Welcome to Grace Enough Podcast, where Amber Cullum and special guests fearlessly tackle challenging faith questions while unraveling the limitless grace of God. Through engaging podcast conversations, Amber dives deep into the hard truths of life and reveals the boundless grace of God through inspiring stories of men and women walking in the kingdom of God here on earth. Grace Enough's mission is to offer more than a Band-aid Bible verse or empty platitude to individuals on their spiritual journeys with Jesus. Discover a wealth of free resources at www.graceenoughpodcast.com. This podcast is specially designed to uplift and encourage Christians, reminding them that, regardless of their stories, God can use them to make an impact on His kingdom. Embracing surrender and trust, you'll discover that His grace is truly enough. Tune in now and embark on a remarkable journey of faith.
Episodes
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
Justin and I chat about habits and how they form us. We chat about practicing habits of purpose particularly as it relates to our digital and media consumption.
4:57Justin shares how he came to know Jesus
"I did have my serious wanderings in late High School and early College. I describe it as the period for me where I personally never really doubted that the claims of Jesus were true, I did experientially wonder if they mattered and if they mattered to me. Through some significant moral failure, and realizing that I was less happy... and more ashamed, living the way I was living. Finally I had my 'I'm gonna follow Jesus, not just because my parents said', but for myself in early college. And it was really because I started to think about who I was becoming. I realized I don't like who I'm becoming, but I like who my dad is. I like who my parents are. And just because they modeled a life of following Jesus."
7:22You have said, "My habits wrecked me."
Share with our listeners a little about what life looked like for you early in your law career and how that led you to develop habits of purpose.
"I look back now and I think the house of my life was very sincerely decorated with the Christian content of calling, but I look back now and I also realize that the architecture of that life was exactly like everyone else's. I completely assimilated to all the typical practices of a top 20 law school, an aspiring young lawyer, just busy all the time. Always waking up earlier. Always staying up later. Always adding more. And that worked in a sense. I graduated around the top of my class and got my dream job at an international law firm doing mergers and acquisitions. And, you know, life was going well, of course, until it wasn't."
"How is it that this missionary to law and business became converted to the nervous medicating warrior, and especially in such a short order? The answer for me...was by habit.... After about a year of this, I realized that my my body and my mind, and all the anxiety that wrecked it, was happening because I had finally become converted to the anxiety and the nervousness and the busyness that my habits and routines worshiped. I was being formed in anxiety even while I was in my head clinging to the gospel piece of calling."
"I think our cultural moment is familiar with the significance of worldview. For example, what we believe about the world has a serious impact on our life. But I do think we're less acquainted with the idea that the practical ways we live have significant impact on who we become."
"Our brain becomes attuned to certain habit activity such that our head thinking can go one way, but our habit activity can go the other way and that's very normal. Then, I started digging into the theology of this and realizing that when your head goes one way and your habit goes the other way your heart follows the habit."
"It is possible to believe all the right things, but but very unwittingly, worship idols of productivity, busyness, exhausting yourself to earn the approval of others just through the little habits of the ways you check your emails or never turn off your devices or never schedule a day off."
16:02 The Common Ruleis a way for people to practice formational habits together and today we are primarily going to talk about digital habits.
You write, "The smartphone is a tool that enables many things, but it will never multiply our presence." What do you encourage others to do to begin practicing presence?
"We are often connected to people, but we are very rarely actually present with people."
19:22One of the daily habits you recommend is Scripture before phone. Why do you recommend that?
"I recommend that and almost everything else I recommend, because of the ways I fail at it."
"We wake up and our heads are asking our phone a really simple question, which is what do I need to do today? But our hearts...this is not totally conscious, or verbalized even, our hearts are asking a really different question, who do I need to become today in order to be lovable? Anything will be happy to answer that question for us, especially the phone."
"Whether we approach our phones looking for love or set out to them to share love makes a world of difference in how we use them. For me, the practice of Scripture before phone is one of those keystone habits to help check myself on what I'm doing when I go to my phone."
Techwise Family by Andy Crouch
SHOW NOTES cont. at graceenoughpodcast.com
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Tuesday May 26, 2020
Tuesday May 26, 2020
Krista, the co-founder of We Start Now chat about building an internal framework within your child when it comes to values and digital habits. Krista also shares a variety of tips to help parents and families flourish in the digital age.
