Skip to main content

Tag: Trusting God

242. Why You Don’t Need to Be Afraid of Your Thoughts as a Christian

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie explores why Christians with OCD do not need to fear intrusive thoughts and how understanding the difference between thoughts, desires, actions, and identity can loosen the grip of scrupulosity.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why having an intrusive thought does not mean you will act on it
  • How mental compulsions like rumination, rebuking thoughts, repeated prayer, and neutralizing can keep Christians stuck
  • Why OCD can attach frightening meanings to thoughts about faith, relationships, harm, or sexuality
  • How ICBT helps distinguish intrusive thoughts from your true desires, values, and identity
  • What Scripture says about the Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, and your identity when OCD tells you something different

Episode Summary

Do Intrusive Thoughts Mean I Have Sinned as a Christian?

I’ve seen how one statement from a pastor, spiritual teacher, or trusted person can get lodged in the mind of someone with OCD and suddenly become a source of intense spiritual fear. In this episode, I unpack the idea that “all sin starts in the mind” and explain why Christians need a more thoughtful understanding of intrusive thoughts, especially when scrupulosity turns an unwanted thought into evidence that something is spiritually wrong.

Why Do Christians With OCD Feel So Guilty About Their Thoughts?

I often work with Christians who are doing everything they can to get rid of unwanted thoughts, whether that means rebuking them, repeating a prayer or Scripture, replacing them with something positive, or mentally reviewing them over and over. Some of those responses may look spiritual on the surface, but when they become compulsive attempts to relieve anxiety, they can keep the OCD cycle going and make us increasingly afraid of what is happening inside our own minds.

Does Having an Intrusive Thought Mean I Secretly Want It?

One of the most painful tricks of OCD is convincing us that a thought must reveal something about our true desires or character. I talk about why thoughts, desires, and actions are not interchangeable, how ICBT understands egodystonic intrusive thoughts and phantom sensations, and why the meaning we attach to a thought can sometimes become even more distressing than the thought itself.

What Do Intrusive Thoughts Say About My Identity in Christ?

OCD may whisper that a disturbing thought means I’m secretly bad, not really saved, or somehow outside the family of God, but that feared version of myself is not where I want to anchor my identity. I return to Scripture, including 1 Corinthians 3 and the truth that God’s Spirit dwells within believers, to explore what changes when I view my imperfect brain through the finished work of Christ rather than through the accusations of OCD.

Can Christians With Scrupulosity Ever Find Freedom From Intrusive Thoughts?

When intrusive thoughts and rumination have been present for months or years, hopelessness can start sounding convincing, but I don’t believe the length or intensity of the struggle gets the final word. I share why there is still hope through appropriate OCD treatment, professional support, ICBT principles, and the spiritual truth that believers have the mind of Christ and are still being transformed by God, even when their brains produce thoughts they never asked for.

Listen to the full episode to discover why intrusive thoughts don’t define you and what God’s truth says about who you really are.

Transcript

For those of you who don’t know, I conduct intensive therapy, and sometimes people will travel out of state, come visit me in Tennessee for a few days, and we’ll work very intentionally on trauma that is contributing to OCD symptoms or childhood woundings Different things that may be really exacerbating OCD symptoms, and then we’ll integrate inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT, into their treatment process. So someone came to visit me a while back for one of these, and they said something that a pastor said that got stuck in their mind, and it got me really thinking a lot. And this is common with OCD, as you’ll hear something from a pastor, spiritual teacher online, maybe a parent, and it just really gets stuck. And then OCD utilizes that stuck thought, maybe a true thought, maybe a not true thought. But it gets stuck in your brain, and then OCD will misuse it in your own mind against you. So this thought that someone got stuck on was, “All sin starts in the mind.” And of course, that can create some hypervigilance over someone’s thought process. Now, as I’ve reflected on this, I think that there’s a lot of sin, at least in my own life, that’s impulsive, that maybe I should have thought about, and had I thought about it, I wouldn’t have engaged with it. So I don’t know that I agree with this statement or this argument that the person was teaching or making. However, I wanted to talk today about why, as a Christian, you don’t need to be scared of your thoughts. And I think that this is an important point, and I want to make it spiritually and psychologically for you. So if you’re kinda new to hanging out with me, that’s what I love to do, is really integrate psychological principles with truth from the Bible and things that God has shown us through His Word, and how those integrate with what we know on a psychological, emotional, and mental level. Now, a lot of Christians have been told to be really careful about what you think because thoughts turn into actions. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this later, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes our thoughts turn into actions, but many times they don’t. I’ve known many Christians with intrusive thoughts who may have had an intrusive thought for months or years without ever acting on it. So let’s talk a little bit about what an intrusive thought is. An intrusive thought is something that you don’t want to think, you don’t desire to think, you wish it wasn’t there, and probably you’re jumping through all of these hoops in some way to manage or get rid of the distress associated with the thought. So you may have mental compulsions like rebuking a thought, saying a short prayer, saying a scripture. Some of these things you may have even been taught in the church to do to handle thought processes. You may try to neutralize it with thinking of a positive thought or positive image, or you may just ruminate on it and get stuck in the same thought circle going round and round. That’s actually pretty common. So these are all mental compulsions that I see with a lot of Christians that I work with, is oftentimes they may not have physical compulsions related to scrupulosity. Although some people can get into things like hand washing To help manage their thoughts as well. So if you’re engaging in any of those behaviors, just know that I’ve also seen that happen as well. You were created with a mind, but you also have the Spirit of God inside of you to lead and guide you as a Christian, full stop. How crazy is that? Like, I mean crazy in a good way. How wonderful and amazing is it that as believers, we have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God living inside of us. I do not understand this. This is something that I have to embrace the mystery on of our faith. And I will say as a side note that this is really helpful for Christians with OCD because you’re not gonna understand it all. It requires faith. I’m totally mind-blown. You can’t contain God, so how is it that God somehow is contained in our body? Or how did the God of the universe enter a womb? The womb is so small. God is so big. Anyway, blows my mind. I could go on and on for that, but I believe it by faith, and I just think it’s incredible, and I believe it because the word of God says so. And I wanna read this verse to you, 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. You probably heard some of this before, but I want you to really look at it in a new way in the lens of your intrusive thoughts. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and God’s Spirit dwells in you?” This is what we were just talking about, right? “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” You’re probably thinking, “What? I’m a holy temple? That doesn’t make any sense.” I can tell you my body’s imperfect, does weird stuff, has aches and pains, doesn’t always do the things it’s supposed to do. I mean, if you know, you know. We get headaches, we get stomachaches, sometimes we get really sick, sometimes we have broken bones. I mean, all kinds of things happen to our body, right? And our brain is part of that bodily system, right? So even though my body itself is imperfect, God is calling it holy as His temple. Now, it’s not anything that I did. I could eat all the vegetables, love some good vegetables, especially if they’re fresh. I can do my little mini trampoline workouts and lift some weights and do all these things, right, to help my body. But that’s not why my body is holy. My body is holy because of what Jesus did in the finished work on the cross. It’s not anything that I did. Once again, amazing. God has chosen to put His Spirit in us to dwell inside of us, and so we don’t need to be afraid of what is happening inside of our brain. You don’t need to be afraid of these intrusive thought misfires that are happening. So let’s talk about thoughts and their relationship to actions. Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean that you’re going to act on it. Everyone has intrusive thoughts regardless of if you struggle with OCD or not. I’ve shared a little bit about some intrusive thoughts that I’ve had. Most of mine involve a phobia of heights, and so I’ve definitely had intrusive thoughts about falling from a variety of places. When I used to go walk the running track at the top of the Y, I would have visualizations of me just toppling over the railing and falling on somebody that’s working on the treadmill. It’s totally ridiculous, like would not happen. I can identify that as an intrusive thought. Obviously, I have no desire to fall from anywhere, and I think that’s, it’s just my brain’s, like, safety mechanism in overdrive. I also wonder if some of that is a little genetic, ’cause I’ve had other family members that have been afraid of heights. Who knows? Regardless, I’ve had intrusive thoughts about driving my car off the road on a bridge into some water. I certainly haven’t acted on any of these intrusive thoughts. I had an intrusive thought about falling out of a window in a really high building ’cause it had these really big windows. Lots of things. Certainly didn’t act on any of those visualizations and certainly didn’t want to have any of those visualizations, ’cause they’re quite scary when you think about falling from high places and not surviving or being seriously injured, which is typically what can happen. Let’s talk about some more common thoughts that you haven’t acted on. So have you ever thought about skipping work or school and not done it? You’re like, “I could just, like, call in today and not go to this job.” Maybe you don’t wanna deal with the boss. Maybe you don’t wanna deal with the customers, coworkers, whatever it is. You’re like, “Oh, I could just so skip today.” But couple of things, you probably need a paycheck. You gotta pay your bills somehow. You’re thinking, “Hey, I gotta stick with this until I can get something else.” You may have some of those thoughts and not act on it. You could say, “I could just roll over and not go to my first class today, but that’s probably not the best idea ’cause I probably need to be learning what’s in there so that I can pass the test later. I might actually need this information for the final exam or to complete some type of project.” I would say those thoughts are probably pretty common for people. We’ve all had that at least once, all right? I had some of those 8:00 classes in college. I was not a fan. I get up early now, but I did not get up early then. I did not wanna go to class that early, was not fully awake yet. Have you ever thought about eating something, but you didn’t do it? Maybe you went to a restaurant, and you’re like, “I really want those french fries, but I think I’m gonna order the side salad instead. I’m gonna try to stick with my health goals.” Maybe I really want to eat this whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s right now, but I’ve decided that’s really not gonna be a good idea. I’m gonna get a stomachache. Not gonna feel so good. So let’s not do that. It’s very common for people who are married to notice other attractive people that are out just walking in the world, going to the grocery store. This can really freak out people who are dealing with OCD, any type of, like, sexual or relationship themes. If they see an attractive person, they may go, “Oh no, that means I don’t love my spouse,” or, “Oh no, that means maybe I wanna leave them,” or this is gonna transfer over into some type of lustful thought. So I may see somebody out in the world as I’m going about my day who’s an attractive person, and I don’t have to make any meaning out of that. I can just be like, “Oh, moving on. I’m married. Not gonna pursue that thought. Not gonna do anything about that thought. Not gonna take it any one step further or start daydreaming about being with somebody.” It’s like, no, I’m married. I’m happy. I’m moving on. I don’t need to entertain this. We have thoughts all the time that we do not act on Let’s say you get angry at someone, and your initial urge may be like, “Ugh, I really wanna be mean to that person. I wanna yell and scream,” but I walk away. I don’t. Maybe somebody just really pokes you and tries to goad you into an argument. You’ve probably met some of those people, right? Like, they really try to get you going, and you just walk away. You’re like, “No, I’m not giving into that anger and what I’m thinking about doing right now. Gonna move away.” Or you may have had situations where you struggled with an addiction, regardless of what that addiction was, and if you had started to have thoughts about using, especially earlier on in your recovery, you’re like, “I really want to go use right now,” or, “I’m really just thinking about it. I’m thinking about what the steps would be for me to use.” And then you wake up and you go, “This is not a good idea. Let me call my accountability person, my sponsor. Go to a meeting. Let me tell somebody else what’s going on so that I don’t have to be sitting alone in these thoughts.” And you actually in opposite to what you were originally thinking about. So God has given us this great ability to filter through our thoughts, to reason through our thoughts, and sometimes it may be a thought that we just need to not think a ton about. Maybe we just need to let it go, like some intrusive thoughts. Like, okay, I don’t have to latch into this thought. It just needs to kinda move along in the mind. Just keep that train going, and I’m not gonna hop on that train. I’m gonna let it pass on by. Easier said than done, and does take a lot of practice, so I’m not minimizing how difficult these things are. But I’d also like to talk with you about the meaning that you may be making about some of these intrusive thoughts. And this is really important, because intrusive thoughts are scary enough, but oftentimes the meaning is worse than the actual intrusive thought itself. So here’s some common meanings that Christians ascribe to their intrusive thoughts. One, you may tell yourself, “Because I’m having this thought about God, or about sex, or about harming, or about relationship, somehow this must mean that I’m not a Christian.” Nope, not the case at all. Intrusive thoughts don’t mean that you’re not saved or not a part of the family of God. Go listen to our personal story episodes. Of the last couple summers, we’ve done a whole personal story series where I’ve interviewed a bunch of Christians who have dealt with OCD and who still deal with intrusive thoughts from time to time. They just have a better grip on how to handle those than they used to when they come up, and they come up a lot less. Lots of people who love the Lord struggle with intrusive thoughts. So if you’re dealing with intrusive thoughts, even ones that are really hairy, scary, that you don’t wanna say out loud or tell anyone about, just know that there are other Christians who’ve walked that road, and you’re not alone. So if you hear nothing else from today’s podcast episode, that’s what I want you to hear. You may say, “These thoughts mean that there’s something hidden, secret, dark, really deep wrong with me.” Nope, that’s not true. Actually, intrusive thoughts typically point to what you value. So if you’re afraid of harming someone close to you, it probably means that you really value those relationships, that you love those people. You would never want to harm them. If you’re struggling with intrusive thoughts about God, maybe blasphemous thoughts or questions about what you actually believe, it means that your faith’s actually important to you. And I think this is something that’s important to highlight because often dealing with OCD leads you away from your values. You may start to avoid certain things or people, um, spiritual practices because you’re so afraid of being triggered. And so what we wanna do through treatment is help you move back towards your values. In doing so, be able to manage these intrusive thoughts differently. OCD also really thrives on this whole secretive thing, right? There must be something secretive here. There must be some kind of like hidden knowledge that I just have to keep scratching at and digging at to uncover. Nope. This is a trick that OCD uses all the time, so don’t let it play tricks on you that there’s something secret in there. You may say to yourself, “Well, if I’m having thoughts about this, this means that I want it, and that’s really scary because I don’t want it.” And you may even feel certain things in your body. We call these phantom sensations in ICBT, and they may lead you to believe that there’s some kind of like pull or urge or… People describe it different ways, but you may start to believe that you really desire what this intrusive thought is telling you. Desires and thoughts are not the same thing, so it’s really important that you separate those two things out. Just like thoughts and actions are two different things. We explored that earlier. You need to separate out the thoughts and the actions, separate out the thoughts and the desires. Sometimes we do have thoughts about things we desire, but in terms of intrusive thoughts, they’re not things that you actually desire. They’re what we call egodystonic thoughts, which means they’re really in opposition to yourself and what you want. You may ascribe the meaning that I must just be a bad person. These thoughts are so shameful. They may be really violent or horrific, and you might be ascribing some type of meaning that I’m just bad. That is not the truth. Everyone at some level or another has dealt with an intrusive thought, and people with OCD come to believe this false feared version of themselves. That’s called the feared possible self in ICBT, and “I’m bad” could be a feared possible self. If you are in Christ, you are a child of God, you are loved, you have been redeemed from sin and death, and you are being made holy into the image of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. So we don’t need to hold on to this thought of “I’m bad.” That is contrary to your identity in Christ. And the last thing you may be saying to yourself is, “I’ve just been dealing with this for so long, I don’t think I’m ever gonna be able to get over it. I don’t think there is any hope for me.” And that’s simply not true. I want you to know that there are good Christian counselors out there. There is good OCD treatment. It is hard to find a marriage oftentimes of people who are marriaging the psychological and the spiritual, but there is hope for you regardless of how long you’ve been dealing with OCD, regardless of how intensely you’re dealing with OCD. You may just feel like you’re in a constant cycle of rumination. I just want to say that there is treatment, there is help, there are medications that are given to us by God. There are many options out there for you. And you may feel like, “You know what? I’ve done a lot of it. I’ve tried some ERP. It was overwhelming or too much, or it just didn’t seem to jive with my faith, some of the things they were wanting me to do.” I want you to know that I have an online course called Empowered Mind, which teaches these inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, ICBT, principles from a Christian perspective. We’ve had lots of students go through it and achieve success. We’ve told some of their stories on the podcast, so there is hope for you regardless of what you’re facing today. God loves you. He wants you to walk in freedom and in the abundant life of Christ. I want to leave you with one last scripture. Regardless of what you’re struggling with, believers, you have the mind of Christ. This is what it tells us in I Corinthians two:sixteen. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” If you are in Jesus, you have the mind of Christ. That doesn’t mean that your brain is always working the right way. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t gonna have intrusive thoughts. Remember what we talked about before, that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you, that you are in a transformational process. From the point you are saved till the point you get to heaven, God is working in your life. “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it,” Philippians one, six. And we know that God is continuing to work in us to transform us to become more like His Son. And so don’t let OCD and all of these lies consume you. Know that the enemy wants you to believe these things. He wants you to believe there’s no hope for you. He wants you to believe that you’re never gonna get better. He wants you to believe that you’re secretly bad or outside God’s family or all these other things that you may be led to believe. And it’s important to identify those things as lies, to say, “Hey, to the best of my ability, I’m not gonna buy into this lie anymore.” And when we let go of the lie, we are better able to embrace truth. But oftentimes, we have to let go of the lie first is what I’m really seeing, and see it as the lie that it is. That’s the first step for you. Thank you so much for joining with me today. I’m in the process of writing a book for Christians just like you, struggling with OCD and intrusive thoughts, specifically scrupulosity related. If you wanna be the first to know when the book comes out, you definitely want to get on our newsletter at carriebock.com, and we’ll put that link in there for you so that you can access kind of some weekly devotionals, that thoughts that I send out to you guys, and can find out about book updates. I’m so excited. I’m just furiously, uh, writing and can’t wait to bring that to you all 

