July 20, 2025 • 28 mins
Join host Rodney Olsen as he speaks with John Knowlton, who brings together the worlds of entrepreneurship, faith, and family in remarkable ways. After building a successful wealth management firm and retiring at just 51, John has dedicated his life to helping others transform their thinking patterns for breakthrough results.
John's journey took an unexpected turn when he and his wife felt called to adopt two traumatized children, leading to a 15-year odyssey that tested every aspect of their faith and resilience. Through violent outbursts, massive financial challenges, and family stress that could have torn them apart, John discovered powerful principles about how our thoughts truly do shape our outcomes. His experiences as a jail chaplain provided real-world examples of how different thinking patterns can lead people from identical backgrounds to vastly different destinies. Now through his book "Thinking for Success" and the Abundant Thought Revolution movement, John is helping business leaders and individuals break free from limiting beliefs and unlock their full potential.
WEBLINKS Abundant Thought Revolution
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to encounter stories filled with hope and inspiration.
(00:29):
Dozens more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
Please share this and other episodes with others through your social media and through word of mouth.
There's an old proverb that says, be careful how you think, for your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Can the way we think actually alter the course of our lives?
(00:52):
Today's guest thinks so and he'll tell us why today.
Today I'm excited to welcome John Knowlton.
John brings a fascinating perspective shaped by his diverse experiences as both an entrepreneur who built a successful wealth management firm and a chaplain who has served in county jails.
(01:20):
After retiring at just 51, John now dedicates himself to helping business leaders and individuals transform their thinking patterns.
His book, Thinking for Success, explores how our thought processes determine our outcomes.
With his deep commitment to helping others discover their purpose, I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.
(01:43):
John, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well thank you so much Rodney, pleasure to be here.
There's been a lot said about having a healthy mindset and how our thoughts can change the directions that we take in life.
I know that you share a story about two men who come from very similar backgrounds, yet ended up on very different paths.
(02:03):
Maybe you can tell me about those men.
Well sure, this is a story of a couple of men that I met in a jail outside of Chicago, Illinois.
So I was a jail chaplain for a couple of years.
The first one was a man who was in jail and in charge of using crack cocaine.
He was using crack cocaine to stay awake while he was driving big over-the-road trucks and he just couldn't understand why they would put him in jail for doing his job.
(02:35):
The second was a guy I met in the jail who was a trustee.
And a trustee is someone that the sheriff or the minders at the jail have decided is trustworthy enough to be let out of his cell and clean up the floors and mop and empty trash baskets and things like this.
He seemed really engaging, a sharp guy, a good personality.
(02:58):
And I said, what are you doing in here man?
Why are you here in jail?
And he said, when I'm outside everybody's got a job and I want to be different so I don't have a job.
And then I got caught up in trouble.
But in here nobody has a job and I want to be different so now I'm a trustee.
In both of those cases these guys had really flawed thinking.
(03:22):
I should use drugs to do my job.
I shouldn't have a job because I want to be different from everybody.
In both of their cases it ended up where they no longer had much freedom of choice at all because their bad choices landed them imprisoned.
But there's a third man also born in Chicago to a fatherless home where drugs and alcohol abuse and dependency was really high.
(03:48):
Somehow that guy went to college, became a doctor, and was a principal in a large anesthesiology practice.
We've got these three examples here where you've got two guys in rotten situations.
Their thinking is broken to the point where they end up in jail.
And the third one whose thinking is different.
(04:10):
He says I'm going to get out of this.
And if you think about it he lived in a family where everybody's behavior and lives and bodies were controlled by alcohol.
And he became an anesthesiologist where his job is to control drugs.
He totally flipped it around from being controlled by drugs to having a career where he controlled them.
(04:34):
It's just a powerful illustration in real life, in real lives, of how your thinking can affect your behaviors which ultimately result in your outcomes.
I suppose we have to go back to what frames thinking for people.
If people don't feel that there's any chance of them breaking free from the past, if they don't feel that there's any chance to say that is what has happened in the past but I'm going forward in a different direction, they can feel trapped.
(05:05):
And I guess that's going to define their thinking, isn't it?
We have a choice to think about what we think about.
That's one of the unique things about being a human being.
I don't think my dog gets a lot of choice there.
He thinks about squirrels and dog food.
But people, we've got a choice.
That's what my work is really aimed at, is helping people spend their mind, time, and energy on better things.
(05:30):
We can think about our problems, or we can think about solutions.
We can think about our limitations, or we can think about our options.
Knowing God and having a relationship with the God who can create things out of nothing, who can win with any hand, who can cause rotten circumstances to work for our good, is a key foundation to helping to break through into better thinking.
(05:55):
That whole idea of better thinking and changing the way we think, it's not just some magic formula to be able to have a better life.
In fact, you're mentioning the faith aspect there.
And even in the Christian scriptures, we read that our life is based on our thoughts.
And so often we can follow the thoughts that the enemy wants to take us down, or we can follow the thoughts that God wants to take us down.
(06:19):
Is that a big part of the sort of thing that you're talking about?
Well, sure it is.