1:57 Take a moment to introduce our listeners to you, your family, and tell us a little about We START NowA couple of years ago, my oldest daughter was in fifth grade. At that time, the hot Christmas gift was a smartphone and I knew that our family was not ready for a smartphone....I really became concerned about that and started reaching out asking if anybody else wanted to talk about it. What happened was it became a conversation ironically, of a close tiny group of people who started talking about this issue and it grew to 3000 people almost overnight. People who really were talking about what does it look like to give our kids smartphone. How do we get them ready for that? What age is the right age?"
START. It's an acronym that stands for sit together and rethink technology.
5:16 What are some of the key take aways that you applied as your family began to re-think technology?"I think that there is a very hopeful, promising movement of the next generation of parents who are beginning to say, we want to do it different and it's gonna look a little bit more incremental."
6:40 I read a study recently that the average U.S. household has eleven connected devices with seven of those, including screens to view content. What are some first steps and things that we can do to really begin to rethink technology?---------------------------------------------------
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Tuesday May 19, 2020
Tuesday May 19, 2020
The founder of Better Life Bags, Rebecca Smith, joins me to talk about growing Better Life Bags(BLB) from an Etsy shop to a large company that provides meaningful work for women in her community. We also chat about slowing down to get ahead, the mission of BLB and pursuing dreams in every season.
A Better Life: Slowing Down To Get Ahead by Rebecca Smith
4:40 Share a little of your faith journey with us. When and how did you come to know Jesus? 9:34 Take us back to being a young married woman in Savannah, Georgia and how you ended up in Hamtramck, Michigan."I was giving micro loans with each bag purchase to a woman who lived in a third world country."
"We moved to Michigan to this little city called Hamtramck. Our point in doing that was we were going to live here for two years immersing ourselves in a different culture. This city is very diverse... There's 26 languages spoken here in two square miles."
"I had never imagined myself going overseas for missions, but I knew God had this heart for the world and I was willing to follow if that was His plan for our life, but I was terrified."
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Thursday May 14, 2020
Thursday May 14, 2020
Sam and I chat about what led us to implement a weekly Shabbat meal and Sabbath rest into our family routine. We discuss challenges and benefits from our experience.
0:34 What led us to begin a weekly practice of Sabbath rest?Sam: “We had started looking at some of the family teams stuff with Jeremy Pryor and Jeff Bethke and some of the research they were sharing about people leaving the faith in western Christendom versus religions like Mormonism and the Hebrew faith….Part of it was that there weren’t rhythms that were part of the standard daily family cycle. And so for me, we were researching that and it really hit me that it was something I wanted to give to my kids to help them see the realness of our faith, but also to give them a practice that gave us an identity as a family.”
3:20 As a family of 5 (3 kids 10 and under) we understand the challenge with actually getting to rest, so what does our weekly Sabbath look like?Our family currently Sabbath’s from 5 p.m. on Friday-12 p.m. Saturday.
Shabbat meal Friday evening followed by 5-10 minutes of quiet time, then family game time.
Tips:
- Choose a day that works for your family and can be repeated
- Form a habit of removing digital distraction
- Make the Shabbat meal special. Ex.) plates only used for that meal, special drink for the kids, table cloth, etc.
Shabbat meal practice:
- Stand behind our chairs
- Pray
- Sing Doxology
- Read Deut. 5:15: Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day
- Light the candles
- Oldest generation present blesses any sons and daughters present
- Kids speak Aaronic Blessing (Num. 26: 22-27) over us in Hebrew
- As a family we bless one another with the Aaronic blessing
- EAT!
Amber: “It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not like you just wake up in the morning and are like, Okay, I’m going to rest now and it just happens you actually have to plan for rest.”
EP. 49: Jeremy Pryor | Family Teams
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Tuesday May 12, 2020
Tuesday May 12, 2020
Pastor Doug and I chat about the heart attack that changed his life. He began the journey out of workaholism toward healthy boundaries and consistent practice of Sabbath rest.
