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.
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Well, hey there, my name is Shannon Scott and I am so excited to welcome you to the very first episode of the Everything Made Beautiful podcast and happy birthday to me. This is my birthday present to myself today. July 1st is my birthday and I committed to myself that I was finally going to do this thing that I had spent so long talking about. So if you and I know each other,
then I just want to tell you thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for tuning in on this journey. It has been a long time coming for me. And if we don't know each other and you are here because you saw something that said that you should tune in, let me just introduce myself. I have been married to my husband, Jeff, for 25 years and we have three children who we love and we like.
Our oldest Maggie is 22. Our middle Jack is 19 and our youngest Allie is 17 and they are the joy of our lives. I am a dog person so I have three dogs. Their names are Nash, Loretta and Maverick and there is probably never going to be a day where I don't have a dog so I am a dog person and it's really important that you know that.
I would describe myself to you as a traveling homebody. So I love, love, love being at home, but I also love to travel. And so it's this weird kind of counterintuitive love affair that I have both with being home and being a homebody and traveling as often as I can to as many places as I can. My husband and I enjoy it together. So if a traveling homebody is a thing,
then that is my descriptor that would most perfectly sum up what it's like to be an introvert who kind of never wants to leave her house, but also wants to get out there in the world and see some things. I love coffee, but I always top my coffee with whipped cream. So we here in Nashville have what I would call a bunch of
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coffee connoisseurs, some people might call them coffee snobs, and they have all sorts of fancy coffees and ways to make coffee and pour over coffee and all sorts of coffee things. And I don't care at all because I'm going to put creamer in it and whip on top of it. And so that is how I like my coffee. So I don't know if I can be considered a coffee person or not, since that is the case. I am a huge, rabid, passionate Atlanta Braves baseball fan.
I try to get down to Atlanta from Nashville several times during the baseball season to watch my beloved Braves play. And I am pulling for another world championship for us. And I am also a person who loves fall and winter. Those are my seasons. Those are my real home run seasons. If I can go ahead and pull that baseball analogy forward. And I do not.
love summer. I do not love the heat or the sun and I am most excited about November 1st because that is when Christmas in my book officially begins. So that probably tells you most of the probably non -essential or unimportant things that you would need to know about me before we launch into this podcast journey together. But the most important things to know about me are that I am a Jesus girl.
I love Jesus. I've loved him since I was seven years old, but the older I've gotten and the more I have been in relationship with him, the more I love him. I find that anything I'm seeking in life, he holds the answer to. And I believe that's true for anyone who knows Jesus. I'm also a church girl. I love the local church. I believe in the local church. Up until this past
April, I was on staff at a local church for the better part of three decades. And so I love the local church and I love her so much that I also am able to see some of her flaws and her dysfunctions and the way that sometimes we get it wrong as church people. But it doesn't diminish my love for and passion for the local church because I do believe it's God's design for community for us.
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here on the earth. It's one of the ways we are to be together in fellowship and faith is through the church. Whatever form or version of that may be your experience. I want to say that I though I no longer am necessarily on staff getting a paycheck for from my church or a ministry job. I am still a church.
girl through and through. My parents raised me to be a church girl. My dad was a pastor his entire life and my mom was in those days we would have called it the church secretary but she was on staff at the church all of my life that I could remember up until the last five years. She was on staff at a local church and my parents were church people. We were there every time the doors were opened and I didn't know anything other than two parents
who served the Lord on a church staff. And I would imagine that is the majority of the reason I so easily followed in those footsteps. My dad, after passionately serving the Lord for 68 years, went to be with him after complications from Parkinson's disease in 2018. And that was a particularly difficult time for me. I'm a daddy's girl for sure. And
the grief of losing him at what I considered to be such an early age and for me to feel like I was really young to be losing my dad. That was a difficult season. Shortly after he passed away, my mom moved with us to Nashville from Atlanta and lived with us for four years, which was such a sweet season for us and for our kids to have their grandmother so close by, but
About a year and a half ago, we started noticing that something wasn't quite right with mom, and she was diagnosed with sudden cognitive decline or sudden onset dementia. And so she is here nearby us in Franklin, Tennessee, in a memory care facility. She has ups and downs, and she has moments of total cognitive awareness, and then she also has moments.
