239. Discerning God’s Call in a New Season with Mandy Horne

Carrie: I love today’s episode because there’s a lot of personal testimony here that I think you can learn from about how to know if God is calling you into a new season. Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. I’m joined today by Mandy Horn, registered nurse, board-certified holistic nurse and nurse coach, founder of Wellspring of Life Coaches. With more than 25 years of nursing experience, her own personal health journeys, Mandy really helps midlife women navigate burnout, hormonal changes, caregiving, empty nest, and seasons of transition.

This episode isn’t just for women, though. It’s for anyone who’s navigating transition or change or who is wanting to hear God’s voice. Mandy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mandy: I have been married for 25 years, so my husband and I, we’ve been together 28 years altogether. But throughout our 25 years of marriage, we have been interwoven through multiple different ministries from missionaries with The Navigators, college students, then he was a pastor at a church, and now he’s a chaplain.

Mandy: That’s not something I can go to work with him necessarily. It’s a little bit different ministry for our family for the first time. But yes, we have two kiddos. We have one 22-year-old, will be a senior in college, so it’s crazy, and a 19-year-old with special needs. He has Asperger’s and ADHD, OCD, all sorts of things, and he took the last year off and is going to be starting at a technical school.

Mandy: I can’t think what they’re called, trade school type things. My personal kinda path in between all that, I’ve been a nurse for 25 years. Majority of that period of my nursing career was on postpartum with moms and babies. So loved that time, and then the Lord called me out to coaching just a few years ago.

Mandy: So that is where I am now. That was a really quick run-through.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that we wanted to dive into a little bit more because you help people who are moving into different seasons of life. I think a lot of times our listeners with OCD really struggle even if they don’t have OCD.

Carrie: Is this something from God? Is it not? I don’t know if this is true for you. It feels like when we’re trying to make these big decisions, it’s like God moves slowly and then quickly sometimes. It’s like slowly, like little things get dropped to us, and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, it’s time.” Like, “I need to move.

Carrie: I need to do the thing.” I don’t know if that’s true for you or not. That’s just something that I’ve seen. But like tell us a little bit about like some of these circumstances that caused you to shift from nursing, that’s a long time in a nursing career, to then nurse coaching.

Mandy: Yeah, definitely. I feel like there were multiple things that kinda led to this, but my own kinda health journey Myself personally, I had three open heart surgeries when I was 19, both genetic things both my grandma and mom had, but not anything that we knew was genetic at that point.

Mandy: Watching my mom and grandma and their health journey That was not very good. I knew that like, okay, is that the path I wanna go down, or is there something I can do to, to prevent this, to change the outcome necessarily? So when the Lord moved us from Texas to Indiana back in 2011, I was just suddenly exposed to a good portion of the people at our church who were doing just things that were different, holistic, preventative healthcare, things like that.

Mandy: And that was just a huge turning point for me because I was curious, I should say. I had always been taught in the medical field and nursing that conventional medicine, traditional nursing, all that stuff were all that there was, and that any holistic practices or things like that were questionable or even kind of ridiculous.

Mandy: It was often like a mock thing, a laughter, a not very cool thing. But as I look back even now, like, I don’t blame any of those people ’cause that’s just what they were taught. They didn’t know any different. There’s lots of stuff out there on the … They play in it, they do it. No, I don’t think … That’s not the heart of

Mandy: Most people is not to cause harm, especially anyone who is called to something in the medical field. That was a little sidescript, but I just really started researching myself. Like, that has just been something that I love doing. I love researching, and I started paying attention to those families, and just noticing that there were more intentional choices when it came to food for their family, environments that they were exposed to.

Mandy: So you kind of have like physical, mental, emotional, all that, how they dealt with stress, and just their overall health, and there were less illnesses. I really can’t even think of anybody who had any chronic health struggles. I wanted to understand why, so that’s why I started really researching it myself.

