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Read Rachel's book, The Widow Chose Red, by clicking here!

Her husband was diagnosed with ALS during a routine executive physical. Two to five years. Go home and get your affairs in order.

Rachel Kerr Schneider asked God for healing for two years. At the start of the third year she realized she needed to prepare for a different kind of life. Their boys were seven and eleven at diagnosis. Ten and fourteen when he died.

Three things you will take from this one.

Faith does not make it easy, but it makes it possible. Rachel is honest about the anger, the anxiety, and the nights she could not eat or sleep.

You are not Jesus. Her counselor reminded her that even He had twelve men helping Him, and He chose them on purpose.

Paul wanted Rome and got there in chains. He was no less effective. Your platform does not have to look the way you pictured it.

Her book is The Widow Chose Red. Find her at on her website, by clicking here.

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Contact Melissa Jean Rod on Instagram.

Her memoir is The Daddy Files, an award winner that reads like a memoir and a workbook together, with questions and prayers at the end of every chapter.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Melissa Jean Rodd.

She grew up not knowing her birth father. As an adult she found him. Then, years after he had died, she learned he was not her birth father at all.

Her mother knew who was. She would not say.

Melissa had to play detective and find out on her own.

Somewhere in the middle of that, she started grieving a second father she had already grieved once. She describes standing at her kitchen island stomping her foot like a two year old, reminding God of every promise He made in the Bible and telling Him to make good on them.

He did.

What she found on the other side is the thing she now tells other women. It stopped mattering who her earthly father was, because she knew whose she was.

That distinction runs through this whole conversation. Knowing who you are is one thing. Knowing whose you are is another, and it is harder to reach when the picture of father you grew up with had a hole in it.

Melissa also talks about forgiveness, which is the subject of her signature talk. She calls it the F word, and she means the harder one. She had to forgive the man she believed was her father for not being there. Then she had to forgive her mother for the lie. She is clear that forgiveness is not a free pass for anyone, and that it is not one and done. Sometimes it is forgiving again two seconds later because it came back.

Her line at the end of the episode is the one to keep. It is not for him. It is for you.

She used to hate speaking in front of people. Radio interviews made her a wreck. Now she speaks from stages, because she figured out that God's purpose for her story does not move if she stays quiet.

She has a hundred day devotional called A Daughter's Quest with her editor now. And she is one of fifteen authors in a collaboration called The Gratitude Project.

Find Melissa at melissajeanrod.com. Her book is on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and her website.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/yourseat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Subscribe on YouTube. Share on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Hosted by Theresa Croft, a Visibility Strategist who helps Christian women move from their calling to their story to being found with a message for their ideal audience.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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Melissa talked about something Free Assessment to bring calm and safety back in your body.

Click here for that tool.

A listener note before you press play. This conversation includes the loss of a family member to violence.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Melissa Turner.

She spent almost eight years as a retail pharmacist. She still dreams about that store. Both drive thru lanes full, a line at the register, two phones ringing, closing time coming, and no way out.

Then came November 30, 2018.

She had gone in early to get everything set before the doors opened. A phone call came. Her sister Katie had been shot and killed by their uncle in their grandmother's house. He killed Katie's boyfriend too.

Five days later they held the funeral on what would have been Katie's twenty sixth birthday. They sang Happy Birthday and then they said goodbye.

She stayed at that job another two and a half years. Almost two years to the day after Katie died, she was at work again when she found out her father had died. Then the pandemic. That was the end of it.

She was angry at God, and she says so plainly. Then came the harder question. How do you come back to Him after you have been mad at Him?

She came back slowly. Her husband pastors their church, and for years her schedule meant she was rarely in it. Once she left the pharmacy she could be there every Sunday. She started a women's Bible study she had always wanted. She started writing again, a couple sentences at a time, a verse and a short prayer.

She built on that.

Now she helps Christian women heal their nervous systems and renew their minds through scripture. She brings the science with her, because she says a woman needs to understand that she is not weak willed. Her nervous system has been running survival for years, and it will choose the familiar hell over the unfamiliar heaven every time until she gives it something new.

The work she does is about capacity. Not reaching a finish line where nothing hurts anymore, but being able to hold joy, grief, disappointment, and anger without collapsing or exploding.

She is honest that she still uses these tools on herself. She describes something that happened just this week that pulled up the old feeling of being forgotten, and she walks through exactly what she did with it.