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Mandy Horne, a registered nurse, board-certified holistic nurse, and nurse coach, to explore how to discern God’s call in a new season, recognize His guidance through uncertainty, and take faithful steps forward when the full path is not yet clear.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to discern whether God may be calling you into a new season
  • Why God may give you one step instead of the entire plan
  • How prayer, Scripture, community, and wise counsel can help confirm a decision
  • Why grief and joy can exist together during major life transitions
  • How abiding in Christ can help you recognize His voice when fear and uncertainty get loud

Episode Summary

How Do You Know If a Decision Is Actually God’s Timing or Just Your Own Impatience?

We want a clear sign, a checklist, something that removes all the guesswork before we commit to anything. But that’s rarely how God works, and learning to sit in that tension is its own kind of spiritual discipline.

This week’s guest on the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, Mandy Horne, is a registered nurse, board certified holistic nurse, and nurse coach who spent 25 years working in hospitals, most of it on postpartum units with moms and babies, before God moved her into nurse coaching. She tells me what it was like when everyone around her kept pointing to the same “logical” next step, a nurse practitioner degree, while her stomach turned every time it came up. That gap between what looks smart on paper and what actually brings peace is worth paying attention to.

What Does Obedience Look Like When You Don’t Know What Comes Next?

Sometimes faith means taking a step before you have the whole picture. Mandy shares how she learned to move forward without having every detail, trusting that God would provide what she needed as she continued to follow Him.

For anyone facing a decision, transition, or season of waiting, this raises an important question: What if you don’t need the entire map before taking the next step?

How Can You Tell If God Is Really Confirming a Direction?

When we’re trying to discern God’s will, we may look for one unmistakable answer. Mandy describes how prayer, Scripture, wise counsel, and unexpected encouragement from other believers became part of recognizing God’s direction.

The challenge is learning to seek confirmation without turning discernment into a search for absolute certainty. Staying close to Christ can help us become more familiar with His voice and more attentive when He leads us.

Why Can a New Season Feel Both Exciting and Difficult?

Transitions don’t always feel the way we expect them to. Mandy experienced both joy and grief as her daughter left for college and as she began moving toward a different professional season.

Whether you’re facing an empty nest, career change, shifting family responsibilities, or another major transition, you may find yourself holding excitement and loss at the same time. Learning to make room for both can be an important part of moving forward.

What If You Feel Like You Need More Certainty Before You Move Forward?

It’s tempting to believe we need to know more, prepare more, or have everything figured out before we’re ready to follow God’s direction.

But sometimes the desire for certainty can keep us stuck. Instead of demanding the whole plan, what might change if we focused on staying close to Christ and being faithful with the next step in front of us?

How Do You Trust God When You Can’t See What Comes Next?

When you’re in a season of uncertainty, it’s easy to feel like you need to know how everything will work out before you can move forward. But trusting God doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means remembering His faithfulness, staying close to Him, and trusting Him with the parts of your future you cannot see yet.

Mandy’s experience of following God’s direction through multiple seasons shows how past moments of His faithfulness can become anchors when the future feels uncertain. Remembering what God has already done can give you the courage to trust Him with what comes next.

Tune in to hear Mandy Horne’s story and find encouragement for trusting God’s timing when you’re facing uncertainty, change, or a new season.

Get Mandy’s Sacred Season Starter Kit… for the Midlife Christian Woman

https://gift.wellspringoflifecoaches.com/wellspringssskit

Connect with Mandy:

www.wellspringoflifecoaches.com/

TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@wellspring.rn

Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/wellspringrn/about

Transcript

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.

238. Is God Asking Me to Give This Up?

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie shares a personal story about how God led her to let go of something she had enjoyed for years, using that experience to help Christians with OCD recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s gentle conviction and fear.

You’ll Learn

  • How to recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s conviction and OCD’s urgency.
  • Why enjoying something doesn’t automatically make it an idol.
  • Biblical questions to ask when evaluating the entertainment you consume.
  • Why lasting spiritual transformation begins in the heart, not through fear or pressure.
  • How to respond to personal convictions without falling into condemnation or legalism.

How Do You Know When God Is Leading You to Let Something Go?

Recently, I made the decision to stop watching a certain type of TV show that I had enjoyed for years. It wasn’t something I felt pressured to do, and it wasn’t a decision I made overnight. As I reflected on that experience, I realized it shed light on a question I hear often from Christians with OCD.

How Can I Tell if God Is Convicting Me or If It’s Just OCD?

As a therapist, one of the questions I hear most often is, “How do I know if this is God speaking or if it’s just my OCD?” Those moments can feel confusing, especially when fear and conviction seem to overlap. In this episode, I share what my own experience taught me and why that distinction matters.

Does Enjoying Something Mean It Has Become an Idol?

