At Thrive Ent, planning your finances is bigger than money. It's a way to support the people, causes, and community you love. Because helping you put your faith into action is at the heart of what we do. ThriveEnt, where money means more. Connect with us at ThriveEnt.com.
Life audio. Hi from the Savish Army and you're listening to Words of Life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. These are the words, these are the words, these are the words of life. Welcome back to Words of Life.
Today we're beginning a new six-week series with author, podcaster, and speaker Nicole Yunes. I first discovered her ministry through her podcast, How to Study the Bible. I cannot recommend that podcast enough.
So, check out the show notes for this episode. I'll have a link to that podcast as well as her website, books, and more. But in this series, the conversation is really going to be centered around the topic of her latest book, Not What I Signed Up For. Which focuses on helping the reader find the strength, purpose, and faith to get through an unexpected season. In this first episode, we're going to learn more about Nicole, her background, and her ministry.
I can't wait for you to meet her.
So, here's Bernie and Nicole Eunice. Just Welcome back to Words of Life. I'm Bernie Dake, and I am so excited. I say it every week, but we really have had an incredible lineup of guests. And today, for the next six episodes, we've got an author, a pastor, a mother, a wife, all the things in Nicole Eunice.
And I want to welcome her officially to our show. Welcome, Nicole. Thank you. I am so excited to be here. I am excited that you're here.
It's not actually been a long time since Chris decided to have you here. And now we're in the studio recording. He's given me a copy of your book. I've almost made it through the whole thing. And we have the study guide, which we're going to tell our listeners about.
This is going to be a great series. Awesome.
Well, I love what you do and what you're about. And any way I can help to continue to spread the message and be part of encouraging. I used to maybe, I don't know, look down, not down on podcasts, but I was like, oh, no, I like to preach. I like to be in person. I've experienced how close and warm the connection can feel when you get to just be with people wherever our listeners find themselves today.
Right.
So glad to be a part of your life today. For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrive Ent, planning your finances is bigger than just money. We help you put your plans into motion and faith into action so you can do more for the ones in your heart.
Because sometimes all you need to make a difference is someone to help you make it happen. Thriveent, where money means more. Connect with us at ThriveEnt.com. I want to know more about you. I want our listeners to know more about you.
And let's go all the way back to the beginning. Who is Nicole Eunice, and what is your salvation story? Absolutely. Yeah. Hi, everyone.
My name is Nicole. I am a very, first of all, proud wife. My husband and I are going on 28 years of marriage. We got married when we were little, little babies, right out of college. And we have three children, 22, 20, and 17, all who are walking with the Lord, which is just so delightful to us.
And before all of that happened, I was an Army brat. I was raised in the military, moved every couple of years, which gives me a very unique little picture on, I think, faith. My parents both became believers in the sort of 1980s revival of California.
So grew up in a lot of Bible churches in California, but also moved around so much.
So just experienced a lot of churches, experienced a lot of change.
So I was one of those kids who did know the right answer is Jesus, but wasn't. Really, I think, fully connecting my head and my heart to who Jesus was, just was really good at knowing the answers. And it wasn't until I was in college, my second year of college, where the best way I can describe it is that the disparity between my inside and my outside had just grown so vast that I felt like I really didn't know who I was. I was putting out all the right answers. I was kind of living for what the world would say is life's about achieving and appearing.
And it was just making me crumble on the inside. And I had a Bible. I hadn't picked up a Bible in a long time at that point. And I happened to have a Bible in my dorm room, which I'm like, thank you, Lord. And it was an old Bible from middle school.
I just flipped open this Bible in desperation, came to Romans 8, read through a familiar chapter. I was familiar with the Bible, but it just struck me anew. And just as many people say in their salvation story, it was just as if the Lord was present with me and the word that I received from the Lord. Was not even you can work hard enough to separate yourself from my love. And that began really a journey where I think those roots started to go deep, not just in my head, but in my heart.
