The Unexpected Journey

God Hears Her Podcast 

Episode 183 – The Unexpected Journey with Nicole Unice 

Elisa Morgan, Eryn Adkins & Vivian Mabuni with Nicole Unice 

[Music] 

Nicole: It’s possible that God moves you into unexpected seasons and is going to use you there, and you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not because you messed up. That’s not the story of Joseph. So, number one, that, number two, I mean, we don’t have to go any further than ask the question, do you make rooms better when you enter them? Because God calls blessing, this passing of healing, and love, and presence, that actually makes other people prosper. 

[Music] 

Vivian: You’re listening to God Hears Her, a podcast for women, where we explore the stunning truth that God hears you. Join our community of encouraging one another and learning to lean on God through Scripture, story, and conversation at godhearsher.org. God hears her. Seek and she will find. 

Elisa: Eryn, we have a really good friend on with us today. Nicole is a pastor and a leadership coach, and she facilitates environments of safety. I like that verbiage… 

Eryn: I do, too. 

Elisa: … and vulnerability so that leaders can, like, get down in it and then help other people get down in it, right?  

Nicole: Yes. Can you come do all of my introductions… 

Elisa: Yes. 

Nicole: … everywhere I go? Because whenever people read it off the page, I’m like, just say it the way you want to say it. It’s fine. Whatever you want to say. Thank you, Elisa. That’s a wonderful way to say it. I do like to get down in it.  

Elisa: Yeah, and we’ve been friends for, I want to say, a couple of decades at least… 

Nicole: Yup, a long time. 

Elisa: … and I’ve been to churches where Nicole has pastored and spoken, and she’s been out in our world, and sometimes we share places, Eryn and I have done other podcasts with Nicole. But this is a little bit different of what we’re going to do because in recent years, you have some work you’ve been doing on podcasts. And there you really focus in on Bible stuff. Yeah. I want to start off, I want to dive right in because, Nicole… 

Eryn: Love that. 

Elisa: … we’ve probably talked about this in late night conversations, like, watching The Bachelor, I remember that. I want to just recall and reflect for our audience today, how did you come to know Jesus?  

Nicole: The older I get, the more I find myself starting conversations or… or messages with my own story, because I think the apostle Paul has really modeled for us how important it is to say there was a before time and there was an after time. And I know, like, I know who I was and I know what the grace of God has done in my life. And so often people only experience you at whatever stage of that journey you’re on, and it… it’s easy to sort of think, well, that’s who they’ve always been. And I can’t even fathom to imagine who I would be without Jesus in my life. I grew up in church. My parents were first-generation believers, they became Christians in the eighties in, like, California. So, for those of us, I can age our whole audience, they can all decide if they know what that means. If you don’t know what it means, don’t worry about it. If you do know what it means, you’re with me. And so, I was very much steeped in a behavior-centric Christianity. I had a lot of answers… I knew the answers. I knew all the Bible stories, but it wasn’t until I was in college, actually, and really came to what I would consider a pretty critical crisis in the separation between the life that I was portraying on the outside and actually how I was doing on the inside. And that came to kind of a fever pitch, and I feel like I was, as Dr. Gregory Peck would say, I was falling into evil. It wasn’t like I was evil. It wasn’t like I… but it was… I… I was falling into and feeling maybe a little bit like I was drowning and had a, like, a wakeup call that I really do think was the Lord tapping me on the shoulder. I just feel like I… I don’t know if anyone’s ever had this, it reminds me of when the prodigal son says he came to his senses. It was like, I just came to myself for a second and was like, what am I doing? And who am I? And I had a Bible in my dorm room because I had been to… church camp and stuff, so somehow this big red Life Application Bible had found its way to my dorm room. And I just opened to Romans, and I was reading Romans 8, and it was right in the passage where it says, like, “Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ,” you know, “Not angels or demons or life or death,” and just had a distinct internal impression that even I couldn’t separate myself from the love of Christ, as hard as I was trying to, maybe just, whether it’s punish myself, control myself, police myself, whatever I was doing to be the judge of my own life, I just had a deep sense that, like, Nicole you can’t even try to separate yourself from My love, and I really did have, sort of, that warm awakening and I… I love telling this story because I love the Bible and I didn’t come into… and I knew… I knew Christ. I really believe I was saved at… at age four in a Good News Bible Club in my neighborhood. But… 

Elisa: Sweet. 

