Podcast

Do you want to grow your faith?

We only have a few more months till we are in a new year! We are also winding down our year-long series. We are going to be diving into some fantastic conversations over to next several months to help you thrive in your life.

Today, I’m excited to share my interview with Pastor Mike Novotny. Are you struggling with your spiritual health? Your relationship with God? Well, finds, today’s interview will be so impactful for you!

If you’re struggling with your faith, please know you aren’t alone.

Pastor Mike Novotny is my special guest today to discuss growing your faith and how we need to work on the small things so that they can grow into bigger things. He shares with us how to celebrate cultivating and honoring the small things in our life!

Pastor Mike Novotny has served God’s people in full-time ministry since 2007 in Madison and, most recently, at The CORE in Appleton, Wisconsin. He also serves as the lead speaker for Time of Grace, where he shares the good news about Jesus through television, print, and online platforms. Some amazing things we talk about in this episode: Habits are essential, but also have habits of not having too many habits Sometimes our faith isn’t growing because the soil is too cluttered.

Practical tips to help us release some of our daily clutter to grow our faith. God wants to use the little things in our hearts to produce the things down the road.

Check out these amazing resources to help you grow your faith:

• What’s Big Starts Small
• Time of Grace The Core Church

Connect with me!

• Website
• Instagram
• YouTube

Have a great week!

Melissa

PS. Did you listen to last week’s episode where I sit down with the amazing Dr. Sasha Shilcutt? If you are struggling to set healthy boundaries, this episode is for you!

As we continue our series on how to thrive in your life, one of the necessities is setting and keeping boundaries. If you struggle with boundaries, this episode is for you!

I’m so excited to have Dr. Sasha Shillcut back on the join today to talk about her new book, Brave Boundaries. We discuss how to live your priorities, and you have to have boundaries, how to set boundaries, and much more!

In this episode, you’ll learn more about:

• Why alone time is crucial for setting healthy boundaries
• The importance of self-compassion
• False beliefs about boundaries
• The 4 parts of the Brave Boundary Model
• What is Boundary Backlash?

“Without boundaries, we become Grade A people pleasers and lose so much of our identity that we do not even know who we are anymore.”

Dr. Sasha Shillcutt is a physician, researcher, speaker, author, wife, mom of four amazing kids, and Founder/CEO of Brave Enough. Sasha’s greatest passion is empowering and encouraging others to achieve well-being in their professional and personal lives. Thousands of people viewed her TEDx talk, Resilience: The Art of Failing Forward. She also leads conferences and retreats for professional women.

Resources:

• Dr. Sasha Shillcutt
• Brave Boundaries
• Between Grit and Grace

Warning: I just wanted to give a quick trigger warning for this episode. If you have little ones in the car or around who may be listening, it might be a good idea to pop in some earbuds or save this episode for later. Also, I believe is this a great episode for those that have a teen – encourage your teen to listen to this as well.

September is Suicide Awareness Month. Around the globe, someone ends their life every 40 seconds. Let that sink in.

As a counselor, I’ve often listened to my clients discuss ending their lives. This takes so much courage! I’m always honored and grateful when my clients bravely talk about their thoughts, especially the dark ones. Kids and teens are more likely to think about and commit suicide: one in five adolescents contemplate suicide daily. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people from 10-24.

Many people don’t know that when I was a teenager, I was suicidal. I thought ending my own life was the only way to be done with all the pain. I’m so very grateful that my parents listened to me when I told them that I wanted to end my life, and within the week, I began counseling. This was the first of many steps that helped me become mentally healthy. As a parent or a loved one of a young person, you may wonder what you should do if your child or their friend is thinking about ending their life.

Today we are talking about suicide prevention with Scott Erickson. He was on earlier this year to talk about what to do when things don’t work out or go as you planned.

In this episode, you’ll learn more about:

• Behavior changes to be aware of that may indicate suicidality
• Mood changes to be aware of that may indicate suicidality
• A greater understanding of why people may feel suicidal
• Prevention awareness of suicide

Scott Erickson is a touring painter, performance artist, and creative curator who mixes autobiography, aesthetics, and comedic narrative to create experiences that speak to our deepest stories. He is the co-author of Prayer: Forty Days of Practice and May It Be So, the author of Honest Advent, a spiritual director to brave women and men, and a professional dishwasher for his food-blogging wife. Scott lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Hotline numbers:

• 24/7 Suicide Lifeline: 988
• NAMI Helpline: 800-950-6264

As I’ve mentioned, we are in the middle of a year-long series about you learning to live healthier lives. We’re talking about taking small and easy tips to increase your happiness, build better relationships and feel stronger.

When I think about freedom and living healthy, we want to look at the fun stuff, but we also need to look at the roadblocks.

Today’s discussion will shed light on what may prohibit your growth. What is it? Control or, more specifically, the illusion of control. In today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Sharon Hodde Miller to talk about her new book, The Cost of Control: Why we crave it, the anxiety it gives us, and the real power God promises.

I loved this interview with Sharon so much. I love her curiosity about what is going on in her. We talk about how as humans, we cannot tolerate uncertainty, and the more control we seek, the less control we have,

In this episode, you’ll learn more about:

• Is it worth the cost to our relationship to have that control we seek?
• We need to pay attention to how we are feeling in the moment.
• Our culture and its need for control atrophy our spiritual muscles.
• The importance of the practice of self-examination and tips on how to do it.

Sharon Hodde Miller, Ph.D., is a teaching pastor at Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina, which she co-founded with her husband, Ike. The author of Free of Me and Nice, Miller has blogged at SheWorships.com for over ten years and has been a regular contributor to Propel, Her.meneutics, and She Reads Truth. She has written for Relevant, Christianity Today, (in)courage, and many other publications and blogs. She lives with Ike and their three children in Durham, North Carolina.

Connect with Sharon Hodde Miller

• Website: https://sheworships.com/
• Instagram: @SharonHMiller

Hey Friends, we continue this week with our year-long series to live healthily and thrive in your life. Today, we are talking all about your relational health. I sit down with Tovares Grey to discuss how to date in a Godly way and his new book, Godly Dating 101.

I love this episode as we get real, honest, and practical. We talk about godly dating, what to look for in a partner, things to look for in toxic relationships, and much more! Tovares and Safa Grey are believers, husband and wife, and parents to two.

Listen in to learn more about:

• Some of the reasons why relationships fail.
• If you know who you are called to be, then you know who you won’t settle for.
• Why should we continue to date our spouse after marriage, and what that looks like.
• How do we know when it is time to leave that toxic relationship and the red flags to look for.

Tovares Grey launched the Godly Dating 101 ministry in 2012 as a single individual trying to learn how and help others to date God’s way. Tovares and his wife Safa have grown the ministry to include a top-rated podcast with more than 3.5 million downloads and a new book, Godly Dating 101.