pervasive in our culture. Andrea tells us how the words we use often communicate a person's worth with the lens of beauty, and it's so normal that we don't even realize we're doing it. You'll hear Andrea take this a step further and show us how the language we use with relationships can convey someone's value as the relationship instead of their true value a child of God. You guys, I'm still thinking about so many things from my conversation with Andrea. I'm convicted and encouraged by what Andrea's pointed out, and thankful for her wisdom and practical steps we can take to start making changes.
{You can listen to the show HERE, and make sure you never miss a Happy Hour by subscribing through your favorite podcast app (ie. iTunes, Stitcher). And of course, I would love if you would share with your friends!}
LINKS FROM THE SHOW
- What Andrea's loving: family vacation to Utah, her new hairstyle for the summer, and Tasha Cobb's Gracefully Broken
- What Andrea's reading: Humility by Andrew Murray, Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, Thick: and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
- It's Not Supposed to Be This Way by Lysa TerKeurst
- Come join The Happy Hour on Patreon
- If You Only Knew
CONNECT WITH ANDREA
SPONSORS
CONNECT WITH JAMIE + THE HAPPY HOUR
SHARE THE LOVE
Screenshot and share your favorite episodes on social with tag @jamieivey & hashtag #happyhourpodcast to show us how you’re enjoying The Happy Hour!
Ladies! So many things going through my mind after listening to this episode! I am a social worker so everything in the foster care portion of this resonated with me and I found myself going, “This is what I have been saying for years!”
Then you guys got to the portion where you talk about when society says we should be married, have kids, etc. I am 40 years old and not married and I hear about it a lot from my brothers in-laws….weird right?! The thing is it has effected me greatly. I’ve heard comments like, “By this point you will only find someone who is divorced” or “didn’t bring anyone to Christmas dinner again huh?” I am “judgmental” if I don’t agree to meet who they want to set me up with but really it’s that THEY are the one’s setting me up but ironically it’s the ones who are divorced with kids…what does that say of how they look at me??
What they don’t see is the work I do for families or how I was a youth pastor for at-risk youth and have seen students come to Jesus and have their lives changed, or how I’m in seminary, or the impact I’ve made on my nieces and nephews, and that I’m looking for ways to use my seminary degree to help survivors of human trafficking heal from their trauma. NONE of that matters because I’m NOT married. It has been so hard to keep moving forward because of “the language” they use towards me, about me or against me. I’ve been successful in every other area except the one that matters the most in society and even in church. Now that I’m not working for a church I have found that I don’t have an easy place to slide into at a church. The church doesn’t know what to do with singles and what some do provide is more like a youth group. We don’t need mini golf outings!
Why are we so hard to work with? So hard to include into a church and it’s MANY programs?
Thank you for this episode. I love the “watch your language” and am going to use that in every area of my life.