Awaken Delight: Embracing a "Delicious" Life with Jesus featuring Stephanie Rousselle

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Life Audio.

00:00:04
Speaker 2: Hey there, welcome back to the Compare To Podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Heather Creekmore.

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Speaker 2: I'm so glad you're watching or listening today. Today, we're going to have a fun conversation about a topic you might not think a lot about, but it's so important. And the topic is delight. What does it mean to delight in God? What does it mean to even consider the fact that God delights in you? That word delight, it sounds so, I don't know, freeing and joyful and light.

00:00:39
Speaker 1: And yet, I.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: Don't know, maybe you had a reach for someone listening today. I know it's felt that way for me. Today, my guest is Stephanie Rousseau. You're going to love her accent. She's a good friend of mine. And she runs this ministry called Gospel Spice. She's a Bible teacher. She's an author. And she's going to talk to us today about how we embrace this topic of delight and really what it looks like to live a life where we can delight in God and feel his delight in us. Stephanie, welcome to the Compared To Podcast. Hi, Heather.

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Speaker 1: It is so much fun. So delightful, if I may say, to be with you today.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: Well, let's start at the beginning. You've been on the show before, but for those who don't know you, you run this ministry called Gospel Spice, which at first blush might be like, what does that mean? Spice? Like what? So can you just kind of like explain like, okay, what does Gospel Spice mean? Like what are you trying to say there? And does this connect to Delight?

00:01:53
Speaker 1: Oh, such a good question. And you have no idea how many people do ask me what this means, because I often get stuff about, is it a cookbook? No, it's not.

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Speaker 2: Or is it.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: Related to, you know, sex?

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Speaker 2: No, it's not.

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Speaker 1: I get those a lot. What it is, is honestly, is I love good food. And what I realized is that when we want to taste and see that the Lord is good, that's, you know, it's almost a command in scripture. Taste and see. It's an invitation at the very least. What does that look like? And oftentimes we have grown so familiar with scripture, with the message of the gospel, because we are immersed in it, because we read our Bible, because we go to church, because we have Christian friends, that we have really kind of forgotten how spicy the gospel is in the sense of how relevant and how it's going to shake our spiritual taste buds. It's the last, the furthest thing from boring or tasteless. And oftentimes I find myself with a faith that feels a little stale and boring and tasteless and flavorless. And when you look at Jesus, I mean, he enjoyed good food. He enjoyed company of his people. And so how do we recover the true flavors of the gospel so that we can really taste and see that the Lord is good? And in a way that doesn't feel cliche, that feels almost a little disruptive. Maybe that's why I chose gospel spice. It feels a little disruptive, but that's on purpose. I think the gospel is meant, the good news of what Jesus has done for us and who he is and who he invites us to be in him, who he calls us as the ones he delights in, really, that's disruptive. So then there's also the French connection for me, because Taste and see that the road is good works so well in my French culture. You can hear the accent, as you mentioned. I can't get rid of it. And I have, you know, I grew up in France and I grew up loving really good food and also realizing how food and even the spiritual food of relationships with one another, relationship with God. These are all things that are almost like stick figures that God uses to as illustrations in life to teach us about him and then to invite us into relationship with him. So one example I have is that Psalm 37, 4 in English is, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. So that word delight that you mentioned, you know, in French, it's the word délice. Can you say that for me?

00:04:32
Speaker 2: Délice. Délice. like delicious.

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Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. You make the connection. Exactly. In English, you have two words, the words delight and deliciousness, but in French, both of these words are translated delice. So my French brain has a hard time dissociating the two concepts of delight and deliciousness. So if something is delightful, it's necessarily delicious and vice versa, but it doesn't just apply to food. So when scripture says, delight yourself in the Lord, in French, it literally says, find God to be delicious. So that means that taste and see that the Lord is good suddenly makes a whole lot of sense, right? Because it's so connected. So gospel spice is about tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. It is about finding the Lord to be both delightful and delicious. And I think that's a really tantalizing suggestion, isn't it?