The Heart Attack that Saved My Life by Doug Gamble
6:08 Share a little of your faith journey with us. How did you come to know Jesus?"I love the church. I'm quite familiar with all of its flaws and faults, because we're not perfect people. But I do love the church, what it can do what it has done, I still think it's God's best plan on earth."
10:45 There was a point in your pastoral life years ago, where you were just burning it at both ends. Share with us a little bit about what happened during that season in your life?"Religious addiction is not like drugs or alcohol...you know, people like when you're doing good and yet it has the same toxic effect. Workaholism, like most other things, involves lying and stealing. In this case, you're lying and stealing time that should be spent with God, with your wife, with your kids, and you're not practicing good boundaries, like we've learned are so important."
"I had a Christian cardiologist, so I went back to him... [he said,] 'I'm going to help fix your heart, but you and your elders are going to have to totally change your life. You can't be coming in here to my office at 49 as a missions pastor with a heart problem, you're not living right'."
"The reason Sabbath has become so meaningful to me is it's really not well understood in the Protestant world. We think Sabbath as you go to church on Sunday, then you watch football or you go out to the beach or you do whatever you do in the summer or in the winter. [But] discovering the Sabbath is as Jesus said in one of his parables, man wasn't made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man. And what that means is we need it more than we realize. We tend to think it's a duty. It's not a duty. It's a one day in seven to live differently, so that you can be different the other six days of the week."
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Tuesday May 05, 2020
Tuesday May 05, 2020
Dr. Matthew Sleeth and I discuss how his world view shifted from secular, humanist, scientific to a Biblical worldview after he read a Bible from his ER waiting room. We chat about this shift from being an ER Physician to a Christ-follower who consistently practices Sabbath and cares for the world God created. Dr. Sleeth talks much about the true rest and joy that comes from Sabbath.
5:40Take our listeners back to when you were an ER doctor and share what happened that led you to a career and overall life change."My worldview, up until that time, was secular humanist scientific. If you couldn't measure it, if you couldn't reproduce it, I really didn't want to talk to you about it. But evil is a spiritual concept. You can't measure it. Goodness knows you don't want to try to reproduce it. But if anybody's seen evil, they know what it is. You can't explain it away. And so I thought, if there's this evil force loose on the world, what's the other side? Where does something good come from? And I had seen good, because being involved in medicine I think is fundamentally good. It's a wonderful career. I love taking care of sick people. I worked in the emergency department my entire career in medicine. Sometimes I'd kind of step back and we could be having a trauma code or something on somebody that we didn't even know who it was....I'd look in and they're just a dozen people throwing everything they had at trying to help and I said, 'This is good. Something here is fundamentally good'. So I went looking for the source of that good. I read through a number of the world's sacred texts. I read the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran and my kind of quest, if you will, culminated by picking up a Bible one day. I'd never read it. We didn't own one. And I actually took the Bible I picked up in a waiting room.... I said, I've never read this thing and I'm gonna read it."
"In the book of Matthew, I met the Lord, I met Christ and it just hit me like a ball-peen hammer in the forehead that this this person was real and different than anybody else that has ever walked the planet. He is so amazingly human and then at the same time, amazingly inhuman. That's how I met the Lord was in the Bible."
"If our lives are set, and we've got all the knobs tuned where we want, it's kind of hard for the Lord to break into that. It's probably more in the times of chaos, that's when we lean on the Lord that we find out that He's there."
"My theology is that Sabbath keeping is not a condition of getting into heaven. It is not fundamental for salvation. So, Sabbath keeping is not a condition of getting into heaven, it's just a condition that heaven is in if you get there."
17:17After reading through the Bible, what did you discover about God's Words on the Sabbath?---------------------------------------------------
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Tuesday Apr 28, 2020
Tuesday Apr 28, 2020
Tim and Darcy Kimmel join me on the show. We chat aboutthe legacy of a grandparent, setting healthy boundaries, and grand parenting with purpose
2:10 Tell us a little about your family and Family Matters. 9:13 Your children are grown and have kids of their own. Long before becoming grandparents the two of you were thinking about how to impact the generations coming behind you for the kingdom of God. What were some of the "notes" you took about grand parenting prior to becoming a grandparent?"Grandparents, because of the nature of their generation and their age, have a lot of assets they can contribute, whether it's a healthy or a fractured home."
