Julie: We don’t often like to talk about it but man there are just some seasons in life where we get hit by stuff and we just come undone. How do you put it back together when you’ve had a season like that? Well, today’s guest on The Modern Motherhood Podcast is Tom Holladay. He is one of the teaching pastors at Saddleback Church and he’s here to talk to us about putting it all together again when it’s all falling apart. I’m your host Julie Lyles Carr and this is The Modern Motherhood Podcast.
Julie: Well Pastor Tom, thank you so much for being with me today. You’re at Saddleback Church, you’ve been in Ministry a long, long time and you’ve got a brand new book Putting It Together Again When It’s All Fallen Apart: 7 Principles for Rebuilding Your Life coming out!
Tom: Thanks for the invitation to come.
Julie: On The Motherhood Podcast we really want to delve into issues that people deal with and I think you are really tapping into the heart of something that I hear very frequently. I myself am in Ministry and when I spend time with people, what I often find is they feel so stuck following a set of circumstances, a challenge they didn’t see coming, a loss, a betrayal, any of those kinds of things. They can just get really jammed up. It seems like your new book really begins to address what we can do about that place.
Tom: Yeah, Putting It Together Again When It’s All Fallen Apart: 7 Principles for Rebuilding Your Life is on putting it together again when it’s all falling apart and I think for a lot of us, we think we should be together all the time. The truth is we live in a fallen world and it’s easy to blame ourselves and maybe there are some times when there’s something we did that caused something to fall apart, but I found most of the time it’s just the fact that we’re in a fallen world with fallen people and we’re all going to face this. It’s not that just some people have to put it together again, it’s that every person has to put it back together again. Every family. Every Ministry. Even when it comes to natural disasters happening that we never expect, that’s just life in this world and, you’re right, we can get stuck. We get to this place where we feel like, “I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other,” because when something falls apart it wears you out because you spent so much time putting it together in the first place. Suddenly that marriage that you took so much time putting together is falling apart, or a relationship with one of your kids you spent all of your heart and energy on. We’re talking a lot to Moms and then they’re in their teenage years or maybe even earlier than that, and somehow it’s starting to fall apart. So the idea that, “I have to do this all over again,” you’re right, can make you really weary.
Julie: When we get stuck, you know one of the quotes that you have in your book, I got to have a sneak peek at the book and it’s just fantastic, and one of the quotes you have that I highlighted and I’m going to probably go back and circle and all kinds of things, is our greatest problem is not our problem it’s how we react to that problem. Unpack that a little bit for us.
Tom: It’s because we’re all going to have problems in this world and scripture, the Bible, is filled with how to react to the problems that we have in this world. So consider it all joy, James says, when you encounter trials of various kinds. Romans reminds us that we need to remember that God causes all things to work together for good, in Romans chapter 8. It doesn’t say to not have problems because he tells us we’re all going to suffer persecution even in this world if we love Jesus Christ, but we can react in a different way. The book really comes out of a personal experience, you know, Julie, I think every one of us, we have life messages that the Lord gives to us and most of those come out of the experiences of our lives. The experiences that we wish hadn’t happened but because they did happen we have to recognize God’s strength in the midst of them. For myself and my wife Shondell this book comes out of a flood that we went through way back in 1986 and I never written down the lessons of it even though I’ve been teaching them for 30 years now.
We were in a small community up in Marysville, California, Northern California and a levee broke and flooded the whole town. Our house was under 9 feet of water, the church library was destroyed. It was near and dear to a pastor’s heart. Very, very fortunately the water moved slowly, even though it went high, so no lives were taken. A lot of property loss. So I’m a young pastor in my 20s and I’m trying to figure out how to help these people to put it together again to have the energy to take the next steps. Since I’m a pastor my mind went to scripture and went to a book in the Old Testament about somebody who had to put it together again. A guy by the name of Nehemiah. You might remember that Nehemiah had a wall he needed to rebuild. The book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament is all about how he did that. I’ll never forget leading those people through studying that book and what it had to say to us about how do you put it together again and one of the main lessons is what we’re talking about right now that you don’t start by just getting started. There’s some things you need to do before getting started or else you’ll wear out.