Mandy: Many of them were part of, like, some MLM companies, you know, oils or different things like that, which made me a little more skeptical, for sure. As I watched and researched myself, I started changing some of those things for our family, like things that we ate, or getting rid of chemicals and toxins that are in our home, and just paying more attention to what we did physically as far as what we put in our bodies, how we took care of our bodies, and that’s including, like, mental, emotional part, and of course, spiritual.

Mandy: Like, that’s the foundation of all of it, our walk with Christ. So I just really dove into it deep. It started out with little things here and there to where there was just a total transformation in our home, and it was just crazy, the results that we saw. And then as I continued working, being a nurse in the hospital, I couldn’t help but not notice how many people came in with things that could’ve been prevented, or most likely could’ve been prevented, by all means.

Mandy: It broke my heart, honestly, just knowing that there was another option, and I couldn’t say anything. You know, you can’t talk about it in the hospital setting or most medical places. I shared with a lot of nurses. Actually, quite a few of us on our unit started doing some things together and just seeing some real changes in their health and their families, and I did get to integrate a few alternative therapies in my hospital.

Mandy: That was a-

Carrie: Wow …

Mandy: crazy experience, but yeah, that- Took almost four years, but it did happen, and it has now gone over to all of the same, the entire system. Like, they have eight locations, so it’s, like, transpired through all of them. So that’s been pretty cool to see, ’cause that was just something the Lord laid on my heart, and I thought, like, that would be it.

Mandy: I thought that was that pivotal moment. The Lord used me to get that into some of the hospitals, but then I just didn’t feel a peace or, like, that was the end. Felt like that was more the starting point, kind of like what you just said a minute ago, the starting point of that transition for me, where He just was like, “Okay, you obeyed me in this one little thing, and now I have something else for you to do.”

Carrie: Tell us about, like, what kind of small changes were you seeing? I’m curious about specifically with your special needs son. What did you notice kind of as you changed some maybe food or environmental things? Was it just less stress on the body made it easier to manage, like, symptoms?

Mandy: Yeah, gut health is one of the biggest things.

Mandy: So when you’re eating real natural food, not getting foods that have hormones or added antibiotics and all these other things that they add to our foods, the dyes that are added, all those kind of things, um, those just cause more inflammation. And there’s that gut-brain connection that is just absolutely amazing, that connection there.

Mandy: So by healing his gut, and not just him, but our whole family. My daughter really struggled with a lot of anxiety. My husband, pain and different things. I always had real bad reflux and migraines. And making those transitions just changed everything. I would love to be able to say that, you know, my son is no longer autistic or

Mandy: He still had those tendencies, but actually a total different side thing. Just a couple years ago, I dove into homeopathy. Um, I don’t teach. I’m not a homeopath, so I don’t teach that. But had never heard of it. It was just another one of those just random holistic options. And I always thought, “Okay, well, that, I’ll try everything, but not that, ’cause that’s really weird.

Mandy: I don’t understand it.” But we did. I finally did, and that has made the biggest transformation for my son, which was absolutely crazy. Anyhow, but I can get deeper on that, but I’m not a homeopath. I don’t wanna speak incorrectly on it.

Carrie: Gotcha. So interesting just that the change in environment really caused you to do some more research, caused you to try a few things, and you saw some changes in your family.

Carrie: That bled over into work. This is really interesting, too, because I think when God moves us, there’s a certain level of unsettled. Like you were saying, it’s like, “Oh, this is cool, but oh, that wasn’t all there was. So this wasn’t, like, the end point of what God wanted me to do. Like, there’s something a little, like, stirring in my spirit.

Carrie: Maybe there’s something more here.” So tell us about that, kind of like as you were maybe wrestling or praying through that. What came up for you?

Mandy: I was unsettled. I didn’t feel competent. I think I’ve kind of said that before. I feel like as the enemy starts to bring just constant self-doubt to us, and we can either grab hold of that and take that thought captive and turn to the Lord and seek His truth and that possible lie that we’re speaking to ourselves.

