Dates, Mates and Babies with the Vallottons
Dates, Mates and Babies with the Vallottons
93. Surrender: The Way Forward
Description:
Life is hard—and family and marriage, as part of God’s design, come with their own challenges. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In this episode, we unpack the tension between fulfilled dreams and unmet expectations. We explore the trap of believing, “I’ll be happy when…” and how comparison can steal our joy. What happens when reality doesn’t match the dreams we had?
We dive into the truth that God’s dreams for us are often bigger—and harder—than what we imagine. Yet, it’s through surrender and perseverance that we discover deeper joy. Drawing from Scripture, we reflect on what it means to embrace the hard work, steward what’s been given, and trust that barren places can become fertile ground for God’s purposes.
Key Themes:
- The mindset of "I’ll be happy when…" and the dangers of unrealistic expectations
- How comparison leaves us disappointed
- Trusting that God’s dreams for us are greater than our own
- Enduring hard seasons with faith, knowing that God rewards those who steward well
Scriptural Truths:
- Romans 12 – Living as a sacrifice, transformed by God
- Luke 9:23 – Taking up our cross daily
- Proverbs 3:5-6 – Trusting and submitting to God’s plan
- Psalm 23 – Finding comfort and provision in every season
Reflection Questions:
- How do I surrender and grieve disappointments when things don’t go as planned?
- What does it look like to truly give my dreams to Jesus?
- Is the joy I seek found in a fulfilled dream, or in surrendering my dream to Him?
- Can the barren places in my life become fertile ground for God’s purposes?
Join us as we reflect on the joy that comes not from ease, but from faithfulness, endurance, and trusting God’s bigger picture—even when it looks nothing like we imagined.
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We're the Valetans and we are passionate about people.
Speaker 1:Every human was created for fulfilling relational connection.
Speaker 2:But that's not always what comes easiest.
Speaker 1:We know this because of our wide range of personal experience, as well as our years of working with people.
Speaker 2:So we're going to crack open topics like dating, marriage, family and parenting to encourage, entertain and equip you for a deeply fulfilling life of relational health.
Speaker 1:Welcome back everyone to Dates, Mates and Babies with the Valetins. Yes, I just got back from a men's retreat, a long range shooting school for BraveCo had a fantastic time. Listen, guys, if you are wanting to take a great adventure at some point, we do these long range shooting schools. I do men's retreats, stuff like that. You just gotta gotta look around, it's awesome.
Speaker 2:You gotta look around. You gotta look around. What does that mean?
Speaker 1:Oh, you gotta look at our Instagram. My Instagram stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, amazing things for the men to get involved in. Oh man For sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just I love to. We're not going to talk about this today, but I'm just coming off of it, right?
Speaker 2:Great yeah.
Speaker 1:We had like, uh, 15 guys, there 16 guys and it's so cool because you watch a guy come in. They don't really know anybody, they're a little bit nervous and by the end of the week they're like best buds shooting 1200 yards, eating roasted lamb on a spigot spit, spit I think not.
Speaker 2:a spigot water comes on a spit Sorry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'm trying just. Incredible week. I just saw so much breakthrough and cool transformation and we had a couple of young guys guys there too 17 and they just they were awesome. Yeah, it's so cool man, these young guys watching like having these other men, grown men like pour into them and cheer them on priceless golly, I just love it yeah, well, yeah, so Jason was gone for the better part of a week. How was it for you, babe?
Speaker 2:Well, you know what? A couple things to note. Number one it was really hard. Yeah yeah, Single parenting is not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1:For those of you that are single parents out there, we seriously want to stop and say you're doing awesome. It's the hardest job in the world.
Speaker 2:It's the hardest job in the world. Anytime, jay and I do single parenting.
Speaker 2:For any length of time we have this conversation, we're like, oh my gosh, we have one I can think of. I have one friend in particular who's been a single mom since her youngest baby was seven months old and he she had no help before that anyways, and uh, what she has done with her two children and the life that she has built for and with them is stunning. And some of the single parents that I look at around I'm like wow. It's real. It's impressive.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like you do those night times by yourself for years in and years out. You're a different kind of person.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:You know, burly, like you can withstand some punches, it's true you know Burley, like you can withstand some punches you know, but I'm glad to have my teammate back. That's what I got to say, Cause it was a hard week and um, but here's the wind, guys. I got to say I did not lose my cool.