I’ve worked with many Christians who become anxious because they enjoy something. They wonder if that enjoyment means they’ve put it ahead of God. This episode explores a different way of thinking through that question and the biblical principles that helped me evaluate my own situation.

How Should Christians Think About the Entertainment They Consume?

Not every decision about entertainment has a simple answer. Rather than looking for a list of rules, I found myself asking a different set of questions. Those questions helped me think more carefully about what was shaping my heart and my relationship with God.

What Does God’s Gentle Work in Our Lives Look Like?

One of the things that stood out to me most about this experience was what happened after I made my decision. It reminded me that God often works in our hearts in ways we don’t immediately recognize. I hope this conversation encourages you to be open to His leading without being driven by fear.

If you’ve ever wrestled with whether God is asking you to let go of something, or you’ve struggled to tell the difference between His conviction and fear, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Carrie with Christian Faith and OCD. One thing that I see a lot of Christians struggle with, with OCD is this thought that, “Well, maybe if I really like something, that must mean that it’s an idol or it’s bad in some way, and God wants me to give it up.” I thought I would share a personal story for you of something that I gave up recently 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 Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode I’m not going to go into massive detail about it, but I will tell you that it was a TV show, and it wasn’t really just about this TV show, it was more about the genre of TV shows that this one in particular represented.

So it wasn’t just that I gave up necessarily that TV show, but other TV shows that were similar to it. And the whole entire process was actually really peaceful, and it got me thinking about how different it is than the OCD spiral operates. So the OCD comes in with a panic and says, “Hey, you really, really like this thing.

Maybe God doesn’t want you to do it,” or, “You don’t wanna do that thing. Well, therefore, maybe it means God wants you to do it.” Uses, like, this weird reverse logic against you. But in my own personal story, I was watching this TV show for many years, consuming this type of content for many years. The reason I’m not gonna go into depth is because I don’t want you to spiral out if you happen to watch these type of shows.

But what came to mind one day, I had finished the episode and I realized, you know what? I’m not in a good head space mentally, emotionally, and just something about this just really doesn’t jive with my spirit internally. And I thought, “Is this actually really benefiting me, or is it doing the exact opposite?

Is this something that’s tearing me down spiritually?” And like I said, it wasn’t a panic or a rush of anything that I had to do right away. It was more just a moment of contemplation that I believe came from the Holy Spirit of what is actually the fruit of this experience that you’re dealing with. And I wanted to bring up this verse for you.

This is 1 Corinthians 6:12, and Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.” That’s the ESV. Paul goes on to talk about food, but then he also goes on to talk about sexual immorality, so the context of the verse is really about sexual immorality and some freedoms that people were taking in the Corinthian church that they shouldn’t have been.

However, this verse got me thinking, and then there’s also another verse that talks about being innocent of evil, and I didn’t look that up ahead of time. But this comes up in Romans 16:19. The second part of the verse says, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil.” That was another thing that came to mind was, am I consuming something that has some sense of evil in it?

Now, I’m not saying, like, the entire TV show was evil. I think there obviously are positive and negative aspects to many different things in our lives that we may come across on the internet or on TV. However, for me personally, after I had this evaluation moment after watching the TV show one day, I thought, “You know what?

I think I’m gonna stop watching this.” There wasn’t any grief over it. I wasn’t upset about it. I wasn’t panicked about it. I wasn’t worried about it. I just said, “You know what? Let me just see how I feel about disengaging, about not consuming this type of material anymore.” In the context really of what God has been doing in my life, I really feel like I’ve been in a place of refinement where God has been rooting out things that don’t need to be there, where God has been cutting off things that aren’t producing healthy fruit, where He has been just really refining different areas of my life, whether that’s relationships or activities I’m engaging in, the way I’m taking care of my health, et cetera.

And kinda knew already in the context, like, that’s what God has been working with me on, and part of that refinement process is just being able to be here and show up for all of you in a really healthy way, and that’s obviously something that I am desiring to do and desiring to honor God with my whole life and love Him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength Several months ago, I didn’t exactly write down the date of when this occurred.

I’m not even sure how I would go about finding that out, but I know that it’s been several months now, and I can honestly say that I don’t miss it. So this was another important piece I wanted to share with all of you, is that I really feel like the Holy Spirit led me towards cutting something out of my life, and it doesn’t feel like a loss.

I don’t miss it. I’m not yearning for that. I’m not saying, “Oh, man, I remember when I used to watch that and it was really great.” I just don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. And that was the part that actually surprised me the most. I found it, like, really bizarre. I was like, “Wait a minute.

What do you mean?” Like, this is something that I look forward to, like, new episodes coming out. Like, “Oh, there’s a new episode. I should go listen to it. What day does it come out on streaming that I’m gonna go stream it and watch it and consume this content?” I used to be, like, really excited about it. Now, I genuinely don’t care.

I’m not looking for it. I’m not interested. I genuinely believe that this has been a change from the inside out, that as God has been working on my heart, that He has removed a desire for something that I used to have and used to really enjoy. So a lot of times with OCD, what I see is that people get really works focused and get very externally focused and forget that we’re in a relationship with God on a day-to-day basis.

It’s a daily walk. It’s over the period of our life, however long that is. It’s not a sprint. It’s not a, we have to do all the things right now. There’s not a sense of, I’m not gonna be completely transformed by God tomorrow. And take it one step at a time. Like, as you spend time in the Word, and the closer that you are abiding in Christ, the more that you are spending time with Him, the more that you are getting to know Him.

Like, this transformation happens at a heart level, and then it extends out to what you do and how you live. So if there is something that you’re panicking over about whether or not God wants you to give that up, I wanted to send out this short encouragement to say that God does not bring this intense level of fear upon you to change.

It’s the kindness of the Lord that leads us to repentance. So if you’re in an immense amount of anxiety, that’s not being produced by the Holy Spirit. It is probably being produced by OCD. And so just take some time. Now, what I will say is just be open. If you’re consuming some type of content online, or if you are– have been following along with something and you do feel convicted, just leave that openness and that willingness to lay it down and say, “Okay, let me try to lay this down.”

Give it over to the Lord, disengage, and not continue to consume that. I know that TV shows are really interesting, especially if you’re following along with certain series. Sometimes they can start out kind of benign, they can be okay, and then they can dip into some really dark territories, and my husband and I have watched certain TV shows like that where all of a sudden it was going down this really dark road theme where it didn’t start out that way at all, and started out more as a lighthearted type of show.

So just be conscious of what your spirit is telling you and really being able to examine what’s the fruit of this experience. But to make these types of decisions, OCD can get super hyper-focused on specific decisions like this. Should I watch this TV show? Should I not? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it not?

And I think that for me, I wouldn’t say to someone, you know, “Hey, if you watch this particular TV show, that’s a sin,” unless you’re just watching something that is about the abuse of children or females or et cetera, things that we know that are very clearly against our faith. But pornography-type stuff.

But if you are just watching television, I think that God deals with each of us individually, and certainly this is probably something that I could have given up a long time ago, and I think probably had wrestled with that at different points in my life, at different seasons. And I’m glad and thankful that God didn’t give up on me and didn’t shame me and didn’t condemn me for the period of time that I did hold onto it.

But I’m also very thankful to be on the other side to say that as a result of letting this go, like, that I can definitely see there’s more peace in my life, and the fruit has been that I’m not constantly getting sad when I watch this or anxious or being aware of certain things that I just don’t need to have any knowledge or awareness.

I know that this is a little bit of a shorter episode today, but I hope that it helps you as you’re thinking through or if you’ve run across this specific obsession for yourself of, is God asking me to give this thing up? I hope that this provides you some sense of grounding and encouraging that the Holy Spirit is loving, patient, gentle, caring towards you and wants your absolute best in your connection with Jesus Christ.

And so we don’t have to be afraid of conviction, because it’s conviction from the Holy Spirit. It’s not condemnation. Keep striving. Keep abiding in Christ. I love all of you, and we’ll be back next week. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area

235. Learning to Trust When Everything is Uncertain: Part 2 of my Testimony 

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie continues with Part 2 of her testimony, sharing how God sustained her through a high-risk pregnancy, her husband’s rare neurological diagnosis, profound grief, and the ongoing journey of trusting Him through life’s greatest uncertainties.

Episode Highlights

  • Why trusting God often begins where control comes to an end.
  • How surrender became a turning point that strengthened her faith.
  • What helped Carrie navigate grief, uncertainty, and unanswered questions.
  • Why remembering God’s past faithfulness builds confidence for today’s challenges.
  • How living one day at a time creates space for peace and hope.

How Do You Trust God When Life Keeps Falling Apart?

In Part 2 of my testimony, I share one of the hardest seasons my family has ever walked through. Within a short period of time, I was navigating a difficult pregnancy while my husband was searching for answers to mysterious health symptoms that would eventually lead to a rare neurological diagnosis.

At the time, I couldn’t see how God was working. Looking back now, I realize He was building a deeper trust in Him than I had ever experienced before.

Why Does God Allow Unanswered Prayers Even When They Seem Good?

There were prayers I desperately wanted God to answer the way I had imagined. I pleaded with Him for things that seemed good, reasonable, and even life-giving. When those prayers unfolded differently, I wrestled honestly with disappointment and surrender.

That painful season taught me something about God’s character that I couldn’t have learned any other way, and it continues to shape how I approach uncertainty today.

How Can You Keep Your Faith During Grief, Illness, and Major Life Changes?

As my husband’s diagnosis became clearer, our family was also facing the devastating loss of my mother to pancreatic cancer. Those overlapping waves of grief, uncertainty, and responsibility stretched me in ways I never expected.

Rather than providing simple answers, God met me with His presence. Some of the greatest lessons came not from understanding everything, but from learning to depend on Him one day at a time.

Why Is Remembering God’s Faithfulness So Important During Hard Seasons?

When life feels overwhelming, it’s easy to focus on what hasn’t happened or what might happen next. I’ve discovered that one of the greatest ways to strengthen my faith is to intentionally remember where God has already carried me.

Those moments of remembering became spiritual markers that reminded me His faithfulness hadn’t changed, even when my circumstances had.

Can God Still Write a Beautiful Story Through Ongoing Suffering?

Our story isn’t finished. My husband continues living with spinocerebellar ataxia, yet we’ve also witnessed incredible evidence of God’s grace along the way. His journey has not followed the path we once feared, and every step reminds me that God is still writing our story.

I don’t pretend to understand every chapter, but I have learned that trusting the Author brings far more peace than trying to predict the ending.

I pray this conversation encourages you to trust God with your own unfinished story. Listen now, and if this episode encourages you, share it with someone who needs hope today.

Transcript

 It is early in the morning, five AM, at the Bock household, and I am currently the only one up upstairs recording, which is good for no child noise, but the cats are a little bit on the prowl. So we’re gonna see how this goes. Last week, I went through part one of my testimony. So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to that about clinging on to God’s promises during a very difficult time and season in my life, encourage you to go back and listen to that one because everything that I went through in part one of my testimony, I recognize now how God used that to build my faith and used that to build my trust in Him 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 Even though I was a Christian for a long time before this point that I’m gonna share today, I don’t think I really trusted God very well. I was definitely more on the control freak side, which I know a lot of you can relate to.

