God of the Unknown

by Megan Feveryear | Sep 22, 2022 | Life Advice, Testimonies | 1 comment

Note from Team LO: We are SO excited to bring you this month’s post from our LO sister member, Megan Feveryear! If you want to be a part of this incredible community, you can join today for free. Find out more about this online sisterhood HERE. And for more info about what LO sister is all about, visit our Instagram Page!

Now, enjoy today’s post from Megan 🙂 

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When 2022 began, I believed God was going to send me on the most incredible journey I had ever been on! I was a new resident in a brand-new city (Nashville, TN), I had my dream job, and great community of friends, and the interest of a cute boy! Ladies, we all know that a cute boy can change the world! Flash-forward to the summer my year of “re-claiming greatness” slowly began to shift to a year I had never asked for or wanted.

At the start of every new year, I begin the year asking God what verse He desires me to soak in for the New Year, this year that verse just happened to be: “Delight thyself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4) Every time I pondered this verse in my quiet time with the Lord, I asked the Lord to show me what the desires of His heart were over the course of this year.

I never imagined by in December of 2021, as I prayed in the new year,  that by June of 2022 I would be diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, suffer the loss of my greatest cheerleader (my grandmother), end up moving to a new home, lose my job, have some dear friends turn their backs, and that boy I mentioned at the beginning well, let’s just say Cinderella still is waiting for her glass slipper.

You know that point when you think life cannot get any worse, well, I thought that about every week of this year. The enemy has a way of worming his way into our minds and reminding us of our greatest failures. For some reason these reminders just continue to make our life a little worse, instead of helping us reclaim the ground for the King of the universe. We all have that voice that sneaks into our heads when we are sitting alone scrolling on our Instagram feeds, when we are sitting watching TV at night, or anytime we are alone. It is the voice of the enemy reminding us of our biggest mistakes and somehow these mistakes seem a little bigger every time he speaks them into existence.

So, the question remains “what has Jesus been teaching me?” In my humanness I would have told you this season has been the worst season of my life. But through the lens of Faith, I see God showing up in community. God has opened my eyes to how beautiful and special community is in our day to day lives. In my lowest and darkest moments, He has sent ladies in my community to surround me in prayer, lift me up and encourage me to take one more step into the next day. 

I used to think that to “Win someone to Him,” we needed to have the perfect job that inspired millions of people. Now through the ups and downs of the seasons God is showing me that I don’t need the perfect career to inspire others to be a part of His kingdom, I simply need to show up each day and share my story with the 5 loaves and 2 fish that He gives me.

God has been teaching me, I don’t need to have my life planned out for my entire life, year, month, or even the week. It all begins each morning and starts with taking another step each day, each moment even with the God of universe. Sisters, we are not promised a single day, God has ordained each one of them. The God of the Universe has opened my eyes to see that my life does not have to be perfect, in fact it is perfectly fine if it is a little messy. 

So back now to Psalm 37:4, I would be lying if I did not say to you, I have not asked God maybe once, twice, or maybe one million times; Why is this happening? But through all the struggle and all the questioning I have come to find God is teaching me truly what HIS desires truly are for my life. I would be again lying to you if I said I was not at all disappointed at the loss of my dream job, that came along with some of the most incredible co-workers. But I’m finding that as I search the heart of the Father, He is revealing that His desires for my life are way better than what I thought my dream job was. Yes, in my humanness I do mourn the loss of what has happened this year, but I look forward expectant of what the God of the Universe has in store.

So, as you can see my life may not be the life of a picture-perfect Instagram influencer, in fact it is quite the opposite. If hot mess Instagram influencers were a thing, I would be verified by now. But through the chaos, the trials, and the total opposite Cinderella story of a year, I have found Jesus to be faithful, true, and beyond worthy of my praise. Back in my Freshman year of College at Liberty University, my Community Group Leader themed our group to “Hills and Valleys.” This theme was centralized to the idea that we face many HIGHS and LOWS in and year, but throughout the highs and lows of our life, we serve a God who will journey with us through the low valleys that life brings, we also serve a God who is with us on the mountaintop moments when we feel like we are the kings and queens of the world.  

So to finish up our time together, Jesus is teaching me that the beautiful dreams I thought I had for my life and my future are nothing compared to the amazing story he is writing for my future. Yes, I am still a hot mess express on most days, but I am beyond expectant to see where the King of the Universe leads me in this next season.  

