15. The Quest for MORE

Host, Vona Johnson, reflects on her faith journey and understanding God's plan in this heartfelt episode. She shares how perceived missteps and years of uncertainty were laying a foundation for her true calling.

Vona reveals the importance of continued faith and trust in God's plan, even when life's path seems unclear. She shares how her podcast Courageous Retirement came to be and introduces the concept of ClubMore, encouraging viewers to find and live their MORE in life, driven by faith and God's purpose for each of us.

Scripture referenced:
Psalm 19: 7-9

Become an official member of ClubMore  at: https://www.clubmore.live.

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Learn more about Vona at vonajohnson.com.

#liveyourmore #courageousfaith #retirement #ClubMore

Thank you for stopping by today! Remember to Engage Your Faith and Live Your More as you reap the benefits of Courageous Retirement!

To watch the video, check out my YouTube Channel!

Learn more about the show, author Vona Johnson, and more at CourageousRetirement.com!

Schedule a free 15 minute Your Path to More call with Vona.

Transcript

0:00

Do you ever wonder if God is listening to you when you pray and you ask for something? Or more importantly, do you ever wonder if you misunderstood when he answered your prayer? I have been there. And it's been an ongoing issue between me and God. For. Not just weeks or months, but years. And just recently I've started to realize that all of the wrong turns and the misunderstandings that I had along the way. Weren't those at all. That God was just building a foundation for me that I couldn't see how all of the bricks fit together. Until just recently, it just was like, Oh, Of course, this makes so much sense, Lord. And when I needed to like start putting on the next layer, I already had all of the pieces in place. It's so easy to feel like we're on the wrong path. That we misunderstood that we're doing something that we shouldn't be doing. And I'm here today to tell you that God will use all of those"missteps". Those wrong paths. And turn them around for his good and for his glory. I hope you'll stick around and, and hear my story and see how it might actually apply to your story, because God does have a plan. He is listening to us. And although we want to think that our life is a straight line from here to there. It almost never is. It's really a quest and it's just a circular path that keeps coming back and forth and around. So I'm going to share that with you today. I hope you'll join me.

Speaker: 1:42

Do you fear what lies beyond retirement? What if it's a gateway to a life filled with purpose, meaning, and adventure rather than an end? Discover peace and fulfillment as you boldly enter this new chapter in Courageous Retirement, a Christian podcast. I'm your host, author and coach, Vona Johnson. Let's get started.

