Podcast

Trusting God’s Timing in a Hurry-Up World. Rebecca George

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Unshakable whole podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kelly Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions such as, how do I trust God’s heart when his ways and delays are breaking mind? We’ll hear from people just like you and me who have experienced God’s faithfulness when life didn’t unfold as they expected my prayers, that God would renew our hope and his word and his love through these conversations.

Kelly: Hey friends, I am so glad you’re here and I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

Kelly: I have a question for you. Have you ever felt like you’ve fallen behind? And it was simply too late for your longings, your dreams, your hopes to be fulfilled Well, if you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you know, there have been numerous times in my own life and even currently, that I have struggled deeply to trust God’s [00:01:00] timeline.

Kelly: And that’s why the question this podcast is framed around is how do I trust God’s heart when his ways and delays are breaking mine? Well, my guest today has a lot of insight into this issue. Her newest book is titled, You’re Not Too Late. I love that declaration. The subtitle is Trusting God’s Timing in a Hurry Up World.

Kelly: She offers a refreshing, a gospel centered perspective for all of us who are navigating seasons of waiting, and she just helps us remember that God’s timing is always right on schedule. So my guest is Rebecca George. She’s an author of two books. She’s a podcaster of the Radical Radiance Podcast. She’s a coach and speaker whose greatest joy in life is discipling others to pursue their passions in a way that builds the kingdom.

Kelly: Her work has been featured on outlets such as Life Today, home Life Magazine, and Moody Radio. She and her husband Dustin, live in East Tennessee. [00:02:00] So Rebecca, welcome to the show. I’m so glad you’re here.

Rebecca: Kelly, thank you for having me. I’m excited about our conversation today.

Kelly: Me too. Well, as you learn to trust God’s timing in your very busy life, I’m just wondering what you do to cultivate joy or realign your heart with God’s heart

Rebecca: yeah, I think that’s such an important question. And if all of our listeners went around and, and we were to all share, I’m sure we all have seasons and spheres of our lives where we’re trusting God and. If we’re honest, we would say that we’re weary today. And so I’ll share a few things that have helped me.

Rebecca: And the first one is just being really honest with the Lord. I think I grew up in, uh, a very sweet Southern culture, which came with so many sweet things that I’m very, very, very, very grateful for. But one of the things that I don’t know that I learned how to do was to. [00:03:00] Be really honest and direct when it was hard.

Kelly: Mm-hmm. And I

Rebecca: think I, I put the same kind of notion onto my relationship with God. I didn’t know how to navigate conflict in my own personal life. So I certainly didn’t know how to navigate difficulty, despair, disappointment, regret with the Lord. Mm-hmm. And one of the most helpful things I’ve worked through in my relationship with Jesus over the last few years has just been.

Rebecca: Me being willing to just go before him and say, this situation really stinks. Like, you know how you wanna work in this particular way or provide and maybe a particular way. I don’t understand that today, and I’m struggling to find joy. I’m struggling to clinging on to hope, and I’m so desperate for you to move.

Rebecca: I’m so desperate for you to show up and. Allow me the eyes to see how you’re at work in this particular situation. So [00:04:00] I think being really honest with the Lord is, is a helpful place to start in our prayer lives because that allows us to kind of recognize the despair, but maybe not stay stuck there.

Rebecca: Yeah. And then secondarily to that, what’s been helpful to me is just really asking that the Lord would open my eyes to see. His goodness to see his blessings over my life, to recognize and be so grateful for his past provision, almost as like a track record. Right? I don’t know how God will show up in the future.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm. But I know that he’s faithful and I know that he. Is is always with me. I know that he is working things together that I may not understand from my vantage point here on Earth.

Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: But what I can do is trust in and stand on the foundation of who he is and, and praise him for how he has worked in my life in the past, [00:05:00] in the meanwhile of not knowing how it will work out in the future.

Rebecca: So those couple of things, being really honest with the Lord and then. Allowing him and asking, asking him and being open to him, opening our eyes to what his best is for us. That’s often maybe gonna look different than what we would’ve imagined or hoped. But uh, again, that comes back to our view of his character.