Megan grew up in rural Lancaster County, PA. Her greatest inspiration was her grandparents as they encouraged her to continue to pursue dreams bigger than the county lines. Megan holds her roots close as she journey’s into the world of LIVE Music. As a graduate of Liberty University and Berklee College of Music, she has had the opportunity to work alongside many of her heroes.  
 
Most known for her diverse skill set in the world of Digital Marketing and Event Management, Megan has worked on album release teams and as the social media manager for many of today’s mainstream artists. Close to Megan’s heart is a ministry that was birthed out of COVID-19 “Clothed in Dignity,” this is a Women’s ministry that focuses primarily on Proverbs 31, reminding women that chosen and loved by the God of the Universe!  

 She is the founder of This Day Ministry and a new start up podcast launching this Fall by the name of Consider the Lilies!

Soul on Fire

by Max Lucado | Sep 15, 2022 | Life Advice, Testimonies

Brad Haugh still remembers the sound of his heartbeat. It thundered in his chest. Two hundred beats a minute. With a fire behind him and a ridge ahead of him, this smoke jumper needed every pulse of power his heart could give in order to escape with his life.  

He was one of forty-nine firefighters caught in a wildfire on the spine of Storm King Mountain, seven miles west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Fourteen of them lost their lives. They were overrun by flames that Haugh estimated to reach a height of three hundred feet. The wall of heat required only two minutes to race a quarter of a mile up the mountain, reaching a speed of eighteen miles per hour. Temperatures reached two thousand degrees, hot enough to incinerate the tools dropped in its path.  

“People were yelling into their radios, ‘Run! Run! Run!’ I was roughly one hundred and fifty feet from the top of the hill, and the fire got there in ten or twelve seconds. I made it over the top and just tumbled and rolled down the other side, and when I turned around, there was just this incredible wall of flame.”

Few of us will ever find ourselves trying to outrun a fire. But all of us have had encounters with fire. We’ve extended cold hands over the warm campfire. We’ve lifted a burning torch into the dark night. We’ve ignited the blue flame of the gas stove and beheld the red glow of hot metal. Fire is a part of life. For that reason when fire and the Holy Spirit appear in the same sentence, we take note.  

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11). This is how John the Baptist introduced his cousin to the world. We might have expected a more, can we say, positive outlook. “He will baptize you in happy feelings.” “He will lift your self-image so you will feel good about yourself.” “He will make it easier for you to have friends and deal with conflict.” But baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire? Such was the job description of Jesus.  

Please note that Jesus is the giver of the Holy Spirit fire. Do you desire the Spirit? Then turn to Christ. He will plunge, immerse, and submerge you in the very being of the Spirit. Just as Jesus stepped out of the river dripping the Jordan, so we step forth into the world drenched in the Spirit of heaven. Every part of us, top to bottom, is designed to be blessed by the Holy Spirit and with fire.  

The soul baptized in the Spirit is a soul ablaze.  

Fire is a chemical reaction that releases energy in the form of light and heat. In the case of a wood fire, the energy was originally derived from the sun and stored in the plant as cellulose and lignin. Heat from another fire or a lightning strike converts the cellulose into flammable gasses, which are driven out of the wood and combined with oxygen. If there is enough air, fuel, and heat, the fire will keep advancing.  

Can’t something similar be said about the Spirit of God? If we let him do his work, he will not be set back. He will not be put out. He will not be quenched.  

Yet this flame is never intended for our harm. Quite the contrary. Everything that is good about a fire can be listed as a blessing of the Holy Spirit.  

Fire is a purifying force. My mom, a nurse, taught us this principle when we were very young. She used a needle on our skin to remove a thorn or lance a sore. She did so after she had twirled the sharp tip in the hot flame of a match. “I want to kill the germs,” she explained. Fire does this. It purifies.  

The Holy Spirit is the ultimate purifier. He comes to eradicate the defilement from the vessel. Are we fit to serve as a temple of the Holy Spirit? We need the cleansing, sanctifying work of heaven to prepare us for this assignment. So the Spirit comes not just to purify but to beautify, not just to cleanse but to adorn.  

This refining fire is not always pleasant. It can come in the form of discipline or disappointment, setback or loss. Yet the fire of the Spirit produces ultimate good. Do we not see this in nature? The American Forest Foundation lists several benefits of forest fires. They . . .  

