Episode #233: How to Harvest the Gains of Your Slow Growth

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Grit ‘n’ Grace — The Podcast

Episode #233: How to Harvest the Gains of Your Slow Growth

Amy Carroll
Do you have any farmers in your family, Cheri?

Cheri Gregory
That is an interesting question, and my first thought was no, but we did! Back in Berrien Springs, Michigan, my Grandma and Grandpa Pudliner, they had a little farm. Like three acres. And they grew corn and had a raspberry patch. And one of my few childhood memories is after my mom told me that her father had died, that Grandpa Pudliner had died, evidently, I cried, and I was like, “But who will drive the tractor?” (Laughs)

Amy Carroll
Oh! Farmers for sure then.

Cheri Gregory
Yes. How about you?

Amy Carroll
Yes. My dad’s family is full of farmers. And I was a really blessed little girl, because I had a city Grandma and Grandpa and a country Grandma and Grandpa. And when I would go to the country Grandma and Grandpa, my grandfather would borrow horses for me to ride and he would take me waterskiing on his boat. So when I finally said to my dad, I think I was in high school, I said “I really want to spend the summer on the farm.” he laughed at me. He said, “You’re such a princess. You think that going to spend the summer on the farm is waterskiing and riding horses, and it’s actually a lot of work. No, you’re not going.”

Cheri Gregory
No, you had Camp Grandma & Grandpa’s is what you had.

Amy Carroll
Exactly. That’s how I wanted to spend my summer. Well, I’m a city girl with a deep appreciation for farm life. A slower pace and slow growth is what we could all use a little of.

Cheri Gregory
So true. So true.

Well, this is Cheri Gregory –

Amy Carroll
– and I’m Amy Carroll –

Cheri Gregory
– and you’re listening to Grit’N’Grace: The Podcast that equips you to lose who you’re not, love who you are, and live your one life well.

Amy Carroll
Today we’re talking with Jennifer Dukes Lee, author of Growing Slow: Lessons on Un-Hurrying Your Heart from an Accidental Farm Girl. Jennifer Dukes Lee lives on the fifth generation Lee farm in Iowa, where she and her husband are raising crops, pigs, and two beautiful humans. She writes books, loves queso, and enjoys singing too loudly to songs with great harmony. Once upon a time she didn’t believe in Jesus; now, He’s her CEO.

Cheri Gregory
Today’s episode is sponsored by Faithful Counseling. Amy, why might somebody consider a counselor?

Amy Carroll
Well, somebody might consider counseling because they have an argument over and over again with their spouse.

(Cheri laughs)

I don’t know who that would be, but somebody might consider a counselor because of that.

Cheri Gregory
Air quotes. “Somebody.”

(Both laugh)

Cheri Gregory
Alright, but in all seriousness, those recurring disagreements can be an issue; and the last year and a half might have made some of them even worse. How come?

Amy Carroll
I just think the stress level of this pandemic continues the isolation, unusual amounts of time with our people might have boiled a few things to the surface. Financial worries, job loss, all kinds of things this past year.

Cheri Gregory
Absolutely. Well, you know, let’s just tell our listeners that this intro and outro – go ahead and tell them where we’re recording this.

Amy Carroll
We’re in Denver, in our hotel room –

Cheri Gregory
– and we are together at the same place in the same time. And my first my number one favorite thing about doing this right now, Amy, is that we’re together; my number two favorite thing is I’m not at my home.

(Amy laughs)

I’m not in the same house with the people I have sheltered in place with for the last year and a half. Okay?

Amy Carroll
Okay. Don’t tell anybody. I might feel the same way.

Cheri Gregory
Oh, I won’t say whether it’s a close second or distant second, I’m just gonna say you’re so right. You’re so right, that all of that time that we spent together, you know, certain things that maybe we were able to ignore before or have come to the surface, and maybe in so many cases don’t need to be ignored. There is help available through a good licensed counselor.