Rebecca: And many times I think we equate his faithfulness and his goodness with our lives being good from our. From our vantage point. Yeah. And so making that shift to, you know, in the middle of despair in the middle of the valley, he’s still in control. He’s still faithful, he’s still the creator, God of the universe, who makes planets spend around one another and also knows how many hairs are on my head.

Rebecca: [00:06:00] He is, he’s that God today, even in the middle of what I don’t understand. So making that shift is really important as we start talking about waiting.

Kelly: Absolutely, man. I wanna talk about just that one thing for the rest of our time. We, I know. Yes. I so agree and I talk about that a lot, that the thing that rescued my heart more than anything else in waiting seasons and when I was weary is, is just pouring out my heart to God and the fact that God speaks in those times and those honest outpourings, I’m so grateful that we follow a God who speaks and, and helps us.

Kelly: Amen. Differently like you were talking about. So good. Amen. Oh, good. I already mentioned I love the title. It’s not too late. And I can tell you there were so many times in my waiting seasons, especially involving raising our special needs kids or even walking them out of, um, chronic [00:07:00] illness that I just thought we’re too late.

Kelly: We’re never gonna be okay. They’re never gonna be okay. And that one thought would diminish my hope in God and I would have to just run to him and say, I need you to tell me what’s true. I need to know. Yeah. And that’s true. So that I can look at you so that I can see this from your perspective, because I know what I’m seeing, what I’m saying is not true about who you are and you are good.

Kelly: And when you mentioned that earlier, I thought immediately of Psalm 27 13, where David declares, I know I’m gonna see the goodness of God in this place. I know it. Yeah. So can you talk to us about some of the other types of obstacles that stand in our way of trusting God when we’re waiting?

Rebecca: Sure, absolutely.

Rebecca: I’ll give you a couple things here. One would be the different types of longing and waiting that we experience here on Earth. Now, these two categories [00:08:00] won’t. Won’t totally couch everything that we’re waiting on this side of heaven, but I think it encompasses a lot. And so these two areas are relational longing, so things like the desire to have grandchildren, the desire to be married, the desire to maybe recognize.

Rebecca: I’m sorry. Reconcile a relationship that maybe is broken. All of those relational things that we wait on this side of heaven, I would put in that category. And then there’s vocational longing. Maybe we feel led to get involved in a certain ministry in our local church or start a business or start a podcast or write a book or whatev whatever that looks like for you.

Rebecca: But we have relational and vocational longings, and most of the things we wait on this set of heaven in. Some way, I think tie back to one of those two things. And so as we’re experiencing relational and vocational longing, so much can bubble up in our hearts and I’ll, I’ll kind of rattle off a few [00:09:00] sometimes.

Rebecca: We’re just stuck in the despair of not knowing how it’s gonna work out.

Kelly: Mm-hmm. And

Rebecca: we kind of ruminate in that like, God, are you ever gonna show up? Is my life ever gonna look any different than it does today? So many times out of that comes envy in comparison against other people’s lives who are maybe getting to experience the thing that we desire in our hearts.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s doubt like, God, are you really able to show up and work in this way? How are you gonna provide? Or are you? Um, sometimes it’s fear and fear. Many times when it comes back to our seasons of waiting, is us fearing the outcome of what may or may not ever be our reality, right? So maybe, um, I’ll give the example of when I was single before I married my husband.

Rebecca: I would often ruminate and think about what my life might look like if I never got married. Like what? I will, I never [00:10:00] get to experience the blessings of marriage. Will I ever have kids? Will my parents ever have grandkids? Like we, we catastrophize? Future. Mm-hmm. When we sit in the meanwhile and just allow ourselves, uh, total freedom to allow our minds to wonder there and, and not really have any, uh, uh, any, any thoughts around like how our thought lives are operating.

Rebecca: Like God does give us a choice. Yeah. Right. And he has, he has wired our brains such that. The neural pathways in our brains and the way that we think can, we can shift that. Like we can, we can decide and take our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ as it says in scripture when we’re struggling in these seasons of waiting.