It’s like I kinda want things my way, and I think that even bled over into my spiritual life because it’s like, “Hey, God, I have this good idea, and I would like this, and it’s not a bad thing.” I talked about that last week. “Can you just fulfill this prayer request, please?” What I’ve had to learn through spiritual maturity over the years is that God knows way better what I need than I actually do at the time, and ultimately, He’s weaving a story that I can’t see.

I’m in the middle of the story. God knows the beginning, the middle, and the end, and I only know the beginning and the middle of where I am right now. I don’t know how things are going to play out. As you know from any good story, whether it’s a TV show, a movie, or a book that you’ve read, things can get really dicey in the middle.

Because it’s a story, you’re like, “Okay, I’m expecting there to be some happy ending.” Now, they may or may not write the happy ending in there for you. Sometimes your favorite character dies, and that really stinks, and you get annoyed that they got booted off the show. But the point is that we, in our own lives, somehow we don’t hope for that positive ending.

We’re like, “Oh, no, it’s forever gonna be terrible. I’m gonna be miserable.” I would just like to remind you that God is the author of all good things and stories, and He’s the one that gave us creative abilities to even create those types of stories and movies and TV. God is the ultimate author, and if you’re in the middle of your story, just know God’s got a plan here.

I left off last week with marrying my husband, Steve. That was just a beautiful story. We had a COVID love story. We got together and started dating, like, right before the COVID-19 pandemic and just kind of made a decision that we were gonna continue dating through that and decided that that’s what we wanted to do.

If you’re super interested in our love story, you can go back and listen to episode 10 where I talk about anxiety through the dating process. We also have episodes on our first and second year of marriage that might be interesting to you as well. We can link all of that in the show notes. I try to drag Steve on around our anniversary every year, and we do some type of, like, marriage episode together.

Even if you’ve been around and you’ve heard some of those episodes- There’s still gonna be new information in this episode because of the way that I’m laying out the story, and when you’re going through some things, there are specific edits that you make and maybe don’t wanna share right away. Now that we’ve had some distance, it’s a little easier to share the coherent narrative.

Steve and I get married in October of 2020, and we make a decision that we’re not gonna start trying for children right away. We don’t quite want the honeymoon baby, so we’re gonna wait a few months. In June of ’21, he goes to the eye doctor. It’s supposed to be just kind of a routine appointment for him to get an update on glasses prescription The doctor tells him that she wants to see him back because she’s concerned about him running his finger along the wall.

At this point, we know that Steve has some issues with colorblindness and that he doesn’t have great peripheral vision, and that there are some issues with depth perception. The interesting thing about all of this is that my mother said, “This doesn’t quite make sense. Do you have some type of syndrome?”

And my mother was coming from a place of working at an eye clinic for years, like 30 years by the time she retired. Because of the specificity of the types of patients that she saw, I’m not sure that she had seen a case quite like Steve’s before. So Steve always says, “Your mother knew at first. She knew there was something more going on.”

This one eye appointment leads to a cascade of specialist visits over the next year. But we find out approximately a month later, “Hey, I’m pregnant. Here we go.” So I’m newly married, pregnant, and my husband is taking off work to get MRIs on his brain, on his eyes, to go through six hours of testing at Vanderbilt Neuro-Ophthalmology.

For the most part, we’ve had really good providers through Vanderbilt, except for the very first one at Neuro-Ophthalmology. It was an absolutely awful experience, and when you’re in a specialty field, you don’t exactly have a whole lot of options. I do really feel like they dropped the ball as well because the eye symptoms that my husband has, some of them are very classic to his disease.

After the six hours of testing, all they could really tell us was that he had lost vision and that he had optic atrophy on his right eye. I had to essentially Google all the words I didn’t know in the medical record after the fact to really get any information out of this doctor about what he knew that was going on.

Steve is working at this time, but he’s having a lot of troubles. He is dealing with double vision, where he’s trying to read insurance cards at a medical office, and he’s having a hard time. He’s taking a nap every day at lunch. He’s coming home with massive migraines from staring at a screen all day, and I’m just trying to survive pregnancy, which wasn’t that great in my experience After dealing with the morning sickness that really is an all-day sickness that nobody tells you is all-day sickness, and then dealing with back pain after that, I woke up in the middle of the night with my hands and my feet itching really badly, which is a strange symptom.

The only reason I knew to bring that up to my OB was due to a Facebook group I was on for pregnant women over 35. Someone else had the same symptoms, and people were telling them, “You have to tell your OB. That’s a symptom of ICP,” which is intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. We’ll call it cholestasis for short.

Basically, it’s a liver condition that has to be monitored pretty closely because it can cause miscarriage or stillbirth. While Steve and I are elated about having our first child, there’s also an enormous amount of stress at this time. One thing I almost forgot to mention is that we ended up having to leave our church in November before Faith was born, so November of ’21, we end up leaving our church that we had been at because they chose to move couple cities away from where we were at.

We really felt strongly that this wasn’t a good move for us, even if the church felt like it was a good move for them to get a more permanent space. There were a whole lot of pieces that we didn’t share at the time that went into that. However, what I will say is that we lost our small group, our support system, at a really critical time as we were going through these health struggles and as I’m going through these pregnancy struggles.

I really don’t have the level of support that I need. One thing that I really wanted from God, and I was praying strongly about, was wanting to go into labor naturally. I didn’t want to have to be induced. I wanted to have a natural labor. That was a big desire of mine, and I was working with a doula on all the strategies as far as that goes.

I did an episode way back when on my labor, if you wanna go listen to that story. However, that was a very critical point of surrender in terms of learning to trust God with this uncertainty. It was either 35 or 36 weeks that I was diagnosed with preeclampsia on top of the cholestasis. My OB said, “You’ve got these two high-risk pregnancy conditions.”

I’m dealing with high blood pressure, where they had to send me over to the hospital for one of the visits, and then they ended up sending me home. But she said, “You know, I really recommend that we go ahead and induce you because I don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby.” I left that appointment.

I went straight over to a prayer chapel of a church that we had been attending for a little while. We didn’t end up staying there or landing, but it was a bit of a respite while we were trying to figure things out. I got in the prayer chapel and just lost it. I mean, I was crying at God. I was mad at God.

I was like, “This was one thing I wanted, Lord. I really wanted to go into labor naturally. I did not want to have to be induced.” It makes it harder to have a natural labor due to the medications they use. I was so mad at God. Like, “Why can’t you just give me this one thing? Our whole world is a mess right now.

There’s so much going on. Can you just allow my daughter to come into the world on her own terms and not have to be evicted?” Steve and I are faced with this huge decision together of do we go ahead and have the induction for the safety of our child and myself, or do we hold off? What do we do there?

Because certainly, even though the doctors were making recommendations, it was still our choice. I was praying through that process. I’m mad at God, and I’m crying, and I’m just so naughty, and it’s a mess. I’m the only one in there because it’s the middle of the day, and everybody else is working. At some point, I just surrender and say, “Okay, that’s it.

Your will be done.” I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. I really just want to make sure that my baby lives and that everything is okay, and I’m choosing to trust you that if you’ve brought us this far, that we’re gonna come out with things going okay. Now, up to this point, she had always done fine as far as, like, the ultrasounds and things like that.

I wasn’t super worried, but I was a little bit worried taking her out at 37 weeks. I was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to breathe and would have to go in the NICU. To condense a very long story, we end up making the decision to go for the induction at 37 weeks to still go for the natural labor, and I made it.

I survived. Faith survived. She came out really well. She didn’t have to go to the NICU. Everything was great, except for maybe the contractions. Those weren’t so great. But anyway, this whole episode that I was mad at God for allowing me to go through ended up being a huge milestone of faith in my life, and I can look back and see that now to say, “Okay, I surrendered and I trusted God that things were gonna be okay in this situation, that we were gonna make it through, and that Faith was going to come out ultimately okay in the end.”

It was like, if God can get us through that piece, then whatever’s happening with Steve’s health that we still don’t have answers for, He can get us through that piece, too. Due to a variety of factors, we had such a hard time trying to find childcare for Faith as I was getting ready to go back to work, and I had started pretty early on in my pregnancy, was on a bunch of waiting lists, but nothing was coming through.

I remember sitting in the bed one evening, and I was holding Faith. Steve was next to me. And I just looked at him and I said, “Will you stay home with her?” I don’t know that he agreed to it that night. I think he said that would be hard, but he would think about it. I was essentially fully telehealth at this time, so I was still gonna be at home in another room seeing clients.

I will tell you that Steve was a five-star stay-at-home dad. It was also a blessing for him because he wasn’t having those massive migraines from staring at a computer screen all day. We knew that this would buy us a little bit of time to make a determination about whether or not Steve would be able to go back to work, or if he would need to go on disability.

But we also didn’t feel like we had a strong disability claim at this time. Meanwhile, we have our follow-up with the awful neuro-ophthalmologist, and I noted, “Hey, Steve is having some balance challenges, like when lights get turned off in a room, that’s really disorienting to him. If we go into a place where there’s really low light, that causes problems and makes it a lot harder for him to be steady, and he’s holding onto my shoulder.”

The doctor looks at me in his crude way of communicating and says, “Well, even blind people can balance.” Because before this point, we’re both really concerned that Steve is going blind. He’s lost vision. They can’t tell us why. They can’t tell us the process, the when. Did it happen gradually? Did he have some kind of eye stroke, but because it was peripheral, he didn’t notice?

We still to this day don’t know the answer to that. However, the original ophthalmologist said, “You need to go see a specialist because I think you have Leber’s disease.” It was super scary because people with Leber’s disease do go blind, most of them by the time they’re fifty, and my husband is in his late forties at the time.

At this juncture, we realize that Steve really needs to be in regular neurology, not just neuro-ophthalmology. Regular neurology led to specialty neurology, and by the time he got to specialty neurology, they knew exactly what he was dealing with. Fortunately, Dr. G at Vanderbilt is an incredibly compassionate human, so the delivery of Steve’s diagnosis, I think, was much different.

It was really scary. I remember being in the room, and they’re performing all of these tests on him, and one of the things they asked him to do was to walk heel to toe. And this is not something that you see anybody do in a normal day-to-day activity. Unless they’re getting pulled over for drunk driving or something like that, which had not occurred.

I’m watching my husband really struggle to put his heel to his toe, and then his other heel to his other toe, and I’m going, “Oh, no.” I don’t know what this means, but I just know it’s not good. There were other things they had him do that he was struggling with, like touch his nose and then touch their finger.

They watched him walk down the hallway. So Dr. G says, “Well, you have something called spinocerebellar ataxia, or SCA for short.” And I think we were both like, “What?” Like, what even is that? Like, we’ve literally never heard those words in our entire life. Like, what are you talking about? And I think this is one of the hardest things about having a rare condition, is that nobody knows when you say, “I have SCA.”

It’s actually very rare when you tell a medical professional that they know what that is. Now, occasionally, they will have run into it before. So it’s not like someone saying, “Oh, I have Parkinson’s,” or I have MS. People know what those things are. There’s a context in their brain for those conditions, and maybe I’ve known someone with this condition, or at least I know what the symptoms are.