Nicole: … I didn’t experience a walking with God kind of life until that moment. And it wasn’t a youth group. It wasn’t a mentor. It wasn’t a church. It wasn’t a sermon. It wasn’t a worship song. It really was just the Word of God. And I think that thread, then, has become a passion in my life to really believe that knowing God’s Word isn’t about knowledge, it’s not about facts, it’s not about being the person who has the right answer. It’s… it’s a conduit to experience the love of Christ, and it’s what God’s given us to experience Him through. And what a powerful, amazing reality that we can just all have a Bible, and I know that there’s some obstacles along the way, right, that I try to address with folks, but that really is… my story was an awakening to the love of Christ simply through the Bible.  

Eryn: Was there a moment where you were self reflecting, or did you really just get hit upside the head with just, like… was it an oppre-… like a… a pressing of the Holy Spirit? What was that experience like in that moment?  

Nicole: Yea, I mean, thanks for asking, Eryn. I think, and I… I don’t know that I’ve totally articulated this, but I… I think it was relief. Like, I think I felt relieved. I think I was trying so hard at a young age to, sort of, control being successful, and not getting hurt, and being perfect enough to not have trouble, and then was having a lot of trouble in the inside. And I think I felt relieved that there is a God who loves us, who cares about us, who’s intimately connected to the details of our life, that I’m not actually alone on an island trying to figure out how to do life. And slowly, and slowly, I began to read my Bible. You know, I was in a… I had a top bunk and it was like, I didn’t want anyone to know that I was reading my Bible. And so, I had my… I had my Bible up on the top bunk with me and I had a little… little disc man with little headphones with some… 

Eryn: Yes… The fuzzy foam… 

Nicole: … like a worship CD, Susan Ashton, shout out to Susan Ashton, like had a little Susan Ashton CD and I would walk around and, like, listen to worship music just a little bit by little bit because I had been raised in the church. So, like, there was a foundation that I could draw from.  

Elisa: Beautiful. You use the word relief, which I love and who doesn’t want that. I mean all of us, but I’m also threading together you started out in your story talking about how your relationship with God was behavior centric, so, and you described that as, you know, kind of black and white, knowing all the answers, doing the right things, and I can hear the angst in that. The hamster and the treadmill kind of thing of just run, run, run, run, run, catch the cheese kind of thing, and what phrase would you use now to characterize your relationship with God instead of being behavior centric?  

Nicole: I would call it relationship centric. 

Elisa: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

Nicole: I mean, it’s… it’s the difference between, you know, there’s… there’s a passage in, I believe, Jeremiah, where it says, if you… if you boast of this, boast of this only, that you know, like, you understand and know Me, and knowing God. And knowing, of course, has many levels and we know someone as an active way of being in relationship, and that knowing changes over a lifetime. And I try to encourage when I’m teaching from that passage, you can understand God. God is a mystery, but He has given us, like, understanding. We can know what He has to say about the world, about us, about Himself. But then there’s a knowing, and the knowing is ongoing and forever and eternal, and it’s this, like, vibrant experience through all the ups and downs. I just, you know, kind of like John 6, where Peter says to Jesus, like, “Where else would I go?” Like, “You alone have the words of life.” So, at… at some level, no matter how difficult it is, it would be that much more difficult without the Lord. So much of the reward of our life with Christ is the faithful hanging with Him… 

Elisa: That’s right. 

Nicole: … just, like, hanging in there and doing it.  

Elisa: You know, and it’s interesting that you… you’re using that phraseology, and you’re absolutely right, there are so many people around us who model that faithfulness and you actually have been digging into a story of one dude in Scripture, in the Old Testament, and Eryn and I want to dive into that story with you and let you say all things to us on it because this is a character who demonstrated stunning faithfulness, stunning faithfulness. So, you know, I… I know you’re a pastor, I know you’re a Bible teacher, but you know, how did you get interested in Joseph and, you know, it’s like a big old right turn here or left turn or U-turn, I don’t know… in our conversation, but, you know, we’re applying everything we just said into this story. You know, and I think that’s so important to say as we dig in, is that the Bible isn’t just this bizarre tome that you research and kind of try and take apart, you know, it’s stories of real-life people that are relationship centered. So, why Joseph? What got you interested in him? 

