When we feel far from the mountain top experiences do we need to work hard to get back there?  Can we find God even in the valley experiences?  Join Alyson Rockhold and I as we discuss the importance of remembering God’s faithfulness and gentleness even in valley moments. 

 

Journaling Questions:

·      What are some things that you can thank God for today?

·      Can you think of times in your life where you can look back and see the faithfulness of God?

·      As you look back do you have anything to thank God for in your valley moments?

·      What are your mountain top (Ebenezer) experiences that you look back on in your life?

·      Are you looking for God working in both macro and micro-moments?

·      Have you considered God wants a relationship with you?  How does this affect how you think about Him? 

Tips:

Gratitude list

Remembering and marking the big and little blessings from God

 

Mentioned in this episode:

Eugene Peterson

Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby           

 

Looking for a tool to help you engage more in God’s word? Sign up here to receive free Bible study and journaling tool to help explore your next step to trusting God more fully.

 

You can connect with Alyson Rockhold at alysonrockhold.com

 

 I want to hear from you!
 You can find me and join in the conversation on Facebook and Instagram @stepstotrusting.

Hashtag your story of God’s faithfulness and stepping out in faith. #stepstotrusting

 

Verses mentioned in the episode:

·      Psalm 4:5

·      Psalm 66:18

·      Psalm 18:35 

·      Verses about remembering

·      Psalm 121:5

·      Joshua 4:21

 

Ephesians 2:10

Special thanks to Jim Dougherty for creating the music for the show! Check out his Album City of God on Spotify or Apple Music.

 

See below for a full transcript.

 

[00:00:00] Erin: Hi, this is Erin

[00:00:03]

[00:00:03] Erin: Michelle. Welcome to steps to trusting. At steps to trusting it is our goal to meet you where you are in your faith journey and encourage you to continue to take steps to trusting the Lord more fully. I’m here with Alyson Rockhold and Alyson is a voice that reminds us to be grateful and to be thankful for what God is doing in our lives.

[00:00:24] She is a voice that is going to point you to put your gaze on the Lord Jesus Christ. The focus of the conversation today is how do we live in both mountaintop experiences and in Valley experiences? How do we live with a steady focus on who God is? And you know what guys, no matter where you are right now, whether you are walking on a mountain, top experience, and God feels very near, or you are walking in what feels to be a Valley and you wish that you could find yourself back on a mountain top.

[00:00:58] No matter where you are in your walk with the Lord right now, no matter how your day looks, whether it was joyful and exciting, or whether it was hard and challenging, This conversation is for you.

[00:01:12] Let’s go ahead and jump right in.

[00:01:14] Well, Alyson, I was wondering, would you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

[00:01:19] Alyson: I’m Alyson Rockhold. I have been a medical missionary and Haiti, Zambia, and Tanzania. Most recently COVID forced my husband and I back home to Houston, Texas. And during that transition, I was really calling out to the Lord of what he was calling me to, everywhere we are, can be a mission field, no matter if that’s in the, in the States or overseas.

[00:01:41] And so I wanted to approach this next time of my life as a mission field and the mission he gave me was writing. So I’ve been doing some freelance writing and trying to use my writing skills, my words to honor him and to encourage his people.

[00:01:57] Erin: I’m so excited to get to have this conversation with you today. as you know, Alyson, this show is called steps to trusting. So if you were to consider daily steps in your life as steps of trust toward God, what are those main steps that come to mind?

[00:02:12] Alyson: I think for me I see I trust in God because we have a relationship and you can’t trust in something you don’t know or aren’t close to. And so for me, those steps to trusting are the same as the steps towards building our relationship with God, which are the same as building a relationship with a person, spending time, listening, talking, sharing moments together.

[00:02:36] So I think those daily steps would be carving out time to, to sit and pray, to listen, to read the Bible into, try to do that. Not in a way to just check it off my checklist, which I’m guilty of sometimes, but to really see that as a way of engaging that relationship.

[00:02:56] Erin: Yeah. I love that. I’ve actually been spending a lot of time thinking about relationship lately and thinking about how God’s relationship with us translates into all our other relationships. You had talked about in one of your articles, the mountain top experience and how when we are no longer in those mountain, top experiences, we really long to go back to those places. And so how does that translate into this relationship? when you don’t feel like you’re on the mountain top?

[00:03:30] Alyson: So where I wrote about the mountain top experience, I was living in Tanzania and I’d been there for a couple of months and I was reflecting on, when I first arrived, I loved everything. Everything was new and exciting, and I wanted to explore it. You have to haul water from a river and isn’t this fun.

