Johnny Sanders (00:00)
Hello everyone, welcome back to another Faithful Friday. I certainly hope you've had a good, I guess, couple of weeks since I've last been on here. So I ended up not doing a Faithful Friday last Friday because it was my Granny's 90th birthday party. So we went to go celebrate her 90 years of life. It's just an incredible thing to be able to, you know, to have a grandparent in my life still at that age and doing fantastic. So that was wonderful being with family, to celebrate that time. So since I was traveling, I wasn't able to make it on this last week. So I hope you've all had a wonderful last couple of weeks. For today, I have some news to share with you guys. I'll start on the good end of things. Some of you who know me personally or maybe even have heard me talk on the show,
over the last couple of years that we have been in the process of building a new home. We wanted some land. This has really been about, well, if we look at it, probably about four years in the making. So during 2020, the whole Summer of Love” and all the riots and all that stuff, COVID, a pretty crazy time of year or just a season in our lives.

During that time, my wife and I really started talking about, hey, we would eventually like to have some space, have a little bit of space for our kids to run around at the time we only had our daughter, but we just wanted some space, wanted our kids to grow up on, some acreage, just to be a little bit out of just some of the stuff in the world. I know we can't completely insulate our kids, but we've greatly enjoyed our house and kind of a nice little neighborhood and it's been a wonderful spot, but we just wanted to move out into the country at some point and then two years after that in 2022 We finally purchased some land. It's if you guys know I'm located in Duncan, Oklahoma. So it's just a little bit outside of Duncan. It's in Empire,  an area that's nearby. So it was a nice spot that

Johnny Sanders (02:31)
You know, not too terribly far out. We're still a 15-minute drive to get to Walmart and stuff like that. It wasn't like way out in the middle of nowhere but had just shy of 13 acres. And we were ready to have some land to have just the ability to run around on and everything. But as I'm sure you all well know, building a new house is certainly not cheap. So we didn't want to rush into it.

We took a couple of years to kind of save up, know what we wanted, get blueprints made, and all that. In April of this year, we finally broke ground and got the foundation started on our, on our new home. And since then has steadily been raising up. And during that time too, we actually bought a neighboring plot next to us because we would have had neighbors right on top of us. So now all, in total, we have a little bit over 16 acres that are ready to go. We are actually, filming this on a Friday and we are moving in on Sunday. So we are super, super excited about that. The kids absolutely love the land. It's just a beautiful place. We've got a pond built out there. We're so excited to get out there. And during this time, a lot of this has been going on behind the scenes, as I'm sure you could imagine if any of you have

built a home before especially, I've known someone who's built a home. There's been a lot of stuff, it's not been bad, but lots of decisions. Decisions of what kind of flooring to get and what kind of paint color and there's all these types of things, and driving back and forth from the construction site. Been good, but just extra stuff on top of that. As most of you know, I am a licensed counselor, so I run my own practice and I'm very busy doing that as well. And doing Faithfully Engaged. I've been, I've been doing that podcasting for, it's been about a couple of years now, a little bit shy of a couple of years and doing explicitly Faithfully Engaged that transitioned over, in the summer of 2023. So over a year, it's been wonderful.

Johnny Sanders (04:55)
I've enjoyed every second of it. I've learned so much about podcasting, about ways to kind of make this medium more accessible, and learning how to interview guests and everything. Met a ton of great people through doing guests and everything like that. And the only thing about it is that it takes a lot of time. From the get-go of doing this, I always had the desire to make this something that is a backup plan for me if something happened with my counseling practice. And something that I wanted to build up slowly over time. Knew it, I knew I wasn't going to make it to like Joe Rogan status or something like that. That wasn't my goal, but to make it consistent. I've always wanted to make these episodes, starting with every Monday and here the last few months, every Monday and Friday. And I knew that consistency over time would pay off. Eventually viewership will increase and quality will increase as well. And that's been great. However, the last few months behind the scenes have just been a little bit more tiresome. Not that doing the podcasting has been bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's just time. Again, doing my full-time job and getting stuff ready for the new house. And here lately it’s been about a full-time waterer on our new sod. The sod takes a lot of water, that we have around the house. I’m just doing a lot of stuff. And the more that I've looked into it, the more that I've prayed about it, the more I've been realizing something has to give somewhere. I can't go at this pace without something having to give. So here are my options. I could either lessen the amount of clients that I see. And to a degree, that is something that I am doing in my own kind of personal balance of things. But there's some more practicality to being able to see clients. That's my full-time job that brings income. I've got to pay for the mortgage and all that stuff.

Johnny Sanders (07:13)
So I don't want to cut into that too much. And really the more logical answer that would happen is cutting into more of my personal time. And the way things have been, I feel like I've been able to manage that pretty well. But the more that we've gotten closer to moving in, the more I see that 16 acres and see so much stuff that not just needs to be done. I can manage and not

do every little chore out there, but more so stuff that I want to do. Being able to explore the woods with my kids and make trails. We got a new pond that we're going to stock with fish and all this, all this stuff. I didn't want to sacrifice that. We wanted this land so we could be able to run and explore stuff with the kids and have all this space. And I don't want this to be, I don't want a podcast where I start to dread doing it because I feel like I'm just doing it to go through the motions. I feel like that's going to come out in my quality of being a podcaster. I feel like that's going to just come out in my, maybe even my attitude towards my, towards my kids, towards my wife. So I've ended up coming up with some pretty bittersweet news, with us moving in on Sunday, we're super excited, but I've decided that I'm no longer going to be doing Faithfully Engaged in the same format that I'm doing currently. I've currently been doing this pretty rigidly every Friday, every Monday. I've been running it more like a business, to people that there's no way I would have been able to make this podcast go as long as it has without, my friend Ian, who's done all my video editing, and my Virtual Assistant, Katie. Katie has been excellent. She does so many little things behind the scenes that you would never know happen. She's actually told me too that she's really enjoyed that. So those of you who are listening and thinking about making your own podcast or know a podcaster who's struggling, Katie is excellent. letkatiedoit.com. I highly, highly recommend her. She gets the stuff done. So she's been wonderful. Ian has helped me tremendously with all the video editing. He just does such a