And frankly, we're storytelling people, right?
The whole scripture is a series of stories.
Having the right stories in our minds can really help shape our thinking.
You think about Joseph, all the trouble that he went through.
Somebody brought on himself, he was kind of rude to his brothers and his mom and dad and ended up in a pit and sold into slavery and ends up in Egypt and he goes to jail himself.
(06:49):
But we can latch onto his story with its incredible conclusion where he can say, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
And we can hold on to stories like that, that shape our thinking and help us see that regardless of circumstance, there's a better future ahead.
There's scripture that can explicitly state that, for example, Jeremiah 29, 11, God knows the plans that he has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future.
(07:20):
And the sort of things you're talking about, it's not just taking the stories of like those three men that you talked about earlier and taking their story.
You've seen this lived out even within your own family, haven't you?
Well, we have.
And my wife and I have been married for nearly 25 years.
She had a daughter from a first rotten marriage.
Then we had a son together.
(07:42):
On Father's Day 2008, we were sitting in church and our pastor was honoring the fathers in the church.
And so he's like, who's had the most kids?
And he gave him a book or something.
And who's adopted the most kids?
Our church has a pretty big tradition and a lot of members who have adopted or fostered kids.
(08:02):
He made a value statement.
And he just said, you know, our church is adoption central.
He was essentially saying, this is a value for us and we care about this and we're a factor for change in our community because we take care of orphans and kids who need help.
And he'd said those kinds of things many times.
And I'd always thought, you know, that's a really good idea for Rodney or for Susan.
(08:26):
But I was surprised that day to sense in my own mind, that's a good idea for us.
It surprised me.
It surely wasn't my thoughts.
And so when we got home from church, I told my wife what I just told you, and she starts to cry.
And she goes to her study and grabs out her prayer journal where three weeks before she'd been thinking what's next for her.
(08:52):
The youngest kid was about to go to school in the fall.
And so she was asking God what's next?
And she'd sensed him saying adoption.
And so she wrote adoption sort of diagonally across the page with a bunch of question marks.
And she said, well, God, if this is your idea, you talk to John about it.
And so three weeks later on Father's Day, bam, there you go.
(09:14):
And so we'd reached the point in our faith journey that when we both felt we had a clear word from God, we just obeyed.
And so we went through the process of getting licensed and there's some classes that are required by the state and all this.
Anyways, we did the stuff.
We got our home certified.
And in the spring of 2009, we got two children delivered to our home whose original home was not safe for them.
(09:41):
Drugs and alcohol and domestic violence, and just all the trouble that you can imagine.
I know that there's a story there and I want to hear what happened next, but I'm very much aware that right from the start there, you're putting yourself in a place where your thoughts can be challenged, where you can hear those new thoughts.
So you've put yourself in a church where the pastor is talking about this and you're free to make those thoughts yours and follow that direction or to say, as you said, first off, no, that's for someone else.
(10:14):
Is that a very important part for us to make sure that we're putting ourselves in the right place to be able to change our thoughts towards success?
We're always being discipled by something, maybe not 24 hours a day, but all the hours we're awake, something is coming into our brains.
It could be news or social media.
(10:35):
News is usually negative and bad news.
Social media is usually about comparison.
There's all kinds of stuff that's shaping our minds, shaping our thinking.
My wife and I have just committed ourselves to starting our days in the Word of God and in prayer.
We read the Bible a lot.
We pray a lot because we want the first thing that hits our brains every day to be the truth from God.
(11:02):
And since He has great plans for us, we want to be aligned with those.
I think there's an element of discipline.
I know that word sometimes strikes people wrong because discipline, for some people, sounds like punishment.
So, maybe let's just change it to say practices or exercise.
We all know how exercise works.
(11:23):
You can't do all your exercise the first week of January and be good for the other 51 weeks of the year.
It's something that needs to be done regularly in order to stay in shape.
So, let's think about that as spiritual exercises.
And when we are intentionally shaping our own thinking and our mindset by the reality that God puts forth, then we're ready to receive and open to hearing what He's got to say to us.
(11:52):
So, we've come to this place where you have these two children delivered to you that have come from a very difficult background.
Tell me what happens next.
How do they start to assimilate into your family?
Two kids, two different experiences, even though they've been raised in the same environment, a girl and a boy.
And the girl's a little bit older.
(12:14):
She was three years old and the boy was just about one, brother and sister.
The girl had had far more trauma exposure and experience than the boy had.
That was almost immediately obvious in terms of behavior and how she interacted with people.
And this little girl having rages and violence and inability to sit still or to even be calm, couldn't sleep and hypervigilance.
(12:44):
I mean, there's all kinds of clinical diagnoses and all this, but it continued to get progressively more disruptive to the rest of our family.
The older daughter was estranged for a number of years because it was so stressful at our home.
Anxiety was really common and intense for some of the other children.
And for this girl, she was so upset by her life and the things that she'd been through and they'd affected her so deeply that it started to come out as violence.
(13:12):
Ten-year-old girl would go through walls where there were no doors, kicking her way through the walls in order to get to other people.
