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She built a house with a wine display room in the center. Two hundred bottles behind a glass wall. Then one fall she dropped to her knees in her bedroom and told God her life was a mess.

Jennifer Merrill laid down drinking that day. Everything she had been numbing surfaced, and she had to face all of it. She hired a contractor, took out the glass, built a wall, and turned that room into a prayer closet.

Three things you will take from this one.

At the root of it was the need to be loved by God. She knew He loved her. She did not believe it. When she came to believe it, the issues got smaller one by one.

Getting busy for Jesus almost broke her. She is honest about the performance culture, the burnout, and the spiritual abuse she had to name and walk away from.

Rest is not laziness. It is resting in what Jesus already finished. Four different people told her she needed it before she understood what it meant.

Find Jennifer at jennifermerrill.net, and on TikTok and Instagram.

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She was given her first dose of LSD on her thirteenth birthday. Years later, living off coffee and cigarettes and unable to sleep or eat, she cried out and asked God to show up if He was real.

He did. Wendy Houser describes it as a tangible blanket of peace she had never felt before. Hungry for more, she joined the church that was all around her and gave it fourteen faithful years, eight of them teaching the adult women.

Then she started studying for herself, and what she found did not line up with what she had been taught.

Three things you will take from this one.

Access to God is not filtered through a system. Jesus is the mediator, and the Holy Spirit is not reserved for an elite group.

Leaving costs something. She grieved it like a death and waited a year before she found the courage.

God moved her alone to the middle of nowhere so she could learn to hear Him. He walked her through deliverance in her own bedroom.

Find Wendy at gemsofknowledge.com and the Gems of Knowledge podcast.

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She was a Sunday school teacher who showed up to church hungover most weeks. Not partying. She says the alcohol was medicine, the equivalent of a bottle of Xanax at the end of a long day.

Yolanda Gray was the oldest of six girls in a difficult home, a teenage mother, and a woman in a hard marriage for almost twenty years. Sobriety came first. Seven years later, everything else changed.

Three things you will take from this one.

Our secrets keep us sick. She spent years trying to stop on her own because she was ashamed, and it was telling the truth that finally moved her.

You cannot take back a life you do not believe is yours. Identity comes before the choice.

Rest is not optional. Shingles laid her out for fifteen months, and she says the hustle we were sold is a lie.

Her book is Take Back Your Life is available by clicking here.

Find her at yolandagrey.com

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Danielle's Live Unleashed twelve week group program launches October 6. Find her at https://linktr.ee/daniellechilds

Two days before the new year she stood in front of a blank board and said out loud, I have nothing. God said, good. It is supposed to start blank.

Danielle Childs has built businesses, sold businesses, and spent decades in corporate America. From the outside it looked like she had it made. Inside she spent thirty years attaching her heart's desires to people, objects, and outcomes that could never fill them.

Three things you will take from this one.

Your vision is not about what you will do. It is about who you get to be. That shift is why she now builds a being board instead of a vision board.

Dig the ditch. In 2 Kings 3 the kings were told to dig, and God sent the water. Danielle's ditch turned out to be the ordinary work she had been avoiding.

Obedience only requires the first step. He guides the rest.

https://liveunleashedcoaching.com. Join for the twelve week group program.

Connect with Danielle Childs
 Website liveunleashedcoaching.com
Email [email protected]
Facebook and LinkedIn under Danielle Childs

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Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Erin Mohr.

At fifty she decided to enter a beauty pageant. She had never talked about pageants once in her life. When she told her daughters she was in, they asked if she was having a midlife crisis.

She calls it a God idea.

Her reason was simple. If she could do it, any woman could do the thing she has been sitting on. It does not have to be a stage. It just has to be the thing she keeps telling herself she is too old for now.

She is done shrinking.

But the pageant is the door, not the room. Erin pastored for twenty years. Youth ministry, music ministry, then associate pastor. She thought she would be there until the day she died. She left right before COVID hit.

Then her husband left the marriage. She held onto being a wife for three years anyway. She says God asked her a question in that stretch that she is still unpacking. What is it to be a wife when you are not wanted as a wife?

She was just starting to dream again when her father got sick. One month from diagnosis to gone.