Rebecca: And so that’s a big area, is fear. Um, a couple that we don’t like to talk about, but I think really matter are bitterness and resentment. Like what happens in our hearts as we continue to [00:11:00] just not take our thoughts captive to allow our minds to drift towards. The possible outcome, ruminating on that comparison in somebody else’s life, that bitterness and resentment will definitely grow in our hearts.

Rebecca: And then the big one is idolatry. And idolatry meaning us when we elevate anything, any one, any relationship, vocational change, and our desire for that. When it elevates to a position that’s meant for, for God alone, right? Like it’s the thing that keeps us up at night. It’s the thing we think about all the time.

Rebecca: It’s the thing that causes us the most doubt, despair, envy, resentment, et cetera. And we have to confront those things. Right. Like idolatry in Western Christianity in 2025 looks much different than in biblical times when you know, like we’re not worshiping a golden calf. Right, right. It is much more insidious than that.

Rebecca: It is. It is us, [00:12:00] you know, obsessively wondering when our kids are gonna start having children so that we can have grandkids. It is when. Maybe the listeners listening and, and they’re single and their desire for marriage is just consuming their life. Um, you know, I could spout off a million examples, but for those listening who maybe you hear me speak idol, and you’re like, oh yeah, that’s, you know, the thing in your heart that, um, you’re struggling to surrender to the Lord.

Rebecca: And so, uh. Short story long. I think those are a few of the things that kind of start to bubble up in our hearts, right when we are in seasons of waiting. So I wonder, Kelly, how does that resonate with you or, or what have you seen to be true? In that. Oh wow. I, you

Kelly: know, I just get, the idolatry thing was so shocking because you’re right, we don’t worship golden calves.

Kelly: So when I was meeting with a writing coach a few years ago when I was working on a book and [00:13:00] we were praying and worshiping one morning, and she said to me, Kelly, as I’m praying, I just see in my mind’s eye an idol. Like God is revealing. You have an idol in your life and, and on the forehead of this idol is the word normalcy.

Kelly: And that was huge because I really was living in a place where I kept waiting for life to be normal. When you have four kids and three of them have special needs and you move all the time in the military, like life was not what I thought it would be. Yeah. And God really convicted my heart. Like you, you’re not longing for bad things, but you’re really.

Kelly: Holding onto an image of what you want your life to be, instead of letting my beautiful plans emerge into that. Yeah, so look to me, so that, that was huge. That was my favorite chapter of the whole book, Aw, idolatry versus Surrender. And in that chapter, you write anything more than God is a lie. [00:14:00] Anything less than God will leave our hearts begging for more.

Kelly: Anything apart from God takes our eyes off mission. And so I just, I think this is one of the biggest things you know, we don’t realize we have an idol. We don’t realize we’re loving something, longing for something more than the Lord until God and His grace reveals it to us. Right? Yeah.

Kelly: That’s

Rebecca: so good. And I think what happens. In the spiritual realm, like I think that’s important to, to think about and to talk about, like our hearts are longing for the ultimate perfect communion with God, the redemption of all things that we will experience one day, either when we take our last breath or Jesus calls us home or he comes back and yet we live in the middle of a world that is really broken.

Rebecca: And so we’re just, we’re bumping into brokenness all day long and [00:15:00] we’re navigating our own longings that ultimately are kind of a mirror for that ultimate longing of all things being made right. That praise God will happen one day.

Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: But thing, things aren’t what they were. Like in creation, in the garden.

Rebecca: God created this perfect fellowship with mankind that was severed because of sin. We live in the meanwhile, kind of between two Edens, if you will. Things aren’t as they were, and they are not as they will be. And so yeah, it’s natural for our hearts to struggle with that. We struggle with the brokenness.

Rebecca: We struggle with the waiting on things, the wondering how it will work out and kind of the nuance of some of those things spiritually, right? Like I, I won’t necessarily be able to make sense of how God is at work in certain situations that don’t feel good to me, [00:16:00] this side of heaven, right? And that’s not necessarily up to me to fully understand.

