Healer & Hope Giver: A Christian Podcast on Healing, Faith & Identity

What if the unfinished thing in your life doesn’t have to become smaller before you’re allowed to receive everything happening beside it?

In 2009, Kim was waiting to become a mother. Infertility, fertility treatments, adoption paperwork, disappointment, hope, grief, and prayer took up enormous space in her life. Seventeen years later, she returned to more than 500 blog posts she wrote during that year—and discovered something she had almost forgotten:

Her life wasn’t waiting. It was happening all around the thing she was waiting for.

In this episode, Kim explores what it means to deeply long for what isn’t here yet while still receiving the life that is. Through stories from 2009, the Red Notebook that recorded her faith in real time, and the unfinished questions she is carrying today, she looks at presence without passivity, gratitude without denying pain, and what it means to trust God without requiring Him to reveal how the story ends.

Because the unfinished thing can be enormous without being everything.

And this isn’t the waiting room before your real life begins.

In This Episode

Kim talks about:

•  What she discovered when she revisited 503 blog posts from 2009 
•  Why a season remembered primarily for infertility contained an entire ordinary life alongside the waiting 
•  How joy, grief, gratitude, and longing can exist at the same time 
•  Why receiving the life you have doesn’t mean resigning yourself to everything in it 
•  The difference between trusting God and simply wanting more information 
•  What her original Red Notebook revealed about formation before she knew how the story would unfold 
•  Why presence is something we return to—not something we permanently achieve 
•  The unfinished questions she is still carrying in 2026 
•  Why becoming may be one of the gifts of being here 

A Few Things to Remember

The unfinished thing can be enormous without being everything.

Pain and gratitude can occupy the same body.

Presence is not the pressure to appreciate everything.

You can deeply long for what isn’t here yet and still receive the life that is.

Knowing what’s coming isn’t what makes a life meaningful. Living it does.

The Red Notebook Journey

The original red notebook Kim began in 2009 became a record of Scripture, prayer, questions, and a life unfolding before she knew what came next.

Seventeen years later, that practice has grown into The Red Notebook Journey — A Guided Walk Through Prayer & Scripture, designed to give you somewhere to read, notice, reflect, pray, live, and return.

The first physical proof is on its way, with release planned for this fall.

Around the Table: Weekly Coffee Date

The podcast is only one part of the Healer & Hope Giver world.

Every Wednesday, Kim sends the Weekly Coffee Date—a more personal place to share stories, thoughts, behind-the-scenes pieces of HHG, and conversations that don’t necessarily belong in a podcast episode.

If you’d like to pull your chair a little closer to the table, join the Weekly Coffee Date here:

Weekly Coffee Date:
Join the Weekly Coffee Date

Continue Listening

If this episode made you think of someone living inside an unfinished story, share it with them. Sometimes it helps simply to know someone else understands what it’s like to live in the middle.

Follow or subscribe to Healer & Hope Giver wherever you listen so you don’t miss what’s ahead.

New episodes every Monday. Devotionals every Thursday.

Healer & Hope Giver
Healing doesn’t always mean the story is finished. Sometimes it means learning how to live, trust, and keep becoming while it’s still being written.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

We were made to need people. But what happens when we ask another human being to become everything we need?

In this devotional, we explore the tension between biblical interdependence and dependence that asks too much of another person. Through Galatians 6, the body of Christ, Jesus in Gethsemane, and the image of a cup and a well, we're asking what it looks like to carry one another without trying to become one another's source.

God is the Source. People are gifts.

And knowing the difference can make us freer to love both.

Extended Show Notes

Needing people isn't a failure of faith.

Scripture tells us to carry one another's burdens, encourage one another, pray for one another, mourn together, rejoice together, and live as members of one body.

But no human relationship was designed to carry the weight of becoming everything we need.

In When People Become Too Much, we're exploring what healthy, biblical interdependence can look like.

Galatians 6 tells us both to carry one another's burdens and that each person must carry their own load. Those two instructions give us a picture of relationship where we help carry what has become too heavy without taking responsibility for another person's entire life.

We'll also talk about what happens when:

• we become afraid to need anyone 
• another person's approval or availability begins determining whether we're okay 
• we need someone else to need us in order to feel valuable 
• helping quietly becomes rescuing or controlling 
• someone we love cannot give us what we need 
• relationships change and we have to grieve the gift without believing the Source has disappeared 

Jesus Himself invited His friends close in Gethsemane. Their inability to stay awake didn't make His desire for companionship wrong.

