What happens when your dreams crumble💔, but your faith remains🙏? Join me as I recount my personal journey, filled with relentless pursuit🏃♀️ and heartbreaking loss😢. Discover how hope🌠 and faith in God became my anchor⚓, guiding me through life's unexpected twists and turns🌀. As I near my 50th birthday🎂, I share reflections on self-love💖, not driven by external validation👥, but by a genuine desire within🌟. Learn how to balance hard work💪 and rest💤 through the wisdom of scripture📖, finding peace🕊️ in your soul and cherishing your journey with love❤️, leisure🌴, and the Lord🙏.
I pray that the roots of setbacks, storms, satanic attacks, and even self-sabotage erode, crumble, and wither away, to be replaced by the incorruptible strength, peace, and joy that only heaven can give that will neither change nor fade.
What happens when your dreams crumble💔, but your faith remains🙏? Join me as I recount my personal journey, filled with relentless pursuit🏃♀️ and heartbreaking loss😢. Discover how hope🌠 and faith in God became my anchor⚓, guiding me through life's unexpected twists and turns🌀. As I near my 50th birthday🎂, I share reflections on self-love💖, not driven by external validation👥, but by a genuine desire within🌟. Learn how to balance hard work💪 and rest💤 through the wisdom of scripture📖, finding peace🕊️ in your soul and cherishing your journey with love❤️, leisure🌴, and the Lord🙏.
I pray that the roots of setbacks, storms, satanic attacks, and even self-sabotage erode, crumble, and wither away, to be replaced by the incorruptible strength, peace, and joy that only heaven can give that will neither change nor fade.
Speaker 1:
This is for the beautiful soul who dreams big. When I was there, in that space between dreaming of our best life and actually living our best life, I was go, go, go nonstop. For five years I was chasing the dream and we were just about to get a taste. We were actually in a better place and we were moving into the best when it was all gone in the blink of an eye. My God, my entire vision, the result of striving all of those years, when I was just about to settle in it was gone. I put all my hope into this one plan and it was working. But then the storm of a lifetime the storm of my lifetime came and it crushed my soul. It swept away almost all of my hope. But there remained one hope, one Easter egg, if you want to call it that, that's what the kids call it and it was that my hope that God, in all his infinite love, would hold me together. This is Ways to Win Wednesday on OneDegreeto Victory, and I am your hostess with the mostess Nelieta Hollis. It's time to lock in, load up and lean in. That means reduce your distractions, gather your mental and emotional energy and direct that energy to today's topic love, leisure and Lord. In the moments between the dream and the reality, I was not loving myself. I mean, yeah, you know, we have the colloquialisms that make us feel good about striving. They validate our pursuit. Phrases like boss babe, you know, I'm savage, I'm fierce. I don't even know what they say anymore. That could be old. But one that I don't like is they said she couldn't, so she did Listen. Don't let that be the reason you do something. Everything I've done from getting my degrees to driving trucks, to doing this podcast, to teaching everything I've done is because I wanted to. I had it in my heart first that I wanted to, and the fact that no one believes I can is irrelevant. Don't fall into that trap. That is not honoring yourself, that is not honoring your vision, that is not honoring your capability, that is not living from the anchor within. Instead, that's living tossed to and fro by everything that everyone says about you, except you, about you accept you. That's Ephesians 4, tossed to and fro by every doctrine that you come across.
Speaker 1:
Listen back to the love, leisure and Lord. You give up on you when you allow yourself to be overwhelmed, and this is what part two of triumphing over, overwhelmed. So you give up on you when you allow yourself to become overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with the necessity to continue the pursuit. You're overwhelmed with obligations of family, overwhelmed with duties of the job. This overwhelm, and we all know that it is not healthy for your mind, for your body or your soul. You know the scripture train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart.
Speaker 1:
Listen, the only reason in that season, the only reason that I have my mind and a renewed and repaired soul, is because I grew up in a family, my nucleus and my extended family, who honored God the best they knew, how, and from their best, from that seed of their best, I've grown and I continue to grow myself. I was not spending time alone in silence, and even when I was alone, I was busy, I was always finding something to do. So lesson number one if there is a lesson to all of this and there almost always certainly is a lesson it is to understand that leisure time I've learned is for loving yourself. Listen, there is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit. I read a scripture the other day that essentially resonated with me like this and you might get a different interpretation, but anyway, this is how it resonated with me at this time in my life. Yourself in a destitute or a desperate situation, then you ought to work to get your behind out of it quickly with urgency, like a gazelle fleeing from her life, from the hunter. That's Proverbs 6. Now, again, that's how it resonated with me. And then, when you start, it goes on to say that when you start working, be like the ant and the bee, be wise, judicious and strategic. So, yes, you are supposed to make your situation better, but you have to be around to enjoy it, and I'll come back to that point later.
Speaker 1:
Lesson number two leisure time is for loving on God. I love that one, absolutely loving on him and being in his presence. Every year I have a theme scripture for the month of my birthday, and this year is Psalms 56, 8, 12 through 13. And my favorite line in all of those verses is this Now I stroll at leisure with God in the sunlit fields of life, fills of life Y'all. Next month I'll be 50 and I am nowhere near where I want it to be. I'm not doing with my life what I had planned to do with it, and I mean kind of sort of I am. It's a re-imagining, not something I re-imagined, but you know how the Lord is, he will get your attention. Yeah, I'm nowhere near where I want to be. I'm not doing what I had planned and that's okay, but my soul is at rest in the Lord.
Speaker 1:
Leisure and rest this is lesson number two. Get this. Leisure time is for walking hand in hand with the one who hears your heart's cry and bottles your tears and turns them into the rain for your harvest. Can I say that again? Make your leisure time a time of rest for walking hand in hand with the one who hears your heart's cry and bottles your tears and turns them into the rain for your harvest. So I got to say this.
Speaker 1:
Going back to lesson one, if loving yourself is curling up with a good book, let your soul be at leisure with the Lord in the sunlit fields of your life. If loving yourself is sitting with a warm cup of tea or coffee or a cold glass of lemonade or chilled wine and cheese, then let your soul be at leisure with the Lord in the sunlit fields of your life. Leisure time, beautiful souls, is deliberate. Take as much of it as often as you need, and he loves the company. By the way, Listen, don't forget to go to our Facebook and Instagram pages, like and follow, share it, because I like that, and remember, beautiful souls, to love yourself a little more than you did yesterday. I love y'all. I gotta go.