• release seeds or otherwise encourage the growth of certain tree species, like lodgepole pines;  
• clear dead trees, leaves, and competing vegetation from the forest floor so new plants can grow;  

• break down and return nutrients to the soil;  
• remove weak or disease-ridden trees, leaving more space and nutrients for stronger trees;  
• keep tree stands thin and open, letting more sunlight in so trees stay healthier; and  
• improve wildlife habitat.ii 

A fire, managed and contained, results in ultimate good for the vegetation. When Jesus baptizes us in the fire of the Spirit, it is so we can bear better and more abundant fruit for him.  

Welcome this refining fire. Invite him to finish this work in your heart. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16 niv). In the next life your heart will have been refined of all dross. Jealousy, gone. Greed, gone. Guilt, gone. Regrets, anxiety, and pride, gone forever. This time on earth is a time of preparation, and God’s person of preparation is the Spirit. Let him do his work in you. Let him set your soul on fire.

Since entering the ministry in 1978, Max Lucado has served churches in Miami, Florida; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and San Antonio, Texas. He currently serves as Teaching Minister of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio. He is the recipient of the 2021 ECPA Pinnacle Award for his outstanding contribution to the publishing industry and society at large. He is America’s bestselling inspirational author with more than 145 million products in print. His latest book is Help is Here: Finding Fresh Strength and Purpose in the Holy Spirit.

Excerpt taken from Help Is Here: Finding Fresh Strength and Purpose in the Power of the Holy Spirit by Max Lucado (Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville, Tennessee ©️ 2022).  

You’ve Been Chosen

by Cynt Marshall | Sep 13, 2022 | Life Advice, Testimonies

In the spring of 2010, not too long after my fiftieth birthday, I sat in a Dallas conference room with my colleagues, AT&T leaders from across the country, filling out the human performance expert Jack Groppel’s Corporate Athlete assessment questionnaire. As the president of AT&T North Carolina, I was required to be there, but I didn’t expect much to come from the session. I was sure I wouldn’t find out anything new about myself. I knew me! I was in excellent emotional, mental, and spiritual health. I read and kept my mind sharp. I spent time with my family and friends to get the emotional support I needed. I was intentional about making time for prayer, going to church, and feeding my soul. As I remember it, my results were off the charts in those categories. 

My physical health, though? I thought it would be my lowest score but figured it would still be decent. I used to be an athlete, and now as an executive and a mom, I was constantly on the go. 

I’d already cut back on Ding Dongs and fried chicken. What else could they want from me? 

I was partially right. Physical health was my lowest scoring area on Jack’s assessment, but the score was far from decent. It was clear where I needed to put my attention. 

A few months before, my primary care physician had given me a referral slip for a colonoscopy test, which he called a routine precaution for all his patients when they turned fifty. I’d thanked him and put the slip on my nightstand, figuring I’d get to it sooner or later. After all, I’d be fifty for a whole year. I had plenty of time. 

I thought about that slip at the end of Jack’s program, when we were told to all choose accountability buddies from within the group and then share with them one specific action step that we would take for improvement. I turned to Frank, a straight-talking executive from New Jersey, and told him I would get a colonoscopy. I was a busy woman, I reasoned, so I picked something I thought wouldn’t require extra energy. 

Over the following weeks and then months, Frank somehow always managed to call me when I was in the Starbucks drive- through. “Did you get that thing done yet?” he’d ask in his gravelly New York accent. I’d tell him no and change the subject. 

Seven months and many Frank phone calls later, I finally got to say yes, the appointment was made, and so could we please talk about something else now? I scheduled my colonoscopy for December 14, the day before my fifty-first birthday. I was cutting that “get it done at fifty” close, but in my defense I schedule all of my routine medical checkups for my birthday week every year. I have an annual health plan that I stick to, and now it contained a colonoscopy “maintenance” box to check. 

I still remember the anesthesia-induced “sleep” I had that day as the best I’ve ever had. I didn’t feel a thing. When I woke up, though, the first thing I saw was Kenny standing over me. That wasn’t normal. Kenny’s not one to hover too close. Through my anesthesia haze I saw that he was frowning, biting his lip the way he does when he’s bothered. I knew right away something wasn’t right. 

“Wife, we’ve got a problem,” he told me, and then he stopped, not sure how to continue. “The doctor saw something he didn’t like.” 

I didn’t know how to respond to that, and my brain still wasn’t working at its normal speed. I reached out toward the paper I could see in his hand. “What’s that?” 

