May 13, 2025 • 41 mins
Transitional periods are difficult times in our lives. Join Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino for an author spotlight into her book, All I Know About Ministry...I Learned in Junior High - and the stories that inspired her transitional years - now to inspire yours. (Intro and Conclusion Track "Ready to Rock" by Yvgeniy Sorokin, https://pixabay.com/users/eugenemyers-40510887/. ACTS Seminary ad back track "Worship" by Ivan Luzin, https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-worship-151061/.)
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Episode Transcript
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Apostolic Covenant Theological Seminary.
The Revolution starts here.
Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge, as we celebrate the Kingdom
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of God within you.
I am your host, Dr. Lee Ann Marino, Apostle Author, podcaster, professor, and theologian,
and founder of Spitfire Apostolic Ministries and all the works that go along with it.
I am excited to share this program with you as we explore the ins and outs of counterculture
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Christianity present as you live out the Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
Want to learn more?
Visit my website at www.kingdompowernow.org
And now, a program which features a variety of formats here, just for you.
Interviews on a variety of relevant topics, teaching and preaching proclaim everywhere from my
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North Carolina studio to sanctuary and beyond, and powerful insights here for now as we
turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, happy whatever time of day it is, wherever
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you are, and to our listeners in Serbia, we say, "szdravo."
We hope that whatever time of day is when you are listening, that you are having a good
one, and I welcome you to this edition of the Kingdom Now podcast.
And I am your host, Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino here as the Spitfire serving as the voice of
counterculture Christianity, where we feature the theme of faith with an edge, and if you'd
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like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, of which there are going to
be some amazing changes over the next couple of months, be sure to check out my website
and keep up with it at www.kingdompowernow.org.
Typically, once every season, I kind of sit back and I do an author spotlight on myself
with a book I've written.
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And I typically do it somewhere mid-season.
Usually it's done a little bit earlier than I'm doing it now, and the reason it wasn't
done earlier is because I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do it on.
And that's pretty much the long and the short of the whole story is that I really wasn't
sure out of all the different books I have which book I wanted to do it on.
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And for those who follow, most of my books have been going through kind of an updating
period, if you will, where I have been going over some of the older works and given some
of them a new look, giving some of the interiors a refresh, doing a little bit of a careful
edit on some of them because obviously the longer I've done this, the editing gets a little
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bit tighter and so going back and updating some stuff.
And it's a long process, obviously updating pictures, updating bios.
I mean, there are still books mine out there where I'm blonde on the cover when I have
not been blonde for over two years.
So it's been kind of a redo season.
And when I read this particular book of recent, which you can get the updated version of,
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I know that this was the one that I needed to sit on here and talk about.
And it is my book, all I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional
for all the transitions in your life.
The cover is the same as it was before except on the back, I've got dark hair now, bio is
updated, some of the content is a little bit more updated and it's a real clean type book.
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It's a wonderful transitional book written with a lot of good humor.
It's written in memory, forms, so I'm basically telling stories from when I was in junior high.
And the question then becomes, well, why did I decide that particular era of life?
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And that is what we are going to talk about on this particular episode is this book, all
I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions
in your life.
It is by me, Dr. Lee Ann B. Marino, you can get it on Amazon.com and we will put another
shout out about it out there in a little bit.
You can also get it anywhere books are sold.
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So to kind of back up a little bit, a lot of people often ask me a lot about how I got here
in my life or how I basically kind of got to a point where I wanted to be in ministry
or knew that ministry was the thing that I really wanted to do.
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And I think that that's a fair question.
I think that we are always kind of curious about the journeys that ministers and public figures
go through.
And one thing I have noted is that most of the time when we do talk about stuff like this,
ministers don't often talk a whole lot about their childhoods.
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They might tell a few stories here and there.
They might kind of give a general overview.
And when we do tend to give general overviews, one of the things that I think is kind of
notable for me or that I've seen as we've gone through stuff is that the stories we tell
tend to be kind of negative.
And according to what I've read, we remember negative memories before positive ones for a
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lot of reasons it has to do with the way that memory is formed.
But at the same time, I'm always very much of the opinion that nothing is all good or all
bad.
That even in the darkest of lives, even in the lives where we have the most difficult times
or the circumstances where we have the most difficult experiences, there is always
something that's not necessarily all bad.
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And remembering that and in kind of keeping that concept, I don't question that a lot of
my childhood was bad and that a lot of the things I went through in my childhood was bad.
But not everything was.
And I told these stories and I told these memories for that reason.
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First of all, some of them were very, very hard to talk about.
Some of them were very easy to talk about.
Some of them were really light.
And overall, this was what I would classify as a fun book to do.
It was something that brought back a lot of good memories, brought back a lot of those
memories from this era that are very, very difficult, but that a lot of people can relate
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to.
And that really gives insight into where I would wind up a few years later.
So before junior high, I really never thought much about writing.
I never really thought much about being an author.
I had a really good teacher.
And my teacher, for junior high English really made sure that we understood what we needed
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to understand and got me interested in for that reason.
And I also became editor of school paper in junior high and that role would follow me for
the rest of my life.
It followed me throughout high school for the periods of time I was there.
It followed me through homeschooling, it followed me through college.
And then when I went into ministry, we had a newsletter first and then we had a magazine
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for a very long time.
So being an editor really kind of was something that balanced out and introduced something into
my life that was very, very important and brought me to something that was a useful skill.
So what I do in publishing now as an editor very much relates to those skills that I learned
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earlier in my life.
It's also a fact that I went to Catholic school.
So from what I have read on the internet about Catholic schooling and about people who do have
these kind of Catholic school experiences that you tend to talk more about your childhood
than other people.
And I would say that that's probably true to a certain extent.
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Although obviously I don't do it nearly as much as I might have done at one time because
I'm much further away from that.
You tend to think about it differently than other people do with their school experiences
and some of that has to do with that.
Your classes are smaller.
You don't have as big of a graduating class or a home room or anything like that.
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Your classes tend to be small.
And you tend to be more close knit and more in contact with people from that point in time
in your life than somebody who didn't go to Catholic school.
And that has to do with that.
You were bound with these people who had the same experience with you.
And so it's something that kind of takes you through life.
And whereas I will openly admit that I don't have as many contacts from that era as I did
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earlier in time, my life is very different now than it was when we were in school.
My life is very different than it was maybe even 10 years ago.
So in saying all of that, these stories needed to be told.
And I do intend to do a sequel at some point in time with it.
I've not done it as yet because I've been working on other projects.
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But all I know about ministry I learned in junior high really made me think about what junior
high was like and that it's basically a transitional period because you're really not quite a teenager
and you're really not quite a little kid anymore.
You're kind of in the middle.
And junior high is often marked as a transition between elementary and high school.
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And it's often a period of a lot of firsts.
Often a period that's very, very difficult for people who go through it.
There are stories abound where none of us would want to go back to that point in time in our
lives and I would still say that.
