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330-He Does Not Waste a Chapter of Your Story · Stuck No More Voices

• 0:00
  Speaker: What if David had looked at the giant and decided the risk was too high?
• 0:04
  Speaker: What if Esther had kept her silence to keep her crown?
• 0:08
  Speaker: What if Moses had told the burning bush to go find someone else?
• 0:13
  Speaker: What if Mary had heard the angel and said,"This is going to cost me too much"?
• 0:18
  Speaker: Every one of them had a moment where they could've said no, and every one of them had every reason to.
• 0:26
  Speaker: The giant was huge.
• 0:28
  Speaker: The palace was too dangerous.
• 0:30
  Speaker: The desert was too long.
• 0:32
  Speaker: The assignment was too costly.
• 0:34
  Speaker: But each of them said yes anyway.
• 0:37
  Speaker: And here's the part I want you to sit with today.
• 0:39
  Speaker: We've been reading about their courage for 2,000 years.
• 0:43
  Speaker: Heaven may be waiting for yours.
• 0:47
  Speaker: Hey, welcome back to the Stuck No More Voices podcast.
• 0:49
  Speaker: I'm Theresa Croft.
• 0:51
  Speaker: I'm a visibility strategist helping Christian women go from their calling to their story to a message and solution for their ideal client.
• 1:00
  Speaker: Hey, do me a favor, will you?
• 1:01
  Speaker: Subscribe to YouTube if you're watching it or share the episode, the podcast episode, with a friend.
• 1:08
  Speaker: This is how we, the right woman ends up in this room.
• 1:12
  Speaker: So let's get into it.
• 1:14
  Speaker: Before I tell you about this episode, I'm just gonna tell you real quick this was born out of listening to one song over and over.
• 1:22
  Speaker: I was gripped by this song.
• 1:23
  Speaker: I'll tell you the name of it afterwards.
• 1:25
  Speaker: Just moved me, and it made me ask some questions to myself.
• 1:30
  Speaker: So today we look at how God writes a story and what it costs the man or woman living the middle of it to say yes before she can read the whole thing.
• 1:41
  Speaker: Because none of them could read the story while they were living in it.
• 1:45
  Speaker: Neither can you.
• 1:47
  Speaker: But your yes still counts, friend, right in the middle before the pages make sense.
• 1:53
  Speaker: Let's talk with Joseph.
• 1:54
  Speaker: Let's start with him.
• 1:55
  Speaker: He had a dream at 17, sheaves of wheat bowing down.
• 2:00
  Speaker: His brothers were bowing down.
• 2:02
  Speaker: He told the family, and they hated him for it.
• 2:06
  Speaker: Between that dream and its fulfillment, God wrote a story that made no sense.
• 2:12
  Speaker: The pit.
• 2:13
  Speaker: Sold by his own brothers.
• 2:15
  Speaker: Slavery in Potiphar's house.
• 2:17
  Speaker: A false accusation.
• 2:19
  Speaker: Prison.
• 2:20
  Speaker: Forgotten by a man he helped.
• 2:23
  Speaker: Not one of those chapters looked like a dream coming true.
• 2:27
  Speaker: Every one of them looked like a dream dying.
• 2:30
  Speaker: Then in Genesis 50, standing in front of the brothers who sold him, Joseph says something staggering.
• 2:36
  Speaker: "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good." He did not say that in the pit.
• 2:43
  Speaker: He did not say that in prison.
• 2:45
  Speaker: He said it decades later when the whole story was finally readable.
• 2:51
  Speaker: That's God's pattern.
• 2:52
  Speaker: He writes forward, we read backward.
• 2:56
  Speaker: Now Moses, raised in Pharaoh's house, trained in each Egyptian's best rooms, then he killed a man and he ran.
• 3:04
  Speaker: Ended up on the backside of a desert tending someone else's sheep for 40 years.
• 3:10
  Speaker: 40 years.
• 3:12
  Speaker: If Moses had written his own resume at year 20 in the desert, it would have read like colossal failure.
• 3:18
  Speaker: A prince demoted to a shepherd, a leader with no one to lead, a voice with no room to speak in.
• 3:25
  Speaker: Then a burning bush, a voice, a calling, a staff.
• 3:30
  Speaker: Everything Moses had lived in Pharaoh's house prepared him to stand in front of Pharaoh.
• 3:36
  Speaker: Everything he learned in the wilderness prepared him to lead a nation through the wilderness.
• 3:42
  Speaker: The 40 years were not a detour.
• 3:46
  Speaker: They were the training.
• 3:47
  Speaker: He could not have known that inside year 20, he barely knew it inside year 40, he only read it once the whole Exodus was written.