I’ve seen a documentary about it on TV, et cetera. I know a famous person with it. I mean, I think that’s a huge one. This actually happened the day that Faith turned six months old. We have a six-month-old, and we’re being told, “Hey, you have this really rare diagnosis. Oh, and by the way, there’s no treatment and there’s no cure.

We just kind of like manage the symptoms.” What in the world? When you get a diagnosis like this, it sends you into all of the grief and loss feelings. Like there’s the initial shock, the denial, the anger, the sadness, the loss. What does this mean for us? We had landed in a church where people were incredibly gracious to us as we walked through this because shortly after Steve got his diagnosis, my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer.

All the grief in my experience internally got super confused. It’s like I didn’t have time to process the grief of the diagnosis because I had to process the grief of my mother. So I processed that grief and then like had to move backwards and process the grief of the diagnosis and what that meant for our marriage and family moving forward.

The loss of my mother was pretty sudden and very huge. She had gotten sick around the time that Faith was born, and when Faith was about four months old, she went into the hospital. We had gone down to Florida to see her. Unfortunately, she was mostly in the hospital for the three weeks that we were there staying with my parents.

And I told my mom I wanted to come down before things got really bad. I, I didn’t want to wait until you were dying to tell you how much I loved you and to really be here for you. And I’m glad that I had that time with her. The timing was really important for me, but it was just such a crazy time of having a four-month-old who’s being cared for by my husband while I’m trying to go in a room in my parents’ house, lock the door and see clients via telehealth and really be there for other people with stuff that they had going on, while at the same time I have all this craziness that I’m going on in my own life.

I was also trying to pick up extra work because my private practice hadn’t fully rebuilt after maternity leave. So we had some financial challenges, of course, because I’m trying to build back up. My husband’s not working. I look back and I don’t even know like how I got through that time. I mean, just the grace of God sustained us.

That’s the only thing that I can say because with all the stress that was happening, all of the unknowns One thing that stands out to me, though, and this might choke me up a little bit, is that I went to go visit my mom in the hospital, and she was like: “Will you get me my phone?” That she had plugged in.

And so I picked it up, and I noticed that she had been listening to a Mother’s Day episode that I did. This was before I had faith. I did a episode on hope for the not yet mothers, I think was what we called it, and it was just different people’s stories of infertility or adoption and just really beautiful stories that different people had shared.

Back when we were Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I would ask people to share stories of hope, and my mom was listening to this episode and I thought, “Well, that’s kinda weird.” But then I realized that in that episode I had given, like, this tribute to my mom in the beginning about how she was essentially the biggest fan of this podcast, and I don’t say that lightly.

We have little podcast cards and things, and Mom was always talking to people and saying, “Hey, do you listen to podcasts? My daughter has this podcast.” And she would hand out those little cards, like on the plane and other places. I can honestly say that my mom would be so happy at where things have gone with this podcast and the people that have been reached.

And Hebrews talks about how we have this great cloud of witnesses that has gone before us that’s passed through the heavens. And when I read that, I just think about my mom, because Mom just loved the Lord, and she was not shy about telling people about it, either. When she was in the hospital, I mean, she was talking to the nurses about Jesus.

And I thought this hospital was in God’s sovereign plan. That was my mom’s final mission field. My mom had gone to seminary in hopes of being an overseas missionary, and she didn’t ever do that. She married a pastor, stayed in the US, but my mom was very much a missionary in two ways, because she raised a daughter that started a podcast that reaches people in seventy-plus countries.

I haven’t looked at that stat recently. So if you’re a mom, just know that’s the highest calling that you could ever have. I really believe that, just raising disciples for the next generation for the Lord. And my mom was very much a missionary while she was here on Earth and in her final days in the hospital.

And talk about things that you don’t understand. Why? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that God has given me peace and that my mom is no longer in pain. Pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing to watch somebody go through. And if you know, you know, they basically just waste away, and it’s very hard to see.

And my mom, of course, went through a lot of emotional struggles regarding, like, “Do I have enough faith for God to heal me?” There were very much things that she wanted to do and wanted to see still. I know that there were dreams that were unfulfilled for her. My daughter was actually, because of the induction, she was actually born on my mom’s birthday.

We did not plan it that way. That’s just kinda the way the calendar fell on her coming out at thirty-seven weeks. And so we had really just hoped and looked forward when that happened that, hey, you’re gonna be able to celebrate your birthday with Faith, and that’s so awesome. But unfortunately, that wasn’t in God’s plan.

She ended up passing away when Faith was about six months old. After Steve had gotten that diagnosis of SCA, around the same time, his balance really started to fail. He went from walking with a cane to then us having to get this stand-up walker contraption. He went for weeks of vestibular therapy, essentially to relearn how to walk, for his brain and his foot to connect together.

What he has is a nervous system condition. He had to stop driving. Once we got the diagnosis, we applied for disability. It was just such a hard road not knowing what was gonna happen. The therapist had told us at that time, “It’s not an if your husband ends up in a wheelchair, it’s a when he ends up in a wheelchair.”

Which was super scary. We did not live in a house that we could even remotely make accessible. And I remember just getting up at that time in the morning and walking the house before anybody was up and just saying like, “I trust you, God. I trust you. If I could trust you with bringing my daughter into the world, if I could trust you with the financial provision, with us being able to get disability incredibly fast,” which rarely ever happens if you know anything about applying for disability.

If I can trust God with bringing me a husband when things look very hopeless as a single person, then I can trust God with this. And that’s the point that I want to make with you is oftentimes we forget there’s so much in scripture that tells us, “Just remember what the Lord has done for you.” When the River Jordan stopped and the people walked across the river, Joshua told them, “Pick up a stone, and we’re gonna tell our children, we’re gonna remember that the Lord stopped the Jordan so that we could walk across and get into this land that God gave us.”

And I think that this is so crucial for us to be telling stories to our children, not just that, but to remember for ourselves, like how far has God brought you from where you started? If you’re in the middle of a storm, can you look back and see what God has done in your life and how He sustained you through some hard times?

That really helps us in the next hard season and is incredible in helping you deal with uncertainty and knowing that you can trust God. And I’m not here saying that I understand everything that’s happened to me. I don’t, especially with the mom stuff. We did not see that one coming. My mom had been incredibly healthy person.

She was the walker. She didn’t drink. She didn’t even drink soda. I mean, she was the vegetable eater of the family. We have no idea how she got pancreatic cancer and why she had to go so soon. So there are some things that we just have to surrender and say, “Okay, I don’t understand it. I’m not gonna understand it.”

But that doesn’t mean that God’s not good, and it doesn’t mean that He’s not sovereign. He is still in control, and He has a plan. Remember, He’s the author of the story. So we’re now almost four years past my husband’s initial diagnosis of SCA. All I can tell you is that prayer works, and we just believe that God has been incredibly good and gracious to us through the midst of this diagnosis.

Because there are so many different forms of SCA, it’s really hard for them to predict how things are going to go. We tried to get some genetic testing earlier this year to figure out if they could type what type he has, and nothing came back conclusive. There’s some more invasive, more expensive genetic testing that we just kinda opted to not follow through with right now.

What I can tell you is that Steve is walking better today than he was two years ago, definitely better than he was four years ago. He was wearing ankle braces, and he’s no longer having to wear those. He was using this huge standup walker because he didn’t have, like, the grip strength to use a regular walker and also was– really couldn’t quite use a cane all the time.

It was making him very fatigued. He’s now at a place where he’s been able to just walk on a regular basis, which is the best thing that you can do for SCA. And due to his walking and how he’s, like, slowly pushed himself over time, he now is just using the cane. We give all credit and praise and honor to glory to God for that, that he has what is considered a degenerative condition, but he’s doing really well and has actually somehow improved.

I can’t explain that to you other than the Lord is good. He still definitely has the vision loss and vision challenges for sure and deals with fatigue And other things as a result of his diagnosis, he’s started to deal with some memory issues as well that have become a little bit more prominent in the last year or so.

We just take things one day at a time. That’s just how we’ve had to live around here. We don’t catastrophize about the future. Steve actually has just an incredible outlook. I interviewed him about uncertainty on a past podcast episode. He just has to focus on what he’s able to do today. At the time of this recording, he came back from a trip to Germany with our church.

I was really nervous about him going on the trip to Germany only because our pastor hadn’t been before. This was a little bit of a scouting trip for them to figure out what would it be like to take a mission team back the next year, what kind of ministries could they help support the church in Germany with.

So I’m asking questions like, “How many stairs are there around? Do they have elevators? How much walking is going to be involved,” et cetera. They did end up walking more than they had anticipated, but it wasn’t actually the walking that Steve had the most problems with, it was the escalators. Apparently, Germany, where he went, they have a lot of escalators, and they don’t always paint the lines on them like they do in the US so that you can know kinda where to step on and step off if you have some vision mobility challenges.

There were a couple times pastor or someone else on the team had to grab a hold of him on the escalator, but overall, we’re just very thankful that he’s still able to go on mission trips, which he’s very passionate about. And I just believe that God will sustain him to do whatever work he has called Steve to do.

I can honestly say that the whole experience has helped me in terms of working with the clients that I work with that are dealing with OCD or dealing with trauma, dealing with other uncertainties, health challenges, relationship issues, to really teach people what I’ve had to learn of how to live in the present day by day, trusting in God that He’s gonna see us through whatever we go through in life.

I know that this isn’t gonna be the last hard season that we go through. Thankfully, we’ve been in a really good season for a while in our life. God has really richly blessed us.

With a beautiful church community that we’ve been at about a year. Our daughter is doing really well and just thriving in a small preschool environment. God is opening up doors for me to write a book for all of you about discerning between OCD and the voice of God. I am so excited about this. I can barely contain it.

I just see such a huge need for this book to be out in the world, and it’s coming from a place of love and burden that God has given me for the Christian OCD community. I think that you guys are just tough stuff, um, and that’s why I call you the OCD warriors, ’cause you’re fighting battles internally every day, and you deserve more resources for going through these times.

I hope and pray that this future book is another resource for all of you out there struggling. Please pray for me, as this project is nothing like anything else that I’ve ever done. But I did start a podcast, and I had no idea what I was doing there either, so it’s all okay. God bless you all. Thank you so much for being here.

We’ve got a couple exciting episodes coming up that I want to tell you about. This is the official end of our personal story summer series, but we are gonna be hearing next week about when autism and OCD overlap from Nicole Kruger. She’s been on the show before, so she is coming back to talk about autism and OCD, so that should be a great episode.

Then we’re also gonna talk about supporting your hormones naturally. This is for all the ladies. Ended up being a super interesting interview, so I’m excited to bring that one to you as well. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

234. Clinging to God’s Promises When Life is Hard: Part 1 of My Testimony 

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie shares Part 1 of her personal testimony, revealing the truths God taught her during one of the darkest seasons of her life and why those lessons still shape her faith today.

Episode Highlights: 

  • Why God’s promises became my anchor through divorce, grief, and unanswered prayers
  • How suffering exposed beliefs I didn’t realize I had about God’s character
  • What helped me keep trusting God when life didn’t unfold the way I expected
  • How counseling, community, and Scripture became part of God’s provision during heartbreak
  • Why God may be doing far more behind the scenes than you can see today

Episode Summary:

How Do You Hold Onto God’s Promises When Everything Around You Is Falling Apart?