But it's also a point in our lives where we do a lot of learning and a lot of growing
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about different things.
And as a result, I said, all right, let's make a devotional that's for a transitional period.
And I did it for 40 days because 40 days is a period that a lot of people use for different
things whether it's they say, hey, I'm going to go on a fast or I'm going to observe
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lint or advent or something of that nature.
40 days does tend to be a period of time where a lot of people like to learn something from
God, take some time, focus on something.
And so this is 40 days.
They're very short devotions and each one of them as I had said earlier is a story and they
are all true stories.
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These are not fiction.
These are very much based on real experiences that I had in junior high.
They are told from the perspective of my memories and from what I remember.
And as we go through them and as I went through them and relived that period, I could really
see the transitional principle.
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And why it's very important as we go through our lives that we find ways to connect with
God through our transitions.
So that all being said, I'm going to share a few different days from this particular devotional.
They are numbered but you can do them in any order that you want.
They don't have to be in the order that they're in.
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I open up with an introduction where I kind of introduce the book and then we go from
there to start telling these different stories and how important they are from this time period.
So I'm going to start with day one because where else to start but at the beginning.
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And day one is transitions are hard.
And we open up with Philippians 4:6-7, don't worry about anything.
We have to pray about everything.
Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done.
Then you will experience God's peace which exceeds anything we can understand.
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His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.
The transition from 5th to 6th grade was one of the hardest I ever made.
I was even harder than high school to college.
I still remember the first day of 6th grade vividly.
It was raining and was extremely dark out almost like it was nighttime in the middle of the day.
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I went from the top floor of the main school building to the last room of the annex to start
junior high, a whole transition in and of itself because I had trouble finding the room I was late.
Our home room teacher was also our social studies and art instructor and I dreaded her.
She had already taught art when we were in 5th grade and the experience of having her as a teacher was vividly unpleasant.
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Well this year was to bring was not only anyone's game, it was intimidating.
We went from being the oldest kids in elementary school to the low class on the pole in junior high.
Our days were more regimented, longer, and the subjects seemed more intense.
There was more homework.
We spent our entire mornings traveling between classrooms and everything seemed harder, including having to carry an entire morning's worth of class materials from room to room, not to mention having to wear our gym clothes under our uniforms on Tuesday, making the entire day feel bulky and uncomfortable.
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It didn't help that I was also dealing with body changes, including my hair suddenly starting to curl and weight issues.
It was a year I thought was never going to end.
I honestly did not think I would make it through 6th grade, as far as grades and experience.
6th grade was my worst year spent in junior high.
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I spent the entire year worried I was going to fail and have to repeat the year going through it all over again.
In some ways I realized I barely made it by.
It seemed like I was always in trouble, whether I deserve to be or not.
And I persistently felt like I had nowhere to go and no place that was really mine.
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I was experiencing the sting of a transition, of going from one thing to another very fast.
Today we talk a lot about transitions in various forms.
It's your time, it's your season, your changes coming, and we all cheer and shout.
People start crying when that word is for them and then they get excited at the thought of a new beginning.
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What we don't often take into consideration is that new beginnings, while having with them the promise of a new start and beginning again,
bring with them hard changes and adjustments that aren't always so shout worthy.
In every beginning we find an ending.
Endings mean certain things in our lives will be no more, and that we don't always know where we are going, what is going to happen, or what might come out of it.
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New beginnings mean new responsibilities, challenges, and leaving old things behind that often we are not always as ready to give up as we thought we were.
Sixth grade meant I was no longer in fifth grade.
It meant elementary school was left behind in pursuit of new and different things.
The elementary was never going to be again.
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It was exciting but very overwhelming all at the same time.
Transitions are hard.
Be patient with yourself when you are transitioning.
Be patient with others while they transition too.
So that first day devotional pretty much sets the tone for where we're going to go throughout this book.
We're talking about transition periods. About periods where we kind of find ourselves in between things.
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We can easily find ourselves in between things with God or in between is any type of circumstance might emerge whether it's jobs or homes or life or anything in general.
We just kind of reach a point where we are not really ready for the next thing but we're not where we're used to be either.
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And all of us go through transition periods.
I'm going to say that we probably spend a long period of our spiritual lives in transitions because we're moving between seasons, we're moving between one thing and another thing.
It's going to be really unsettling. They can be really difficult to figure out and navigate.
And that's why I picked Junior High as the time to write about for the sake of this book.
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So let's read another day.
And for this we're going to do day 14 use time wisely.
So be careful how you live, don't live like fools but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.
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Don't act thoughtlessly but understand what the Lord wants you to do.
Computers weren't new when I was in Junior High but the idea of an affordable home PC was becoming an expanding reality.
Windows 3.1 was all the rage and we had one modern computer in our computer lab along with an array of archaic Apple computers from the 1980s.
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Every chance we got we swarmed around the one modern PC in the lab for hours on end.
How were we doing you ask? Schoolwork? Computer programming? Research for assignments? Expanding our minds? Oh no we were playing solitaire.
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Computerized solitaire was a big deal in those days. Big enough for us to spend every waking spare moment of free time we had fighting over who was going to play solitaire at that moment.
And for how long? It became such an issue we started forming solitaire teams which kind of defeats the purpose of solitaire being a one person game but anyway.
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And organizing times and solitaire events where we would gather in small groups hovering around the machine and whoever it was playing at that moment so we could have our say and input into what they did with the cards and feel involved.
Early morning before classes every recess when we were stuck indoors every chance we got during a study period and were able to sneak in the lab and get a few rounds in.
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Even every chance we got after school we made a deliberate point to go in and play solitaire with our teams with no other intent or purpose to it but to improve our solitaire game.
Nowadays I look at my day planner which overflows with appointments, phone calls, meetings, teleconferences, prayer calls, Bible studies, services and internet meetings and I shake my head at the incredible amount of overflowing work that seems to go before me.
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Not only do I not have time to waste, I don't have nearly as much free time as I did in those days.
What seemed like endless fun and something we took so seriously now sounds like a huge waste of time. We could have been studying, doing homework, working on group projects, anything else in the world. But we were playing solitaire.
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I believe it is very important to use time wisely but that doesn't mean swinging to the opposite end of the extreme from wasting time.
I admit to being at this opposite extreme more now than I would like to admit. Things are so busy, it seems as if time is consumed by many projects with rest is an impossibility.
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Using time wisely is a balancing act. It is the perfect balance between activity and rest, making sure that time is not just used well but what is done in those active periods is productive.
Rest time should be refreshing, sometimes fun, sometimes peaceful, but always consistently bringing rest to the body, so one is able to work well again and be productive again.
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So spending so much time playing solitaire was probably not the best use of time. But it was fun.
The lesson remains the same, whether it was the best use of time or not. Too much of anything is out of balance and creates a situation where we don't use our time wisely.
Rather than striving for extremes, it's important to accept that there is a time and a place for all facets of life and embrace each time and season for what it is, maintaining balance everywhere we can.
