In the finale of this podcast’s inaugural season, I return to the story of God vibrating the building and speak candidly about what I thought that meant (and what God was really up to). I also share my ill-fated efforts at growing a backyard garden and what I did when every bud in my trying-to-blossom ministry was suddenly pinched off before they could ever begin to bloom. I spill the secret of the fig fruit and what it means for you and your gall, and I wrap it all up with a look at what David did after God said no to his dream.
It’s all right here waiting for you, so, let’s dig in!
I told you from the beginning that this season was based on a message I preached at a women’s conference in the fall of 2021. There was a lot happening for me behind the scenes at the same time as that conference, specifically, two big projects I had spent years working on were about to be launched simultaneously into the world.
The first was my School of Scripture course that I had spent three years writing, designing, and developing. I was within months of finishing it and was set to take a local church’s women’s ministry through a beta test of it the following spring.
The second was a kickstarter campaign for a quiet time product that I had spent over a year designing, creating a prototype, and finding a manufacturer to bring it to market.
I had a lot to be excited about. A lot of dreaming and planning and praying was about to be brought to life. So, remember that shake-the-building story I told you in the very first episode of this podcast season? That was my David moment from right after his anointing when King Saul sent his servants to bring him to the palace. My version of “this is it! Its happening! Oh my gosh, it’s really happening!” I believed with everything in me that that moment during that one conference was my launching pad. Because that entire day, before I spoke, my body physically shook, trembling, like I was shivering, but I wasn’t cold. And then God literally vibrated the building and I truly felt with everything inside of me that I was experiencing the unmistakable rumbling that happens to the ground just before a rocket is launched into space. The amount of momentum I felt was palpable.
But here’s the thing about rocket launching that I didn’t know: yes, that rocket shakes the ground, blasts off in a blaze of glory and quickly goes supersonic. But what I didn’t know about rocket launching is that within about three minutes of the actual launch, they cut the rocket’s main engine. I had no idea when I left that conference that God was about to cut my engine.
I spent the next six weeks using every minute available to me (which wasn’t much with three kids 5 and younger) trying to finish my course while also studying and preparing to teach at the church’s Spring women’s conference that would then lead immediately into the beta testing of my course. That January, I received a phone call out of the blue that informed me that I was being replaced as the conference speaker in favor of another. And it wasn’t discussed, but mostly quietly understood that the beta test of my course would also not be happening. In one fell swoop, my joy and excitement and feeling of momentum entirely disappeared. And a song that had no tune began to quietly play in the back of my mind: Nobody asked for this. Nobody wants it. Why am I doing it?
Two weeks, my kickstarter campaign failed. We missed the goal by $11,000. Josh and I sat for a few hours the night before the clock ran out on it, crunching the numbers, trying to justify an investment to cover the cost of the remaining balance, to push it over the goal ourselves. But it didn’t feel right. As much as I wanted to help it along myself, it just didn’t feel right. So, with puffy eyes, I made the difficult decision to leave it where it was.
It wasn’t until I was laying in bed in the stillness of darkness that leaves you alone with the shouting thoughts in your head that I realized why it didn’t feel right. Forcing this thing over the goal line ourselves felt the same as the idea of doing in-vitro to force a pregnancy in our waiting days. Would it have been an incredible story of God’s provision for getting us to the end goal in both situations? Yes, absolutely. But for us? In our unique story? It wasn’t right. So, that night, I released my grip on the first iteration of my dream project. And the next morning, I poured my coffee and watched the final seconds count down, flashing red, all the way down to the flatline.
That’s not how things are supposed to go, right? When you push a very public campaign on social media for two full weeks, it’s all supposed to be picture-perfect, look what I turned to gold, and happy hustle endings. It’s embarrassing to publicly concede to a failed goal.
And you also have to understand that the year before this, my writing agent sold his agency. The woman who bought it and inherited me as a client had one phone call with me before very kindly, very politely informing me that I was free to look for other representation. In other words, she didn’t want me as a client. So when that kickstarter failed, and I was uninvited from that conference, and my beta-testing audience suddenly disappeared, it was the latest in a series of doors I was convinced God had told me to step through that suddenly slammed closed in my face.
The dial turned up on my tuneless song. Over and over, the same thoughts plagued me: Nobody asked me to do this. Nobody wants it. Why in the world am I doing it? I quietly retreated from public view and began to really wrestle with God in what would become a battle to return the calling I thought He had given me. But, try as I might, He wouldn’t take it back again.
Five months later, I had set my sights on a new project: landscaping our backyard, which sounds like an easy enough task, right? But, there are a number of things you need to know about our yard: the first is that our house sits on top of an old lava field, and our lot backs up to a rock outcropping covered in juniper trees. There are lava rocks and boulders everywhere, above the ground and beneath it. Now, because our lot backs up to that outcropping, it’s impossible to put a fence up. So the deer are regular visitors with voracious appetites. Also, our house faces east, and the rock-hill behind us is west, leaving a mostly-shaded yard, let alone the fact that the soil is a unique balance of things that actually work against fertilizer instead of with it (I know because I actually sent a sample of it to a university to have it tested) because I was determined to plant a gorgeous, thriving, blooming garden.