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where she's not making sense and the things she says don't make sense, but we roll with it and we just love her and love any time that God continues to give us with her. And so because of the loss of my dad and now the kind of ongoing slow loss of my mom, it has given me a lot of time to think about the seasons.
of our lives. And really for the last decade, I have pondered seasons and I've pondered it specifically around a passage out of Ecclesiastes chapter three that is so familiar. It's probably the most familiar passage in Ecclesiastes. But Ecclesiastes chapter three just says, to everything there is a season. That's the ESV translation to everything there is a season.
The Christian Standard Bible, the CSB version says to, let's see, I have it right here in front of me, let's see, there is an occasion for everything and a time for every activity under heaven. And there is a season and there is an occasion for everything. All sounds really well and good until you start looking into Ecclesiastes chapter 3 and you see the list of things that there is a time for and an occasion for.
It says there's a time to give birth and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones, a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing, a time to search and a time to count as lost.
a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. And as you start looking through that list in Ecclesiastes chapter three, I have always read that and thought, these are all the good things I want to strive for and these are all the
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bad things I want to try to avoid. But as is always the case with scripture, context is key. And so when we read Ecclesiastes chapter three in context, we have to remember that the writer is basically driving home the mortality of human beings. We are finite. We are
limited on this side of eternity, there is an end to our existence. And so in this, a time to a time to a time to and a time to, he's saying the finite nature of our lives in a fallen world means that in the economy of God, the way he has chosen to set it up, there is an appropriate time for everything.
on this list, not just the things that we want to categorize as good, but there is even an appropriate time for the things we don't think are good. I said that the beginning of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 says, for everything there is a season. And if you look up that word season, both in scripture and just if you just look up Webster's dictionary, all of the definitions of that word do agree.
And a season in Ecclesiastes chapter three is a proper or suitable time. And so these scriptures are saying to us that there's a proper and a suitable time for everything on that list. The good things and the not so good things that you and I don't want in our lives. None of us would be saying that we want these things in our lives, but these are the proper
and suitable things God has made. The real encouragement comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 verse 11 though which says, He has made everything beautiful in its time. Or in the CSB, He has made everything appropriate in its time. So the challenge for you and for me as people who love Jesus and want to follow Him with our lives is to have
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this perspective of everything being made beautiful during the hardships, the suffering, the pain, the betrayal that we might experience in our lives and to have it during those unfortunate things, during those painful things, during the things that grieve us, during loss, during hardship, not just in retrospect. Now to be clear,
there is something called toxic positivity that this could sound like. Okay Shannon, so you're telling me that in the hard things of my life I'm just supposed to know that God can make it beautiful and so everything should be fine? That's not what I'm talking about. Toxic positivity actually denies or suppresses or avoids painful emotions at all costs. This is not what I'm talking about. This is not
well, He'll make everything beautiful. So I guess everything's fine. That's toxic positivity. That's not what I'm talking about. But the everything made beautiful way of life acknowledges that someone greater than us is in charge of our story, and that He specializes in beauty. Toxic positivity would say, this isn't happening. I don't feel anything. This doesn't hurt me.
but an everything made beautiful perspective says, I don't understand it. I don't like it and it's painful, but I trust the One who's in control of it. So it's believing God knows what I don't and sees what I can't. It's trusting that from ashes can come beauty and it's begging for the eyes and the heart to discern it. This is where so many of the Psalms in scripture and books like
job and lamentations are gifts to us because they model for us what it looks like to not have toxic positivity about the painful things in our lives but instead to develop a posture that says I don't like it I wish it weren't happening I don't understand it but I do trust the one who's sovereign over it so it feels like to me we've got
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two options in front of us when we are encounter encountering difficult seasons of our lives. One is to squander it. And the other would be to savor it. To squander something is to waste it in a really reckless and foolish manner. There are lots of ways that you and I can squander the difficult seasons of our lives where we can
choose instead of trying to have an eternal perspective on it we can choose to wallow or self -pity or frustration or anger or lashing out we can make it everybody else's problem we can rail against God we can express how unfair this is and how we don't believe that we deserve to be going through something painful
That would be a squandering of an opportunity to be more conformed into the image of Christ, which scripture says comes in a really distinct way through suffering. Or we can choose to savor these seasons of our lives, not the circumstances of them. I'm not saying that if you experience betrayal in your life that you should savor the betrayal.