And I love telling my story because it wasn't a church service, it wasn't a Bible study, I wasn't evangelized. It was truly like God's word. And that theme of believing that God's word is relevant and can speak to us and is present for us and is available to all of us continues to be a big part of my ministry today. It is impossible for God's word to not accomplish what it's meant to do. That's why I always say I have the best job in the world because I show up to preach and I'm like, I'm already winning, guys, because I'm just, I'm going to talk about God's word and it's always that it never returns void.
So this is great. That is exactly right. Uh Now, you talked about school. Where did you go to school? I went to the College of Women and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
If you're not familiar with Williamsburg, it's the place where people come to see colonial times.
So we would be in class and also people in full colonial garb would be walking by. It's a pretty, pretty cool place. It's a great spot for tourism. If you're ever driving down 95, you get on 64.
Well, there'll be a link in the show notes, I'm sure. We're going to give them a map directions. If you go, go to the cheese shop.
Now I had to get involved. I'm like, now I got to prop up my town. My son just graduated from there as well.
So we've had a long, my husband and I went there. My son just graduated.
So it's been a fun part of our story. That is really cool. My wife and I are celebrating our 33rd anniversary this year.
So we're right there with you. Congratulations. Yeah, I think we're finally, we're finally, both of all four of us are just far enough along now to probably have a few things to say about marriage. That's what I say. Yeah.
Maybe. It's worth hanging on to. I'll give you that. That's awesome. Absolutely.
At ThriveEnt, planning your finances is bigger than money. It's a way to support the people, causes, and community you love. Because helping you put your faith into action is at the heart of what we do. Thriveent, where money means more. Connect with us at ThriveEnt.com.
There's certainly a passion or an excitement about you. There's an energy in the talking with you. I wish our listeners could see your face. You believe what you're saying, which is cool. That makes me want to listen because you are passionate.
about something. And I'm going to set you up. This is a softball.
Okay. What are you passionate about today? Oh my gosh.
Well, and you guys maybe have heard it said that every pastor, and I would actually say author, but every pastor only has one message. They just give it 10,000 different ways. And my one message is freedom and confidence in Christ. That's truly everything that involves freedom and confidence in Christ, from untangling from your past to experiencing joy in the present. to having confidence about the future, like all of those pieces.
Are really what I like to explore in my writing and teaching. I actually started my career as a therapist.
So I spent a good eight years in the chair just listening to stories and listening to where people felt stuck and learning to listen, learning to believe that everyone's made in the image of God and that people are stuck for good reason. And that kind of softened, I think, some of my maybe what might have been dogmatic before that into what I hope is deep compassion and love, but also really believing it's true. If what Jesus has said is true and if the promises of scripture are true, then these things are accessible to us. We can experience freedom from our past. We can experience joy in the present.
We can have confidence in the future. Those are not limited by socioeconomic background, by education. By age or race or anything. And that's a beautiful truth that I'm running hard after and inviting people to run with me about. That's incredible.
Freedom and confidence in Christ. That's a good way to sum it up. It's like a little square. I'm gonna post a step. It's a little tiny, yeah.
Well, this is so not what I signed up for. The book we're gonna talk about today was actually my 10th book. And so, when you have 10 books, that's a lot of words. I'm like, I'm done. I've said enough words for the rest of my life.
But. That's a big body of work to say, what am I really trying to say? And I'm like, that's it. That's the only thing I've ever been trying to say. And the reason I'm trying to say it is because I struggle too.
Like it, always follow a teacher who struggles with the thing they're teaching you. Cause if they're just good at it naturally, they're not good teachers. But people who are good at explaining and walking and encouraging, I think generally usually struggle with that. And so I've been on a quest to discover that freedom and that peace and joy in the present my whole life. And that's a lot of why I write what I do.
Yeah. I always say, never trust a skinny baker, but that has everything. It's exactly the same point. Exactly. Mm-hmm.