There was a season when it felt like everything I had prayed and planned for was slipping through my fingers. My marriage was ending, the future I had imagined was disappearing, and I was left asking God questions I never thought I’d have to ask.

What carried me through wasn’t having all the answers. It was learning to anchor myself in God’s promises when my circumstances gave me every reason to doubt. Looking back, I can see how that season transformed not only my faith, but also the way I help others walk through suffering today.

Why Would God Allow Heartbreak After You’ve Tried to Follow Him Faithfully?

One of my biggest struggles wasn’t simply the pain. It was trying to understand how life could fall apart after I had sincerely tried to follow God. I had done what I believed He wanted me to do, yet I still found myself grieving a marriage, lost dreams, and prayers that seemed to go unanswered.

As painful as that season was, it uncovered beliefs I didn’t even realize I was holding about God’s goodness, His sovereignty, and what it really means to trust Him. Those lessons didn’t come quickly, but they changed my relationship with God in ways I never expected.

How Can You See God’s Provision When All You Notice Are Closed Doors?

In the middle of loss, it was easy to focus on everything that wasn’t happening. Foster care placements ended. Opportunities I desperately wanted never came together. Even simple decisions about my future felt overwhelming.

Years later, I can see that God was faithfully weaving together details I couldn’t recognize at the time. Some of the very things I questioned most became evidence of His protection, provision, and preparation for what was still ahead.

Where Does God Meet You When Grief Feels Too Heavy to Carry?

God didn’t meet me through one dramatic moment. He met me through counseling, faithful friends, Scripture that spoke to my heart in a new way, and countless reminders that He had not abandoned me.

Those ordinary moments became sacred. They reminded me that even when I couldn’t see what God was doing, He was still present, still working, and still inviting me to trust Him one day at a time.

Can God Redeem the Years That Feel Like They’ve Been Lost Forever?

There were seasons when I wondered if too much had already been lost. I questioned whether the years of heartbreak, waiting, disappointment, and uncertainty could ever have purpose.

Over time, God gently showed me that His story was far bigger than the one I had written for myself. Some of the promises I clung to in desperation eventually became reminders that He had been faithful all along, even when I couldn’t yet see where He was leading.

I hope you’ll listen to the full episode and hear how God met me in the middle of suffering, because my prayer is that you’ll be encouraged to keep trusting Him in the middle of your own story.

Transcript

 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 gonna let you guys in on a little secret. The top fear of anyone wanting to start a podcast is running out of things to talk about. Certainly, when you’ve had over two hundred episodes, like I have, you think, “I’ve probably covered everything by now,” which, of course, is not true.

There are many things to talk about, but also many things that maybe have been covered that could be talked about again in a different way. And that’s a little bit of what today’s episode is about. I decided I’ve been interviewing so many amazing people discussing their OCD testimonies, and I thought, “You know what?

Why not create an episode of where I’m at right now and what God has brought me through?” Revelation twelve eleven says that we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. So this is my testimony to you today. I thought, “What is one thing that I could share with people that has made perhaps the biggest impact in my life when I was going through hard times?”

And one of those things has been really clinging to God’s promises. Many years ago, I was listening to sermons on the radio by Pastor James McDonald. He had a sermon series based on his book called Always True. I remember in the very early period in between when my first husband decided that he was gonna leave and when we actually got divorced, obviously, that was a very challenging time, and there was a lot of uncertainty about how things were gonna progress.

I was definitely praying really hard that he would come back to the marriage, that he would be willing to put in the work and for us to be able to work together towards redemption. But I remember listening to the sermon series about God’s promises, and I got ahold of the book, Always True. At that point in time, I made a decision to say, “I am going to put my faith into action.”

I’m not just gonna say, “Hey, I believe these things about God.” Now all of my weight is going into these promises. In order to make it, I had to believe that God had not left me. I had to believe that God was not done working in my life. I had to believe that He was gonna work all things together for good As Romans 8:28 promises, when I was going through the divorce process, I had an immense amount of spiritual confusion because in my mind, with my logic, I said, “God, I wasn’t perfect, but I did some of the right things.

I hit the right check boxes. I married a Christian man I met at church. I saved myself for marriage. I was praying, reading my Bible, attending church regularly, serving in the church, going to small group, going to the church marriage events, reading books on how to become a better spouse.” I felt like, “How could I have done all of these things and it still go so horribly wrong?”

I followed the formula that everybody told me to follow. I did the things. We became foster parents. We were looking to adopt, believing that was what God wanted us to do in order to build our family. Now, I can look back and really see God’s hand and God’s providence in a way that I didn’t at the time.

When we were in the process of trying to adopt from foster care, we would keep getting these placements where DCS believed this one isn’t gonna go back, or their parents aren’t gonna do what they need to do, or they’re probably gonna end up needing to be adopted at some point or another, and that’s why they would place those particular children in our house.

And repeatedly, something would happen. DCS would lose in court. That actually happened on more than one occasion that I can think of, or the case would just not go the way that they had anticipated. Initially, when we lost our first foster placement of two girls, that one still to this day bothers me to think about and talk about.

I’ve done a lot of healing. I’ve done a lot of therapy around this. It was just tough because I thought, “You know, God, I’m not gonna understand this. I’m not gonna understand why you would bring these children into our lives to be able to love them as our own children, and then for them to be ripped away on a technicality and potentially go back into an environment where it wasn’t known if they were gonna be taken care of well or not.”

At the time, it felt like God was cruel. Really, I think I had that belief, and I just wanna say that very honestly. Like, all of our friends around us, they’re getting foster care placements, and they’re adopting their first placement. That happened to multiple friends that we knew, and for us, it just seems like they keep going back and keep going back.

And I thought, “Why in the world, God, are you allowing this? And now Of course, when I look back, I’m, like, thankful, and I see God’s mercy in that, that He foresaw and knew ahead of time the decisions that my first husband was gonna make, and was really saved from further heartache. Unfortunately, we did have two children at the time that he made the decision to leave, and there was no way that I could support them financially, physically, emotionally on my own.

My work schedule at the time was not conducive to single parenting at all. So I literally went from being– living as a family of four to now I have a house by myself, having to figure out, “How do I pay this mortgage, and how do I make life work?” Clearly, I wasn’t in a emotionally healthy headspace to make decisions at all, but they had to be made.

And one of the major decisions was, do I stay in Tennessee? Do I try to move home to Florida? Do I hang out with my parents for a while and see if I can get a job down there? What do I do? Do I sell my house and move into an apartment? Do I get roommates? God was just so gracious to me during that time that as I was looking at apartment options, I felt very strongly that it didn’t make any sense for me to sell the house and go into an apartment.

If I could just get a roommate or two, if I could do some refinancing, which I had to do anyway to get it in my name, that I could figure out a way to keep the house. When I prayed about it, I remember asking God, “Is it greedy for me to want to keep this house? And if it is, if I’m only keeping it out of greed, I don’t wanna do that.

I wanna be willing to lay it down and to let it go.” But I had already lost so much, and what God showed me in the process of praying about my heart and just the condition there was God showed me that I wanted to stay there because I felt safe there. I kinda knew what I was getting into ’cause I had lived in the neighborhood for several years at that point, and that was just a beautiful thing for me to feel peace about keeping the house, to say, “Yeah, if I move into an apartment, I don’t know if it will be safe or not.

I’ve haven’t lived there before. But here, I know the neighborhood, and I know the people next to me, and it’s a safe place to be.” As a single woman, I think it’s obviously very huge to feel safe in your own home, and I just so appreciate God guiding me and leading me in that direction to keep the house.

And also, just providing me with some roommates, even though I didn’t have the best experience ever with roommates, I also didn’t have the worst experience ever. Could’ve been a lot worse. I learned a ton from it. Definitely, if I had to have a roommate again, I would probably do some things differently, but like I said, God was just faithful, and I just see His provision through that whole process, that He blessed me by providing other people to live in my house.

But it was also, hopefully, a blessing to them as well to be in a safe neighborhood, to not have to be in apartment, to be able to go outside and hang on the back deck if they wanted to. God provided me with an incredible support system to get through this very hard time. God, I was already seeing a counselor.

I knew that things were not great in the marriage, although I didn’t know that he was interested in leaving I did know that he wasn’t interested in going to counseling with me, so I had gone myself and thought, “Well, maybe if I can work on me and work on communication from my end, maybe things will improve.”

So I went to counseling that first time after he told me he wanted to leave, and I know that the counselor just read it all over my face that things were not well at all. But I was thankful to God that I had that support system already in place, and I didn’t have to, on top of very stressful experience, now go try out counselors or find somebody that was gonna be the right fit to help walk me through that.

And I went to counseling weekly for probably two years at least. Was so beneficial to me through that period just to have a sounding board, to have somebody else who could help me navigate all of the different things that I was navigating and the emotional impact of some things that I hadn’t processed yet that had happened to me through that period.

I had had a very stressful, toxic work environment where they were, for whatever reason, vacillating between they loved me one week, and then next week they were writing me up and threatening to fire me, and I mean, it was literally that drastic, and that was just awful and toxic. I think it had a effect on my physical body, and it’s actually disgusting that those types of work conditions occur in the mental health field.

But unfortunately, I have heard from many other counselors about toxic work environments. There were certain criteria and things that we had to do and had to meet, some of which was completely outside of my control. I’d never worked in an, any type of work environment like that. There were so– There was processing of that happened in counseling, processing the grief of losing my foster children, losing my marriage.

Basically dreams that I felt like somebody might as well have lit a match and burned down the forest of my dreams, like it was just gone. Here I am, I’m like, “Okay.” My fertility is, like, clicking away day by day here. In my 30s, I’m not getting any younger, and I just share that ’cause I know so many people that I’ve talked to feel very similar, whether you had a broken engagement or a breakup, or you just have really struggled in dating.

Like, just know God still loves you and still sees you and cares about you, and He’s fully aware of your fertility, like, more than you are. There was a song on the radio at the time, and it was played a lot, called I Am Not Alone by Kari Jobe. It basically says, “You will go before me, and you will never leave me,” and that was really clinging to that promise of God has not left me.

Like, my husband that was here on earth, he’s left me, but God never left me, even though I didn’t understand how all of this could have happened to me. There was one time in counseling where my counselor said, “Do you think that your husband left you first or left God first?” And I was very easily able to say, like, “No, he walked away from God first,” and that’s how we ended up separated.

I think that provided me with a certain level of comfort. This period of time, God really showed me how sovereign He was because I had to come to terms with understanding that God’s sovereignty covers other people’s sins, that even if someone sins against you, whether that’s a parent, a spouse, a friend, whoever that is, that’s not gonna derail God’s plan for your life.

God still has good plans for you. He still cares about you. And also, that even, like, our own screw-ups and mess-ups and regrets, God is still sovereign over the sins of other people as well as our own sins. It’s really complicated. We can’t understand it on a human level. Don’t try to fully wrap your mind around that one But I know that I had to deal with a lot of regrets that I felt were things that I felt I should have done differently in the marriage.

I would lay up at night and be like, “Okay, well, maybe I should have asked to go to marriage counseling earlier,” or, “Maybe I should have done this differently. Maybe I never should have done that.” Or it could have been just the littlest things, and I questioned everything, like, where was the exact point that this went wrong?

