Kingdom Chaos

Progress Over Perfection As A Daily Practice

• Troy • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Purpose doesn’t wait for quiet. It grows right in the middle of real life—marriage tensions, work confusion, spiritual dry spells, and the daily noise that won’t turn down. That’s the heartbeat of Kingdom Chaos, and in our first conversation, Troy opens up about fear, obedience, and the surprising freedom of progress over perfection.

We start by naming who belongs here: everyone from longtime Christians to curious skeptics who want honest talk without the highlight reel. Troy shares a candid story from a chaotic career season where he tried to hand God a finished plan. A simple question from his wife—What is God telling you?—shifted everything. Instead of informing God, he learned to listen. That posture reframed purpose as faithful steps taken in uncertainty, supported by prayer, Scripture, and the slow work of character that shows up in everyday choices.

James 1:22 becomes our North Star: don’t just hear the word—do it. Troy admits he delayed this podcast for all the “right” reasons: not enough gear, not the perfect setup, not the perfect sound. Then obedience won out over optics. Along the way we talk about grace and accountability: we don’t condemn repentant people for their past, but we don’t excuse intentional, ongoing sin either. We point to three anchor passages—John 18:36, John 16:33, and Colossians 3:17—that keep us rooted in a kingdom not of this world, steady in trouble, and centered on Christ in everything, not just Sundays.

If you’re overwhelmed, doubting, or just tired, you’re not alone here. We’re building a community that prays, encourages, and tells the truth with love, because purpose is still possible in the chaos. Hit play, share this with a friend who needs hope, and tell us what you’re walking through so we can tackle it together. Subscribe, leave a review, and drop your topic ideas—we’re listening and we’re learning with you.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

Speaker:

Welcome to Kingdom Chaos, a podcast for anyone trying to live a purpose and faith-filled life in a loud and messy world. Jesus said his kingdom in the story, yet here we are navigating real life and real struggles. I'm not a guru, just someone learning that God's grace meets us even in the chaos. This is Kingdom Chaos where faith meets real life and purpose is still found in the mess. Yes, Kingdom Chaos. My name is Troy, and in this first episode, I want to talk to you about what Kingdom Chaos is, the heart behind it, and what God's called on my life through Kingdom Chaos in this podcast. So Kingdom Chaos is for anybody. Don't care if you're following Christ, have questions, or you're an atheist, doesn't matter to me. This is for everyone. We're going to talk about real life situations. Yes, we're going to apply biblical principles and scriptures to those real life situations, but it's for everyone. I want to make sure that we don't look at our lives through this Instagram lens or the social media lens. It's not a perfect life. Christians don't have perfect lives and don't avoid struggles. We go through things just like anybody else. And so I want to make sure that we're doing this with the right understanding of scripture and how we treat people and how we walk through life together. This is not about playing church. This is about being the true hands and feet of Christ. I don't want to play church. I want to be the hands and feet of Christ. And you'll hear this hopefully from me quite often. It's not about perfection, it's about progress. I want to be different tomorrow than I am today. I want to be different five years from now than I was ten years ago. So it's all about progress and being better in the future. And how we do that, we need to make sure that we're building our relationship with Jesus through prayer, reading God's word, building our character on the inside, knowing his character so that can be shown on the outside. I wanted to start this podcast because there's a lot of tension that I feel between God's kingdom and the everyday, seemingly everyday chaos that we live in. God's kingdom is a place that we belong to. We are citizens of heaven as Jesus followers. And today we live in what seems to be a chaotic world, but we know God's in control. And I want to talk about that, how my faith is working through the everyday struggles of things that I deal with. In my marriage, parenting, work, my personal growth, my spiritual growth. We want to talk about real life situations and bring people on that are going through those same struggles. I want to make sure people out there know that they're not alone, that there are other people walking through struggles as well. Some of them are the same struggles, and we can walk through those together, pray for each other, and encourage each other through those biblical principles. Again, that word keeps coming up. I thought that I needed the mic right mic, I need the right sound equipment, the right computer. I didn't have the right stuff, the right area to do recordings in. It wasn't gonna sound good. People weren't gonna listen to it. There was fear in my life from it. I didn't want to be rejected. I didn't want people to say, hey, you could do better. So that's what uh you know God had called in my life for this, and now why did I step into it now? It's because I've been challenged a little bit. You know, we went through as a small group uh Romans, and we just started this Bible study on Romans. It was chapter one we went through, and as I was going through this, and one of the questions uh kind of convicted me, and I was looking at my life and saying, Man, I'm being a little hypocritical here in what I'm telling people and what I'm actually doing. You know, God's called this uh this part of my life to happen, and I'm not stepping into it. Whether it's gonna be for one person or ten million doesn't matter. God calls you to do something, you need to be obedient and do it. And so through that, I was like, you know what? Uh I've got to do this to be obedient in Christ and bring him glory and make sure that I'm walking the same walk that I'm telling other people you need to do as well. You know, in James 1.22, that's kind of my verse for the year. James 122 says, Don't merely listen to the word and deceive yourselves, but do what it says. Don't merely listen to the word and deceive yourselves, but do what it says. And I want to be that person that listens to Christ and follows him. So remember, this is not about being perfect, it's about progress, and that's what I'm applying to this podcast. I don't care if it's perfect, I don't care if it's the best, I don't care if it sounds the best. I want to make sure I'm making progress in my life, obeying Christ every day. I've made plenty of mistakes, some of them have been costly, some of them have humbled me, but I have to learn from those mistakes, and hopefully uh through that I can kind of talk to you guys about the real life situations that have happened in my life that I'm currently going through. And maybe you might be able to avoid some of those mistakes. Uh, maybe you're going through some of those mistakes right now and we can walk through them together. Uh, but man, it's about growth, it's about trying to avoid making those mistakes again and really growing in Christ and being better again tomorrow than we were yesterday. It's all about progress. Make sure we're we're being uh you know, we're walking through that progress together. Uh, it's also I I wanted to kind of talk about a season in my life that was chaotic. You know, we're talking about kingdom chaos. So what are you talking about? What is this what can I expect to hear on this podcast? This is the type of stuff, you know. Um, you know, I I I walked through this chaotic period in my life where I was at work. There was no direction, I felt no purpose in it. Uh, I didn't know what was going on. Uh I felt lost a little bit. Um, I was praying to God about this situation, and finally I went to my wife and I said, Look, this is what I think I'm gonna do. I'm gonna leave my job and this is what I plan on doing from here on out. Boom, boom, boom, kind of laid out the plan for her. I said, I've been praying about this. And she turned to me and said, You know, Troy, I don't think you're gonna be happy doing that. I said, No, no, no, you just didn't hear me. Here, here's let me tell you again what what I plan on doing. Boom, boom, boom, boom, laid it out for her again. I said, I've been praying about this. He said, You know, you said that a couple times. You've been praying, you've been praying. And she turned to me and said, What's God been telling you? And right there, in that chaos that I've had, uh what I realized was I was telling God, trying to guide him for my life, rather than you know, asking him to help guide my life. I was telling him, Hey, this is the plan I have for my life, this is what I need you to do, rather than asking God, God, what where do you have me right now? What do you want me to do? Am I in the right place? Guide me in this situation. And instead of doing that, I was telling him, This is what I want you to do, God. And when my wife told me, what is God telling you? It hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was like, Oh my goodness, I haven't been listening to God. I've been telling God things. And right when she told me that, I realized God was telling me, be patient, trust me, this is my purpose for your life. It's gonna all shake out and be that you're gonna have the direction you need, but right now you need to trust me, and that's what faith is about. Even though your circumstances around you, and my circumstances and my job, look, they weren't the worst. It's just I didn't, I didn't feel uh like I wasn't doing the right thing. I didn't feel like I had a direction. I didn't know what I was doing. I felt a little lost. And so in that, God just said, trust me, I've got you in the right spot. And so uh in that chaos, we need to find our faith and make sure we're sticking to God's plan and trusting Him. And when we pray to Him that we listen to Him and put those uh guided uh prayers into action. So uh that's the things that you can kind of expect to hear. Uh this that was a very short little story, but most of them would be more in-depth. I want to make sure I give you uh my testimony uh with my wife. I'll I'll get her on too, and we'll talk to you about our marriage struggles, uh, how we walked through almost getting a divorce, how Jesus saved our lives, all those types of things. But that's what you can expect. Real conversations, not some kind of polished, scripted answer, but real stuff. I want to talk to you about uh those everyday marriage problems that you have, those everyday job struggles that you have, those everyday I'm I'm in a relationship with someone, uh, not an intimate one, but uh maybe it's a coworker or friend, and I don't know how to handle it. What do we do? We are struggling, we need to walk through that together. How do we treat people? Let's talk about real stuff that we deal with every day. There's gonna be plenty of grace here. I'm not here to judge people as they, you know, you know what they're what's happening in their lives, what they've done in the past. But let me under let me make it clear about judgment. If you're living in sin and it's intentional and you know what you're doing, and you say you're a Christian, I'm gonna call you out. That's not being judgmental. What judgmental means is whenever you do something, you mess up and you repent, I'm not gonna judge you on your past and condemn you and all these things. I'm gonna welcome you in and we're gonna walk through life together as we're supposed to do as Christ followers with those biblical principles, look into God's word and how we walk through this together. That's what I mean by grace and not being judgmental. We're gonna apply scripture to real situations, not just quote it. This isn't gonna be a podcast of highlight reels. Again, we're not looking through that social media lens of that perfect life. We are people who go through real struggles. Whether we believe in Christ or not, things come our way. It's just how we deal with those and who we go to when we deal with those when those struggles come into our life. The anchor scriptures for this podcast, I want to give you three scriptures to go look up. I'm not gonna read them word for word, but I'll give you the gist and the summary of what they are. John 18 36, we're living for a kingdom that's not of this world. John 16 33, trouble is real, but so is hope. And Colossians 3 17, inviting Jesus into everything we do, not just Sundays. That's important to me to understand that we are not Sunday Christ followers. We are Christians every day of our lives. We aren't different when we go to church on Sunday than we are when we go to work on Monday. You need to be the same genuine, transparent person every single day of your life following Christ with a Christ-centered heart. We need to make sure that that's first and foremost up front, that we just don't talk about Sundays. This is an everyday thing. And community matters. You need to be going to church, build your community because whenever we go through those struggles, we don't want to be alone. We want to make sure we have Christ followers that can encourage us biblically through those principles and pray for us. So important. We want to reflect and grow together and walk through life together. Make sure that you guys share with each other. Share this podcast. Share things that you're going that struggle in your life. Share with me. I want to know what topics you want to talk about. What are you going through? And what can we talk about to help you walk through those things? If you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're doubting, if you need to be rebuilt or restored, if you're just plain tired, you belong here. This is about encouragement. This is about sharing things that are real. This is about being part of a conversation. So I hope you stick around so we can continue to grow in this and continue to learn together. I want to learn with you, and we're going to learn together, and we're going to learn because Christ is going to lead us that way. I want to make sure that you understand that purpose is still possible in the chaos. That is what Kingdom Chaos is about. It's about living for God's kingdom while navigating everyday chaos. I want to say that again. Purpose is still possible in the chaos. It might seem chaotic around you. Your circumstances might seem crazy, but there's still purpose in it. God's got a purpose for your life and a purpose for your pain. Kingdom Chaos, this podcast about living for God's kingdom while navigating everyday chaos. So let's pray. Lord, I just thank you so much for your calling on my life. I thank you so much for the people that are listening to this podcast. I pray that they feel encouraged as they listen to this. I pray that they know they're not alone. It's not only myself and others that are going through real situations that believe in you, but you are there for us. You are faithful even when we are faithless, God. And I thank you so much for your faithfulness. I thank you so much for giving us so much love and grace and mercy and compassion. Thank you so much for showing us the way to live through your word and the stories we have in the Bible. Thank you so much for giving us that example that we can follow, God. It's your son Jesus Christ that is in our hearts that is showing us the way. Thank you so much for changing my life and so many others that we're gonna help others, not because of our power, but because of who chose us. That's you that live within us that want to use us to find other people and to show them that Christ experience so they can go out to other people and continue to share and share the gospel of hope and love. Thank you so much, God. We we thank you. We thank you. We're so grateful for you. It's in your name, Jesus, that we pray. Amen.