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Overworked, take some time to enjoy yourself. Well rested, make sure you get some business accomplished before the end of day today.
So that's a funny story and it's kind of a sweet story in some ways because there was a certain level of innocence to it, where we're sitting there fighting over and modifying solitaire so that we all have time to play it and we all have time to be involved.
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And so it kind of has a sweet edge to it. Well at the same time, really teaching us something about a good use of time because you know we were also the first ones there who forgot about assignments or who forgot about homework or who maybe forgot to do something at times and then cried that we didn't have enough time to get stuff done.
Well that probably was the case when we were always running around playing solitaire all the time. We needed definitely to find a balance between too much recreation and not enough recreation, too much rest and not enough rest.
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And finding that middle ground goes a long way in our lives, even though maybe today our extreme is to not do enough or maybe our extreme nowadays is to do too much.
Well and if that's the case, then we need to find that balance back so that we are better able to be better servants for the Lord.
So let's go to a third one day 23. I get by with a little help from my friends, which those of who know that song that that is actually a classic Beatles reference.
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And the verses Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. Two people are better off than one for they can help each other succeed.
If one person falls, the other can reach out and help, but someone who falls alone is in real trouble. Likewise, two people lying close together can keep each other warm, but how can one be warm alone?
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A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back to back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple braided cord is not easily broken.
In 1994, the pilot of a show that would become an international phenomenon aired one September evening.
The show we now know in eternal reruns as the sitcom Friends, as we, who were their live at the time remember, was an incredible statement on the contemporary issues and thoughts of young single professionals had a bad life at that time.
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Even though I was in seventh grade at the time, obviously much younger than those on the show, we all loved the show and watched it religiously.
We wanted to grow up and be like them, living across the hall from each other, being friends, sharing lives, hanging out in a coffee house and splitting rent as we took on the world one day at a time in the big city, New York City.
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Despite our age difference with the characters on the show, there was something about the relationships they all had with each other that clicked with us.
The support, the camaraderie, the fun, even their disagreements were things we could identify with, even at our young age.
We knew true friendship when we saw it, and friends made us want to be better friends with each other.
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Every Friday morning we would come in and discuss the plots and dialogue from the prior night's episodes.
We'd come in on every detail from clothes to hair to what we thought was going to happen. Like the rest of the world, we waited with baited breath to see if Rachel and Ross would finally once and for all get together.
It was as if these people were our own friends, people we cared about and people whose lives were intertwined with our own.
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The show friends made us all think about who our friends were and what it meant to have friends, especially those people in our lives who were close enough to us to be in what we now call our inner circle.
I remember our French teacher telling us that even though we might have many acquaintances and school friends, people we hang out with at school, if we were able to count the number of people on one hand who were really there when we needed them, we were lucky.
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I don't think we really understood what she was trying to tell us back then, but I certainly know what she means now.
As a leader, lots of people want to be around me all the time. People want me to put them in my conferences to be handled licenses and ordination paperwork, to be approved or mentioned in a certain context, or to be seen with me.
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During a service, after a service before a service, people loved to buzz around the leader, loved to get a word and loved to hang out, hoping that being with you will somehow benefit them.
When I've had times and I needed help, or someone to be there, however, only a few people are already willing and able to be there in that moment of need.
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Jesus was followed by multitudes, and then he had disciples. There were seventy, then there were twelve, then there were three. And it was that three that was his inner circle. Jesus clearly had his choice of people to be around, but he knew the hearts of those closest to him.
Even though they didn't always do things right, he saw something in them that made him know they were right to be closest to him while on this earth.
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Our friends, our inner circles, those who are closest to us, are very important in our lives because they help us to be all we seek to be and hope to be.
They help us get by in bad times and are happy in good times. When selecting your inner circle, remember how important it is to be among true friends.
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So there's a real powerful application, particularly in this day and age, for us when it comes to friendships.
I've heard it said that that particular age group, you know, right before junior high and then junior high, you never have friends like that ever again in your life.
And I will say this, I have had some incredible friends in my life, and I've got some incredible people in my life now, but I will say that the relationships are not the same as they were at that age.
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And I don't know what it is about that age. I don't know if it's that we're all just in a certain state of mind, if it's that we're going through this growing phase together.
Because as adults, we do tend to be in different places than other people are at.
You know, we're not necessarily always at the same stage of life. Like for example, I have a friend who's got a teenage daughter. I don't have a teenage daughter.
At an earlier point in time, I had dogs. Now I don't. I spent a long period of my life by myself from being widowed.
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Being in different phases of life as adults is a little bit more tricky to navigate.
At that particular age, we were pretty much all going through the same things together at the same time. And I think that that had a lot to do with it.
But friendship still matter. And I have read that people are more lonely and people need community more now than they ever did before. And that ironically enough, we're often having it and finding it less than we did in years past.
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And so it's really important to get out there and have friends. It's really important to have community. And I know that that's a continuing theme, something that we kind of talk about a lot on this program.
But it really is true and your friends really do matter. Let's read another devotion. Let's do day 25. Broken hearts mend. And we're going to read our opening verses Isaiah 61:1-2.
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The spirit of the sovereign Lord is upon me. For the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to comfort the broken hearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed.
He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord's favor has come and with it the day of God's anger against their enemies.
As quickly as my first boyfriend and I became an official item, we were no longer one after junior high ended.
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Graduation came and went and with him living close to 30 minutes from me, our post-graduation life met new schools and new lives.
It also meant, our very, long term, especially for that age group relationship was over.
We then had to confront going through what a few of our other comrades had already gone through, and that was the breakup.
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Official dating was not common in the junior high I attended, so only a few of us had paired off.
We went through the excitement of the first hanging out dates all the way to the end of the breakups with everyone and to us back then, it might as well have been the end of the world.
There would never be another one like the one we had and we thought that life was over.
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In a sense we weren't wrong, we were experiencing firsts that we would never experience again.
Of course we would go on to experience other relationships, but they wouldn't be our first relationship ever again.
Something was started and over within what seemed like a short period of time, and it was heart-wrenching.
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All the things we thought in our young minds would last forever, were suddenly over and done with, and we were left feeling broken.
I think the concept of a broken heart is about more than just losing a person.
When we deal with a broken heart, we are dealing with the loss of the concepts, hopes, dreams and ideals we had placed in that person.
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We don't just have a relationship with an individual, we also have a relationship with the way in which we have built up a life around that person, concept or ideal.
This makes breakups, broken dreams, and broken hearts that much more difficult, because we don't just mourn the loss of a person.
A part of us also mourns some of our most deeply held hopes and ideals.
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The good news is that broken hearts do mend.
Even though we might hurt for a while, we come to a point where life starts to make sense again.
We develop new ideals and goals, we have new aspirations, and we aspire to share these with someone different.
Our lives rebuild, not always in a better way, but in a different way, from where we were heading prior.
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In the healing of a broken heart, we find a new start, and in many ways we become a new person.
Life is about building up, falling down, getting up and starting all over again.