Mandy: I felt like I really had to have all the answers to, like, be an expert in everything before the Lord could use me. So I feel like for several years, I was just researching, digging more, trying to get all these different certifications, trying to become just the expert, but then realizing that I didn’t need that.

Mandy: Like, God, He doesn’t call the ones who are already knowledgeable and have all the answers, know everything, but He calls you, and then He provides. He prepares, He provides for us. He gives us the word. Invite the Holy Spirit, and He will walk with you through that It’s really that one step at a time is what I’ve seen really is taking one obedient step at a time.

Mandy: And you’re not gonna have the whole picture out front. Like, He doesn’t give us the whole map or blueprint or anything, but He’s that light for that one step to take the next step, and then just kind of build on that. There was a period of time when I first started seeking what exactly the Lord was calling me to do next, where He showed me, uh, coaching.

Mandy: I had actually never heard of coaching. And then He said, “Yes,” but He said, “But wait.” And that was confusing for me, I think. But as I look back and reflect, that was the time it was my daughter’s senior year in high school. There was just a lot going on in our family. We actually moved my parents here from Texas and built a home together, so we were all learning to adjust to that in one space.

Mandy: But I know that what was nice was having just that peace of knowing, okay, this isn’t the right time. When it is, He’ll show me. And just continuing to seek His truth, be in the Word, pray through it, ask for a wise counsel of friends, family, church members to kind of confirm that. And when I say that, I always wanna say, I didn’t say, “Hey, can you confirm to me that I’m in God’s will?”

Mandy: It was more just like, yeah, it was praying that, “Lord, would you bring that confirmation if I’m in your will, if this is the direction?” And it was probably the coolest thing I’ve experienced in my years of walking with the Lord, was just how randomly it was, how He would send another believer to just say something to me that maybe they didn’t have any idea necessarily what it meant, but it was that confirmation that the Lord sent.

Mandy: And, and I like to encourage people with that. If the Lord lays something on your heart for someone else, share it. Like, that’s an act of obedience there, you sharing that because you have no idea what that is gonna mean for that person. So I think I got off the trail there.

Carrie: No, I think that’s good. I’m on this book-writing journey that the Lord has brought me to, and it’s been a very long journey of thinking about writing a book, of thinking about different topics, of really feeling like it wasn’t the right time.

Carrie: Like you said, yeah, maybe that’s for me someday, but I’m just gonna lay that to the side and just trust God with that. And different people have said things like, “You should write a book,” or, “I would love more information about this,” et cetera. And so it’s just interesting. And I don’t know exactly where that journey is gonna go fully, but it’s, uh, quite a messy process.

Carrie: But I can definitely see how it’s been a long time coming. It’s not been a rushed process. And I think sometimes we’re so much in a rush. Like, “I gotta know right now, and I gotta know how it’s all gonna turn out and make sure it’s okay,” and God doesn’t give you that. Like you were saying, it’s more like, no, God gives you the peace.

Carrie: You’re on the right track. This is just put one step in front of the other, the road that you’re going down. And I think really having the time to devote to it, where you knew, like, your family was gonna be more settled, your daughter was gonna be graduated, and all of that, that makes sense. How did you have that assurance that it was time when those things settled?

Mandy: Yeah. I feel like the assurance didn’t come from, like, having one big dramatic sign or knowing, like, every detail of exactly what I should do. So that’s for sure. I feel like he, like I mentioned before, he doesn’t give us that whole blueprint up front. So I was kind of praying through, this is pre-finding, like, the coaching option.

Mandy: Everyone kept saying, “You need to become a nurse practitioner. You need to do this or that.” And I had just no peace about becoming a nurse practitioner. In fact, it kind of made me sick to my stomach every time that it came up. But I experienced, like, a deep peace And just recognition when I did discover the nurse coaching thing.

Mandy: God, like, repeatedly confirmed that direction through prayer and scripture and other believers, like I mentioned. I sensed a clear instruction to remain focused during that time on my family for that season, and then when that timing finally changed, that calling was still there, and I was more prepared to receive it.