Rebecca: And so part of navigating longing is, is kind of being okay with the nuance of like living in the gray a little bit like

Kelly: mm-hmm.

Rebecca: I would love to understand why 10 years ago my mom walked through breast cancer. I would love to understand why one of my best friends is struggling with infertility. I would love to understand so many things about the longing that we experience on earth, and one day we will one day.

Rebecca: We’re gonna be in heaven, all things will be made. Right. We will be at the throne of Jesus worshiping him for all eternity. And none of this is gonna matter. Yeah. But today we have to recognize that our perspective is limited. Yeah. And, and we worship a God who knows all things, who is omniscient. And our rightful place is, is realizing that we’re not, and we [00:17:00] have a very limited view, you know?

Kelly: I love that God is so faithful to meet us in our confusion, and one of the things I say a lot is we can be convinced that God is who he says he is and confused and hurting about how life is unfolding, but he’s so faithful to meet us in those places and help us see differently and speak life and hope and perspective over our hearts.

Kelly: He rescues us from these pieces. Yes. Amen. I’m so grateful. Could you tell us a story of from your own life, of a time when you were set free from some of the things you mentioned in the book when you were waiting for something that was hard for you.

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you a really beautiful God story that I am so grateful I got to write into the book.

Rebecca: So you’ve, you’ve read this story, but, uh, it’s one of my favorite ways God met me in the middle of my longing. So I live right outside of the Smokey Mountains, which, which, you know, I’m in east Tennessee, which is my [00:18:00] favorite place in the world. I love living here so much. I love hiking. And a few years ago I went on a hike with a friend and she was walking through a difficult season of life.

Rebecca: I had been a bridesmaid 12 times before I got married and was just in that season of all of my friends getting married and me wondering, you know, would it ever be my turn? And she called me one day and asked if I wanted to go on a hike that Saturday. So we made plans and went to a trail that I’d never done before and I can remember us parking her vehicle, getting out of the car.

Rebecca: It was a beautiful day and we hiked up this trail, took pictures along the way, and on our way back down, we stopped at this bench and we took a photo together. And then I did like a little back bend on the bench and she took a photo of me and we kind of kept going. And it didn’t feel all that significant in that moment.

Rebecca: But I left the trail that day, posted that photo on my Instagram and [00:19:00] really didn’t think a whole lot else about it. But throughout that hike we talked, you know, a lot about what was going on in our lives. But a good bit of the hike, I just silently prayed and was just really honest before the Lord of, um, you know, like, when is it ever gonna be my turn?

Rebecca: Am I ever gonna get to experience? Marriage and this, this good thing that you’ve woven into my heart as a desire. And so left those desires with the Lord on that trail and kind of went about my life. And many years later, I was dating my now husband. I. He called me one day and he said, I sent you a couple of pictures, but I wanna tell you a story before you look at ’em.

Rebecca: So don’t, don’t look at ’em on your phone while we’re talking. And I was like, okay. And so he starts telling me a story of a day when he went hiking. I. In the s smokey is one of his favorite things to do is hike and fly fish in east Tennessee. And so he went by himself one day and went up to his favorite trail and fished and was [00:20:00] hiking back down.

Rebecca: And as he did that, it was kind of dreary and rainy and his heart was feeling kind of similar. Like, Lord, I, I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be my turn. Am I ever gonna get married? He stopped at a bench and he sat down and just prayed for his future wife, and he said, I vividly remember standing up and thinking, I really need to take a picture of this bench totally in faith that one day I will bring my wife back here and show her one of the places where I prayed for her.

Rebecca: And so he did that. He took a photo and, and kept it all of those years, and he said, I was scrolling through your Instagram this morning, and I came across this photo that stopped me dead in my tracks. And so I pulled it up and you were doing this back bend on the bench. Of course, he, he doesn’t know my side of the story and he said, it just jogged my memory.