Amy Carroll
Absolutely. And you and I are both big believers in Christian counseling. So Faithful Counseling is just a natural fit for us to have as a sponsor.

Jennifer, welcome back to Grit’N’Grace. We’re so happy to have you here.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
You have me again, I can’t believe it. I’m so honored.

Amy Carroll
Well, I’m so excited because you know, The Happiness Dare was just one of my all time favorites. And, so, excited to talk to you about this today, your new book today.

So Jennifer, we know that books do not show up out of nowhere, there’s always a personal journey that led up to them. So fill us in on the backstory of Growing Slow.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Absolutely.

So the book that I probably could have written a lot more easily is a book called Growing Fast. That fits my personality. I’m an enneagram three, I like to get a lot of things done. I just I move quickly. And I realized that I – hurry owned my heart. And it’s crazy because I have written books about business. And I’ve preached about business. And I had handled my calendar fairly well. I figured out how to say no to things I needed to say no to, I figured out what things I ought to say yes to, and I felt really confident about that. But even on days, when I didn’t really have that much going on, I had a hurried nature to my heart.

The minute my feet hit the floor, the adrenaline levels were high, the cortisol level levels were high, I was in constant fight or flight mode, and I was really an adrenaline junkie. And the idea of slowing down or slowing my pace of growth was – it sounded boring. It sounded lazy.

(All laugh)

Amy Carroll
I love that just said that out loud! That’s awesome.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Like books on slowness, like used to irritate, you know, slow down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that a million times. Okay, let’s go, let’s go, let’s run. And so it’s not just about the stuff that’s going on around you. It’s mostly about the stuff that’s going on inside of you, and how you feel about the things that you are growing in your life. It’s the sense that a lot of us have, that I’m falling behind, or I should be further along by now. I know authors who feel that way, feeling like, yeah, somebody just started, you know, got the first contract to two months after starting their Instagram account. And I’ve been at this for 11 years, and just trying to keep it going like feeling behind feeling behind. I know freshmen in college, thinking I have got to have my whole life figured out. And I also have to find a spouse before all the good ones are taken, I’m falling behind. And then you get into your mid 20s. And you think I should be further along in my career, or I need to start having kids or I have to buy a house. And then by the time you’re 35, I need a bigger house. And then by the time you’re 50, I need a lake house, like there’s never a contentment or a settledness.

So it doesn’t really have a lot – it can have something to do with business, but it’s more about what’s going on inside of us and how we feel about the growth in our lives. And so God began to validate the good small things that I was growing in my life. And I began to pay attention to that. And I was like, I’m not the only one who’s struggling with this. I’m not the only one who’s rushing through life and I needed – I didn’t need somebody to tell me how to go big or go home anymore. I needed permission to grow slow and even just to be unspectacular and boring.

Amy Carroll
Yes, that’s so funny. I have some blank space in my calendar right now. I just finished a writing project and I have been – I’ve been hearing God whispering “Fo the inside work.” Well, that doesn’t sound exciting. Nobody sees that.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
No, absolutely.

Cheri Gregory
How do you post the inside work on Instagram?

Amy Carroll
Oh, well, He told me to get off Instagram. So what? What?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
I gotta get more followers. I gotta do it. Now. Everybody’s ahead of me. I’m falling behind for a little while.

Cheri Gregory
Alright. Well, Jennifer, your book is called Growing Slow: Lessons on Un-Hurrying Your Heart from an Accidental Farm Girl. So talk to us about this accidental farm girl part. How can you call yourself an accidental farm girl?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Probably some people are like, because she’s like tripping down the stairs or something like that. But that’s not the kind of accidental –

Cheri Gregory
Not an accident prone farm girl!

Jennifer Dukes Lee
I am that. I have had more than than one farm related injury. But the idea of being an accidental farm wife is that this is the last place I thought I would land. I was on my way. I was in the midst of a successful career in the news business. And my husband and I decided to move back. We were running ourselves ragged. We were on a growing fast journey. And it was kind of fun. And there was a lot of adrenaline. So you know, that felt good. But we knew that something had to change. We came back to the farm and picked a growing slow way of living.

