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In Ecclesiastes 3:11, we read that God makes everything beautiful in its time. It is comforting to know that nothing is wasted in God's economy, but all of it will be used for our good and His glory. You're invited to join us for poignant conversations and compelling interviews centered on believing for His beauty in every season.
Everything Made Beautiful (00:02.146)
Well, hello, hello, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Everything Made Beautiful podcast. We are right here in the smack middle of June, and I really hope that you are enjoying our summer series. This will go all the way through June, and then we will take another little break in July just to have a bit of a summer sabbatical in there.
And then we will be back in August and the plan is to be weekly all the way to November starting at the beginning of August. So I hope you'll enjoy these last several sessions in our summer series in June. I was going to take the whole summer off, but frankly, I just had so many friends who were releasing amazing things and asked if I would partner with them to promote those things and get the word out. And it is my joy to do that. So I was happy to do it.
And right here in the middle today, it's just gonna be me and you, which kind of feels appropriate, because what we're talking about today is one of the loneliest and weirdest seasons I have walked through in recent years. And maybe you're walking through something similar and this will be helpful to you. Now, I called this episode the sacred space of subtraction because that is really...
what I have experienced and I originally wrote about this as a post on my sub stack and just shared it as a link to an Instagram story but something about this particular piece seemed to resonate with people in a way I wasn't expecting. I've heard from ministry leaders but even from people in completely different fields who've experienced similar identity shifts as I did when they left roles that had defined them for years.
So the response made me realize that while I will not turn every Substack post into a podcast episode, trust me, this particular topic seemed to need more than just written words. So I'm adding the layers and the nuances that didn't make it into that written post. And I wanted to make sure it was accessible to everyone, whether you're a Substack subscriber or not, because apparently this weird season of being nobody where you used to be somebody is more common than.
Everything Made Beautiful (02:17.44)
Certainly I, but maybe any of us have realized. So it's been over a year since I stepped away from being on a church staff and I'm now finding the words for it. It's been a peculiar season and that should tell you something about how bizarre this experience has been. When someone who writes for a living takes 14 months to articulate her own life, there is more than a little necessary nuance involved.
So today I want to talk about something that I think happens more often than we discuss out loud, which is the strange territory of being nobody where you used to be somebody. And you guys know that I'm not saying that we are nobodies and I understand identity in Christ and all those good things, but when you've held a visible strategic role somewhere for a long period of time, people come to associate you with that role.
And then how do you explain what it's like to go from having the keys to everything to needing to ask if someone can let you in, which is what happened to me a few weeks ago. It feels like trying to explain the color blue to someone who's never seen the sky. But maybe the year long delay has been necessary and maybe some experiences need to marinate in awkwardness before they're ready to be shared. And trust me, there's been plenty of awkwardness to marinate in.
You know how when you go through something really hard or really weird, people always want you to immediately have the pretty bowtied lesson, especially if you're a writer or a teacher. So we want the Instagram worthy takeaway, the pithy quote that makes it all make sense. But some experiences are too raw, too fresh, too tender to be packaged up into neat little spiritual sound bites anytime shortly after they happen.
They need time to breathe, time to settle, time to figure out what actually happened before you can figure out what it means. And that's what has happened to me. I think there's wisdom in letting our stories marinate before we serve them up to others. In the immediate aftermath of transition, I was too close to it to offer anything helpful. I would have just been word vomiting my feelings all over the place without any real insight or hope to offer. But now...
Everything Made Beautiful (04:34.382)
14 some odd months later, I can see God's fingerprints on this whole journey. I can see how he was preparing me, protecting me, and yes, even blessing me through the discomfort. So for over 30 years, my name has come with a spiritual job description.
Shannon, she's the one who teaches the Bible study. Yeah, Shannon's on the church staff. Shannon writes the stuff. Shannon leads the whatever ministry. Shannon is the associate executive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my identity felt as secure as a person wearing both a belt and suspenders, redundantly attached to my function. And it could have reasonably stayed that way forever, frankly. After all, I'm a church girl.
I knew all the right answers about identity. could teach a whole series on how our worth comes from being children of God, not from what we do. I could quote Ephesians 1 about being chosen and adopted and sealed, and I have. I genuinely believed and believe these truths. But somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, I had absolutely become comfortable with the applause.
