TRANSFORMING STRUGGLE INTO STRENGTH WITH CHERLYN DECKER | EP 31

[DAWN GABRIEL] Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome back spiritual explorers. I’m excited to talk today. I don’t know about you, but the fall air is coming and it feels good to kind of have some of my faith favorite things with fall coming, with the leaves turning. I just love the change of season. I’m excited today. Today I have a guest who is a fellow Colorado person. Her name is Cherlyn Decker. She is a speaker, author and coach who has helped hundreds of women turn their struggles into a source of strength. Cherlyn believes that it’s only when we face our challenges that we can take back control and triumph over them. When Cherlyn isn’t busy, helping women become warriors God created them to be, she loves spending time with her husband and two beautiful daughters at their home near Denver. Most weekends, Cherlyn can be found loudly cheering at her daughter’s volleyball game, or curled up on a couch with a blanket, a book, and a cup of tea. Cherlyn welcome to the show. [CHERLYN DECKER: Hey Dawn. Oh, and happy Fallolorado, because that’s what we call it here. [DAWN] Yes. I love it. Falloroda, I haven’t heard that. I’ll have to use that. And I could tell we were going to get along because I am a similar person. I don’t drink coffee, I drink tea and I just love to curl up and read a book with a cup of tea. So when I saw that and you were a fellow Colorado when we got introduced, I was like, we’re going to get along. [CHERLYN: We are, we definitely are. [DAWN] Yes. Well, I’m excited to hear some of your story. When I was reading about you I thought I can’t wait to hear. I was excited and I know my listeners are going to be, it sounds like one of, like we connect on one of my pillars of my podcast, is really diving into our doubt, our pain and our struggle and how that can actually be transformational if we can embrace that and really be real with it. It sounds like that is one of your things, one of your values too. It is. I definitely believe that if we are willing to look at our past and the current things, we’re going through, the difficulties that we are walking through, there are a ton of lessons there. There’s treasure in it if we are willing to take a look and to be courageous and say, “Okay, God, what is it that you want to teach me through this?” Because He promises that He will use all things. There’s no caveat there. All means all. So that means that these difficult things that we walk through, God wants to use that as well if we’re willing to be brave and say, “All right, let’s look a little deeper here and see what He might have to say.” Yes, I think, as you’re saying that I was thinking sometimes like most people don’t start out in the middle of their struggle thinking that. It usually is a process or a journey to get to that point. Would you agree with that or what do you think? [CHERLYN: Oh, that’s for sure. I think sometimes for me it was like rock bottom, but hits the bottom of the pit and then you’re like, okay, now what? Then God’s like, “Are you ready? Are you ready to listen?” [DAWN] I think there comes, there’s like an intimacy there with God because we have to have this level of trusting Him to say, okay, this sucks. I don’t like this, but the there’s a little inkling that I’m going to cling to that you know what you’re doing, even if I don’t like it and I don’t know what’s going on. [CHERLYN: Right. I think for me, one of the biggest things that was in my way was my independence. I realized that what my source of strength is, is Him. And that says dependence. I had to really let go of everything that I thought I had my hands on and say, “All right what are we going to do here?” [DAWN] Well, I love that you say that, because that is one of my struggles is, especially when you’re working with strong women and we are used to are running businesses and running homes and we’re used to like running the show but then deep down there is this independence that can get in the way of our relationship with God. Sometimes we like, at least me, I have to get knocked on my butt to realize how far away I ‘ve gotten. Sometimes that does come through struggle and pain. But I love that you said that, your independence. Can you say more about that or what comes up when you’re thinking about that? [CHERLYN: So when I lost my job from corporate America and it was not something, it was kind of expected, but not really expected, definitely not planned for financially, when I lost my job and everything that was tied to that I was in a position of leadership. I had reached what I thought was a, I had reached a C-suite position and I was very happy and I was confident in my job and what I was doing. I knew that I could do what I was doing out of my own strength. Then when I got laid off, I really had to come face to face with, do I really believe that God is my provider? Because even though I knew that, even though my husband and I had taught stewardship and Sunday school, all of those