So, that summer, I bought $140 worth of deer-resistant plants that the deer ate for breakfast within a week. Undeterred, I tried again, returning to the nursery and asking the woman there to point me to the most deer-resistant, and bought another $200 worth. As I was planting them, I quickly got frustrated with the amount of boulders that were everywhere in our yard. I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough or wide enough for the plants to go into without hitting one. I couldn’t imagine how the roots would grow down deep through the rock for the plants to even survive, let alone thrive. As I thought about that, I went to pull another shrub out of its plastic bucket and it came up without its roots. The entire root ball stayed in the container, and I nearly cried. It was a perfect picture of how the last six months had felt for me – I had the vision, the means of execution, the passion to plant, but there were so many things outside of my control that all consistently and collectively worked against me, stunting my growth, nipping the buds off the stalk before they could ever even begin to bloom. The garden became my metaphor. As I pinched off the dead flowers leftover from the original planting that the deer hadn’t bothered with, I saw new buds forming and I begged God for blooming and growth, against all odds. For the plants, for these words He’s given me, despite everything working against me.
“Against all odds, God,” I prayed. “Protect these plants. Protect this, all of this You’ve given to me, whatever this is, God, protect it. Establish the roots. Let me see it bloom and flourish.”
I knew it was an outlandish kind of prayer – asking God to keep the deer from eating my plants in a yard and a neighborhood that is teeming with hungry deer. But I prayed it anyway. Against all odds.
The next day, my husband took an early-morning photograph of three deer nibbling on the delphinium blooms that had, just the day before, made my heart soar. There was hope! All that work was working. Then, with just a nibble, it was gone.
But, as I sat with God that morning, He whispered David’s deathbed words from 2 Samuel 23 to my desperate-for-plant-growth heart: “Truly is not my house so blessed with God?” David said in 2 Samuel 23:5. “For He has made an everlasting covenant with me, ordered in all things, and secured.” And then the words jumped off the page and right into the depths of my spirit as God carried on this garden conversation He and I had been having together with my knees in the dirt, because David continued on with his 2 Samuel 23:5 words “For will He not cause to grow and prosper all my salvation and my every wish?” And again, he reiterates: “Will He not make it grow and prosper?”
The Hebrew word that David uses there for “grow” is samah and it is specifically used to describe plants sprouting. But the stem is hiphil, which is causative. Which means that God alone will cause the plants to sprout and grow into trees. No amount of boulder-removing, nutrient balancing, deer-resisting, efforts I make will do any good if God isn’t in it.
As I read, He pointed me to the stump in corner of our backyard from the poplar tree we had removed – the one thing that flourished too much in our yard was a tree that had no business being in a neighborhood. It’s the kind of tree that multiplies itself and creates groves. Its roots shoot out beneath the ground and keep going, around boulders and house foundations and whatever it comes up against, it pivots and moves and refuses to die. We saw evidence of that as the tree roots were taking over our entire yard, and we had to hire a tree removal company to cut it down and treat the stump, ironically, around the same time that my kickstarter failed. We took it out in February. Five months before this I-will-make-it-grow moment I was having with God. But just the day before, I saw new sprouts on that stump, and new suckers from the killed tree roots popping up all over the yard.
Satan can cut down your tree, I felt God whisper to me. But he cannot kill its root. Your tree is not dead. Emboldened with faith, those words became my prayer – that this Dig Your Well ministry would grow far and wide – far beyond my control, my vision, or my wildest plans for it. Spoiler alert: Nothing changed. My literal backyard garden didn’t grow, I finally embraced the natural landscaping with some grass and grassy shrubs as just as beautiful as the flowers I dreamed of. And my ministry garden didn’t grow either. Emails to podcasters who I was personally connected to went either unanswered or declined. My facebook business page got stuck in some sort of purgatory where I could see it, but nobody else could, not even Facebook itself when I tried to promote posts and advertise on social media, the page that was tied to the account that funded the campaigns couldn’t be found – it was an entire cornerstone of marketing when it comes to a business that I was suddenly and inexplicably entirely locked out of.
I spent all of 2022 flip-flopping between this wild faith and debilitating doubt. Wrestling with the thought that what if all of this was God really saying “No” and I was just refusing to hear it. What if He was just appeasing me because of my relentless asking, waiting for me to finally let it go and move along to something else. Everywhere I looked was chewed-off buds and locked doors, and everything pointing straight to “No,” but still, I felt the Spirit of God nudging me forward. None of it made sense. It was lonely. Defeating. Exhausting. And very confusing. It felt …. You know what it felt like? Like there was a cavernous difference between my flesh and my spirit, my fear and my faith playing tug-of-war together. And the more I grew my faith to meet this big, impossible dream, the louder and more pessimistic my flesh became. I had never been more convinced and more doubtful of the direction I was to go at the same time. So, I wrestled – daily. For weeks, then months, which melted into all of 2022 I spent rolling this ball back to God that was rolled right back to me. He never even touched it, just looked at me as I rolled this ball uphill with a glint in His eye, amused at my willingness to let it go.
You definitely want to listen to the full episode of this one because this transcript only covers half of it! You can find it here!
Thanks so much for listening!