There are a few people in this life wind up in a vertical state of being, keeping themselves in one relationship or set of goals for a lifetime.
The changes that broken hearts bring to our lives cause us to look at ourselves in a way that's often hard and hurtful, because they make us look at ourselves.
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Every failure and every success should cause us to ask ourselves just what it is we want and need and how we can go about that, without having to feel dependent on a relationship or other person to take us to that place.
Broken hearts do mend, the things that no longer are will most likely never be again. Have we ever considered that maybe they're not supposed to be again?
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Some things are with us, carrying us and holding us close, but only through a season.
When that season is up, it is time for something new. Embrace the new, let your broken heart heal, so new people, new adventures, and new things can come along and bless you in your life.
So learning that, particularly at this time, and I think that that's kind of an ending story to junior high, was that the things that we left behind in the hurts that we experienced did come to a new place where we were able to find new.
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And then we started that cycle all over again, and as amazing as it is and as incredible as it is, we do need to remember that when we hurt, we do also have the chance to heal.
And that often the healing comes in the form of being able to move forward in life.
Now for our last little preview at this book, because we don't want to give you too much of a peek.
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We have day 37, which is life is not fair, and our opening verses, Isaiah 2:3-4.
People from many nations will come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of Jacob's God. There he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths.
For the Lord's teaching will go out from Zion, his word will go out from Jerusalem. The Lord will mediate between nations and will settle international disputes.
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They will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into perning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor trained for war anymore.
I've already stated a few times that my social studies teacher wasn't the greatest woman in the world.
She wasn't really nice, wasn't that great of a teacher, wasn't that interesting, and was on the eccentric side.
I will never forget the day. She sat in front of the entire class and cleaned her ears with her keys.
(34:34):
Her pursuit in life was not to just teach us social studies, but to use her oddities to try and prepare us for her concept of what life was going to be about.
She was what I would now in hindsight classify as the teacher who felt the need to teach us all a lesson.
In her mind, we had it too easy, even though she knew nothing about our lives or what we experienced as people.
(34:55):
So she was going to be our hard dose of reality.
Her way of being realistic was being hard all the time without mercy.
It didn't seem to matter that she lost things all the time, couldn't keep track of our assignments and was forgetful.
If any of us forgot, lost or ran into an issue, she was there to issue a quick zero or a fast attention.
(35:17):
She would frequently yell and had no sense of humor.
She was begun silence and on making sure we were silent whether or not it was required at that moment.
Her mannerisms made us uncomfortable with her, and awkward when we knew we somehow screwed up, because we knew she would not tolerate nor understand what happened.
One thing she used to tell us any time we got in trouble whether justified or not, and we protested by telling her she was being unfair, was life is unfair.
(35:45):
As much as we hated hearing it back then, she was right, life is not fair.
While she might not have gone about it in exactly the right way, she was aware that life was hard and was going to be far harder for us than we could ever begin to imagine.
It is full of things that happened to us deserved or not that we have to deal with.
In the real world, just like in her classroom, you are hard pressed to find someone who particularly cares about what you were going through or why you made a mistake.
(36:13):
All the world cares about is getting whatever it feels is owed to it, and if you can't deliver it wants to know why.
Given how unfair the world really is, isn't it important that the church is a place that provides refuge from that kind of attitude?
Every day I hear stories from people who have been burned by the church worse than they were burned by the world. It almost feels like an epidemic of uncaring and interested people have washed over into the church to be praised for their good-looking, surface deep deeds.
(36:41):
The church should not be full of people who are hard on feeling and act like they don't care most of the time.
We should be people who love those that come through our doors. Let them know that for every person who never accepted them, we accept them.
And we want to see them thrive and change as God works within them from glory to glory and faith to faith.
It's great to hope we are all prepared for the real world and for life itself, especially given life itself is not kind to us most of the time.
(37:07):
As a minister, I hope that we, the church, prepare people for the greater reality that God loves them and wants us to dwell in His kingdom as His people rather than the worlds.
Maybe if we look more at how unfair the world is, it will inspire us all the more to represent the kingdom well.
And I think that that's a great devotional to kind of leave us with because how we act and how we represent the kingdom of God matters.
(37:36):
And if we are representing it, Shady, if we really act like we don't care, then that's the message that people are going to have.
And life isn't fair. That's a truth. But it doesn't mean that we can't.
Well, I thank you all for listening to this episode of the podcast today and I do hope it's been a blessing to you and I encourage you if you've been blessed by it to go out and get the book.
(38:01):
All I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions in your life.
That's all I know about ministry. I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions in your life.
By me, Dr. Lee Ann B. Marino, go on Amazon.com or wherever books are sold and get your copy today.
Also check out my other titles. There are 39 and total definitely something on there for everyone and so go out there today and get your copy and look up that work today.
(38:28):
Also, if you're interested in what you've heard today, check out my patheos column at patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire.
That's patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire. Leadership on fire is a column devoted to all things related to leadership.
So whether you're in it, interested in it, want to learn more about it, etc. That is a podcast for you.
(38:51):
So go and check that out today and you can subscribe to it and so do that. Definitely get on that list and definitely be blessed.
Also follow me on social media @kingdompowernow. That's @kingdompowernow. I'm on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, WordPress.
WordPress, you name it. We're there @kingdompowernow. Let's start having that conversation today. Let's connect so I can know what you like, what you don't like, what you want to hear more of. Follow me on social media today.
(39:23):
Also, if you'd like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, feel free to visit my website at kingdompowernow.org. That's kingdompowernow.org.
Also, if you're looking for entirely affordable seminary with no BS involved that you can take from anywhere in the world where you're at, check out Apostolic Covenant Theological Seminary acts for short at acts176.org.
That's acts176.org. And if you are in the Charlotte North Carolina area and you would like to connect with your found family, we are here for you at sanctuary.
(39:53):
Visit welcomeinthisplace.org. That's welcomeinthisplace.org. And if you have a question that's not answered on the site, feel free to reach out and I will be more than happy to get back to you.
And this is Apostolic Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you in closing that transitions are hard, but even within the hard times, there are great memories to be had and always lessons to be learned.
(40:17):
Until next time, be blessed.
Thank you for joining us on the Kingdom Now podcast today. I pray it is proven to be a blessing in your life.
To learn more about this work, ask a question, submit feedback, advertise with us, be a guest, or donate to support this work.
(40:39):
As our podcast is sponsored by listeners like you visit my website which contains essential information projects and works for other points of contact around the web at www.kingdompowernow.org
Also, if you are in our area and would like to visit sanctuary international Fellowship Tabernacle, visit welcomeinthisplace.org.
(41:04):
Until next time, this is Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you that the Kingdom of God is within you and that means the Kingdom is now.
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The Revolution starts here.
Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge, as we celebrate the Kingdom
(00:57):
of God within you.
I am your host, Dr. Lee Ann Marino, Apostle Author, podcaster, professor, and theologian,
and founder of Spitfire Apostolic Ministries and all the works that go along with it.