Speaker 2:No this is a big for me. This is big for me. Jason's parting words to me as he left to go on his trip were babe, whatever you do, do not match her energy when she freaks out, talking about our four-year-old daughter who, if you've been listening for a bit, you know that our youngest daughter has some sensory stuff and some dysregulation issues. And yeah, I mean like I'm not great sometimes at not matching her energy and that things escalate especially if I'm not there to like yeah, like run interference a little bit.
Speaker 2:So, but I have to say I had that line in my mind the whole week and she had some of the harder moments that she's had in a while while Jason was gone. This week, and I have to be honest, I really stuck to the script and I'm proud of myself. I did not lose my mind, I did not get angry, I did not explode on anybody. Um, yeah, that was a big win for us.
Speaker 1:So way to go, babe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, um, jay's back. The kids and I are stoked that he is and we are back in action. Today's podcast episode is, you know, actually I'm just going to kind of share a little bit about what's been on my heart the last week or so. We're going to talk about that, and I think I'll just start by sharing a conversation I had on the phone with a friend yesterday. Um, one of my lifelong friends, uh, she's a mom to twin two-year-olds.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's easy.
Speaker 2:And uh, I just giggle because when we were little, she wanted to have twins, like she would talk about how her dream was to have twins. And here she is she got her twins. They actually adopted these twins to have twins. And here she is she got her twins. They actually adopted these twins. And um man, she's, she's grinding. You know it's a grind.
Speaker 2:And her husband was out of town too, so it was just like, wow, what a life, uh. But what we were talking about is how you know some of the things, especially with regards to relationships. Whether it's you know, you're single and you just want to be in a, in an epic dating relationship, or you're dating and you're you're. Or you're single and you long to be married someday. Or you're you're married but you just dream of having children and maybe it takes longer like it did for us longer to have babies than you would have wanted. Just that reality of like you can spend a lot of time, a lot of years, dreaming of and longing for something a spouse a child, whatever that thing is.
Speaker 2:And then when that, when that fulfillment comes you know this concept of like with any sort of breakthrough and increase, everything increases the joy, yes, the sense of purpose and fulfillment, yes, but the stress and the pressure too. And when we dream of our desires being fulfilled, we don't usually account for the stuff that's bound to increase. That's not fun. And so you know, we can be grown adults and, you know, married with children, which would tick off a lot of people's boxes of dreams fulfilled. And yet we're finding ourselves in a really hard time. What my friend and I were talking about yesterday is how it's crazy that God is the one who actually designed us for marriage and family. Yet in the context of marriage and family we find some of our greatest hardships. And so if it's by design and it's challenging, then that it is hard must mean it's not bad.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's not bad that it's hard.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:But it is hard and there's a lot of struggle inside of those hard places in our lives, whether it's marriage or parenthood or whatever, or singleness. So we're going to talk a little bit about kind of that. What is inside of some of that truth to unpack in your heart, like what are the implications of that, what are some of the truths inside of those tensions? And probably because we're really practical people, we'll talk about, like, how to practically navigate some of that heart territory.
Speaker 1:Let me just start by saying the. The place I think which I don't have this all the way mastered or anything, but the place where I think we really mess up is we go. It's not, this isn't like I'll be happy when. I'll be happy when I have more money gosh and we can relax and we don't feel like we're always pressed.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:I'll be happy when we have these kids, these babies that are amazing, that just we can grow these little humans and I can wrestle with them and I can put pigtails in her hair and she'll wear overalls and it'll be so cute when I'm gone, you guys will have these fun little trips that you do. It'll be amazing Right but now. But right now, I have this unfulfilled part of my heart, so it's hard to be happy, or I'll be happy when I'm married.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:All these other couples are together and they do life and, yeah, it's hard, right, I know that it's hard for them, but they have each other. And so I have this missing piece of me that is unsatisfied, that feels unfulfilled, and therefore I'm stuck in like this pain because I want something that I don't have, and this idea that I will be happy when puts so much pressure on the now that I have it. What's wrong?