After a second of hesitation—“Maybe you should read this later when you feel better”—Kenny relented and handed over the report from the gastroenterologist, who’d been called off to see another patient while I was still in recovery. He’d given Kenny copies of the scans they took, promising to call the next day to talk me through them. 

I’m no doctor, but when I looked at the pictures of my body, even I could see the nasty-looking mass. It was not the birthday gift I was hoping for.

To be honest, the colonoscopy wasn’t actually my first sign that something was wrong. 

I’d been prone to sinus infections ever since I moved to North Carolina four years before, so I was used to swollen lymph nodes. When I felt something swelling in my neck a few months before, I didn’t pay much attention. I just called my doctor for another round of super-duper antibiotics. 

When I started inexplicably losing weight, I welcomed it and didn’t ask questions. I complained sometimes to Kenny that I was feeling off and not like myself, but neither of us thought it was anything more than I had too much work, too much travel, and too many sinus infections. When Venessa, my chief of staff, mentioned that I looked tired and pale, I rearranged my travel schedule a little but kept going. 

Then, in November, my kids all insisted that we go Black Friday shopping. It wasn’t my favorite holiday tradition, but I agreed. We teamed up with a couple of my friends and their kids, and the crew was all at the mall by 4:00 a.m. As we were getting ready to go, I noticed my back hurt a little, but I wrote it off as the result of being on my feet in the kitchen the whole previous day, making Thanksgiving dinner. 

The pain got steadily worse and harder to ignore, until about an hour later, when my son Anthony found me in front of a Ma- cy’s register, collapsed all the way to the floor in excruciating pain, but still holding up my credit card to the salesperson who was ringing up a new coat for my youngest, Alicia. 

My conscientious boy was next to me in an instant, simultaneously helping me up and yelling at his sister for not doing some- thing. He threatened to put me in a wheelchair until I agreed to stop shopping and wait in the car until he could round up the rest of the group. 

I went to an urgent care clinic that afternoon, but they couldn’t find anything specific wrong with me and sent me home, suggest- ing it was an early stage of diverticulitis. When I was still having trouble standing the next day, Kenny insisted I go to a hospital emergency room. There, a CT scan showed a lesion on my liver, but I left again with no real diagnosis. In fact, the ER doctor specifically told me he didn’t think I had cancer, even though lower left back pain like mine is a symptom of colorectal cancer (as are weight loss, fatigue, and blood in the stool, which I’d also noticed but had dismissed recently). 

The pain subsided after a few hours, and I went home and went on with my weekend. The day after my colonoscopy, my actual fifty-first birthday, I went back to the office. I have a tradition that I always work on my birthday, and not just because I don’t want to miss my cake and ice cream at the lunchtime “surprise” party. Growing up poor taught me not to take my career for granted, and whenever I count my blessings, two near the top of the list are a great job and the ability to take care of my family. 

Instead of enjoying ice cream with my team, though, I found myself stuck in a conference room, being grilled by auditors making a surprise visit. I’d been the president of AT&T North Carolina for almost four years at that point, and we had become a model program that other AT&T programs across the country followed. But that birthday meeting with the outside interrogators was unusually intense, and the way they asked about some of our business practices sounded more like an inquisition than a normal audit.

As a Black woman in corporate America, I had learned long ago that I would sometimes be treated as if I were unqualified or untrustworthy. It was an unfortunate reality. I sat with no notes in front of me, grateful for my good memory as I honestly answered all their questions and gave them facts. 

I had nothing to hide and kept my cool, but after about five hours and one missed birthday party, my aggravation was starting to show. When my assistant stuck her head into the room to tell me that my doctor was on the phone, I gratefully took the opportunity to step out. 

It was a case of “out of the frying pan and into the fire,” because the gastroenterologist didn’t have good birthday news for me, either. That out-of-body feeling struck as I stood in my office on my fifty-first birthday and heard for the first time that the nasty thing in the scan was a tumor in my colon and that I needed to talk to a surgeon right away. I don’t think the doctor could use the word “cancer” without an official pathology re- port, but he was insistent that I get this “thing” looked at immediately. At the end of the call, he said again that it didn’t look good. 

I thanked him and hung up. After a quick call to Kenny to let him know what had happened, I went back to the inquisition much calmer than I’d been before. The auditors’ questions were still ridiculous, but suddenly insignificant compared with what else I was facing. 

To their credit, when I explained to the auditors that the call had come from a doctor, they offered to break for the day so I could make my appointments. I declined; postponing meant they would come back, and I needed to wrap this up so I could focus on what came next. I stayed in the meeting until they ran out of questions, sent them on their way, and then turned to my next task—making an appointment with Dr. Tyner, the surgeon my gastroenterologist recommended. 