Nicole: The very first Bible study I ever wrote, the first homework that I put together in a women’s ministry that I had started, was on the book of Jonah and the reason I was drawn to Jonah was because I felt like it was a character who had been created as a caricature. Like, there had been this turn in the story where this is a very flat character, and it was kind of like a hokey, you know, very much a VeggieTales story and there’s parts of it, of course, that feel fantastical to us, but I really had this heart where I felt like God was saying to me, imagine what your Nineveh is and then imagine Me sending you there, like, before you get too far into the story. And so, I got really passionate about the… the humanizing of Bible characters. That they’re not there for us to feel separate from, they’re there for us to relate to. And that even though these are true stories that actually happened to actual people, I also think that in the inspired Word of God, the Holy Spirit has put together for us truly, like, archetypes of ways that we engage with God and… and… and ways that life can go. So, although no one here, you know, from the book of… Genesis, like, none of us is about to become, like, the second in command in Egypt, as far as I know, I mean, maybe someone out there is about to, but, like, no one here is… 

Eryn: What? You should see my emails. No, I’m just kidding. 

Nicole: … you’re like… Eryn’s, like, that’s so weird, I actually just got an email from a Nigerian prince. So, that’s weird, like… 

Eryn: It’s odd… it’s weird timing. [Laughter.] 

Elisa: Oh my gosh. 

Nicole: But, like, so, of course we’re not living in that context or that culture, but… 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Nicole: … I do think God invites us to submerge ourselves in stories so that we might discover, like, how the human existence works, right? And then, how also God interacts and operates with. And there was a couple of things when I was getting ready to teach this for the first time that really stuck out to me about this story. One of them was, of course, that it is a caricature. It’s… it’s become, often in our culture, it’s a hero story. So, it’s not as relatable because you’re, like, well, I mean, my brothers aren’t falling to my feet to ask for forgiveness for the things they’ve done wrong. You know, it’s easy to only get the highlights of the story and miss what’s there. And there was a couple of things that really drew me in to this story. One of them is some very subtle details that are incredibly humanizing, emotional, speak to a different, maybe, story than the highlight story. There’s a chapter in Joseph where Joseph cries eight times, I think, in the story. Like, there’s a lot of crying. And I’m like, this is an interesting detail. That’s a lot of suffering. That’s a lot of emotion. That’s a lot of, like, pent up what was going on there. So, that really drew me in, you know, I’m… my training is first as a therapist before I was a pastor, so… 

Elisa: Yeah. 

Nicole: … if we’re going to talk about tears, I’m going to be interested. I’m like, crying is sacred and there’s a lot that happens there, right? And then the other thing was the very lack of God’s appearance in this story in the sense of directly connected to Joseph, or Joseph having a direct connection where we hear about that. We see God operating in the background in really sovereign ways, but not, like, in the forefront. 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Nicole: In fact, the first time that God is mentioned in the story outside of Joseph’s dream, which of course we would believe was given by God, is when Pharaoh himself says, “Who else could have the spirit of God in him, but this man?” So, many years into the story, it’s like God makes an appearance through the fruit and the character of this leader, not through, like, writing on the wall or, you know, any sort of appearance, or a cloud or fire, or, you know, anything like that. So, those things were really interesting to me. 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Elisa: So, let’s net out, who was he and what happened to him? 

Nicole: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean, so here’s the highlights with some of the low lights to maybe make it a little bit more real. So… Joseph was a favored son, and, which is always a difficult place to start. That’s why I’m always like, okay guys, let’s start here, like, before we think this story is so great, the first opening scene of the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis talks about his brothers hating him. It says that three times that they hated him, and that they hated him so much they wanted to kill him. It’s not exactly Leave it to Beaver. Let’s put it that way. He’s a favored son of a father who has multiple wives, and multiple sons from multiple wives, who also happen to be sisters So, I’m always like hey, I know it’s weird that the Bible has polygamy in it, but it never goes well. I think God’s making it clear, like, one wife’s enough. This is never going to go well. And so, we’ve got this kind of, like, dysfunctional family going on. And then we have this favored son who is clearly very secure in his identity as a favored son and is… is very confident in who he is. And at age seventeen, he has a dream that he tells his brothers about. And he’s like, hey, I had a dream. It’s a very thinly veiled dream, by the way, it doesn’t take much interpretation. He’s like, hey, I’m a stalk of wheat and you guys are stalks of wheat and you all bound… bow down to me. Like, so, it doesn’t go well for him given the context. And his brothers… 

Elisa: They’re very threatened by him. 

