God’s Power Stories | Finding God’s Lead, How God Shows Up, Bible and Everyday Life Stories, Approaching God with Boldness

What do you do when the peace you've always taken for granted is shattered in your own bedroom? And the only thing you know to do seems so wonky, even to your own way of thinking?

In this GPS episode, I sit down with Joni Topper. She's a pastor's wife, speaker, worship leader, songwriter, and author of "The Power of a Well-Placed Yes: God's Abundant Faithfulness in a Small Church."

Joni's faith was planted early by a mother who had survived an alcoholic childhood and made a deliberate decision to raise her daughters differently. At the age of 7, Joni prayed to accept Christ in her living room. But at 16, that faith was tested in a way she never expected when a stranger broke into her home and assaulted her while she slept.

Joni lost her peace until she did something that she calls "wonky." What she found in Psalm 4:8 became the turning point of her life. She made a decision to trust God, and she's never lived in fear the same way since.

We talk about her ministry today, too. Joni shared how a canceled musical partnership and an unexpected invitation to a writers' conference led her, in her retirement years, into a completely new calling as an author and speaker, built on the belief that God can use even the smallest, seemingly dull acts of obedience for something meaningful.

Key Takeaways:

• A decision to trust God can happen in complete privacy. Joni's pivotal moment of faith came alone, in her bedroom, and it changed the trajectory of her entire life.
• You can thank God for the good without blaming Him for the bad. Joni pushes back on the idea that crediting God for protection means holding Him responsible for every hardship; He allows growth through difficulty, not cruelty.
• Warnings from wise mentors deserve real weight. Being "unequally yoked" isn't only about faith versus no faith, but about depth of commitment, and ignoring that warning cost Joni real heartache.
• Daily manna, not stockpiled faith. Exodus 16 teaches that trust in God is a daily practice, not a one-time event.
• God doesn't require flashy obedience. Joni's ministry was born from unexpected doors opening in her retirement years, proving that even small, unglamorous acts of faithfulness matter deeply to God.

Key Themes:

Childhood faith · Trauma and trust · Psalm 4:8 · Being unequally yoked · Daily dependence on God · Late-in-life calling · Storytelling as ministry · God's relentless pursuit Who Will Benefit: Anyone who has experienced trauma or injustice and wonders where God was in it, anyone considering marriage and weighing a mentor's warning, believers seeking a daily (not one-time) understanding of trust, and anyone wondering if it's too late in life to step into a new calling.

If you're spiraling right now, wondering if God really cares — crawl into His lap. He reaches, and reaches, and reaches for you, and He will never stop. I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. And this is God's Power Stories.

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link, all four Lambswool Chronicles books, community, and speaking inquiries at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What if the substance that you told yourself was "the safe one" was quietly leading you to the exact same place as the one that took your father's life?

I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. In this episode of God's Power Stories, I sit down with Ryan McKinney, the founder of the 143 Movement and the CMO at ActsSocial. He's the host of the ActsSocial Podcast, a 24-year-old who has already lived through more than most people twice his age.

Ryan lost his father to a drug overdose in 2016. And in the years that followed, he told himself a story so many of us tell: that alcohol and marijuana were different...safer, more controllable, and a "better path" than what took his dad.

Ryan takes us through how that rationalization quietly built a life he couldn't fully control, culminating in one terrifying night just after high school when he drank himself into an alcohol overdose, alone in his kitchen. Though he doesn't remember most of what happened, his mother does. Their dog, Angel, wouldn't stop barking at 4 a.m. So, Mom came downstairs and found Ryan unconscious on the floor. Paramedics got him back. If Angel hadn't barked, if his mother had ignored her, this conversation would not exist.

That night changed him, but not all at once. Inspired by his mother's unshakeable, sober, joy-filled example through her own losses, Ryan built the 143 Movement out of love and positivity long before he fully surrendered his life to Christ. It wasn't until a night in the fall of 2024—high, alone, and unexpectedly prompted to open his Bible—that everything shifted. He opened to 1 Peter and read about the devil prowling like a roaring lion. Something broke open in him that had never broken before.

We talk honestly about the "it's different with me" rationalization that keeps so many people stuck, about sin as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy, about the courage it takes to speak truth into someone else's life even when it's uncomfortable, and about why Ryan believes no one is ever too far gone to find their way home.