• 3:56
  Speaker: Hmm, let me tell you a personal story.
• 3:59
  Speaker: I spent five months in a headset with a microphone in front of my face taking one call after another.
• 4:06
  Speaker: I worked customer service for Nike.
• 4:08
  Speaker: Some callers were kind, a lot of them were not.
• 4:12
  Speaker: The ugly ones did something to my nervous system I was not ready for.
• 4:16
  Speaker: One ugly man said I sounded like a child, ripping me apart with his anger.
• 4:22
  Speaker: They landed in the same place my husband's words used to land.
• 4:25
  Speaker: Same tightening, same held breath, same hurt heart, different voice, same spot.
• 4:33
  Speaker: Nobody on that staff knew I had spent years on the radio.
• 4:37
  Speaker: I don't think it would've mattered or changed if they had.
• 4:40
  Speaker: Early in that year, I heard the Holy Spirit say I was a voice revivalist.
• 4:45
  Speaker: I wrote it down.
• 4:46
  Speaker: Then I put on the headset and took the next call.
• 4:50
  Speaker: It felt like a dream.
• 4:51
  Speaker: The long ago sweet spot past I was too far away from.
• 4:56
  Speaker: Here is what I could not see.
• 4:58
  Speaker: I was on that microphone every single day, five to eight hours a day, steady voice, hard callers, no applause.
• 5:06
  Speaker: God was not benching me.
• 5:08
  Speaker: He was rebuilding the thing that used to shake.
• 5:11
  Speaker: Then a position opened up at the station I had left 18 years ago, and I was hired.
• 5:17
  Speaker: And when I walked back in, the station had a new branded name, Victory 91.5, the Sound of Revival.
• 5:25
  Speaker: He said that word to me in private, then He put it on the building.
• 5:30
  Speaker: I go to the mic now with joy.
• 5:32
  Speaker: Nobody's waiting to tell me I did it wrong.
• 5:35
  Speaker: So if you're in a season that looks like a step down, check it again.
• 5:39
  Speaker: Some seasons are not a demotion, they are a tune-up Let's get back into the Bible.
• 5:46
  Speaker: Esther, an orphan girl taken into a foreign king's palace through a beauty contest she did not enter, for spiritual reasons, married into a court she did not belong in.
• 5:57
  Speaker: She was in position long before she knew the assignment.
• 6:00
  Speaker: Then Mordecai says the sentence that unlocks the whole story,"Who knows if you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?" Notice, not God caused this, not God spared you for this, just who knows?
• 6:16
  Speaker: Because sometimes even the person who lived the story does not fully know why God wrote them into the room they are in.
• 6:24
  Speaker: They just know that they are in it, and they have a choice to make.
• 6:29
  Speaker: You may be in a room right now that makes no spiritual sense to you, a job that feels like a mismatch, a city God moved you for reasons no one explained, and an audience of five when you were expecting 5,000.
• 6:43
  Speaker: The room may not be a detour.
• 6:46
  Speaker: It may be the position.
• 6:48
  Speaker: On to David.
• 6:50
  Speaker: Samuel poured oil on his f- head in the father's field.
• 6:53
  Speaker: He was a boy, a shepherd, the one no one thought to even invite to the family lineup.
• 6:59
  Speaker: He was anointed on his lunch hour, then he went back to the sheep.
• 7:03
  Speaker: Between the anointing and the throne, David lived through Goliath, Saul's spear, years in caves, betrayal by his own son.
• 7:12
  Speaker: Every one of those seasons could have made him quit believing the anointing was real.
• 7:18
  Speaker: He did not quit believing, because David understands something most of us miss.
• 7:23
  Speaker: Anointing and appointment are not the same event.
• 7:27
  Speaker: God anoints in private.
• 7:28
  Speaker: He appoints in public, sometimes years apart.
• 7:33
  Speaker: You may have been anointed for something a long time ago.
• 7:36
  Speaker: The public appointment has not come yet.
• 7:39
  Speaker: That does not mean the anointing was fake, friend.
• 7:42
  Speaker: It means God is writing the story properly.
• 7:45
  Speaker: Let me tell you another story.
• 7:47
  Speaker: The first time I substitute-taught was years before my husband died.
• 7:51
  Speaker: It was not my calling.
• 7:52
  Speaker: I knew that.
• 7:53
  Speaker: It was just provision for that time.
• 7:55
  Speaker: But I loved those kids.
• 7:57
  Speaker: I let them hug me.
• 7:58
  Speaker: I wasn't supposed to rub their heads, and I did anyway.
• 8:01
  Speaker: I was the strange sub who told them they were going to be somebody.