Rebecca: So I went back in all of my photos and I found this. Photo that I took one day. And at this point, like we’re looking at rings and talking wedding dates, and we knew [00:21:00] we were gonna marry each other. And he said, I stopped after I had fished all day and was hiking back down. And I, I sat at that bench and I prayed for you.

Rebecca: I, I prayed for my future wife and I took this photo totally in faith that one day I would take you there. And when I saw your photo doing a back bend on that bench. Kind of look at the waterfall in the background and the trees and the outline of the whole photo, and it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same place, it’s the same trail, it was the same bench and all of the great Smoky Mountains National Park, God sent us to the very same place in the middle of our longing years apart where we prayed for one another and had no clue how it was gonna work out.

Rebecca: Right. But it’s just such a testimony of how God. Oftentimes is writing a story that we will not know some. Sometimes he allows us a peek behind the curtain in, in our case, with the bench. He allowed us to see that, [00:22:00] and I’m so grateful for that. Right. But it just reminds me also of all the little ways that he’s working things together that we’ll never know this side of heaven.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm. And so I’m just, I’m, I’m grateful for how God works and just the specificity with which he writes our stories. Yeah. And that, that testimony in our life is just, I think, such a testament to that. So I’m so grateful.

Kelly: I love that story so much. I’m so glad you shared it. I even shared that story with my daughter-in-law today on the phone.

Kelly: Did you? Yeah. I love that. And she said exactly what you just said. I love how God weave our stories together. He is intentional. , he is purposeful. Nothing is wasted. The waiting is not wasted. He’s already there. He already has. A plan and he will get us to where we need to go. And I just love for y’all [00:23:00] and for us as readers who now know this story, to be able look, to look back and see God’s hand.

Kelly: Amen. Like you, this was never, this story was never lost on God. It was never random. His timing is perfect.

Rebecca: Yes. Amen. I’m so grateful.

Kelly: Mm. Is there a foundational lesson that you always wanna be sure you communicate when you speak to women about navigating seasons of waiting?

Rebecca: Hmm. I think just the notion of like pressing back against our culture, that always tells us like we’re onto the next thing. Yeah, we’re in a hurry up culture and, and kind of defining that so that we can recognize it.

Rebecca: That tends to be really helpful.

Kelly: Well, I’d love for you just to share more about that one particular issue. We live in a hurry up world.

Kelly: And we always feel like we’re late and because we live in this performance driven idea that we need to be [00:24:00] producing, it is very hard for us to. To believe that we’re not behind and for panic and fear not to arise. So I really liked it when you talked about fear in the book. That’s another, that was my second favorite chapter because fear,

Rebecca: oh, I love that

Kelly: is a really, really big thing. When we are afraid that we’re behind and we’re left behind. That’s how it often feels, right?

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Kelly: We feel abandoned. Yes. And so talk, let’s talk about the fear and how we can have trust in God in those places.

Rebecca: Totally. Yeah. I think that’s so important and I love that that chapter resonated with you because it was such an important piece of it for me.

Rebecca: I think so many times, fear, and this is why I say it in the book, fear can look like grief, right? Um, because many times. What our brains do when we’re scared about the outcome is we start to play out [00:25:00] different scenarios of how the story might end.

Kelly: Yeah. And

Rebecca: that’s kind of what we ruminate on, rather than trusting in God rather than just totally hands open and surrender to him.

Rebecca: We try to. Figure out how it’s gonna work together and, and that causes and, and builds up fear in our hearts. And so, kind of speaking to the first part of the question of our culture, um, we say this in the subtitle of the book, trusting God’s Timing in a Hurry Up World. That is our culture. There’s just this kind of low hum of.

Rebecca: When this takes place, then you’ll be happy. There’s always that low hum of, of, of, then one day, we’ll have joy, we’ll have hope, we’ll have whatever, when that thing takes place. A lot of that’s bad marketing. A lot of that is just the way that our culture operates. , and I think we’ve actually settled for a life that is so fast, that it [00:26:00] does nothing but train our hearts.