[00:03:50] Then a couple months in, I was getting the same water from the same river and I was dreading it and I was hating it and I was complaining about it. I was longing for, Oh, if I could just have those same feelings I had three months ago, this would be much easier. I feel like. what God came to me with is, the same is true in my relationship with him. there are mountaintop moments where I go to a retreat and I feel so close and excited, or I joined a new church and I’m all of a sudden, Oh, they have the best ministries and I’m going to just jump right in.

[00:04:21] But then when those things grow stale, I’m so tempted to get discouraged and have a complaining heart and stop pressing into those things because they don’t feel as fun anymore. What God has encouraged me is, it’s not about looking back to the mountain top and trying to make your way back there to turn around and go backwards.

[00:04:45] But. if I can really dig in, in those moments where I feel like this isn’t fun anymore, I don’t like it. I don’t understand it. If I can find God there in what I would call the Valley moments that’s where I think I really get to know God’s heart of love for his children that he wants to be with us in the Valley to walk with us do during those hard times and that his walking with us doesn’t mean that he’s just going to magically make it all better.

[00:05:13] And we’re going to put a jet pack on with Jesus and fly to the next mountain top. But that he’s going to be with me there and I can rely on him there, even if my circumstances don’t change, even if it’s still not fun to haul water from a river. And so that’s, yeah, that’s how I’ve seen. My faith built in the Valley moment.

[00:05:33] Erin: how do you react? Is there something you have in place like a discipline or something that when you find yourself in those low valleys to help you to refocus like that.

[00:05:45] Alyson: There are different things that I’ve engaged in at different points in my life to to find God in the Valley moments. And I think it’s important for me to say up front something that I’ve learned recently that the way is a person and not a method. That’s something from experiencing God book by its Henry Blackaby.

[00:06:04] And I think that’s important because I want to be so careful in my writing and in when I’m talking to people about faith, I don’t want to say, follow this method. And you’ll know Jesus better because Jesus says that he’s the way. So the way is a person, the way is not a method. So I just want to make that clear up front because my methods have changed over time, but the person the way has stayed the same.

[00:06:27] So actually, when I wrote the article that you mentioned I was doing a practice was a short little three to four minute meditation that I had found a recording where a woman would tell you to calm yourself down, close your eyes, take three deep breaths, and then think about three things that you were grateful for that day.

[00:06:47] So I would do that practice right before bed. I found that those couple of minutes at the end of my day, reframed every day for me. Then it started this habit of. I’d be going throughout my day and I’d say, Oh gosh, that was a beautiful flower that I saw. I’m going to think about that tonight in my, in my gratitude list.

[00:07:10] so it was a practice that just kind of retrained my brain, my muscles, to look for the good to look for God. that was so encouraging to me because even if things were hard, even if I had felt like I was in a Valley, I was seeing at least three signs of God’s presence every day. I did that practice for quite a while.

[00:07:31] Kind of that, that method got stale after a while. And currently what I do is I try when my alarm goes off in the morning, before I get out of bed, I try to take a couple minutes just to tell God what I’m thankful for. And so that gratitude theme has kind of run throughout different ways. I’ve done the

[00:07:49] book a thousand gifts or where you write down everything. So different ways of just exercising that gratitude muscle for me has been huge because when you’re in the Valley, when you’re in hard times when things are foggy and you can’t see, it’s very easy, at least for me to trick myself into thinking God’s not here or I’m lost or I’m going the wrong way.

[00:08:10] And so gratitude reminds me that God is there, that there are signs of his presence all around me. And that, that gives me the courage to keep moving forward.

[00:08:19] Erin: yeah, I love what you’re saying too. As far as that it’s not just one thing But it’s this reminder to turn to God. And I think that for me is one of the things that I’m hearing is that in relationship or constantly turning to him, right. We’re constantly seeking him, wanting to know him more, wanting to see what he’s doing in our lives.

[00:08:40] And I love that. That is the focus. And it’s not this XYZ, like follow this and it’s exactly like this.

[00:08:49] But you actually talked about another practice based on Psalm four five where it was talking about like offering right sacrifices to the Lord. Could you tell us a little bit more about that discipline that you practiced?