I liked being needed. I enjoyed being the go-to person, the one with the answers, the one who could solve the problems and write the things and lead the teams. There's something really intoxicating about being indispensable, even in ministry. Maybe especially in ministry because it feels so spiritual to be busy for Jesus. I told myself I was just being faithful, just stewarding my gifts well, just saying yes when God opened doors. And all of that was true.
But it was also true that I'd gotten a little too comfortable with my nameplate, my name tag, a little too attached to my access, a little too dependent on my role for my sense of self-worth. I just didn't realize how much until it was all gone. And I mean gone. And then I found myself in the unprecedented position of being just Shannon. Regular Shannon.
Everything Made Beautiful (06:44.02)
Shannon who sits in the umpteenth row, Shannon with no special anything. And I did it on purpose, in faith, and out of my obedience. But I wasn't ready to realize that my identity was actually wrapped up in my function, even though I knew it shouldn't be. Dang it! And suddenly an identity earthquake arrived right into my 48-year-old reality.
Now, when you transition away from church leadership, you don't just leave a job. You lose your immediate answer for who you are and what you do. You lose the assumption that your biblical insights carry extra weight because of your position. Spoiler alert, they don't and never did. You lose the comfortable busyness you equated to faithfulness and discover you have no idea what to do with yourself on a Tuesday. Seriously, what do normal people do on Tuesday afternoons?
I used to have back-to-back meetings, deadlines to meet, emails that demanded immediate responses, and a calendar color-coded within an inch of its life. I could tell you exactly where I was supposed to be at 2.17 p.m. on any given day. My worth was measured in productivity and my faithfulness gauged by my Google calendar. And then suddenly, I had time. Unstructured, unscheduled, nobody needs me right now time.
Do you know how terrifying that is for a recovering productivity addict? I found myself checking my phone, not because anyone was texting me, but because I was hoping someone would need something from me. Anything. Please, somebody have a crisis I can solve or a project I can jump on. I deep cleaned closets to feel useful. I organized drawers that didn't need organizing. I researched vacation destinations we weren't planning to visit.
but sitting still felt like laziness and laziness felt like spiritual failure somehow. Turns out learning to be instead of constantly do is one of the hardest spiritual disciplines of all. What remains when the title falls away? Who are you when the weekly meetings no longer need your input? If they don't miss a beat without you, did they ever really need you?
Everything Made Beautiful (09:00.706)
These questions played over and over in my first few months, like that one annoying song that's mentally on repeat and you can't get it out of your head. You know the one. After all, you don't return to the office once a week when you leave the law firm. When you quit teaching school, you don't go back and hang out at carpool. You don't show up at the company picnic after you quit your corporate job. But when you leave the church staff,
you enter a weird no man's land of not just a congregant, but no longer a leader. You're still supposed to show up every week because after all, it's a church family, right? This is where the whole church as family metaphor gets really complicated because in actual families, you don't get demoted from parent to cousin at Thanksgiving dinner. You don't suddenly lose your voice in family decisions because you changed jobs.
But in church, the lines between spiritual family and organizational hierarchy get blurry fast. Think about it. In every other workplace, there's a clear exit strategy. You clean out your desk, turn in your badge, maybe grab drinks with your former colleagues occasionally, and everyone moves on. But church isn't just a workplace. It's supposed to be your spiritual home, your community, the place where you worship and grow and belong.
So what happens when your workplace and your spiritual home are the same building? You end up in this strange liminal space where you're simultaneously an insider and an outsider. You know where all the bodies are buried, but you're not supposed to mention the shovel. You have institutional memory that goes back years, but your input is no longer requested or particularly wanted.
You love the people and the mission deeply, but your relationship to both has fundamentally changed in ways nobody really prepared you for. I would guess it's maybe like being divorced but still living in the same house because you have kids together. Technically, you're still family, but everything is different and awkward and nobody knows quite how to act. Except instead of kids, it's Jesus, and instead of a house, it's the kingdom of God.
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which makes it all feel much more complicated and loaded with spiritual significance. Now, before I go any further, I need to be really crystal clear about something. This episode is about my experience, my feelings, and my journey. This isn't about anything that went wrong. Just because something's weird doesn't mean it's wrong. This isn't a calling out of mistreatment or a veiled accusation against they or them.