things, my faith was put to the test of, do I believe that God is who he says He is. So it wasn’t until you began to unpack and unravel everything that was tied into me doing it myself. Thank you very much. Just pat me on the head and blessed me as I go. I really began to realize that my independence, my wanting to hold on to control was really my fear of whether I could truly depend on God. And that is quite the face to face do I trust you? Do I really believe that you are who you say you are? And He is so faithful. He knows our heart. He already knew that was in there. It was just, He used this circumstance to expose it and say, all right, now let me show you that when I say I’m going to provide, I’m going to provide. [DAWN] Wow. So how did that play out? Can you kind of walk us through what that looked like in the moment, like when you lose your job and then you realize, oh my gosh. Financially, how are you going to provide here? What did that look like on your day to day? [CHERLYN: It was terrifying because I was the breadwinner. We were living outside of Washington DC at the time and that is an area that requires two incomes just to survive really. It’s just a very expensive location. We had lived comfortably with two incomes and we had a lot of extra fluff in the budget that we had grown accustomed to. So there was certainly a matter of panic and a matter of cut, cut, cut, where we could and making phone calls to negotiate school loans and all kinds of stuff and just being really honest with people to say, “Hey, lost my job. This is kind of what things look like. This is what we can afford now” trying to get ahead of it, just so we weren’t spiraling into any kind of really bad financial situation. We tried to be really upfront and honest, but that does not mean that it balanced. At the end of the month it didn’t. It didn’t make things go away. It didn’t make all of a sudden, we were using Quicken. It didn’t make Quicken green. It was still red all over the place saying we didn’t have enough money left over at the end of the month. It was terrifying because I’m a planner. I like to know what’s coming down the road three months from now to make sure that we are good and we’re covered. Because of the fact that we had so much steward and financial, biblical financial understanding underneath our belt early in our marriage, we did have some savings. But that was not meant to sustain us on a regular basis. It’s meant there to be an emergency. Well, this was definitely an emergency and we had to tap into that. So financially it was definitely difficult and hard. I mean, it had an impact on my marriage because I was the breadwinner and my husband’s like, well, you just need to go back to work. Then every single door that I knocked on closed in my face. My network had nothing. I’d been in the workforce for 12 years. This wasn’t something that all of a sudden I was a, nobody. I had plenty of people I could reach out to and say, “Hey, I lost my job. I’m looking.” They were so wonderful and they’d be like, “Oh, Hey, this place is hiring or that place is hiring.” I got nowhere fast. Then I was wrestling with the Lord of saying, trusting that He was going to provide the job. I remember very clearly when the job of a lifetime, kind of a head hunter had called me. It was for a sea level position for a very large university. I was going to be running the entire department, like I had done in the past and the pay was amazing. The problem was it was inside Washington, DC and there was no public transportation to this university. The challenge became very quickly, this is going to be a two-hour commute one way. [DAWN] Oh, wow. That’s like half a day for just traveling. [CHERLYN: Yes, yes, absolutely. Then I had little ones. My youngest was in daycare and my oldest was going into kindergarten. So this was not something that I could be, I could accept this kind of thing with the type of life that I wanted. I felt very strongly that I wanted to be present for my kids. So I had left a previous job that had an hour commute, just so I could have an opportunity to work from home and do some travel and things like that. So I was only gone like every other week or something like that for a couple of days. So that was easier because then I could put my kids on the bus and we just had this whole thing planned out. So it was just quite the struggle when I’m faced with the job of a lifetime and I have to now choose between my family and what I thought was my career path. Well, that was a very easy choice. I chose was my family but there are some women that I realized can’t make that choice because they’re single moms or there’s just a financial hardship. So my heart was just, went out to all of those women who were stuck. So God really just exposed a lot of stuff in my heart about, do I really care about title? Do I really care about money? Do I really care about all of these things that I thought I cared about? Or am I willing to let go of those things and trust him to do something else? That was