Nicole: … Yeah, they’re so threatened, they’re so jealous, there’s so much that’s been built up over this time in a… a very interesting symbolic gesture of what a cloak means in Scripture, what a robe means. Joseph had a favored robe that spoke of this favored identity, and when his brothers decide to kill him, and then the… the plot changes a little bit, they end up selling him into slavery. They rip his cloak from him, and they use that same robe of identity to build a story of deception to their father. And they’re like, this favored son has been killed by a wild animal. We’re going to tell this story. And I always tell people, we’re now going to get thirteen more chapters of Joseph’s story, but for all intents and purposes, he was dead to his family and his family was dead to him at that time. There’s no internet, there’s no Instagram, there’s no GPS. Like, he’s gone. He’s taken away by this whole group, a caravan of camels and Midianite traders to Egypt, but that’s the end of the story for so long. I mean, the end of the story happens, and it doesn’t come back until decades later. And so, then we kind of engage with him. 

Elisa: I think it’s important to point that out, Nicole. Until you know your child is dead. And even then, you know, your spirit is alive and waiting, but Joseph’s situation, the brothers set it up that he had been killed. So, his original father, et cetera, kind of not move on, but they accept it in a different way. Joseph, though, is like, well, nobody wants me, and he’s, you know, sent to a new place. So, okay. Yeah. Pick it up and then let’s… let’s see what happens in terms of what we can learn as well.  

Nicole: Yeah. And so, even stopping there and experiencing times in life where you’ve sort of lost a robe of identity, like, maybe something that was a place of comfort or status, or it just, maybe you had placed your identity in it as, like, this is who I am, this is my thing, and then that’s violently taken away in whatever way, whether it’s… it… it’s… sometimes it’s a change of season. You know, sometimes it’s, I love being a mom and I… I’ve… I’ve been so fulfilled at being a mom and now I’m empty nesting and I just feel adrift. I feel exposed, like this thing that I had is gone. And, you know, to enter into the story, starting there and asking the question, you know, have you ever felt that sense, like, I’m in an unexpected season, I’m in a new place and it’s unfamiliar, because that’s how this story opens. A new place, a new language, no religion, no friends, no family, no rope, all of that’s gone. And so, now Joseph has to rebuild. And I think for so many of us we know that people go through hard seasons, but yet our hard season is still completely unexpected to us. We just… we know it’s part of life until it happens to us, and then it still comes with this kind of shock, like I didn’t expect this. I didn’t want this. What do I do with a season that has an unknown timeline and an uncertain outcome? Like, there’s just no sense. And so, Joseph engages in a world with no end in sight, no rescue, no, you know, he’s got to make his way here. And what we see him do is be so faithful to what he knew to be right and to be true. And in the many parts of the story that continue, this faithfulness, which is fascinating, his faithfulness to God causes people who don’t serve God to prosper. Blessing, and this is the other reason I love this story, because God says He’s blessing Joseph, but the blessing is coming while Joseph is enslaved, apart from his family, without his identity, without his robe, and the people who are experiencing blessing, the people who are prospering, are people who are far from God. Like, he is serving in an unknown land, and how challenging for us to first of all engage the idea that it’s possible that God moves you into unexpected seasons and is going to use you there and you didn’t do anything wrong.  

Eryn: Yeah, yeah. 

Nicole: It’s not because you messed up, like, that’s not the story of Joseph. So, number one, that number two, I mean, we don’t have to go any further than ask the question, do you make rooms better when you enter them? Because God calls blessing, this passing of healing, and love, and presence, that actually makes other people prosper. And in our divided world right now, in the highly polarized culture that we’re in, what a challenge to us as believers to not think about where we need to be prophetic or where we need to be blasting the truth from the mountaintop, but the question would be in any room that you enter, do you make it better by your presence? Because if Christ is in you, then that love and that presence is coming, and God calls that blessed. He says, like, that’s what blessing is. 

Eryn: Yeah. 

Nicole: It’s coming to you and through you, and it’s experienced by others. That same refrain is repeated in Jeremiah actually, right? Where we say, “For I know the plans I have for you…” 

Elisa: Yes, yeah. 

Nicole: … which we love that part. Before that it’s like, you’re oppressed, you’re in exile, but, you know, build houses, have families, work for the prosperity of the place that you are in, and they are in exile. So, they’re under a government, an oppressive government, that does not seek their flourishing and God’s refrain is seek the flourishing of those around you. And that’s what we see Joseph do. And every part of the story, which we can’t possibly jump all into, which is so… it’s such a great story, but you see him taking these actions where he’s just faithfully… showing up and serving wherever God’s placed him. And that’s a challenge for all of us.  