This isn't a leadership failure expose. This isn't about what anyone has or hasn't done. If you're wondering if I'm passive aggressively calling someone out, rest assured that I am not. I communicate directly if I have something to say to someone. But this is an attempt to put language around something that has felt just out of reach of easy explanation, but it's very real. And I'm sharing it because I think there are others of you who might be in similar seasons and need to know you're not
crazy for feeling what you're feeling. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of my journey has been remaining in the same church where I once served. We knew unequivocally that we were supposed to stay put unless God called us elsewhere. Jeff and Allie are still serving, but I felt like the question God was asking me was, are you okay being nobody where you used to be somebody?
The answer, by the way, was no. I wasn't okay with it. I wanted to immediately sign up to serve everywhere, attend everything, and be the most committed all-in A-plus volunteer and stakeholder on earth. I remember from being a staff member how much we loved those people. You know, maybe I wasn't being somebody, but at least I was being everybody and I was definitely not being nobody. But the Lord said, nope.
So did my wise counsel bless them. No, Shannon, you can't serve in children's ministry. It would be weird since you used to lead it. No, you can't attend women's Bible study and be a table host. It would be weird for them. No, you can't volunteer for camp. It would be, well, you get the idea. And they were right about the weirdness factor. Think about it from everyone else's perspective.
Everything Made Beautiful (13:37.014)
If Shannon shows up to volunteer in the ministry she used to run, is she there to help or to quietly evaluate how things are going without her? When she raises her hand with a suggestion, is it helpful insight or thinly veiled criticism? When she offers to organize something, is it genuine service or an attempt to stay relevant? The new leaders would be wondering if they're being silently judged against how things used to be done.
The volunteers would be looking to her for direction out of habit, potentially undermining whoever's actually in charge now. And honestly, I would have been doing all of those things without even realizing it. Because when you've been the person with the plan for so long, it's really hard to just show up and trust someone else's plan, no matter how much you want to. Sure, everyone's trying to be mature about it, but there's just too much history, too many dynamics, too much potential for things to get weird.
Even with the best of intentions from everyone involved, there are invisible landmines everywhere. So the kindest thing for them and for me was to just not. At least not yet. Maybe not ever. And that realization stung more than I expected it to. So I basically feel weird all the time. Going is weird. Not going is weird. Serving would be weird.
Not serving is weird, sitting here was weird, sitting there was weird, coming late was weird, being there early was weird. Nobody ever told me how weird it would be. Before this, my transitions took me to a new role in a new church, so I'd never left staff and stayed in the church until now. So I told the Lord begrudgingly that I wanted to be someone who was okay being nobody where I used to be somebody, but in all honesty, I wasn't.
I thought surely he could figure out how to get me there. While I prayed and prayed for the humility to do this without an attitude, as if the Lord didn't have bigger world affairs to manage, I began to feel convicted that a few familiar things would have to be disallowed in my new weird reality if I was actually going to embrace this. goody. So in this new bizarro world, I didn't allow myself to...
Everything Made Beautiful (15:55.969)
Enter special doors where I could slip in and slip out as though I were Beyonce. I didn't allow myself to sit in special sections where I would be seen and more candidly be seen talking to all the somebodies. I didn't hang out in the green room or backstage where I could feel like somebody surrounded by somebodies. I didn't avail myself of special rooms, special snacks or special Diet Coke stashes. This one was hard, I'm not gonna lie. Diet Coke is special indeed.
and I didn't allow myself to take shortcuts, call in favors, or use discounts. That last one hit particularly hard when I was one day late signing up my high school senior for student camp because I didn't use my insider knowledge. It was full and she went on a waiting list. Now after a few weeks, she was cleared off the waiting list, but I'd never felt more out of the loop or more, well, generic. So...
without any perks and with only a feeble attempt at obedience to what I felt God was asking of me. I sat in the seats I once viewed from the platform. I experienced the actual impact of the parking lot circus that I had never had to navigate before since I was always first in and last out. It was like the stuff of lore. I'd heard about it. I just hadn't experienced it. And by the way, the parking team are the real MVPs at church.