Speaker 1:I this was supposed to be easier. This was supposed to be funner. This was supposed to be funner. This was supposed to bring more joy to me. This was supposed to be more peaceful. And this was supposed to be is a misconception in my mind, at least for me, from when I look at my life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This was supposed to be because, like, even if I step back and like if I map, if I timeline my life just really fast, and like, if I map, if I timeline my life just really fast, man, there's just so much heart in it. There's the addiction that started at 10 years old to masturbation and I just think about, like I don't want my kids to be addicted to masturbation at 10 years old. No.
Speaker 1:All the way to 16. And then the pornography use and the getting married at 18 and the hard marriage and getting having kids at 19 and divorce at 27 and nervous breakdown that lasted five years and the remarriage, and you know, there's just so much heart in it. So I do think the place where we set ourselves up for failure is in. I'll be happy when place where we set ourselves up for failure is in. I'll be happy when. It reminds me of when I was a school ministry pastor at Bethel Church and you were one as well. For years and years and years, we had told our students that if you're in my revival group, you're in my family. Welcome to the family. And so each pastor there's probably 12 or 13 pastors, depending upon the first year or second year or third year of the school each pastor had around 50 to 60 students and those were your students that you were pastoring, and for years we would call them family. This is our Revival Group family. You're in our family, we talk a lot about family. We would call them family. This is our Revival Group family, you're in our family, we talk a lot about family.
Speaker 1:And then we started to realize, like man, these students are one in a lot of pain and they have these expectations for us pastors that we can't possibly fulfill. And then we realized it's our fault. I'm calling the student that I just met this year a part of my family, and what they're thinking is that I'm going to treat them like I treat my kids. So they're like, well, I, I'm hurting and you're not helping. I'm like, well, I mean I, how can you possibly solve 50 people's problems? Well, I have financial problems and I'm coming to you and you know my kids have access to my bank account on a lot of levels. My kids have access to my off work time. My kids have access to my refrigerator in my home and and the students would start to go like we've never even been over your home and yet we're family.
Speaker 1:Okay, where am I going with this? Because we created this unrealistic expectation. It led to tons of pain. So we had to switch the expectation and people and go like you're not. We didn't even say what they were. We just said this is our, you are our like, you're our people and this is what you can expect from me this year. And relay better. This is what you can expect from me this year. And relay better, a better like picture of who they really are for us, for me, for you, for for people we have these ideals, this this idealistic view of what parenting is going to be, what marriage is going to be, what sex is going to be.
Speaker 1:I mean, let's get honest. I thought about my sex life for ever I mean 10 years old and what it was going to be like. Oh man, when I get married, my wife's going to do crazy things. I mean, for a guy that was like the woo.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's so much pain in a lot of people's sex lives because you're having to sex lives, because you're having to recalibrate what's not just realistic, but what actually? Brings joy. Yes, so I think a lot of the challenge with with parenting, with marriage, with um, our you know, our sex lives is we have these unrealistic expectations where we think that is. We have these unrealistic expectations where we think that the bad is a problem. We think the hard, sorry, we think the hard is what's keeping me from the joy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I would be happier if X.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, I think too, because I don't spend a lot of time thinking I would be happier if dot dot dot. But what I do spend time doing is grieving the loss. It feels like a loss of the ideal that I had. So I'm, you know, realistic enough to go well, there's no changing this life. This is what it is Like. This is the marriage that I have, which I love, by the way. These are the kids that I have, who I love. But inside of the struggles, you know I'm not going to go in in the hard places of our marriage, I don't get to just shop around and find a new spouse. And in the hard places of raising children, I don't get to send back the kids that I have and get kids that do enjoy wearing pigtails and overalls, like this is what I have. So that's that and I love. I love these people of mine.