“Happy birthday to me,” I told Kenny dryly that night when I finally got home. I didn’t know what to think of all this hitting now. Was it a birthday gift or a birthday nightmare? Would I look back on my fifty-first birthday in the years to come and see the start of something tragic, or the start of something great? The jury was still out. 

What I did feel right away, though, was that fifty-one was going to be very different than fifty had been.

By the time Kenny and I sat down with Dr. Tyner that Friday afternoon, I’d spent three days looking at pictures of the tumor in- side me. It looked nastier and more annoying every time I saw it. I was sure it was growing centimeters every hour. It needed to go, and it needed to go soon. 

Dr. Tyner was pleasant and respectful, and appeared competent. I liked that he’d been practicing for more than twenty years and had experience with this type of tumor. I could see Kenny liked him, too. But things started to go sideways when he asked about our holiday plans. I explained we had originally thought we would go home to see our families in California, but obviously the trip was canceled. 

The doctor looked perplexed. In his professional opinion, he said, my tumor was probably not cancerous, and there was no reason to interrupt our holidays. My surgery could wait until January or even February. 

Oh, no. That didn’t work for me. My own voice of power started to make itself heard. 

I’m not a soft-spoken person like my mother, so when I take on “the voice,” my volume doesn’t change. But I lean in. I make eye contact. I let the person who’s listening know what I know and how we’re going to proceed. 

I hadn’t been born with a voice of power. It had taken a long time, and a lot of trial and error, to know how to trust my instincts and use my own voice to speak with both respect and advocacy, regardless of a person’s title or outward presentation. I’d hesitated often when I was younger. Should I speak up? Should I sit back? 

On that Friday afternoon, fifty-one years into my journey, I didn’t hesitate. I leaned in and told Dr. Tyner that thirty years of leading teams all up and down the corporate ladder had taught me the only way to get things done is to act, and to act fast. I ex- plained that I’d learned way back in Sunday school that my body was a temple and it was my job to take care of that temple. I had a nasty tumor inside me, and I wasn’t willing to just leave it there, dirtying up the temple. I was willing to wait over the weekend, but this thing was going to come out of me no later than Monday. 

Dr. Tyner was very polite. He agreed that the tumor was nasty, but told us he’d seen nastier. He repeated that this wasn’t some- thing for me to worry about. And besides, his schedule was fully booked for the next two weeks, and so were all of the hospital operating rooms in the city. Lots of people have elective surgeries right before the end of the year, I learned, and my tumor was going to have to compete for space with facelifts and tummy tucks. 

None of that mattered. I was polite, too, but I explained that I wasn’t leaving until we found a hospital that could handle this nasty tumor on Monday morning. We sat, smiling at each other and in a stalemate as the clock ticked. At one point, Dr. Tyner gave us a tour of his facility. I complimented his great medical library. Then I went back and sat in his office again. I had plans for that night—a birthday celebration with family and close friends— but I explained to the men in the room that plans can change. 

Dr. Tyner studied me for a minute and then asked Kenny how long I was going to sit there. 

“Get ready for a long night,” my husband said. “She’s not leaving until a surgery is scheduled for Monday.” The doctor jokingly told Kenny he had a pretty good idea what my husband lives with daily. Kenny was too nice to explain that this was nothing. 

I smiled at them both, prayed, and waited for good news. The doctor, reluctantly, told his staff to try to find an available operating room. They made several calls, to no avail. I kept sitting and silently praying. 

An hour and a half later, a staff member came in to report that an operating room had opened up, and my surgery was scheduled for Monday, 6:00 a.m. It was even at WakeMed Cary Hospital, the hospital closest to our home. 

My prayer became a prayer of thanksgiving. 

Cynt Marshall is the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, president and CEO of Marshalling Resources consulting, and the former SVP of human resources and chief diversity officer for AT&T. She is the first African American woman to hold the CEO role for any NBA team and was named one of the “30 Most Powerful Women in Sports” by Adweek, one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Corporate America” by Black Enterprise magazine, and one of “15 of the World’s Most Inspiring Leaders” by Forbes. She is also an outspoken cancer survivor and regular speaker at cancer-related events. The fourth of six children, Marshall grew up in Richmond, California, and lives in the Dallas area. She and her husband, Kenneth, have four adult children.