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Speaker 2: It is. It's so funny. When I wrote my first book, I had a little bit of my testimony in it. And I used this term. I said, my testimony is pretty vanilla. And I meant that in sort of a derogatory way. Because it was like, there's nothing interesting about it. I was raised in a Christian home. I went to Christian schools. I wasn't rescued from this wild life and God did a 180 on me. And I had a beta reader for that book right back this long thing, like, no way. Like every testimony is a story of going from death to life. And, you know, you're, you're basically to how you would put it, you're not finding your testimony to be delicious, right? You're not delighting in that. And then, so that, that paused me in my tracks. And actually, I know you have a lot to say about whether or not vanilla is actually boring. We'll talk about that in a minute. But then I'm thinking like, oh goodness, you know, Stephanie, my story, you know, my story and A lot of my listeners, right, if you had any sort of eating disorder or disordered relationship with food, right, delicious food is the enemy. Delicious food is almost sinful, right? I mean, that's the word we use, right? It's sinfully delicious. Or if something is maybe fat-free or sugar-free, it says on the label, it's guilt-free, right? Like this whole concept of finding something delicious and And being able to go that one step further and be like, and I enjoy it. Wow, this is a good gift. Like that's kind of hard for women with eating disorder, disordered eating background. So I'm just kind of throwing that out there. But I think where I hope we're going today, right, is if we can really embrace this concept of delighting in him, finding him delicious, right? It feels like that touches every aspect of my life as a Jesus follower, right? It's not supposed to, and this is actually a line from my workbook, right? It's not supposed to be like plain bread and black coffee. That's not supposed to be the Christian life, God gives us great blessings to delight in. So I love that this is your message.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting.

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Speaker 2: I noticed you're using this term like awaken delight. Like, is that purposeful? Why awaken delight?

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Speaker 1: That's a good question. Before I go there, first, your testimony of coming to faith in Christ in a boring quote sort of way, that's the story as mothers we want for our children, right? And so that's actually the best possible story. I don't want my children to have dramatic conversion stories. I want them to just give their faith to Jesus when they're five years old and never depart from that way. That's what I want. It sounds as boring as possible, but that's the best way. And I think in heaven, these stories will be highly celebrated. So I completely agree with your better reader on that. And then as far as finding sin in deliciousness and vice versa, I think that's a very human thing because... I think when we reorder our loves and our desires, and when we realize that God has given us a lot of good things to find delicious, whether they be food or not, it puts things in perspective. And so there is no shame or no guilt to be had for finding food delicious. And even more so because the problem, if you start finding food sinful, if it's delicious, then That is a mentality we are necessarily going to export to God. And then we can start feeling guilty if we actually are enjoying God and we're finding him to be delicious. Because if anything delicious is sinful, therefore God is sinful. Ooh, yikes, that's dangerous territory there. And so if we want to avoid that, we're going to like really safe territory of just a very safe and plain vanilla relationship with God because that's safe and not dangerous. But yeah, but then we're cutting ourselves off from all of the promises of scripture. And honestly, in heaven, we're going to find God to be so delicious anyway, that might as well start now. So as far as awaken delight, the word awaken, I think I spent a lot of time trying to find the right word. And I didn't want to something that had to do with finding delight or, um, discovering delight, because these tend to indicate something that we must wrap in our own strength. Right. And delight is not delight in God is not something we can create in our own strength. It is not something we can squeeze like, you know, toothpaste out of a, you know, we just can't squeeze toothpaste out of a tube. The, in the same way that we would squeeze faith. We can't do that. So that means that when we awaken delight to our delight in God, we awaken to something that already exists. When we awaken to the sunrise, we haven't created the sunrise. We awaken to it. We awaken to a reality that objectively exists and that we are ushered into, that we are choosing to become a part of. We awaken to a new day. We awaken our senses. We awaken delight in God. And so we awaken to something that God is actually inviting us into. He has set the stage for us to delight in him. That's part of the message of the gospel. But how do we step into it? How do we choose to awaken to this delight that already exists? How do we choose to become a part of it? How do we choose to let it flavor our day so that it becomes the primary flavor of How do we let it scent our day? And that's where I love to use vanilla because vanilla is both flavor and scent. And I think we find a lot in scripture about the true extravagance of real vanilla in God. And it's both flavor and scent. And it's something we can fully experience through our five senses because we awaken, first of all, it's our bodies, right? So we are, scripture never invites us to a disembodied experience of God. So we awaken to delighting God through our five senses. And yes, that includes our taste buds. And so, yes, there is a dimension to food, but it's all of the five senses. When we focus exclusively on deliciousness as being related to taste, we forget the other five senses. Because in my French culture, anything that is delicious has to do with beauty. And so it's not necessarily just food. It can be a flower. It can be a baby's laugh. It can be a sunset. It can be the hug of a loved one. These are all delicious experiences, delightful experiences. So- it broadens the conversation way beyond just the one sense of food, but all of the five senses. God became human and dwelt among us. And so in the same way, he invites us to use our five senses to awaken and cultivate our delight in him. That's rooted, if I may say, in the fact that he delights in us first. First John says somewhere, and I forget the exact address, we love because he first loved us. And I think at the very least, it means that We delight in him because he delights in us. So we awaken to that reality.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, here's what I'm picturing. I feel like, and this may have even been communicated in the American church, you know, probably going back to maybe the Puritans. It feels like being a Christian has been interpreted as kind of a life of duty. Maybe like, I'm just picturing like a black and white movie of like, we're good soldiers, onward Christian soldiers. You do the things. And what you're describing, and I don't mean this in a sexual way, but it's a more sensual experience, right? It's, it's like you said, embodied, but it's full color. It's beautiful. It's enjoyable. It's, something I want to wake up in the morning and see like a beautiful sunrise. And that's, that's different. I think then, then the Christian life, so many of us have been taught to live, you know, I mean, I know you've not been in the U S your whole life, but for a while, like, I mean, do you see that? I mean, is that part of why you wrote a book on this?