But if you do experience a season of betrayal in your life, there is a way to savor Jesus in that difficult season. To savor something is to dwell on it, to delight in it. And that is what we can do with the person of Jesus Christ no matter what season we find ourselves in. But it takes power. It takes surrender. Surrender.
from us and the power of the Holy Spirit inside us to enable us to savor a difficult season. Does it mean denying pain? No. Refusing grief? No. Ignoring boundaries? No. Withholding truth or justice? No. None of that is what I'm suggesting. But what I am suggesting is in the midst of these things, in the midst of difficult scenarios, we can have an eyes up
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perspective that sees kind of beyond the veil, if you will. Listen, no one knows better than me that life can be hard, painful, disorienting, even scary in seasons. And I've had seasons where I've thought, I either believe what I'm singing on Sundays, or I don't. God is either sovereign over my life, or he's not.
And you and I need the faith stories of one another. We need truth. We need scripture as we follow Christ. This life, this journey was meant to be taken in community with one another. You and I are not to be left to ourselves to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus well. You and I are not to be left to ourselves to navigate difficult seasons. You and I aren't even to be left
to ourselves navigating joyful seasons. We were meant to do life in community. We were meant to understand that things come to pass. That in the same way that God has created the seasons on the earth of winter, spring, summer, and fall, He's created the seasons of our lives, the good and the things we would consider bad.
seasons and that all of them can be used by Him in an appropriate and beautiful way. So this is why the Everything Made Beautiful podcast exists frankly to put real people with real faith stories into the world and I'm just one of them. I want to hear how others are pursuing Christ. I'm going to be interviewing lots of my friends and people who have stories to tell about what it looks like
when God makes everything beautiful in its time. You know, it's interesting when we see this word beautiful in scripture and he makes everything beautiful, I think it's interesting that it doesn't guarantee that it'll necessarily look beautiful to you or to me. It may not be on this side of the veil that we see beauty in a particularly painful
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circumstance but it doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean that God can't see and make something beautiful out of it. So along the way we'll hear some stories that's what you can expect on this podcast. We will hear the journeys of other people as they seek to live and follow after Christ. You'll hear some truths I've learned along the way. There've been a few
But hopefully this podcast can be a bright and encouraging spot in your day whenever you choose to tune in. These episodes with me will be a little on the shorter side and then we'll spend a little bit longer with our guests hearing their stories. We will drop episodes each Monday and I welcome the chance to hear from you and to hear the stories of your own faith journey and to hear what God is teaching you and how he is meeting
you and making things beautiful in your life. You can always reach out to me at my website, which is shannonsusannscott .com and I would love to hear your stories. And I do just want to say I'm so grateful for the Kava podcast network who is sponsoring this podcast. Kava is a streaming service that I get the opportunity to be a part of and be on the team with. I've
taught a couple of Bible studies that are streaming on the Kava network. And there are all sorts of workshops and roundtable discussions. And all of them by really profound and wonderful teachers are meant to help you go deeper in your faith. They're meant to give you handles on and opportunities to ask questions around and just dig into what it means
to not only be a follower of Christ, but understand some of the things in His Word that trip all of us up. So if you are interested in checking out Kavah, I would really encourage you to do that. I'm so thankful for their support of me and of this podcast. And there is actually a free trial available for that subscription service. So you can check that out at kavah .tv. And then lastly,
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Please, please, please download and like and subscribe and share and listen and watch and whatever else you do with podcasts because we want as many people as possible to be sharing stories of God's faithfulness, but also being encouraged by the faith stories of others. I'll tell you that of all of the things I've studied and taught over the years,
this everything made beautiful concept has been the most transformative in my life. It has helped me have handles to grab onto in navigating the different seasons that God gives me to steward. And so it's my prayer that through this podcast that you will find hope.
that you will find encouragement, that you will feel seen and that you will have truth given to you on this journey, that you will dig deeper into scripture, that you'll have a better understanding of God, that you will know that He's for you and that He sees you and that He is with you. It would thrill me to no end if you knew after listening to some of these great
speakers and communicators and friends that I have coming up on this podcast that you would just know that you're not alone and that God sees you through something that they share or that I share and that this would be a way that even through your car radio or your computer screen or anywhere in between that we would just feel more connected as brothers and sisters in Christ going after him with all we've got.
because at the end of the day he is actually making everything beautiful including you and me and I'm so thankful for that. Thanks so much for listening today we will see you right back here next week and I can't wait to share this journey with you.