71 | A Time to Tear Down — What God Is Really Doing in Your Author Life

Sometimes you have to delete a few chapters and rewrite them to write a bestseller. And sometimes God has to do the same in your author life.

In today's episode I'm taking you deep into one of the most misunderstood seasons a Kingdom writer can find herself in — the one where nothing is working, nothing is growing, and no strategy seems to hold. Using Ecclesiastes 3:3 as our anchor, and the story of Nehemiah — a man who rebuilt an entire city from rubble in fifty-two days — I want to completely reframe the season you might be sitting in right now.

Because the tearing down is not the opposite of the building up. It is the prerequisite for it.

"A time to tear down, and a time to build up." — Ecclesiastes 3:3

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Transcript

Sometimes the chapters that get deleted are the ones that make the final book a best seller.

Ecclesiastes 3:3 says there is a time to tear down and a time to build up.

But what happens when God is the one doing the tearing down in your author business?

And what does that even look like in your author life?

If your author life feels like nothing is working right now, like you're pushing harder than ever and still getting nowhere,

today's episode is going to completely change your perspective on where you are at today. I want to take you deep into one of the most misunderstood seasons a Kingdom writer can find herself in.

And what Nehemiah, of all people,

has to teach us about it?

Grab your favorite beverage, friend, sit back and take a listen.

This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

I'm Urcelia Teixeira, ex real estate agent turned award winning Christian fiction author.

When I wrote my first novel on a bucket list whim, I I had no idea it would spark a spiritual journey that would redefine my calling. But you know what friend?

Self publishing wasn't easy. I got caught in the hustle chasing rankings and sales while desperately trying to stay rooted in Christ.

Now, by God's grace, I'm building my author business his way. And now he's called me to help you do the same.

Welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast with Where Faith Meets Business for Christian Writers. Let's write, publish and grow our author business God's way. Are you ready? Well then, let's get started.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urselia. And welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

If this is your first time here, consider this your official welcome to the Anointed Scribe Tribe.

I'm so glad you found your way here today, friend. And to my regulars. Hey friend. Good to have you back.

I'm grateful you chose to come back and hang out with me again today. It's always great to have you here.

So today we're going somewhere deeper than usual. I want to teach today, or at least attempt to teach today. And hopefully it will not come across too preachy, but more in a way of my heart, to your heart kind of way,

but because I think what I'm about to share has the potential to completely change your perspective on a season you might be sitting in right now.

It's personally something I didn't fully grasp or even tried to understand until one day it just came to me.

It was a real aha moment and I'm hoping it'll be one for you too.

So Settle in, friend. This one requires a little space to breathe.

And it all started when the Lord brought me to Ecclesiastes 3,

which is all about God's timing and preparation and how God brings you to certain seasons in your life.

But it's when I read verse three in particular that it hit home for me, because it says this.

There is a time to tear down and a time to build up.

See, it hit home because at the time, I was ready to throw in the towel and give up on writing.

And I'm trying to create this author career for myself because nothing I did was working. I wrote more books, I learned more, I pushed more ads.

Nothing worked.

And the enemy was having a field day in my mind too,

because instantly when I read this verse, I thought, oh, just great.

I am clearly in a tearing down season.

I'm not supposed to be a writer, and. And I obviously got this all wrong. Perhaps being an author isn't my purpose or my calling after all. Just great.

But years where the Holy Spirit flipped this around for me as I sat with this verse for weeks after,

this is what I thought. I had one of those what if? Thoughts cross my mind. And I said, what if God was intentionally tearing things down?

See, most of us are very comfortable with the building up part, right?

We pray for it, we plan for it, we work toward it, we measure ourselves against it.

But the tearing down part, that's the part we fight.

That's the part we misread.

That's the part we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to reverse or escape or explain away,

when actually it might be the most purposeful thing God has ever done in our author lives.

Because here's what I want you to understand today.

The tearing down is not the opposite of the building up.

It is the prerequisite for it.

Are you hearing me on this? The blank page is not the enemy of the story.

It is where every story is begins.

God does not tear down what he has finished with.

He tears down what he has not yet done with.

You cannot have one without the other. And God, as the architect of your author life,

understands something that we often don't,

that you cannot build something new,

something that will actually hold the weight of what he has planned on a foundation that was never stable to begin with.

I want to borrow a framework here from a teaching I listened to once, because it articulates this better than almost anyone I've encountered. But unfortunately,

I didn't make a note of who wrote it. But essentially it teaches that when God begins to dismantle something in your life,

your plans, your momentum, your sense of direction, even.