At the very beginning, Nehemiah, as he looks at the situation, that the wall was broken down and had been that way for, oh my goodness, decades and decades, and the first thing he did is he sat down and he mourned, he fasted and prayed. That’s where you start. You don’t start with, “I’m going to just jump in and start doing things,” because you need God’s strength. Not just for the first day but for the whole journey. So mourning is expressing your hurt to God. Fasting is focusing your attention on God, focusing your heart on God. Praying is asking for help from God and when you star there you are building a foundation that you’re going to be able to build on for a long, long time.
Julie: Do you ever find that sometimes we try to skip the mourning part a little bit, like almost that wouldn’t be good faith if we we faced a major challenge?
Tom: I can speak for myself and I know I do. You know I think our culture isn’t very good at mourning and I know as a man in this culture I am not very good at mourning. I want to get back to work as quick as I can to sort of ignore the pain rather than dealing with the pain and walking through the pain and so I totally agree. I talk in the book about how the Old Testament is a model. There are The Old Testament examples of them taking a week, a month, 6 months, a year to mourn. What I’ve discovered about mourning is that it’s like a fingerprint. It is very unique to every one of us, we all mourn in a different way and telling someone else how they are supposed to mourn never works. You don’t need somebody telling you how you need to deal with hurt that’s in your life, but also it never works because the way that they mourn is not the way that I’m going to mourn. I can learn from some other people. I can learn from their models, but I also have to recognize there’s a particular personal journey I have to go through in the morning, and when you find yourself tearing up about things and maybe even not about the thing that you’re hurt over, without explanation, many times that is an expression of the fact that we’re going through morning. Just to go into this a little more because I know a lot of us are going through this, especially coming out of the holiday season, You’ll tear up over a song or over at the opening of a present and you won’t even know why and it’s maybe a memory of a mom or a dad you lost 20 or 30 years ago but you’re still hurting over it in ways that you don’t know.
Julie: Yeah, I love the way that you talk about the individualization of a mourning process. I think that’s so powerful. Of our 8 children, two of them have been identified with special needs, and when our child Macy was identified with a significant hearing loss, it was so fascinating the difference between my husband and I. So I kind of jumped in and cried it out for about a week, a week and a half, and then okay I gotta figure out what’s going on. My husband’s was stoic for quite awhile and he adores this kid, it wasn’t about that but it was really almost like two or three years later he was having trouble communicating with her on something and he came downstairs just bawling and I said what’s wrong and he said Macy can’t hear. I was like, yeah dude, where have you been the last couple of years.
Tom: That’s a man for you, that’s us.
Julie: It was very fascinating.
Tom: It takes us awhile to catch up but we eventually get there.
Julie: It was kind of a watershed and then we were able to get back on page together. After a couple years. So even our rebuilding cycle was different about what we were going to do for her. He threw himself more quickly into the decisions that we were having to make. I cried it out and then threw myself into that, but it just feels like we don’t actually get to skip the mourning thing even if you get it out of sequence.
Tom: You don’t. And Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. So unless I mourn I can’t receive God’s comfort for that hurt if you don’t mourn, so I want that blessing in my life, I need that blessing in my life, so even though mourning can be hard and it can’t be pretty the other side of it is God’s comfort.
Julie: Now I think some people might feel like well, yeah, I had this disappoint. Disappointment that things didn’t turn out the way I want it, but wow, compared to the stories of a lot of people ,do I even have a right to be sad about this or to feel like there’s something that has to be rebuilt? Okay, the job didn’t work out exactly the way I thought, or the book proposal got, you know, refused, but is this a legitimate place to also look at putting something back together again?
Tom: Every place is. What we tend to do is compare our hurts to other people’s hurts. And one of two happens: either we realize there’s a lot of other people that hurt a lot more than we do and so we feel like we don’t have the right to hurt. Well, I don’t see that anywhere in Scripture. You are supposed to bring every hurt to the Lord. Jesus tells us that he cares about the little bird so course I care about you. The other side of that is what if you have a hurt that’s greater than anybody else’s? What if you can’t find anybody else to compare it to and say well I’m okay. That strategy never works because we need to know that God is going to be with us in every hurt. And that’s the beginning point, I think, of putting it back together again. It’s not the end point. It’s the beginning point I think a lot of us tend to skip.
Julie: For those who have engaged in this mourning process, when do you know that it’s time to move on to fasting and prayer?