And when we left the news business, when we left that fast paced life, I remember my colleagues said you’re throwing away your potential. You’re throwing away your career, you’re throwing away your education. And when we first moved here, I thought, what if they’re right? And that was the beginning of my growing slow journey. I didn’t realize I was in the midst of it. But I was – and over the course of the next 15 to 17 years, I began to ask the question ‘What if they’re wrong?’ and now we are living this life that I thought I’d never live. We accidentally sort of ended up here because of a variety of circumstances on the farm. And the last place I wanted to be is what’s turning out to be where God planned for me to be all along. So big accident, but it’s a happy accident, as Bob Ross would say. It’s a happy little accident.

Cheri Gregory
I love that you switched from worrying ‘What if they’re right? What if they’re right?’ to intentionally asking ‘What if they’re wrong?’ that’s a wonderful shift in thinking.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Yeah, I think a lot of people are like that, you know, we know some of these things instinctively that we need to make some different choices for our lives. But we are bombarded with this self doubt. Like, I can’t, I just can’t slow down, I can’t afford to do that, I’ll lose my edge, I’ll lose my job, you know, if I do those kinds of things, and so we just push it off, because we’re constantly asking the wrong questions. And we’re constantly saying, you know, what if, you know, what if, what if, but what if we are making the right decision? What if we just gave it two weeks just to try and see what happens? Again, it doesn’t have to do so much with whited out, you know, wiping out your whole calendar, you can still have a lot of things on there. But I know people who had really hurried hearts when they had nothing on their calendar this past year, so wiping out your calendar didn’t change that. It’s interior work that has to be done in order to have an unhurried heart.

Amy Carroll
Well, so a lot of these lessons that you write about are on your farm. And that is a life that is so different than so many of us live. And it’s fascinating. You have 700 acres and a barn full of pigs – I saw the pigs on the Instagram feed, oh my goodness, these little piglets are so cute. But clearly, this is a way of life that you’ve chosen. And it’s been impactful. And so what can farm life teach us no matter where we live?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Yeah, absolutely. So people might say, oh, well, good for you, Jennifer, you live in a slower paced life, which is true. I mean, I live where pigs out number people by a huge margin. No kidding. And a traffic jam here is when the neighbor’s cattle get loose and block the road. These things happen. So yeah, I mean, it looks sort of Hallmark Channel. But the truth is, we succumb to the same pressures that everybody else does, you know, more influence, more fruit in our parenting, more fruit in our marriages, and wanting more and more and more, whatever that happens to be. It’s like, we’re not immune to that.

So what I’m saying is that my problem is the same as anybody’s, whether they’re in the city or in the country, but the solution is the same. And the land teaches us lessons. When I look out on this land, this growing slow land, whether it’s a productive year, or a not so productive year, it teaches us things about ourselves. And Jesus uses the land to teach us things about ourselves. I mean, He was speaking to an agrarian culture, who probably had dirt under their fingernails from the farm work they’d done that morning. So they knew when He talked about the soils, they knew when He talked about threshing, they knew when He talked about all of those kinds of things, what it meant. That metaphor was growing in their midst.

And so it’s a really an embracing of the growing season, that if we could apply these things to our own lives. So Scott, starting Friday, he’ll be out in the fields planting, and he’ll be planting millions of seeds into 700 acres. And this is an important step in life too. But if I was a corn seed, I would be freaking out. Like, why am I in the dark? When is something gonna burst forth here? But I have never once seen a corn seed or a corn plant freaking out, they just don’t pop up. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes even a couple weeks before you see just the tiniest hint of green. And if you look over hours or days, the growth is nearly imperceptible. But when you look back over weeks and months, you can see the growth and the same is true of us.