The need wasn't wrong. The people were limited.

And maybe that's something many of us need permission to recognize.

People can carry cups of love, comfort, encouragement, prayer, wisdom, laughter, truth, and practical help to us.

But they aren't the Well.

God is the Source. People are gifts.

We don't have to diminish the gift to honor the Source—and we don't have to turn the gift into God in order to let it matter deeply.

This devotional continues the conversation from Episode 40 about the people God allows to participate meaningfully in our formation.

Explore episodes, devotionals, and resources at:

https://healerhopegiver.com

Scriptures

Galatians 6:2–5
 Matthew 26:36–46
 1 Corinthians 12
 John 4

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

Who has helped shape the person you’re becoming—and whose becoming have you been invited to be part of?

Last week, we looked backward and asked who we were becoming while we were busy living. But when Kim looked at that same life again, she noticed something she couldn't unsee:

There were people everywhere.

The husband who has known almost every version of her adult life. The friend who walked beside her son toward his grandfather's casket. The people who showed up at a funeral for a man they'd never met simply because they loved the daughter who lost him. The relationships that survived disappointment because both people were willing to repair. And an 84-year-old woman named Janis who can apparently see Future Kim quite clearly—and would appreciate it if she could hurry up and get there. 😂

In Episode 40, We Don't Become Who We Are Alone, we're talking about the people woven through our becoming.

What does it look like when a healthy relationship gives us room to change instead of requiring us to stay the person we've always been? How do we carry one another when we can't fix the thing that hurts? Can we be disappointed in someone without deciding we're done with them? And what happens when someone else sees something in us before we're ready to see it ourselves?

This isn't a conversation about staying in every relationship at any cost. Some relationships require boundaries, distance, or an ending. Repair requires safety, accountability, and participation from both people.

It's also not about needing other people because we're too weak to carry our own lives.

Sometimes we're strong.

Sometimes the person beside us is strong too.

And still, one of the gifts of relationship is being able to look at someone we love and say:

“I've got this part.”

Because becoming isn't something we do entirely by ourselves.

We become while loving people, losing people, forgiving people, learning from people, setting boundaries, telling the truth, repairing what can be repaired, carrying what we can, and allowing someone else to carry something too.

And eventually, another realization emerges:

The people around us aren't just supporting characters in our stories.

We're in theirs too.

Maybe someone helped you become who you are.

Maybe someone believed in a version of you that you couldn't see yet.

Maybe someone simply kept showing up while your story remained unfinished.

And maybe, without even realizing it, you've become that person for somebody else.

Go Deeper

If this episode has you noticing the people woven through your own story, the Episode 40 Companion Guide, We Don't Become Alone: A Relationship & Formation Map, gives you space to explore it.

You'll look beyond simply naming your closest relationships and notice the people who saw you, carried something with you, challenged you, modeled something for you, grew beside you, helped you repair—and the people whose becoming you've been invited to be part of.

Because when we look backward, we may discover that we weren't becoming alone at all.

We were becoming beside one another.

🎧 Listen to Episode 40 and find the Companion Guide at Healer & Hope Giver.

New long-form conversations every Monday. Scripture-centered devotionals every Thursday.

Healer & Hope Giver — real stories, honest conversations, and hope for the person you're still becoming.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What do you do when you can't see what God is doing?

Sometimes hindsight gives us an explanation. Sometimes it doesn't. But it can still give us evidence—evidence that God has met us before, sustained us before, and remained faithful through stories we couldn't understand while we were living them.

In this devotional, we explore Joshua 4, Psalm 77, and the biblical practice of remembering when the future remains uncertain.

You don't need the answer key for what God is doing next. You can remember the evidence of His faithfulness behind you.

Extended Show Notes

When life doesn't make sense, we often want the answer key.

Why did this happen? What is God doing? Where is this going? What am I supposed to learn?

But hindsight doesn't always give us an explanation.

Sometimes it gives us evidence.

In Joshua 4, after Israel crosses the Jordan River, God tells His people to gather stones and build a memorial so they will remember what He has done.

The stones don't predict what God will do at the next river.

They're reminders:

God met us here.

Psalm 77 gives us another picture of remembrance—this time while the psalmist is still distressed and asking difficult questions. He doesn't suddenly receive an explanation. Instead, he deliberately remembers God's works.

In Remember What You Know, we're exploring what it means to remember God's faithfulness without rewriting painful parts of our stories.