Tom: I think that those three things actually go together because fasting obviously and praying you’re still expressing the mourning in that so you doing those three things at the same time and, as you focus your attention on God, as you ask for help from God in the mourning, you’re going to discover, not that one day everything is just suddenly okay, but that God has a light. It’s very dim at the beginning, but it’s a light that shows his direction and it gives you a sense of how he wants you to rebuild your life out of that loss that you’ve had, that mourning that you’ve had.
Julie: Tom, what would you say to someone you know that has walked through these steps. They say, I fasted, I prayed, and I’m just not seeing any relief. What do we say to someone who feels like they walked through these initial first steps but they’re just struggling to kind of even move back into a place of proactivity?
Tom: The first thing I always ask somebody who says that to me is “Are you going through it alone?” You’re never going to find any relief. We are meant to live in community, we’re meant to live in relationship with other people, so that’s the first thing I’d always check, because without others in your life walking alongside of you, there is there is no relief. You can’t encourage yourself in a pain, you need other people to encourage you. And you need God’s word. It takes both in our lives, but then on the other side of that I would say, if you have other people in your life and you are continuing to worship Him, then give it the time it takes. It may take longer than you think it will take. Time that it takes now if you thinking it’s been it’s been too long it’s been way too long and then maybe you need to think about moving on to a next step but I found for most people we don’t give it the time that it takes.
Julie: I read recently that a lot of us go ahead and have you know on a shoulder that’s kind of bummed out on us or a lower back issue, but what’s interesting in this particular research, is it said that if you will give it six to eight weeks of true rest and just trying to kind of stay in the lane, a lot of times surgery wouldn’t be necessary.
Tom: It heals itself.
Julie. Yes, we get anxious and frustrated with the time length and I think sometimes these initial steps of sort of dealing with the disappointment or the loss or betrayal or whatever it is, we just don’t quite give it enough time and maybe time is something that it needs.
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Jule: You have another quote, again, that was circled, highlighted, all the things “to put something together again you will have to face your fears.” I can’t wait to hear you discuss that and talk about what that means. There’s just so much truth packed into those few words.
Tom: If I go back to my experience of a natural disaster and trying to help a church rebuild. We were a small Church of maybe 80 or 90 people and there had been like 20 people and we just started to grow and so I started to encourage them to think about what we could build. We could maybe buy some land near a freeway. How we could build a better building then we had and they actually listened to what I was saying, and then the fear set in. What if I fail? What if I’m actually leading these people in the wrong direction? What if there’s a disappointment in it? I’ll never forget sharing with some of them about that and them saying to me we really think this is a place where we need to have faith. That’s really tough when you’re own sermon gets preached back at you. And, in that moment, it was a reminder to me, I was living by fear and not by faith. It was a reminder from some important people in my life and so whenever you’re rebuilding, if you are going to rebuild a relationship, man there’s a lot of fear in that. What if I have to go through that pain again? When it broke up the first time to think about rebuilding a marriage anybody who has even thought about that let alone taking the first steps in that, I think, the greatest courage of anybody I’ve ever seen because of the fears of maybe having to go through that pain again.
Julie: I think when we rebuild from fear a lot of times unintentionally perhaps but we’re using toxic elements to try to have those bricks hold together and I think that really to rebuild something that’s going to be solid it’s going to take that mortar of faith versus fear because fear just crumbles us doesn’t it? I mean it really disempowers us.
Tom: Yes, it really does. Our fear tells us we need something new. I need a new family or a new job and whatever. I’m going to run from this I’m going to get something new then what you see happening in the new job or the new family that they run to because they are running and not building.
Julie: A big difference. You know sometimes we make progress and we start seeing that relationship coming back together, seeing our finances getting rebuilt and we’re really excited or we see that community of friends that we thought maybe we weren’t going to be able to engage in again begin to green up and then something comes and we feel like we’re failing in the rebuilding process, but is that perhaps just a natural cycle? Is that something that Nehemiah faced?
Tom: It is something Nehemiah faced. In the book I talk about the opposition that comes and inevitably we’re going to face opposition in the rebuilding phase. And the first one I talk about is one that Nehemiah faced. They’ll be people in your life when you want to rebuild something to go make fun of you for it cuz it’s easy to make fun of because it’s easy to see why it might not work or why you’re trying to recapture the past or whatever so you say I’m going to rebuild my career and they go, “What career? Flipping hamburgers?” or whatever, there’s some kind of ridicule that comes your way. It can even go deeper than that. Somebody in your own family and you say, “I’m going to rebuild my marriage,” and they say to you, “Heh that will never work.” And that kind of ridicule can destroy a person’s heart when it comes to rebuilding.