We want things to grow quickly. But the slow growth must happen so that deep roots can go down. And I know some of you are like what did she just say? We got to put those roots down to hold us in place. And then we go through growth cycles. We go through harvest cycles, whether you’re harvesting crops or ideas, or children. And then 1/4 of the season here is winter. And that is 1/4 when it looks like there is nothing happening where there’s nothing growing and it feels unproductive. And Scott calls winter seasons critically important to – my husband is Scott, and he says that winter heals the land because there’s all kinds of things happening where you cannot see. So what if we allowed winter to do its work in us? These quiet times when we aren’t all that productive, but where the inside work is being done just as winter works the land in so I think we want to live in seasons. Most of us have, plant, grow, harvest, plant, grow, harvest, and that is not the way to live. The land teaches us that 1/4 of the year is winter and I think we would do well to let winter do its work in us and heal the soil of our heart.

Amy Carroll
I just had a physical exhale, like that just that feels like grace to me, Jennifer. So wonderful,

Cheri Gregory
Absolutely. Yeah, well you know, and if I were to be honest, I’d just rather live in constant harvest. I mean, let’s forget about the rest. Let’s just go for 100% productivity. I’m an enneagram two wing three. And, you know, you already mentioned this, that we often are saying to ourselves, I should be further along by now. And you gave a bunch of really great examples of how this happens at different stages of life. And I feel like for many people, 2020 held them back, or at least made them feel like they were losing even more ground. And so one of my concerns for 2021 and 2022, is that there’ll be the temptation to try to make up –

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Yep!

Cheri Gregory
– for lost time. So what would you say to the person who feels like they should have already hit some of these milestones, but feels so far away from achieving them? And maybe they were on track, and then fell off track? Like, they are now derailed and don’t know how to get back on? What would you say?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Well, first of all, that is spot on point. I have been pondering that so much lately, I’ve got friends in their their 20s unmarried friends, and they’re like, I lost a whole year of dating. Now, you know, now I’ve got to hurry up and like, get on all these dating apps. And that’s the thing, we now are about ready to run headlong into everything that we need to do in 2021. But we still think we got to do everything that didn’t get done in 2020. And we have the potential of being more hurried than we have ever been in our lives.

And so what I want to suggest – number one, you use the word milestones. And I talk about milestones a lot with people, because there really are no set milestones, even though we think there are for how far along you should be in your career, or when you should get married. Or even if you should get married, when you should have kids, or even if you should have kids, there really just aren’t milestones for these sort of things. And so if we could just sort of set those aside and just have permission to live the life that we’re already living without looking, you know, I mean, I love long range plans. But let’s hold those loosely, and just live the life that we’ve been given.

Because if I was only set on my long range plan, I would not be living in Inwood, Iowa right now. I would be living in Washington, DC, or New York City. So we have got to – you make a plan but hold it loosely. And then the other thing I want to pick out is I think when we talk about what’s happened over the last year, I think that all of us had something happened to us in the first couple weeks of lockdown, where we were like, there are things that are really important to me that I don’t want to forget when this world opens back up again. And those were things like connection, people that we couldn’t connect with. And we were trying to teach our grandparents and parents how to do Zoom calls and all of that. But in our house, we had longer dinners. Dinner became entertainment for us. We tried new things in the kitchen, we surprised each other. Each of us took turns. We know that people really all over the world were doing those sorts of things. Grocery stores were running out of yeast, because people were baking bread. And before that, like people weren’t even eating bread. We’re all like no carbs. But all of a sudden, we wanted to bake and create and do those kinds of things. Amazon ran out of puzzles, you couldn’t get a puzzle to save your life. Puzzles were about as rare as toilet paper in this world.

And so I think if we just find what those things were, like, go back and think what were the things where I said, I want to hold on to this, go back and claim those don’t let that go when you get back to quote normal, decide which parts of normal you don’t want to get back to, and reclaim and claim again, the things that made a difference in your life and your enforced slowness when you actually had to live in a growing slow way.