And we tried every kind of therapy modality that we could think of and that could be suggested to us.
And she just continued to be really violent.
And so, I think about it from my perspective, what it was like to live with her.
(13:36):
But sometimes I can think about what it must be like to be her.
And when we see that kind of behavior, we often might think, what's the matter with that person?
But I think the right question is, what did that person go through?
What happened to her?
And so, she had some really rough stuff happen to her that simply being in our home didn't fix.
(14:00):
We ultimately realized that she needed to be in a 24-hour-a-day therapeutic environment.
We found a place that was recommended.
The first place kept her for about four or five months and said, she's too intense for us.
You need to find somewhere else.
There's actually a profession called an educational consultant in the United States.
(14:22):
And that job is to try to figure out which facilities are appropriate for your kids.
So, we hired an educational consultant who found a place that was a good fit in Texas, which is a couple thousand miles from where we live.
She lived there for about three and a half years.
All that violent behavior was ultimately extinguished, praise God.
(14:43):
She was able to come back and live in our home and finish out her high school career.
But that was an intense 15-year period, Rodney.
As you continue to look for solutions, for treatment, again, coming back to the whole idea of how you think, shaping your life, you and your wife and your family continue to think there is hope.
(15:09):
Even when that facility that should have been helping said, no, no, we can't do this.
Their thinking said, she's too intense for us.
You continue to think there is a way forward.
And I'm sure that a big part of that was that you knew that there was a big God in charge of it all.
Oh, for sure.
And I'll tell you, my wife was just a diligent prayer warrior.
(15:33):
She would just declare the word of God over our family.
I've already shared Jeremiah 29, 11.
That was the one she's clung to the most, but she had others that she just would say over and over, God is working all things for good because we love him and we've been called according to his purpose.
That's a slight paraphrase of Romans 8, 28.
And she had several others that she would just declare all the time, both to manifest the reality of God's word into our family life and to convince herself to change her thinking.
(16:04):
One of the reasons I make declarations based on scripture, and I start like this and I say, God, I'm saying your words in your presence to change my thinking.
My wife did the same thing.
Together we would say God's words over our family.
Honestly, I don't know how a family would have gotten through this without that hope that God is working things out for good.
(16:29):
I know that there have been some theories around, and I guess more new age ideas that you just think things into existence.
It doesn't seem to ring true because obviously in your case, you could think that this young lady was going to be healed, that she was going to be okay, and yet things didn't happen immediately.
(16:52):
So, how do we see the difference between that kind of thinking of just think and it'll happen and more a biblical way of changing our thinking?
You're absolutely right.
There's this whole idea that the universe will manifest things to you.
Well, we know that the universe was created by God, the creator of the universe, and that the power comes from him and that he has a will for us.
(17:18):
The universe doesn't have a will.
It's just atoms and rocks and stars and things like this, but God has a will for us.
We also have an enemy, the devil, who seeks to wreck things, especially our thinking.
And so, we are intentional about aligning our thinking and our behavior with what God has said, with the reality that God has stated.
(17:43):
Abraham had faith in God who calls things that be not as though they were.
The things that didn't exist, which was peace in our family and healing in this girl.
Well, we called those things that be not as though they were.
So, we would call healing in and we would call peace into our family.
Even though we didn't see it yet, we were calling it in.
(18:05):
Hebrews talks about hope.
You don't hope for things that you see, but you hope for the things that are unseen.
And so, we anchored all of that to God's truth and not to some weird mystical thing about the universe.
The universe doesn't care about us, but God does.
And so, we would root our belief and hope in God.
Now, I mentioned that you had a very successful business and that gave you the opportunity to retire at 51, but I suspect that you didn't quite retire as some may note of just, well, I'm just going to sit back and relax for the rest of my life.
(18:41):
What direction has life taken you after that?
I keep looking, but nowhere in the Bible do I find any concept of retirement.
And so, you're right.
I changed what I was doing and God was incredibly faithful to us.
But by the way, the care that our daughter required cost about $200,000 a year.
There was no state funding for this.
(19:01):
And my income went up as needed, a little more than the need.
Incredible.
I recently went through and plotted my income for the past 25 years.
That year, 2017, when she needed that intensive, expensive care, there was a big leg up.
Incredible.
I'm not a great business guy.
(19:23):
I was trained as a pastor.
And somehow, God found a way to get the income that we needed at the time we needed it.
The result of that was a business that was very valuable.
And ultimately, I sold to my partner group at the end of 2020.
Well, since then, my wife and I have written a book called Thinking for Success.
(19:46):
And it's 52 stories that upgrade your thinking to boost productivity, problem solving, and relationships.
It's not a Christian book explicitly, although a Christian who's familiar with the Bible will find a lot of themes that ring through it.
I intentionally wrote it for a business audience because I really want to be able to help upgrade the thinking of anybody in a business setting.
(20:14):
We've got a business that we're calling Abundant Thought Revolution.
And we call this a movement dedicated to helping people renew their minds, break free from limiting beliefs, and unlock their full potential.
We've heard a lot about limiting beliefs.