Speaker 2:But what I do find myself doing quite often is, in the hard moments, there's grief and there, and, and if I'm grieving it's over the loss of whatever dream or ideal I had. And you know we've talked a lot on this episode. Well, we've talked in other episodes about processing pain and how to do that. There's practical ways to actually process painful thoughts and painful memories and painful experiences, but we do like when we hit those griefs in our life. I think we have to know what to do with them. We can't sit with them forever, but it is important to acknowledge them and to validate them for ourselves. I just think that learning what to do in the places of grief is one thing, but what's been on my heart and my mind lately, more than even what to do practically with my grief, is, um, what do I believe about this grief in my life? What do I like? What is the truth about the hard places in my life? And I would say I mean, if I was just to kind of like detail for you what's been on my mind the most recently, it would be um, okay, we had this dream of having children of our own after we've. We raised our older kids and got them mostly through junior, high and high school, and it took us a long time to have babies. So you know, I have this ideal in my mind, like we've just done this hard thing. We've raised a set of kids like high five. They're thriving. That's a win. I'm really excited to have babies we finally get pregnant with our daughter. She's born precious cute.
Speaker 2:You do that first little bit of motherhood where you're like, wow, having a newborn baby is wild. And then you move into like, oh my gosh, she's eight months old and she's like sleeping and this is amazing and I have a lot of vision for what this is gonna look like. We're gonna grow together. We're doing this little life together, me and you. And then part of my dream was that I would get to raise babies with my mom. You know like we bought this house there's an upstairs apartment. I had visions of my parents coming to stay for long stretches of time to help me raise these babies, and there's so much joy in the ideal. And then, when Edie was nine months old, my mom got diagnosed with terminal cancer. So instantly my dream of raising littles with my mom vanished. There's so much grief there, of course.
Speaker 2:Then, shortly after our son was born, our daughter started exhibiting a lot of really interesting behaviors and we learned that she's got some nervous system dysregulation stuff which lots of kids do do, as we have learned Lots of kids do. But the impact of our life at home together is pretty dramatically different than what I would have imagined or dreamed of in raising a little girl. I I joked like I've I've dreamed of raising a little girl that likes me to put pigtails in her hair and she likes to wear a little overall dresses and cute little ruffly socks. Well, false, like our daughter, like you don't touch her hair with a hairbrush, you she definitely doesn't wear ruffly socks. In fact, she doesn't wear socks at all. In fact she wears sandals in the winter and she wears the same pair of one pair of pants every single day of the week because they're the only pants that feel good, and from time to time she'll try a new shirt. But normally she's going to walk out of the house every day looking semi homeless because she doesn't want her hair brushed and she can't wear normal clothes. And you know there's grief in that for me, not because she's not wearing cute clothes, but because she gets so dysregulated with her sensory issues that she erupts into really aggressive tantrums at home every single day and I get semi-verbally attacked by my four-year-old most days and I'm telling you what, guys? That wasn't the dream. That wasn't the dream. So presently there's grief for me in like this is my lot. Like this is what I've been given. God has entrusted me with these kids.
Speaker 2:In this context, without a mom and without, you know, a ton of resources at our disposal, to like figure it out, we're just, we're putting one foot in front of the other and on a hard day I would say on a hard day I can sit down and I can go. Wow, I longed to be married. Here I am. Marriage is great. We've worked hard.
Speaker 2:I've longed to be a mom. I've been a mom for 13 years. It's been really tough. I longed to have babies of my own. I have two babies. What a blessing. And somehow, after getting all of those deep desires fulfilled, getting all of those deep desires fulfilled, my life is harder today than it was 14 years ago when I was single and dreaming, and I think that is a that is a tension to sort out in life. That is a tension and what I'm learning, like what I'm processing on a deep heart level right now, is that when our desires are fulfilled, we tend to think it's about us and you know, on one theological level, I deeply believe that God cares about the desires in our hearts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:But ultimately I think that we're so unaware of the bigger plan that he has and that go on is the journey of understanding that this is way more about the dreams that are inside of the heart of God than it is about my own little dream and my own little understanding of how that dream will come to pass and what it will feel like when it does.