[00:09:04] Alyson: Yeah. So that was when the four minute meditation on gratitude got a little stale, I was trying to find the other ways to exercise that gratitude muscle. And my husband gave me a book by Eugene Peterson. That was going through the Psalms and he described this practice about, at the end of the day that you could visualize giving your giving your day giving everything that happened that day and. Putting it on the altar as your sacrifice to God and saying that, okay, God, all of my effort today was for you and everything I did, even if it was imperfect, even the mistakes that I made, I’m turning them back over to you and I’m releasing them to you.

[00:09:51] And I’m saying that I’ve worked all day but you’re gonna continue working all night. You’re going to continue using these things. Things that may look like little seeds, things I didn’t even recognize were going on. I turned them back over to you and. Trust you with them. And that was really huge for me because I tend to be a worrier.

[00:10:13] in my medical practice, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, worried about my patients. When I released an article online, the first night, I’ll wake up, what, what do people think? What are they going to say? Is anyone going to comment? And so that practice was really helpful in my relationship with God, to trust him with that, to let go, to visualize in my head an altar and to visualize myself, setting everything that happened that day on that altar and trusting that what God did with it, what he chose to, to grow what he chose to burn that that would be okay.

[00:10:48] That I could release that to him. So that, yeah, that practice, I should start doing that again. was very, it was very helpful for me.

[00:10:56] Erin: Yeah, when I read that, I was like, wow, that’s such a, a reminder to go back in our day and to just let go of things. I’ve been looking a lot at this idea of turning to the Lord. And, and I think that that’s like a, a great way to actually like turn over our things to the Lord as well.

[00:11:18] Right. And actually I was just reading this morning. in Psalm 66 and it was verse 18. it says, if I cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened, but God has listened. He has attended to the voice of my prayer. And I just was really struck by that, how we can be turned towards our sin and towards the things going on in our lives and towards all the things going on around us, or we could be turned to the Lord.

[00:11:44] at first that sounds kind of scary or thoughtless or something to say, well, God isn’t listening. But the reality of it is, is if we’re turned and focused on all these other things, we’re not actually talking to him. Like you said we’re in this place of worrying and trying to figure it out, or we can take those things and we can take them to the alter and we can actually like bring them before God and he’s listening because we’re turned towards him.

[00:12:09] And I think it’s not that God doesn’t hear me when I have worries or when I’m thinking about the things that I’ve done during the day. But I think it’s when I’m focused on that, instead of focused on him again, like you’re saying in relationship. Yeah.

[00:12:25] Alyson: Yeah, definitely too. If we’re relationship also has to do with, with listening. I think a lot of the practices that I’ve been talking about of writing down my gratitude or those sorts of things, it’s like, it is turning towards God. It’s that, that muscle that, as a human, I want to look at my worries and focus on them and magnify them in my mind. But whatever different little methods I’ve found, like they they’re all bringing me back to God.

[00:12:52] Erin: So as far as in relationship and turning back to him, what characteristic of God do you think has really hit you in your life that helps you to turn to him?

[00:13:05] Alyson: Say God’s gentleness is something that has been displayed in my life. Times that I have sinned or been puffed up with pride or tried to go my own way or seek my own glory and God has convicted me of that. I have found him to be so gentle and loving and accepting taking me right back in. There’s a verse Psalm 18:35 that says your gentleness makes me great. And I’ve found that because knowing that God will love me with gentleness and kindness gives me courage to keep turning to him, to keep going back and saying, Oh God, I’m, I was focused on my worries, but I’m refocusing on you.

[00:13:56] I think there were times in my life where maybe I felt like God was more of a, of a strict task master that would, punish my sin if I turned away. I think just seeing , his gentleness, his love makes me want to keep turning to him because. It feels so good to be held and to be assured of his love.

[00:14:17] Erin: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that, but first before but I’m contemplating what that looks like, So to you, what does it mean that God’s gentleness makes you great?

[00:14:31] Alyson: I think when I think when I want to be brave or courageous for God, naturally I think of, things like the warrior God, the, the strong, almighty the powerful words and yes, those do, give me courage and those, those do help me to want to move forward.

[00:14:51] But for me, when I think of God’s gentleness making me great, it’s like I envision more of like a safety net, a protection around me that whatever I’m going into God’s love and God’s gentleness will be there with me so that I’ll be able to make it through whatever happens. the other words like the warrior and the savior, which are important and are so good.

[00:15:16] I envision those more as like the like protection, like a helmet and a sword and things that are, fighting and moving forward and action. And whereas the gentleness of God is softer and it’s internal and it’s ever present. And it’s there regardless of if I’m fighting a battle externally or internally.