I am excited to share this program with you as we explore the ins and outs of counterculture
(01:17):
Christianity present as you live out the Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
Want to learn more?
Visit my website at www.kingdompowernow.org
And now, a program which features a variety of formats here, just for you.
Interviews on a variety of relevant topics, teaching and preaching proclaim everywhere from my
(01:40):
North Carolina studio to sanctuary and beyond, and powerful insights here for now as we
turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, happy whatever time of day it is, wherever
(02:02):
you are, and to our listeners in Serbia, we say, "szdravo."
We hope that whatever time of day is when you are listening, that you are having a good
one, and I welcome you to this edition of the Kingdom Now podcast.
And I am your host, Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino here as the Spitfire serving as the voice of
counterculture Christianity, where we feature the theme of faith with an edge, and if you'd
(02:23):
like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, of which there are going to
be some amazing changes over the next couple of months, be sure to check out my website
and keep up with it at www.kingdompowernow.org.
Typically, once every season, I kind of sit back and I do an author spotlight on myself
with a book I've written.
(02:45):
And I typically do it somewhere mid-season.
Usually it's done a little bit earlier than I'm doing it now, and the reason it wasn't
done earlier is because I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do it on.
And that's pretty much the long and the short of the whole story is that I really wasn't
sure out of all the different books I have which book I wanted to do it on.
(03:07):
And for those who follow, most of my books have been going through kind of an updating
period, if you will, where I have been going over some of the older works and given some
of them a new look, giving some of the interiors a refresh, doing a little bit of a careful
edit on some of them because obviously the longer I've done this, the editing gets a little
(03:29):
bit tighter and so going back and updating some stuff.
And it's a long process, obviously updating pictures, updating bios.
I mean, there are still books mine out there where I'm blonde on the cover when I have
not been blonde for over two years.
So it's been kind of a redo season.
And when I read this particular book of recent, which you can get the updated version of,
(03:55):
I know that this was the one that I needed to sit on here and talk about.
And it is my book, all I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional
for all the transitions in your life.
The cover is the same as it was before except on the back, I've got dark hair now, bio is
updated, some of the content is a little bit more updated and it's a real clean type book.
(04:18):
It's a wonderful transitional book written with a lot of good humor.
It's written in memory, forms, so I'm basically telling stories from when I was in junior high.
And the question then becomes, well, why did I decide that particular era of life?
(04:39):
And that is what we are going to talk about on this particular episode is this book, all
I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions
in your life.
It is by me, Dr. Lee Ann B. Marino, you can get it on Amazon.com and we will put another
shout out about it out there in a little bit.
You can also get it anywhere books are sold.
(05:00):
So to kind of back up a little bit, a lot of people often ask me a lot about how I got here
in my life or how I basically kind of got to a point where I wanted to be in ministry
or knew that ministry was the thing that I really wanted to do.
(05:20):
And I think that that's a fair question.
I think that we are always kind of curious about the journeys that ministers and public figures
go through.
And one thing I have noted is that most of the time when we do talk about stuff like this,
ministers don't often talk a whole lot about their childhoods.
(05:41):
They might tell a few stories here and there.
They might kind of give a general overview.
And when we do tend to give general overviews, one of the things that I think is kind of
notable for me or that I've seen as we've gone through stuff is that the stories we tell
tend to be kind of negative.
And according to what I've read, we remember negative memories before positive ones for a
(06:05):
lot of reasons it has to do with the way that memory is formed.
But at the same time, I'm always very much of the opinion that nothing is all good or all
bad.
That even in the darkest of lives, even in the lives where we have the most difficult times
or the circumstances where we have the most difficult experiences, there is always
something that's not necessarily all bad.
(06:27):
And remembering that and in kind of keeping that concept, I don't question that a lot of
my childhood was bad and that a lot of the things I went through in my childhood was bad.
But not everything was.
And I told these stories and I told these memories for that reason.
(06:49):
First of all, some of them were very, very hard to talk about.
Some of them were very easy to talk about.
Some of them were really light.
And overall, this was what I would classify as a fun book to do.
It was something that brought back a lot of good memories, brought back a lot of those
memories from this era that are very, very difficult, but that a lot of people can relate
(07:10):
to.
And that really gives insight into where I would wind up a few years later.
So before junior high, I really never thought much about writing.
I never really thought much about being an author.
I had a really good teacher.
And my teacher, for junior high English really made sure that we understood what we needed
(07:31):
to understand and got me interested in for that reason.
And I also became editor of school paper in junior high and that role would follow me for
the rest of my life.
It followed me throughout high school for the periods of time I was there.
It followed me through homeschooling, it followed me through college.
And then when I went into ministry, we had a newsletter first and then we had a magazine
(07:54):
for a very long time.
So being an editor really kind of was something that balanced out and introduced something into
my life that was very, very important and brought me to something that was a useful skill.
So what I do in publishing now as an editor very much relates to those skills that I learned
(08:15):
earlier in my life.
It's also a fact that I went to Catholic school.
So from what I have read on the internet about Catholic schooling and about people who do have
these kind of Catholic school experiences that you tend to talk more about your childhood
than other people.
And I would say that that's probably true to a certain extent.
(08:38):
Although obviously I don't do it nearly as much as I might have done at one time because
I'm much further away from that.
You tend to think about it differently than other people do with their school experiences
and some of that has to do with that.
Your classes are smaller.
You don't have as big of a graduating class or a home room or anything like that.
(09:00):
Your classes tend to be small.
And you tend to be more close knit and more in contact with people from that point in time
in your life than somebody who didn't go to Catholic school.
And that has to do with that.
You were bound with these people who had the same experience with you.
And so it's something that kind of takes you through life.
And whereas I will openly admit that I don't have as many contacts from that era as I did
(09:24):
earlier in time, my life is very different now than it was when we were in school.
My life is very different than it was maybe even 10 years ago.
So in saying all of that, these stories needed to be told.
And I do intend to do a sequel at some point in time with it.
I've not done it as yet because I've been working on other projects.
(09:46):
But all I know about ministry I learned in junior high really made me think about what junior
high was like and that it's basically a transitional period because you're really not quite a teenager
and you're really not quite a little kid anymore.
You're kind of in the middle.
And junior high is often marked as a transition between elementary and high school.
(10:08):
And it's often a period of a lot of firsts.
Often a period that's very, very difficult for people who go through it.
There are stories abound where none of us would want to go back to that point in time in our
lives and I would still say that.
But it's also a point in our lives where we do a lot of learning and a lot of growing
(10:28):
about different things.
And as a result, I said, all right, let's make a devotional that's for a transitional period.
And I did it for 40 days because 40 days is a period that a lot of people use for different
things whether it's they say, hey, I'm going to go on a fast or I'm going to observe
(10:54):
lint or advent or something of that nature.
40 days does tend to be a period of time where a lot of people like to learn something from
God, take some time, focus on something.
And so this is 40 days.