You don't have to call the fire good in order to trust that God is good.

You don't have to manufacture a lesson from every wound.

You don't have to force gratitude before its time.

And you don't need yesterday's evidence to guarantee tomorrow's outcome.

The stones aren't predictions.

They're reminders.

When fear tells you everything that could go wrong, you can let it speak without allowing fear to be the only witness. Bring the evidence too.

This devotional accompanies Episode 39 — The Person I Couldn't See Yet and continues the conversation about formation, hindsight, and trusting God inside stories we cannot fully interpret yet.

Explore episodes, devotionals, and resources at:

https://healerhopegiver.com

Scriptures

Joshua 4
 Psalm 77 

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What if some of the biggest changes in you happened so slowly that you never noticed them?

A strange interaction in a Walgreens checkout line sends Kim looking backward—from childhood teacher books and sequined maracas to a high-school truancy scandal, painful relationships, a college plan that fell apart, faith, motherhood, homeschooling, and the unexpected calling she could never have predicted.

Along the way, she asks what was always part of who she was, what became tangled up with survival, what needed healing, and what God has been quietly forming through ordinary days. This is a conversation about hindsight, gratitude without pretending the fire was good, and learning to have compassion for the person you are while you're still becoming.

Extended Show Notes

Some growth announces itself.

And some growth happens so quietly that you don't recognize it until an ordinary moment reveals:

I don't respond to that the way I used to.

For Kim, that moment happened in a Walgreens checkout line.

Episode 39 begins there and travels backward through nearly five decades of becoming: the little girl who loved teacher books because they had answers, the teenager happiest behind the scenes, the fierce instinct to protect other people, relationships that revealed how difficult it was to protect herself, the college teaching plan that unraveled, and the unexpected ways old threads eventually resurfaced in homeschooling, writing, ministry, and Healer & Hope Giver.

This isn't a conversation about declaring everything that happened “good.”

Some things weren't.

Some things shouldn't have happened.

Instead, Kim explores the difference between a gift and a survival strategy, between understanding someone's pain and accepting harmful behavior, between being grateful for the fire and being grateful for the ways God met you in and after it.

And maybe looking backward gives us something more useful than an answer key for the future:

evidence.

Evidence that you've changed before.

Evidence that a closed door didn't end the story.

Evidence that you can learn boundaries.

Evidence that things you once misunderstood about yourself can become clearer.

Evidence that God has been present through pages you couldn't understand while you were living them.

You don't have to know who you're becoming yet.

You are allowed to become slowly.

In this conversation:

• How an ordinary Walgreens interaction revealed years of invisible growth 
• The childhood interests and personality traits that can become clues in hindsight 
• When strengths become tangled with survival 
• Why understanding someone's story doesn't require tolerating harmful behavior 
• Learning to extend protection and compassion to yourself 
• What happens when the future you planned falls apart 
• The difference between your gifts and the form you expected them to take 
• Why gratitude should never become a deadline for hurting people 
• Why you don't have to call the fire good to believe God is good 
• How hindsight can become evidence instead of an answer key 
• Learning to appreciate Present You while still allowing yourself to grow 
• Why becoming slowly isn't failure 

Continue the Journey

This week's free Episode Reflection is The Person I Couldn't See Yet.

It's a place to look backward at an earlier version of yourself—not to judge or diagnose them, but to notice what was already there, what became tangled with survival, what has healed or matured, and the evidence that you may have changed more than you realized.

Then you'll turn toward Present You and ask:

What might be forming in me right now that I simply can't see yet?

Find the free Reflection and this episode at healerhopegiver.com.

And if someone came to mind while you were listening—someone who may have trouble seeing how far they've come—send this conversation to them.

Sometimes “This made me think of you” is enough.

Follow Healer & Hope Giver wherever you listen to podcasts, or subscribe on YouTube so you'll know where to find the next conversation.

New long-form conversations Mondays.
 Devotionals Thursdays.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What do you pray when you don't know what to pray?

Sometimes the needs ahead of us are things we couldn't possibly anticipate. In this devotional, we explore Isaiah 43:18–19 and Romans 8:26—and the relief of knowing that God's care isn't limited by what we can see, understand, or remember to ask for.

You don't have to know everything you'll need in order to be held by the God who does.

Extended Show Notes

There are prayers we pray over and over again.

And then there are prayers we never pray—not because we lack faith, but because we don't know we need them yet.