It is impossible to rebuild without facing some kind of opposition for a couple of reasons. One, there’s people in your life who needed to rebuild and they didn’t and so when you say you’re going to it’s a challenge to them until they have to have to push back against that because they know they should have rebuilt that relationship, they should have tried. Second, t’s just the fact that we live in a fallen world and in this world it’s always easier to see what could go wrong than we can go right and there’s a lot of people who are so-called prophets. They think they are prophets and their their prophecy is them telling you what they think can go wrong in your life before it goes wrong in your life. If we look at the Old Testament Prophets they were telling people a little of that, but they told mostly what was going to go right in people’s lives if they would only follow the Lord, so you’ve got to look for those kind of prophets in your life.
Julie: How do we tell the difference between opposition and wisdom in the rebuilding process? If we’re doing this along side of our engaging and strong community to help support us, you know sometimes it may be that there may be somebody in our life that sounds like they’re down playing what we’re trying to do, but can there be wisdom sometimes in there and how do we tell the difference?
Tom: There can be that’s why there’s wisdom in a multitude of counselors Proverbs tells us. You can’t have just one counselor, but I, so for instance, just to be honest, I’ll tell people many times who are trying to rebuild a marriage that your parents aren’t going to give you your best wisdom because they don’t want you to hurt again. They don’t want you to go through that again. They are your protector. It’s very rare that they would say, “Go back into that pain again.” They want you to escape that, they don’t want you to face that again, and you know what they might be right, but you need more than just that wisdom. You need a multitude of counselors like maybe 5 or 6 people in your life that you trust.
Julie: You have a concept that you talk about in the rebuilding process called securing your success as you’re making progress in this rebuild. How do you secure your success when you have something that you’re not really sure what the outcome might be? How do you secure that?
Tom: So we are skipping ahead a little bit to talk about what happens when the rebuilding starts to work, when all of a sudden natural disaster you start to recover from it or the business starts to be successful again or the marriage starts to feel like we’re not just trying anymore, it feels like we actually do love each other again. What happens? What do you do at that point? We have, whenever you have a success, one of the things Nehemiah teaches us is we need to realize that every success is a stewardship. It is not a trophy, it’s a stewardship. So we never want to point to it and say, “Wow, look at what I did.” or even “Wow, look what God did” as a trophy.
You see it as a stewardship for what God wants to use you for another people’s lives and one of the keys to that is securing that success, so that means you do the things that keep the success running. There’s so many stories of people who have put a relationship back together again by a process or having a date night or maybe we are putting a relationship back together with your kids and you had to eat lunch with your kids and it gets put back together again and then the date night stops or the date lunch. And then it starts to fall apart again. So you have to figure out what caused it to work and how do I keep doing those things. It’s human nature I do the same thing that when things start to work we back off and we start to work on some of their area but those most important areas of Our Lives it’s worth securing success so for Nehemiah for example the Bible tells us that he personally made sure the doors were locked in the wall every night, because why have a wall if he didn’t lock the doors and people can get in and out anyway. So the question is what do you personally need to make sure is done to make sure whatever success God has given can continue to be used.
Julie: Where do you think the roll of a counselor comes into play with in this entire rebuilding process? We want to lean heavily on the Lord, I know for us as a pastoral staff, we have those people we’re trying to walk through, but you know sometimes it may take the voice of somebody who is really skilled and helping guide within a psychological way. Where does that come into play?
Tom: At Saddleback Church we deeply believe in counselors. They are using the biblical gift of teaching actually and encouragement one-to-one rather than one to a whole bunch of people so it’s a Biblical giftedness. We have hundreds of lay counselors in our church who, as a Ministry, are trained many many many hours of training in order to do counseling for people for free in our church, but then we also realize that there are certain issues that people are facing and they need to go to a professional counselor, and they need to find someone to walk that with them. And figure out why is it that I keep doing this that doesn’t make any sense to me or anybody else in my life.I believe that good trained, Biblical counselors are there using spiritual gifts to help you understand how God can help you see past the problem. We talked earlier about seeing past the problem to see the opportunities and sometimes you are only going to be able to do that with a counselor.