Rebecca: How to not deal with our longing. Right? Like, yeah. Even just little silly things like if we are sick, we don’t ask a friend to bring over a can of chicken noodle soup, we just, DoorDash Panera to our house. Yeah. If we have an early flight and we don’t want to inconvenience a friend to take us to the airport, we call an Uber.

Rebecca: Right? Like there’s just, there’s so many ways in which we just. Hasten the pace of our lives and just hurry up onto the next thing. Um, that every rep we have with that just trains our hearts to move that much faster. And so it makes it that much more difficult to trust God in the meanwhile. Yeah. And so.

Rebecca: That’s why things like idolatry pop up fear, resentment because we don’t know how to navigate it. Yeah. Um, our attention spans are so short. We just have a microwave [00:27:00] society and so it’s, it’s never, I think this side of heaven gonna feel natural. For us to just drift towards trusting God or drift towards placing our hope in him, or finding joy in him alone, not our circumstances.

Rebecca: So it’s always gonna be this intentional pursuit. Um, but I think knowing that changes the way we think and, and, and. That also changes the way we live. Right. So, right. I don’t know, how has that been true in your life?

Kelly: Oh gosh. That is so good. There’s so much I wanna talk about there. I, you know, one of the things that comes to mind is we do so often silence our longings.

Kelly: We silence our desires, we silence what we want, and we are just busy, I think as. Women, we tend to take care of people. And so to take a minute and say, oh, this is what I would really like, and what if we considered running to Jesus with that desire? And what if we asked him, how [00:28:00] would you like to serve me in this need?

Kelly: Like, doesn’t that go against everything in our heart to ask Jesus to serve us?

Rebecca: Yes, and to be. Just in total dependence on him. Yeah. Yeah. Our culture preaches this message of, you know, get up earlier, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work a little bit harder. Whereas the Christian life looks like surrender and dying to self and living in a full dependence on him.

Rebecca: And so that causes our pursuit of seeing our longing in a gospel centered way. To feel very countercultural. Yeah. So if what we’re talking about today feels like that Yeah, that’s true. Like that it will never feel natural for us to put push back against culture. But I think in the absence of that, we’re just, we’re settling for [00:29:00] a fast-paced life.

Rebecca: We’re settling for always hurrying up. We’re settling for, um, just struggling to ever. Feel and notice God’s blessings in our lives and, and to count the fruit of that when he does allow us behind the curtain at how. He’s at work, so

Kelly: Oh, that’s so good. I love too, that you talked about how fear can be rooted in grief and unprocessed grief, I guess we would say.

Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. We’re great because we haven’t processed the grief, and so I think it’s helpful just to ask ourselves to pay attention to our souls and to ask the question, gosh, what are you so afraid of? What, what is something you’re most afraid of right now? And then bring that to the Lord and I, I think that can really help us not be stuck because we’re being honest as we talked about at the beginning.

Kelly: I’m wondering if there’s a particular story in scripture that you find a lot of hope in as you’re [00:30:00] waiting.

Rebecca: Oh

Kelly: man. Are there just so many? . Oh, I know. My mind is just

Rebecca: scanning. Like, which one do I wanna share? For some reason, Mary, the mother of Jesus is coming to my mind and I think because of every level of just trust in the Lord that she had as she was.

Rebecca: Carrying the savior of the world. Like if we think of all of the factors culturally and her age and uh, her relationship with Joseph and, and how all of that worked together , and how at the end of the day, this teenage girl was a part of God’s perfect redemptive plan. Yeah. For our salvation. And she was a willing vessel for that despite so many factors that God knew how he was going to work together, but she didn’t right her, her faith in that.

Rebecca: Um, I’m even thinking of the [00:31:00] angel, telling her to fear not as, she’s finding out like, Hey, you’re. Carrying the savior of the world. Like, could you even fathom, not imagine, could you even fathom that at her age? And so I, I think when we are faced with situations where we’re just taken aback by our circumstances, or lack thereof, her story challenges me to persevere, to trust in the Lord.