Tell our listeners what not what I signed up for really means. Ooh, yeah. I'll give you guys the backstory. I've always really loved stories and characters in scripture and kind of digging deeper into the details to find the humanity there, particularly characters that I think we can cartoonize pretty easy. And so one of those is Joseph from the book of Genesis.
I want to just give you a quick overview of the story in case you're not familiar, or if the last time you saw it was as a Disney movie, because that really hits the highlights of Joseph's story. If you were just going to see the highlights, you would say, okay, at age 17, he's a favorite son of his father. He has this dream. He offends his brothers. They decide to plot against him to kill him and instead leave him for dead.
They trade him into slavery. He finds himself in Egypt. And then through a series of twists and turns, he becomes the governor of Egypt, the second in command of all of Egypt under Pharaoh. And in doing so, he actually reunites with his brothers. When he reunites with them, he forgives them.
They move their whole family to Egypt during this famine. And that's really how the Israelites got to Egypt, which kind of connects the stories.
Some commentators would say the reason the Joseph story is there is just to make that connection so he can continue the history. But if you really spend time in the story, you discover that those highlights really don't speak of these long valleys of unexpected. In the midst of this, Joseph was stripped of everything he knew, his family, his identity, his language, his religion. And he's left in this experience where the God that he believed he knew and this dream that he thought God was going to see through doesn't even come to fruition. I would say that he accepted and surrendered to what his life would be, and I have reasons for believing that, far before he met his brothers again.
So, if you've ever felt yourself in a story where you had a dream or an idea of what life would be like and it seems to be not turning out any way that you expected, if God feels silent in your season, if you're trying to figure out how do you have faith even when it feels like you're walking around in a fog, Joseph is a fantastic character to learn from. And so, Not What I Signed Up For is really a book about what do we do with unexpected seasons and how could we maybe dig in and sort of dive into a story and put ourselves there and experience what it's like to, through someone else's story, really know a God who is sovereign but also sometimes silent, and to know a God who seems to allow suffering, but also is a God of redemption. How do these things come together? How do we hold them together? And more than anything, for people who are experiencing trials, and by the way, usually if I say, What does not what I signed up for mean to you, to anyone individually, they will have something in their mind.
It will be a story, it will be a relationship, it will be a diagnosis, it will be a vocational challenge. And they're like, Yeah, that's a thing I never saw coming. And what I feel like is particular about these kinds of unexpected seasons that we can find in the life of Joseph is that they have an uncertain outcome and an unknown timeline. And there's something about those two things together that are very challenging for the human heart to hold on. And so we invite this story, this study guide, is really what I hope is a gentle, compassionate invitation to either look back at a season that you've been through and ask yourself, where was God in that and what have I learned?
Or if you're in a season like that, What would it be like to invite God to be with you as you walk through that and really find yourself in this very dramatic story about this teenager with a dream that turns into this expansive, generational-long redemption story? Man, I can't say it enough. You need to run. To Amazon right now, or to your local bookstore, Christian bookstore, whatever, and get a copy of Not What I Signed Up For by Nicole Yunes. We're going to tell our listeners more about the study guide, more about the resources that are available.
But I think it would be appropriate just to close this episode with a prayer. Nicole, it would be a real privilege if you would pray with our listeners. I would love to. Father, we don't know where we're going, but we trust you. We sometimes feel like it's dark, but we know that you're the light.
And Father, our feelings might not be there, but we will put our will and our thoughts in your hands, trusting and knowing, Lord, that you are always with us, that you have not forgotten us. and that you are and always will be the God of redemption, of love. of compassion. of purpose. In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. There's more to come, so make sure you check in next week for the second episode of Nicole Eunice. God bless you.
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Okay. These are the words. These are the words of life. These are the words. These are the words.
These are the words of life. Thanks so much for listening to Words of Life. We want to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the show. Visit lifeeaudio.com where you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They have shows about prayer, Bible studying, parenting, and more.
Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Rebecca Scott. As a servant of God, wife, and mother of four, I understand the juggle of multiple roles and stages. That's why I created the Encourager podcast to help guide us through the messy middle stage of life.
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