This is the Promises of God Podcast and I’m your host, Tracie Rollins. This podcast is about you, your ability to hear and believe and take action on God’s promises in your life because all of God’s promises are yes and amen. Resources mentioned in today’s episode can be found on PromisesofGodPodcast.com. Now, let’s get started.
Welcome back to the promises of God podcast, episode number 23 my name is Tracie Rollins, and I want to thank you so much for spending some time with me today as we learn and take action on God’s promises in life. This one series is about confidence, and we’re working at of the momentum devotional offered by Bible journaling ministries titled Unshakable Confidence. You can learn more about Bible journaling with their free 10-day Bible journaling course at BibleJournalinMnistries.com today we’re talking about the confidence that originates with God and our verse is Psalm 89:34 in our King James version. It reads my covenant will I not break nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips Confidence originates with God. I have felt unqualified for many tasks that God’s placed in my life. As a young engineer, I didn’t feel qualified to make decisions for millions of dollars.
I was in this internship, it was a nine-month-long internship in another state was the first time I was away from my family, and my manager was, you know, used to go up and down the aisles, just yelling. That’s what he did. He loved to yell at people and, and it was a hard situation to be in, and I didn’t have confidence in my education. I didn’t have faith that I knew how to do my job as an engineer. I was right in the middle of college, just really had taken my undergraduate courses. I was planning on leaving engineering. I didn’t like it anyways, and I just thought, why am I doing this And God always puts us in funny situations so that we can learn and grow from them. Well he came up to me, my boss, and he gave me this blueprint, and he said, find the best place for this tool.
And when I say tool, I mean this big machine. And it took me about eight hours. I talked to people and, I try to find out, you know, I wanted to learn more about this tool, and I wanted to learn more about specific layouts and why it would be significant. So I would do things as I would go into the factory and when you go into the factory at the place I worked, you had to put on this, the suit that covered all of your clothes and your face. He didn’t breed on anybody and any of the equipment or any of the products. So I would be all gowned up and in the suit and I would talk to people about like, where do you think it should go and what are the best places for it And so after eight hours, I came back the next day, and I showed him my plan.
I said the best place for this tool is here. Um, here are my reasons. It’s great for this. It’s great for that. And he looked at me, and said, well, we’ve already changed our mind. It can’t even go over here. It has to go over here because, and he didn’t also tell me why, but I found out later it was because a bigger multimillion dollar machine was coming in and the only place it would fit was where I was planning to put this little machine. So within two minutes, all of the work that I had done over the last eight hours was gone. And did that build up my confidence? Absolutely not. Did I learn and grow from it and you know, pick up something else? And do you have success with another project? Absolutely. But you know, having confidence in myself was, was hard and I didn’t have confidence in myself because I was new and out of college.
I didn’t have any experience as an instructional designer, which is someone who creates curriculum. I was tasked cause I was actually brought into the marketing department. I’ve had many jobs over my life. I was brought into the marketing department to lead its content strategy. And basically what that meant was I needed to tell the marketers that had been there for years what they needed to publish when they required a publish. And you know how they needed to publish it was I had to come up with all of the strategies, and I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even have, you know, years of experience in marketing. I had a masters in business. But when you get a college degree with a Master’s in business, you take like two to three marketing courses, and they’re certainly not digital marketing courses. So you have to figure all that on your own.
So did I have confidence in my ability to execute on what my managers are expected of me. No, I didn’t have confidence in doing it. Trusted God, I would, I would do the next step. I would do, you know, pray for resources, you know, ask around, do some research and come up with a plan and hopefully the plan would be executed, and hopefully, we would do better than what we had planned. So my point in telling you all of these things is there so many times in my life that I felt unqualified for the task that God has put in my path and my self-confidence. If I relied on that self-confidence, right That would get me a little bit, you know, give me a little bit in terms of credibility with people around me and at least boosting up their confidence. I feel like when you have self-confidence, people around you, sometimes if they’re on your team, they feel like they also can have confidence or they feel more secure because you have all this confidence, right
But this confidence is confidence in yourself. It’s confidence that I had in myself in my ability to do the things that God has placed in front of me because of the things that I had done in the past or the experience that I had it done in the past. But I will tell you that I didn’t truly understand the confidence that originates with God until he gave me this ministry that I lead today as a marketer, engineer or teacher, whatever you want to call me. I’ve had so many jobs in my life, so many different careers. They’ve all been amazing and fun, but I didn’t feel like when God put me in this position that I had the knowledge, the skills, or even the ability to lead a ministry, I didn’t feel like he had picked the right person. And I certainly didn’t have a theology degree.
I never tended seminary. Um, I didn’t really even have, you know, the, I didn’t even know like enough about the Bible. I thought in order to share, in order to write, in order to do all the things that this ministry requires. But God had different plans and he always has different plans. And it’s so funny because although I didn’t have the confidence in myself, eventually after multiple, you know, multiple, multiple hours in prayer, I learned to have the confidence in him because a lot of the things that he had done in my past, he’s always shown up, right He’s always been around. But I don’t always give him the credit. And when it came to this ministry, I knew I couldn’t do it without him. I didn’t have anything, I didn’t have anything. I believe that was good enough to serve him in this way. So I took one step and as I started taking steps, I started realizing that choosing this path in this ministry meant that I would have to take some risks in my life. Uh, one of the things was I would have to close down my small business and risk not having enough money to make ends meet again.
But then I remembered Philippians 4:19 and I remember that he would always provide for my needs. And so after prayer and conversations with my family and a lot of trust, we launched Bible journaling ministries. And I will tell you that launching this ministry with my self-confidence and myself assurance would have, we would be, we would be gone by now, we would not have been here for, I think it’s been almost way over two and a half years now. We’ve been around, I had to launch this ministry, and I have to live every day with a next step with having confidence in him because he knows the plan, and he knows the way, and he knows what he needs, and he provides for me and he provides exactly what I need when I need it in order to do the things that he has put in my life and that’s what he does with us.
Thanks for listening to the Promises of God Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Bible Journaling M