Mandy: And I, I can tell you the moment, like, that the Lord just brought me this peace. Honestly, it just was in a moment of grieving my daughter being off at college. Have you experienced the emptiness in your kids off yet? No. Okay.

Carrie: I am qu- quite far from that.

Mandy: Yeah, I didn’t think you had yet, but just prepare your heart for that.

Mandy: It was a lot harder than I expected. I think we long– We see our kids succeeding, doing these things. We think it’s just gonna be all peace and joy and wonderful, and it is for some people. But for my husband and I, it was kind of devastating. Like, we were happy and sad all at once. There was joy and grief all together.

Mandy: It was just a mix of emotions we didn’t anticipate having. And as I was literally just crying and crying to the Lord for her protection, for her experience there, for the people she would encounter on campus as they would continue to pour into her and her walk, the Lord literally just laid on my heart, “Okay, now it’s your turn.

Mandy: Now you can go and pursue that.” It was just a moment where I just– Did I hear you right? Are you sure? I don’t think so. I’m a hot mess right now. And the Lord just gave me such a peace, and my time with Him through the Word, confirmation after confirmation, and that’s when I was saying that the Lord brought several people from church who just came up and randomly said things that I knew without a doubt was from the Lord, just that confirmation.

Mandy: That was just sweetness of how much our Heavenly Father loves us and cares and how He pursues us.

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, just the whole structure of your day because you had been homeschooling as well, that now you had a lot more time to dedicate to things. The happy/sad with that. I’m sad that I’m not– and still investing in this way, and the happy of, like, she’s launching out into the world, and you have done the beginning part of the parenting, right?

Carrie: And now there’s some letting go. Not that the parenting ends. I think we’ve brought this up before, and I really, I guess, wanna stress to people that in our Christian life, we don’t wanna just go to God when we feel like we need something or we feel like we need an answer. Here I am, God, I need this answer, or I have this uncertainty, and I need you to kinda, like, fill this gap.

Carrie: How do you feel like that time of, like, abiding in Christ, of whatever that looks like, the worship, the prayer, being in community On a day-to-day basis, how do you feel like that connects with when people are making these big transitions of decisions, like for a new season?

Mandy: Honestly, I really can’t fathom, like, trying to navigate life, especially big transitions, without that walk with Christ, bringing that hope, like the light in the dark world.

Mandy: I mean, you know all this crazy stuff going on in our world today, but, like, living in the dark, and we hear so many voices, I feel like, coming out of so many opinions and responsibilities of all these things that we’ve gotta take care of, and fears and uncertainties and all that, and it’s just constantly consuming.

Mandy: But when we abide in Christ alone, that’s a reminder that we don’t have to understand the entire story, because we trust the one who’s writing that story for us. One of the verses that I go to often, I’m trying to think right now where. I think it’s John 15:4, the, “Abide in me, and I in you. And apart from me, you can do nothing.”

Mandy: To me, that abiding means remaining closely connected to Christ, and that can be, you know, prayer, scripture, time alone with Him. Worship is a huge one that I feel like is so empowering for me That daily dependence on him that keeps us close to him so we can recognize his voice and when he tells us.

Mandy: You’ve probably heard multiple times, if you aren’t spending time with your spouse, you know you’re not gonna know them. But the more time you spend with them, you know their voice, you know their sneeze, their cough, all the little sounds that they make. And it’s the same thing in our relationship with the Lord, that being close to him, we can recognize his voice.

Mandy: And when he does clearly call us or tell us to maybe take that next step or whatever it is. And we have a lot of just really cool testimonies, I feel like over the years, of where the Lord has come in and intervened and told us to do something that seemed absolutely crazy. And in fact, we had one before moving from Texas to Indiana, where it was kind of like the joke of the community because we were like, “The Lord is telling us to move, to leave, to go somewhere.”