Johnny Sanders (09:36)
such a great job with it and has really lessened the amount of time, lessened the amount of stress that I have had up to this point. But I want this to be something that is not.

Johnny Sanders (09:57)
much longer without there being some sacrifice somewhere. And so I've decided to treat this more like a hobby. That means that there'll no longer be any scheduled Faithful Fridays. Today is going to be my last Faithful Friday. I still have two more scheduled Monday episodes. So this coming Monday and the next one, November 4th is the last scheduled weekly episode. And then from there, more than likely, I'm going to take a break through the rest of the year just to kind of be able to unpack on the property. Being able to stretch our legs and figure out some of the things that we want to do and just be able to enjoy the new property with the kiddos and everything. And then after that, I'll probably still do some podcasts. I'm probably going to do a lot more audio-only stuff. It's a little bit easier to manage and a lot more a lot less time that goes into that, but it's gonna be much more when I feel like it again. I'm approaching this much more like a hobby So when you do your hobbies at home? Yeah, you do it when it's that's kind of fun and that's how I want to make this. So this is not a goodbye forever. It's just a goodbye on this scheduled kind of maintenance that I do things currently, and from here, I'm also faithfullyengaged.com. Another person who has been wonderful, Josh over at Freedom Sites, runs both my Faithfully Engaged website and also Truth and Grace Counseling. I'm actually going to be shutting down the website at the end of November. I'm keeping the domain name because I want to reserve the right to make it come back whenever I feel like it. But it's...

The domain name is just going to route back to my Substack. So you might also see me do some more posts on Substack. but again, this is just going to be more sporadic and when I feel like it, I, as much as I, I have put a lot of work, a lot of money, into this, I, I, again, I don't want this to be a burden. that's the last thing that I want. So I'm still going to be able to contribute, but on my time, on my schedule.

Johnny Sanders (12:24)
And yeah, you, unfortunately, you just won't be seeing quite as much of me, but I'm not gonna disappear. So with that being said, for the last Faithful Friday, I still want to bring in a scripture that kind of ties into the theme here, this is in Ecclesiastes I have specifically Ecclesiastes 3:2 but I'm saying I'm gonna read all of this from 3:1 to 8 a lot of you have probably heard of this passage of scripture before. Ecclesiastes is pretty famous for, some people call it a little bit pessimistic. There's certainly some pretty blunt language in Ecclesiastes, but I think there's a ton of wisdom. It's in wisdom literature for a reason. So let's start from the top here. Ecclesiastes 3:1 through 8. “For everything, there is a season and a time for every matter under Heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill. And a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to seek, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away. A time to tear, and a time to sew.

A time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” So in this passage, pretty, pretty easy to see here. There's a time for everything. That's something that has given me some solace here, some peace during this time of transition with Faithfully Engaged. If you've ever done anything completely on your own, setting out to do a kind of a new venture that you weren't sure how it was gonna go. You put a lot of time, effort, and money into it, and then you give it up. It hurts a little bit. This is a decision that I've made that I've not come by lightly. Been discussing this for some time with.

Johnny Sanders (14:50)
made a little bit more difficult is it doesn't just affect me. Even the people that I've hired to help me with the podcast, it affects them as well. So this is something that I've done with somewhat of a heavy heart, but this type of scripture gives me solace that there's a time for everything. There's a time for Faithfully Engaged to be that time of growth and consistency, but this is a time to back away from a little bit. It's a time for me to focus more on my family time

Johnny Sanders (15:34)
into a new house transitioning into having acreage. It's a lot different having 16 acres as opposed to the, I don't know, half-acre lot or something that we have on the front and backyard at our current home. It's an adjustment, but there's a time here for this change. And my encouragement to you all is I'm sure you all listening, you have something that there's a time of change in your life as well. I don't know what that may be. Maybe it's a new job.

Maybe it's going to a new church. Maybe it's having a new attitude about something. But there's a time for it. There's a time to mourn. I've not fully accepted this fate either, that I'm not going to be doing this every single week. And it is a little sad. There's a time for that to mourn. There's a time for you to mourn if you've lost a loved one. Give yourself that time and space to be able to do those things, but realize there's a time for everything. So just because you may be sad now doesn't mean that there's not something good on the other side. So reflect on that, think on that. I have to say it's been wonderful having these more consistent Faithful Fridays and on Monday with the interviews. I've absolutely loved every second of it. Again, I am not, I'm not done forever. You will see sporadically a new episode pop up and I would love to hear from you whenever those stumps happen. Just know that they won't be happening as frequently. So, check in on this coming Monday and then on November 4th for the last two weekly interview shows that are going to be wonderful. And otherwise, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Take care.