What those sweet people experience weekly from some unhappy quote Christians who've just spent two hours worshiping Jesus, help us Lord. I've been reading communication I used to write, hearing plans I used to help ideate, watching the launch of programs I created and sitting in messages that a year earlier I'd have likely been teaching. That isn't me being cocky or self-assured, those are just the conversations we'd had.
This season has been like being a former restaurant manager who now just comes in for the weekly special. You know how the kitchen works, you have opinions about the menu, but what you're supposed to do is just sit there and enjoy your meal like a normal person. Turns out, being a normal person is harder than it looks. There are three services, so most people don't know you're there.
Everything Made Beautiful (18:14.872)
People know you, but you don't know them because for seven years they saw you almost every week in some sort of leadership role, fluttering around, always busy, busy, busy. So they say things like, you're alive, or it's close companion, you're not dead. And the weirdness of normal continues. Now to be fair, these people are trying to communicate.
that they've missed me, that they've noticed my absence, that I mattered to them. They're attempting to bridge the gap between the last time they saw me frantically rushing around and this moment when I'm just sitting there like a regular human. But what comes out is, wow, you do still exist, which while probably true, isn't exactly the warm reconnection anyone was going for. The problem is that nobody really knows what to say in these situations.
So instead, people default to existential observations about your continued presence among the living, which somehow manages to make everyone feel more awkward than before they said anything at all. I've realized over time that these interactions are actually quite sweet, even if they're clunky. People are trying to acknowledge that something has changed, that they noticed that the transition mattered. They just don't have a script for it because this particular brand of weirdness doesn't come with a greeting card section from Hallmark.
There's a nuance to this dance that they don't teach you in church staff school. Do I mention this thing I see or do I let someone else figure it out? Should I tell someone this thing is happening that they definitely think isn't happening or do I just assume someone else is gonna take care of it? Is this where not my monkeys, not my zoo comes in? But what about when I deeply love both the monkeys and the zoo? Furthermore,
How do we as former coworkers navigate relationships that seem to have primarily been defined by our proximity to each other on an org chart? After all, no one taught when staff members leave and stay in church staff school either, so none of us really knows how to act or what to do with our hands. This is honestly one of the most painful parts of the whole experience.
Everything Made Beautiful (20:25.814)
you realize that some relationships you thought were deep friendships were actually just really good working relationships and really good working relationships are awesome. But when you no longer have the common ground of staff meetings and project deadlines and shared organizational stress, you discover there might not be much else there. And sure, that can hurt. But then there's the flip side. What about the relationships that were really deep friendships?
Those people are now in an impossible position. Do they include you in conversations about work stuff? Do they invite you to stuff where mostly staff people will be? Do they tell you about the new initiatives or would that feel like rubbing salt in the wound? Are they allowed to complain to you about work things or does that put you in an awkward position? Can they celebrate wins with you or does that highlight what you're no longer part of? And from my side, I'm wondering,
Do I ask how things are going or does that seem like I can't let go? Do I offer input when they ask for it or does that make me seem like I think they can't handle things without me? If I don't ask about work, do I seem like I don't care about the thing I poured my life into? If I do ask, am I being inappropriate? It's like everyone is walking on eggshells trying to be sensitive and kind, but nobody knows what sensitivity and kindness actually look like in this situation. The relationships have to be renegotiated, sometimes from scratch.
And that process is messy and uncertain and sometimes reveals things we didn't really want to know about the foundation we thought we were building on. I watch other people do what I once did and I feel like a proud parent and utterly forgotten all at once. I'm genuinely thrilled to see programs and people flourishing because I poured so many years of my life into it all. But there's also a quiet, okay fine, it's loud voice that bellows, see?
What you did isn't special. They just split it all among other people when you left. In the early months of transition, if I'm being completely candid, a particularly nasty lie occupied my brain. You were only valuable for what you could produce. Now, to be fair, that's always been a fear of mine, but now it felt like it was coming true. The enemy, woo, he has a real gift for timing, doesn't he?
Everything Made Beautiful (22:49.538)
When you're already feeling vulnerable, he shows up with his greatest hits playlist of personal inadequacy. Fun. And this lie had such convincing evidence. Look how quickly they replaced you. See how smoothly everything runs without you. They didn't replace you. Were you even needed? Notice how no one's calling to ask your opinion.