Julie: I think it’s really important that you know we make that note because I think sometimes people can be in the rebuilding process and and they can be instilling some spiritual discipline they can have their Community they can be trying to batten down the hatches you don’t get make sure those doors are locked and and trying to engage and good habits but find themselves sliding back into patterns that are are moving them backwards from where they want to go and I think sometimes you can be hesitant to seek out that help sometimes we try to keep it in house for too long and I do think it’s so important.
Tom: So, how do I know if I need to go to a counselor?
Julie: Right, right.
Tom: If you’ve had the thought, “maybe I need to go to a counselor,” you need to go. Maybe you’re wrong and they won’t help you but go and find out. There is only one way to find out. You also need to realize that counseling is a little like dating. When you were dating, the first person you dated wasn’t necessary the person you were going to marry, and the first counselor you go to may not be the person that God has for you. You might need to try two or three people to find the right person.
Julie: Why do you think sometimes within the Christian construct, people are really hesitant to engage that level of professional counseling when it comes to trying to rebuild and move beyond some really challenging circumstances in our lives?
Tom: You know, I studied this for a long time, there’s actually some theological reason behind it. Sometimes we feel like counseling causes us to look away from God’s word and to look, instead to human answers to our problems. Some counselors can do that. But, if you get a good Biblical counselor they are going to help you look to God’s word. I found even counselors who are not followers of Jesus Christ, if they’re good counselor, they tend to teach biblical principles many times, not all the time, but many times, because those are the principles that work in people’s lives. But when you combine that with somebody who knows the Lord and has God’s spirit in their lives then you find the power of God working.
Julie: We are bouncing a bit because you have such a beautiful 7 step process for walking through building things and putting things back together and this is all from your new book putting it together again when it’s all falling apart I’m going to jump ahead just a little bit because I want our listeners to go out and get the book and work through it and read through all of the amazing truth that you are able to bring to the table on the topic, but you talk about that celebration should be part of that rebuilding process. You know, I think a lot of times, people think, “When I get to this destination then I’ll celebrate,” but it sounds to me like you are talking about celebrating during the journey.
Tom: Well yeah because to rebuild you have to have energy, so where does the energy come from? Celebration! From the celebration of worshiping the Lord. There is a very famous verse in Nehemiah that says, “The Joy of the Lord is my strength.” Not my determination is my strength and not even my determined faith and trust in the Lord is my strength but the joy of the Lord is my strength. Many times we lose strength because we lose joy in our lives, we lose celebration.
Celebration always starts with worship. There’s a lot of ways we can celebrate, a lot of things that we should celebrate in our lives, but it always starts with a focus on God because he’s the one who gave us all good things to enjoy, he’s the one who made us to understand that everything we look at is a particular creation that he made in such a way that we can look at it and realize God loves me. God wants to be a part of my life right now and apart from that celebration you won’t last in the rebuilding. In order to last you have to celebrate and you have to dedicate. Those are the two things you have to do in order to last.
Julie: So tell me a little bit about dedication.
Tom: So dedication is letting yourself know that this isn’t about you, letting yourself know that it really is about what he’s doing in your life and one of the ways you do that is by taking whatever he has done and allowing him to use it to encourage other people. 1 Corinthians teaches us so clearly that whatever hurts we’ve had in our lives God wants to use them in other people’s lives all the way in the 2nd Corinthians Paul keep teaching that same truth that we’ve got a ministry in other people’s lives. Dedicating it to God is one of his the way that anything last and the pattern of the Old Testament is they would dedicate it to God, it would all fall apart and then they would realize their sin, they would confess the sins, then dedicate it to God again, but then again would fall apart and over again. It is the same cycle. A lot of us have been through that cycle. Every one of us in some way because when it starts to work we start to think all this must be me or is he going to keep working. We don’t realize that it’s our dedication to God that caused it to work in the first place, and that’s going to keep it working. Whatever is important in your life, just let me invite everybody right now in your life, just say, “Lord, I dedicate it to you.It’s dedicated to you.” That is one of the most important moments for making sure that things will continue to last and to be rebuilt.
Julie: You know I think for a lot of us, I think we like putting out our goals and putting out our strategies and we have these end results that we have in mind. We can approach a rebuilding season for relationship or finances or for habits or things along those lines and we can sometimes forget that maybe God might have another plan so are their circumstances upon which perhaps we’re not supposed to rebuild?