very hard. It was very hard. And when every door kept kept closing, my husband just was not in a good place. He was, well, what are you going to do? What are you going to go do to fix this? And that’s when God began to start speaking to me about doing something different. When you have no money and you have no job and you’re like, oh, let’s go be an entrepreneur. That isn’t exactly the time. That’s the stuff for marriage counseling. [DAWN] It’s like a setup. But I mean, but what I’m hearing, the word that keeps coming to mind as you were talking about your process, is there was this, well, two words, humbleness and vulnerability are the two words that keep coming up for me when I hear this. [CHERLYN: I love that you called it humble because it felt, this season felt, I feel like that is a compliment for how much I’ve grown. What that felt like before was a definite, like pride comes before the fall. It was a humbling process for sure, where I was all up in myself, in my arrogance and in my abilities and God’s just done such a major work that I’m so glad that now that you see that it does feel more humble than it was in that process because my identity Dawn was tied to everything. It was who I was. I didn’t know how to do anything different other than do or be what my title or my paycheck said that I was. I mean, that’s ridiculous as I think back now, knowing that all that I know and how much I ‘ve grown with the Lord to realize it really is enough to be daughter. [DAWN] It’s hard. I feel like living in America, that is something we all struggle with in the corporate world. Or it just in general, like first world problems is, yes, we put a lot of identity in our work and who we are professionally and we get there are, but I feel like things come into our life where God brings them into our life to say, there’s deeper things to put value in than your profession or your title. But it’s hard. I feel like we are groomed that way to achieve and success and hustle. And it becomes this like tyranny of the urgent. Like we’re just running on this wheel, like a hamster to get ahead, but that there’s deep for things in life to take stock of and spirituality and faith in God is huge and it’s way deeper than titles. Sometimes we need to lose those things so we can see. It is what I’m hearing you say. [CHERLYN: Yes, that’s absolutely right. When we are attached to the right things, when we built our house on the right foundation, when are anchored in the right place, then it doesn’t matter what comes, that there’s no storm now that can ever impact me the same way, because I don’t have my attachments to any of those things anymore. And it was hard to realize that I was attached to all the wrong things, but once I detangled myself from all of that and realized, oh man, I just had my vision in the wrong place. I had my purpose in the wrong place. I was people pleasing in the wrong place and all of those things, if I realized I could just focus on God and let Him be everything and let Him define who he says that I am in His word and let that be enough, then trusting Him that He will work all things out. I can see that now, as we’ve gone through several moves and several trials since then because things happen in cycles I’ve noticed. Is when I get a chance to learn a lesson, I will learn it again — [DAWN] On a different. [CHERLYN: Yes. [DAWN] It’s true. I look at it like a sphere, not like a ladder. I look at it as like a sphere because you’re like over here on one side of the sphere and then you’re going to learn it again on a different side. It’s not like lateral. [CHERLYN: No it’s called going around the same mountain again. [DAWN] Yes, [CHERLYN: And then all of a sudden I’m like, Ooh, there’s an exit ramp. I didn’t even know it existed the first time. [DAWN] Sometimes I call it circling the drain. [CHERLYN: Oh, isn’t that the truth? [DAWN] Wow. So can you give us a timeframe, like how long ago was this, that you lost your job and where you are now? Just so people can kind of get a feel for it. [CHERLYN: So I lost my job in 2015. So it’s been a couple of years now. But that first year was extremely painful. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. There was so much transformation though that happened. Just to kind of give you an idea of how quick God worked, so my layoff happened in February and I had hired a coach and I had hired a spiritual director to kind of walk alongside me in that season because this just wasn’t something that most people that I knew were equipped to walk alongside me in, this whole dying to self process was not exactly a part of the Sunday sermons that I was listening to. Let’s just be true about that. I needed a deeper work done, like a complete overhaul. So I had had people come alongside me who God just brought in at the right timing for that. So by September of that same year, we were invited to a barbecue. This was a barbecue with somebody who I used to work with and she also attended my church. So she had invited people from both groups in her