The programs you helped build are thriving. The people you poured into are flourishing and the world keeps spinning as if you were never there at all. If you were really that valuable, wouldn't someone miss you for who you are, not just what you did? The lie whispers that love is always conditional, always earned, always performance-based.
The lie convinces you that every relationship was transactional, that people loved the things you could do for them, not the person you actually are. And when you're sitting in your house on a weekday afternoon with nowhere to be and nothing urgent to accomplish, that lie feels deafeningly loud. It's insidious because it takes a kernel of truth that our culture does equate worth with productivity, and it twists it into an identity-crushing narrative.
The enemy doesn't usually come at us with outright lies. He comes with distorted truths that feel believable enough to take root. And once that root system is established, it starts poisoning everything. Your sense of purpose, your understanding of God's love, your confidence in who you are when no one's watching and no one needs anything from you. I wondered if people missed me or just missed the things I used to do. Did they value Shannon the person or Shannon who could?
fill in the blank. Also, did I really value Shannon the person or only Shannon who could accomplish things? In a world that measures worth by productivity, stepping away from a highly visible role can feel like vanishing into thin air like all those people in Avengers Infinity War. You know how they were there one minute and then the next they just kind of blew away in pieces? The busyness gives way to a quieter rhythm and suddenly you're faced with the prospect
Everything Made Beautiful (25:03.968)
of having thoughts and ideas that aren't immediately useful to anyone. I found myself also thinking about everyone who'd ever transitioned before me, either generally from the staff or specifically from my team over the years. I had a different and deeper empathy for what they experienced, no matter the circumstances of their transition. I wished I'd reached out more after the goodbye party faded into distant memory. I wished I'd texted more often when I thought of them.
They'd been where I was, at least in part. I wondered if there was a way to make it not so weird for people going forward or if this is just a club you join and it is what it is, which would kind of suck. There's not even a cool t-shirt or other merch. But now that I've been on both sides, I realize no one knows precisely how to navigate it. I also spent time considering if I had made a colossal mistake, usually while sitting in church.
Had I given up something seemingly essential for something undefined? Was I crazy to leave a role where I'd felt needed only for the great unknown of what was it again exactly? But here's the thing, and this is where scripture becomes not just comforting, but absolutely essential. I left because God made it unmistakably clear that it was time for a new season. Isaiah 55, eight and nine reminds us that his thoughts are not our thoughts.
His ways are not our ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways. A side effect of obedience is that knowing you're supposed to move doesn't reduce your love or gratitude for what you're leaving behind. If anything, it intensifies it. There's always a grief commensurate with the love. And I loved that season, that work, those people so deeply, and I still do.
My pastor has referred to sadness and gladness in life and how you rarely only experience one without a little bit of the other. I think this is one of the hardest things for people to understand about obedient transitions. They expect that if God's calling you away from something, you must be ready to be done with it. But that wasn't my experience at all. I loved my work. I loved the people I served with. I loved the mission and the vision and the way God was moving.
Everything Made Beautiful (27:29.452)
So there's this strange guilt that comes with grieving something you chose to leave. People don't always know how to respond when you say, I'm sad about this thing I decided to do. They want to fix it or talk you out of the sadness or remind you why you made the choice. But the sadness isn't a sign that you made the wrong decision. It's a sign that what you're leaving behind mattered. It had weight. It was worth grieving.
I've learned that holding both the sadness and the gladness at the same time isn't a contradiction. It's maturity. It's what happens when we love deeply and trust fully, even when we don't understand completely. Ecclesiastes 3 tells us there's a time for everything. A time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Sometimes loving something well means knowing when to release it.
even when, or maybe especially when, it still feels like home. Often the most profound spiritual formation happens not through the addition, but through the subtraction. Sometimes God reveals who we are not by giving us more responsibility, but by taking away what we thought defined us. And let me tell you...
Having your identity stripped away is about as comfortable as wearing a wool sweater in July when it's hotter than a thousand hills like it always is in Tennessee. It's itchy, it's uncomfortable, and you spend a lot of time wanting to take it off. But this is how God operates, sometimes through the divine art of holy discomfort. In the stripping away, I've discovered parts of myself that were buried beneath to-do lists, weekly meetings, and program deadlines.