Maybe you can just give us a thumbnail sketch of how you see limiting beliefs and what are they?
(20:34):
Well, I'll go back to the story about the trustee.
We'll start right there as a simple example.
The guy wanted to be different.
And so, he wouldn't have a job, a normal job when he was free.
But when he was in prison, he wanted to be different.
So, there's a limiting belief.
I want to be different.
So, I'll do anything, break the law in order to be different.
(20:55):
Lots of other limiting beliefs show up in our lives as well, in our thinking.
For example, I'm not good enough.
God can't use me.
That will be too hard.
If I start now, I'll be so old by the time I get ready to...
There's millions of them.
They're a limiting belief that then stops us from taking the action required to produce a better outcome.
(21:22):
I'll probably fail.
I won't succeed.
I can't make it.
I'm not good enough.
I don't have the resources.
Those beliefs keep us stuck.
The reality is, if we bring our thinking in line with God, is that God doesn't care about our circumstances.
(21:43):
He cares about our future and who we are becoming.
And he can work anything out to work for our good.
Back to Joseph.
He's in jail, falsely accused, forgotten about.
And yet, he had the reality in his mind that God was with him.
And ultimately, he came out of that jail and ran Egypt in such a way that he was able to store up grain for years and years.
(22:12):
And then when all of the surrounding regions had a famine, they all came to Egypt to buy grain.
So, the gold and silver and money from all of the surrounding area came to Egypt.
You might remember 400 years later, when the Israelites got ready to leave Egypt and go to the promised land in Exodus 12, Moses told the people to ask of their neighbors for their clothing, silver, and gold, and they gave it to him.
(22:44):
So, 400 years prior to the Exodus, God had put Joseph in place with a strategy to bring all this gold and silver into Egypt.
And then 400 years later, the Israelites asked their neighbors and they had favor with the Egyptians and they got all the gold and silver and they left with it.
(23:05):
Now, what did they do with it in the wilderness?
Well, they cast it into a golden calf.
So, they had a little problem there, but God set them up for incredible success.
The constraint of a prison cell has nothing to do with God's plan for your life or the ultimate outcome that might obtain.
(23:26):
And that's an interesting story too, that as we see that they were set up for success by God, and yet they chose to go a different way, we need to be looking out for how God is setting us up for success, not just in business success or in the way that the world would see success, but in success in serving God.
(23:49):
He's often setting us up and wanting us to go forward in that, isn't he?
Absolutely.
Just think about the word that I heard on Father's Day, adoption is a good idea for us.
Wow.
Okay.
So, we obey.
We bring these kids into our house.
There's a lot of trouble that comes with it.
And that's a pattern we see as well.
(24:09):
When God gives you a word, then trouble comes.
And the word comes, trouble comes.
Inside of all of that, God's always working something out.
So, just in our personal life.
So, we said, yes, adopted these kids.
We had a tough parenting season.
But somehow, God worked it out that our finances would just increase and increase and increase in order to meet the needs.
(24:33):
And ultimately, the adopted kids are on a path to be successful.
The daughter is living independently on her own.
Her brother, who's nearly finished with high school, just committed to attending a Bible college and is dedicated to serving the Lord through apologetics.
He likes to help people think about how to articulate their faith.
(24:57):
Incredible.
But we said yes to God, and then provision and resources came.
It's just an incredible pattern.
God loves people who are committed to Him, and He will set things up for success.
When we allow God to direct things, He directed those two young people to, the right people, to be adopted by those who would have the resources and the ability to stick with it through thick and thin.
(25:28):
Now those young people are reaping the benefits of you saying, hey, God's got this, and we need to follow that plan.
That's exactly right.
And I'll tell you two more quick things.
One is, we didn't have the resources at the time we adopted the kids.
Those came after we said yes.
The other thing that we had was a relational resource.
(25:49):
So when pressure like this comes inside your family, for many people, that pressure becomes a wedge between husband and wife, and that pressure can drive them apart.
But we decided that we were going to get so close together that the pressure would push us together.
That was a resource we had, which was a decision to commit to each other in the middle of it.
(26:14):
And when it felt hard, and when it felt tough, and when there was pressure, we made sure that the pressure was pushing us together as a couple.
And it's really made for an incredible relationship.
I'd never trade for anything.
And the scripture talks about a marriage being between three.
It's between a man, a wife, and God Himself.
(26:37):
And I suppose that is what helps you continue to grow together, because if you're both growing more toward God, then that's going to bring you more in alignment, isn't it?
Well, absolutely.
We had Ecclesiastes 4.12 read at our wedding, where threefold cord is not quickly broken, and we think of that as husband, wife, and God in the marriage, just like you said, Rodney.
(26:58):
Absolutely.
Now, I know that the book is getting ready for release.
It's called Thinking for Success, but people can access your website in the meantime.
What are they going to find there?
Yeah.
Abundantthoughtrevolution.com is the website.
So there'll be information about the book.
We also have lots of other information about relationships.
(27:20):
How do Julie and I manage our family schedule and our calendar?
