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Fernando Arroyo

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Army veteran Fernando Arroyo considers himself privileged to serve veterans struggling with different issues ranging from PTSD, drug addiction, and homelessness. His job is to provide veterans with pastoral counseling and to walk alongside them as they regain sobriety and control of their mental health.

In his powerful new memoir, The Shadow of Death: From My Battles in Fallujah to the Battle for My Soul, Arroyo details his career in the military, as well as his crisis of faith: “I went from feeling invincible to feeling completely broken. There was only one person to blame for all of this, and it was God. God took the woman I loved away from me, God kept me from getting out of the Army, and God was making me feel miserable. I was angry with God—and meanwhile I had to train for war.”

 

Book: The Shadow of Death: From My Battles in Fallujah to the Battle for My Soul

 

 

 

CHERYL SCRUGGS is the host of the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast. She and her husband, Jeff, are doing life together and thriving in Dallas, Texas.


 

 

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Cheryl Scruggs on Thriving! (Part 2)

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You can live an abundant life in every area and in every season. You can practice the lost arts of being a vibrant human being. You can be energized and enjoy more of what matters most spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, and relationally.

The closer a courageous, rooted, and thriving woman gets to realizing her life’s purpose, the more she understands that abundant living is nothing like what she once thought it was. It’s not perfect circumstances; it’s perfect peace within those circumstances. This book gives women practical tools to improve every relationship they have by doing the hard work of knowing “the real you” and learning to be vulnerable. Deep satisfaction comes from women knowing who they are, overcoming their fears, facing the difficult stuff of life, and making lasting change. And it all starts with the journey of knowing and understanding who God made them.

No matter where you’ve come from, what you’ve experienced in the past, or the mistakes you’ve made—you can learn to thrive the rest of your life. This book shows you how.

 

About The Author:

CHERYL SCRUGGS is the host of the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast. She and her husband, Jeff, are doing life together and thriving in Dallas, Texas.


 

 

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Cheryl Scruggs on Thriving! (Part 1)

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You can live an abundant life in every area and in every season. You can practice the lost arts of being a vibrant human being. You can be energized and enjoy more of what matters most spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, and relationally.

The closer a courageous, rooted, and thriving woman gets to realizing her life’s purpose, the more she understands that abundant living is nothing like what she once thought it was. It’s not perfect circumstances; it’s perfect peace within those circumstances. This book gives women practical tools to improve every relationship they have by doing the hard work of knowing “the real you” and learning to be vulnerable. Deep satisfaction comes from women knowing who they are, overcoming their fears, facing the difficult stuff of life, and making lasting change. And it all starts with the journey of knowing and understanding who God made them.

No matter where you’ve come from, what you’ve experienced in the past, or the mistakes you’ve made—you can learn to thrive the rest of your life. This book shows you how.

 

About The Author:

CHERYL SCRUGGS is the host of the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast. She and her husband, Jeff, are doing life together and thriving in Dallas, Texas.


 

 

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087: Sarah Nuse

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What an absolute blessing it is to have Sarah Nuse with me today on Thriving Beyond Belief!

Sarah is such a light and is someone who naturally thrives. She is a wife, mother, and owner of Tippi Toes, a dance program that is built into schools during the school day. As a mother herself, she knows that afternoons running around and taking children to various activities can be exhausting, so the dance program is built for young children to participate in during normal school hours, complete with recitals and all! This amazing program has been adopted all over the country, and will hopefully soon be offered internationally!

Tippi Toes was actually birthed out of a time of desperation in Sarah’s life, a time when there was not much direction. She was encouraged to dream big and implement those dreams by her parents. We take some time to discuss the importance of the roles of parents in their children’s lives. In a culture where parents want to bless their children with more than they had, there tends to be a generation of people who don’t know what it is like to struggle, fail, and figure out what to do next. The story of how Sarah’s business came to be is so refreshing to hear.

We talk a lot about balance. The balance of being a good parent but also putting marriage before parenting. We discuss the balance of what to say “yes” to in your life. We talk about the balance of communication with your partner and taking time for marriage. We discuss the balance of figuring out how the Lord created us and what He wants to do with that creation. Sarah shares some amazing wisdom on all of these topics, reminding us at the base of it all that we were not created to live in fear. We were created to thrive. So anytime we begin to feel the fear creep up, we must turn to the Lord to be reminded that we were made for so much more than living in a “stuck” place of fear. We were created to live and live well. Let us cast away the thought that we “aren’t enough” in whatever capacity the enemy is telling us- whether that be our marriage, how we parent, our position at work, a dream that we want to come to fruition, etc. Let us instead lay those things before the Lord and find strength in who HE is that spurs us to do our best.