Speaker 1:I mean, I love that so much because, ultimately, we're all following Jesus's model, right, like? That's the goal for us believers. And this, the standard in which Jesus came was. He said it's not my will, but it's God's will that I'm doing. I'm coming down here, I'm not doing what I want to do, but I'm coming down here doing it, not just what God wants me to do, but how he wants me to do it. And that was very evident when he was going to the cross. Right, he was in the garden and he doesn't want, he doesn't want to die, he doesn't want to go through the punishment, through the whipping, through the beatings, through the nails, through his wrists and feet. And he asked God, like is there any other way that we can do this, which I'm so thankful that he did.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Because he didn't even like the pathway.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And then Jesus makes this recalibration. He says it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross. He found peace and he found joy in knowing the ultimate outcome. I'm pleasing my Father, I'm doing the will of my Father, and it's an interesting thing because it's like you get a say in the direction. Well, it's the Bible verse that man plans but God directs the steps. You get a say in the plan, but ultimately God's going to go. This is where your foot lands and then this is where the next foot lands.
Speaker 1:And, um, and I've been thinking a lot as you're talking about responsibility, because all the all, really, what we're talking about is us graduating into more and more and more responsibility, which reminds me of the story in Luke.
Speaker 1:It talks about the parable of the talents and there's a different measure given to each of these servants One, he gives whatever three, and to the next, he gives two and three, and to the next he gives, um, or sorry, two and three and five. And the guy that had five multiplied his to 10 talents, and the guy that was given three multiplied his, and the guy that was given two or one buried his and he didn't do anything with it. And what you see is the master saying to the guy who hid and buried his talent like you're wicked and you're evil. That's actually what he says of him You're wicked, evil servant. He takes the one where the guy didn't try and he gave it to the guy who had the most. But for the guy who had the most, he took a guy who was good, who was faithful with finances, and he puts him over 10 cities. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is a crazy jump. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Right, like you, did a great job with the master's money, and he doesn't give you $20 this time, or 20 minus. He gives you 10 cities. And when I think about what we're talking about here, I look at my dad's life and the men that are ahead of me. Their whole life has been a graduation unto more responsibility, more troubles, more problems, more resources needed, bigger prayers, more faith, more reward, more joy, more whatever I mean community, and so I think it's part of where we're at in life when I look at it. That's why I feel like the mourning is important, because Matthew, says yeah, the grief sorry.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, mourning grief, yeah.
Speaker 1:Matthew says that blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Right. And mourning isn't always for something. You know, I had this tragedy in my life. Yeah, mourning often is I have this thing that's. I have these expectations that I really wanted. Yeah. And my life's not. That Life is not what I wanted it to be. But if I can mourn that, then I can change my perspective. I can get a whole new perspective. Your mom's not coming back.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:And our financial situation's going to change, but it's slow, right, and we're going to make progress with our kids, but not at the speed that we would want.
Speaker 2:Totally. So, to me like I don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. Those are the areas that I have pain as well. I have pain in our finance. I feel like I've been pushing hard to solve it for several years now.
Speaker 2:And we still have room to grow. And we have room to grow, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's like God dang man.
Speaker 2:Totally, yeah, absolutely, and you know I'm. I'm thinking back to the conversation that I had with my friend on the phone yesterday who has the twins, and you know when I'm talking to her about it.
Speaker 2:it's funny how how things clarify for your own self when you're talking through it with somebody else about their life and and she, you know we're we're laughing about just the chaos of raising kids and having toddlers is just bananas sometimes. But you know, when we were talking I said you know it's wild, like it's actually supposed to be hard work. Like life is actually hard work, a good life is a life where you work hard.
Speaker 2:And I told her. I said you know what? We're at a little bit of a disadvantage because we're raising kids in 2024.