We've been having a weekly meeting for 25 years, and a lot of people are interested in that.
There's lots of resources on teaching, around our thinking, around finances, and around relationships.
So there's lots of great resources, lots of free stuff there.
(27:41):
And obviously, we haven't had time to touch on every facet of your life during this short time, because there's just so much going on for you.
I know that you're also pastoring at the moment.
There's so much going on, but I will put a link to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily.
(28:02):
But John, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, it's been a pleasure, and I sure hope this has been a blessing to your listeners.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to encounter stories filled with hope and inspiration.
(00:29):
Dozens more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
Please share this and other episodes with others through your social media and through word of mouth.
There's an old proverb that says, be careful how you think, for your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Can the way we think actually alter the course of our lives?
(00:52):
Today's guest thinks so and he'll tell us why today.
Today I'm excited to welcome John Knowlton.
John brings a fascinating perspective shaped by his diverse experiences as both an entrepreneur who built a successful wealth management firm and a chaplain who has served in county jails.
(01:20):
After retiring at just 51, John now dedicates himself to helping business leaders and individuals transform their thinking patterns.
His book, Thinking for Success, explores how our thought processes determine our outcomes.
With his deep commitment to helping others discover their purpose, I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.
(01:43):
John, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well thank you so much Rodney, pleasure to be here.
There's been a lot said about having a healthy mindset and how our thoughts can change the directions that we take in life.
I know that you share a story about two men who come from very similar backgrounds, yet ended up on very different paths.
(02:03):
Maybe you can tell me about those men.
Well sure, this is a story of a couple of men that I met in a jail outside of Chicago, Illinois.
So I was a jail chaplain for a couple of years.
The first one was a man who was in jail and in charge of using crack cocaine.
He was using crack cocaine to stay awake while he was driving big over-the-road trucks and he just couldn't understand why they would put him in jail for doing his job.
(02:35):
The second was a guy I met in the jail who was a trustee.
And a trustee is someone that the sheriff or the minders at the jail have decided is trustworthy enough to be let out of his cell and clean up the floors and mop and empty trash baskets and things like this.
He seemed really engaging, a sharp guy, a good personality.
(02:58):
And I said, what are you doing in here man?
Why are you here in jail?
And he said, when I'm outside everybody's got a job and I want to be different so I don't have a job.
And then I got caught up in trouble.
But in here nobody has a job and I want to be different so now I'm a trustee.
In both of those cases these guys had really flawed thinking.
(03:22):
I should use drugs to do my job.
I shouldn't have a job because I want to be different from everybody.
In both of their cases it ended up where they no longer had much freedom of choice at all because their bad choices landed them imprisoned.
But there's a third man also born in Chicago to a fatherless home where drugs and alcohol abuse and dependency was really high.
(03:48):
Somehow that guy went to college, became a doctor, and was a principal in a large anesthesiology practice.
We've got these three examples here where you've got two guys in rotten situations.
Their thinking is broken to the point where they end up in jail.
And the third one whose thinking is different.
(04:10):
He says I'm going to get out of this.
And if you think about it he lived in a family where everybody's behavior and lives and bodies were controlled by alcohol.
And he became an anesthesiologist where his job is to control drugs.
He totally flipped it around from being controlled by drugs to having a career where he controlled them.
(04:34):
It's just a powerful illustration in real life, in real lives, of how your thinking can affect your behaviors which ultimately result in your outcomes.
I suppose we have to go back to what frames thinking for people.
If people don't feel that there's any chance of them breaking free from the past, if they don't feel that there's any chance to say that is what has happened in the past but I'm going forward in a different direction, they can feel trapped.
(05:05):
And I guess that's going to define their thinking, isn't it?
We have a choice to think about what we think about.
That's one of the unique things about being a human being.
I don't think my dog gets a lot of choice there.
He thinks about squirrels and dog food.
But people, we've got a choice.
That's what my work is really aimed at, is helping people spend their mind, time, and energy on better things.
(05:30):
We can think about our problems, or we can think about solutions.
We can think about our limitations, or we can think about our options.
Knowing God and having a relationship with the God who can create things out of nothing, who can win with any hand, who can cause rotten circumstances to work for our good, is a key foundation to helping to break through into better thinking.
(05:55):
That whole idea of better thinking and changing the way we think, it's not just some magic formula to be able to have a better life.
In fact, you're mentioning the faith aspect there.
And even in the Christian scriptures, we read that our life is based on our thoughts.
And so often we can follow the thoughts that the enemy wants to take us down, or we can follow the thoughts that God wants to take us down.
(06:19):
Is that a big part of the sort of thing that you're talking about?
Well, sure it is.
And frankly, we're storytelling people, right?
The whole scripture is a series of stories.
Having the right stories in our minds can really help shape our thinking.
You think about Joseph, all the trouble that he went through.
Somebody brought on himself, he was kind of rude to his brothers and his mom and dad and ended up in a pit and sold into slavery and ends up in Egypt and he goes to jail himself.
(06:49):
But we can latch onto his story with its incredible conclusion where he can say, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
And we can hold on to stories like that, that shape our thinking and help us see that regardless of circumstance, there's a better future ahead.