Mandy: We didn’t know where at that point yet, but we knew clearly the Lord said what to do. The Lord literally told me, “Start packing things and sell all of this.” Like, we sold all of our furniture, everything, and we had not taken on a new position or anything but the Lord clearly told my husband that, “You’re leaving this ministry,” that was leaving Navigators, “and I have somewhere else for you.”

Mandy: And so when my daughter was in public school at that point, she was in kindergarten. She was in first grade at that point. Yeah, they were like, “Where are you going?” We’re like, “We don’t know yet, but we trust the Lord. He told us to pack.” And literally when we sold our stuff, all of our stuff sold in one weekend, and I’m talking multiple people.

Mandy: It wasn’t like one person came and bought it all, like everything. Anyhow, that’s just a small little just testimony. If you start to know what it feels like when he tells you to do something and to act in obedience.

Carrie: Yeah. And then the opportunity, like the door opened there really fast or something? Was it like one of those situations?

Mandy: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah.

Mandy: Literally, I can share. It was Easter Sunday of 2011. We had been packed for a couple months at that point, and a church in Indiana called us. And just to know a little backstory before that, when God was telling us to pursue family and children’s ministry, we were like, “Okay, great.” So my husband put out applications all over Texas and, like, there were no bites, no bites, no bites.

Mandy: Or, like, we’d have interviews and it was like, “That is not where God’s calling us.” And the Lord brought us to a point where he was like, “Do you trust me? Why are you limiting my boundaries, like, on a global map?” And we’re like, “Well, okay, maybe we’ll trust you with that part. Where are you thinking that you wanna send us?”

Carrie: Yeah.

Mandy: There was, like, a church in Kansas. I was trying to think where it was, and then there were, like, five in Indiana, and literally I was like, “Okay, where’s Indiana again? I don’t really remember where that state is. Who in the world goes to Indiana?” Yeah. Like Indiana.

Carrie: That’s

Mandy: funny. But Easter Sunday, yeah, a church from Indiana called us, and we started talking to them.

Mandy: We had to sit on my son’s bed because we had kept our kids’ furniture. That was it. Everything else had already been sold. My husband and I were sleeping on a blow-up mattress. We didn’t have a kitchen table. Our couches were gone. Everything was gone, and they didn’t know that. They flew us out for an interview.

Mandy: We were here for, like, five days, and then when we got back home, they wanted us to have a video call, which was very rare back then to have video calls, of course, in 2011. And it was with all the elders so they could do, like, their final interview, and they were like, “Well, we just want you to know we’ve already made a decision.

Mandy: We love you. We want you guys here. Like, how soon do you think you guys can be here?” We’re like, “Next week.” And they’re like, “Well, don’t you need to, like, pack or sell your hou-” We’re like, “No.” We were renting. We were like, we had already released the rent and our whole house is packed and ready, ’cause God told us to be ready.

Mandy: That’s a very short end of that story, but it was just an amazing– And we always reflect back to that. There was a time my husband left that church that God moved us to Indiana for just a couple years ago to become a chaplain. And we were just like, “Man, did you really bring us here, like, for him to not stay there?”

Mandy: I mean, he was there for seven years. We can’t deny the testimony of the Lord bringing us here. And then we thought we would move back to Texas for sure. We’re gonna move back to Texas. You know, we homeschool. We don’t have to stay here. The Lord said, “No, this is where I want you. I want you here in Indiana.”

Mandy: We’re like, “Okay.” And then we moved my parents here, so now we’re here for life, I guess.

Carrie: Man, I love those stories because I do think they provide what I’d call, like, an anchor point. In Joshua, when they were crossing the Jordan River, he’s like, “Take a stone. You’re gonna remember that day that God, oh, parted the Jordan River so that we could walk across and go to the Promised Land.”

Carrie: And I think that God gives us those stones kind of in our own life, and we have to be willing to not forget them, to make some type of, like, write it down, put it in our brain, make a piece of art so that we remember to look back and say, like, “Yeah, God did that. And if God did that, then God can do this over here.

