WHAT THIS EPISODES ABOUT:

Welcome faith friends. Let's get ready for today's episode.

So where do I begin?

Well, I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. So I was that little girl, that school girl who always wanted the extra workbooks. After school was out for the summer, and I would play school, and of course I would be the teacher with my friends in the neighborhood.

I grew up in the Church of God in Christ and I was told by my pastor at the time that you are going to be a teacher, and I told him, I don't think so because you know teachers, they don't make any money. I'm going to be a doctor. When I was grown, I attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, entered the school to be a doctor, but changed my major to education. God has a plan, right?

So this is my story. The evolution of where I came from. I'm beautifully broken and I'm working on me every single day. 

Listen in...

 

WAYS TO CONNECT WITH ME…

• Website: https://raisethepraisepodcast.com

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jbell2007

• Facebook Group: https://www.choose2praise.com

 

SHOWNOTES:

•    I grabbed a hold of this poem that my mother in-law gave me called 'I Can' by George Washington Carver. I posted that poem right above my door, so every day I walked out, I could see that I can... I can... Long story short, of course I graduated, and as I walked across the stage and I saw that particular Dean of Education sitting there, and I kind of pointed my degree, like... There you go, I did it, I did it. And he gave me this smile, I just remember, I was thinking, either he said those words to me to encourage me, or he really felt that I wasn't teacher material. Either way, I made the decision that I was going to do whatever I need to do. (3:37)

•    He's not only my husband, he's my friend, he's everything. So now we go on and we're doing life and family, faith and careers, we're just doing life. And God has blessed us with three amazing human beings. Kirsten, she's married and she started her life as a nurse, and we have our son, he is in the Air Force and he's doing well, and we have our baby girl who is currently a college student at the University of Texas in Austin, so we're doing life. And, I get my dream job. (6:31)

•    And that call was a call that I got from my hometown to say, You need to come home and see about your mother. You see, my mother has been challenged with Colon Cancer, and it just got really bad in about 2017. I go home, and you will hear from my mother on this podcast, that is my hope that we can get it together, so that you can hear her story. But long story short, four weeks I was there with her in the hospital, I spent the night there, staying with her day in and day out, and saw her declining. All these doctors coming in and going out.. We don't know what's wrong with her. She wasn't in pain, she wasn't hooked up to any tubes, she was just declining. She didn't know who I was, and then the doctors are saying, we've done everything we can do, so we're going to have to move her to hospice. (9:01)

•   God tells me on the drive home, it's time to leave your job. And I'm like, What? If the joy was pretty much gone from doing what I did, because I always said when the joy is gone, it is time to to do something else. I did not know what that something else is going to be. But when I heard God say, leave your job, I thought, Okay, I'm going to leave my job. You all can listen to the episode 01 to get a little bit more about the whole story about me leaving my job and what God had for me next. So, I jump full speed into helping others to live healthy and well, I started to focus on faith community, to live 3 John 2, God wants us to be healthy, he says it in his word, I want you to prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers. (15:02)

•   I activated my faith, and one thing I do know for word, I know we're guaranteed to move the hand of God, and that is Lord, your word says, because God tells us to put him in re