There's scripture that can explicitly state that, for example, Jeremiah 29, 11, God knows the plans that he has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future.
(07:20):
And the sort of things you're talking about, it's not just taking the stories of like those three men that you talked about earlier and taking their story.
You've seen this lived out even within your own family, haven't you?
Well, we have.
And my wife and I have been married for nearly 25 years.
She had a daughter from a first rotten marriage.
Then we had a son together.
(07:42):
On Father's Day 2008, we were sitting in church and our pastor was honoring the fathers in the church.
And so he's like, who's had the most kids?
And he gave him a book or something.
And who's adopted the most kids?
Our church has a pretty big tradition and a lot of members who have adopted or fostered kids.
(08:02):
He made a value statement.
And he just said, you know, our church is adoption central.
He was essentially saying, this is a value for us and we care about this and we're a factor for change in our community because we take care of orphans and kids who need help.
And he'd said those kinds of things many times.
And I'd always thought, you know, that's a really good idea for Rodney or for Susan.
(08:26):
But I was surprised that day to sense in my own mind, that's a good idea for us.
It surprised me.
It surely wasn't my thoughts.
And so when we got home from church, I told my wife what I just told you, and she starts to cry.
And she goes to her study and grabs out her prayer journal where three weeks before she'd been thinking what's next for her.
(08:52):
The youngest kid was about to go to school in the fall.
And so she was asking God what's next?
And she'd sensed him saying adoption.
And so she wrote adoption sort of diagonally across the page with a bunch of question marks.
And she said, well, God, if this is your idea, you talk to John about it.
And so three weeks later on Father's Day, bam, there you go.
(09:14):
And so we'd reached the point in our faith journey that when we both felt we had a clear word from God, we just obeyed.
And so we went through the process of getting licensed and there's some classes that are required by the state and all this.
Anyways, we did the stuff.
We got our home certified.
And in the spring of 2009, we got two children delivered to our home whose original home was not safe for them.
(09:41):
Drugs and alcohol and domestic violence, and just all the trouble that you can imagine.
I know that there's a story there and I want to hear what happened next, but I'm very much aware that right from the start there, you're putting yourself in a place where your thoughts can be challenged, where you can hear those new thoughts.
So you've put yourself in a church where the pastor is talking about this and you're free to make those thoughts yours and follow that direction or to say, as you said, first off, no, that's for someone else.
(10:14):
Is that a very important part for us to make sure that we're putting ourselves in the right place to be able to change our thoughts towards success?
We're always being discipled by something, maybe not 24 hours a day, but all the hours we're awake, something is coming into our brains.
It could be news or social media.
(10:35):
News is usually negative and bad news.
Social media is usually about comparison.
There's all kinds of stuff that's shaping our minds, shaping our thinking.
My wife and I have just committed ourselves to starting our days in the Word of God and in prayer.
We read the Bible a lot.
We pray a lot because we want the first thing that hits our brains every day to be the truth from God.
(11:02):
And since He has great plans for us, we want to be aligned with those.
I think there's an element of discipline.
I know that word sometimes strikes people wrong because discipline, for some people, sounds like punishment.
So, maybe let's just change it to say practices or exercise.
We all know how exercise works.
(11:23):
You can't do all your exercise the first week of January and be good for the other 51 weeks of the year.
It's something that needs to be done regularly in order to stay in shape.
So, let's think about that as spiritual exercises.
And when we are intentionally shaping our own thinking and our mindset by the reality that God puts forth, then we're ready to receive and open to hearing what He's got to say to us.
(11:52):
So, we've come to this place where you have these two children delivered to you that have come from a very difficult background.
Tell me what happens next.
How do they start to assimilate into your family?
Two kids, two different experiences, even though they've been raised in the same environment, a girl and a boy.
And the girl's a little bit older.
(12:14):
She was three years old and the boy was just about one, brother and sister.
The girl had had far more trauma exposure and experience than the boy had.
That was almost immediately obvious in terms of behavior and how she interacted with people.
And this little girl having rages and violence and inability to sit still or to even be calm, couldn't sleep and hypervigilance.
(12:44):
I mean, there's all kinds of clinical diagnoses and all this, but it continued to get progressively more disruptive to the rest of our family.
The older daughter was estranged for a number of years because it was so stressful at our home.
Anxiety was really common and intense for some of the other children.
And for this girl, she was so upset by her life and the things that she'd been through and they'd affected her so deeply that it started to come out as violence.
(13:12):
Ten-year-old girl would go through walls where there were no doors, kicking her way through the walls in order to get to other people.
And we tried every kind of therapy modality that we could think of and that could be suggested to us.
And she just continued to be really violent.
And so, I think about it from my perspective, what it was like to live with her.
(13:36):
But sometimes I can think about what it must be like to be her.
And when we see that kind of behavior, we often might think, what's the matter with that person?
But I think the right question is, what did that person go through?
What happened to her?
And so, she had some really rough stuff happen to her that simply being in our home didn't fix.