Key Takeaways:

• "It's not as bad as..." is a dangerous rationalization. Comparing our struggles to someone else's worse ones doesn't make ours safe. It just delays us from facing them.
• God can reach you in your lowest, haziest moment. Ryan was high the night he felt prompted to open the Bible. God met him there anyway.
• Sin isn't measured by visibility. Ryan points out that Jesus confronted the religious leaders as much as anyone else. Sin comes in many forms beyond the obvious ones.
• Open rebuke is better than hidden love. Sometimes loving someone means having the uncomfortable conversation, not just praying from a distance.
• You are never too far gone. Desires can change. Addiction can lose its grip. The closer you get to God, the more your heart's desires actually shift.

Key Themes:

Addiction and recovery · Rationalization and self-deception · Faith and sobriety · Divine intervention · Accountability · Grief and loss · Sin without hierarchy · Coming home to Christ

Who Will Benefit:

Anyone minimizing their own struggle by comparing it to someone else's, parents and loved ones of someone in active addiction, young adults navigating faith and temptation, and anyone who has ever believed they were too far gone for grace.

You're never too far gone. Take one step toward God, and He will carry you the rest of the way.

I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. This is God's Power Stories.

What if the thing you locked away thirty-five years ago is still fully alive inside your brain. It's waiting, unprocessed, and exactly as it happened?

I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. In this episode of God's Power Stories, I sit down with Lisa Saruga, a licensed professional counselor, trauma therapist, speaker, and author of The Trauma Tree: Going Beyond Survival, Growing Toward Wholeness.

Lisa is also a survivor. At eighteen years old, in her college dorm room, she endured a violent assault where she was nearly suffocated, knifed, and raped by a masked intruder who told her he was going to kill her. She survived. And then she did what so many of us do with our deepest wounds. She minimized it, told almost no one, and packed it away on a shelf in her brain for thirty-five years.

Then came a phone call. Her cold case had been reopened, and the attacker had been identified. In an instant, everything she thought she had dealt with came flooding back with the full force of the original trauma, because, as Lisa explains, that's exactly how the brain stores what it hasn't processed. We talk about why she now prefers the term post-traumatic stress injury over disorder, how trauma physically changes the brain's amygdala and hippocampus, and why healing is possible no matter how many decades have passed.

Lisa also shares a powerful story of how she stood in the very dorm room where she endured the assault, hours before the building was demolished. Her husband handed her a fistful of Sharpie markers. She tells us what she wrote on those walls, what she discovered when they finally broke through it with a sledgehammer, and what she found waiting on the other side. It will stay with you long after the episode ends.

We talk honestly about self-blame, about Job's friends and the human instinct to find fault so tragedy feels avoidable, about the long and imperfect process of forgiveness, and about Psalm 27:13, "I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living," a verse Lisa clung to and ultimately relearned the meaning of. We also talk about the moment healing turns a corner.

If you've ever locked something away and told yourself it was handled, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Unprocessed trauma is stored, not gone—the brain keeps it fully intact until it is faced
• Post-traumatic stress is an injury, not a disorder—your brain reacted exactly as it was designed to
• Forgiveness is not a single decision but a daily, ongoing process
• Self-blame after trauma is common and rooted in a need to feel safe from what happened to someone else
• Healing turns a corner when we begin comforting others with the comfort we ourselves received

Key Themes:

Trauma and healing · Forgiveness · Post-traumatic stress injury · EMDR therapy · Self-blame · God's goodness in the land of the living · Comforting others · Survivor story

Who Will Benefit:

Anyone carrying an unprocessed wound from years or decades ago, survivors of assault or violent trauma, counselors and caregivers who want language for what their clients are experiencing, and anyone wondering whether God was present in their darkest moment.

If something in this conversation stirred up memories you thought were long settled, know that it is never too late to begin healing. God's goodness is still here, in the land of the living.

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link, all four Lambswool Chronicles books, community, and speaking inquiries at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What if the hardest chapters of your own life were actually training you to write the very story someone else needed to read?

I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. In this episode of God's Power Stories, I sit down with fellow biblical fiction author Matthew James Elliott, a writer, former ministry leader, and the creator of a world where the Kedoshim live, a fictional universe set in the time of the early church.

Matthew grew up largely raised by pastors at the Salvation Army church his father served, while his mother struggled for years with serious mental health battles including depression, anxiety, and what he now understands to be a spiritual gift of discernment that manifested as night terrors and a sensitivity to spiritual warfare. Those same struggles of depression and anxiety would eventually become Matthew's own. Now, they shape the emotional realism at the heart of everything he writes.