backyard. They were roasting a pig and it was like, bring dessert if your last name is this or salad if your last name is one of those? I walk in and one of the ladies that used to be on my staff was there. She said, so I’m coming in with my toddler and my kindergartner and my husband and with whatever my side dish was. We’re coming in there with our lawn chairs. So she says to me later, she says, “Cherlyn, I recognized your form, but not your countenance.” So much in me had changed that she recognized the frame of my figure coming in there, but just so much of my presence had changed. I no longer looked like myself because God had done such a work and to be almost unrecognizable for people that knew you and worked with you every single day, she was on my staff. There was not a day she did not see me that to have so much transformation that she almost didn’t recognize me is just a testimony to the work that God can do. In that same season, I was on the worship team at church. So we were leading worship and every single week I was up on stage with microphone in hand, just pouring out my broken heart to God in front of everybody. And it’s just, people would come up to us a couple months later. So then again by September and people are asking my husband and I if we were expecting another baby, because there was so much low on the face. But nobody had realized the trauma that we had gone through and the pain that God had just completely healed and all of these wounds that were attached to me losing my job and what that did to my entire family in that season. So just in a short period of time, God did an amazing work. Did I have a new job? No, but there was so much that God had done in that timeframe, just in my heart, that I was a different person already. [DAWN] Wow. That’s so powerful. Even for that woman to be that specific and notice, and to say that like your countenance is different, that’s such an interesting way to say it, but huge for you to just reflect and be like, yes, I’m changed and it’s obvious physically. My emotional state, internally is coming out physically. That’s just amazing. Wow. [CHERLYN: It’s really the testimony of saying, oh, wow, exactly. It’s finally seeing fruit after a very difficult process with the Lord. There wasn’t anything in my life He didn’t prune and to be able to kind of see, to look back and have somebody else recognize that change had happened was so affirming to me. [DAWN] And I’m thinking as I’m listening to you, I like to get really practical too, so that people can like have these takeaways, as you’re thinking back, if you could come up with like two or three things that were pivotal on, how do you do that, how do you dive into this vulnerability and this dependability on God, what would you pinpoint as some of the hows? Do you know what I mean? What do you do if someone’s in the same situation? [CHERLYN: So I think the first thing I’m going to say is how to respond to circumstances when they hit, because we are so used to getting caught up in all of our emotions and all of the drama of everything that’s going around. But instead, if we could just realize that inside the word of God are amazing promises that He has for us. I’d said how I needed to trust that God was going to be my provider. Well, I also needed to trust that I was who He says I was, and that means I had to dig in and find out what He said. So when I found a promise from God in the word that spoke to my circumstances specifically, I held onto it and I began to speak it out loud. I began to say though God’s word says He’s going to provide, He says that He takes care of the sparrows, that the lilies of the field are dressed in more slender and He’s, and so at every single verse I would just hold onto and that I need to not worry. Then I need to cast my cares upon Him. All of these verses I would just memorize and begin to hold onto. So when we would get a bill in the mail and I’d be like, “All right, God, this is yours. Your word says you are my provider.” So God began to show me how many times people use the word of God mainly when we see the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. He says to the enemy, it is written. It is written. So that means we get to do the same thing. I got to hold onto my Bible and say, “It is written here on page, whatever verse, with this address. It is written here that this is the promise that you have given me and my circumstances don’t look a damn thing like your promises. So I am declaring your word over my circumstances that they will shift.” So to me, learning how to declare the word of God was not something that was a part of my faith tradition, but I ‘ll tell you what it became my anchor, because I had nothing else. I had no one else giving me anything else. Everyone else’s suggestions were apply to this job, apply to that job when God was like, “Hey, I’m going to give you a Costco rebate check that’s the same amount of money as your electric bill with 11 cents leftover.” And you’re like, who does that? But God. So