Her book Rooted in Prayer is in progress, built around the six parts of the Lord's Prayer. She is also co hosting a new podcast for Christian healthcare professionals with Todd Urie of the Pharmacy Podcast Network.

She is offering listeners a free survival mode assessment, about twenty four questions to show where you are and what is running underneath. Find it here,

Connect with Melissa at turnaroundwellness.com, on Instagram at turnaroundwellnessnc, and on Facebook at Turnaround Wellness.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/your-seat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Subscribe on YouTube. Share on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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You can reach Melissa on Instagram by Clicking here.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Melissa Dyess.

Twelve years ago she was in a major accident. The first thing the hospital told her mother was to get the family together. She was not going to make it.

Her father had died nine months earlier. Four of her five children were bracing to lose her too.

Her mother is a praying mother, and she called coast to coast until the prayer chain was running. Hours later the report changed. She would live, but with a broken back and twelve weeks flat on her back. Then the doctors came in and said they could not explain it, but she needed to get up and walk.

On day eight they told her she was too healthy to be there. She walked out on a walker.

She also had bleeding on the brain and a broken hip. Today she carries scars and not much else. She calls the scars her receipts, and she will not have them covered up, because they remind her how good God has been.

Melissa helps kingdom authors, churches, and ministries get clear, get published, and get their message into the right hands. She has done it for other people for over a decade.

Then someone asked her where her own book was.

It came from a bird. She was at church, distracted during worship, watching a bird in a window sing his heart out and stop every time the room stopped. She sat there wondering if she was letting a bird out praise her. By the end of the service she had written a poem called The Bird in the Window. That poem became her book, Battle Scars of the Redeemed, which is up for a Kingdom Award. She is now writing book two, and while decluttering she found thirty eight book outlines waiting on her.

In this conversation she talks about marrying young and unequipped, the years of emotional and religious abuse that followed, and the season when she went looking for what God actually said instead of what people expected. She talks about how much of her real story lives inside her fiction. And she is clear about something a lot of women need to hear. Not everyone is an author, but everyone can get their story out.

She also gives one practical habit worth stealing. Post it notes on the bathroom mirror, so you cannot forget what God has already done.

Find Melissa at mpvirtualsolutions.com, on social at Missing Piece Virtual Solutions, or by email at mpvirtualsolutions@gmail.com.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/your-seat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Subscribe on YouTube. Share on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Hosted by Theresa Croft, a Visibility Strategist who helps Christian women move from their calling to their story to being found with a message for their ideal audience.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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A listener note before you press play. This conversation is about childhood abuse and a home ruled by fear.

Karin's book available on amazon: My Journey to Enjoying My Life.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Karin Thomson.

Her father came out of the Second World War in Holland carrying things nobody had words for yet. What her family knew was that anything could set him off. Coffee too weak. Coffee too strong. Not enough sugar.

They started counting the granules. Twenty seemed to be safe. Twenty one was not.

There was no way to get ahead of it, because the problem was never the coffee.

She says she never got a childhood. She grew up as an adult. Four sisters in a house with no friends over, no socializing, and one rule that held it all together. Do not tell anyone what happens in this home.

When one of them set him off, all of them paid. So they learned not to like each other either.

She met the Lord at twelve and held on with everything she had. She has been walking with Him for over fifty years now.

But this was the eighties. No Google. A set of encyclopedias that had nothing useful under anxiety and nothing at all under abuse. Counseling was expensive and carried a stigma. So she prayed, and God answered her slowly, one thing at a time.

One of the first things He said was that she had to deal with her temper. She pushed back. Doesn't everybody have a temper? Isn't everyone angry like this?

No.

He told her to count to ten. She says ten did nothing. She had to count to about five thousand before she came back to herself. Then she would look at the situation and realize there was nothing there.

What she hated most was seeing her father in herself. She did not want any part of him in her. But that house was the only place she had ever learned anything, so that is what came out.

Her book is My Journey to Enjoying My Life. It is her testimony, and it has twelve steps in it that she still does today. She wrote it because plenty of books describe the abuse and stop there. Hers is about how you get out. She is direct about it. If you want to do the work, it is the book for you. If you want sympathy, it is not.

She is honest that the questions may never get answered. Daddy, why couldn't you love me. Mommy, why couldn't you take care of me. What she found instead is a different Father, and a different identity to stand in.

She has been married forty nine years to a man she calls amazing, and she says the odds against two people with their histories making it even a year were slim.