We talk about his books—Finding Philemon, The Cyprus Journal, The Ephesus Pages, and his most recent release, The Hope of Inheritance —and why he chooses to release his stories episodically, almost like a modern-day Charles Dickens serial. He opens up about the book he's currently writing, A Broken Embrace, which connects a paralytic healed at the pools of Bethsaida to a firsthand account of the crucifixion. It was a scene that started as five hundred words and became an entire chapter because, as Matthew put it, researching the details of the cross brought him to tears.

This conversation is about more than craft. It's about what happens when a writer stops trying to build a platform and starts simply obeying what God has given him to say and how the darkest seasons of our lives so often become the very things God uses to reach someone else.

Key Takeaways:

• Our pain is not wasted. Matthew's years of watching his mother's mental health struggles, and later facing his own, didn't disqualify him from ministry through writing. They equipped him for it.
• A parent's final blessing can shape a lifetime. Matthew's mother's dying prayer over him—passing on her spirit of discernment—became the foundation for his life verse and his calling.
• Writing can be a form of processing, not just producing. Matthew often writes scenes in real time as God is revealing something to him personally, using his fiction as a form of spiritual journaling.
• Shifting from platform-building to obedience changes everything. Matthew shared how God redirected his focus from selling books to simply being faithful to the stories he's been given to tell.
• Biblical fiction gives permission to wonder. Imagining what could have happened in the margins of Scripture can help readers relate their own struggles to the very real, very human people of the early church.

Key Themes:

Mental health and faith · Writing from lived experience · Generational blessing and legacy · Biblical fiction as ministry · Obedience over platform-building · Grief and healing · Spiritual discernment

Who Will Benefit:

This GPS episode is for writers who wonder if their pain disqualifies them from being used by God, for anyone processing mental health struggles within their family of origin, for biblical fiction readers and writers looking for a new series to dive into, and for anyone who needs to hear that God can turn even our darkest seasons into the very thing someone else needs to read.

I'm honored to be one of the featured authors for Matthew's biblical fiction blog tour: (19) PenWorks of The Word Blog Tour - Part One | Facebook

I'm Anna Moore Bradfield. This is God's Power Stories.

What do you do when loss comes out of nowhere and you can't find your footing again? In this practical and hope-filled conversation, Shaina Hargens joins me to share the resilience map she developed out of her own experience with grief and loss—a tool designed not to give you someone else's answers, but to help you discover your own "next right thing." Shaina explains why nobody else can tell you what will move you forward (not even her), why writing things down externalizes the "debris" sitting on your foundation, and how turning your feelings into words on a page creates room for God to work with what's been weighing you down. This conversation offers a refreshing alternative to generic self-help advice, instead pointing listeners toward a personalized, prayer-infused process of self-discovery, rewriting your own narrative, and moving from mere survival into meaningful growth. If you've ever felt stuck, spinning your wheels, or unsure how to take the next step after a loss you never saw coming, this episode offers both permission and a practical starting point: pick up a pen and begin.

Takeaways

1. Nobody Else Has Your Answer—Only You Know What You Need Next

2. Writing Externalizes Your Pain So You Can Actually Do Something With It

3. You May Need to Write the Same Pain Five Different Ways Before It Moves

4. The Enemy Wants You Spinning Your Wheels, Stuck, or Burned Out—Movement Itself Is Resistance

5. God Doesn't Waste Anything—Every Loss Can Be Used for His Glory

6. Our Bodies and Souls Aren't Designed for the "Black Hole" of Our Devices

Themes

Grief and Loss • Resilience and Personal Growth • Journaling as Healing • The Resilience Map • Moving From Survival to Growth • God's Redemptive Use of Pain • Rewriting Your Narrative • Spiritual Warfare Against Stagnation • Trusting God's Leading • Self-Discovery Through Writing • Prayer as Surrender • Community and Sisterhood • Foundational Truths • Screen Time vs. Reflection • Designed for Greatness • The Next Right Thing

This is for:

✓ Processers of unexpected loss

✓ People who feel stuck, burned out, or like they're "spinning their wheels"

✓ Those looking for a practical, actionable grief tool

✓ Writers, journalers, or anyone curious about the therapeutic power of putting feelings on paper

✓ People who feel pressure to heal "the right way"

✓ Anyone questioning whether their pain has purpose

✓ Those overwhelmed by comparison

✓ Believers wanting to understand resilience and growth through a spiritual, rather than purely psychological, lens

✓ People who feel disconnected or numb from excessive screen time

✓ Anyone in community-building or ministry work

✓ Those who need a gentle nudge to start journaling

Shaina's Blueprint: https://shainahargens.com/lp/resilience-map/

Shaina's retreats: Shaina Hargens

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What are the odds that a church bell rings out across Athens at the exact moment a teacher reads aloud the words "To an unknown God"—while standing on the very hill where Paul first spoke them?