Speaker 2:Imagine if we were raising these toddlers in the 1800s, where you know you live out on your family's farm and you are working the land and you are homesteading, you are providing for yourself, you're making your clothing, you are making your food, you are making your shelter. You may have some extended family around you that you have community with, but largely you're doing this thing and the and the goal of life is to survive and provide for your kids and hand something down to your kids so that they can survive in a way that's a little easier than you Like. If we were raising our kids in the 1800s, when our children were hard to put down for a nap, we wouldn't be getting on Instagram looking at the mom who is currently traveling the Caribbean with her perfectly tanned husband and her two beach blonde kids, and it looks like her life is perfection. And yet here we are just desperately trying to get our kids down for one nap. Like the level of comparison that we have access to right now makes stewarding those places of your heart a little harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think comparison is the greatest thief of joy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I said to her like, hey, listen, raising kids is supposed to be a lot of work. Anything that you're really proud of, that you do in your life, has been work. It has cost you something to get there. That you do in your life has been work. It has cost you something to get there.
Speaker 2:So you know, we just happen to be living in 2024 when the illusion of ease is everywhere, but actually a good marriage is a lot of work. It is actually raising awesome, responsible children is a crack load of work. It is.
Speaker 2:And and anything else that we do that we're really proud of is going to take a ton of effort. And, yeah, hopefully every now and then we do get to go on an awesome vacation. But you know what, if we don't imagine what life was like in the 1800s? They were still trying to figure out marriage and raising kids and all of that. They were just doing it in a very different context. So we can't forget that we are human beings. Doing the hard work Like heart work is not different just because we live in the age of ease heart work connection work, family work, relationship.
Speaker 2:Work is the same as it's always been. It takes a lot of intentionality and a lot of, I think, stewarding our minds and our hearts well to actually not be robbed, in the midst of the hardship, by that temptation to compare or the grief even of it being different than you expected.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's true. Here's a couple of verses that I just want to read for us. Okay, I think again helps, like there's um in Romans 12,. It says offer yourself as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God and man, when you think about yourself as a living sacrifice. Sacrifice, yeah Right.
Speaker 1:Like that it becomes this I become pleasing to God when I am sacrificing in a holy way, right In a way where I'm going. This isn't my will, it's your will. And um, in Luke 9, 23,. It says um, jesus is teaching. He says whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.
Speaker 1:And you can take this a whole bunch of different ways. It's not about not having needs, it's not about having desires, but it's having this ultimate realization that, again, this life is not your own and you don't get. The goal of life isn't to indulge and to be a glutton. The goal of life is to be pleasing to God. Yeah, and so I'm going to pick up these things, this cross. I have this. Okay, I've got the way that I want to go, but then I have this way that God's asking me to go.
Speaker 1:And in Proverbs 3, 5 and 6, it says trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to him and he will make your path straight, which is just this crazy picture right Of. In everything that I'm doing, I'm going to lean on God, I'm going to trust in God, I'm going to submit, yeah, and he's the one that's going to iron all this out. Yeah, there's an incredible burden that we feel to solve all this, even with our kids. There's an incredible burden that you and I feel to like okay, how do we get our daughter to be regulated, how do we get her to? And the fear of what she's going to be when she gets older if we don't solve this Right. That's actually, for me, that's the real misery, and it is when I start to think, like, if we don't fix this now, then what kind of teenager will she?
Speaker 1:be. Yeah, it's not what's happening today, it's the fear of what will happen tomorrow. But I think the picture of what the real Christian life was designed to be knowing that the joy is in. The real joy is in doing His will. The real joy is in trusting Him. The real joy is in trusting him. The real joy is in submitting to him, knowing that he is the light into my feet the lamp before my path, which means I actually can't see further than that.
Speaker 1:He's this I'm doing one step at a time. He sees the big picture. I'm trusting him for this thing right here. And then the last picture that I want to give I mean I'm talking to me as much as anybody here is Psalms 23. We have this man who is broken down. This person that's broken down, he's emotionally, mentally, physically, completely devastated, and it says that he gets laid down in the green pastures and his soul gets restored. Now, if it was me and this was my kids, and I restored their soul. I would send them out into the pastures of peace. I'd be like y'all go into this place of peace, don't leave it. But god restores his soul and then he sends him on his mission, which is, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. We were built and born for the value of the shadow of death, because our job on this earth is to bring peace to chaos.