Years before Kim knew she had Moyamoya or would need two brain surgeries, she couldn't possibly have prayed for the surgeon she would eventually need to move from Boston to Houston.

She didn't know to ask.

And yet something was already moving.

Isaiah 43 gives us a remarkable question:

“Do you not perceive it?”

God can be doing something even when we cannot perceive it.

And Romans 8:26 gives us even more room to breathe: sometimes we don't know what we ought to pray for. The Spirit meets us there too.

In Before You Know What to Ask For, we're talking about the pressure to anticipate every possible future, what happens when prayer becomes tangled with anxiety, the fear that we might somehow miss what God is doing, and why our limited view never limits God's care.

You don't have to pray perfectly.

You don't have to anticipate every need.

You don't have to decode every circumstance.

Pray what you know. Trust God with what you don't.

Explore more episodes, devotionals, and resources at:

https://healerhopegiver.com

Scriptures

Isaiah 43:18–19
 Romans 8:26

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What if your inability to see a way forward doesn't mean God isn't already making one?

Sometimes we recognize God's provision only in hindsight—a job that became a bridge, a path that changed without the calling disappearing, a doctor who moved closer before the diagnosis ever came.

In this deeply personal conversation, Kim looks across adoption, career changes, a toxic workplace, Moyamoya, childhood, and the still-unfinished story of Healer & Hope Giver to explore what faith looks like when we don't know what God is doing.

Because trusting God doesn't require us to call painful things good, manufacture meaning, or pretend we know how the story ends.

Sometimes it simply means leaving room for this possibility:

What I can see is not everything God is doing.

Extended Show Notes

We like to know where the road is going.

We want the plan, the timeline, the explanation—and preferably some reassurance that everything is going to work out the way we're hoping.

But much of life doesn't give us that.

Sometimes we're left holding one strange piece of the story with no idea where it belongs.

Looking backward, Kim can see moments when something was already moving before she understood why it mattered.

She entered college intending to become a teacher, only to have that path abruptly close after a frustrating class about teaching math. Sociology became the new direction.

Years later, the teaching thread returned through alternative certification, homeschooling her children, ministry, and eventually the work she does through Healer & Hope Giver.

The route changed.

The deeper thread didn't.

Later, after years in an extraordinarily toxic nonprofit workplace, Kim lost her job following Tyler's birth. At the time, she had two babies, bills, and months remaining before her family could move to Memphis.

Then a friend and former coworker needed someone with exactly her skills for almost exactly the amount of time she needed work.

It wasn't another destination.

It was a bridge.

And sometimes a bridge doesn't need to become a destination to have been exactly what we needed.

Years later, another piece would become even more striking.

When Kim was diagnosed with Moyamoya and learned she needed two brain surgeries, she initially believed treatment might require spending approximately a month in California while her three-year-old boys remained in Texas with family.

Then she discovered an experienced surgeon in Houston.

A surgeon who had previously been in Boston.

Before Kim knew she had Moyamoya...

before she knew she needed two brain surgeries...

before she knew to ask God for a surgeon...

the expertise she would need had already moved closer.

That doesn't make Moyamoya good.

It doesn't make the fear or surgeries good.

And that's an important distinction in this conversation.

Because recognizing God's redemption does not require rewriting the truth about what hurt us.

Kim also reflects on childhood experiences she has sometimes told with too much polish—trying so hard to understand the grief, anger, and history behind other people's behavior that she didn't always give equal weight to what those behaviors did to the child experiencing them.

Understanding someone's pain doesn't require pretending they didn't hurt you.

Abuse can be called abuse without turning another human being into a one-dimensional villain.

Compassion and accountability can sit at the same table.

And redemption doesn't mean the painful thing was secretly good.

It means the painful thing doesn't get final authorship.

Perhaps most remarkably, many of the earliest threads in Kim's story began before she became a Christian.

Looking backward, she doesn't see a God who suddenly appeared halfway through her life.

She sees a God she eventually learned to recognize.

And that changes how she approaches the unfinished stories she's living now.

Including Healer & Hope Giver.

Kim doesn't know what HHG will ultimately become.

She doesn't know which things she's building are destinations and which are bridges.

For once, this isn't a testimony being told entirely from the safety of hindsight.

She's still inside the story.

And maybe that's where many of us are.

We don't know what God is doing.

We can't see how the pieces fit.

We don't know what comes next.

But perhaps faith doesn't require knowing.

Perhaps we can simply leave room for the possibility that our field of vision has never been the boundary of God's activity.