Amy Carroll
Well, and what you described there – time was our friend for a short period of time. And now we’re going back to the the hurried attitude. So how is time still our friend and not our enemy?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Right. So time is often treated as the enemy. It’s this thing that must be attacked, and squeezed and fit into boxes. It’s why we tell our kids hurry up, come on, I’m running out of time. I don’t have enough time. I mean, these are the kinds of ways that we that we treat time, but I want to pitch out that time can be our friend that we can embrace time as it is.

When we look at scripture, it is clear that God made friends with time seasonally, and that He embraces time and shows us what it is to go through seasons. And you know, we could talk about Ecclesiastes 3, where it says that God has made everything beautiful, and it’s time that we go through all of these different seasons of life and some of the seasons we love and some not so much and we can talk about that later if you want. But anyway, God teaches us what it looks like to embrace time as a friend. And to use time, not as this thing to be managed, but also as this thing to enjoy our lives. Like, I started daily walks during lockdown. And I’d walk a mile or two, I saw parts of my neighborhood that I never saw before. Things I’d never paid attention to you before. And never once did I come back and think I wasted that time. Time became my friend.

And even now, when I’m back into a busier way of living in the world is opening up, there isn’t a single time where I have regretted those moments spent out on this road with the Lord, I’d never come back and say, well, I shouldn’t have done that. And that, I think, is how we begin to make time our friend, to really throw ourselves into these moments of whether it’s our work or our rest, to really bring our whole selves to the seconds and minutes that we’re living.

Cheri Gregory
I love that. I love that you’re right. I’m just thinking of the times I’ve taken walks – Ii’ve never come back and said, oh, that ruined my day. I’ve never gotten to the end of the month and gone, you know, it was the walks. It was the walks that ruined everything. And you know that a data-gathering brain would have figured that out if that was the common denominator.

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Right? Like we’ve never said, oh, I really wish I wouldn’t have spend that time with friends. Oh, I really wish I hadn’t visited my aging parents. Oh, I really wish I hadn’t done that kind thing for my neighbor. We don’t say those things.

Cheri Gregory
I also do not regret all the loaves of bread I ate. That’s my own. No regrets whatsoever. That is some of the best bread ever.

Alright, so let’s talk to our friends who are listening who – some of them might have a new business or new ministry or a new side hustle. And we’ve all heard the expression, and you already said this, go big or go home. Given all the pressure on us to grow fast, which is the book you didn’t write, how can you convince people that deliberately choosing to grow slow is really a good idea?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Absolutely. Well, growing slow is a superpower. Yeah it is! Uh huh! It’s a superpower because fast growth is not sustainable. We know that on the land, we have what’s called sustainable agriculture, like, Scott cares about this land. So much – five generations of Lee families have cared for this land, we want it to be cared for, and feeding the world 5, 10, 15, 20 generations down the road. And so we have to do things now that will far outlive us. And that involves good stewardship of the resources that we have been given. You know, you can compare it to a field, you can compare it to a workout or a weight loss plan, for instance, like there are so many, you know, lose 10 pounds in 30 days, kind of a thing. And we all know that those quick hit, gimmicky weight loss plans might give you some results for you the way you want to look in your swimsuit in July, but they don’t work long term.

The same is true for a business. I’m an acquisitions editor, in addition to being an author, and people will often talk to me about their book proposals. They want to to publish a book. And I am not looking for somebody who went viral one time on Facebook, I am looking for somebody who has put down good roots in their work that maybe has been added 5, 10, 15 years that just keeps showing up. And that their audience is building not by thousands a day. I don’t care. I mean, that can happen. Sure, but most of the time, the best growth is sustainable growth. And it happens slowly over time. And that’s true.