Tippi Toes is now franchised across the country with 35 franchise owners in 14 states. The company was recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine as a top 500 franchise company in the world.

​Tippi Toes was featured on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2012, where Sarah and her sister, Megan, landed a TV deal with Shark Mark Cuban.

As a company, Tippi Toes has had the opportunity to release four music CDs. The latest, “On Top of the World,” hit the Top 10 on iTunes and top 20 on Billboards chart on the Best Children’s Album chart. “On Top of the World” was also submitted for the Best Children’s Album for the 60th Grammy Awards. Sarah and her sister write all lyrics on each CD to ensure that positive, encouraging music is played throughout each class at Tippi Toes.

​Sarah has co-authored, with her husband, Adam, a children’s book, Pink Ballet Shoes. Sarah is currently working to expand the company by adding a line of ballet slippers and dance wear due to come out early 2019.

Sarah is in the process of writing her first business book and has spent much of the last year speaking to all types of groups about dreaming big, being bold and using your God-given talents.

Sarah is engaging, inspiring and desires to share the practical tools that allowed her to reach her big dreams so that others can do the same. Sarah’s journey in business has made her very relatable and she wants to help others in their business life, as well as in their marriage and family.  Living outside of Nashville, Tennessee with her family, Sarah is the wife to baseball executive Adam Nuse, and mother to her three children: Lucy, Lola and Hank.

This episode is so sweet to me, and I wish we could have kept talking. I cannot wait for you to hear this today and be encouraged to live your best!

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Highlights:

  • Sarah is engaging, inspiring and desires to share the practical tools that allowed her to reach her big dreams so that others can do the same.
  • We talk a lot about balance. The balance of being a good parent but also putting marriage before parenting. We discuss the balance of what to say “yes” to in your life. We talk about the balance of communication with your partner and taking time for marriage.
  • We discuss the balance of figuring out how the Lord created us and what He wants to do with that creation. Sarah shares some amazing wisdom on all of these topics, reminding us at the base of it all that we were not created to live in fear. We were created to thrive.

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081: Jenny Randle

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Super excited to have Jenny Randle on the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast today!

As a speaker, author and creative ninja, Jenny Randle believes deeply in the power of story.

At the age of 18, she encountered the greatest love story ever told, the Gospel. The prayer that followed for her was simple: “God, use me to make an impact for you.”

Since that prayer, Jenny has worked as a video editor on billion dollar franchises in the heart of Hollywood. In 2009, She was recognized with one of the highest honors in the entertainment industry — an Emmy Award.
As a creative ninja, over a decade ago she found herself living in this performance mentality zone, riddled with anxiousness and comparison. God broke the chains of inadequacy, taught her about her identity in Jesus and brought her such freedom. In this space of freedom, God has equipped Jenny to challenge others to CREATE AND DREAM COURAGEOUSLY again.

Also to every wounded creative or procrastinating dreamer… Discover the freedom to create again. The world needs you to shine.

Creativity is a gift from God to each of us—including you.

Is a message weighing on your heart or stirring in your soul today, but you’re wondering how to communicate it?

This hands-on journey in Courageous Creative will give you the tools and encouragement you need to discover your God-given identity, cultivate your creativity, and express your thoughts. You’ll find fun, think-outside-the-box creative challenges that will spark your imagination and inspire you in fresh, new ways.

You’ll also learn the foundations of your creativity, find ways to overcome the obstacles that keep you from fully expressing yourself, and discover secrets to unleashing the courageous creative in you.

Experience creative and spiritual freedom in this one-of-a-kind interactive devotional.

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Highlights:

  • Jenny believes in the power of story—
    The greatest story ever told- the gospel.
  • What to do with insecurity and not feeling good enough.
  • Our creativity is our greatest weapon we can really hold on to and understand because God wants to use us as a solution-makers; God wants to give us vision.
  • As we age our creativity decreases because we are not being intentional. Stress and time are the two biggest creativity killers
  • Simple prayer: “God use me to make an impact!” God calls us to shine especially as a believer. But first we have to understand what our gifts are. Then we need to feel comfortable in our gifts in order to be able to express freely in that gift!

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079: Jessica Smartt

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Memory Making Mom

I’m super excited to have Jessica Smartt with me today on the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast!
Jessica Smartt is a former English teacher turned homeschooling mama of three. A week after her first baby was born, she began her motherhood blog, Smartter Each Day. Jessica and her husband live in beautiful North Carolina, where she loves hikes with kids(mostly), steaming coffee in the afternoon, family bike rides, and anything that’s ever been done to a potato.

I love Jessica’s heart behind this book and what came about for her to write it. She reminds us that celebrations are not man-created, but something the Lord created. We see biblically that there are festivals and events to remember what the Lord had done. We should do the same thing in our lives today, celebrating those moments that the Lord is faithful in our lives. Celebrations are a blessing from the Lord and something to embrace in our everyday lives!