"I think we figured it out. Why grandchildren get along better with the grandparents and sometimes with their own parents is that they share a common source of annoyance." LOL!!
18:10 What are some ways you grandparent with purpose?Extreme Grandparenting book and video series
"The first thing we can do is give a blessing to our grandchildren. The way we do that is that we help meet three basic needs that all children have. The need for security, the need for significance and the need for strength."
"Three specific ways we can bless our grandkids is always use our words and our actions to appeal to one of their one their three basic driving inner needs. Most parents don't even know their kids have three driving inner needs.... They all need to know they're secure. They all need to know they're significant. They all need to know they're strong or sufficient for the life that they're facing. We can come alongside them using our words or actions, to always give them a secure love, help build a significant purpose into their life, and to represent a strong hope to them for the future. I mean, that stuff's gold to a kid."
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Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
Jim and I discuss parenting your adult children, how your role changes, avoiding unsolicited advice, and moving them from dependence to independence.
4:16 Will you share a little of your faith journey with us?"We've been married a long time [45 years]. We write books together. Some people call us marriage mentors, but we have high maintenance marriage. High maintenance is not bad, it just means we got to really keep working at it."
"The Bible says that you inherit the sins of a previous generation to the third and fourth generation. Well, we want to stop that. You can either recover or repeat."
"Really good parents have kids who make some poor choices, at times.... I always like to say, a sinner married another sinner, and then you have sinnerlings."
"Be ruthlessly honest about your own brokenness. You don't have to always focus on it, but but the truth is when you're ruthlessly honest about your own brokenness I think you parent better."
"We who are studying where kids are going when they become adult children. Unfortunately, a lot of them are walking away from faith, yet there's some studies out right now....that are pretty exciting that say if there are faith conversations in the home, there's about a 300% better chance that they'll stay in the faith."
11:27We are going to chat about doing life with adult children. When our children live under our roof we rarely consider what parenting will look like when they become adults. What were some surprises or challenges you and your wife faced when transitioning into parenting adults?"Experience is a better teacher than advice."
19:13You discuss 9 principles in your book, "Doing Life with Your Adult Children." A few being: Your role as the parent must change. You can't want it more than they want it. Let's talk about Principle # 5: Your job is to move them from dependence to independence. What are some common mistakes parents make in this area and what advice do you have for them?"Age 0-2 and say your job with them is caring and you're not going to discipline them. You're not giving them a whole lot of advice. You're just showing care. If they cry, you pick them up. Hungry, you feed them, etc. From two to 10, you do pretty much control them. That's micromanaging in the best way. You aren't going to say to your kids, 'You know what I'm doing this podcast right now, so you guys can go outside and if you want to go over to the mall.' ...By about age 10, you've got to turn into a coach, which means you still lead, you still sometimes take them out of the game....you're still in charge....But at the same time, they've got to make some decisions because they've got to learn you're moving them from dependence to independence. By the time they get to older teenagers, you're almost a consultant. Their day to day decisions should be done by them. There are parents who say, 'Yeah, but you don't understand my kid.' No, I don't and you may have to squeeze in especially if there's addiction issues or sexual promiscuity or things like that, but the truth is they should be making most of their decisions. By the time they're adults, they're going to have to learn to do it on their own....I think a lot of parents miss that. They keep wanting to control. If you try to control your kids as young adults, meaning 18, 19 and 20, when they're not always acting like adults, if you keep controlling them, then you don't give them that chance to experience some of the highs and lows of life and become responsible. No young adult wants you to always give them advice, because they view that as you don't trust them, or you don't think they're grown up enough."
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Monday Apr 20, 2020
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Natalie and I chat about her son's diagnosis and how that experience altered the their lives leading them to adopted 3 children with special needs. Natalie shares how her view of life became filtered through the question: Is this going to matter for eternity?
2:32 Will you go back to when you were pregnant with your first child and share with our listeners what it was like to find out he had a congenital heart defect in utero?"There was kind of an added level of stress on us as a young, newly married couple, but we did have our faith. I remember that first night after me and my husband had cried together and prayed and begged God to heal our baby, just knowing that whatever happened, we were going to give God glory through it, that we wanted our child's life to tell God's story, no matter what that may be, but then walking that out was extremely difficult."