2:01

Years ago, I did a Beth Moore study called The Quest. At the time that we did that study, I was still in the work world. And I was starting to feel that that nudge that there has to be more to life that. That this, even though I loved my job and I loved the work that I was doing, I just, through this study and this understanding of how God leads us through life and the stumbles and how he makes them work. Somehow, I don't remember the details, but I just remember that feeling that it was like, yes, She's talking to me. And it's time to take the next step, even though I don't know what that will look like. So I did. I took some health coaching classes and I was going to be an amazing health coach. And then it shifted a little bit, and you've probably heard this story before, but it was like, Nope, I'm going to be a life coach. Oh, wait. You want me to talk about my faith? Really? Okay. And there's, there's stories and many of those are in my podcasts Longing for More because that's really what was going on. My soul was longing for more. Not more of all the things that I thought I needed. Not more money, not the millions of books that I thought I would sell when I wrote my book and not the money that I thought I would make by being this prestigious health coach. My soul was longing for more of Jesus Christ in my life. And I'd been on the path to get to know him for a long time. But it wasn't until I took that big step. That was a scary step. It wasn't until then that I started to realize how much I really needed God in my life and not the Sunday mornings or the Wednesday night Bible studies, but the daily interaction, the daily exchange and. And just immersing myself in his word. It was then that I started to realize what more really is. In fact, I wrote my book A Different View about. This, this longing for more, this need to fill our lives with more of God. And the more actually is an acronym for missing order. Redefine and eternal. And I'll get into all of that in, in other shows. I've, I've talked about it many times through the years, and if you're interested, I can send you a on it even. But I don't want to take the time to dig into that so much today, but I want to tell you, I want to show for you how God has woven all of these things that didn't make sense individually into something that I think is really beautiful. Um, first of all, I don't want to ever give you the impression that I don't have a good life that even though everything felt like it was wrong, I literally say on my website, I felt like a failure. I would put something out there and. Two or three people would respond. I had masterminds. I had group coaching. I had individual coaching and I've had clients off and on through the years, but never to the degree that I thought I would. And so every time that those didn't go the way that I thought God promised that they would go, I'd be like, well I must have misunderstood. Oh, oh, you want me to do that? Oh, okay. And I would go off and I would create another offer. I would create another package. I would put something else out there that would lure people into my business. And I realize now that, you know, part of that was just, I mean, people had to have seen that almost desperation in me. And that can be quite off-putting. I get that. Um, and I realized that God had provided everything that I needed and it wasn't about the money. And once I realized that and I set that need to earn aside. And just wanted to get out there and help people know God, the way that I've gotten to know God through this quest that I'm on. That's when I realized that that's what really matters. So I started the podcast a long time ago. I it's like I've gone through all these iterations. I literally started out with a blog. And I remember basing that on Proverbs 31. And there were two words in the devotion that really jumped out at me and it was truly live. And that was what I think I called my blog initially, because I wanted to help people to truly live. And then I got the idea to create a podcast and I started out with the podcast. Reviving the Soul based on Psalm 19: 7-9 I love that verse. It's still my verse. I love it because it's scripture that really revives our soul. That's what we're longing for. Well in one of the coaching programs that I had. This really high powered coach convinced me that nobody would know what reviving the soul meant. I needed to change. My name of my podcast, which was a huge effort. Trust me. And he wanted me to call it meant for more ironically, somebody else is using that and they're probably making millions of dollars off of it. I don't know. I don't follow it. But somehow that didn't ring true to me. What really rang true to me at the time was the words longing for more, because again, my soul was longing for more. So I did 175 some episodes of that. And just really, loved the, the experience of that podcast. Well then, uh, when I got breast cancer, I stopped the podcast for awhile. I wrote a book. Some point along the way I started that podcast again, wrote another book, all of these things, you know, it was just like taking the next step. Oh, that's what you want me to do now. God. Okay. I'll do that. But none of them ever really took off. Like I thought they would. Then somewhere in the last six months or so, I was working with a really beautiful couple who are coaching me through this from a biblical perspective, because I think that's really important. And I think sometimes that's how I got off path was I was listening to people who weren't looking at it from a biblical perspective. But anyway, I was talking to my coaches and we realized that one of the things that would really bring me joy would be to coach Christians to take this step into retirement and to be able to really answer god's call to more in this season when I call the best season, because we have the freedom to do what we want to do to do what our soul is longing for. So do what our soul is calling us to do. So. I created a coaching package. I even started a new podcast called courageous retirement And, and, and it was all good. It was like, okay, well, I guess the book, all those things didn't really have a purpose. And then another thing that I did was I created this quiz called the faith quiz, and it talks about the journey of moving through the more process from when we're beginning. New Christians. We, we get that sense of there's something missing and then we move and we