Women’s Leadership and Acknowledging Your Gifts with Sophie Hudson

September 11, 2024·57 min·3 clips

Five women preserve Moses’s life before he is born, and their “sight” shapes the whole argument.

1. Live Well Anyway centers this conversation on Sophie Hudson’s A Fine Sight to See and its reading of Exodus. 2. Mackenzie Coppa hosts Sophie Hudson, a writer and Big Boo Cast co-host, because Hudson wrote A Fine Sight to See and Coppa has followed her work for years. 3. The episode asks how “seeing” shapes leadership, women’s gifts, and everyday decisions in faith and family life. 4. Coppa opens by saying Hudson’s books were “little lifelines” during a period when she lived with her parents after leaving an abusive marriage. 5. Coppa and Hudson compare notes on sports, with Coppa saying she listens to the Big Boo Cast with her boyfriend and can now name “random sports fact[s].” 6. Hudson connects A Fine Sight to See with Unreasonable Hospitality, saying both books are about noticing people and letting that noticing lead to action. 7. Hudson says Unreasonable Hospitality showed why “our kindness to one another matters so much and our thoughtfulness.” 8. Hudson says the new book is about how “seeing impacts our leadership” and calls healthy sight a path to healthy leaders. 9. Coppa says she highlighted 58 quotes from the Kindle version and says she could hear Hudson’s voice while reading. 10. Hudson says she wanted the book to be funny even though it centers on Exodus and Moses. 11. Hudson explains that she kept returning to the word “seeing” because it appears repeatedly in Exodus and she had never noticed the pattern before. 12. She says she first saw the pattern on a flight to Houston and later walked into her friend Marian’s house with Exodus open to show the passages. 13. Hudson says the first five women in Moses’s story—Shiphrah, Puah, Jochebed, Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter—helped preserve his life. 14. She says the midwives defied Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew baby boys and that each of the other women acted in ways that kept Moses alive. 15. Hudson contrasts those women’s redemptive sight with Moses’s own sight in Exodus 2, which she says led him to kill an Egyptian and flee into exile. 16. She says Moses still did not want to use his voice when God called him, but he turned aside because he saw the burning bush. 17. Hudson says women should not be reduced to a narrow set of church tasks like caregiving, nurturing, or hospitality. 18. She says many women carry shame and regret from their twenties and need to “throw off your grave clothes and walk.” 19. The tone is conversational and personal, with Coppa steering from faith and family into books, sports, and leadership. 20. Listeners who like Bible study, women’s leadership, and thoughtful interviews will get the most from this episode; listeners wanting a short or narrowly technical discussion may skip it.

As heard by us

A warm case for noticing gifts church culture can overlook.

Mackenzie Coppa gives Sophie Hudson room to make a warm, clear case for noticing the gifts women bring, especially the ones church culture can miss.

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Why you'd press play

If you've ever felt boxed in by church expectations about what women should do, start here.

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