Elisa: To go a little deeper into the story, Nicole, what we really remember about Joseph was how tragedy shaped him, how awfulness, awfulness, played a huge role. And, you know, so maybe take us into that part of the story and what… how we can relate to him. 

Nicole: Yeah. The story does turn, and his brothers do find him, and they are reconciled, and he forgives them. And, basically, we learn how he framed his own story, and he does that at the very end. And it’s, again, the real joy and craziness of the story is in the details. These last words I’m going to share that Joseph said about his brothers, they happened forty years after their sin. So, they were holding on to this guilt, even though he had forgiven them years before. At the very end of the story, they’ve all come back together, they’re all in Egypt together, and Jacob, the father dies. And when Jacob dies, the brothers are like, this is when Joseph’s actually going to punish us for what we did to him when he was seventeen, they had been holding on to their own shame and guilt this whole time. And so, they voluntarily fall before his feet, this is the true fulfillment of the dream when he was seventeen. I’m sure a dream that Joseph never would have wanted fulfilled. This is not the way you would have imagined. It was a life, right, marked by tragedy, and suffering, and patience, and obedience, and really self-sacrifice for the sake of others. And they voluntarily fall at his feet, and what he says is, “What you intended for evil, God used for good.” And I often will say, let’s not forget the first part. Joseph did not sweep tragedy under the rug… 

Eryn: Right. 

Nicole: … he did not say no big deal bros, he actually says what you had in your heart was not good. What you had in your heart was evil, but God. And I think the framing of the ability to be honest about difficulties, about suffering, about evil that’s been done to us, about ways that we ourselves maybe have fallen into evil, being able to own that and not say, like, this is not part of the story. This is part of the story. And yet, but God could do something with that. That God is the one who refashions our stories and redeems our stories. But before that, and this is the part, Elisa, that I think is really impactful about him… him being shaped by tragedy. Long before his brothers came back, Joseph had two sons. And this is when he’s prospering in Egypt, like, for quote unquote, like, he’s now in this position of leadership, he’s taken a wife, he’s having children, and this part, I mean, literally brings me to tears every time I share it because this is to me a moment of acceptance. And I think that in our story, God is inviting us to surrender and acceptance. He’s not inviting us to keep striving until He turns the story around, because, I believe, for Joseph, this was the end of the story for him with God. Like, he had accepted his life, and he had moved forward. It was far before his brothers came back, I think, his forgiveness of his brothers happened at this point. He names his sons, and most people in the Jewish faith would name their sons for something they were aspiring to be. So, you’re going to name them for the life that you’re expecting them to have. And instead, Joseph names his sons and… and sort of creates bookends to his own story. And so, he names his child… his children Manasseh and Ephraim. And what that means is, the first thing it means is God has made me forget my family. The best I can hope for is God has helped me forget. And then the second name means God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering. What if that was it?  Like, the faithfulness is there. The faithfulness says God has not forgotten me. God has reshaped this. God has done something with something terrible. God has done something good. It wasn’t like Joseph was waiting around for his brothers to come back. Nobody could have ever imagined that was going to happen, but… so… and that happens later, but this beautiful moment that can get missed in this story, I believe, is this, like, acceptance where it’s, like, this isn’t what I signed up for and yet God is in it. And God is redeeming it and God has work for it. I don’t have to deny that there’s suffering. I don’t have to make it sound good. I can just say, like, God has done a good work with what is here, as hard as it is. It’s challenging to our faith. It’s also something to aspire to. I believe if we’re really going to live in the reality of how hard life is it’s, like, wow, I hope I can be a person who can do that.  

Eryn: That’s good, Nicole. My therapist reminds me that the most disorienting feeling is being punished by doing the right thing, by being faithful.  

Elisa: So good. 

Nicole: I love that word, disorienting. I think that’s super important. Yeah. 

Eryn: It’s, like… because you feel, like you said earlier, you feel like you’re being punished, or… or you said… you alluded to you’re not even being punished. Like, that’s not even a punishment, it’s just the nature of life could happen, being on the other side of somebody else’s free will, you yourself falling into evil. But when she said, you know, the most disorienting feeling is being punished by doing the right thing, what do you think, based off of just the story of Joseph and him, I would imagine that’s what he felt. It was disorienting for him to just exist, and he’s being punished for just existing in a lot of ways. What do you think God is inviting us into learning about Him and what He thinks of us during a disorienting season? 