They're very short devotions and each one of them as I had said earlier is a story and they
are all true stories.
(11:15):
These are not fiction.
These are very much based on real experiences that I had in junior high.
They are told from the perspective of my memories and from what I remember.
And as we go through them and as I went through them and relived that period, I could really
see the transitional principle.
(11:36):
And why it's very important as we go through our lives that we find ways to connect with
God through our transitions.
So that all being said, I'm going to share a few different days from this particular devotional.
They are numbered but you can do them in any order that you want.
They don't have to be in the order that they're in.
(11:58):
I open up with an introduction where I kind of introduce the book and then we go from
there to start telling these different stories and how important they are from this time period.
So I'm going to start with day one because where else to start but at the beginning.
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And day one is transitions are hard.
And we open up with Philippians 4:6-7, don't worry about anything.
We have to pray about everything.
Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done.
Then you will experience God's peace which exceeds anything we can understand.
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His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.
The transition from 5th to 6th grade was one of the hardest I ever made.
I was even harder than high school to college.
I still remember the first day of 6th grade vividly.
It was raining and was extremely dark out almost like it was nighttime in the middle of the day.
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I went from the top floor of the main school building to the last room of the annex to start
junior high, a whole transition in and of itself because I had trouble finding the room I was late.
Our home room teacher was also our social studies and art instructor and I dreaded her.
She had already taught art when we were in 5th grade and the experience of having her as a teacher was vividly unpleasant.
(13:35):
Well this year was to bring was not only anyone's game, it was intimidating.
We went from being the oldest kids in elementary school to the low class on the pole in junior high.
Our days were more regimented, longer, and the subjects seemed more intense.
There was more homework.
We spent our entire mornings traveling between classrooms and everything seemed harder, including having to carry an entire morning's worth of class materials from room to room, not to mention having to wear our gym clothes under our uniforms on Tuesday, making the entire day feel bulky and uncomfortable.
(14:12):
It didn't help that I was also dealing with body changes, including my hair suddenly starting to curl and weight issues.
It was a year I thought was never going to end.
I honestly did not think I would make it through 6th grade, as far as grades and experience.
6th grade was my worst year spent in junior high.
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I spent the entire year worried I was going to fail and have to repeat the year going through it all over again.
In some ways I realized I barely made it by.
It seemed like I was always in trouble, whether I deserve to be or not.
And I persistently felt like I had nowhere to go and no place that was really mine.
(14:55):
I was experiencing the sting of a transition, of going from one thing to another very fast.
Today we talk a lot about transitions in various forms.
It's your time, it's your season, your changes coming, and we all cheer and shout.
People start crying when that word is for them and then they get excited at the thought of a new beginning.
(15:18):
What we don't often take into consideration is that new beginnings, while having with them the promise of a new start and beginning again,
bring with them hard changes and adjustments that aren't always so shout worthy.
In every beginning we find an ending.
Endings mean certain things in our lives will be no more, and that we don't always know where we are going, what is going to happen, or what might come out of it.
(15:44):
New beginnings mean new responsibilities, challenges, and leaving old things behind that often we are not always as ready to give up as we thought we were.
Sixth grade meant I was no longer in fifth grade.
It meant elementary school was left behind in pursuit of new and different things.
The elementary was never going to be again.
(16:07):
It was exciting but very overwhelming all at the same time.
Transitions are hard.
Be patient with yourself when you are transitioning.
Be patient with others while they transition too.
So that first day devotional pretty much sets the tone for where we're going to go throughout this book.
We're talking about transition periods. About periods where we kind of find ourselves in between things.
(16:34):
We can easily find ourselves in between things with God or in between is any type of circumstance might emerge whether it's jobs or homes or life or anything in general.
We just kind of reach a point where we are not really ready for the next thing but we're not where we're used to be either.
(16:58):
And all of us go through transition periods.
I'm going to say that we probably spend a long period of our spiritual lives in transitions because we're moving between seasons, we're moving between one thing and another thing.
It's going to be really unsettling. They can be really difficult to figure out and navigate.
And that's why I picked Junior High as the time to write about for the sake of this book.
(17:24):
So let's read another day.
And for this we're going to do day 14 use time wisely.
So be careful how you live, don't live like fools but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.
(17:49):
Don't act thoughtlessly but understand what the Lord wants you to do.
Computers weren't new when I was in Junior High but the idea of an affordable home PC was becoming an expanding reality.
Windows 3.1 was all the rage and we had one modern computer in our computer lab along with an array of archaic Apple computers from the 1980s.
(18:16):
Every chance we got we swarmed around the one modern PC in the lab for hours on end.
How were we doing you ask? Schoolwork? Computer programming? Research for assignments? Expanding our minds? Oh no we were playing solitaire.
(18:37):
Computerized solitaire was a big deal in those days. Big enough for us to spend every waking spare moment of free time we had fighting over who was going to play solitaire at that moment.
And for how long? It became such an issue we started forming solitaire teams which kind of defeats the purpose of solitaire being a one person game but anyway.
(19:02):
And organizing times and solitaire events where we would gather in small groups hovering around the machine and whoever it was playing at that moment so we could have our say and input into what they did with the cards and feel involved.
Early morning before classes every recess when we were stuck indoors every chance we got during a study period and were able to sneak in the lab and get a few rounds in.
(19:28):
Even every chance we got after school we made a deliberate point to go in and play solitaire with our teams with no other intent or purpose to it but to improve our solitaire game.
Nowadays I look at my day planner which overflows with appointments, phone calls, meetings, teleconferences, prayer calls, Bible studies, services and internet meetings and I shake my head at the incredible amount of overflowing work that seems to go before me.
(19:57):
Not only do I not have time to waste, I don't have nearly as much free time as I did in those days.
What seemed like endless fun and something we took so seriously now sounds like a huge waste of time. We could have been studying, doing homework, working on group projects, anything else in the world. But we were playing solitaire.
(20:19):
I believe it is very important to use time wisely but that doesn't mean swinging to the opposite end of the extreme from wasting time.
I admit to being at this opposite extreme more now than I would like to admit. Things are so busy, it seems as if time is consumed by many projects with rest is an impossibility.
(20:41):
Using time wisely is a balancing act. It is the perfect balance between activity and rest, making sure that time is not just used well but what is done in those active periods is productive.
Rest time should be refreshing, sometimes fun, sometimes peaceful, but always consistently bringing rest to the body, so one is able to work well again and be productive again.
(21:06):
So spending so much time playing solitaire was probably not the best use of time. But it was fun.
The lesson remains the same, whether it was the best use of time or not. Too much of anything is out of balance and creates a situation where we don't use our time wisely.
Rather than striving for extremes, it's important to accept that there is a time and a place for all facets of life and embrace each time and season for what it is, maintaining balance everywhere we can.
(21:37):
Overworked, take some time to enjoy yourself. Well rested, make sure you get some business accomplished before the end of day today.
