What Are You Devoted To? How Midlife Women Find Deeper Purpose and Spiritual Growth with Dr. Judith

In this episode, Dr. Judith explores how God’s love is not only meant to comfort us but to transform us, especially when circumstances and people don’t change. She invites listeners to shift from asking God to fix situations to asking what is being activated and developed within the soul—patience, humility, forgiveness, courage, discernment, or truth without cruelty. Through the story of Evelyn and her sister Marilyn, she shows how divine love can help us keep the wisdom from painful experiences without continuing to carry the wound, set boundaries without denial, and release the need to be understood or proven right. Drawing on Jesus washing Peter’s feet, she emphasizes expanding our understanding of love, choosing a higher response in daily moments, and bringing honest struggles to God without self-judgment as the path of ongoing soul refinement.

Dr. Judith explores how, especially in midlife and later life, desires often change rather than disappear, raising questions about drive and ambition. She reframes this shift as God purifying desire by separating what is “mixed” in us—love with fear, service with needing to be needed, achievement with insecurity, faith with control—like refining gold in fire. Through examples of Ruth and Margaret, she shows how disappointments, aging, and changing family roles reveal attachments and invite deeper purpose, trust, and freedom. She explains fasting as interrupting automatic gratification to expose what’s underneath desire and suggests “fasting” from things like being right, rescuing, comparison, complaining, or being needed. She ends with a seven-day experiment to pause impulses, discern personality versus soul, and ask God to align desire with what brings us closer to Him.

The episode invites viewers into a quiet, guided meditation on desire as a possible pathway to deeper spiritual longing and closeness with God. Through breath, body relaxation, and imagining a protective white light from the divine, listeners are led to place their many wants on an inner “table,” choose the one consuming the most energy, and explore what it promises to provide (security, love, recognition, peace) and what the personality versus the soul may be seeking beneath it. The meditation distinguishes wanting from devotion, then moves through surrender and consecration—offering the desire to God for purification from fear, ego, control, and attachment to outcomes—while separating the form of a desire from its essence. It culminates in a deeper longing to “abide” in God and return to daily life carrying that stillness.

In this episode, Dr. Judith explores spiritual purification—how some prayers are answered not by receiving but by removal, and how “pruning” can free the soul rather than signal rejection. She explains the difference between devotion and purification, showing how we can be devoted to something good yet still attached to outcomes, approval, control, or identity. Using Jesus’ vine-and-branches image and a midlife example of Denise losing a desired leadership role, she highlights the distinction between the form of a desire and its essence, and how the word “if” can reveal conditions we place on peace and faith. She offers the PURE process—Perceive, Unhook, Release, Entrust—and invites listeners to examine one desire this week, then announces a special guided meditation episode on desire and purification.

Stop feeling pulled in many directions—and gather your energy around what truly matters. In this episode, Dr. Judith explores why midlife can feel exhausting even after you’ve let go of what no longer fits: you may still want too many good things at once. She explains “spiritual concentration” as gathering attention—your life force—around what deserves more of you now, not simply ranking a to-do list or eliminating desires. Using Ava’s story, she shows how treating everything as a priority keeps you negotiating by pressure rather than purpose and prevents depth. Dr. Judith distinguishes concentration from fear-based contraction, likening scattered desires to a river spread into shallow channels. She notes that too many competing desires can make it hard to hear God’s guidance, and offers a simple practice: list what’s taking your energy, then ask which deserves more, which deserves less, and where your soul is trying to gather you.