Nicole: This concept of testing is really hard in the Bible, and it says in Hebrews that God tested Joseph, and I think we’re all like, ooh, like, pass fail? Like, what does that mean? You know, and, you know, testing is not so that God knows what’s in us. Testing is so that we know what’s in us because God already knows. And when I think about Joseph just faithfully showed up in the places that he was, and so, when he was punished for doing the right thing in the palace with Potiphar’s wife, he was punished. But it was where he went that put him in the exact right position for what God had next. And so, the vehicle to the next thing was this hard thing that was a… a needed requirement, right? And… and yet, so these testing moments of what is your character? What is your nature? And many of… and many of times when I feel tested by the Lord in some way, or I… or I see who I really am, what I feel is not worthy, right? Or what I feel is, like, I can never measure up, and this is where we started our conversation, right? Where God says, “Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ.” I… I need you to know that, you know, it says again, and… and I’m preaching through John so, it’s on my mind, but, you know, these religious leaders come to Jesus and they’re like, what works do we need to do to get to God? And Jesus… Jesus is like, there’s only one work. The work is believing. And I think when we go through these seasons, that’s what’s really tested, is what we believe about God, what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about the world. And we can get all kinds of beliefs that sort of grow up in this tangled garden that we just haven’t tended because we can. And we’re kind of like, well, I guess I’ll believe like the rest of the culture that if I do the right thing, it’s going to turn out well for me. Or if I work hard enough, I’m going to get where I want to go. Or if I confront this relationship, they’re going to seek forgiveness. Or whatever those if/thens that we put together. And those things kind of grow up in our belief garden, and a lot of times it’s when we hit hard times, where we really have to cultivate what we’re believing, and find our way back to the truth… and praise God for His word, which gives us a place to find that truth, where our lament is welcome, and our emotions are welcome, and being disoriented, like you said, Eryn, is not comfortable, but it’s not unwelcome… by God, you know, He invites that in. 

Eryn: That’s good.  

Elisa: What do you hope people will take away from the life of Joseph? 

Nicole: I hope they’ll see that we all, maybe almost every day, have things that we could choose to be upset, disappointed, frustrated by, and we all have things, probably every day, that we could see as beautiful, and good, and signs of God’s presence. That’s not true every day, but lots of days it’s true. And the freedom that comes from believing that there is a redemptive story in your life, even if you’re not exactly sure what that story is, the freedom that comes from knowing God’s not withholding goodness from you, that you’re not being punished, if life is in a place that you did not expect, you’re not alone. I went through a difficult season a few years ago, and in that time reached out to some friends in the ministry that I just looked up to a lot. They were about my same age, and I remember two particular conversations where both parties told me about brutally difficult things that they themselves had been through that I didn’t know about that really I put my own challenges in perspective and I thought, oh, maybe this is actually a part of the deal. 

Elisa: Yeah. 

Nicole: Like, if you’re going to get to your mid-forties, you’re going to have some stories, and [music] it just was one of those, like, the relief and the comfort of saying, oh, we can go through difficult things and God can be at work, and that redemption is a choice, and seeing life from that redemptive angle is an actual choice that we have to make. It’s not like you’re a have or a have not. It’s about whether you’re going to allow God to write that story and choose and… and agree and accept Him refashioning whatever He’s doing in your life that might not be what you yourself would have chosen. 

[Music] 

Elisa: We can all connect to the story of Joseph and the unexpected seasons that God may lead us through. It was so nice to hear from Nicole during this conversation.  

Eryn: If you’ve liked this episode, please be sure to leave us a rating and review. We would love to hear from you.  

Elisa: But before we go, be sure to check out our show notes for links to learn more about Nicole and her book, Not What I Signed Up For. You can find that and more at godhearsher.org. That’s godhearsher.org. Thanks for joining us. And don’t forget, God hears you, He sees you, and He loves you because you are His.  

Eryn: Today’s episode was engineered by Anne Stevens and produced by Jade Gustman and Mary Jo Clark. We also want to thank Jerry and Sarah for all their help and support. Thanks everyone.  

Elisa: Our Daily Bread Ministries is a donor-supported nonprofit ministry dedicated to making the life changing wisdom and stories of the Bible come alive for all people around the world. 

[Music] 

Elisa: God Hears Her is a production of Our Daily Bread Ministries.