then you’re like thankful for a Costco rebate check that’s the same amount. Then like little things like that would just show up. My daughter, we were walking the dogs and doing a little walk around the neighborhood. She found $50 in the ditch. We’re not near anybody’s house. It’s not like we could go knock on the door and say, “Hey, did you lose some money?” This was in the middle of nowhere, like in the section where there’s no houses and we’re like — [DAWN] It’s $50. It’s not like a penny. [CHERLYN: That was groceries for that week. I mean, it wasn’t fantastic groceries, but it was. So all these little things where God would provide. I remember when I would show up and somebody would be like, I feel like I need to buy your gas at the pump. I mean, little things were, God is clearly showing up, but that was because, as I’m saying, Lord, you said, you’re my provider. And that means in this situation with you knowing what things look like here, so those are some tangible things of how God showed up. Now the how for someone else listening is going to be different because God chooses to do things differently. But I ‘ll tell you what it says in revelation that we overcome the enemy by the blood of the land, which is the blood of Christ and the word of our testimony. So if you need God to provide for you today, then my testimony can be that thing that you hold onto that says, Hey, God, do that again for me. So the second piece of information that I would give about how to dive in and really let your difficulties kind of transform you is to really become face to face with who are you letting speak into you during this time? Because I had to evaluate all the voices. I had to recognize that some of the voices that were speaking to me weren’t mine, or they were the voice of the enemy that was whispering in my ear. I mean, we are women, we recognize the voice when we stand on the scale and it says all kinds of things about our value. We know that that voice is not ours. So that’s the voice of the enemy who likes to plant his thoughts and his feelings towards us in our minds. So when I began to recognize, wait a minute, that’s not, God. God doesn’t speak that over me. Or that’s not me. Or that thought didn’t come from me. I could discern whose voice this is coming from then I could choose to reject it. Well, that meant there were also people in my life who, in this very tender season could not have permission to speak because they either were problem solvers, like job’s friends. But they were like, “Hey, just curse God.” And I’m like, “Absolutely no, I’m not going to do that..” Or they would have solutions and they weren’t understanding that God was calling me into entrepreneurship. So they were thinking, oh, well just tweak your resume or update your LinkedIn or all kinds of different things. God was calling me to do something else and had I been chasing what everyone else’s voice was saying I would’ve been in a direction that God was not having me in. So I had to be really careful about the people who I was letting speak into my life. For me, it came down to, are they good listeners, are they trying to problem solve or are they really trying to listen to the holy spirit with me for me and in alignment with what God is saying right now in this season. And frankly not everybody is gifted in that. [DAWN] It’s true, because again, it’s like, what is their focus? Is it this deeper level or is it like a superficial level? And I just want to go back to the first thing you said. Actually I love both of those things you just said, because it sounds so much like what I actually do in my counseling relationship with clients is so much of my work on a deep level is number one, like fact checking the thoughts that go through our head. When you’re a believer, you do, you do have the Bible to go back to and say, is what I’m really saying in a true or not.. So many times whether people are believers or not like most of people in therapy or should be in therapy are people who aren’t realizing how much our negative beliefs are impacting and driving our life. So I love that you said being anchored into the promises of, God because that is truth, that is not based on circumstances. But God can very specifically dive into your personal story with those promises and to cling to those truths, especially when you’re so thrown about with like we said, the vulnerability, the self-worth and all this stuff is swirling around in so many emotions. You need somewhere to anchor. I love that. That was your first thing to, step one, anchor yourself to truth and the promises God give. I love that. When I had no job to go to every day I put on my yoga pants and pull up my greasy hair and sit on the couch. And really all I had was my Bible. So I could choose to binge the Hallmark channel and cry all my tears, or I could choose to dive into the word of God and say, “All right, I need you to build me up right now. I need you to speak life into me because you are my source.” When I began to do that, I mean, I began