That is where her faith actually got deep. Not on Sunday mornings behind a pulpit. In the middle of the not knowing, when the God she grew up describing turned out to be someone she had to meet all over again.

Now she is a certified life coach who works with women in midlife. Empty nest, divorce, aging, career change, the seasons where a woman looks around and realizes her community thinned out without her noticing.

Her language for it is a toolbox. She says being fearless does not mean fear is gone. It means doing it afraid and using the fear as fuel. She helps women sort fact from fiction, quiet the anxious loop, and get anchored in peace that holds on a bad day.

She also refuses to be put on a pedestal. She hated it as a pastor and she will not have it now. Down to earth, relatable, reachable. That is what she is after.

Find Erin on Instagram at the.elegant.erin. Send her a message. She says the best thing she does is start an organic conversation with a woman who feels stuck.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/your-seat.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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Get Carol's book, Jesus Jesus Jesus: The Life Journey of a Jewish Girl Who Came To Know Jesus The Messiah by 

Reach her at her website by clicking here.

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A listener note before you press play. This conversation includes the loss of children, domestic violence, and a mental health crisis.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Carol.

She grew up Jewish in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and says she thought the whole world was Jewish. She barely got out of high school. What she loved was walking that boardwalk all the way to Coney Island for Nathan's hot dogs.

She married at nineteen. By twenty four she had three sons, and two of them had died. Her mother died at forty four.

She told her husband she was leaving. She could not stay in a place where people asked who was watching the baby.

What followed was years of hard road. Ocala. A wedding on a ranch set for the seventh of July at seven o'clock that she called off when the man started beating her. Beauty school, because she says a woman needs to be able to take care of herself. Fort Lauderdale, then Miami, where she went looking for the most expensive haircut in town and talked her way into the salon behind it.

She is honest that she was stoned most of that time.

Then Christmas 1978. A client handed her a Bible and told her to read the book of John.

She was going to throw it away.

She sat down instead. When she read that Jesus and His disciples were Jewish like her, something opened. She loved Passover. She had grandparents from Europe. This was not foreign. Then she read that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.

Almost forty years later she is still telling that story.

There is a chapter in her book called My Nervous Breakdown. She had been a Christian for years, studying the Word, when she and her husband were out walking on Shelter Island in San Diego and he turned around to find her curled up in the grass. She says the hard season handed her a master's degree in human life without ever going to school for it.

Out of that came Changing Point, then a one day seminar, then a six week journey toward healing, then a nonprofit ministry that traveled for years. Three years ago she says God told her to get the workbook out of the closet and do it again, under a new name. A Deep Change. She does not charge for it.

She also runs Second Saturday Sisters, which started in her clubhouse ten years ago because she has a sound sensitivity that kept her out of church. When COVID scattered everyone, a friend suggested Zoom. It has been meeting there ever since.

Her book is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: The Life Journey of a Jewish Girl Who Came to Know Jesus the Messiah. Her second book is in progress, and she announces the title in this episode for the first time anywhere. Back to Brooklyn, Born Again.

She has a line she offers in Spanish, and it is the only Spanish she knows. Siempre hay esperanza en Jesús. There is always hope.

Find Carol on Facebook, on Instagram at lovejoyhope3, and at frommyheart-2yours.org.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/your-seat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Subscribe on YouTube. Share on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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You are the prophet. AI is the scribe.

Today's Calling Table Session is with Shay Sparks. A woman who has built her whole practice around helping business owners lean on AI as a tool without losing the human spark that made their business real in the first place.

Shay opens up about the abusive relationship that started her healing journey, the Christian counseling that helped her rewrite the inner voice she did not know she had, and the moment she realized Sparks was not just her last name. It was a verb.

Then she walks me through the framework she calls bringing the HI to the AI. Human interaction. Human integration. Discernment. Curiosity. Critical thinking. The things AI can never replace.

She names the pattern she is watching in business owners right now. Overwhelm. Decision fatigue. Isolation. Feeling left behind. And she offers the way through.

Shay also shares how she teaches clients to build a personal and business DNA inside their AI so the tool sounds like them, holds their values, and honors their voice.

If AI has been making you sound less like you, this conversation will pull you back to center.

