Conquering Mountains: When God Says "Not Yet"

He is not necessarily saying “not ever”.

I have struggled with what to write to kick off this moment because I desperately wanted it to NOT be about me but instead about HOPE. My prayer for Conquering Mountains (the book) is that it would be an agent of hope and so it is fitting that I testify to what God did to bring it to completion. If you find yourself in a circumstance where God is telling you “not now” then you can find hope in my experience that it doesn’t necessarily mean “not ever.”

I completed (or at least I thought I had) Conquering Mountains in October of 2014. Maggie was home from the hospital and we were putting our lives back together. Conquering Mountains was God’s gift to me as I sat alone in her hospital room and tried to understand what we were experiencing, walk authentically in that with the Lord, and find an avenue of healing for my exhausted heart. While the words are mine, they flowed like water out of my heart to my fingertips and I felt like I was sharing them both for myself and for the next person who might walk this road.

When we got home, I read a publishing guide for Christian authors and reached out to a few publishers. The feedback that I was given was that publishers wanted to invest in someone with a platform or in someone who would continue writing. I knew neither of those were where my heart was for this book nor my future. After all, the book was written in the center of my tragedy and I certainly wasn’t signing up for that again in order to win a book deal. I also had no desire to be the next name in Christian writing. That wasn’t my calling. Encouraging others through this story was my calling.

I looked into self-publishing and learned that it would cost several thousand dollars to move forward. My other reality in those months was that we were drowning in medical bills so the expense of self-publishing was not an option either. As doors seemed to close around me, I felt an extreme peace about shelving it until God told me otherwise, and perhaps forever. After all, it was His work in me, not my effort to put forth a product during my darkest days that brought this about. He gave me this desire and the ability to bring it to pass, He could take it to completion if it was His will.

Three years passed by, we walked through heart surgery and another four agonizing months in the hospital. When the book would cross my mind, I would pray and hear “not now” so I left it in my Dropbox untouched. Then this summer God brought my healing to completion. You see he had redeemed Maggie’s story but restoring my soul would take longer. During that time, I read Rising Strong and Daring Greatly by Brené Brown and they rocked my world. In the midst of Rising Strong, I heard God say very clearly, “Now is the time.” So I pulled Conquering Mountains back out and re-read it from cover to cover and reflected on God’s faithfulness in the midst of that storm. Trent and I had many great conversations about what God did and how He carried us through the unimaginable.

As I looked into self- publishing again, a friend told me about how Amazon had created a self-publishing company that published your book for FREE. They just take their part off of the sell of each book. I was overwhelmed by what I thought was the reason God had told me to wait. He wanted to save me upfront costs (so I thought). While that part was certainly awesome and no doubt a blessing, it wasn’t even the beginning as to why God had told me “not yet” so many years before and “now is the time” this summer.

Here is where it gets crazy. I decided to add one last chapter as a testimony of where we are now, and how our mountain had changed us for the long haul. I was sitting in my favorite Ikea yellow chair, completing that chapter, when Trent informed me that the roof was leaking in the garage as this rain event called Hurricane Harvey was making landfall 200 miles south of us. We knew it was going to be a long night of tropical storm force rains but we had no idea that God was placing our next mountain at our feet.

I completed the book that night, went to bed, and then woke up the next morning to find our city flooded. When I logged into Facebook to see how everyone was, a memory popped up. It was the 3^rd anniversary of the day we brought Maggie home from the hospital after her strokes. I sat in my yellow chair again and wept because I understood God’s perfect timing in having me re-read those words in the days leading up to our next mountain and His loving reminder of His faithfulness 3 years ago to the day. We were now fully prepared to take the first steps up our next mountain.

Here are 3 points of direction and HOPE that I pray you take away from this:

1. It is important that we don’t take God’s plans into our own hands and move
ahead of Him in our journeys.
Perhaps the best biblical example of this is the story of Abraham, Sarai, and Hagar in
Genesis 16. Sarai took God’s promise into her own timing and the consequences of that
action played out for generations. Now taking God’s timing into your control
might not end with the creation of an entire people group but it could very well rob you
of the opportunity to see the fullness of God’s blessing in His perfect plan.

2. We have to let His voice be louder than our desire.
I write a lot about hearing God’s voice and I am confident that throws some of you for
a loop. For me, God’s voice is not an audible sound but is instead a passionate
assurance. He speaks to my heart in ways that no one else can. His voice can give me
extraordinary energy and extraordinary peace. Learning to hear and respond to that
voice was one of the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit for me. I am also a passionate

“getter done” type A personality so I have had to learn to discern what is God’s voice and
what is my personal desire for resolution. Anytime I am uncertain which I am hearing, I
stop and wait.

3. Trust that His timing is perfect.
Oh this part is so hard. If you are in the middle of your “not now” and your heart
longs for a different word, I want to encourage you to return your desire and your
control back to the Lord. If He truly gave you those desires, the process of bringing
them to completion will be so much more beautiful in His perfect timing. I could not
have fathomed three years ago that our experience with Maggie would play out in how
we responded to the greatest natural disaster that would ever hit our city and likely the
greatest ministry opportunity that He would ever place before us. Only God in His
sovereignty knows the reason for your “not now.” You have to trust His timing.

As I write this, I am listening to Spotify and the song, Do It Again by Elevation Worship is playing. The lyrics speak to God’s faithfulness to move mountains and how He never fails us. It says, You never fail me yet. I never will forget.

Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up.

I am going to post the link to the song here because if you are hearing “not yet” from God right now, I know you must be disappointed and confused. Take these moments to remind yourself of His faithfulness.

DO IT AGAIN by Elevation Worship

Conquering Mountains is available on Amazon now. It is Maggie’s story and lessons we learned along the way about how to prepare for and navigate your mountains. If you know someone who might benefit from her story, please pass it along.

You can order it HERE.