In this powerful series finale, Anna and John climb Mars Hill (the Areopagus)—the rocky outcrop where the Athenian council once tried serious cases, and where Paul delivered one of the most strategically brilliant sermons in the New Testament (Acts 17:16-34). They unpack why Paul opened not with condemnation but with genuine observation: "Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in all respects"—turning misdirected religious passion into a bridge rather than a battleground.

Featuring a remarkable live recording of Jonathan Cahn teaching at the exact site, complete with a church bell ringing at the precise moment he read the words "To an unknown God" from the ancient altar inscription—an unplanned, unmistakable God moment captured on tape. This episode explores Paul's profound theological claim that God "is not far from each one of us... in Him we live and move and exist," revealing that Athens, for all its temples and altars, had been reaching toward a God who was already standing in the room.

The episode—and the entire twelve-part In the Margins series—closes with worship and anointing in the city where Paul once stood, a tender and vulnerable reflection from John about how this trip changed him, and a final challenge: the God of Athens' unknown altar is not far from any of us. He never was.

#InTheMargins #MarsHill #Areopagus #UnknownGod #ApostlePaul #Acts17 #JonathanCahn #ChristianPodcast #RevelationTour #InHimWeLiveAndMove #SeriesFinale #FaithJourney #Athens #BiblicalArchaeology #ChristianTravel #GodMoments #BibleStudyPodcast #NotFarFromEachOne #SevenChurchesOfRevelation #TheUnknownGod

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What happens when a city has all the genius, all the devotion, and all the precision in the world—and points it at the wrong thing?

In this first of two Athens episodes, Anna and John walk through the Ancient Agora, where Paul reasoned daily with strangers in Acts 17:17, using the Greek word dialegomai—dialogue, not lecture—to meet people exactly where they were. They explore the Acropolis and the Parthenon, marveling at the ancient Greeks' astonishing architectural precision (including entasis, the intentional inward curve of columns designed to appear perfectly straight to the human eye)—all poured into worship of Athena, a goddess who wasn't there. They visit Pnyx Hill, birthplace of Athenian democracy, and reflect on the paradox of a civilization that gave the world profound civic ideals while also condemning Socrates, excluding women, and depending on slavery.

This episode doesn't shy away from the very human side of pilgrimage: after days of exhausting travel, Anna and John admit they didn't make the climb to the Parthenon's summit—and found peace in that limitation. They wander through Syntagma Square, the Panathenaic Stadium, and the ancient neighborhood of Plaka... where they end up eating McDonald's in the shadow of the Acropolis. Because sometimes the most honest thing you can do on a holy journey is admit you're hungry.

Athens was brilliant. Athens was broken. And Athens was reaching for something it couldn't quite name—setting the stage for what happens next, on Mars Hill.

#InTheMargins #Athens #AncientAgora #Acropolis #Parthenon #PnyxHill #ApostlePaul #ActsOfTheApostles #AncientGreece #ChristianPodcast #RevelationTour #Entasis #AthenianDemocracy #BiblicalArchaeology #FaithJourney #GreeceTravel #ChristianTravel #BibleStudyPodcast #Plaka #Socrates

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What does it feel like to watch two former Muslims commissioned as missionaries on the exact shore where Paul once fulfilled a vow before setting sail toward Jerusalem?

In this shorter but deeply resonant episode of In the Margins, Anna and John travel to Cenchreae, the humble eastern port of ancient Corinth where Acts 18:18 tells us Paul cut his hair to fulfill a Nazirite vow before departing for Syria. Unlike the grand tourist sites of Ephesus or Corinth, Cenchreae is quiet, worn, and honest—a place where something real happened two thousand years ago and, remarkably, still happens today.