• 8:05
  Speaker: One afternoon, a little boy with these huge brown eyes looked up at me and asked if he could come home with me.
• 8:13
  Speaker: I had known him for one day.
• 8:15
  Speaker: I carried that.
• 8:17
  Speaker: I just did not think it counted.
• 8:19
  Speaker: It was not a career.
• 8:20
  Speaker: It was not a stage.
• 8:21
  Speaker: It was one woman filling in for somebody else.
• 8:26
  Speaker: Then my husband died, and I had to make a living, so I went back.
• 8:30
  Speaker: And I was driving to church one evening, dark evening, the evening service before my first day back.
• 8:38
  Speaker: I knew what Monday meant, the alarm, alarm going off before daylight, me standing in somebody else's classroom, by eight, doing work I had already done once before.
• 8:49
  Speaker: But then God spoke to me in that car.
• 8:51
  Speaker: He said,"Tee, you're not a substitute teacher.
• 8:54
  Speaker: You're my undercover agent for the Kingdom of God." Undercover, a substitute who you get when the real one is gone.
• 9:03
  Speaker: An undercover agent is the one nobody knows is the real one.
• 9:07
  Speaker: He said it before I walked in.
• 9:09
  Speaker: I had not taught one day of that season yet.
• 9:12
  Speaker: He handed me the title first and let the classroom catch up.
• 9:17
  Speaker: And I finally understood that little boy.
• 9:20
  Speaker: He was not asking a substitute if he could come home, home with her.
• 9:24
  Speaker: Something got through the cover long before I had a word for it.
• 9:27
  Speaker: Nothing about Monday changed.
• 9:29
  Speaker: Same early call, same rooms full of kids who did not know my name.
• 9:34
  Speaker: What changed was who walked in.
• 9:37
  Speaker: That sentence followed me into every teaching day.
• 9:40
  Speaker: It followed me into the Nike headset.
• 9:42
  Speaker: It walks into every call I lead now.
• 9:45
  Speaker: You may d- be doing work you were not put on a business card.
• 9:49
  Speaker: You're getting through it while you build the real one, the real thing on the side.
• 9:55
  Speaker: But look at what you keep doing anyway when nobody is paying for it.
• 10:00
  Speaker: That is not a habit.
• 10:02
  Speaker: That is the assignment showing through the cover.
• 10:05
  Speaker: God is not waiting for the real thing to start using you.
• 10:09
  Speaker: Here's the question I want you to sit with as this episode ends.
• 10:13
  Speaker: Where has God repeated himself in your life?
• 10:16
  Speaker: Not the moments that felt random, the theme underneath them, the word that keeps showing up, the role you keep being pulled back into, the kind of woman who keeps ending up in your DMs, the scripture you cannot get away from, the chapter you have had to live four different times before you finally listen.
• 10:38
  Speaker: That repetition is God writing your story.
• 10:42
  Speaker: Joseph had a dream repeated.
• 10:44
  Speaker: Moses had a burning bush, and then a rod, and then water from a rock.
• 10:48
  Speaker: Esther had Mordecai in her ear more than once.
• 10:52
  Speaker: David had Samuel's oil and then a thousand of days practice.
• 10:57
  Speaker: Mary had the very voice of the Holy Spirit.
• 11:01
  Speaker: You know, God repeats himself in your life for the same reason.
• 11:04
  Speaker: Not because he is unclear, because you are not ready to fully hear it the first time.
• 11:10
  Speaker: The story he's writing in you has a theme.
• 11:14
  Speaker: Go find it.
• 11:16
  Speaker: Here's what I want y- this you to sit with.
• 11:18
  Speaker: You cannot read your story clearly while you're living in the middle of it.
• 11:22
  Speaker: Neither could Joseph, Moses, Esther, or David.
• 11:26
  Speaker: Then you can, you can watch for the repetition.
• 11:30
  Speaker: That is where God whispers the theme he is writing, and you can say yes before the story makes sense.
• 11:37
  Speaker: That is what every hero of scripture did.
• 11:39
  Speaker: They said yes in the middle, not at the end.
• 11:44
  Speaker: Your next step, I invite you to the Calling Activation Study, where we take you from your calling to your story.
• 11:51
  Speaker: And it's a place where, a safe place where you can really see some story mapping, see, s- understand where your story may fit in.
• 12:00
  Speaker: One live session where you find the story that connects your calling.
• 12:04
  Speaker: Your story is being written, and he does not waste a chapter So this episode was inspired by a song called What If That Is You by May The Lord Studio.
• 12:17
  Speaker: Take some time, go listen to it, and maybe listen to this episode again.
• 12:23
  Speaker: I'm Theresa Croft and I'll talk to you in the next Stuck No More Voices episode