00:14:31
Speaker 1: Oh man, you're so, you're so right, Heather. And actually it's the bent of my own heart. So I, Don't even have to look at culture. I just have to look at my own heart. I tend to be, you know, a type A achiever, you know, control freak. Maybe you can relate to that a bit.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: No, no, I have no idea what you're talking about.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: And so I think, yes, I can so easily get stuck on the duty, the tasks, the next thing to do. But there's no delight in that, at least not real. There is a measure of delight because nothing is, you know, it's very enjoyable to check a checkbox. But at the end of the day, it's just a checkbox, right? If any of us has added a line of something you've already done just to be able to take it, we've all done that because it's enjoyable. But there's so much more to that. If you think about it, there's nothing wrong in duty. And I think the Puritans were onto something with that. But it's a matter of emphasis. Jesus said that his generation... was upset with John the Baptist who was extremely rigorous and dutiful. And then they were also upset with Jesus who was drinking and eating and going to dances and having so much fun.

00:15:35
Speaker 2: Right?

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Speaker 1: So either way we can see how we can get upset with either of them. And so, but Jesus says that clearly if he comes eating and drinking and dancing and he gets criticized, we get criticized either way. And so it's so easy to see that and to see how enjoying God is could almost feel too good to be true. But actually, I think it's the opposite. It's true. Therefore, it's good because it's from the Lord. And so I'm hoping that I can come alongside anyone who has, like me, maybe been in the rut of duty and of trying to accomplish something for God. Because deep down, I think when I live a life that is rooted in duty and in the next thing, it's either because I feel inadequate in myself or I feel I have something to prove to myself or to God, right? And so the message I think of Awaken Delight and of Gospel Spice is really to say, my dear friend, the gospel message is this. There's absolutely nothing you can do for God to love you more than he already does. And we can go through the message of scripture of how he has proven his love that is beyond measure, right? I was reading literally just this morning, a sentence that stuck with me and now I'm going to struggle to paraphrase it. But basically the mercy of God is so great that he forgives great sinners who have sinned greatly and And he forgives them even after a great length of time with a great forgiveness that brings in a great joy and a great delight towards the joy we'll experience in heaven, the great heaven of the great God. So this idea of the greatness of God and his delight of us and the fact that There is absolutely nothing we can do for God to love us more than he already does. His love for us is indeed great in the greatest sense of the term. But the flip is also true. There is absolutely nothing you can do for God to love you less. And that's what we need to hear oftentimes, right? On your worst day, there's nothing you can do that's going to make God love you less in Christ Jesus. Romans 8.1, there is now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus. So we can Probably many of us say that and actually believe it's true. But do we actually live like it's true? Has it actually internalized all the way to our heart where we can say with certainty, I know that God loves me on my best today and on my worst day in Christ Jesus. And not just that he loves me because he kind of has to. God is love and he kind of signed on the dotted line in scripture that he's going to love us no matter what. No, no, not just that. But he actually likes us. He actually enjoys us. Scripture says he delights in us. Seriously, when I wake up in the morning and I remember that God delights in me, it just puts a spring to my step, Heather. It just changes how I go through my day.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, I mean, what I encounter with my coaching clients specifically is we get kind of stuck and like, well, I don't like myself. I don't, you know, there's all these things I feel like I could do better at. I'm not doing well at. And so we kind of project all the ways we feel like we're failing onto God and be like, well, of course he must not delight in me. He must not love me. Or, I mean, you know, to your point, right? Like, I think we all like, of course God loves me. God loves everyone. Right. But it's like, it's not special, right? Believing that he actually loves me, that he could find enjoyment in me. That's kind of hard to swallow for a lot of us. And then, and then, like I said before, like, but do I delight in him? Like how, like, what does that actually looks like? I, I, yes, I, I can say, I love God. I try to do what he asked me to do. Right. But again, is that, is that just onward Christian soldiers, you know, marching, marching dutifully, or is that delighting? And man, Stephanie, it just feels like, well, I mean, you and I've talked about idolatry before. Like, it feels like there's some sort of idolatry component to this, right? Like, because if I really stop and think about what I delight in, there are some things I delight in. Maybe it's my checklist, right? Or maybe for some, I mean, for me, it definitely used to be trying to delight in my body. Like if I could just have an appearance that made me happy, then that would be my delight, right? And so there's an idolatrous component to that. But yet, aside from that extreme, well, extreme might even be too, because I think it's so ubiquitous, right? But aside from that, it's like, okay, Lord, like how do I learn how to feel your delight and not turn it into anything that it wasn't meant to be? I don't know. I said a lot of words there, but what are you thinking?

00:20:48
Speaker 1: Let me just, what you just said here, how do I feel your delight of me?

00:20:53
Speaker 2: Right.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: That's the thing. Cause That's why, again, the word awaken, we awaken to a reality that is objectively present. And again, we know from scripture that objectively God's delight of us is real and that his presence, I mean, God is nearer to you and me than we could ever imagine. We're just not awake to it. We're not just aware. We just don't have the awareness of God's presence all the time. He's always present. We know that it is not our felt experience. And so I think delight is a bit of a disruptive word that forces us to pause, unlike joy or happiness that have been, again, so ubiquitously used that we kind of lost what they really mean. And so I think delight is just a way to say, okay, how can I grow in my awareness of the objective reality of the presence of God? The objective reality is, of God's delight of me, the objective reality that he invites me to delight in him. Because these are all things, yes, of course, in scripture, we can prove they're true, but they're not our experience. And so I think awakening delight is bridging that gap from theology or doctrine towards experience and felt reality. That's what we long for, right? I mean, Tim Taylor says our desire, our soul's greatest longing is to be fully known and fully loved. And that's bridging that gap in that way. So how do we do that? I guess that's the million dollar question. And at the end of the day, again, this is not something we manufacture in our own strength. That's the whole point. Because if we could, then it would keep us on that hamster wheel of performance and control and be like needing to do a little bit more to get a little bit further. I think delight, when we seek to make delighting God our actual reality and the driving force of our life, It takes us off the hamster wheel because one of the first things we need to realize is that this isn't something we can manufacture in our own strength. This isn't like, you know, again, and back to what you were saying about, you know, I'm just going to love God no matter what. I'm going to grit it out come what may. I am going to muster up those feelings of love. Well, has that ever worked for you? Because it sure hasn't worked for me. It's the same way with our kids. There's days that our kids are more or less lovable, right? Or I would say, no, they're more or less likable. Maybe that's a better one.

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Speaker 2: Or husbands.

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Speaker 1: Husbands. Ourselves, right? Ourselves, most of all. Let's just keep it with ourselves. Honestly, most days, I don't like myself a whole lot. And so I'm not going to muster up those feelings. I'm going to go back to what God says. And that's where the beauty of delight comes in to me because again, love, we have been so conditioned, maybe by the Puritans, maybe I think I would say by the more modern Christian culture to love God, right? But we have completely emptied it of meaning. When we say God is love, it has become a bumper sticker. We don't really know what it means anymore. But what if we started saying God is delight? That's again, that's just, it shakes things enough that it forces us to think about it. And love is not something that you can force because if you could force love, then by definition, it would not be love, right? You can't, as you know, you can't force your kids to love you. You can't force yourself to love yourself. Maybe you can force your dog to love you, but that's about it, right? Give or take.

00:24:26
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:24:28
Speaker 1: So love requires choice. And in the same way, delight requires the choice of saying, okay, God, I'm going to surrender everything. I'm making the choice to ask you to teach me to delight in you and to ask you to teach me that you delight in me. Because no matter how much I read scripture, if you don't, by your Holy Spirit, connect my head to my heart, it's not going to make sense to me. So it's that position of saying, okay, Lord, can you help me actually live a life that is the outpouring and that is an extension of what you tell me is true in your word. So it's connecting the dots. of truth and experience. And I think delight is that key.

00:25:11
Speaker 2: So which comes first, delighting in God or feeling his delight in me?

00:25:17
Speaker 1: Chicken and the egg sort of question.

00:25:22
Speaker 2: Or is it happening at the same time?

00:25:24
Speaker 1: I think it's a bit of both, but for me, at least in my experience, I came as a Bible teacher. I'm a Bible geek. I love to go through scripture and I had been a Bible teacher for many, many, many years before it dawned on me that I had way more head knowledge than heart experience. There was a whole lot of things I could teach you about God that I didn't actually have an experience of. And that kind of stopped me in my track because that made me, I don't know if it made me a hypocrite, but it definitely showed me a gap between my theology and my experience. And I wanted to bridge that gap. And so for me, at least for me, it was realizing, you know, Heather, I actually deep down when the rubber hits the road, I don't actually believe God likes me a whole lot. I don't believe he likes me. I believe in that general sense that he loves me because he loves everyone.

00:26:21
Speaker 2: Right.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: And I just kind of got squeezed in, you know, it's, there was, there must have been a loophole somewhere that I got it by mistake, but you know, Right, something like that. But no, but that's not how scripture, that is absolutely not what scripture teaches. It's extremely personal. And so for me, it was, it all came, it all made sense when I realized that God really delights in me. And now when I say that, it's probably easy for you to believe that. It's so easy for me to believe that God delights in Heather. Of course, you're delightful. I love you. But me?

00:26:56
Speaker 2: No, no, no.

00:26:57
Speaker 1: I know myself way too much. I know my own sin way too much. There's no way God could like me. And I'm so disappointed in myself most of the time. And you touched on that. We can be so disappointed in ourselves because we don't know what the future holds. So I'm disappointed in myself today because I did something today that I didn't think I was capable of yesterday. So yesterday, I never imagined myself doing whatever it is that I'm disappointed with myself today. because we don't know the future. But God does. God already knew yesterday that I was going to blow it today. And he hasn't changed his opinion of me. He already knew perfectly. It's a bit like a parent who commits to loving a child no matter what. And that can be really difficult. But God cannot be disappointed in us because he already knows the future. And if he was Okay, here's the other thing to keep in thought as well, is that God in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, we see him naming his creation good. And the Hebrew for good means extravagantly delightful, incredibly beautiful, satisfying. It's not just like, yeah, it's good. Yeah, good enough. That's not it. It's like, oh my goodness, it is staggeringly stunning. That's what it means. That's how God calls us, like staggeringly stunning, awe-inspiring, which is kind of crazy to think about. And so God being God, he has the luxury of creating a universe that is to his liking, right? Like when you furnish your home, you're not going to put ugly stuff in there. When you dress your kids, you're not going to put nasty stuff on them, stuff that you enjoy, right? And so God, when he creates his world, his universe, he fills it with things he really enjoys. That's us. Man, imagine that. He would not put junk in his universe. He only put the best, the staggeringly beautiful best. That's us. And so, no, God is not disappointed in us because if he was disappointed enough, he simply would not have created us. He wouldn't have cluttered his universe with stuff he doesn't like or people he doesn't like. So all the people he didn't like, he didn't create them. They're not around. Right.

00:29:10
Speaker 2: It's so simple. But if you're living and breathing, he delights in you.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: I mean, so then, okay, how do you let that sink into your heart? You ask him to do that. And then when that happens, when God doesn't feel so threatening or punitive, because if he really delights in you, then maybe it's not so scary to delight back in him in return, right? And so I think we can only delight in someone when they kind of like us.

00:29:38
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Um, even.

00:29:40
Speaker 1: Parents of prodigals or spurned lovers would disagree on that. You know, it's really difficult to love someone who doesn't love you back.

00:29:46
Speaker 2: Right.

00:29:47
Speaker 1: But we don't have that problem with God.

00:29:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:29:51
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I'm thinking the only really thing that confuses everything is my opinions. Right. Or, the opinions of the zillions of people trying to sell me something that they have to convince me that I am not delightful or delighted in or good enough because they want me to spend money buying whatever it is they're selling so that I can become more delightful or beautiful or insert your adjective here, right? And so... It really isn't any biblical message that confuses me. It's my own, you know, deceitful heart. It's the messages of the enemy and it's the world, right?

00:30:29
Speaker 1: It's back to, you know, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's exactly what it is. It's identifying for us a need we do not have and then making that the all important thing. Yeah. Yeah. that's, that's at the end of the day, that's what it is. We're back to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where it's like Satan pointed Adam and Eve in the direction of something they didn't actually need and made them believe they absolutely needed it. Right.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: And also, yeah. And making them believe that they then, so then they get to define good and evil, right?

00:31:05
Speaker 1: And the only way, and actually, interestingly, they had to taste the fruit, right? So again, it's an embodied experience and we're back to the scenes of taste and the five senses, because They had only been tasting and experiencing good so far. The only way for them to know evil as they knew good was through an embodied experience. That's why they had to take a bite of the fruit. They had to taste it. It had to become a part of who they are because the only way for them to know evil was to have firsthand experience of it by tasting it. And that evil was the moment they chose to disobey God and not trust God, but trust themselves or Satan, that's how they experienced evil. And now the tree of the knowledge of good and evil delivered because they knew evil firsthand, even as they had known good for all the time prior to that. So yeah, it really delivered.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: Interesting stuff. Girl, we could probably talk for an hour or more on this, but I just, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention you wrote a book on it. And so I'm assuming the book will give us some, actually I've read it, so I know it does, give us some practical things to incorporate into our lives if we want to experience delight. But can you just say a little bit more about the book and kind of what we would expect there? Yeah.

00:32:28
Speaker 1: So thank you. So it's called Awaken Delight, Satisfying Your Soul's Longing for God. And it's really about, there you go. Yes, we're both. It has a pretty cover. They did a good job with a cover, I think. So it's really about what we talked about, about really, okay, do I really believe what God says about me? Do I really believe what God says about himself? Because everything is rooted about who God is and who he says we are, who he says we are. he says? What does he say about us? And do we actually believe it? So the book walks us through that and, and roots delight in God in his delight of us. And then we talk a lot about pain and suffering and seasons of hardship, because, you know, maybe it sounds easy to delight in God when life is good, but what, what happens when life is hard. And so the bulk of the book is really about how do we awaken and sustain or delight in God when life really doesn't go our way. And then we talk about really, really practical ways, the spiritual disciplines, but from a place of delight, not from a place of duty. So if you've ever felt like you had to, you know, read your Bible verses or pray or go to church to check the boxes, we try to incorporate delight as the ingredient that's going to change how you experience all of these things that God says are good things for us to do.

00:33:46
Speaker 2: I love it. It's a delicious book. So I encourage everyone to go get it. And you're going to do a little giveaway just for my listeners. Tell me what you're giving away and where they should go and what they need to do.

00:33:57
Speaker 1: So much fun. I'd love to partner with you to give anyone who is interested a five-day email devotional in order to awaken your delight in God rooted in his delight of you, especially in seasons of weariness or tiredness or pain or suffering. And so it's available at gospelspice.com slash Heather. And it's really just for your people. So you can grab that for free. And we would love to bless one of the person who will sign up by randomly drawing a name for a prize that contains a piece of jewelry made by survivors of human trafficking. One of the ways we delight in God is by helping those around us who struggle. And so Gospel Spice is committed to the fight against human trafficking. And one of the ways we do that is by buying jewelry. made from the Starfish Project, among others, which is beautiful jewelry. So we're offering that to one winner alongside with a prayer journal and a bunch of other really fun stuff. So go to gospelspice.com slash Heather to grab your prize and potentially win the giveaway.

00:34:57
Speaker 2: Awesome. I love it. Stephanie, thanks so much for being on the Compared To podcast today.

00:35:02
Speaker 1: You're the best. I learned so much from you, Heather, and I am so grateful for you. Thank you.

00:35:08
Speaker 2: And I hope that you all got something out of today's episode. I know you did, but I hope maybe the main takeaway, Stephanie, maybe you agree with me or disagree, add something to this if you like, but man, we can all just kind of inhale, exhale, and just delight. He's good. He made us good. We can just breathe in that reality today. So I hope that encourages you if you're watching or listening today, go grab Stephanie's brand new book, Awaken Delight. You can find it anywhere Christian books are sold. Go to the Gospel Science website. Use that backsplash. I'm not redecorating my kitchen either. Use that backslash or is it forward slash Heather and get your free devotional and maybe win the cool jewelry too. Hey, Stephanie, thanks again for being here. Thank you for watching or listening. I hope something today helps you stop comparing and start living your life.