So that's a funny story and it's kind of a sweet story in some ways because there was a certain level of innocence to it, where we're sitting there fighting over and modifying solitaire so that we all have time to play it and we all have time to be involved.
(22:00):
And so it kind of has a sweet edge to it. Well at the same time, really teaching us something about a good use of time because you know we were also the first ones there who forgot about assignments or who forgot about homework or who maybe forgot to do something at times and then cried that we didn't have enough time to get stuff done.
Well that probably was the case when we were always running around playing solitaire all the time. We needed definitely to find a balance between too much recreation and not enough recreation, too much rest and not enough rest.
(22:32):
And finding that middle ground goes a long way in our lives, even though maybe today our extreme is to not do enough or maybe our extreme nowadays is to do too much.
Well and if that's the case, then we need to find that balance back so that we are better able to be better servants for the Lord.
So let's go to a third one day 23. I get by with a little help from my friends, which those of who know that song that that is actually a classic Beatles reference.
(23:03):
And the verses Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. Two people are better off than one for they can help each other succeed.
If one person falls, the other can reach out and help, but someone who falls alone is in real trouble. Likewise, two people lying close together can keep each other warm, but how can one be warm alone?
(23:26):
A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back to back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple braided cord is not easily broken.
In 1994, the pilot of a show that would become an international phenomenon aired one September evening.
The show we now know in eternal reruns as the sitcom Friends, as we, who were their live at the time remember, was an incredible statement on the contemporary issues and thoughts of young single professionals had a bad life at that time.
(24:01):
Even though I was in seventh grade at the time, obviously much younger than those on the show, we all loved the show and watched it religiously.
We wanted to grow up and be like them, living across the hall from each other, being friends, sharing lives, hanging out in a coffee house and splitting rent as we took on the world one day at a time in the big city, New York City.
(24:23):
Despite our age difference with the characters on the show, there was something about the relationships they all had with each other that clicked with us.
The support, the camaraderie, the fun, even their disagreements were things we could identify with, even at our young age.
We knew true friendship when we saw it, and friends made us want to be better friends with each other.
(24:46):
Every Friday morning we would come in and discuss the plots and dialogue from the prior night's episodes.
We'd come in on every detail from clothes to hair to what we thought was going to happen. Like the rest of the world, we waited with baited breath to see if Rachel and Ross would finally once and for all get together.
It was as if these people were our own friends, people we cared about and people whose lives were intertwined with our own.
(25:13):
The show friends made us all think about who our friends were and what it meant to have friends, especially those people in our lives who were close enough to us to be in what we now call our inner circle.
I remember our French teacher telling us that even though we might have many acquaintances and school friends, people we hang out with at school, if we were able to count the number of people on one hand who were really there when we needed them, we were lucky.
(25:40):
I don't think we really understood what she was trying to tell us back then, but I certainly know what she means now.
As a leader, lots of people want to be around me all the time. People want me to put them in my conferences to be handled licenses and ordination paperwork, to be approved or mentioned in a certain context, or to be seen with me.
(26:02):
During a service, after a service before a service, people loved to buzz around the leader, loved to get a word and loved to hang out, hoping that being with you will somehow benefit them.
When I've had times and I needed help, or someone to be there, however, only a few people are already willing and able to be there in that moment of need.
(26:23):
Jesus was followed by multitudes, and then he had disciples. There were seventy, then there were twelve, then there were three. And it was that three that was his inner circle. Jesus clearly had his choice of people to be around, but he knew the hearts of those closest to him.
Even though they didn't always do things right, he saw something in them that made him know they were right to be closest to him while on this earth.
(26:49):
Our friends, our inner circles, those who are closest to us, are very important in our lives because they help us to be all we seek to be and hope to be.
They help us get by in bad times and are happy in good times. When selecting your inner circle, remember how important it is to be among true friends.
(27:10):
So there's a real powerful application, particularly in this day and age, for us when it comes to friendships.
I've heard it said that that particular age group, you know, right before junior high and then junior high, you never have friends like that ever again in your life.
And I will say this, I have had some incredible friends in my life, and I've got some incredible people in my life now, but I will say that the relationships are not the same as they were at that age.
(27:36):
And I don't know what it is about that age. I don't know if it's that we're all just in a certain state of mind, if it's that we're going through this growing phase together.
Because as adults, we do tend to be in different places than other people are at.
You know, we're not necessarily always at the same stage of life. Like for example, I have a friend who's got a teenage daughter. I don't have a teenage daughter.
At an earlier point in time, I had dogs. Now I don't. I spent a long period of my life by myself from being widowed.
(28:05):
Being in different phases of life as adults is a little bit more tricky to navigate.
At that particular age, we were pretty much all going through the same things together at the same time. And I think that that had a lot to do with it.
But friendship still matter. And I have read that people are more lonely and people need community more now than they ever did before. And that ironically enough, we're often having it and finding it less than we did in years past.
(28:34):
And so it's really important to get out there and have friends. It's really important to have community. And I know that that's a continuing theme, something that we kind of talk about a lot on this program.
But it really is true and your friends really do matter. Let's read another devotion. Let's do day 25. Broken hearts mend. And we're going to read our opening verses Isaiah 61:1-2.
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The spirit of the sovereign Lord is upon me. For the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to comfort the broken hearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed.
He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord's favor has come and with it the day of God's anger against their enemies.
As quickly as my first boyfriend and I became an official item, we were no longer one after junior high ended.
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Graduation came and went and with him living close to 30 minutes from me, our post-graduation life met new schools and new lives.
It also meant, our very, long term, especially for that age group relationship was over.
We then had to confront going through what a few of our other comrades had already gone through, and that was the breakup.
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Official dating was not common in the junior high I attended, so only a few of us had paired off.
We went through the excitement of the first hanging out dates all the way to the end of the breakups with everyone and to us back then, it might as well have been the end of the world.
There would never be another one like the one we had and we thought that life was over.
(30:15):
In a sense we weren't wrong, we were experiencing firsts that we would never experience again.
Of course we would go on to experience other relationships, but they wouldn't be our first relationship ever again.
Something was started and over within what seemed like a short period of time, and it was heart-wrenching.
(30:36):
All the things we thought in our young minds would last forever, were suddenly over and done with, and we were left feeling broken.
I think the concept of a broken heart is about more than just losing a person.
When we deal with a broken heart, we are dealing with the loss of the concepts, hopes, dreams and ideals we had placed in that person.
(30:59):
We don't just have a relationship with an individual, we also have a relationship with the way in which we have built up a life around that person, concept or ideal.
This makes breakups, broken dreams, and broken hearts that much more difficult, because we don't just mourn the loss of a person.
A part of us also mourns some of our most deeply held hopes and ideals.
(31:23):
The good news is that broken hearts do mend.
Even though we might hurt for a while, we come to a point where life starts to make sense again.
We develop new ideals and goals, we have new aspirations, and we aspire to share these with someone different.
Our lives rebuild, not always in a better way, but in a different way, from where we were heading prior.