to strengthen my spiritual muscles and realize, oh my gosh, there’s so much power here that I’m not even tapping into. It’s when I began to find my voice of confidence when I could face off of my circumstances and be like you are going to come into alignment with what God says. I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but I know who He is. There’s tons of examples in the Bible of how He came through for somebody else. So I don’t care if He has to part the water. I don’t care if He has to walk on it. I don’t care if the water comes out of a rock because at the end of the day, God can do it because His word has said that there’s nothing in His way. And if he can create the world out of nothing, that he can create a job for me out of nothing too. [DAWN] Yes. He’s God. I think we forget that He tells a us to claim it. He tells us to reach out and take it. So many times we do not access the power of God. I remember one time I was struggling really hard with anxiety and panic attacks in my life. I was sitting and I was listening to one of my pastors and he, I don’t even remember everything, I just remember he said, we have the same power that rose Christ from the dead. We have access to that because we are children of God. We are his daughters and sons. I was like, wait, I am not accessing that. I am letting fear and anxiety run my life. And it doesn’t mean it’s like, everything’s gone the next day and it’s like this magic wand, but it’s this deeper level of diving in and saying, what do I need to let go of? What do I need to cling to? We have access to that. We have access to the Holy Spirit. I just love what you’re saying Cherlyn. You’re right. Because we sometimes are like, okay, I’m still anxious. Even though your word says, cast my cares on you, what does that actually look like? That means that every single time, this worry begins to rise up in me. I acknowledge it. I say, I am aware that this is here and I choose to give this to you God. So if that means I have, have to do that all day every day until I feel His peace, then that’s just what I do. If that means that, okay, I have to do it again tomorrow, that means I do it again tomorrow. But this is just, I mean, it’s exercising muscles that we haven’t used. And our faith is what Jesus says. We’ll cast the mountain into the sea. If we have enough faith that we can say faith is the evidence of things unseen, it’s the things that are hoped for, we have to put our hope that God will show up with our faith, that He can, because he says he will. He will, because He says it. I mean, I said, tried to say that two different ways to kind of get my point across is that if God’s word says it, we can trust that He will fulfill it. The Bible says His word does not return void. It will finish what it to set out to accomplish. So that means that if God is going to speak it, or if He’s going to write it in His word, He’s not going to let us flounder. Well, there will be there be things we have to learn along the way and say, okay, what is his job loss trying to tell me? What are you trying to teach me? He’s trying to teach me to be fully dependent on Him, to let go of the things that I’m worried about and trust Him. [DAWN] Yes, and when you’re saying that I’m hearing two things that come up is. One is it’s a choice. I heard you say the word choice. You have to choose this. The second one is not trying. It’s like training yourself for it. You have to exercise this muscle. It’s not like, you’re going to say, I’m going to go run a marathon tomorrow and you just wake up and do it. No, you have to train for it. You have a training program laid out, you have things you do every day. It’s training, not trying. That’s what I’m hearing you say, like it’s a choice and a choice again the next day and again, the next day, like it’s a training program almost of exercising these promises. It’s not magic. You have to claim it. [CHERLYN: No. But the good news is the holy spirit is our teacher. If we are open to learning these things, he will teach us because that’s what he is. When Jesus said that he had to leave so that the spirit could come, this was part of what he was talking about. He had to leave in the flesh so the spirit could come and lead us and guide us and train us and equip us in the way we’re supposed to walk this life of a kingdom minded person, where we’re constantly saying, I choose to stand in a place of victory, knowing that Jesus paid for this, knowing that God going to provide for me. It’s choosing to say, I’m in agreement with what your word says and I’m going to help you change my heart and change my behavior to be able to come into alignment, because there were some things that I was doing that were in my own way. And we have to sometimes realize, oh, wait, that’s on me. It’s my anger that got me in this situation or it’s my impatience or it’s my whatever. So God’s like, well, maybe you didn’t lose that job on your own. Maybe it was this, that, or the other thing that caused you to be in a position where they