(14:00):
We ultimately realized that she needed to be in a 24-hour-a-day therapeutic environment.
We found a place that was recommended.
The first place kept her for about four or five months and said, she's too intense for us.
You need to find somewhere else.
There's actually a profession called an educational consultant in the United States.
(14:22):
And that job is to try to figure out which facilities are appropriate for your kids.
So, we hired an educational consultant who found a place that was a good fit in Texas, which is a couple thousand miles from where we live.
She lived there for about three and a half years.
All that violent behavior was ultimately extinguished, praise God.
(14:43):
She was able to come back and live in our home and finish out her high school career.
But that was an intense 15-year period, Rodney.
As you continue to look for solutions, for treatment, again, coming back to the whole idea of how you think, shaping your life, you and your wife and your family continue to think there is hope.
(15:09):
Even when that facility that should have been helping said, no, no, we can't do this.
Their thinking said, she's too intense for us.
You continue to think there is a way forward.
And I'm sure that a big part of that was that you knew that there was a big God in charge of it all.
Oh, for sure.
And I'll tell you, my wife was just a diligent prayer warrior.
(15:33):
She would just declare the word of God over our family.
I've already shared Jeremiah 29, 11.
That was the one she's clung to the most, but she had others that she just would say over and over, God is working all things for good because we love him and we've been called according to his purpose.
That's a slight paraphrase of Romans 8, 28.
And she had several others that she would just declare all the time, both to manifest the reality of God's word into our family life and to convince herself to change her thinking.
(16:04):
One of the reasons I make declarations based on scripture, and I start like this and I say, God, I'm saying your words in your presence to change my thinking.
My wife did the same thing.
Together we would say God's words over our family.
Honestly, I don't know how a family would have gotten through this without that hope that God is working things out for good.
(16:29):
I know that there have been some theories around, and I guess more new age ideas that you just think things into existence.
It doesn't seem to ring true because obviously in your case, you could think that this young lady was going to be healed, that she was going to be okay, and yet things didn't happen immediately.
(16:52):
So, how do we see the difference between that kind of thinking of just think and it'll happen and more a biblical way of changing our thinking?
You're absolutely right.
There's this whole idea that the universe will manifest things to you.
Well, we know that the universe was created by God, the creator of the universe, and that the power comes from him and that he has a will for us.
(17:18):
The universe doesn't have a will.
It's just atoms and rocks and stars and things like this, but God has a will for us.
We also have an enemy, the devil, who seeks to wreck things, especially our thinking.
And so, we are intentional about aligning our thinking and our behavior with what God has said, with the reality that God has stated.
(17:43):
Abraham had faith in God who calls things that be not as though they were.
The things that didn't exist, which was peace in our family and healing in this girl.
Well, we called those things that be not as though they were.
So, we would call healing in and we would call peace into our family.
Even though we didn't see it yet, we were calling it in.
(18:05):
Hebrews talks about hope.
You don't hope for things that you see, but you hope for the things that are unseen.
And so, we anchored all of that to God's truth and not to some weird mystical thing about the universe.
The universe doesn't care about us, but God does.
And so, we would root our belief and hope in God.
Now, I mentioned that you had a very successful business and that gave you the opportunity to retire at 51, but I suspect that you didn't quite retire as some may note of just, well, I'm just going to sit back and relax for the rest of my life.
(18:41):
What direction has life taken you after that?
I keep looking, but nowhere in the Bible do I find any concept of retirement.
And so, you're right.
I changed what I was doing and God was incredibly faithful to us.
But by the way, the care that our daughter required cost about $200,000 a year.
There was no state funding for this.
(19:01):
And my income went up as needed, a little more than the need.
Incredible.
I recently went through and plotted my income for the past 25 years.
That year, 2017, when she needed that intensive, expensive care, there was a big leg up.
Incredible.
I'm not a great business guy.
(19:23):
I was trained as a pastor.
And somehow, God found a way to get the income that we needed at the time we needed it.
The result of that was a business that was very valuable.
And ultimately, I sold to my partner group at the end of 2020.
Well, since then, my wife and I have written a book called Thinking for Success.
(19:46):
And it's 52 stories that upgrade your thinking to boost productivity, problem solving, and relationships.
It's not a Christian book explicitly, although a Christian who's familiar with the Bible will find a lot of themes that ring through it.
I intentionally wrote it for a business audience because I really want to be able to help upgrade the thinking of anybody in a business setting.
(20:14):
We've got a business that we're calling Abundant Thought Revolution.
And we call this a movement dedicated to helping people renew their minds, break free from limiting beliefs, and unlock their full potential.
We've heard a lot about limiting beliefs.
Maybe you can just give us a thumbnail sketch of how you see limiting beliefs and what are they?
(20:34):
Well, I'll go back to the story about the trustee.
We'll start right there as a simple example.
The guy wanted to be different.
And so, he wouldn't have a job, a normal job when he was free.
But when he was in prison, he wanted to be different.
So, there's a limiting belief.
I want to be different.
So, I'll do anything, break the law in order to be different.
(20:55):
Lots of other limiting beliefs show up in our lives as well, in our thinking.