In This Episode

We talk about:

• Why trusting God is so difficult when we can't see the plan 
• Adoption and learning that an answered prayer can involve stories much bigger than our own 
• Losing the education path Kim thought she would follow 
• How sociology became an unexpected lens for understanding people and their stories 
• Becoming a certified teacher through another route 
• Homeschooling and discovering that the calling survived even when the original path didn't 
• Leaving an extraordinarily toxic nonprofit workplace 
• The six-month job that arrived at exactly the right time 
• Why a bridge doesn't have to become a destination to matter 
• Moving home before knowing how much family support would soon be needed 
• Moyamoya and the surgeon who had already moved from Boston to Houston 
• Why we should be careful about explaining God's purposes in someone else's pain 
• Telling the truth about abuse without abandoning compassion 
• Why redemption doesn't make the wrong thing right 
• Recognizing God's presence in years before Kim knew Him 
• The difference between connecting dots in hindsight and pretending we can predict what God is doing now 
• Healer & Hope Giver as an unfinished story 
• Finding the next faithful step when we can't see the road 

Continue the Journey

If there's a piece of your life you can't make sense of right now, this week's free Episode Reflection, The Pieces I Can't See Yet, was created to help you sit with it.

You'll explore:

The piece you can see — What do you actually know right now?

The pieces you don't have — What do you wish you knew but cannot control?

Your next faithful step — What actually belongs to you today?

What you can entrust to God — What are you carrying that was never yours to solve?

The evidence behind you — Where have you already seen God's faithfulness, provision, presence, or redemption?

Not so you can figure out what God is doing.

So you can stop requiring yourself to.

Find the free Episode Reflection and continue the conversation at HealerHopeGiver.com.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What if receiving the life you have today doesn't mean giving up hope for the life you're still praying for?

In this devotional, we explore Psalm 118:24, Israel's daily manna, and the difference between receiving and resigning. God doesn't ask us to pretend difficult circumstances are good. He invites us to recognize that His presence and provision are available even in an unfinished story.

You can keep hoping for tomorrow while faithfully receiving today's portion.

Extended Show Notes

God has not postponed His presence until your circumstances improve.

We know the familiar words: “This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

But what does that mean when this isn't a day—or even a season—we would have chosen?

In The Gift of Today, we're talking about what it means to faithfully inhabit the life God has given us without pretending everything about it is good.

Through the story of Israel receiving manna in the wilderness, we'll explore how God provided enough for each day without giving His people control over the entire journey.

We'll talk about why receiving today is not the same as resigning ourselves to our circumstances, why joy and grief can coexist, and why enjoying something good does not mean we've stopped praying for something to change.

Because maybe some of what God has placed in your life today isn't the promise.

Maybe it's manna.

It isn't the destination. It isn't necessarily the answer you've been waiting for.

But it may still be God's loving provision for this part of the journey.

And you don't dishonor the promise by receiving the manna.

This devotional accompanies Episode 37 — Don't Miss the Life You're Living, where we explore how easily longing can make what is missing more visible than the life already happening around us.

Explore more episodes, devotionals, and resources at:

https://healerhopegiver.com

Scriptures

Psalm 118:24
 Exodus 16
 Matthew 6:34
 Lamentations 3:22–23
 Philippians 4:4–7
 James 4:13–15

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What if the life you're waiting for isn't the only life worth receiving?

It's easy to postpone joy until something changes—until the prayer is answered, the body is different, the finances improve, the grief gets lighter, or life finally slows down.

In this deeply personal conversation, Kim looks back at infertility, early motherhood, a move to Memphis, her Moyamoya diagnosis, adoption, and the ordinary life she's living today to explore a truth she's still learning:

You can deeply want something to change without treating the life you have today like a waiting room.

Because joy doesn't require everything to be resolved. Sometimes it begins when we stop staring only at what's missing long enough to notice what is already here.

Extended Show Notes

There are seasons we don't recognize as beautiful until they're over.

During years of infertility, Kim spent so much time longing for motherhood that she didn't always recognize the gift of the uninterrupted years she and John had together. She could genuinely celebrate someone else's pregnancy while still carrying the ache of her own unanswered prayer.

Then the babies came.

Within six months, Kim and John went from having no children to having two. Soon afterward, a promotion took John to Memphis while Kim spent six months working full time and caring for two babies during the week before the whole family could finally move.

The answered prayer she'd waited years for was beautiful.

It was also exhausting.

And lonely.