Speaker 1:Totally because our job on this earth is to bring peace to chaos Totally. There is no mission in which the believer doesn't go into darkness to bring light.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:We are removing the basket off of ourselves and shining light into this world. That is an incredible responsibility. It's what the disciples saw when. It's why Peter denied Jesus three times. And if you look at how most of the disciples died, they had realized oh my gosh, this life is going to cost me everything. Totally. But I gain everything in my submission. I don't have this all figured out. These are just the verses for me that I'm like.
Speaker 1:no, this is a picture of what we've been called to Every other picture every other picture that we look at is promising something that he didn't promise us. Every other picture is an unrealistic expectation. If I lean on him, if I trust him, if I put my hope in him, my faith in him, I can rest assured and be sound in the storm.
Speaker 2:So good. Yeah, the last thing I'll say that is really really helpful, that is so good. I'll list out those verses for you guys in the show notes, but I think, with all that we just said, I'll say this. With all that we just said, I'll say this.
Speaker 1:I have a short list of things that I feel like I need to learn more about in this season.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a long list, but, on this topic, a list of things I really feel like I need to learn in the season. So if what we're saying like resonates with anybody out there, then you know, sometimes we have to figure out like, okay, then what's the next? Like what do I do next, or whatever. Well, I don't a hundred percent know exactly what you do next, but what I know I need to learn in this season is a couple of things. Number one I need to practice surrendering and and and partly. What I think that looks like is I think it looks like actually grieving the disappointment, so potentially like actually do, like processing that pain. I think part of of surrendering is actually processing the pain.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:So I know I need to practice, that I need to. I know that I want to learn more, and this is like in my time with God, in my reading the word what does it actually mean to have surrendered something to Jesus? Like what is that actually? Because if you're going through something hard and you know that he's asking you to surrender it quote nailing it to the cross or quote giving it to Jesus is theoretical until you figure out how to actually do that. So that's on my list of things to do, and then you know understanding. Okay, what is the joy? Like God give, redefine for me the joy, because it isn't obviously like unending joy is not in the fulfillment of a dream. That's not where joy is, because in the fulfillment of the dream we've already talked about this comes the increase, the increase of the hard and the increase of the good. So what is the actual joy? And God, would you help me, on a deeper level, understand what it is that Jesus is our joy? And then I'm reminded of I have a friend of mine.
Speaker 2:Her name is Charity Osorio.
Speaker 2:We've actually had her and her husband on the podcast before, but she was teaching at one of our women's nights at Bethel Church last week and she was talking about how, all through scripture, we see that it's in our barren places where the dreams of God are actually birthed, places where the dreams of God are actually birthed, and so inviting the Lord to show us in those places of pain or loss or grief, or disappointment or overwhelm.
Speaker 2:I have a friend right now who's getting married. She's never been married before and the dream of her life is to get married. She's also becoming a step-mom and they're buying a house and she's moved to a new city and she's working. Guess what? The dream of her life fulfilled equals like more work than she could have ever imagined. So maybe the pain is actually the overwhelm. Whatever it is that we would learn about how to give into the barrenness of a loss or of a grief or of a disappointment, trusting that actually it's in those places where the dreams of God are birthed. And isn't it more important that we would be aware of his story than of our own little tiny chapter in the, in the whole book, you know?
Speaker 2:So all that to say, I feel like those are the things that my heart is longing to have deeper understanding over in this season. I love it and hopefully it's helpful for you guys listening.
Speaker 1:It's so great. Let's pray for them. Yeah, father, thank you for what you're doing in our lives and each one of our lives. Lord, that this is a part of your ultimate plan, god, that you love us so much. And, lord, I ask that you would come as the comforter, as our father, as our leader. Lord, that you would meet each person where they're at God. Lord, that we would be able to surrender to your will, surrender to the life that you've given us, and feel so much peace and so much joy. Lord, would you guide us on this path like a good father. Amen.
Speaker 2:Amen.
Speaker 1:All right y'all. Thanks so much for joining us this week. Hopefully you loved it. If you're getting a ton out of it, would you share it with a friend or even repost some of our stuff on social media? It helps us a bunch. Otherwise, have an incredible week. We will see you next week.