(31:47):
In the healing of a broken heart, we find a new start, and in many ways we become a new person.
Life is about building up, falling down, getting up and starting all over again.
There are a few people in this life wind up in a vertical state of being, keeping themselves in one relationship or set of goals for a lifetime.
The changes that broken hearts bring to our lives cause us to look at ourselves in a way that's often hard and hurtful, because they make us look at ourselves.
(32:17):
Every failure and every success should cause us to ask ourselves just what it is we want and need and how we can go about that, without having to feel dependent on a relationship or other person to take us to that place.
Broken hearts do mend, the things that no longer are will most likely never be again. Have we ever considered that maybe they're not supposed to be again?
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Some things are with us, carrying us and holding us close, but only through a season.
When that season is up, it is time for something new. Embrace the new, let your broken heart heal, so new people, new adventures, and new things can come along and bless you in your life.
So learning that, particularly at this time, and I think that that's kind of an ending story to junior high, was that the things that we left behind in the hurts that we experienced did come to a new place where we were able to find new.
(33:16):
And then we started that cycle all over again, and as amazing as it is and as incredible as it is, we do need to remember that when we hurt, we do also have the chance to heal.
And that often the healing comes in the form of being able to move forward in life.
Now for our last little preview at this book, because we don't want to give you too much of a peek.
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We have day 37, which is life is not fair, and our opening verses, Isaiah 2:3-4.
People from many nations will come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of Jacob's God. There he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths.
For the Lord's teaching will go out from Zion, his word will go out from Jerusalem. The Lord will mediate between nations and will settle international disputes.
(34:08):
They will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into perning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor trained for war anymore.
I've already stated a few times that my social studies teacher wasn't the greatest woman in the world.
She wasn't really nice, wasn't that great of a teacher, wasn't that interesting, and was on the eccentric side.
I will never forget the day. She sat in front of the entire class and cleaned her ears with her keys.
(34:34):
Her pursuit in life was not to just teach us social studies, but to use her oddities to try and prepare us for her concept of what life was going to be about.
She was what I would now in hindsight classify as the teacher who felt the need to teach us all a lesson.
In her mind, we had it too easy, even though she knew nothing about our lives or what we experienced as people.
(34:55):
So she was going to be our hard dose of reality.
Her way of being realistic was being hard all the time without mercy.
It didn't seem to matter that she lost things all the time, couldn't keep track of our assignments and was forgetful.
If any of us forgot, lost or ran into an issue, she was there to issue a quick zero or a fast attention.
(35:17):
She would frequently yell and had no sense of humor.
She was begun silence and on making sure we were silent whether or not it was required at that moment.
Her mannerisms made us uncomfortable with her, and awkward when we knew we somehow screwed up, because we knew she would not tolerate nor understand what happened.
One thing she used to tell us any time we got in trouble whether justified or not, and we protested by telling her she was being unfair, was life is unfair.
(35:45):
As much as we hated hearing it back then, she was right, life is not fair.
While she might not have gone about it in exactly the right way, she was aware that life was hard and was going to be far harder for us than we could ever begin to imagine.
It is full of things that happened to us deserved or not that we have to deal with.
In the real world, just like in her classroom, you are hard pressed to find someone who particularly cares about what you were going through or why you made a mistake.
(36:13):
All the world cares about is getting whatever it feels is owed to it, and if you can't deliver it wants to know why.
Given how unfair the world really is, isn't it important that the church is a place that provides refuge from that kind of attitude?
Every day I hear stories from people who have been burned by the church worse than they were burned by the world. It almost feels like an epidemic of uncaring and interested people have washed over into the church to be praised for their good-looking, surface deep deeds.
(36:41):
The church should not be full of people who are hard on feeling and act like they don't care most of the time.
We should be people who love those that come through our doors. Let them know that for every person who never accepted them, we accept them.
And we want to see them thrive and change as God works within them from glory to glory and faith to faith.
It's great to hope we are all prepared for the real world and for life itself, especially given life itself is not kind to us most of the time.
(37:07):
As a minister, I hope that we, the church, prepare people for the greater reality that God loves them and wants us to dwell in His kingdom as His people rather than the worlds.
Maybe if we look more at how unfair the world is, it will inspire us all the more to represent the kingdom well.
And I think that that's a great devotional to kind of leave us with because how we act and how we represent the kingdom of God matters.
(37:36):
And if we are representing it, Shady, if we really act like we don't care, then that's the message that people are going to have.
And life isn't fair. That's a truth. But it doesn't mean that we can't.
Well, I thank you all for listening to this episode of the podcast today and I do hope it's been a blessing to you and I encourage you if you've been blessed by it to go out and get the book.
(38:01):
All I know about ministry, I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions in your life.
That's all I know about ministry. I learned in junior high, a 40 day devotional for all the transitions in your life.
By me, Dr. Lee Ann B. Marino, go on Amazon.com or wherever books are sold and get your copy today.
Also check out my other titles. There are 39 and total definitely something on there for everyone and so go out there today and get your copy and look up that work today.
(38:28):
Also, if you're interested in what you've heard today, check out my patheos column at patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire.
That's patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire. Leadership on fire is a column devoted to all things related to leadership.
So whether you're in it, interested in it, want to learn more about it, etc. That is a podcast for you.
(38:51):
So go and check that out today and you can subscribe to it and so do that. Definitely get on that list and definitely be blessed.
Also follow me on social media @kingdompowernow. That's @kingdompowernow. I'm on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, WordPress.
WordPress, you name it. We're there @kingdompowernow. Let's start having that conversation today. Let's connect so I can know what you like, what you don't like, what you want to hear more of. Follow me on social media today.
(39:23):
Also, if you'd like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, feel free to visit my website at kingdompowernow.org. That's kingdompowernow.org.
Also, if you're looking for entirely affordable seminary with no BS involved that you can take from anywhere in the world where you're at, check out Apostolic Covenant Theological Seminary acts for short at acts176.org.
That's acts176.org. And if you are in the Charlotte North Carolina area and you would like to connect with your found family, we are here for you at sanctuary.
(39:53):
Visit welcomeinthisplace.org. That's welcomeinthisplace.org. And if you have a question that's not answered on the site, feel free to reach out and I will be more than happy to get back to you.
And this is Apostolic Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you in closing that transitions are hard, but even within the hard times, there are great memories to be had and always lessons to be learned.
(40:17):
Until next time, be blessed.
Thank you for joining us on the Kingdom Now podcast today. I pray it is proven to be a blessing in your life.
To learn more about this work, ask a question, submit feedback, advertise with us, be a guest, or donate to support this work.
(40:39):
As our podcast is sponsored by listeners like you visit my website which contains essential information projects and works for other points of contact around the web at www.kingdompowernow.org
Also, if you are in our area and would like to visit sanctuary international Fellowship Tabernacle, visit welcomeinthisplace.org.
(41:04):
Until next time, this is Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you that the Kingdom of God is within you and that means the Kingdom is now.
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