Rebecca: To be okay not understanding the outcome always, or, or how it’s gonna work together, or the chosen path for how all those things are going to work together. , that. That encourages my heart

Kelly: so much. I love that picture of how she surrendered. It was such a childlike faith. Like she just asked one simple question.

Kelly: I’m sorry. How can I get pregnant? Because Yes, with the man, like I’m confused. I just have one question. Yeah, yeah. It’s such a beautiful picture of we can [00:32:00] surrender to the Lord even when we don’t have all the answers

Rebecca: Amen

 

Kelly: One of the things that I also really liked is, you and your husband. Anchored yourself into God’s sovereignty. I mean, that I would say is really the foundation of our faith, right? God is yeah, good. And he is completely in control of all things. So you anchored your heart in the sovereignty and goodness of God as you walked through this really big decision, and it was about moving and whether you should move and, and you wanted to be there, but you didn’t know if it was God’s will.

Kelly: The reason I want you to share this story is because I think it’s so good for us to understand how God can lead us through times of indecision and times of confusion, and you laid it out so perfectly. I think you had it in the chapter of doubt versus hope.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think you’re right. Yeah.

Kelly: Okay. Throw that out for us.

Rebecca: Yes, I would love to. So it was almost three years ago, I would say three years ago. Now is when [00:33:00] we were kind of in the meanwhile of that decision, but my husband and I continued to feel our hearts drawn back to East Tennessee, which is where we live now, where I grew up, where a lot of our friends and family are.

Rebecca: And we were kind of sitting in that decision of feeling led there and also not wanting our desire to override God’s best for us.

Kelly: Yeah. Um.

Rebecca: We felt like our desire was from God, and yet we didn’t want that to cloud the decision. And so my husband’s a pastor and we many times over the first few years of our marriage would see an opportunity and maybe our hearts would feel stir in some way and send his resume into a, a couple of churches over that time.

Rebecca: But. Still just didn’t really have a peace about moving. But, there was this opportunity that came about. I was looking on a job board online and saw this opportunity that really felt like it [00:34:00] might be a fit for us. And I can remember drafting this text message to Dustin, my husband, and it was like the Holy Spirit just stopped me dead in my tracks and said, don’t you know that if this is for you, I, I’m able to confirm that and

Rebecca: dustin will bring it up if it’s something that needs to go anywhere. Which was so strange.

Kelly: Yes. No kidding.

Rebecca: Like how many times had I seen a job opportunity that I did send to him that I didn’t feel the Holy Spirit stop me and tell me not to bring it up or whatever. And so I just kind of stomped my feet there at my desk in the middle of my home office and deleted the text message, closed out the browser, and just.

Rebecca: Kind of left it in God’s hands and for many weeks afterwards, that’s kind of where I stayed. I thought about it a lot. I thought about the opportunity, I thought, you know, is this something that might be for us? And we were on, uh, just a dinner date a few weeks later and we were driving home [00:35:00] and just totally out of nowhere, Dustin just kind of drops this on me and he is like.

Rebecca: Hey, did you see that there’s a church in East Tennessee looking for a pastor and he names the name of the town and all the blood drained from my face and I just said, so here’s the thing. I’ve been praying about that for weeks. The Holy Spirit told me to not say anything to you, and that in confirmation of that you would bring it up if, if it was something that we needed to pursue.

Rebecca: And so we in the car just prayed that God would guide us and that if we continued to have peace, that he would submit his resume and he, he did the following week and mm-hmm. What I think a lot of listeners will relate to is we sat in the meanwhile of that for six months.

Rebecca: Wow.

Rebecca: It was a very long process that the, the church went through and I think by the time he had submitted his resume, they were pretty far in conversations with an another pastor that, um.

Rebecca: God ultimately was not leading to that church. And um, [00:36:00] six months after he submitted his resume, we got an email from the search committee. And by that time my husband had kind of moved on and for whatever reason, my heart never did. I maybe once a month would look at the church’s website and would just.

Rebecca: Look at the staff page to see if there was an update of any sort. And, and I remember the day I logged onto the job board where I’d found the job originally, and they had taken it down.