Tom: That’s why we don’t want to dedicate it to God because he might say, “I got a different direction with it. I want to keep it close enough.” We have a birthday party for Jesus every year in our family. One of things we do is talk about just simply wha we are thankful for in the last year and what we want to give to Jesus this next year. I told my family I want to give to Jesus is living with an open hand, so he can put in what he wants to put in and take out what he wants to take out. I know I’m hard that is to do haven’t been a follower of Jesus Christ for many decades now because I want to hold on to it I want to make it work the way that I wanted to but I’ve learned in those decades that what he wants to take out really does need to be taken out and what he wants to put in even if I’m afraid for it to be put in he really does want to use that in my life so when you think about dedicating your life to God. That is a picture of living that way that I’m doing this next year.
Julie: How do we live with that open hands? So we’ve been saying okay, I’m going to rebuild that marriage and we put in the time and we’ve done the things and we have humbled ourselves and we’ve gone to the counselor and yet the other party just doesn’t seem willing. Have if we failed in the rebuild?
Tom: I need to state two things about that that I feel with equal passion. First, I found that most people stop rebuilding way too soon. They give up way too soon because it takes so much energy and because there’s so much hurt and pain in it. I understand why we do that. I understand why I do that and so we need other people in our lives to encourage us to take that one extra step. I can’t tell you how many stories of people’s lives we rebuilt It was just because somebody took one extra step and that one extra step all of a sudden things begin to open up because of that and so I would encourage you, if you feel like it’s just not going to work to take that one extra step.
With equal passion, I feel the truth that you cannot force someone else to change their mind, even God doesn’t force us to change our minds. So there does come a point where the other person has decided, you can’t force them to change their mind, and now you’re not taking extra steps, now you’re at the point where you become almost codependent and trying to force them to think the way that you want them to think at that point living with an open hand made you have to let that go to God. That’s very painful to even say, but when you do that you have to recognize God may bring the person back. Many times when you let the person go, truly let them go, it’s like you stop playing their game, they’re saying, “Wait, you’re supposed to chase after me. I liked it that way,” and when you let them go, it’s like you release the tension on the rubber band and they get a little bit afraid of that, and that’s when they will many times chase after you. Just some advice if that happens. Don’t go back right away. Give it some time. Let God work on their heart. What you really want to see is God work again. If they really are committed to change, it won’t be at a one time commitment or decision, it will be something they express over many weeks and months.
Julie: I think that applies not just in marriage relationships but with adult kids who are making bad decisions, or coworkers or bosses you’re struggling with or people you are in community with.
Tom: We chase after them which they hate, but then we’re silent for a week or two and they calls and say, “Why haven’t you called me.”
Julie: Well, Tom, what is the main thing that, if you had to, you could condense all of this just incredible message down to what you want people to walk away with when it comes as a legacy from the message of Putting It Together Again When It’s All Fallen Apart: 7 Principles for Rebuilding Your Life .
Tom: Well, the main heart I had behind this was so many people I talk to need to rebuild but just can’t find the energy to do it, can’t find the place to get started. We’ve been talking here at the end about some of the things we do after the rebuilding has started, but for most people listening to this, if there’s some rebuilding that needs to be done, it just looks impossible right now. The first chapters of the book are what to do when it looks impossible. If you started out there and watch what God would do I think some good encouragement would come. I think we all feel alone when we need to rebuild and I want people to know that they’re not alone, that 
God is with them in this and that there is a process that they can walk through. A Biblical, God-given process that can cause them to be in a different place,. Maye not a few months but in a few years.
Julie: Tom, if people want to connect with you where can they find you. Tom Holladay on Facebook is a great place to connect. Tom, thank you for being here today. The book is Putting It Together Again When It’s All Fallen Apart: 7 Principles for Rebuilding Your Life . Thank you for your heart.
Tom: Do you mind if I pray for moms? Since we are focusing on Mom’s before we close it would love that. Lord I pray for every mom listening to this. I know a lot of them need to rebuild things maybe in their family maybe in a business that they’re working with, maybe from something in the past, I pray, Jesus, that you would give with your spirit hope, hope that you can make a difference, hope that you can cause things to happen in our lives that we could never cause to happen. We look to you, Jesus, as the comforter that we need. Amen.
Julie: Amen.
Next week we are looking forward to listening to Sam Kelly, whose voice you may recognize on-air! She has an incredible story of how she walked through a failing marriage, come into a new one and then a baby who just turned out a little different than Sam was thinking. Her name is Zoe and her story is incredible. Tune in next week.
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