were like, let’s just get rid of her. I mean, but there are, and I can say that because I’ve walked with enough women who have lost their jobs and are in transition who are like, I just don’t want to work in a toxic work environment anymore. How do I then leave? Then what do we do to kind of heal our hearts from those things? There are some things we have to let go of along the way so that God can heal us and we can move on. [DAWN] Yes. And I’m hearing just like this brutal honesty with yourself is also how you got through it to just be really courageous and look at yourself and stop letting our own stuff get in the way and just be honest and sit there and say, “Okay, God reveal to me what needs to change.” And I’m wondering Cherlyn, it sounds like you now help others through this. Tell us a little bit about what you do now with your, you said you’re an entrepreneur. So tell us a little bit more about that. [CHERLYN: So in that season, when God was calling me to do something else, one of the things that we were identifying as what are the things that I’m good at was I was really good at building people personally, professionally, and then spiritually, building them up and launching them into new things. So what I do is I coach women to lead, hear and experience the voice of clarity. So that really is God, being able to listen to the voice of God for all of our circumstances that we’re kind of walking through. So I do coach women, one on one, I have groups that I help walk people through when it comes to how to overcome some of the trials in their life. Then for those that I know that don’t hire a coach or want to try DIY, because there’s a bunch of us that like to do that, and that’s fine, I did write a book with my entire story and a lot of these how-tos and the process that God walked me through and what he had me do at a practical level; not just learning how to respond differently with the word of God and not just identifying who the right people are that speaking to your life, but so many other things. I’m glad to make that book available to your audience. [DAWN] Tell us the book name so we can find it and where do we get it? [CHERLYN: So the book is called Roar Back: Transforming Struggle into Strength and it’s available on Amazon. It’s also available on my website and I have a special place for your listeners to go to. They can go to my website, cherylndecker.com/fringes. That’s for you guys. Then that way you can connect with me there on social media. There’s a link for my book. I do have signed copies of my book that I can make available too, if people want those. [DAWN] I love that. Thank you. That is so generous. I’m excited to read it myself because I just feel like we connect so well on a deep level. I’m resonating so much with what you’re saying and I feel like it’s a lot of similar work that I do with people. So I’m excited to get your book. So yes, say that again. Spell your name, Cherlyn Decker so people can look it up. Yep. Cherlyn, C-H-E-R-L-Y-N Decker, D-E-C-K-E-R.com. For your listeners /fringes. That way that’s a place for you to go. And I have, how I said that I want you to practice declaring the word of God over your life, I have on that site for you, a declaration that you can get a hold of and you can declare it when you’re walking through some difficult stuff to kind of say, “Hey, here’s a verse from the Lord,” and how to then declare that in your life, how to speak that out loud. Because this is not something that all of us have been trained in how to do just like we go to the gym and hire a personal trainer. Sometimes we need to know how to use the word of God as a weapon. So that’s kind of what this tool is for. [DAWN] I love that. I love it. I’ll probably use it with my clients because I feel like it’s true. We either have heard it in like a weird woo woo woo way or somebody has said a verse for us and it was just to get them out of their uncomfortableness when they’re talking to us. But this sounds different. This sounds like this is truth and claim it. I love that you have that. I think it’s such a great thing for people. Thank you so much. [CHERLYN: Oh, I’m glad to make that available. It’s been such a, to know the power of the word and then to keep the sword in its sheath just doesn’t feel like we’re doing it justice. So let’s get our swords out and swing it. [DAWN] Yes, it’s an active thing, sword. I love it. Well, Cherlyn, thank you so much. I feel like this has been such a blessing to hear your story. I feel like it was very encouraging and hopeful and very practical at the same time. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you today. [CHERLYN: Oh, Dawn, this has been a absolute pleasure and thank you for having me and introducing me to the spiritual explorers that want to connect with God in a new way. If when we are willing, He’ll meet us. [DAWN] I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up. Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. Itis given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.