[00:15:39] And knowing that, that is with me gives me courage to keep going out and trying, because even if I fail his gentleness will catch me.

[00:15:48] Erin: yeah. Yeah. That’s really encouraging. It really encompasses his forgiveness when you try and go out and do something and if you do fail, it’s like, he’s still going to be there. are there any Bible verses that when you think about how you step out to the Lord that encourage you any verses that encourage you to take those steps towards Him?

[00:16:07] Alyson: There are many verses in the old Testament where God tells his people to remember, to remember what he’s done, to remember his faithfulness, to remember that he’s the God that brought them out of Egypt. That he’s the God that parted the red sea. And so in moments where I am fearing what’s next, or I feel a little precarious stepping out and trusting I hear those reminders to remember, I hear those many verses and they encourage me to think about yes, how God was faithful to the Israelites and to Christians throughout history.

[00:16:47] And also how he has been faithful in my life so far. And so I can look back and recall. The times that he’s been faithful to me the times that he’s proven himself trustworthy, and that gives me the courage to know he’s going to continue being that same trustworthy, faithful, gentle God in the future.

[00:17:09] And so I can take that next step and trust.

[00:17:12] Erin: What are the, main things that come to your mind when you think about God’s faithfulness in your life? When you try to remember that?

[00:17:19] Alyson: Okay. I guess the best one that I can think of is God’s faithfulness in. Bringing me, my husband. I didn’t get married until I was in my thirties. And for a long time, I thought that my call to medical missions, my dream of living in East Africa that, that would mean that I would have to do it as a single woman.

[00:17:43] Because I just didn’t think there would be anyone that would want to do that with me. And yet I kept having that desire for a husband and desire for a spouse. And I kept telling God, I want to follow you. I want to go into the missions field. I am, I went as a single woman. But I always had this desire to be married and. I tried to get rid of it. I tried to pray it away. I tried to say, God, this is something you want me to lay on the alter for you.

[00:18:13] I will do it. And okay, just ways that could only be God, through a Tanzanian nun who I met started to go to spiritual direction with her through conversations with her. I realized that God had already introduced me to my husband, that we had been friends for 16 years. And that, even though he told me once I will never go to Africa. I am not called to missions that God was doing something in his heart.

[00:18:39] we ended up dating while I was still in Tanzania and he was in the States and then getting married and then going back on the mission field together. yes, God’s faithfulness was in answering that heart desire and that prayer. But I also see God’s faithfulness in walking with me through those moments, which I would call valleys, where I just felt so lonely and so sad a lot of the time that if God had answered that prayer, when I first wanted it back in my twenties, I wouldn’t have had those moments of growing in faith with God of walking through the hard times in the valleys and finding him faithful even there that allowed me to trust him.

[00:19:22] And so yeah, when I look at my marriage, I see God’s faithfulness.

[00:19:27] Erin: that’s a cool story. I was just, as you were just saying about remembering, we are in God’s word told to remember that he is the one that brought them out of Egypt. We’re we’re told to remember all the faithfulness that , he had toward the Israelites, but he’s not just a God that was faithful in the old Testament,

[00:19:51] And, and I think he is talking to a specific people group that he’s saying, remember how I was with you. Remember what I did for you, remember? and I think it’s important that we actually do that in our own lives. I think it’s really important That we take the time to remember. And I actually think your practice of gratitude is.

[00:20:11] Actually really flows well into that verse of remembrance, because each day when you are thinking about being grateful, you remembering what has God provided for me today? What has he done for me today? I think we often tell those stories that are the big things like, Oh, I found a husband, like that’s a big thing.

[00:20:33] And that, like you had said how God allowed that to you to realize that. But he’s also there in the day to day, he’s there in the mundane. And he’s there, like you said, walking with you in that time where you felt very alone. I guess as you think about that time where you were feeling alone, where you were feeling like desiring to have a husband, but just really pressing forward in those mundane moments, how is it that we see God in those mundane moments and that every day, how did you see his faithfulness in that time?

[00:21:05] Alyson: I don’t know if it’s my humanness, my weakness often it’s in looking back. I’m not always able to see it in the moment. And maybe that’s something that will come with more faith with more of the Holy spirit within me prompting me because I feel like there were definitely. Many moments, many days spread into weeks where I wondered where God was.

[00:21:31] I didn’t see him. I didn’t sense his presence. And so it’s been more in looking back, to be able to say this now years later, five years later, wow. God was there. God was loving me and holding me and encouraging me and guiding me. And so I don’t know if you always feel it, in the moments I think of I don’t know if you’ve read much of mother Teresa’s writings or letters where she wrote about God just felt so absent from her.

[00:22:00] For much of her ministry, for much of what she was doing. And we can look from the outside and say, Oh my gosh, God was God’s there. Can’t you see, it’s so obvious what he’s doing through you. And but even for someone like that, such a great Christian woman who had such a strong relationship with Christ, she, she didn’t feel him.

[00:22:17] She didn’t see him in the mundane and the hard all the time. And so I think getting that vision, remembering, looking back and saying, Oh, wait, God was there. Then the next time that I feel like that the next time I feel like it’s dark and I don’t sense God’s presence. And I’m trying to think of a list of things I’m thankful for.

[00:22:35] And all I can think of as well my heart kept beating today. In those moments, I can say, okay, I’ve felt like this before five years ago and God was there. And so five years from now, I’m going to be able to look back and see what God’s doing. But I think I love what you’re doing with the podcast of like trusting God in the big and the small.

[00:22:59] And I think both are so important because if we only trust God on the mountain tops, when things are perfect and wonderful and or if we only praise God for the mountain tops of looking back and he gave me a husband and, he turned this disease. In some ways that’s only a very shallow faith to me.

[00:23:16] The deep or I’ve seen my faith grow, I’ve seen my faith deepened is to be able to to see God in the Valley moments to experience his presence looking backwards. When I didn’t feel it didn’t feel his presence in those moments. To me, that’s where the deeper trust and a deeper relationship have really grown, just like a relationship with a person.

[00:23:39] If you you see someone once a year at a, at a big celebration that’s great. And you’re going to look forward to seeing them and it’s fun and it’s good. And maybe over, 10, 20 years you’ll have some memories together, but if you’re in the trenches with someone we see it with our spouses, we love this person and we’re in the hard things together.

[00:23:58] And sometimes you don’t like what they’re doing, or you don’t understand, or there’s, that tension that grows But then over a lifetime there’s, there’s that beauty of that relationship that’s so much deeper and so much stronger than the once a year friend.

[00:24:13] Erin: I’m just thinking about I relate to what you’re saying, as far as looking back on the moments where you feel like God was far from you and looking back and saying like, no, he was there all along. And and I think, that is our humanness so much that It does take that looking back and that what’s built before and after those moments, right?

[00:24:37] Like you’re saying, we build that in longer relationships. it is something that we build with the Lord. And actually I was thinking of a verse in song in the Psalms again, like I keep bringing up the songs, It’s actually from some one 21 verse five. and it says the Lord is my keeper. Right. And so I had this time where I just felt like I questioned God so much where I felt so far from him.

[00:25:03] And at the end of all of that coming back and realizing that like, no, all along, he was the one who was keeping me. all along. He’s the one that draws me to himself that at the end of the hardship, I can say like you are, he was there the whole time and I’m part of that.

[00:25:24] What felt like separation? What felt like quiet from him was part of what caused me to seek him. Okay. And I think there is this growth that happens when we have to seek him. Right. When he feels so far away and we have to figure out where is he? he’s there all along, but it’s, I think maybe to like that, that turning back of our own hearts to, to say like, God, I will seek you.

[00:25:52] Alyson: the experiencing God by Henry Blackaby book has been really influential to me. He talks about kind of what we were mentioning earlier of to take time, to sit down and to write out, I would call them mountain top moments. He would call them, Ebeneezer moments where you set up your pillar and you, you see where God was faithful.

[00:26:14] And you write that down. And he talked about, sitting down now and looking back over your life and picking out at least five or six main mountain, top moments, main times that you saw God at work in your life and writing those down. And when you’re in the hard times, when you’re in the moments where you’re not sure which way to go That you take that list back out in your own mind or have it written somewhere and you look back over those, Ebenezer’s those mountaintop moments that you, I picture like somebody standing on a road and they’re looking back and there are five or six stone pillars set up behind them and they remember, Oh yeah, God was there and God was there and God was there.

[00:27:03] That gives you the courage and the faith to make the next step. That was something that was, has been really helpful to me. Like we’re talking about the macro in the micro, the, seeing the big movements of God and remembering those in times of trial or a times of confusion. But then also the daily remembering, and I think for me both together have been really powerful To trust that God is there and has been there and will be there.