If only I had done this, then maybe I could have saved my marriage. The reality is I just had to trust that God was in control and that He knew, that this didn’t catch Him by surprise. I got into a DivorceCare support group, and there were emails that you could receive from the DivorceCare folks. You would get an email a day for an entire year, and those were just sources of encouragement.

I needed people who had been there before I needed people who were devastated by divorce and felt like they couldn’t make their way back, but had survived and made it. I needed somebody that had the guide, and unfortunately, I had a lot of people in my life that had experienced divorce before, and it was like, “Oh, it was a good thing for them,” you know, was the message.

Like, I remember somebody at work being like, “Oh, that was just your starter marriage,” and I was like, “What in the world?” Like, we don’t have the same views on marriage. And even some other Christians that I knew, they were like, “Oh yeah, my ex-husband this or that,” and they were like, “Well, I married the wrong person,” or, “It didn’t work out,” and they didn’t have the same level of devastation that I had.

But when I got in this DivorceCare support group, there were a few other women that were in the exact same boat that I was in. They had not had children, but wanted to have children. Most of them had been left by their partner. They weren’t the ones that initiated the divorce. They didn’t want the divorce.

They felt like a lot of their dreams had died in that process. These were the people that I was like, “They get it.” Like, they understand. The leaders of that DivorceCare group were really helpful because they had some time and space away from their divorce and were actually able to see how God worked in a positive way through it coming out in the end.

It was helpful to hear some of their stories and their encouragement and knowing, like, how much they cared about us. One thing that was interesting about going through DivorceCare was I was so ashamed of my divorce that I was like, “Oh, gosh, this is a scarlet letter on me for the rest of my life. I’m a bad Christian because I got divorced.

Here I am, I’m a pastor’s kid with a divorce on my record.” I mean, just so much shame. I couldn’t even go to DivorceCare at my own church. My church had DivorceCare, and I went somewhere else. I went to another church where nobody would know me because I just needed to pop in there and be anonymous. And I think even that decision, like, I thought, “Oh, I’m making this decision,” but I can just see how God even directed those steps so that I would meet the people that I met that I might not have met at my church, even though I could have had a positive experience there.

Oftentimes, when you’re going through something and you’re in the middle of it and you’re in the thick of it, you’re really blinded to God’s goodness in your life. And so if you’re going through a hard time right now, I just want you to stop and look around and find anything that’s good that you can cling and hold onto.

There was a day where I read James 1:17, and it said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above.” And that changed my life, that verse, recognizing that. And I was going through some depression ’cause of everything that was happening. I got on Prozac for the first time in my life and just made the decision that I needed to function, and that it didn’t mean I had to be on an antidepressant forever, but that I was going to take The help that was available to me, and that was something that was recommended by my counselor, but I had already been thinking about it ahead of time.

And I just looked out and I was like, “Okay, what’s good about today? It’s sunny. It hasn’t been sunny in a few days. That’s good. That’s a gift from God. Thank you, God. I am driving a car that I have to get to and from work. Thank you, God.” It didn’t matter that the car was barely past emissions. I’m like praying, “Dear God, please let the check engine light go off this car so that it will pass emissions.”

I don’t know what happened, but God answered that prayer. I think it may have had to do with some weather changes, but thank you, Lord, my car passed emissions. We don’t have that anymore in, in Middle Tennessee, but my car passed, so I didn’t have to get further repairs on it. It was some glitch with the light anyway.

I can look back now and see God’s grace. The year that my divorce was finalized, I got out of the toxic job. God opened up a door just very randomly. I did not know this guy. I saw an ad that he placed that he was looking for counselors to join his group practice. I stayed with him a couple years before starting my own practice.

That was just a gift from God at that time, and I don’t even know that I fully recognized it because I was working so hard since I was starting out and I didn’t have a full caseload of clients or anything of that nature. It takes you time to get on insurance. There’s all these things that had to happen for me to get set up and established.

I had the most random income streams ever. I was combing lice out of kids’ hair. I was grocery shopping for people. This was way before COVID, before Walmart had delivery and Kroger had delivery and all that. You didn’t have all that. It was Shipt, that was it, and you had Shipt that you could get for Publix orders initially.

That was, I think, all you could get was Publix. And so I learned how to fly through Publix pretty quickly, put a bunch of groceries in the cart that people wanted, and deliver them to their house. And everybody was like, “What is this Shipt thing?” ‘Cause they would see me in a store with my shirt, like, “What is that about?”

Of course, no one knew at the time that COVID was gonna happen several years later and the whole thing was gonna explode and a slew of people would be getting their groceries delivered. One day very early on, I was wrestling with this fact that I was leaving a job, a W2 job, where I had paid time off, I had benefits.

It was scary because I had the consistent income and now I was gonna be fully self-employed. I went to do the grocery delivery and I was– I delivered like 12 orders that day. Ended up just at the end of the day going to a mall. I was in a department store and there was… Looking at jewelry. I don’t even know why I was in here doing this.

I think it was just one of those things where you don’t quite wanna go home yet because you know home’s gonna be empty and nobody’s gonna be there. Except for you and the cats. And I found this ring, and on the ring, this was not a Christian store by any means, it was like a normal department store, and it said, “If God brings you to it, He will see you through it.”

Every time I would look at that ring, whether I was combing lice out of kids’ hair, whether I was delivering groceries, whether I was getting ready to sit down and meet with a client, I was reminded that God is with me in this hard season. He’s gonna get me through this. Philippians 1:6 is an incredible verse because it says, “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.”

If you’re going through a hard time right now, even if it’s a hard time that you feel like you caused because of your own sin or your own mistakes, just know that God is not done with you yet. I know that some of you are wrestling with things like, is God good? Can I trust Him? Does He really love me?

Does He see me? Does He care about my plight? Does He wanna heal me? Does He want to restore me? These were all things that I had to learn through the hard season of suffering. It was there that God met me in a deep and powerful way and ministered to my soul in ways that I couldn’t even explain.

Suffering will– really has the potential to change your theology for the good. Another verse that I clung onto was Joel two twenty-five, which says, “I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.” I felt like years had been stolen from me, years where I could have had a child or had been parenting children, years where I wish that my career path had gone differently at the time.

When I was in this toxic job, I just couldn’t understand why God was not releasing me from that, why He would not open up other doors for me. What I can tell you now is that God was preparing me. God was preparing me for working with really challenging individuals that had a lot of complex issues going on.

I wouldn’t feel the confidence and the comfort that I do in handling certain client situations had I not had all of that experience of working with really challenging children and adolescents. As hard as it was, it was the best school for me. I also had access to some incredible trainings during that time.

I was able to get trained in EMDR for pretty cheap. I think that my work may have paid part of it for one thing that I went to. I can’t remember. But I know that I did not pay the full amount. I may have gotten some type of scholarship or something to go. So while it was incredibly hard, there were blessings on the other side of it.

There have been so many times in prayer where I’ve gone to the Lord and just been like, “I don’t understand, God. Why can’t you just give me this one thing that I want?” Whatever that thing is, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not bad for me to wanna be out of a toxic job environment. It’s not bad for me to want to be a mom.

It’s not bad for me to want to no longer be a single person and find someone to join my life with who’s gonna understand where I’ve been. Like, I don’t get it. Why won’t you just give me the thing? What I’ve learned over time and experience is that God cares enough about us to give us what we need, not always what we want, ’cause those are two different things.

My daughter will come to me sometimes, and the thing that she wants at that moment, whether it’s to stay up later, whether it’s to eat pure sugar instead of her dinner, whether it’s to skip out on a bath that she desperately needs ’cause she’s dirty Like what she wants isn’t always what’s best for her.

There are times where I just need her to trust that I know what’s best for her and that I love her, and that I’m not withholding any good thing from her, that if I’m not allowing her to have something, that there is a reason for it. I can see that now with God so much more than I could when I was a younger Christian.

I just didn’t get it. I believed a lot of lies of the enemy, just to be honest with you. I believed lies that maybe God was unhappy with me, maybe I wasn’t living up to His standards, and that’s why these things were going wrong in my life, or that’s why I was experiencing this suffering. I thought, “Yeah, I know that God loves me,” but I didn’t always trust that He had good for me or that He had my best interests at heart Four years later, I met my husband now, Steve.

I can honestly say God knew exactly what I needed. He did restore the years the locust had eaten. We got married in late 2020, got pregnant in ’21, and had our daughter, Faith, in 2022. I’m going to take some more time next week to share part two of my testimony. That’s probably the part of the testimony that more of you are familiar with.

Next week, I will start you off with some pregnancy complications and then probably the craziest year of our lives with so many different things happening right after Faith was born. I don’t know where you are on your OCD journey. If you feel like you are in a mess right now and don’t feel like you’re ever gonna be able to get out of it.

When you’re in the middle of a really hard season, you feel like it’s always gonna be this way, and you just wonder if there’s ever a light coming at the end of the tunnel. And part of the reason we do this podcast is just to give people hope. That’s just a huge mission behind the show. I also want you to know that the devil is a really good liar.

That’s about the only thing he’s really good at, and we are here to promote the truth of God’s character in scripture, that the devil causes people with OCD to doubt. Even people obviously don’t have OCD still struggle with lies, as I shared just throughout my testimony of different times where I felt like God didn’t care deeply about what I was going through or God seemed to be putting me through things that were cruel.

I wanna wrap this up by just letting you know that you can trust the promises of God, that He’s never gonna leave you or forsake you, that He loves you regardless of your past or present, what’s going on, regardless of your sins. He’s faithful to forgive. God has not given up on you. He’s gonna finish the good work that He started to make you more like Jesus.

If you are a follower of Christ Whatever suffering you’re experiencing right now, God promises that He’s gonna use that for good. I know it looks bad. You’re thinking there’s no way anything possibly good could come out of this, but I am living proof to tell you that God has used my sufferings for good.

And so I know that if He has used these things for good, that He can use them for good in your life. It doesn’t mean that you have to go on tour with your testimony of OCD recovery. But what it does mean is that God may be using this in your life right now to shape your character, to cause you to be a more compassionate person, to cause you to be more dependent on Him, to shift your life in a direction that maybe it wouldn’t have gone before had you not had OCD.

I don’t know. Maybe there’s people that you’re supposed to encounter. I don’t know for your particular story. I just know that God is working behind the scenes, and He’s weaving something good and beautiful, even if you can’t see it right now. So stay hopeful, be encouraged. God loves you, and I’m so glad that you’ve hopped on to listen to this podcast today.

If you enjoyed hearing some of these personal stories, definitely sign up for our newsletter because they get first dibs on all the stuff that’s happening in the Bock world, just little insights and devotional pieces that I feel like things that God is showing me and that I wanna pass along to you guys.

So definitely go to carriebock.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

122. How Do I Deal With Uncertainty? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie delves into the challenges of facing uncertainty amidst significant life transitions. Drawing from her own experiences, she offers helpful tips for coping with uncertainty and finding peace amid the unknown.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of trusting in God’s plan and finding peace amidst unknown circumstances.
  • Insights into dealing with uncertainty from a faith-based perspective.
  • Ways to find comfort and strength in your personal journey through uncertain times.
  • Tips for maintaining confidence and hopefulness despite facing unknowns in life.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 122. I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, specializing in trauma, anxiety, and OCD. Today, I’m diving into a topic that’s deeply personal for me right now—dealing with uncertainty. My husband and I are in a challenging transition, moving from our split-level home due to his neurological condition, spinal cerebellar ataxia (SCA). The condition impacts his balance and mobility, and we’re facing an uncertain future.

The process of selling our house and finding a new, accessible home has been overwhelming. With the real estate market in high demand, it’s been a struggle to find a suitable property that meets our needs. As we navigate this uncertainty, I’m reminded of the same principles I teach to those grappling with OCD: embracing uncertainty and trusting in God’s plan are crucial.

I lean on the comforting words of Lamentations 3:22-23, which remind me of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. Reflecting on past instances where God’s provision has been evident strengthens my faith and helps me trust that He will guide us through this challenging time. Even though the outcome and timing are unclear, I find peace in knowing that God has a good plan for us.

I invite you to listen to the full episode for a deeper exploration of how I’m managing this period of uncertainty and the spiritual insights that have guided me.

Explore related episode:

118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 122. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I specialize in working with people dealing with trauma, anxiety, or OCD, often a combination of those things. 

Today on the show, we’re talking about “How do I Deal with Uncertainty?”

My husband and I are going through a period of intense uncertainty in our lives right now. As I share this story, it may not be a big deal to you, but it is a big deal to us in our lives right now. We are in the process of transitioning houses from one house to another house. For those of you who’ve followed my story, my husband has a neurological condition called spinal cerebellar ataxia or SCA for short. This is a degenerative condition. He has issues with balance, walks with a cane or a walker right now, and there’s a lot of uncertainty with that diagnosis. We don’t know what the future holds for him, but we have been told that There’s a great chance that at some day or another, he will end up in a wheelchair due to this condition, which is hard to sit with that reality.

In preparation for that right now, we have been living in a house that’s a split level. It has a lot of stairs.  There are stairs to get into the house from the front porch. Once you enter the house, there are  more stairs that either go up or down. It’s not great for somebody with balance challenges. Not wheelchair friendly at all. 

We’ve been praying and processing about timing, when should we move, what do we do, the housing market, the interest rates, it’s all crazy. We’re in a high-demand area. Lots of people are moving into our area in middle Tennessee. So what do we do, God? How do we time this correctly?

We’ve been working with a realtor that we trust. He said, “Hey, you’re going to have to sell your house before you can buy another one because nobody wants to go for a home contingency right now. If your offer has a home contingency and it’s up against another offer that’s cash or doesn’t have one, then you are going to be bid out.”

We put our house on the market and it sold in record time. We got everything ready and looking nice. That was super stressful. I didn’t know I had a lot of uncertainty about showing the house. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never sold a house before. I had so many questions for all my friends. “Tell me about selling your house. Tell me about what it was like getting it ready to show in the morning. How much notice did you have?” 

I went through all these things and ended up selling your house very quickly. The only problem has been that there just has not really been a whole lot on the market in our price range that also would fit with what we are needing for my husband’s unique challenges. 

There are lots of two stories in our area. Lots of houses where the bedrooms are all upstairs and that just isn’t going to work for us. Lots of new builds that are coming that are unfortunately outside of our price range or the lots are not flat. Maybe the home is one storey, but the lot has a steep drop-off in the back because we live in Tennessee.

There are hills, there are mountains, not mountains in our areas, but lots of hills and elevation changes for sure. We’ve been going through this process, knowing we have a month and a half to two months to really find a place and get everything set up so that we can get out of our house and hopefully into what we hope to be our forever home.

It’s been a huge waiting game with a lot of questions. “How long do we wait to be in a particular area? What if nothing comes open in the market in this city that we want to live in? Maybe God wants us to live a little bit further out. We’re also a part of a church plant. What does that look like? There’s a lot of uncertainty there.

We don’t know where the church is going to end up being located, feeling the call of God to be a part of this church plant and not wanting to be too far from wherever they’re going to land and end up at the same time trying to find a place that’s not too far from our daughter’s Mother’s Day Out programs that she goes to.

A lot of questions. What if we put a bid on a house and we don’t get it? What if someone overbids? What if we don’t find a place to live by the time we have to be out of here and we end up in an apartment? I haven’t lived in an apartment in a long, long time. I don’t even know much about apartment living today, other than it seems expensive, and I have two pets, so I know that would be even more expensive to have cats in the apartment.

There’s so much uncertainty right now. I teach people, especially who are dealing with rapid thought processes, a lot of what-if questions, and overthinking. I work with a lot of people who are struggling with OCD, and one of the things that we do is we help them sit with uncertainty, so I thought I would talk with you as I’m going through this period of uncertainty in my life, and it doesn’t have a happy bow or a happy ending yet.

I’m in the middle of it, speaking to you about it, and unsure and have some lack of clarity, even spiritually, from the Lord. “Okay, God, what are you doing here?” I thought that as I’m going through this process of life uncertainty, that we’re all going to face uncertainties at some point or another, I would walk you through how I am dealing with this uncertainty.

One thing is that I have to rest and trust in the character of God and who I have experienced Him to be in my life. Number one, I know that I can rest in God’s character. Lamentations 3, 22-23 tells us that God’s mercy is new every morning. Great is his faithfulness to us. God has just shown me that time and time again, God is good, God has good plans for us, God is kind (Ephesians) and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus So God expressed his kindness to us in Christ. That’s awesome That’s something that we can really rest in. 

I think it’s hard for us because we know that sometimes God calls us to hard things. Sometimes God calls us to things that might be uncomfortable for us. After living in a home for over 10 years, it would be uncomfortable for me to go live in an apartment. But if that’s where the Lord has me, if there’s some ministry that I’m supposed to be doing in that apartment, if there’s a person I’m supposed to meet needs to know the Lord, if there is some reason that God wants to plant me there until he plants me in a forever home, then I am all for it.

My life is surrender to Christ and to what he wants for me. It’s not about me anymore. I am called to take up my cross daily to follow him, and as we connect with Christ, a lot of people are afraid that God is going to ask them to do something that they completely don’t want to do. 

Here’s what happens when we abide in the Lord and our desires become God’s desires. As we pray, and as we say, this is what I would like, I know for me, I know where I would like to live, I know that I would like to have a shorter commute, I know that I would like to be close enough to get my daughter, and for that to not be a burden after she’s done with school. I would like to not feel like I’m too far from my church family right now.

These are things that I desire, but I desire the will of God more. And wherever God wants us to be, we’ve been praying for ministry opportunities. In our new community that God would plant us where he wants us to be. I just believe that the Lord is going to do that in faith and trusting him. The uncertainty is the timing.

I don’t know what timeline that’s going to be. God could have a house for us in two weeks. God could have a house for us in two months. God could have a house for us in six months. I have no idea. That’s the uncertainty, but I rest in God’s goodness. I know that I can trust him. 

Point number two of the way that I’m dealing with this uncertainty.  I can point to times in my life, I can go back and say, “I didn’t think this situation was going to work out, but it did” because of God and His intervention.

There’s a story behind a lot of places where I’ve lived. There’s a story to getting this house that I’m in that the only reason I knew about this house was because we got lost trying to get out of the neighborhood. This house that I’m living in now was not on the radar until I got lost, and God put it there and said, “Huh, maybe this house. What about this?” It ended up being my home for over 10 years and that is incredible. 

I have stories behind offices that I’ve rented my very first office. I remember calling the guy on the phone and this was just after being beaten down, just feeling like, “Lord, I’m never going to get a space because I call and either they want too much money or they’ve already rented it out, or they want me to pay for the build-out that I didn’t have money for. They are all these different roadblocks, and the Lord graciously provided this cute little office. It was not very big at all, but it was exactly where I needed to be for the two years that I rented it.

The guy we’re walking through the office, looking at it and I’m saying, “Okay, I think this is going to fit the needs that I have at this time. He kept telling me I wasn’t supposed to work today. He managed the place. He didn’t live in that area and he happened to be in the area for a completely different reason.

God brought all these things together to make that happen. When we were praying for my husband’s disability process to come through, God just wholly provided. God granted us favor. He ended up getting disability faster than some other people. We don’t tend to talk about that too much because we’re not prideful about it. We didn’t do anything. That was all God because God knew our needs. God saw that we were in a difficult place. I had a very young child at the time that we were trying to provide for and my husband had been out of work for many months at that point and he was partially taking care of her. I was trying to work and make sure that everyone had what they needed.

It was a tough time in our life and I sent in a bunch of paperwork, literally just prayed over it and said, “God, please give us favor with these people. Please let them know that my husband is truly disabled and that we do need this disability to come through to pay for our bills at this time.” 

God was so faithful. We were just incredibly blessed by that experience. There’s just been time after time after time where God’s provided something that I’ve needed. God’s not going to let me be homeless in this situation. I know that there’s going to be some kind of roof over my head. I don’t know if I’m going to be in a temporary situation for a little while or if we’re going to have a smooth transition.

We have no idea right now, but I just know that God’s in it. Whatever uncertainty you’re facing today, just know that God is right there with you. God will never leave you and never forsake you, and that it’s okay if you don’t know something right now. God’s word is a lamp to our feet. And a light to our path is what we’re told. God doesn’t give us the whole picture. Oftentimes, he only gives us the next step. And sometimes we have to wrestle with him in that process of decision making to know where do we go from here? God, what do we do? I’m trusting and resting in the character of God. I’m believing in what he’s done in the past for my family.

This is why, oftentimes, we forget, as human beings, what God has done in the past. You will see in the Old Testament, they had festivals to remember, things like Passover. Passover was to help them remember that God led them out of Egypt. God led them out of slavery and when angel of death came through and the firstborn sons died, yours didn’t because you had the blood of the lamb on your door.

It was a complete picture of Jesus. We are covered by the lamb of God. If you are a believer, the Israelites had festivals and times of celebration to remember those things that God did. I feel like in common American society, we don’t celebrate or sit and think and remember what God has really done for us.

Maybe you haven’t been a Christian in a long time, or you don’t have as many stories that maybe you can point to in your own personal life, but you can always point to God showing his kindness in Christ Jesus that we were saved while we were still sinners. We were hopeless, we were far from God, we were lost, and God came and sent Jesus to us to be the substitutionary sacrifice.

That in itself is enough If God never did anything else for us, God gave us Jesus, God gave us his presence, God has gifted us heaven when we die, and man, that ought to just be celebrated, make you excited and just full of joy. Whatever is weighing you down today, whatever you’re uncertain about, just know that you can sit with that in the Lord, that you don’t have to run from the uncertainty.

It’s a part of all of our lives at different points. There’s going to be times where you may question who God is. I know I’ve had those times in my own life and that we have to cling to faith and believe what we know to be true when we’re in a good place. I hope this information has been helpful to you.

You can follow along on my journey. I send out little emails every week about things that are happening with our podcast, things that are happening with me, what God’s teaching me. You can get on our email list by going to hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. We’ve got some amazing resources on there: 100 tips for managing anxiety, Things that Christians with OCD Should Know. If any of those appeal to you, you can get those downloads in your email box, and then you will be on our email list. Subscribe and follow us. 

Thanks so much. Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

​