It is seldom because you were wrong. Even is far more often because you have outgrown your previous level.

The old structure served its purpose,

but it cannot support what's coming, right? And so before God can build what he has planned, he has to clear the ground. He has to level things.

Think about what that actually looks like in a building project.

Before you can lay a new foundation, you have to remove the old one.

Before you renovate your house, you have to break some walls down and smash things down.

That process is loud, it's messy. It looks from the outside like pure destruction, right? There is debris everywhere. Nothing looks like progress.

And if you didn't know what was being built, you would be forgiven for thinking the whole thing had fallen apart.

But the demolition is not the disaster. The demolition is the beginning.

The writer of this teaching that I was listening to stopped me when I first heard this.

And they said that visibility without stability is dangerous.

God will not elevate what he has not first grounded.

And if the grounding requires dismantling what you built in your own strength, your own striving, your own understanding of what success is supposed to look like,

then that is exactly what God will do. Not to hurt you, not to punish you,

but because he knows the weight of what he is planning to place on your life. And the current foundation simply cannot carry it.

Now, I want to take it to Nehemiah because Nehemiah is one of the most instructive examples in all of scripture of what it looks like to build after a tearing down and what it requires of us in that particular season.

Now, when Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem, the walls of the city were in ruins, completely demolished. The gates had been burned. The people who lived there had made a kind of peace with the rubble.

It had been that way for so long that the brokenness had become normal.

They had learned to live inside a collapsed version of what was meant to stand.

Sound familiar?

Nehemiah didn't arrive with a motivational speech. He didn't immediately announce a plan. He didn't start handing out assignments.

The first thing Nehemiah did when he arrived in Jerusalem was spend three days in silence. He surveyed the damage at night, alone, before he said a single word to anyone about what he was going to do.

He looked at the full extent of the rubble before he began.

I think that is one of the most important things we skip in a tearing down season.

We are so uncomfortable with the sight of the rubble.

Our stalled author Business, our flat sales, our dried up creativity, our confusion about our calling that we rush to cover it back up.

We announce a new plan, we start a new book, we sign up for a new course. We do anything rather than sit quietly with God and and let him show us the full extent of what needs to be rebuilt.

But Nehemiah sat with it first. He let himself see it clearly. And it was only from that place of clear eyed honesty that he could begin.

So what is God actually clearing in a tearing down season? In my experience and in what I've observed in other authors, it tends to be one or more of three things.

The first is ego and self reliance.

This is the version of your author life that you built in your own strength. The goals that were yours rather than his.

The definition of success that came from the industry rather than from God.

The habit of making decisions based on what's working for other authors rather than what God has specially called you to do.

Self reliance is a subtle thing. It doesn't always look like pride.

Sometimes it looks like diligence.

Sometimes it even looks like faithfulness.

You're working hard, you're showing up consistently, you're doing everything right.

And it's something underneath it still feels off because the engine running it all is you rather than Him.

And God in His kindness will dismantle what we are running on our own so that he can rebuild it under his authority.

The second thing he clears is old identity structures. These are the labels and measurements we have quietly allowed to define us. Our sales rank, our review count, our download numbers, our comparison to other authors who seem to be further along.

When our identity as an author gets built on any of these things,

and it happens so gradually that we hardly notice it,

we become fragile in ways that have nothing to do with our talent or our calling. A bad month undoes us. A negative review derails us.

Another author's success diminishes us. Right?

God cannot elevate a fragile identity, friend.

So he will sometimes strip away the very things we have been leaning on.

Not to take them from us permanently, but to show us that we were never supposed to be standing on them in the first place.

I'm reminded of Moses and the Israelites. Why did God lead them into the desert around and around and around that mountain?

Because he needed to tear down what they were relying on. He needed to replace and rebuild.

He needed to put laws in place. He needed to put order in place for them to be able to enter the promised land.

And the third thing he clears is vision. That belongs to us rather than to God.

This is perhaps the most painful one because it means tearing down that vision board that we had so much fun building, letting go of a plan you genuinely believed was from God,

a series maybe, or a book that you've halfway written, a platform strategy or a direction for your author business,

and then trusting that what he rebuilds in its place will be better.

Not just different,

better. More aligned, more fruitful,

more truly yours in the way that only things given by God can be.

I want to pause here for just a moment because if what I'm describing today is already resonating with you,

I want you to know there's a structured path through this season and the door is open right now. I've already done the heavy lifting for you.

All you have to do is take my hand and let me lead you through it, stopping along the way to meet face to face with God.