Comparison and competitiveness are some other topics we discuss in the sense of motherhood. Our culture, with the influence of social media, has led to comparison in the circles of women and mothers. Jessica discusses how to make things special in your own home without the burden of trying to keep up with others. She beautifully reminds us of the point: that we are to do everything in our lives with our focus on the Lord. The point of these celebrations is not to make your calendars busier or more hectic, but for them to be a genuine time of enjoying your family and celebrating what the Lord has done in a special way.

Jessica will be the first one to tell you that her and her family’s life is anything but calm! In fact, all of what the Lord has laid on her heart about taking time to celebrate came from a season of busyness that left her family not seeing the Lord in the everyday moments. She felt the Lord telling her then and there to slow down and be able to see Him in the small moments of their lives. Jessica and her family still live in this fast-paced world like everyone else, and still have busy schedules. But they have taken on some traditions that are special to their family and have chosen to keep those sacred.

What’s the solution to gaining the balanced, meaningful life you desire with your family? Create traditions that bring joy and significance. Popular “Smartter Each Day” blogger and mom of three, Jessica Smartt explains in her book, Memory-Making Mom: Building Traditions That Breathe Life Into Your Home

She also offers practical encouragement to modern parents to keep on adventuring—even when they are fighting distractions, are on a budget, and exhausted.

I loved today’s episode because of the intentionality in which Jessica lives her life! I hope it inspires you to do the same in your own family!

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Highlights

  • Encourage families to make memories together
  • Building Traditions That Breathe Life Into Your Home
  • It’s never too late to become a memory-making mom

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075: Debra Fileta

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I welcome Debra Fileta to this week’s episode of Thriving Beyond Belief!

Debra is a wife, mother of three, and a licensed professional counselor, specifically dealing with relationship-focused issues. She also has written two books, Choosing Marriage, and True Love Dates!

Debra has such insight on working on relationships in a healthy and balanced way. There are so many issues that we discuss in relationships, specifically within the Christian culture. Just because you are a believer in Jesus doesn’t mean you will naturally be good at certain relationships. Just like anything in life, we need to put in time and effort and practice to make any relationship work.

For Debra’s definition of thriving in relationships, she says that “relationships don’t exist for us to just get through them. We are meant to thrive in all of our relationships and let them be testimonies in our lives.”
She speaks with such wisdom about what the goal of relationships are. The end goal is not happiness, and Debra dives into this to explain what our focus in relationships should be. We talk about the fact that healthy relationships are made up of healthy individuals and discuss the steps to take for yourself that will in turn help improve your relationships.

Debra brings up an amazing point: we see that Jesus had to go through the lowest of the low to get to the point of resurrection. We need to know that we may have to go through the dark season of exposing all of our issues in a relationship to get to where Jesus can resurrect it. Counseling is such a tool in this area. There is such an importance in counseling and learning to fight the stigma that counseling is for issues that have already arisen. But our culture needs to let counseling be something that helps us maintain health in our lives, whether in relationships or not.

Let’s not believe that passivity and selflessness are the same thing. Let conflict be a place to learn and discuss and be vulnerable. Discussing hard things isn’t just saying what you think. It is about digging deeper and wondering what the root of the conflict is. That is what leads to true healing.

All of Debra’s links

I can’t wait for you to tune in and listen today!

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068: Alex Seeley

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Welcome to this week’s episode of Thriving Beyond Belief! With me today is Alex Seeley, author of the book Taylor Made, wife and mother, minister, and native Australian who calls Nashville her home!

Being in full time ministry since she was 22 was a calling Alex had on her life ever since she called Jesus her Savior at age 11.

Thriving is God’s promise to us if we know Him personally. Alex talks about the difference between being saved and being freed. Salvation is our justification, but our walk with the Lord is our sanctification. Alex shares such wisdom on the expectation we have of our Christian life without working out our faith. There is such negativity, gossip, hatred, judgement, comparison, and anxiety in our minds, yet we do nothing to transform our minds. It is one thing to know in your mind that Jesus loves you, but it is a whole other thing to let that fact resonate who you are.

Alex shares her amazing story, which begins with her life being considered an “accident”, continues through broken parents raising broken children, and led to thoughts of rejection and a sense that she would never measure up. These thoughts and the need for some control in her life led Alex to developing an eating disorder. Even though she knew the Lord at the time of her disorder, she didn’t believe the Lord could handle this aspect of her life and heart, which is something so many believers deal with now. We believe that the deep, dark hard places of our lives are something God cannot handle, which is precisely what the enemy wants us to think. But Alex talks about the journey from that and the wrestles she had with the Lord about speaking the truth out loud and receiving help.