start reading the Bible and we understand there's an order to things. And then we start redefining our priorities and then we start living for our eternal purpose. And in this path I did this quiz and, um, didn't really get a lot of traction and kind of forgot about it and recently. I've had people taking the quiz, the faith quiz.com. If you haven't taken it, I encourage you to do so. Um, and all of a sudden I'm getting people taking it, like. Every day, sometimes, maybe only every week. But a lot of people have taken it recently. It was like, huh? Isn't that interesting. And then I thought, well, if that's good, I'll create the retirement quiz. And I worked on it and I spent hours and hours and hours, and it just wasn't coming together. I mean, there were so many technical problems and I'd switch companies and there'd still be technical problems. And again, talking to my coach, they were like, You know, we don't always think that, Obstacles and hurdles are a sign not to move forward sometimes they're just to see how you can persevere. But it might be a sign this time that that's not where you should be. So I'm like, okay, I'll refocus my efforts on the faith quiz. And then I got a call out of the blue from a dear friend who is an incredible coach of her own. And we're going to actually have some conversations with her over the next few episodes, because she really does have an amazing story, but we were talking. And she said to me, something that just really clicked into place. She said, You know, It feels like you have so many different pieces and I recommend, I encourage you to find that one link, that one word that links it all together. And I realized that up until courageous retirement. That it always had been more, you know, live your more. And I didn't, I wasn't using that in courageous retirement. And then after we got off the call, it was just like, well, duh, Courageous retirement. Answer God's call to more, that's it? And it just ties it all together. And so I'm, I am have changed the tagline to this show and I'm just reincorporating all of these concepts. But what was really cool is one of the things that I had done along the way that just didn't come together again, was I wanted to do a membership. And I wanted to bring people together so that we could talk about, important issues from a faith perspective. And I wanted to just have a sense of community. And as I was talking through it with my coaches again, I realized that that's, I, I. In this season of my life and I'm busy taking care of parents and grandkids and doing the podcasts and writing for books and all the things. I don't have time to create a community. In fact, I'm in a number of communities. I don't really even take the time to interact in them as it is. Why would I want to create something that would take even more time? And then I got to thinking about it and I realized that we all want a sense of belonging. I had this ClubMore. This has been running through my, I mean, I even have t-shirts with the logo of ClubMore on them and as I'm. Thinking about this, it's like really? Ding, ding, ding. Club more can be the club-less if you will club, there's no meeting place. There's no dues. There's no requirement to do anything other than to identify with the principles in ClubMore. And so I've created this, this thing basically going to my newsletter will now be ClubMore and I have all kinds of ideas, not all of which are implemented yet, but I'm inviting people to join me in in club more. And if you're interested in that, I encourage you to go to the link at. Club more.live that's C L U B M O R E dot L I V E. And in that you will, see the pledge, and if you agree with that pledge and would like to be an official member of ClubMore, I would love to have you. And we'll just talk about how we live our more, both before and after retirement. And we'll talk about helping others live there more. And, and what a challenge that can be in the world that we live in today. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, I would love you to be the first to join ClubMore and just. If you resonate with it. Great. Sign-on and you'll, you'll actually get a printable form that you can sign and hang up on your wall or frame it. And. And just be a part of a community that believes that there is more to life and that there are things that we can do together. To help encourage others to live there more. God has a plan for all of us and it looks different for all of us. And. I believe that if we are leaning into him, And, and following the dreams that he put on our hearts. He will lead us to exactly where we need to be. So courageous retirement club more live your more, those are, those are those are the things that he has led me to, and I'll tell you, I love it. I. I get out of bed in the morning, excited to work on these things that I hope will encourage and empower you to live more for God and to answer his call. I hope that these words of encouragement are doing just that, that they're inspiring you to figure out what God might be calling you to. And I hope that you are feeling empowered to continue to take the next steps. Even if it doesn't look like what you think it should look like or what you thought it would look like. If it's something that God laid on your heart, just keep taking the next step. Keep keep laying the foundation of whatever your more is. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be published. It doesn't have to be anything as visible as what I'm working on. For you, it might be taking care of a neighbor, it might be driving veterans to the hospital for checkups. I mean, it could be anything. It might just be praying for your neighbors or your loved ones or the people in the nursing home, down the street. It's different for everyone. But God's got a plan and he's got a purpose for us all the way through the end of our lives. So I just encourage you to lean into that. And again, if this resonated with you and you want to be a member of ClubMore I'd love to have you there. I hope you'll come back in a couple of weeks where we are going to explore further this friend of mine and her journey. That's incredible on how she has done things. Built things. For children and their parents to help them live out their faith in this challenging the world. So thank you so much for stopping by today. I pray that you will engage your faith, live your more and feel the beautiful benefits of courageous retirement.