Her last word in this episode is the one to keep. If you want answers, get close to Him. And if you cannot manage anything else, say help me.

Find Karin at her website, and on Instagram and Facebook under her author handle. Her book is linked in the show notes.

Register Click HERE: The Calling Activation Study; Discover the Story Gold. That Connects Your Calling to the People You're Meant to Serve.

To be a guest on the Calling series: https://theresacroft.com/your-seat

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Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Lisa Schaefer.

Five years ago she was working part time in healthcare and getting buried in office work she was never built for. She prayed about it, and she says God told her to go home. She went, a little like Abram, with no idea why.

She thought maybe she was supposed to write a memoir. Trouble was, she is not a writer. She says she does not even want to take down the order before the family gets pizza.

So she sat at a blank screen for weeks.

She had plenty of material. Twenty five years of homeschooling. Three adopted children with special needs. Infertility. An interracial family. None of it felt right.

Then a friend prayed one sentence over her, and the wall came down. She said the place God has redeemed Lisa the most is probably the place she is meant to reach out from.

That changed everything.

Her father left when she was two. A man abused her when she was five. She carried the shame, and she says she built plenty of her own on top of it. It took four decades before she could forgive either one of them, and by the time she did, she had almost forgotten how heavy it had been to carry.

Now she walks women through the same process.

In this conversation she talks about the difference between asking Jesus to be your Savior and making Him Lord, and why forgiveness gets so hard when that gap is still open. She talks about starting with the lie underneath the pain instead of the pain itself. I do not feel loved, prove to me I am. She talks about what to do at two in the morning when the memory comes back. And she says out loud what a lot of women are afraid to say, that both of her perpetrators died without ever asking her for anything.

She is also clear about what she will not do. She does not sit in the ugliness with a woman and pick it apart. She says you are not your trauma, and she means to get you out.

There is a line in this episode you will not forget. A pastor once told her that staying bitter means handing your heart to the very person you would never give it to.

Lisa hosts The Diary of a Discarded Daughter, available on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/yourseat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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Desiree Young releases a special resource for the Calling Table Audience.

Click here for free resource:

https://forging.storiesofglorypublishing.com/findyourstory

She asked God for her marketable skill. He said write. She asked whether He meant finance or accounting instead.

Desiree Young started her first book, wrote diligently for three months, and then stalled out for years. What got her moving again was a mentor telling her that when we bury our gifts, we may be denying someone else their breakthrough.

Three things you will take from this one.

Writing is worship and it is warfare. She says you are not putting words on a page. You are forging a sword, and the forge is hot for a reason.

Progress follows a decision, not a feeling. In three years she wrote 30,000 words. In one focused month, she wrote 35,000.

Get the vision before you get the words. Who is this book for, and what changes in them when they read it?

She now runs Stories of Glory Publishing and has written twelve books. Find her at https://storiesofglorypublishing.com.

Share this episode with the woman who has been saying she is going to write that book.

Register Click HERE: The Calling Activation Study; Discover the Story Gold. That Connects Your Calling to the People You're Meant to Serve.

To be a guest on the Calling series: https://theresacroft.com/your-seat

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Walk through the five steps with her live at the Calling Activation Study, Wednesday, October 14th at 7pm Eastern. Register at theresacroftlive.com/seminar.

Most women do not have a story problem. They have a seeing problem. They think they need a huge dramatic testimony before their story counts, so they walk past the moment at the kitchen table and the ordinary Tuesday when something quietly shifted.

That is where the gold is.

Theresa Croft walks through all five steps of the Story Gold Method in this episode.

See the moment, not the whole story. One location, one face, one sentence.

Find the sacred turn. Every real story has a hinge, and it is often a whisper rather than a shout.

Trace the golden thread. Lay three or four turns side by side and watch them rhyme.

She shares the plaque beside her stove that meant one thing in a camper and something entirely different years later, the Valentine’s Day biopsy table and the question she heard there, and the woman who told her years after the fact what those Sunday night emails had done for her.

Silence is not the same as no reach. You are counting opens. God is counting kitchen tables.

Walk through the five steps with her live at the Calling Activation Study, Wednesday, October 14th at 7pm Eastern. Register at theresacroftlive.com/seminar.

Register Click HERE: The Calling Activation Study; Discover the Story Gold. That Connects Your Calling to the People You're Meant to Serve.

To be a guest on the Calling series: https://theresacroft.com/your-seat

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