Alex speaks on becoming free of so many burdens, such as insecurity. There is a difference between having insecurity about something and being bound by insecurity. She speaks so beautifully about the struggle and some steps to take to overcome the self-doubt you have about yourself. Once you focus on your Creator and what He did so that you could be His, the fears and doubts and insecurities will dissipate. We change our focus from ourselves to the Lord.

There are so many pressures on women today, so many expectations we put on ourselves of what we have to be all the time. We discuss the shift from that mindset to simply being obedient. We should cancel the noise from other people telling us we are and focus on the voice of God telling us who we are.

 

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Social Media Links

Instagram: @alexseeley

Website: www.alexseeley.com/

Facebook: @alexseeley

Order Book here: https://www.tailormadebook.com/

Media: http://www.alexseeley.com/media/

 

 

 

Lysa TerKeurst

067: Lysa TerKeurst

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I am thrilled to have Lysa Terkeurst with me on this episode of Thriving Beyond Belief!

And why am I thrilled…….let me count the ways:
1. We have a similar stories and the same Redemptive God
2. We both have had serious marriage struggles, but God still Reconciled
3. Both marriages have hurts, pains, resentments and anger, but God still Restored
4. Trust has to be rebuilt with time and consistency, and God never leaves us or forsakes us
5. Vulnerability happened for both of us, & God desires intimacy with all of us! He wants our heart!
Lysa just published a new book, “It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way” and it has resonated so deeply with me and I hope you each receive an opportunity to read it. One of Lysa’s goals with this book is to make sure others don’t feel alone in their journey, which so closely correlates with the ministry Jeff and I have given our life to.

The amazing thing is how Lysa has seen how the circumstances in her life have led to deep and painful times before the Lord, which leads further to deeper understanding of the Word of God and to be an even more reliable teacher of the Word.

We talk about the deep, difficult questions of who God is and how He could allow life-altering painful situations happen to His children. Lysa dives into her own journey of emotional healing through the church and Christian counseling and how that led so much to the content in her book.

We also discuss the redemption and restoration of the hard times, mainly with the Lord and then with others in our lives. From Lysa sharing her story, the Gospel is being shared and there has been so much healing for so many just by knowing that they are not alone, even in the valley. And what joins each of us in the valley is the truth of God’s Word and His character.

Lysa shares with vulnerability what she now has to work through because of what has happened in life, and beautifully clarifies the healthy difference between vulnerability in sharing and the importance of privacy. We even talk about no longer taking things for granted, but taking every situation to the Lord. We take our situation out of the center of our lives and replace that with the Lord. He is the only one that can bring peace and remove fear.

“God loves us too much to answer our prayer in any other time than the right time and in any other way than the right way.”

This is one episode you will not want to miss. I hope you join me!

 

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Social Media Links

Instagram: @LysaTerkeurst

Website: www.Lysaterkeurst.com

Facebook: @OfficialLysa

 

 

 

065: Donna Pisani

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Welcome to this week’s episode of Thriving Beyond Belief! Today, I have Donna Pisani on and I can’t wait for you to hear all that she has to share!

Donna lives with her family in the heart of Washington D.C. and has written a book, The Power of Not Yet. She has an incredible story and shares it with us today of how the Lord radically met her in the middle of her life and fulfilled the love she was so desperately looking for.

Donna shares that she truly knows what thriving is because she knows what not thriving feels like. She talks about the difference between going to church and having a true and intimate relationship with Jesus. She is so encouraging when discussing that her passion is for young women to truly get who Christ can be in this life. There is so much to discover about who the Lord is and what He is doing, but we so often miss out on knowing His love and grace because we are so task oriented, fixated on behavior modification. That was never what the Lord intended our relationship with Him to be!

We talk about the power of vulnerability and how that it is directly linked with thriving. Donna discusses that perfection, for her, is somewhat having control over a situation. But as long as we as humans are involved in a situation, it will never be perfect! Perfection is a story of the Lord’s redemption in our lives. God does not long for perfection, but for sanctification.

Speaking on Donna’s book, The Power of Not Yet, is so fascinating about the fact that our lives with the Lord are ever changing. We are hit with circumstances in our lives that we couldn’t prepare for, but how we process and move forward means more than the end result sometimes. She writes on how the Lord is telling us “not yet” in different capacities, and what we can learn in the process of our waiting.

With her book, we also talk about identifying fear rather than running from it, how to begin digging into Scripture, and the power of the process.

“Whatever you are walking through is developing you for leadership and influence.” This podcast went by so fast and there is so much wisdom within it. I hope you take some time to listen today!

 

Tune In

 

Social Media Links

Instagram: @donnapisani

Book Website: The Power of The Not Yet

Facebook: @donnapisani

 

 

 

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