For example, I'm not good enough.
God can't use me.
That will be too hard.
If I start now, I'll be so old by the time I get ready to...
There's millions of them.
They're a limiting belief that then stops us from taking the action required to produce a better outcome.
(21:22):
I'll probably fail.
I won't succeed.
I can't make it.
I'm not good enough.
I don't have the resources.
Those beliefs keep us stuck.
The reality is, if we bring our thinking in line with God, is that God doesn't care about our circumstances.
(21:43):
He cares about our future and who we are becoming.
And he can work anything out to work for our good.
Back to Joseph.
He's in jail, falsely accused, forgotten about.
And yet, he had the reality in his mind that God was with him.
And ultimately, he came out of that jail and ran Egypt in such a way that he was able to store up grain for years and years.
(22:12):
And then when all of the surrounding regions had a famine, they all came to Egypt to buy grain.
So, the gold and silver and money from all of the surrounding area came to Egypt.
You might remember 400 years later, when the Israelites got ready to leave Egypt and go to the promised land in Exodus 12, Moses told the people to ask of their neighbors for their clothing, silver, and gold, and they gave it to him.
(22:44):
So, 400 years prior to the Exodus, God had put Joseph in place with a strategy to bring all this gold and silver into Egypt.
And then 400 years later, the Israelites asked their neighbors and they had favor with the Egyptians and they got all the gold and silver and they left with it.
(23:05):
Now, what did they do with it in the wilderness?
Well, they cast it into a golden calf.
So, they had a little problem there, but God set them up for incredible success.
The constraint of a prison cell has nothing to do with God's plan for your life or the ultimate outcome that might obtain.
(23:26):
And that's an interesting story too, that as we see that they were set up for success by God, and yet they chose to go a different way, we need to be looking out for how God is setting us up for success, not just in business success or in the way that the world would see success, but in success in serving God.
(23:49):
He's often setting us up and wanting us to go forward in that, isn't he?
Absolutely.
Just think about the word that I heard on Father's Day, adoption is a good idea for us.
Wow.
Okay.
So, we obey.
We bring these kids into our house.
There's a lot of trouble that comes with it.
And that's a pattern we see as well.
(24:09):
When God gives you a word, then trouble comes.
And the word comes, trouble comes.
Inside of all of that, God's always working something out.
So, just in our personal life.
So, we said, yes, adopted these kids.
We had a tough parenting season.
But somehow, God worked it out that our finances would just increase and increase and increase in order to meet the needs.
(24:33):
And ultimately, the adopted kids are on a path to be successful.
The daughter is living independently on her own.
Her brother, who's nearly finished with high school, just committed to attending a Bible college and is dedicated to serving the Lord through apologetics.
He likes to help people think about how to articulate their faith.
(24:57):
Incredible.
But we said yes to God, and then provision and resources came.
It's just an incredible pattern.
God loves people who are committed to Him, and He will set things up for success.
When we allow God to direct things, He directed those two young people to, the right people, to be adopted by those who would have the resources and the ability to stick with it through thick and thin.
(25:28):
Now those young people are reaping the benefits of you saying, hey, God's got this, and we need to follow that plan.
That's exactly right.
And I'll tell you two more quick things.
One is, we didn't have the resources at the time we adopted the kids.
Those came after we said yes.
The other thing that we had was a relational resource.
(25:49):
So when pressure like this comes inside your family, for many people, that pressure becomes a wedge between husband and wife, and that pressure can drive them apart.
But we decided that we were going to get so close together that the pressure would push us together.
That was a resource we had, which was a decision to commit to each other in the middle of it.
(26:14):
And when it felt hard, and when it felt tough, and when there was pressure, we made sure that the pressure was pushing us together as a couple.
And it's really made for an incredible relationship.
I'd never trade for anything.
And the scripture talks about a marriage being between three.
It's between a man, a wife, and God Himself.
(26:37):
And I suppose that is what helps you continue to grow together, because if you're both growing more toward God, then that's going to bring you more in alignment, isn't it?
Well, absolutely.
We had Ecclesiastes 4.12 read at our wedding, where threefold cord is not quickly broken, and we think of that as husband, wife, and God in the marriage, just like you said, Rodney.
(26:58):
Absolutely.
Now, I know that the book is getting ready for release.
It's called Thinking for Success, but people can access your website in the meantime.
What are they going to find there?
Yeah.
Abundantthoughtrevolution.com is the website.
So there'll be information about the book.
We also have lots of other information about relationships.
(27:20):
How do Julie and I manage our family schedule and our calendar?
We've been having a weekly meeting for 25 years, and a lot of people are interested in that.
There's lots of resources on teaching, around our thinking, around finances, and around relationships.
So there's lots of great resources, lots of free stuff there.
(27:41):
And obviously, we haven't had time to touch on every facet of your life during this short time, because there's just so much going on for you.
I know that you're also pastoring at the moment.
There's so much going on, but I will put a link to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily.
(28:02):
But John, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, it's been a pleasure, and I sure hope this has been a blessing to your listeners.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!