"We went into that appointment having a plan of what our future was going to look like...Then everything was kind of ripped into the unknown. I didn't know who was going to deliver my baby and I didn't know if I was going to be able to hold him after he was born and I didn't know if he would make it through the labor and delivery. So many unknowns and I think that was the hardest part of the pregnancy."
8:04What transpired after Landon was born? 9:50 Eventually, you were led to adopt 3 children who all have special needs/disabilities. I know I am asking you to condense your life into a few minutes, but can you share a little about that experience?"God opened our eyes to how relentlessly short life is, and that it is more precious than we ever realized. Both me and my husband knew we were never going to be the same after this. We had a new perspective on life. It didn't matter where our children went to school or what clothes they wore, or what sports they played, we realized what really matters in life and that's connection.... We realize that all we can take with us into eternity are the lives that we touch. And so that's really the heart of what God led us to adopt. That's the filter that we based every decision after having Landon through: Is this gonna matter for eternity?"
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Thursday Apr 09, 2020
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
Mazi and I chat about how anxiety manifests itself, practices to manage anxiety, identifying unproductive thought patterns, and how to overcome them.
5:34You're here today to talk about some aspects of mental health. Something that we're all hearing or reading on a daily basis, during this quarantine and unknowns, is the rise in anxiety in people. Talk to us a little bit about anxiety and what you have seen as a counselor during these times, and how to identify that in ourselves.
"One of the things that I've been communicating to clients and talking with other people about is that if you are feeling anxious right now, that's normal. If your anxiety is elevated right now, that's normal. The reason for that is because we are living in very stressful anxiety inducing times, because what we're living in is filled with uncertainty."
"The thing that we have to understand is the way our brain works. Our brains main job is to keep us alive. The way our brain does that is by constantly assessing if we're in danger or if we're okay. One of the things that our brain perceives as dangerous to our being, to our security is uncertainty. So whenever our brain perceives that we are being faced with uncertainty, with change, with something that is outside of our control, our brain registers that as a threat to our being. Our brain immediately sends us into fight, flight or freeze mode, also known as our anxiety response."
Anxiety may manifest as:
- anxiousness, worry, panic
- frustration, irritation, more easily annoyed
- heart racing or pounding
- changes in appetite and digestion
- withdrawing, under functioning
- over functioning
- sadness, depression
- and others
13:25 Once we identify how anxiety manifests itself, what are some practices, some tools we can put into place in our daily lives to help us to deal with it in a healthy way?
- Structure: "As human beings, we crave comfort and certainty and structure. What recent events have done is they've taken all that and thrown them up in the air. If you can try to create some sort of structure and routine in your day, that would be beneficial, because it sends a message to your mind of, 'Okay, we're not in control of a lot of things, but we're in control of when we eat lunch. And I know I'm going to lunch at 12 o'clock and I can count on that.' "
- Showering (self-care): "It's a way of sending a message to our mind that the wheels may have fallen off the car, but I'm still worth taking care of in the most basic of ways."
- Emotional Awareness: "Now's not the time to stuff our feelings. We're feeling too much. There's too much to emotionally respond to and so now is not the time to stuff it and not bring it up or think I'm just not going to deal with it. I'm going to sweep it under the rug. It's really important for us to process our fears, to process our worries, to be emotionally honest with those we are close to in our lives right now."
- Remind ourselves of truth: "It's natural for us to feel critical of others. It's natural for some of us to feel critical of ourselves. Why can't I get this routine down? Why can't I figure out this homeschooling. And so just being very aware of when our thinking is turning negative and reminding ourselves of truth? I'm doing the best that I can. This is so unknown. I've literally never lived through this before. So I'm not going to get it right."
- Get outside: "Every day we need to get outside and if you don't feel like you want to go outside, then that's the day you really need to go outside."
- Consistent face to face connection with people outside of our home: "It is so important that every day we are talking and if we can video see someone, because we are not designed to be physically isolated. And even if you are isolated with your family that still isolation and that in of itself is kind of a different stress because you're with us all the time."
Show NOTES continued
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