Connect with Shay at ShaySparks.com. Her book is How to Get Your Voice Back. Her podcast is The Shay Sparks Show. Her mastermind is The Makers Machine, with a free monthly gathering on the last Thursday of every month at 3pm Eastern.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat for you at theresacroft.com/yourseat.

Some stories are not for scrolling past.

Subscribe on YouTube. Share on Apple Podcasts or Spotify with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Hosted by Theresa Croft, a Visibility Strategist who helps Christian women move from their calling to their story to being found with a message for their ideal audience.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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Be a part of the Calling Table sessions by clicking here.

Years ago I sat with my journal and wrote out a dream life. Studio lights. A red coat. My hair curled just enough. My real life that day looked nothing like it. A marriage under strain, money pressure, and a rental home we lived in because someone had tried to burn ours down.

I wrote a life I had no evidence for. Not one shred. Then recently, in the middle of interviewing a woman for the Calling Table, it hit me. I was sitting inside that journal entry and had not even noticed.

In this episode I share what most women miss. God rarely answers the prayer the way you drew it. You wrote studio lights, He gave you a mic. You wrote red coat, He gave you a voice. The pain you were in was not a disqualifier. It was the ground the prayer grew out of.

If you are writing pages that have no evidence yet, hear me. You are not delusional. You are prophetic. Keep writing. Keep praying. Keep showing up on the Mondays that feel like nothing. One day you look up and you are already standing in it.

Come see your own journal entry start to become real at the next Calling Activation Study on October 14. We go from your calling to your story to the path where the right people find you. Link in the show notes.

New here? Subscribe on YouTube, and share this episode. That is how the right woman gets in the room.

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You survived the thing you were not sure you would survive. Now what? They call it moving on. My guest calls it coming home to yourself.

In this Calling Table Session, Theresa Croft sits down with Lisa Atkinson, a life-giver who helps women who have walked through the unimaginable rediscover who they are and reclaim the life still theirs. Lisa shares the accident that changed everything at nineteen, thirty years of caregiving through chronic pain and addiction, the loss of her husband, and the audible promise from God that carried her through it all. This is a raw and honest conversation about grief, faith, loving the unlovely, and learning to create the way God creates.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This is one of them.

Connect with Lisa at LisaSpeaks.life.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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Follow Mackenzie on Instagram here.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Mackenzie Shelton.

For six years she built a real estate business while raising a family, and she did it the way high achieving women usually do. All of it. Perfectly. Herself.

Then early in 2020 she found out she was pregnant with her fourth. At about ten weeks she lost the baby, with complications so serious she came close to needing a transfusion. She did not feel right for months.

Her body made the decision her calendar never would have. She had to slow down.

The problem was the train did not stop. She had spent six years building something that could not just sit there while she healed. So she started asking a question she had never asked before. What if I do not have to carry all of this.

She asked her husband for help. She hired help. She built systems for the things that kept turning chaotic.

And she says something honest about her faith in that stretch. She had not been leaning on it much. She had a business coach and a plan and a very secular way of growing. The season that broke her open is the season she started praying about her business instead of just her body.

Out of that came her book, The Serenity Solution, about freedom from control, perfectionism, and the pressure to do it all.

There is a story in this episode you will retell. To keep her sanity with four kids, she hired a friend to clean her house once a month. She was one of that friend's first clients. That friend now runs a six figure cleaning business with a staff.

Mackenzie also leads a real estate team seven years in, where the average agent earns around $150,000 a year, and most of those women are single mothers running their lives on systems. She and her husband run a real estate investment business and bought a forty acre farm outside Council Bluffs, Iowa three years ago.

When people tell her they do not know how she does it all, she tells them the truth. She does not.

Find Mackenzie on Instagram at MackenzieLeeShelton. Her book, The Serenity Solution, is on Amazon.

This is The Calling Table Sessions on the Stuck No More Voices Podcast. One seat. One woman. One story handled with care.

If you are a Christian woman leader with a story that could reach the woman you used to be, there is a seat here for you at theresacroft.com/yourseat.

Share this episode with the woman who came to mind while you were listening.

Register Click HERE: The Story Gold Method: Learn to connect to your audience with stories from your experiences. The best strategy for content? Your Story

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