I have found dreams that were filed away under, someday when I have time. I've reconnected with gifts that the urgent needs of organizational maintenance had overshadowed. After all, Sunday comes at the exact same time every week. This season has been painfully sanctifying in the way that really good medicine tastes terrible but actually works. In the quiet moments when I wondered who I was without my title.
Everything Made Beautiful (29:42.168)
God whispered reminders of whose I am. In the vulnerability of no longer being needed in familiar ways, I've learned to trust that His plans for my life extend beyond any single role or performance of tasks. Here's the plot twist I didn't see coming. There's something genuinely liberating about being, quote, nobody special on Sunday, about not being on or responsible for everyone else's experience.
Just being a regular person who can focus on her own heart without simultaneously considering 50 other details. What a concept. This functional obscurity has become a gift I didn't know I needed. I now pray for it at some point in life for all my church staff friends here and elsewhere. Because when you're always on,
Always representing something or someone, always conscious of how your words and actions reflect on the organization or the ministry, you can lose touch with your own heart. You start filtering everything through the lens of how will this look or what will people think? You become a professional version of yourself even in your quiet moments sometimes. But in obscurity?
You get to remember what it feels like to just be a regular person seeking God for your own soul's sake, not because you have to teach it or preach it or model it for anyone else. You can ask questions without worrying that someone will lose confidence in your leadership. You can have doubts without feeling like you're failing your team. You can be messy and uncertain and human without it being a liability.
I've watched some people burn out, not from the work itself, but from the constant weight of representation. They can't go to the grocery store without being pastor so-and-so. They can't have a bad day without someone reading spiritual significance into their mood. They can't struggle or question or grow without it becoming a public concern. So yes, I pray that all my ministry friends get a season of functional obscurity at some point. Not as punishment or exile, but as a gift.
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A chance to remember who they are when no one's watching, when no one needs them to have it all together, when they can just be beloved children of God, learning to trust him in the quiet corners of ordinary life. So here, over a year later, I'm still learning to navigate this new normal. I'm not gonna lie. I'm still discovering who I am when I'm not defined by what I produce, and it's very easy for me to look to productivity for my worth.
And yes, I still occasionally have phantom limb syndrome where I fantasize about reaching for responsibilities that are no longer mine and wonder why no one asked me what I thought. But why would they? I opted out of being asked. So here's what I know for certain. The God who called me into several decades of being a church staff member is the same God who called me out of it.
and now has me in a season of still being in full-time ministry at Kava, still getting to write, still getting to teach, still getting to travel and do ministry, but being church adjacent while doing it. And I like this new seat. The one who used me in that season is using me differently in this one, and his definition of useful is much broader than mine ever was.
Romans 8 28 reminds us that in all things God works for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose. All things, even the weird things, even the awkward things, even the seasons that feel like extended exercises and holy discomfort.
So I want this episode to be for anyone who finds themselves in the strange territory of being nobody where they used to be somebody. It's for those of you navigating the awkward dance of staying put when everything has changed. For those of you wondering if you've made a terrible mistake or discovered a beautiful new freedom. It's okay that it takes time to find your footing in this new space.
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It's okay that the questions outnumber the answers. It's okay to grieve what was while remaining open to what might be. And it is definitely okay to still have opinions about how things function, even if no one asks for those opinions anymore. It's also okay if some days you feel completely at peace with your decision and other days you wonder if you've lost your mind. I had those days. Transition isn't linear. Healing isn't a straight line.
Some days you'll feel grateful for the freedom and other days you'll feel forgotten and irrelevant. Both can be true in the same week, sometimes in the same hour. You're not failing at this if you still miss the work. You're not being ungrateful if you sometimes wonder what would have happened if you'd stayed. You're not betraying your calling if you occasionally fantasize about going back to something familiar, uncomfortable. These feelings don't disqualify you from God's plan. They make you human. Please know
that your value didn't walk out the door with your name tag. Your worth isn't tied to your title, your significance isn't measured by your schedule, and your identity isn't dependent on how indispensable you once felt. You matter because you're God's beloved child, period, not because of what you can produce or organize or lead or fix.
The skills and gifts and heart that made you good at ministry leadership don't disappear when you step away from it. They just find new expressions, new outlets, new ways to serve the kingdom that you might never have discovered if you'd stayed in the familiar lane. God isn't done with you. He's just getting started with this new chapter. Many of you hear me talk often about Psalm 139, 16 that tells us all the days ordained for us were written in God's book before one of them came to be.