If you are still sitting on the edge of signing up for my Revive to Thrive Away program, allow me to to gently nudge you by saying it's the structured version of everything I wish I had when I was sitting in my own rubble.

It's a conversation between you and God with a little bit of structure to hold it.

And I want to remind you that the early bird price is only available until midnight on the 31st of March.

After that it increases.

Go to anointedscribd.com forward/revive to thrive and let God break down so he can elevate you to a new place in your author life.

I'll leave the link in the show notes, but back to Nehemiah.

Here's what I love most about him.

When he finally began to rebuild,

he did it in the face of enormous opposition.

As with every story, there's an antagonist. And in Nehemiah's story, he had two Sanballat and Tobiah were two officials.

Both were regional leaders who felt politically and personally threatened by Nehemiah's plan to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. So they mocked him.

They told him the wall he was building was so weak that a fox walking on it would break it down.

They tried to distract him, discourage him, and derail him at every turn.

And Nehemiah's response is one of the most instructive things in Scripture for a kingdom writer. In a rebuilding season,

Nehemiah kept building.

Not because he was immune to the discouragement,

not because the opposition didn't hurt,

but because he knew who had commissioned the work.

He prayed constantly and he kept building.

He stationed guards and he kept building.

He addressed the problems that arose and he kept building.

He never once lost sight of the assignment that God gave him,

even when the circumstances tried to convince him it was impossible.

And the wall was rebuilt in 52 days.

52 days for a project that surrounding nations had assumed was permanently destroyed, that they had become so comfortable that living in.

Because when God is in the rebuilding, the timeline is his,

not ours.

And what looks like ruins to everyone watching can become a wall in less than two months,

when the builder is God.

So what does this mean practically for you as a Christian author who is in or sensing the beginning of a tearing down season?

It means resisting the urge to cover up the rubble.

It means being willing to survey the damage honestly, to sit with God and ask him to show you clearly what has been built on unstable ground before you start rebuilding with Him.

It means trusting that God is not destroying your author life.

He is strategically pruning it, clearing the thorniest parts, not to shame you, but to free you.

What feels like loss is often just the releasing of what no longer fits the calling that he is preparing for you.

And it means understanding really, really understanding that the tearing down is not the end of the story.

It is, as Ecclesiastes tells us simply, it's time.

There is a time to tear down and there is a time to build up.

Both are in his hands,

both are purposeful, and both are on their way to something better than what you had before.

C.S. lewis wrote that God comes into a house and begins knocking it about in ways that hurt.

You thought he was going to make it a little tidier,

more livable,

fix a drafty window here, patch a leaking roof there.

But God starts knocking walls down and building new ones up. And you wonder what on earth he is doing.

The explanation is that he is building something quite different from what you had in mind.

A place where he intends to dwell Himself.

Friend, he is building a palace. Don't mistake the demolition for the end.

Here's what I want to leave with you today.

If your author life feels like rubble right now,

if the walls have come down and you're standing in the middle of it, wondering what happened, I want you to hear this.

God has not abandoned you.

You have not been punished. You have not missed your calling.

You are in the time to tear down. And the time to build up is also coming.

Sit with God in the rubble. Let him show you what he is clearing and why.

Trust the architect. And when he gives you the word to begin,

build steadily, prayerfully, one stone at a time in the face of whatever opposition comes, keep building because what he builds on a cleared and stable foundation will not fall the same way.

The old how house dead.

Meditate on Ecclesiastes 3:3 a time to tear down and a time to build up.

Both are his and both are for you.

Before I close, I want to share what one of the new Revive to Thriveway students just wrote to me. She said this your course is helping me to answer my heartfelt prayer as the Holy Spirit uproots all that hinders me.

Friend, if you've lost your joy, if you feel crushed and confused and operating from a place of pressure,

there's healing to be done.

God needs to break down so that he can rebuild your author house the way he intended it to be.

Because for such a time as this,

friend,

you have been called to thrive as God's anointed scribe.

Friend, if today's episode stirred something in you, if you found yourself thinking, yes, this is exactly where I am, I want you to know you don't have to keep circling the same mountain.

There comes a point where working harder and more information aren't the answer.

What's needed is a step by step,

spirit led journey that takes you from knowing what's wrong to actually fixing it from the inside out. From the foundations up.

The Revive to Thrive way is that journey. It's not another strategy. It's not another checklist. It's you,

God and the work that actually moves things forward at your own pace, in your own time.

If you sense this might be your next step, head to https://anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive