Welcome And Podcast Purpose

Hello my friends and welcome to Everyday God for Your Every Day with Kathy, a space where we'll discuss real practical ways for life with God, especially for those days when life is hard, complicated, and messy. How do we apply biblical principles such as God's love, mercy, grace, and wisdom to our daily grind? Well, join me each week as we do just that together. So wherever you may find yourself today, please know that you are seen, held, accepted, loved, and never alone. So let's get to it. Welcome back to Everyday God for your everyday. I am Kathy, your host. We made it. We made it through episode one, and I can't believe it. I can't believe that the podcast is actually live and out there. And so many of you have listened. And I want to thank you for that. Thank you for downloading and listening and sharing that. Honestly, you've no idea. It means so much. There's been quite a bit of, you know, I would say anxiety about starting it and then figuring out that, oh, okay, it's done now. Okay, what's next? So, you know, I have a friend of mine who used to say, you know, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. And it there's there's a bit of weightiness with, okay, what do I do now? So I'm again humbled that you have chosen to come back and to go on this journey with me as we discuss doing life with God at the helm. So just a brief recap of episode one, right? We discussed life with God, the origin story behind the podcast, the goal of the podcast, which is ultimately to share God's love with you and to encourage you wherever you might be in this journey, as I've been encouraged in my life. So the plan was to drop an episode on fear. So, how does one move forward even when we're afraid? But God had other plans. I will, I started thinking about it because again, the fear episode was one of the demo episodes that I'd already recorded. So it's clearly mapped out. You know, I have it there. It's just editing and stuff like that. So it would have been the simplest thing to do, easiest, most certainly for me, but I am not the one driving this bus. It is God's podcast. And he has a clear plan. I've learned that about God that, you know, we might envision things one way, but God has his own time and his own thoughts and his own ways. And as we are reminded, his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts. And God is a God of order. And we must seek before we know. That makes perfect sense, right? If we think about it, we seek before we know, even in terms of knowledge, right? When we're going to learn anything, you first have to pick up a book or, you know, Google whatever information you're looking for, or, you know, seek it out, ask questions. You must seek before you know. And so if we think about everyday God for your everyday, this concept of lifing with God, how does one life with someone that you don't know? That's that's a recipe for disaster. And I think many of us at one point probably have seen that or maybe are guilty of having done it. Really kind of linking ourselves or tethering ourselves to someone that we didn't truly or fully know. And you encounter trouble. You can't trust someone whose character you don't know. And if you don't know certain things about them, then you find misalignment. So if we're gonna really go through this journey together and we're gonna talk about this life with God, if I'm gonna tell you the genesis of this podcast, well then as we walk through this together, we're gonna talk about what it's like to seek this person of God that I'm talking about that you can do life with. And, you know, in the Bible, it promises that if you seek me with all your heart, you will find me. That is a promise. And as I know God, I fully know him, not and we're gonna talk about that, fully knowing someone and truly knowing everything about them, two completely different things. I know God and I trust his character, which means that when I read a promise in the Bible that says, if ye seek me with all of your heart, you will find me. I know that God is not a man that he should lie, meaning any promise that God makes, he keeps his promises. I know this full well. I've experienced this, I've lived it. So when we seek, we find, right? So we're gonna talk about seeking God. So as we talk about this concept of seeking, how does one seek God? Well, there are many ways. And I think just as I discussed in our first episode, that sometimes we can overcomplicate faith, we can also overcomplicate the seeking. Seeking doesn't require you being the best version of yourself. Seeking does not require having a degree in theology. Seeking does not require that you be perfect or that, you know, it doesn't require an Oscar-worthy performance. I mean, since the Oscars just happened, it doesn't require sainthood. It doesn't require that you've read the Bible through and through. It doesn't require any of that. Seeking can be as simple as calling out, God, I I want to know you. Do you really exist? Show me if you're real. Show me that you see me. Show me that you know me. And I think I'm gonna emphasize again, if you seek me with all your heart, you will find me. So I think in the seeking, there is this uh commitment, right? This true desire to seek the person that you hope to find. Again, I'm gonna liken this to our regular lives, right? When you're seeking a mate, right? Or when you're seeking someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with. If you are not really seeking this life mate, this soulmate, if you're just seeking someone to, you know, spend a night of passion with or whatever it is, you will find whatever it is that you're seeking. In other words, uh your uh heart knows subconsciously, you know what it is that you're seeking. And whatever you're seeking, that's what you're gonna find. So if you're seeking God, truly seek, it doesn't mean that you have to believe yet, but it means that you truly have to want to find him. That's what seeking with all your heart means. It means that you want to find him. And so therefore, he promises that if you want to find me, you will find me. So again, it can be a simple calling out of asking him to show himself, to do something, to just show you who he is, and he will do so. A simple calling out of Jesus, I want to know you, I need you. Even in trouble, to say, I need your help, Lord. See, one of the things I love about God and this whole journey with him, right? Is that there's uh an invitation for us, all of us as human beings, to know him. It's a standing invitation that really it doesn't require anything else, just that. You be you and you look for him. The invitation is open, there's no formal dress, no formal attire needed. It doesn't even require great faith. It's a standing invitation to seek. So, again, what do we do? How do we seek? Well, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my seeking. So, as I discussed, I really have known God my entire life. I grew up in church, you know, having prayer reunions at our house in Haiti and, you know, reading the Bible. I went to Catholic school. God wasn't a stranger to me in terms of the person God. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that I had a relationship with God. So, one of the things that we'll talk about a lot, and you'll hear this theme of God is a relational God. He truly is. He wants to have a relationship with you. It's a triune God, if you think about it, God in three in one. We're not gonna discuss the Trinity because sometimes, especially for those that may not be familiar with it, it can be a little bit mind-blowing. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. But we'll discuss the fact that God is a relational God, that he wants to have a relationship with you. I will tell you a bit about my seeking because one of the things that we're gonna talk about is that see the seeking never ends, really. It is a kind of it's a constant, right? And I don't want you to think about, oh my gosh, so I'm like never satisfied, I'm just gonna keep seeking. So the way that I want you to think about this, and I want to liken this, is to imagine that you discover the greatest treasure in the world. And I don't know what that treasure would look like for you. I don't know whether it would be a fashion house with just the most beautiful gowns ever, or whether it would be gold, or whether for some it might be a relationship, and you just discover this person that you absolutely adore and who adores you right back, just loves you like you have never been loved before. And every time you spend time with them in their presence, you are filled with just this feeling of wholeness and completeness, and I want more. That's what it's like with God. When we get close to him as he draws us near, there is a constant longing to want to know more. And one of the things I've learned about God is that I don't know that eternity would be enough for me to know enough about him. So if we think about one of God's names, right, it's the great I Am. God is the great I am, the great I am, and it's kind of like into infinity, meaning it's not the great I am provider, it's not the great I am, you know, supplier of all of your needs, it's although he is all of those things, it's not the great, you know, warrior, it's not the great maker of heaven and earth, the great commander of heaven's armies. Again, he is all of that, but he is the great I am. I am that I am. That means I am everything, all-encompassing everything. That statement, I think, is worthy of taking a moment to just imagine the magnitude of that name, the great I am. So that means the great I am. He is everything, everything that I could put behind that I am, that I need in my life, that I want in my life. God is that everything that I could ever hope for him to be, he will be. So when I talk about the fact that the seeking never ends, it's not you don't even want it to end because the more you know about God is the more you actually want to know about him. It's the more you want to just drink in, it's the more you want to bask in his presence and in his greatness. So I'm gonna tell you a little story about my seeking. So it was uh December of 2019. At that point, we knew nothing yet about COVID. A very good friend of mine gives me a journal by Paper Sunday. So just to explain, I have always wanted to journal. I I think I asked for multiple diaries when I was little, and yet not once did I ever really manage to come back more than twice to that diary. So, although I have always wanted to journal or to have a diary, I just simply lacked the consistency or follow-through to manage to do it. So when she gave me the journal, she gave me the journal because number one, she knew the desire of my heart. But number two, she also knew that I, you know, I was in a period of transition. There was a lot going on in terms of some familial things and and and you know, emotionally I was going through a lot. So she gave me that, knowing again the desire of my heart to start journaling. And the desire of my heart, really, I think to always get closer to God, right? So she gives me this journal, December of 2019. And then I don't actually start writing in the journal until February of 2020. So again, right before the COVID pandemic kind of like hit the world. I started kind of writing in it and pouring my heart and kind of just asking God some questions and seeking Him, seeking His counsel for where I was in my life and how I was feeling. See, I I've always known that God loved me. I had faith. I had all of that, guys. I've been through some stuff with God, my mother's death, you know, leaving our house behind. I'll tell you that story of kind of like following God and having, you know, having shown kind of like that biblical kind of faith. You know, you're not talking about someone who didn't know God. I'd walked with God, but I was in a season of my life where I just was struggling. I was struggling quite a bit. I just needed more. I needed to be closer. I don't know what I needed. And there were also things that was really, I hadn't yet gotten to a place where I trusted God with every single thing in my life. I do believe that there were things that I was still holding from God. We do this thing where we hold back, right? We say, okay, God, you can have this portion of my life, you can handle these things. I'm gonna take care of this. Okay, you you got this part, I got this part. And if we think about what I said the last episode, God wants to be involved in every facet of our lives. And as a Christ follower, one of the things that it is important to do is to give God control of every facet of your life. Now that doesn't happen overnight. That's a process. And God is very patient with us when it comes to that. So I'm going through this kind of season of seeking God. And I also was struggling in terms of my ability to feel love or to feel truly like I knew that God loved me, but I don't know that I felt loved. And I don't know if you guys understand. Maybe someone who's listening to me right now gets what I'm saying. You can know that you're loved, but that is different than feeling loved. And so I, you know, I struggled with that, and I struggled with knowing whether I could really love people and love God the way that I needed to love God. You know, I'm going through this and God takes me through a year study, deep dive of 1 Corinthians 13. So for any of you who are remotely familiar with the Bible, you know that's the love chapter. It's been read at countless weddings. It's been quoted multiple times, it's on t-shirts, it's on coffee mugs, and it's also it was quoted in one of my favorite movies, A Walk to Remember, with Mandy Moore, if you've ever seen its old movie. I love that movie. But, anyways, it's, you know, love is patient, love is kind, love is not boastful, it is not proud, it bears all. I'd read that multiple times, and by the way, even read it at a childhood friend's wedding. So this was a chapter of, again, the Bible that I was keenly familiar with, but I would say familiar with. I didn't have intimate knowledge of that chapter. And God knew that because he knows everything. And he took me through, I would say about a year, year and a half of that chapter. Where, and again, so think about, you know, a backdrop of this story, right? I start in February of 2020. The pandemic happens. I was, you know, I was working at that time, leading a fairly large team. I had to all of a sudden kind of think about a lot of things that leaders and you know had to think about in corporate America. Now, how do we go remote? How do you go hybrid? How do you do this? One of the things that I really had to do was that I had to make decisions and which weighed quite heavily on me in terms of people's livelihood. That was my responsibility. And I'm not gonna lie to you, like I never crisis management. I mean, who I didn't take any courses in that. It was very heavy. Had three kids, and you know, the world as I'm looking at it, it's like legitimately like it's falling apart. And I, you know, God gave me strength through all of that and really helped me to kind of make some wise decisions that I know that I wouldn't have been able to make on my own. But through that, as I was a bit of a control freak. So not only a control freak, but up until that point, I probably had been working at least about 16 years. And although, you know, experienced challenges and obstacles and all of that, I'd had the Midas touch. I'd had success. If I put my mind to it, it I had this amazing ability, I believe, to kind of will things to happen. My wall became uh COVID for multiple reasons. And I needed God. And I remember seriously struggling, like seriously struggling. If ever there was something that was triggering, that that was triggering for me for many, again, for many reasons. Because number one, being a control freak, number two, feeling the weight of, you know, multiple lives, people's livelihood, again, feeling responsible for that, and watching my children go through this, going through some other emotional things that I was going through. And really not knowing, I mean, knowing who to turn to, God always. But how do I coexist in this, Lord? How how do I how do I live? Not just exist, but how do I live in this moment? Like, how do you find any positivity here? Like, well, how? I don't know. Like, I remember one day sitting and feeling the weight of the world on my chest. And God really took me through what love was, not what I understood it to be, but what love truly was, what patience was, what it meant to be kind. And part of that is I wouldn't have understood any of that if I didn't become vulnerable or allow myself to be vulnerable. That was one of the greatest lessons I learned through the pandemic was the value of vulnerability. I would tell you that before that, weakness wasn't just something I did not allow. It is impossible to show others grace, to be accepting of other people's failures, to be accepting of other people, period, when you cannot show yourself that level of grace, when you cannot accept your own failures, when you yourself cannot accept your own shortcomings. And in seeking God and in really kind of taking the time to spend with Him. And that meant, guys, that, you know, I had to make an appointment with God every morning. That meant setting an alarm in the morning, setting an alarm at like 5 or 5:30 so that I could read my Bible and I could pray. And by the way, praying is essentially talking to God. It's a conversation. And there were times that I would fall asleep while praying or while reading my Bible or doing one of my devotionals. And but I kept it. I kept it up. It was an appointment. And it it was a divine appointment. You can call it that. Where I got to spend time. I spent time with my father. I spent time with him. And in spending time with him, well, it it did something for my soul. It gave me what I needed. You know, when I think about the our father, you know, give us this day our daily bread. That's what God was doing. When we meet with him, when we seek him, he gives us what we need to face the day, to face the challenges of the day. He equips us. And he did that for me. So my appointments, you know, as time went on, I no longer needed an alarm. You know, my kind of internal alarm would wake me up. And I look forward to the time that I would spend with him. And it it became this thing where I would not read an email, I would not check a text before I spoke with God. I opened my day with God. And by spending the time with him and seeking him, I not only got to know him, I started enjoying the seeking. I started enjoying just the exercise of like, okay, what what little tidbits, what little, ooh, treasures, like what is he gonna reveal to me today? And I heard his voice and he spoke with me and he filled me and he ministered to my soul. I mean, it wasn't just about me. I was able to be there for others. It was just an incredible thing. And for the first time, I can't tell you exactly when, but for the first time in my life, within I would probably say months in this exercise, this kind of experiment, I understood fully. I mean, I knew and felt loved. I felt like I could bask in God's love. And our relationship blossomed and just became much more intimate. I reached levels of intimacy with God then that I never thought I could reach. And then it led to, quite frankly, healing, healing of some old wounds and things from my childhood that I quite frankly had held on to and didn't realize. If you are in a point in your life right now where you are seeking, or you may not even realize you're seeking, God will help you. You don't have to know it all. I didn't realize that I was seeking or that I was going to need that next level relationship with God. And by the way, it's just grown. My relationship with God continues to grow in the last 16 or 18 months where my life has gone through multiple transitions. I needed to seek him more, to have an audience with him, audience with the king, with my dad. So after this 2020 kind of journey through 2021, you know, God's my dad. I know that there are people that react to this, right? When people say, my dad, they're like, that's God of the universe. I know that God is God of the universe. He's mighty. And I wouldn't risk or do some of the things that I have done if I didn't realize just how mighty my God was. But I also have an intimate relationship with him that I can call him my daddy. That's how intimate it is. That I know, just like a child who has a loving father knows that I am loved. I am loved. I am treasured. I am accepted. I am protected. I'm provided for. I don't know if I can ever convey that in any way that would really encapsulate what that does for someone, especially someone like me with daddy issues. He filled that. There was a void that had been present my entire life. And God has filled it. And I realized in many ways that no one else could have filled that. It was a God-sized hold that he filled. So seeking. Just call out to him. You know, if you don't have a Bible, there are multiple Bible apps out there. I use Uversion. There are devotionals that will help you along the way. But it starts with a call, starts with a question, starts with a knock, saying, God, I want to know you. Jesus, I want to know who you are. I hear that you're my savior, but I kind of want to know that. And He will guide you through it. So thank you again for joining me. And we're gonna continue this conversation with the knowing. So before we end this episode, I hope that if you heard nothing else, you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to fix yourself. You don't have to be the very best version of yourself before you can seek this God. Seeking is not difficult. Just call out to him and he will meet you wherever you are. He's amazing that way. Secondly, start by making an appointment. I like to start my day with God. By the way, people are blessed when that happens. I'm gonna tell you, if you ever see me drive, you'll understand. It helps to anchor me, to center me. So just like any type of appointment, if you really want to go somewhere, right? If you have a hot date or if you have an interview, what do you do? If you have an important meeting, you put it on your calendar, you set an alarm, do that until it becomes natural. Don't worry about whether you fall asleep while you're talking to him. God can handle that. Don't worry if you understand the Bible. By the way, no one understands the Bible until the Holy Spirit reveals it to you. And the more and more you read it, the more and more he reveals it to you. So don't worry about those things. But just remember the one thing if you seek with all your heart, you will find him. So I'd like to close us out in prayer. Father God, thank you. Thank you again for giving us this opportunity to gather together. Lord, thank you for giving me, for using me in the way that you are. Thank you for loving us the way that you do. I pray for every single person that is listening that, Lord, that my words would somehow not be my words, but that they would be yours, that they would move hearts, Lord, that they would just penetrate whatever walls that exist somehow, Lord, that each person listening would know how deeply and fiercely you love them, and that they would know that you will never leave them nor forsake them, that there is no place in the world, Lord, that they can ever be that would be too far for you to come and get them. That there is nothing, Lord, your word promises that there's nothing that we can do that could separate us from your love. So, Father, I pray for everyone who is listening and everyone who might listen in the future, that Lord, you would move hearts, heal hearts, that Lord, you would bless where blessings are needed, that you would heal where healing is needed, that you would make whole where brokenness exists. It is in your son's holy and mighty name, Jesus, I pray. Amen. Thank you again for listening, and I look forward to sharing part two of Audience of One.