That includes this weird day, this awkward season, this in-between time. He's not surprised by our displacement or our questions or our struggle to find our footing. I had such a sweet season on church staff with beautiful teammates. I served Jesus and some of the finest humans Franklin, Tennessee has to offer. And some great work was done. And everything is always preparation for the next thing.
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Everything in that season happened exactly as it was supposed to. Everything this year has happened exactly as it was supposed to. And everything that happens next will happen exactly as it's supposed to. That's what building one's life on a robust theology of the sovereignty of God means. That nothing touches me that's not first sifted through his hand and that everything will work toward his glory and my ultimate good. Even the weird stuff.
A few weeks ago, I emceed a conference that took place in my church in the room I spent so many years in in a leadership role. On the stage, I experienced so many wonderful memories on and it snuck up on me. This opportunity God was giving me as a person who likes to intentionally mark moments when and where I can. Here I was, you know,
Coincidentally, one year to the day after my last day on staff, and I stood in the auditorium that has represented so much in my life. I was alone. Everything had been loaded out. All the attendees had gone. It was big, empty, and silent, and I felt God offering me the chance to raise an Ebenezer.
For those who might not be familiar with the term, an Ebenezer comes from 1 Samuel 7 when Samuel set up a stone between Mizpah and Shin and named it Ebenezer, saying, thus far the Lord has helped us. It's essentially a monument to God's faithfulness, a tangible reminder of how he has carried you through, provided for you, and been present in your story. I didn't have a literal stone to set up in that auditorium.
but I had something even more powerful, the ability to look back over all those years of ministry and see God's fingerprints everywhere and the ways he had used my brokenness and my gifts in equal measure. Standing there, I wasn't just saying goodbye to a season. I was acknowledging that every moment of it had been held in his sovereign hands. The good days when everything clicked and the hard days when nothing made sense.
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The victories that felt like vindication and the failures that drove me to my knees. The relationships that flourished and the ones that disappointed. All of it. Every bit of it had been filtered through his love and his purposes. That's what an Ebenezer really is. Not just gratitude for the good stuff, but recognition that God has been faithful in all the stuff. Even in the parts of the story that were painful or confusing,
or didn't turn out the way we thought they should. It's saying, thus far the Lord has helped us, even when the help didn't look like what we expected or wanted. To thank him for his faithfulness, to remember fondly, to pray for those continuing on and to mark the moment while saying goodbye. That's the Ebenezer I got to raise. Because that conference will be in a different church next year. So this was a moment of holy consecration.
God didn't have to extend me that kindness, you know, but he cares so deeply and specifically for all that concerns us. So he'll even orchestrate a profound Ebenezer moment right when and where we least expect it in the very place we need it. And when we need holy closure, he is the closer. The beautiful thing about God is that he's not finished with us when we're finished with a particular chapter.
Sometimes the most important work happens in the margins, in the spaces between what was and what will be, in the holy ground of not knowing every detail of what's next, but trusting that he does in the sacred space of subtraction. Now, I know exactly what it feels like to be a nobody, deeply seen and loved by somebody. And as it turns out, that's enough. More than enough, actually.
So here's to all of us learning to be okay being nobody where we used to be somebody. And here's to trusting that God's definition of significance is different from the world's. And here's to believing that sometimes the most important lessons are not learned the way we thought they'd be. If you're walking through a season of transition, a season of
Everything Made Beautiful (40:49.844)
sacred space in the in-between, a sacred space of subtraction, sacred space of obscurity. Just know that I see you and I feel you and I pray for you even though I don't know every detail of your story because I do know the details of mine and it helps me know how to pray. Thank you so much for being with me in this episode, just you and me.
having a little conversation and really the most transparent I've been about this journey because I really try not to put words to things casually. I want to be really careful with what I say and I felt the pressing that it was time to put some words around this and it's okay that it took 14 or so months. And it's also probably not the end of my processing, but I do feel
in a really sweet place in it where I can feel the Lord so near. So for those of you walking through something similar, that is what I'm praying for you as well, because we know that he is making everything beautiful in its time. So this week, be on the lookout for the ways that that's true all around you, but especially with you. We'll see you next time.