Their group gathered on this rocky shore to pray and worship at the water's edge, small against the vastness of the sea—much as Paul and the original disciples once were. Then came the moment that stopped everyone: two men who had come out of Islam to faith in Jesus, now serving as missionaries, joined the group and were commissioned right there on the shore, echoing Acts 13's sending of Barnabas and Saul from Antioch. This episode explores the profound meaning of being "sent"—not self-appointed, but interrupted, redirected, and commissioned by something larger than personal ambition—and reflects on how every stop of this entire journey, from Smyrna's martyrdom to Ephesus's lost first love to Corinth's dysfunction and redemption, prepared the ground for this singular moment of watching the mission continue, unbroken, from the same shores where it began.

#InTheMargins #Cenchreae #ApostlePaul #ActsOfTheApostles #NazariteVow #Missionaries #Sent #ChristianPodcast #RevelationTour #FaithJourney #GreeceTravel #ChristianTravel #Acts13 #BiblicalArchaeology #ExMuslimBelievers #CalledAndSent #BibleStudyPodcast #CorinthPort #FromTheseShores #TheMissionContinues

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What does it feel like to stand on the actual stone platform where Paul was put on trial—and to accidentally discover a plant growing in the ruins whose name means "Esther"?

In this rich episode of In the Margins, Anna and John explore Corinth—the wealthy, morally notorious crossroads city where Paul lived and worked for eighteen months, longer than almost anywhere else on his missionary journeys. Discover the staggering engineering of the Corinth Canal, cut nearly 300 feet through solid limestone, and learn about the ancient diolkos, a paved trackway where Greeks once dragged entire ships overland rather than risk 200 miles of treacherous open sea.

Walk through the Archaeological Museum where a fragment reading "Synagogue of the Hebrews" may be the very doorway Paul passed through, then stand at the Bema—the actual judgment seat where the Roman proconsul Gallio dismissed the case against Paul in Acts 18, an act of divine protection disguised as bureaucratic indifference. Hear the unexpectedly funny (and unexpectedly profound) story of a Greek woman shooing Anna and John away from a shade tree—only for Anna to discover afterward that the plant she'd been protecting was myrtle, the very plant referenced in Isaiah, Zechariah, and tied to the Hebrew name Hadassah... better known to us as Esther.

This episode reveals why 1 Corinthians 13's famous "Love is patient, love is kind" wasn't written as a wedding reading, but as pointed correction to a divided, quarrelsome, litigious church—and why taking communion in the very city where Paul first recorded the Lord's Supper instructions felt less like ritual and more like reaching across two thousand years and finding the table still set.

#InTheMargins #Corinth #ApostlePaul #FirstCorinthians #CorinthCanal #TheBema #Myrtle #BiblicalArchaeology #ChristianPodcast #RevelationTour #GallioCorinth #LoveChapter #Communion #FaithJourney #GreeceTravel #ChristianTravel #BibleStudyPodcast #AncientGreece #HadassahEsther #TableIsStillSet

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield

What happens when an entire group of tourists goes silent at the exact same moment—not from awkwardness, but because words simply fail?

In this uniquely reflective episode of In the Margins, Anna and John step away from ancient letters, archaeological ruins, and biblical history to explore something entirely different: an island so breathtaking it seems to communicate on its own terms. After a full day touring Crete's Cathedral of Saint Titus and the Palace of Knossos, they sail to Santorini—the crescent-shaped remnant of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history, circa 1600 BCE.

Discover the fascinating geological connection between this island and the Minoan civilization they'd walked through just hours earlier in Crete, and why some scholars link the Santorini eruption to Plato's legend of Atlantis. Explore the remarkable architecture of Oia, where entire homes are carved directly into volcanic cliffside rock, turning catastrophic destruction into breathtaking canvas. And sit with the deeper question this episode raises: after days of processing letters, sermons, and teaching, what do you do with an experience that offers no words at all—just overwhelming, wordless beauty?

Drawing on Psalm 19 ("The heavens declare the glory of God... they have no speech, no words... yet their voice goes out into all the earth"), this episode considers whether beauty itself might be a form of divine communication, and how encountering something too vast for your own perception might be the closest most of us ever come to understanding what the Apostle John saw when he tried to describe the throne room of heaven.

#InTheMargins #Santorini #Oia #GreekIslands #Caldera #Atlantis #MinoanCivilization #Psalm19 #ChristianPodcast #RevelationTour #BeautyOfCreation #FaithJourney #ChristianTravel #GreeceTravel #DivineBeauty #GlorOfGod #BibleStudyPodcast #TravelPodcast #WonderOfCreation #GetOffTheShip

If this podcast has been a gift to you, help us reach someone who needs it. Find the giving link along with links to my books and community at beacons.ai/annamoorebradfield