I mean, Queen’s Gambit, did you watch that? Okay, so that is a highly popular show. And everybody was saying, look at that, an overnight success. How amazing is that? But that producer of that show has been trying to get that thing going for 30 years, no one would have blamed if he said, you know, I guess this this wasn’t meant to be, no one would have blamed him if at year 5 or 10 he said, you know what, I’m just gonna move on to something else. But 30 years later, millions of people are being entertained and calling it you know, one of the creative works of our time. And so let’s just allow time to work itself out, even in our businesses, in our creativity, in our workouts, in our finances, whatever it is,

Amy Carroll
Well, okay, you’ve used the term – you just used it in this answer too – putting down deep roots. So I’m starting to get the clue that this is really important. Why are deep roots important in farming and in our lives?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
So when that seed is planted down, there is all already happening, the downward growth of roots before we can even see something coming up often. And certainly for every inch up there is inches down. And so when the corn plant in August is way higher than my head, and there is a drought in our area, that plant stays green and lush and begins to produce corn or soybeans, if it’s a soybean plant, because that root system went down for water, went way down deep, deep, deep to find water. And the other things that those root systems do is they keep the plant alive during storms. So a big windstorm can hit and you can look at a plant that’s been over pretty significantly and thinking there’s new way that is going to be productive at all come harvest, but there will be something there because the plant put down good roots. And so the same is true of us that we would put down good roads that search for living water in the drought seasons of our lives, that we would put down good roads that we could stand during the storms that will inevitably come and try to knock us down and knock us over. And good roots are just what keeps things going up and down.

You know, if you’re a you know, fortune 500 company, and you’ve got a bad year, but you’ve got 20 good years sitting behind you, you aren’t going to be tanked when the bad year comes, because you put down good roots.

Amy Carroll
This is so important. And I cannot wait to talk to Cheri about this more in our next episode, because I think the church doesn’t even understand this. I have watched talented people put in high positions too soon and fall over and over. It’s tragic. So this is such an important concept, Jennifer, it really is.

Cheri Gregory
Alright, so much to unpack. So much to unpack. But I want to move on to a couple of questions from our friends who listen, they give us amazing questions. So I’m going to start out with this one. What was the moment you knew that you had to transform your crisis driven life? And what practical steps did you take to overcome the overwhelm?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Such a great question. You know, I think there were moments all along in the journey since I was a kid. But they weren’t – they were moments I chose to ignore, you know, just the idea of like, tell me to slow down, come a little bit closer and say that. Because I got stuff to do in a hurry. But the the moment that was a turning point for me, there was a literal turning point for me. Well, there was a couple of them. One of them was in a doctor’s office. And he said, in essence, I have a hurried heart, and there’s an actual trauma to your body called hurry sickness that causes all kinds of physical ailments, and they couldn’t find anything on the MRIs or anything like that. And he’s like, you got hurry sickness. I was like, well, I’m not stressed out hurry, person, but whatever. But that was a big clue that something needed to change.

Well, the following spring, we couldn’t get into the fields because of rain. And you can’t get into a wet field and put down seeds, anybody who’s planted a garden probably realizes that. And so we prayed a lot that the rains would stop so we could get into the fields. And I really believed that God would make that happen, there was just no doubt because He is the God of these fields. He’s the God of seasons, He knows what we’re up to, He was going to come through for us. And I just said to Scott, it’s just going to be a growing slow year, right honey? We were just going to be slow into the fields and slow out of the fields, but the harvest will come.

And I realized in that moment that what I believed to be true for the land, I didn’t necessarily believe to be true for my life, I felt that I needed to get into those muddy fields and just plant right now. Because if I didn’t, there would be no harvest. And that really took me on a journey of writing that book through the course of an entire growing season, like in the midst of figuring out what it means to adopt a whole philosophy of growing slow.