And complicated.

Because sometimes the thing we prayed for doesn't lead us into an easier life.

It simply becomes our life.

Years later, another move brought their family back to Texas just as Kim was becoming increasingly sick. They couldn't have known that a Moyamoya diagnosis and brain surgeries were coming—or how desperately they would need the family and friends waiting for them at home.

Looking backward, Kim can see something she couldn't always recognize while living those chapters:

The hard season and the beautiful season aren't always two different seasons. Sometimes they're the exact same one.

In Episode 37, we're talking about what happens when we stop requiring life to be resolved before we're willing to receive the goodness inside it.

We'll explore the complicated emotions of infertility and adoption, the difference between honoring real limitations and postponing your entire life, why joy and pain don't cancel each other out, and what it means to let God use the person you are today—not some future version of yourself.

And yes...

we're also going to talk about laundry.

Because sometimes the ordinary thing frustrating us today is evidence of something we once desperately prayed for.

The laundry is still laundry.

The circumstances may still be hard.

The prayer may still be unanswered.

But sometimes gratitude turns our attention just enough to help us see the people, provision, laughter, love, and ordinary goodness that were already there.

This isn't an invitation to pretend everything is good.

It's an invitation to ask:

What part of my life have I been treating like a waiting room?

And...

What is already here that I don't want to miss?

You are allowed to hope for tomorrow.

You are allowed to work toward change.

You are allowed to grieve what's missing.

Just don't miss the life you're living while you're waiting for the life you're hoping for.

In This Episode

We talk about:

• Longing for something good without allowing its absence to define everything else 
• Looking back at the years before motherhood differently 
• Why celebration and heartache can exist together 
• Going from infertility to two babies within six months 
• Six months of solo weekday parenting while John worked in Memphis 
• The beautiful and difficult reality of finally receiving an answered prayer 
• Moving home shortly before Kim's Moyamoya diagnosis 
• Recognizing God's provision without calling painful circumstances good 
• The emotional complexity surrounding adoption 
• Real limitations versus postponing your whole life 
• Refusing to wait for a different body or a more confident version of yourself before saying yes to God 
• Finding joy in coffee, laughter, books, baking, fuzzy socks, good pens—and "girl couch" 
• Why a mountain of laundry can become evidence of a life you once prayed for 
• Sitting beside hurting people instead of trying to rush them toward resolution 
• The relationship between joy, gratitude, attention, and presence 
• Learning to receive today's life while continuing to hope for tomorrow 

Continue the Journey

This week's free Episode Reflection gives you room to explore the two questions at the heart of this conversation:

What part of my life have I been treating like a waiting room?

What is already here that I don't want to miss?

Use it to slow down, notice the ordinary goodness around you, and consider where you may have unknowingly postponed living until something changes.

Find the free Episode Reflection and other resources at HealerHopeGiver.com.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Weekly Coffee Dates: https://healerhopegiver.com/coffee-dates/

Want to stay connected throughout the week?
 Come hang out with me on social media for daily encouragement, real-life stories, and the behind-the-scenes pieces of this healing journey.

If you feel led to support the show, you can do so through the link in the show notes — and please know, your generosity means the world. You’re a gift. 

What if discovering your calling isn't about finding one dramatic answer...

What if it's about recognizing the clues God has been leaving throughout your life?

In this devotional, we explore Ephesians 2:10 and discover how God often shapes our hearts long before we recognize the purpose He's preparing us to fulfill.

Extended Show Notes

Scripture

Ephesians 2:10

Psalm 139:13–16

Romans 8:28

Proverbs 3:5–6

Jeremiah 1:5

In This Episode

Have you ever wondered what God's purpose is for your life?

Maybe a better question is...

What clues has God already been leaving?

In this devotional, we'll explore:

• Why calling is often recognized in hindsight

• The surprising clues God leaves throughout our lives

• How one ordinary role as a drill team manager became an early glimpse into a lifelong calling

• Why God usually shapes our hearts before revealing our assignments

• How to begin following the thread He's already been weaving through your story

If you've ever wondered whether your life has purpose—or if you've felt like you've missed it—I hope this conversation reminds you that God has been faithfully writing your story all along.

Continue the Journey

This week's free Episode Reflection will help you begin tracing the thread through your own story.

Together, we'll identify the people, experiences, burdens, and questions that may have been quietly preparing your heart for years.

Download the free reflection and explore more episodes, devotionals, and resources at:

https://healerhopegiver.com

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