Kelly: Oh, wow. Which

Rebecca: led me to believe like, okay, they’ve, they’ve found their guy, but for whatever reason, my heart was still just stirred towards that.

Kelly: And

Rebecca: so, um, you know, then came the real discernment of, is this our selfish desire? Is it God’s will? , which we are imperfect people following a perfect God, right? Making really hard decisions this side of heaven. So if all of our listeners were to come to us with their own story that feel similar to this, like, I just [00:37:00] wanna also give you the, the permission to say like, these are hard decisions and.

Rebecca: We ask God for that wisdom and that discernment. And the book of James, James one tells us that he grants that to us liberally without reproach when we ask him for that. So there was a lot of us going, God, we are so desperate and dependent on you to show up and move and give us that discernment because, we just wanna be in the center of your will.

Rebecca: We just wanna keep serving you wherever you want to plant our feet. And, through many other circumstances and conversations, God confirmed that that was where we were supposed to be. And so I’m, I’m grateful for that. But those situations in our lives are so hard, aren’t they? Yes. When we’re just trusting him, imperfectly.

Kelly: I love the story. I love how God, how it all unfolded, and I love that you included, how much time it took. It was really more than six months because you were holding onto it for a while and then you didn’t even [00:38:00] know after they pulled the job off, there was still time that passed and it wasn’t finalized for quite a long time.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. It was about a year probably of Wow. Of a journey for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Kelly: Well, I love how you just kept. Surrendering it to the Lord and he is so faithful. We don’t have to be afraid. Amen. In those places either he is faithful to show us the way, he will guide us. My husband and I have been in tons of decisions that were really hard and really confusing him being a fighter pilot and our girls having special needs, and we’ve had to live in a lot of different places and had to be separated a lot because of those requirements.

Kelly: So I love hearing how God leads and guides people. Yeah. He’s always faithful.

Rebecca: Amen. So good.

Kelly: Well, as we close, I’m just wondering if there are any, I. Any other words that you want to lay on our listeners? What do you wanna leave us with today? And then I also want you to [00:39:00] tell us how people can get in touch with you, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I think, you know, we’ve said it, but this pursuit of the Lord and and how he’s at work in our longings. We’ll always feel like we’re pushing back against culture and that’s okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So if that’s how it feels and it feels sticky and it feels hard, um, that is part of how God refines us in the middle of the waiting and I’m so grateful for that.

Kelly: Yeah. Um.

As I look back, we can always see those things in hindsight, but there’s, there’s a story that God is writing with your life that you can’t see right now, and that’s okay.

Kelly: Yeah.

Um, so I would wanna leave them with that. And then, yeah. How to connect with me. I’m the most active over on Instagram. My handle is Rebecca George, author.

I’m a CCA Rebecca, so that makes it easy to spell. And I have a podcast as you’ve. As you’ve mentioned called Radical Radiance. We release episodes every week, and so I’d love to have you over there. You can grab the book. You’re not too late, trusting God’s Timing in a [00:40:00] Hurry Up world, wherever you like to buy books, Amazon, Christian Book, Barnes and Noble, all of those places.

So it’s been just a joy to be with you today, Kelly.

Kelly: Oh, Rebecca, thank you so much. This has been absolutely delightful. I am so thankful to be able to talk about waiting and how sovereign and good our God is. We can trust him, and as you’ve said, he will take us to where we need to go. His timing is perfect.

Kelly: We can trust him. Amen. , I also love what you said, that even when we bump up against the brokenness in our world, , he is faithful in that place as well. Yeah.

Kelly: Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for today, and I know God will, bless our listeners through this conversation.

Rebecca: Thank you, Kelly.

If you were encouraged in your faith today, it’d be great if you’d help get the word out by subscribing, sharing with a friend, or leaving a review. I’d love to hear from you. You can reach out through my website, kelly hall.org and pick up some free resources while you’re there. [00:41:00] Thanks for listening to the Unshakeable Hope podcast.