Carrie: God can lead me into this next season. If God got me through the last season, He’s gonna lead me forward into the next one.” You talked about a little bit of grief and loss in terms of going from homeschool mom and, like, launching your daughter out to college to the transition, the grief and loss that occurred there.

Carrie: Was there some grief and loss from leaving the hospital, from leaving, like, postpartum work that you wrestled with?

Mandy: Yeah. I’m not completely gone from the hospital. I actually still work part-time, so I like to-

Carrie: Oh, okay …

Mandy: still say that. But yeah, there was tremendous … I feel like there was absolutely grief in that.

Mandy: Let me kind of backtrack a little, see. So it was something that was on my heart for so long. So there were one point, as far as the nursing part, there was tremendous joy and anticipation of being able to just leave at that point because I felt like, surely God doesn’t want me here anymore. He’s transitioning me to this other place.

Mandy: And right now, just living in that middle transition rather than standing, like, on that side where I had been for so long. I’d been at the hospital for so long, just longing for getting to the other side. Now I’m in that balancing, trying to balance between when is time to let go of more hours, those kind of things.

Mandy: But being here is just surreal To know that it had been on my heart and the Lord had been calling me to this for so long, I’m not saying there’s not days that are hard, because almost every day is hard, for sure, but I know this is the Lord, what He has called me to. There’s definitely a difference in knowing, like, what He’s calling you to, when to take that first step of obedience, and to be faithful in pursuing what He’s called you to.

Mandy: I feel like coaching brings me such a joy, and being able to pour into the women in a way that I never felt like I had the opportunity before. When I did nursing on the floor for so long, I prayed every day on my way to the hospital. I prayed that He would give me the right patient, the right person at the right time, and it was amazing to see the interaction and how

Mandy: I don’t know if you know how the hospital world works, but you have, like, say, 50 patients, and you have 10 nurses, and then everyone’s just randomly assigned five patients or something like that. It was so awesome to see how the Lord put His hand even on that during that season. That was my calling during that season, um, without a doubt.

Mandy: And to see how the patients that He gave me, the interactions, being able to plant seeds or maybe confirm, it was so crazy how often I had other maybe moms that were having babies and who preferred a more holistic side, whereas some of the other nurses would have been very negative and given them grief in that situation, if you know what I mean.

Mandy: Seeing His hand on me during that time, and even the days that I still work for the hospital, how He still intercedes and He’s still using me in that time, compared to the nursing, where I just feel total freedom to be myself, to be able to share what has just empowered me and given me just hope for people.

Mandy: And one of the things I coach through is not just physical health, but the main foundation is that spiritual foundation of where they are in their walk with Christ. Because without that foundation, nothing else matters. That is something that I love being able to share that, ’cause I can’t do that at the hospital.

Mandy: I cannot speak. Unless someone speaks Jesus or something first, I cannot say anything. So being able to have that freedom now, and for clients that come to me, majority, in fact, all of them are believers typically. I’ve had a couple who weren’t, but I trusted that the Lord brought those people so I could plant seeds in their lives.

Mandy: There’s been grief about leaving that one side, but then joy. There’s been grief about not being able to be fully into coaching yet. So it’s kind of that mixture, that mixture of that joy and grief, and I feel like they kind of come hand-in-hand. Kind of like when we look at when your child goes off to college and you have joy and grief there.

Mandy: You have joy that they’re doing what you have prepared them for, but then grief that’s gonna change kind of your life and relationship almost forever at that point.

Carrie: Let’s talk a little bit about what is it that you do through Nurse Coaching, like how do you help people with transitions, and you kinda spoke to looking at several different aspects of health.

Mandy: I help women who are in midlife seasons, so that 40 and up age range just kind differs. I have quite a few, like, in their 60s and even a couple in their 70s. I mean, if you look back, you went from being a teenager to maybe a newlywed, then all of a sudden becoming a parent. All these different stages and transitions.