[00:27:34] Erin: Yeah. I actually spent some, when I first started my blog, I spent a lot of time what I called a series called stones of remembrance, but I think it’s the same, it’s that Ebeneezer, right? It’s that like pillar of where God tells the people to set up a stone and it will be a reminder for the generations, right? And then when your children ask, what does this mean? You can say like, this is what this pillar means in my life. And I do, I agree with you. I think that’s so important to take the time, to see where is God working in my life, because I think it’s easy to It’s easy to forget.

[00:28:12] It’s easy to just go on with life and, and I feel like I have gone through a lot of time in my life where I feel like a lot of the things that I have are because of me. Right. And, and for me it took recently some challenges in my life, some Valley experiences to really reveal to me that, many of the blessings that I feel like I have in my life, that I had been looking at as accomplishments instead of blessings, to look back and to see those pillars and say, no, these are God’s gifts in my life.

[00:28:46] These are how he has provided for me, not what I’ve accomplished. And that’s been eye-opening to me too. And I think that did come in almost first. Having to have the failure. I had to have the failure to see that, Oh, all along. It’s been him. It’s nothing me all along.

[00:29:05] Alyson: I think that’s, I think that’s so true. That’s definitely, I see that at play in my human nature as well. I want to, if I’m going to build a monument, I want it to be a monument to me, that’s kind of that’s my, my natural tendency. But making the Ebenezers their, their monuments to God.

[00:29:23] I see that in my, in my writing as well, I’ve always wanted to write. I’ve always had this passion for writing and I tried a blog and nobody read it. And I tried being really active on social media and nobody responded and I kept trying and trying and trying to get my voice out there and to get my writing read and And it was so frustrating and I felt like I kept banging my head against the wall.

[00:29:47] Then it feels like over the last year, God has brought me all of these opportunities. There’s just no way that I can deny that it’s him because I tried for years and didn’t make it. I think now of course, looking back again, remembering I see God’s faithfulness in that because it would have been really tempting to get puffed up with my own good writing skills and my own, look I’m in the paper and I’m this If I had gotten that success right away.

[00:30:17] And because now that it’s coming, I’m just like, Oh, this is, this is all God, this is my name may be on it. But he brought this opportunity because years of my own trying didn’t make it happen. So I agree with that human tendency to want to reframe it, to put ourselves in the best light possible.

[00:30:36] Erin: Alyson, thanks for being here with us today. I’m so excited to actually see your face and to get to have this conversation with you today. could you tell us a little bit about where we would be able to find that writing you’re talking about. How can we connect with you?

[00:30:51] Alyson: Yes. So you can go on my website, which is my name, Alyson rockhold.com. I’m a one L and a Y kind of Alyson and you can find my portfolio there, different places that God has given me opportunities to write for and sign up for my newsletter, where I’ll send you an email every month with what God’s been putting on my heart.

[00:31:12] And I would love to connect with you there.

[00:31:15] Erin: Great. Thank you, Alyson. Would you be willing to close us in prayer?

[00:31:19] Alyson: Yes.

[00:31:20] Dear God, we are so grateful for your faithfulness, for your gentleness, for your presence with us, Lord and God, we confess that we struggle in the Valley moments to see you. And we struggle in the mountaintop moments to not make it all about us. And and God, we just, we’re so thankful that you are with us in the mountains and the valleys that you are showing your faithfulness to us.

[00:31:51] And we just pray that you would help us to find different ways to memorialize those things in our life that we could remember them, that we could recall them in times of struggle, that we could trust you more each day in Jesus name, we pray. Amen.

[00:32:10] Erin: thank you, Alyson.

[00:32:12] Thanks again for joining us friends, You can find the links to connect with Alyson as well as journaling questions in the show notes to help you process through what we discussed today.

[00:32:23] and to point you to look at what is your next step

[00:32:27] If you enjoyed the show, please like subscribe and share with a friend. I would love to connect with you too.

[00:32:33] You can find me at erinmichele.net. There you’ll find my blog show .Notes and transcripts to the show

[00:32:41] as well as my journaling resource to help you sit down, look at scripture as you contemplate. What is my next step?

[00:32:49] I love how Alison points us to look for God. Even in the valley moments. This is going to be a theme that carries through. In our episode next week with Monica Kirkland

[00:33:00] where we will be talking about revival. Can we only find God in the mountain top experiences, or can we find revival with him in what feels like valleys Lowe’s or even mundane places I hope you join us back here next time where we will be discussing and wrestling through these very questions till then I want to leave you with this reminder from Ephesians two 10. for we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them, friends I’m praying for you as you keep on stepping.