So your listener, your friend asked what practical things can you do. The first thing is to know that this is a complete undoing of the way that we’re taught. So it’s bigger than just a few little steps. It’s a complete transformation. It is adopting a whole different kind of philosophy. But there are little things that you can do starting today to figure out how to grow slow. One of them is setting your alarm 10 minutes earlier to sort of set the tone for the day, to welcome the day, whatever that looks like for you. Whether it’s standing under a sky, whether it’s contemplating something in Scripture, whether it’s just hey God, what’s going on today, whatever it happens to look like for you to set the tone for the day.

Another thing is to stop checking your phone in Target, when you’re in the Target checkout line or at the stoplights, because if you have something urgent that happens, you don’t have the ability to handle it in that moment. So until you get home or to a place where you can actually handle it, hurry hangs around the edges of your heart, because you have this urgent matter that you’re unable to handle in that moment. So just don’t look at your phone.

A third thing that I would pick out is to sit down while you eat. So many of us are standing up and eating so quickly that we’re not even tasting the food. To linger at the table and just give a space for ourselves for our bodies and our souls right around lunches and dinner times. I even make a fun breakfast for myself once a week. Not always, but just once a week where I just sit down, and I enjoy a breakfast that’s just a little bit different. And it takes about five minutes to put together my favorite little omelet, it’s not a big deal. But it’s just a way to welcome the day and to slow down from the beginning. So those are those are three practical things.

Cheri Gregory
Love those.

Amy Carroll
Jennifer, this is all so good. And what closing words though do you have for our friends who are listening who would love to grow slow, but feel like it’s too late to reset?

Jennifer Dukes Lee
Well, I am 49 years old. So if you’re 49 or younger, it’s not too late. And it’s not too early either. I don’t care where we are in life’s journey. The temptation to hurry is always there, the temptation is to feel like we’re falling behind. I know people who are at retirement age that feel like they have to make up for lost time or regret that they didn’t come to know the Lord earlier or regret that they didn’t handle things as a parent differently than they did. It’s just not too late to start over. And to begin to enjoy these precious minutes and moments that we have remaining in our lives and to begin to treat time as a friend just like God does. And He says that there’s a time for every purpose, every activity under heaven. And some of those things are really great things, a time to plant and a time to dance and a time for laughing and all those things. But there is also no matter where we are in life, a time for difficult things, the hard things, the time for weeping and mourning, and death and sorrow and all those things. But God takes all of that as a whole and says in Ecclesiastes, things that he is making everything, everything beautiful in its time. And we can begin to embrace that truth in our hearts today,

Cheri Gregory
If you resonated with anything that Jennifer had to say today, but you really don’t know how to start moving from a more frantic life to learning how to grow slow, a good counselor can be someone who can really help with that. Faithful Counseling offers four ways to get licensed counseling: video sessions phone calls, live chat, and messaging.

Amy Carroll
Faithful Counseling is available worldwide. You can access faithful counseling from every country and there are counselors who speak a variety of languages.

Cheri Gregory
Every counselor in Faithful Counseling is licensed by their respective state board in the United States and has over 3000 hours of experience.

Amy Carroll
And it’s affordable! Faithful Counseling costs $260 per month, which gets you unlimited messaging with your counselor and four 30 minute sessions. Financial aid is available for those who qualify.

Cheri Gregory
Well friends, we sure hope that you’ve enjoyed listening to Episode 233 of Grit’N’Grace: The Podcast as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you.

Amy Carroll
And we want to say a big thank you to Faithful Counseling for sponsoring this episode of Grit’N’Grace.

Cheri Gregory
Check out our web page at gritngracethepodcast.com/episode233. There you’ll find this week’s transcript and a link where you can learn more about Faithful Counseling.

Amy Carroll
Next week we’ll be discussing what we learned from Jennifer Dukes Lee, author of Growing Slow: Lessons on Un-Hurrying Your Heart from an Accidental Farm Girl and how it’s impacting our lives.

Cheri Gregory
For today, grow Your grit.

Amy Carroll
Embrace God’s grace.

Cheri Gregory
And as God reveals the next step to live your one life well,

Amy Carroll
we’ll be cheering you on! So –

Both
take it!