And for so long I feel like it’s just a natural, easy flow of transition that we kind of anticipate and expect to come with life. All of a sudden midlife comes. I think most of us look forward to midlife of my kids are grown, you know, I don’t have that responsibility as much anymore, depending on where you’re at.

And then maybe you’re at a pivotal point in your career. Many of the women I talk to are at a point where they’re really successful and finally reached, like, that, that kind of main point that they’ve been trying for for so long. Sometimes it’s really unexpected to have these shifts and that empty nest, that stirring on your heart that you didn’t anticipate.

You finally got to where you thought you were gonna be, and it’s not quite what you thought it was gonna look like. A lot of the women I speak with are just kind of really on the pivotal edge. They’ve poured so much into their family and their careers and all these things for so many years, that their walk with Christ isn’t exactly where they thought it would be at this point either.

So there’s just, like, a million transitions, a million things happening all at once from physical, mental, emotional changes that hit us, aren’t necessarily always what we thought it was gonna be at this point. I really help women to slow down and reconnect in their identity with Christ, to recognize, like, where The peace might be leaking out and paying attention to the desires and gifts that God has repeatedly placed on their hearts.

Midlife, it’s more than a change in circumstance, whatever that is, empty nest or anything, but there’s just a real identity transition. Each woman comes to me with a different place, so there might be some physical things, maybe hormone changes is the biggest one for sure that we talk about and go through.

A lot of people are dealing with insulin imbalance and gut health that’s a mess or fear, grief, trauma is huge right now. I see a lot of women that are dealing with something from years back they’ve pushed down for so long because they’ve been so busy as a mom or in their careers that so many of these things just got pushed down, and not realizing how it just can often start festering back up and really messing us up.

It all connects, the spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, all of that connects. When you don’t have one of those things in alignment, it can often throw other things out of balance. That’s where I really try to help the ladies pour into where they’re at physically, where they’re at spiritually, mentally, emotionally.

Carrie: And there’s a level, too, where what took to get you maybe to that pivotal point or whatever you wanna say, or the success, it’s like you can no longer run 100 miles per hour on the treadmill. And so if people got used to that way of life and now their body is telling them, like we don’t have the physical energy or the emotional energy or sometimes the relational energy that we used to have for certain relationships that are draining.

Carrie: Like you said, the peace is leaking out all over the place. I like that phrase. I’m gonna have to ponder that a little bit more.

Mandy: And you bring up the relationships. The boundaries is a huge one. I feel like for women just, I think we feel like we need to be there immediately for everyone, and so it’s so much harder in midlife.

Like we can only handle so much, I think, and that’s part of that physical, mental, emotional. So learning how to have healthy boundaries with different people, even your grown kids and grandkids and those kind of things where you think that, “I’ve gotta say yes to everything,” but learning to have, like, boundaries to take care of yourself still in there.

Carrie: Yeah. That is really huge, and I know that sometimes it’s like saying no to one thing means you get to say yes to something else. And I’ve found for myself it’s much easier to say, “This is what I’m able to do right now,” versus just giving out like a flat no. “Here’s what I’m able to do or not able to do.”

Mandy: Exactly. But you have to know that ahead of time. Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, you have to know that. Like be connected to yourself to know what you’re able to say yes to even. I think this is just incredibly timely conversation, and I think it’s gonna be helpful for many of our listeners, so I appreciate you coming and sharing your wisdom with us.

Mandy: Absolutely. Happy to do that.

Carrie: We’ll put your link to your website in the show notes and where people can find you.

Mandy: All right. Thank you for having me.

Carrie: Hey, if you love the podcast, I know you’re gonna love our email newsletter. It is sent out once a week on Wednesdays when we have new episodes come out.

Carrie: It’s an opportunity for me to share little devotional thoughts with you about what God is teaching me, and those on our email list are the first to know about things happening with the podcast. So if you’d like to be an email insider, all you have to do is go to carriebock.com and sign up for our email list.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD Carrie: is a production of By The Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment.