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Practical Chats for Intentional Living
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Wednesday Oct 10, 2018
Wednesday Oct 10, 2018
[00:00:00] <music>
Laura Dugger: Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host, Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.
[00:00:17] <music>
Rach Kincaid: I want to say thank you to Leman Property Management for being such a loyal sponsor of The Savvy Sauce. They're located in Central Illinois, and with over 1,600 apartment homes in all price ranges, they have listings throughout Morton, Pekin, Peoria, Washington, and Canton. They can find the perfect spot for you.
Check them out today at MidwestShelters.com or like them on Facebook by searching Leman, L-E-M-A-N, Property Management Company. We'll make sure and put a link in our show notes. Thanks again for the sponsorship.
And if you're interested in sponsoring The Savvy Sauce, we would love to hear from you. Make sure you reach out to us. You can email us at info@thesavvysauce.com.
Today I get to interview Rach Kincaid. She is married to Chris and she's the mother to six children in her blended family. She uses the internet to share her faith and encourage women. [00:01:20] Today she's going to let us in on a little bit more of her story and her approach to parenting. Here's our chat.
Hello, Rachel.
Rach Kincaid: Hi!
Laura Dugger: I think your story is captivating, so can you just share a bit of your journey with us?
Rach Kincaid: I would be happy to. I was born and raised in the church, so I grew up in a Christian home and gave my life to Jesus at a pretty young age. I didn't get serious about my walk with the Lord until my late teens, early 20s.
I went to Christian school. I went to Christian camps. I was in the church, youth group, that kind of thing. But it's just so difficult to make Jesus your own and make your faith in Him your own when you've had... I mean, it sounds silly to say this, but when you had a kind of easy life. I didn't really know that which I had been saved from. I hadn't really hit any kind of rock bottom or identity crisis or anything like that until I had to start figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, you know, college and marriage and career and where I wanted to live and what kind of style I wanted to have. [00:02:31]
I mean, even down to those little granular levels, I wasn't really sure who I was in my late teens and early 20s. And that is when I realized, "Oh, I'm a daughter of God. That's what I've been practicing my whole life, now I get to actually put it to the test." I would say I got serious about the Lord around that time.
I met my husband when I was 19. We are 10 years apart, so it's a very interesting story. He was a single dad when I met him, and we ended up dating for four years, basically until my family and his family could come around to the idea of our very strange setup.
I guess most of my friends and family thought that I'd marry somebody close to my age at my college or some kind of traditional setup. But that was not God's plan for us. We ended up getting married four years later, and we've had custody — we've raised his boys my entire adult life at this point. Their mom is involved. She's local. I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point, because step-parenting is an interesting journey in and of itself. [00:03:32]
So we had his two boys, and then we had four children in the next three and a half years. So we had one baby about a year after we got married, twins about a year and a half later, and then another baby a year and a half after that. So that's what the last, you know, 10 to 12 years of my life has looked like. And it's been quite a journey. So we've got six kids and a couple acres of land and some chickens, and it's a fun, wild life.
Laura Dugger: My goodness, yes, adulthood sounds like it's been jam-packed for you. I think that listeners would love to know what it was like to marry someone who had been married before. So did you ever struggle with resentment or bitterness because you had not been previously married?
Rach Kincaid: That is such a good question. I think we would all anticipate that if we hadn't been in that situation. So I could definitely see from the other side how if I was friends with a woman who married a divorced man or a single dad or any of those things that there might be that issue. [00:04:35] But when I was in it, that is not where I struggled.
I struggled with the idea that my husband had had a lot of life experience before me. And it was like us bumping heads constantly for the first four or five years about the silly things where I kept having to tell him, "I want a chance to learn how to be a mom and I want a chance to learn where to keep the silverware in the kitchen."
And he's been this expert single dad with his own routines and patterns, and he had a really difficult time letting go of those. We can laugh about it now, but our very first fight we ever got in was probably two days, three days after our wedding, I had just moved in, and he was smiling at me leaning against the door jamb, watching me vacuum. And he said, "Oh, is that how you vacuum?" And it just set me off to this place of everything I do is now under a microscope, and I'm not even sure if I know the right way to vacuum, but I want to figure it out myself. So we giggle about that now. [00:05:38]
I don't think I ever struggled with resentment that he had been married before. With the day and age that we have, no one is getting married at 15 to 19 years of age with no previous romantic encounters or experiences. No matter who you marry or when you marry, chances are there's going to be some baggage, whether that be baggage from your family of origin or a previous romantic relationship.
So I was prepared to deal with that with whomever I married. We did have a really cool couple of conversations before we got serious where we called them honesty nights. And we would be able to ask each other just point blank, really hard questions in a setting that might not have been good to ask while we're driving in the car on the way to dinner or anything like that.
So I think I was able to get past some of that wonder, why did you and your ex-wife divorce? And whose fault was it really? And did you do these things with her? Did you share those memories with her? I kind of processed that in a way that was healthy and that I can honestly say never struggled with it since we've gotten married. [00:06:41] So that's been a really beautiful process, I think.
Laura Dugger: That is such a mature response. I've heard you speak before about your husband's ex-wife, and you always have a grace-filled approach. Can you just share a little bit more about your bond and your view on that relationship?
Rach Kincaid: I totally can. I love my husband's ex-wife because he was married to her at some point and she birthed two boys that are very important to me. I never identify her. I never share about her in a way that would be degrading or disrespectful, a) because I just want to be honoring to everybody that I encounter and meet and being online, sharing things on Instagram, speaking, writing, whatever, I think that holds me to a different standard of the way that I talk about people.
So just common decency keeps me in a good place with her mentally. But even more so the fact that she is not here right now on this interview answering these questions, the fact that she doesn't have the Instagram platform that I have or the opportunities that I have to share about those boys, that right there feels like a gag order. [00:07:49]
So from the very beginning, we met for coffee when I got engaged and she knew that I was going to be entering into her family. And it might have been cheesy at the time, but I just forced it where I looked at her across from the table at the coffee shop and I said, "When I marry your ex-husband, I am marrying you. I do not want to replace you. I do not want to be the boy's only mom, but I am going to try my best to love them for the rest of my life. And that's going to have to look different." Because you know, God's design—I didn't share this part with her, I'm just sharing this with you—but God's design was not for divorce. God's design was not for children to grow up with multiple sets of parents coming and going. And I know that.
We're living in the consequences of sin and brokenness, and I knew that going into it and I tried my hardest to say it and spend it in a way that was not threatening, but that also was kind of resolved. I am resolved to loving my husband until I die. [00:08:47] I'm resolved to loving those boys, whether or not other people in their lives want me there or not, you know, different types of family dynamics.
So it's been a very interesting journey. She and I were actually pretty close friends for a long time. She went into a similar field of work that I did, so we got to kind of share that. We do share mutual friends and connections because we were all from the same area. So I've tried really hard to handle that delicately.
Over the last few years, we've tried to kind of give each other a little more space. Maybe it's not the best idea to have family dinners with all of us around the table all the time. So just to have our own journey as these boys grow has been important. But for the most part, it has been a really cool experience, not because of anything she or I did, but just because I've asked the Lord from the very beginning to not make it about me, not make it about my feelings, and to also remind myself that birth children or stepchildren, they are never yours to begin with. [00:09:47]
So I share this all the time when I'm talking about parenting and it doesn't always go over very well. But I'm a nurse, so I have a very morbid sense of reality and sense of humor. Even if you're not in health care, even if you're not a school teacher now, you know that school shootings are happening all the time, you know that car accidents happen all the time, illness happens all the time.
So I have to trust that God has given me these boys, whether or not I birthed them, to play a part in their lives for a certain amount of time. And so I'm not going to spend any time fighting over whose time is more important or who matters most in their lives or any of that, just like I don't with my birth kids. I tell them I love them every single day. I try to discipline them and disciple them the best way I know how. And then I remind myself that they were never mine to begin with. So that's been a really interesting and helpful dynamic when it comes to kind of sharing children with multiple sets of parents, if that makes sense.
Laura Dugger: That is incredible. And maybe just for the woman who's listening today who is in your shoes, what if they want to reflect the love of Jesus through their own difficult or unexpected relationships in their lives? [00:10:54] What encouragement would you offer them?
Rach Kincaid: I would say that in order to do that, it takes a threefold approach to walking with Jesus, something that I've only begun to learn in the last few years. And that is this idea our church calls it upward, inward, outward.
In order to go to the end result, which is to live in peace with people and to love people well, first we have to have an appropriate, healthy, high, and lofty view of God — that God is so big and so powerful and still chose to love us. Then we have to look inward and figure out how to love ourselves correctly, which means embracing flaws, working through sin, processing past trauma or family issues, getting help, getting counseling, being vulnerable so that we can learn how to see ourselves the way that God sees us. And only then are we able to press outward, which is loving people compassionately. [00:11:54]
And when you've done the upward inward part and you're doing that every day, then loving people compassionately has nothing to do with the way that they reflect that love back. It's just constant. So whether it's a biological birth mom, or a stepfather, or co-workers that are difficult, or any of those things, it's not a two-way street. It's just me loving them, me loving them the best way that I know how, because I know a God who loved me, and I know how to love myself.
So my identity does not depend on the way that those people view me, or talk to me, or treat me. Instead of it being what I thought at the beginning was just kind of putting my head in the sand, like, "That doesn't sound like fun. I want them to love me back," now I just focus so much on God and myself, which is interesting, because I grew up thinking focusing on myself was selfish. And if we're doing it correctly, the way that Scripture teaches us, it's actually a very healthy way to live in community.
So if I'm focusing on God and focusing on myself, then I'm not worried about the way that my love or my actions are received, and it becomes a very simple marching order. [00:13:00] Every day I wake up, I know what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to love God, love myself, and love people. And that, I hope, is encouraging to other women in my situation, or just women in difficult relationships in general, because it's no longer dependent on the way that they receive, process, or reproduce that love back to me.
Laura Dugger: I love that model. And it kind of ties into another question I have on that topic. Do you have any stories or examples of how you've died to self to love others well?
Rach Kincaid: Yeah. I would say in raising teenagers, that has been super interesting. Because I know my birth children, my biological children will probably go through the same thing that I've been experiencing recently. And I only know that because I'm in community with older women who have teenagers or college-age kids. I try so hard to stay in relationships with women, moms with kids that are different ages so that I can kind of figure out what to expect or ask for advice or give advice. And that's been really powerful. [00:14:02] So that's just a little side note.
But some of the women that are raising teens alongside me, pouring into step-sons that are about that age, is just that that age, I've done a lot of reading on it, hormones, science, all of it points to the idea that those kids are supposed to be self-absorbed. Teenagers are supposed to be reflecting, looking inward, navel-gazing, basically to answer one question. And it's like, do I have what it takes? Do I matter to the world? Do I have a place? What am I going to do next? What is life about to me?
Because up until 15 or 16, I'm just digesting and regurgitating everything my parents, my trusted adults, my teachers have taught me. And now that I'm in high school and I'm looking to the future and people are asking really hard questions... I mean, can you imagine how difficult it is to be 17 and every single time you interact with another adult, they say, what are your plans after high school? I mean, they just, they want to know what's next.
So if you can imagine how difficult that is, the rest of us, no one asks us those questions. [00:15:03] So they're constantly bombarded with that. And what I've learned is that because of that, they're selfish. They can't really help it. They're focused on whether or not they have enough gas to get to wherever they are to hang out with their friends, or the newest song that just came out from their favorite rapper or shoes. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but it is so important to them. If they miss a viral meme that goes wild online and they come to school and everybody's talking about it, then they're left out, they're ostracized.
So because of all these things, and they're still trying to figure out, like, do I even believe in the God that my parents taught me about? They're very, very, very inward-focused. And because of that, they're not saying thank you a lot. They're not looking you in the eyes and cheering you on as a parent.
And at this point it makes me laugh. But at the beginning, I was super wounded by it, because I wanted to treat my kids like peers. And you just can't do that. You can't be their friend, their bestie, their cousin. You just have to be their parent. And so you have to say like, Hey, when I put that money in your account to go to whatever event, I really expect you to say thank you and look me in the eyes and hug me or whatever. [00:16:10] And my boys are amazing at that now. But I would have to say it takes constant conversation.
And you have to figure out a way not to beat them up about it. It can't be like, You're so selfish, you're ungrateful, or you don't pay attention. It's just this constant reminder that you and I are orbiting each other in this hole, bumping up against each other, doing community, doing life together, and trying to figure out the best way to do it.
So I can think of an example of just this past week I told one of my boys, you know, "I've never been here before. We've never had teenagers in our home. So here's what we expect from you. Some grace, just like we give you grace when you leave your clothes everywhere or when you try to go out with friends without asking or whatever the thing is. But at the same time, what I think I am doing really well is giving you respect and giving you what you need in this home, and I do expect that to be reciprocated. So I'm not frustrated with you. I'm not mad at you for not doing it up until this point. I'm telling you now, you've been put on notice. I expect you to treat me with the same respect that I'm giving you." [00:17:16]
And so I would say dying to self looks like those conversations because what I want to do is smack them around with my words, of course. But just kind of like the wakeup call of, you know what I do for you and how much money I make and how much money goes to you and all that. I'm not even talking about my teenagers all the way down to the 5-year-old. I want to be able to tell her, do you know how much preschool costs, and do you know how expensive it is to put clothes on your body that keeps growing? It's so rude, you know?
But instead, I have to say like, no, they don't know. And we don't want them to leave their family of origin with this idea that they were a burden or a nuisance or they quote-unquote couldn't get it right. Because I don't want them to go into their next season of life feeling like we were not on their team.
So it's this constant refining. It's the iron sharpening iron. My dad used to say it's like a diamond getting its facets polished. It's uncomfortable. There's friction. It's not fun all the time. And dying to self looks like being willing to enter into that when you'd rather just go to bed and ignore it or yell or not give them what they want or whatever the example may be. [00:18:26]
Dying to self looks like entering in and saying, I'm willing to get sweaty. I'm willing to be tired tomorrow morning because we stayed up all night talking about this. I'm willing to take the hit and not be the cool parent because I want to teach you something that might save your life or save your soul down the road.
Laura Dugger: And now a brief message from our sponsor.
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Laura Dugger: Okay, so you've mentioned you're in this unique place of parenting teens and littles simultaneously. So how has your parenting style changed as you've grown in wisdom? That is a great question.
Rach Kincaid: First, I would say it's been incredible to watch teenagers and little kids interact. I thought for sure there would be this big culture gap because there is an age gap. I wish I knew the math right now. I think my eldest son is 13 years older than my baby.
But I have this photo that I took of them on his graduation day, he graduated from high school this year. And I have a photo that I took where she's sitting on his knee looking up at him and she had just graduated from preschool. [00:20:50] And it hit me that they formed a bond that was not forced. So this idea of expectation, the same expectation across all of my kids, all the different ages, I think it worked. And that expectation is just that we said, you guys all belong to each other, take care of one another.
And we didn't try to cater to one age over another. So there might have been a day when we made our big boys watch a little kid movie so that we could all hang out in the den together. But there were also times that we listened to Kendrick Lamar or other hip-hop artists that I would have never wanted to expose my little kids to at such a young age. And we would find the clean version and throw it on in the car and all of us listened to it for hours on end.
I have no regrets about that because I feel like It has helped them see that there are no favorites and there isn't an age that requires or deserves more attention or affection. [00:21:50] So we might have been giving our eldest, before he got a job, now he's one of the hardest working kids I know and makes all of his own money and makes pretty much all of his own decisions. But before he got to that point, he might have required more money or more investment with sports or equipment or prom tickets or whatever it was.
But then there were also times when the little girl got a new dress for preschool graduation and everybody ooed and aahed over it and nobody felt left out. So we've tried really hard to do that across the spread. We've tried hard to do one-on-one dates with our kids. We've even recently tried forcing them to go on dates. I say force, they're happy to do it. But expecting them to go on dates with each other and the older kids hanging out with the younger kids by themselves. Or we have a little boy who's nine and he loves our 16-year-old. And so having them interact with one another, playing video games or whatever it may be has been really cool. So that's been neat.
Another thing I've noticed about raising little kids and big kids together is that I am constantly under a microscope in a way that actually holds me accountable. [00:22:58] So if I want to fly off, like I have anger problems when I'm depressed, when I have anxiety, both of which I've struggled with in the past, they do not manifest themselves in the form of crying or staying in bed all day.
I have these feelings of rage, of this sense of injustice, like something in our house goes wrong and I feel this thing well up in me that makes me want to scream or throw things. And I haven't, thank God, done those things in a long time. Before counseling and before I started sharing about it publicly, it felt like I struggled with it by myself. Now I feel like God's totally delivered me from a lot of that.
He has not delivered me from that feeling of the sense of justice. I don't know if you've paid attention to the Enneagram or you follow along with that, but I'm a one on the Enneagram. So there is a right and wrong to every conversation. There are rules to be followed. There are reasons that we have rules in place. At my flesh, I'm a perfectionist. I think that I can earn my way to God and earn my way into right standing with people. And God has had to gently lay me flat on my back time and time again to prove me wrong. [00:24:04]
But I would say as a parent, I'm very quick to go to the negative. I'm very quick to go to, like, you did this thing wrong and then blow it up into this big "you let me down," or "you're not living up to your potential. That's where my nasty flesh could go.
So what's been helpful is that having teenagers watch me parent preschoolers has taught me patience in a new way because I know I want my teenagers to be patient with my little kids. I want them to not yell at them or scream at them if they come into their room while they're sleeping in on a Saturday morning or whatever. And so them watching me has helped me think, well, how do I want those big boys to love my little kids and to look at my little kids? Well, I should probably treat them with that same affection and that same level of patience.
And it goes the same for the other. I know that my little kids, they understand that my big boys have another mom, that they have a quote-unquote real mom, that I'm just their stepmom. And so I have tried very hard to show them that all the kids in our family are equal in my eyes, all the kids in our family have the same amount of love and respect, and affection from me. [00:25:17]
And so raising kids across the age spectrum has helped me to kind of be on my best behavior. And I don't mean that in a striving, perfectionist, fake way. I mean in that cool way of a check in my spirit the Holy Spirit convicting me and reminding me that, Hey, these kids will remember the way that you treat them, but also they're going to remember the way that you treated their siblings. So what do you want from your heart to spill out of your mouth? And that has been really revolutionary when it comes to being a stepmom, as well as raising kids that are multiple ages.
Laura Dugger: Wow, Rach, these stories are extremely helpful. Do you have any other examples to share of what you've done well in parenting so that we can all learn from you, too?
Rach Kincaid: Oh man, you're asking me to brag. I don't like to brag. I can think of things my husband and I have put into place that when other families see our family, they think, Wow, that's interesting or that's different. And I can't help but think that those quirky things that we do actually help our kids grow up in a more well-rounded setting. [00:26:24]
The first thing I can think of is multi-generational community. We don't really do playdates. We don't really do sleepovers with friends. Instead, perfect example, last week a girl from one of my twins' classrooms asked for my daughter to come over to her house. And I told the mom that that doesn't really fit into our schedule or our setup right now, but would they like to meet for snow cones as a family? So our family and their family went out for snow cones after dinner one night this week.
And what was cool is that we also brought one of the girls that I've been mentoring, a college grad who's now become one of my best friends. We brought her along with us because she was already over for dinner. So in that hangout, we had age 5 up to age probably 45 with teens and elementary and all sorts of ages in between. And I think my kids are going to get more out of that than they will sitting in a playroom at a classmate's house fighting over a toy for two hours. [00:27:27]
And so I keep reminding myself, like, this is what the early church looked like. This is what God's idea for community is. Because when we are living in that type of community we're actually embodying the family of God in the way that I think he intended. And so if we were to take that to the extreme, when we're isolating ourselves or we're only doing like peer-to-peer hangouts, or my kids are only hanging out with kids in their own age bracket, then they're actually missing out on the wholeness of what it means to be the body of Christ. So that's been one interesting thing that we've tried.
Another that I know a lot of families out there care a lot about, and that is multi-ethnic community. So we actually left our church a few years ago in order to really dig into our own local community and really understand what God wanted for our lives by way of diversity. So we have learned all sorts of crazy and painful things when it comes to raising kids in a broken world, including some of our own sin with tokenism, looking for that one person of color to be our friend so that we could say we were doing it right. [00:28:32]
We've just repented of all that. So we have just smushed our kids up against families that don't look like them in hopes that they can be the next generation to really eradicate the problem of systemic racism and oppression, specifically in our country but also in our churches.
So that would be another thing I can think of, that we talk a lot about "your friends with brown skin" and "do you know where India is?" and "that's where your friend such and such is from" and things like that. It's just been powerful to watch them at a young age learn that. And they're starting to pay attention when we go into predominantly White spaces. where they know that something's missing. So I would say there's never too young of an age to introduce them to multi-ethnic community, multi-generational community.
Then the last thing that we do that we're proud of is we make our kids work really hard. So our youngest kids, nine down to five, they are our sole dishwashers now, effective this year. They wash, dry, and put away all of our dishes. We don't own a dishwasher. [00:29:30] All of our kids have to clean their room before they do anything else.
None of our kids are out there shoveling the chicken poop or doing anything hard or super inconvenient or not fun. They're not vacuuming. They're not scrubbing toilets. But when it comes to taking responsibility for their own belongings, that's what we say: we take care of our own things because we care about our things.
So if you ate off of that plate, it's your job to wash it, dry it, put it back so that you can eat off of it again. And if you made a mess in your room, then you need to clean it up because it's your stuff and we don't want you to lose it. We don't want you to miss out on the opportunity to have new things because you didn't take care of these things.
I would say we're pretty strict with that, as well as this idea of work meaning investing in our family so that we don't take electronics to restaurants. We want them to engage with us. We don't allow them to run around wild while we're talking to other adults.
We want it to be a marriage-centered, family-centered, Jesus-centered family. [00:30:34] And if it's a kid-centered family, then we know things will go awry and things will get knocked off kilter because God has given us tiny humans for us to steward and invest in and disciple. So they can't be running the show. I hope that makes sense. But those are just some of the things that we have noticed have really made a difference in our large family setting.
Laura Dugger: That is so good. Thank you for sharing.
Hey friends, I just wanted to give you a quick reminder that we're asking for ratings and reviews on whatever platform you use to listen to this podcast. If you would be willing, could you also hit subscribe to the podcast and share this with a friend? Thanks for listening. Now back to the show.
How have you experienced God's grace during transitional periods in your life?
Rach Kincaid: I would say I have experienced His grace. which, if we look at translations from Greek and scripture and all sorts of good theology background, grace is a gift that we did not deserve. So I try to remember that when I use the phrase "God's grace". [00:31:39]
But God's grace to me when it comes to transition has always shown up in the tangible form of His faithfulness and His favor. And that would be money coming from places where I did not expect it, friends coming alongside me and offering tangible help, childcare, food, that kind of thing, when I did not expect it. And services, counseling, our church coming alongside us, that kind of thing, where I did not expect it.
Then I would say, too, that I want to talk about His mercy, because our transitional periods have often been a result of my sin or Rash decision-making or things like that. I left a job that I had to leave because it had become toxic for me, and I felt like I probably should have left it sooner, and God showed up there.
We left a church, possibly a little bit too late, but we felt like God was stirring on our hearts it was time. [00:32:37] I always joke with people that leaving a church is like breaking up with your boyfriend and then still going to prom with him, because we love the church, we love everybody there, we love the mission, we love Jesus, and the way that Jesus is highlighted and presented there, but we also knew that God was calling us to something else.
Sometimes there is such a thing as being too faithful and staying too long. And so we've seen transition there, and it was painful. And then I've also had transition with my mental health. So experiencing depression, postpartum depression, anxiety, things like that, and having to transition away from my old life and into a new one.
Some of those things, I've seen God's mercy, which is basically a pardon, a forgiveness when we didn't deserve it. I've seen Him kind of let me off the hook in places in ways that maybe that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And I know that He loves me because He was willing to step in and show Himself to me. So that's been cool. [00:33:34]
There's been ways that I could have really damaged my relationship with my kids through my mental health struggles and I feel like God miraculously preserved those relationships. And I feel like it could have been a lot uglier, you know, when people leave one church and go to another, but that transition was just covered and blessed. We had another place to land the Sunday after we left, and that was just such a sweet.
So it's a mixture of grace and mercy. But I would say I've seen His grace in those tangible ways because... I can give you an example of last year I was struggling... I've gone in and out of different types of depression throughout my adult life. I compare myself to David sometimes when I'm reading the Psalms where things are high and low.
So far I've never been diagnosed with any type of official depression, but I've just been able to seek out counseling on my own when I knew that things weren't right. And I've been able to see patterns in my life where I feel like God's given me a lot to steward. I tend to be pretty high-capacity. And I want to qualify that by saying that capacity is not a talent or a skill. It doesn't mean that anybody's closer to Jesus or higher up on a platform of ministry. [00:34:43]
But I tend to be a gal who can run fast and hard and long, carrying a lot of things, and I don't put safeguards in place to help me offload some of those things when it's time or take a break when it's time. So last year I was struggling with that exact situation and was writing about it on a blog and sharing, "I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight, I want to publicly talk about this," and my pastor called my husband, wrote me an email, set up a triage appointment with our care team. And I was in the office of a counselor within a week and they had paid for 75% of my entire counseling bill for 10 weeks of sessions.
So that would be God's grace. That is a gift that we didn't deserve or we did not earn and that we did not expect. But what's cool is that God blesses us with that when we invest in His kingdom and His family. So I would not have been able to access that resource if I wasn't plugged into the local church, if I wasn't serving. [00:35:45] I say serving and tithing and reading my Bible, not because of the checkoff list that we have to have to be a good church member, but just these spiritual disciplines that God was instilling and teaching in my heart so that I would know His face and His voice when I saw it and when I heard it. When I needed it and I cried out to Him, boom, it was there and I recognized it in the form of my pastor and my church coming alongside me.
So I would say that's how I've seen God's grace and God's mercy through transitional periods in my life. And it's been neat to be able to identify those things for what they are, and then write them down and bind them to my heart to remember them for the future, because we're pretty much guaranteed that we will go through those things again. Suffering and hardship are guaranteed, but so is God's presence, and that's been a beautiful gift.
Laura Dugger: I love all of that. My background is in marriage and family therapy, so I'm very excited that you knew and your husband knew and your pastor knew that counseling was such a great option. Maybe that's one of the reasons that you're able to articulate all of this from such a healthy place. [00:36:51] Do you have any other practical things that have helped you come to this healthy place that maybe a listener could try today as well?
Rach Kincaid: Yeah. I would say reading my Bible regularly has helped. I did not do that as a teenager and young adult. I would say I've been reading my Bible daily for the last five years or so. And that's really blessed me because I can see stories of God trying to love on His kids. And I can also see stories of people screwing up epically, and God not saying, like, I forgive you for your sin. But instead, He's just given them more responsibility. He's called them back onto the team. He's commissioned them to do something.
I'm thinking of Peter specifically, when Peter denied Jesus three times. Jesus never said, I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you three times. He said, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? Then feed my sheep, feed my sheep, feed my sheep, kind of to negate and abolish the sin that Peter had committed and instead say, I'm going to plant my church on you. [00:37:53]
And that is so powerful to read about a God who loves us so much that it's not just him pulling us out of the muck and the mire and trying to polish us off and say, well, I guess I can try to use this some more. Instead, He's like, are you ready, girl? Get back in the game. And I never knew God to be that kind of God until I started reading the Bible. So I would say that has been really helpful.
Then the other thing is learning how to confess my sin. That's what I'm dealing with right now. It's just so difficult to look at my husband and say, I intentionally withheld that from you, or I could have called you to apologize when I was snippy earlier and I didn't, or I wanted what I wanted and I wanted to hurt your feelings so I said what I said or whatever the situation is. I've never done that before.
And now that I'm starting to do that, I feel so exposed in the best way because I know that I've already been found out, I've already been found needy. That's what my best friend Jess always says. Amazing, amazing author. [00:38:51] But what she talks about a lot is that when we go first, when we go humble, when we open ourselves up and we say, "Here it is," then nobody, especially the enemy, has anything on us. Because God's like, "Yeah, I already knew that. I died for that. I sent Jesus to the cross for that."
So that's been really helpful in developing the way that I articulate my struggles. Because a) I'm not saying like, "Look at my mess. Let's all get in here together and talk about our mess." But b) I'm also not lying and saying like, "I've got it all together. Things are tidy." Instead, I'm calling sin what it is. I'm calling brokenness what it is. But I'm also calling hope down on top of it so that people can see both at the same time and so that I can experience both at the same time.
When I start focusing on Jesus more than my own sin, then suddenly it's not that big of a deal anymore, and it's easier to confess. I would say those two things they sound really old, almost liturgical and strange, but the spiritual disciplines of giving away my time, my money, reading my Bible, confessing my sin to the people that I trust, that I have invited in alongside me, those are the things that have helped me to see that this world isn't all there is, and that I don't have time anymore to fake it or strive or to wallow in the brokenness and stuff that I deal with all the time. [00:40:10]
So I would say all of that together, just learning how to grow in my relationship with Jesus has helped me learn how to share that relationship with other people in the form of being vulnerable and also hopeful.
Laura Dugger: Wow, this time has just been so beneficial. How can listeners find you online to connect?
Rach Kincaid: That's awesome. I have a blog that I don't keep up with on the regular, but I do write in it several times a year. That's RachKincaid.com. And then I'm on Instagram and Twitter and all the fun places, Rach Kincaid. So I'd love to hang out with you guys online. I love, love, love Twitter. That's one of my favorite spots. I'm an original, you know, back in the early 2000s internet kind of girl, so all the old platforms still have my heart. But Instagram is a fun place.
Then one of the things I love to do is when people send me direct messages, I typically try to get them to email me. So if you send me a DM and you want to chat more, I would love to do that, but I'll probably send you my email address and then we could, you know, be like internet pen pals. [00:41:13]
Laura Dugger: Oh, that's great. Thank you for making yourself available. We're called The Savvy Sauce here because "savvy" is synonymous with practical knowledge. So as my final question to you today, Rach, what is your savvy sauce?
Rach Kincaid: Oh my goodness. Okay, so I would say this has nothing to do with Jesus or my relationship with Him, but actually it does because it helps me give more time to it. I love having a capsule wardrobe, having my exact style, hairstyles, shoes, my makeup look, all of that selected in a way that never really changes. So I'm pretty much the same person Sunday through Saturday.
I would say why that makes me feel like savvy and also a little bit saucy is because I feel like if I spend less time trying to figure out who I am on the outside, then I have more time to really work on who God is making me on the inside. [00:42:12] So I literally only have probably 10 outfits total in my wardrobe. I have a little [armoire?] and I have a tiny little makeup bag. I love Glossier, the incredible cult makeup skincare brand online. And I use pretty much all of that all the time.
So if I'm going on a date night, I'm going to church, we're going to hang out friends, I try to get dressed every day. I try to do my hair the same two or three hairstyles every day so that I never worry about what I'm going to wear somewhere or how I'm going to look. I feel confident every time I leave the house. I know what looks good on me.
And those things they kind of make room for me to care about kingdom things that matter more. And so in a way, taking care of my body, taking care of my skin, taking care of my wardrobe, those things do matter so that I can go out into the world and fight in a way that God has created me to. So it's strange to say it, but like the gym routine, what I eat, what I wear, my makeup, my hair, all that feels kind of like part of my armor. And that's been a really cool development over the last three or four years. [00:43:13]
Laura Dugger: That's so fun. Thank you for sharing. Everything that you've mentioned today has just been dripping with wisdom. So thank you so much for spending time with us.
Rach Kincaid: Thanks for having me. It's been such a blast. It's been an honor for real.
Laura Dugger: One more thing before you go. Have you heard the term "gospel" before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you. But it starts with the bad news. Every single one of us were born sinners and God is perfect and holy, so He cannot be in the presence of sin. Therefore, we're separated from Him.
This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So for you and for me, it means we deserve death and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved. We need a savior. But God loved us so much, He made a way for His only Son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute.
This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with Him. [00:44:15] That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life we could never live and died in our place for our sin. This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus.
We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished if we choose to receive what He has done for us. Romans 10:9 says that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
So would you pray with me now? Heavenly, Father, thank You for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to You. Will You clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare You as Lord of their life? We trust You to work and change their lives now for eternity. In Jesus name, we pray, amen. [00:45:16]
If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring Him for me, so me for Him, you get the opportunity to live your life for Him.
At this podcast, we are called Savvy for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So you're ready to get started?
First, tell someone. Say it out loud. Get a Bible. The first day I made this decision my parents took me to Barnes and Noble to get the Quest NIV Bible and I love it. Start by reading the book of John.
Get connected locally, which basically means just tell someone who is part of the church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.
We want to celebrate with you too. So feel free to leave a comment for us if you made a decision for Christ. We also have show notes included where you can read Scripture that describes this process. [00:46:16]
Finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, "In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents." The heavens are praising with you for your decision today.
If you've already received this good news, I pray that you have someone else to share it with today. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.
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