Welcome to better today with your host Shawn Maguire and with over 25 years of counseling experience, this is the Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond podcast. It inspires you to create both an amazing family and marriage. This is the Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond podcast that helps you to navigate the challenges of modern life. In this Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond podcast, you will be given the same tools, techniques, and stories that Sean and his team have used to help thousands of people to transform their lives. If you’re ready to make real progress, that will change your marriage, your family, and your life. Then get ready because better today starts now. Hey guys, and welcome back to our
or episode of how to overcome anxiety, a life well lived. Let’s go. I’m super excited about this. We have with special special guests in town, in town, and also he, it’s his first time on our first time. This is our first guest. First gas first. Yeah, so this is going to be really fun. Are you saying my kids walking in the background coming in and out? They don’t count as my first guest. What about my wife making coffee, making in the background? Does that count? You know that’s a little Baffi is always in your way. It’s always in. The family is always in. Okay. His guests come home. Then he did come from out of town all the way from Texas. Oh Man. Twice. Yes. Like George Strait. Oh Man. He brought it. He brought, he bring his guitar. He may have brought, he brought his running shoes.
I’m not sure he brought his guitar. True, true guys. Who is this? Who is this mastermind? This guy. If you don’t know him, you’ve probably been living under knee for rock cause you need to know to know. I don’t. Out of the rocks and in the Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond podcast when they introduced it guest, so I thought I like it. That will tie fine. Come on. I’m offended. He didn’t say to me but I mean I’m good. I’m good, we’re good. But he’s a phenomenal man. I’ve met him in Colorado. Awesome Man of God. Very, very articulate wise man of God who has a pastor’s heart. It’s hard to find those Combos, but Brian Casey Waller and you’re going to be, you know, blown away when you get to know this guy even more. He’s a pastor and writer in an IX, aspiring therapists and recovering for, come on now, recovering lawyer was never praise the Lord.
He’s the Lord. Come on, get ready to get ready. With no further ado, Ryan, what’s up bro? Man, this guy, I’m excited because he did you not just pass your LM ft or you’re taking your elam ft. I just took my MFT exam. I’m sure you did. Great brother. Get go. Wow. I’m sure you just nailed it. Thank you. I did a great job. I hope so. You never know though. Standardized tests. Yeah, it’s true. They don’t measure brilliance. They measure something, something. We don’t know what that is. We don’t exactly know what these standardized tests measure, but they do not mirror measure brilliance. That’s for sure. Absolutely not. Well, you know, I’m excited because you know a lot of what I’m talking about very well. You just graduated school. I think it’s your what? Third degree? It’s my third graduate degree. Yes. Isn’t that amazing?
Yeah, that is incredible. Now it’s a problem. Actually. I need to stop the addiction and you know I have little known, in fact, I have two master’s degrees. One is the marriage family therapy and one is in Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond counseling. So you have the problem as a, well, I have a little bit of a problem just a little bit. You seem like you’ve been further down the road with this issue. I think. I think I’m going to be recovery a recovery and graduate student now. Yes. Amen. Amen. I can’t wait to hear what your doctor is going to be like. Neuroscience, physics, Astro. You know, when I got married to my wife, she made me promise. The only thing I promised I wouldn’t go do is go to medical school. So that’s, that’s off. But you never know what the doctor name, man. You just never know.
They have all those home studies now and you can go abroad, take your, take your career to an island somewhere and get a doctorate. That’s right. $15,000 right, right, right. Well, you know, excited to talk to you about how to overcome anxiety a life well lived. Because I went into some stories about how we just struggled with trusting God. Like with our kids. We want them to trust us. We want them to believe that we love them. And if we’ve done a great job in parenting, by the time they’re in their teenage years, they’ll say, I know, I know. I tell my daughter Berklee, I love you. I know my son. He’s infamous for saying this. Hey Buddy, I love you. What can you do to make me love you less? What can you do to make me love you more? And he says, I know dad, nothing. I know, dad, you always say that, man. I love to hear that. Yeah. Because it means that I have taught him well throughout the years that there’s nothing he can do to go out of the boundary of my love. Absolutely. And how amazing would it be if we could grab hold of that for our own personal relationship with God?
Yeah. Well absolutely. Well, I mean, the thing that you and I both know is that the human tendency is to forget. And that’s one of the brilliance that we get in our faith, right, is that if we’re going to actually know something, we need to hear it. Not once, not twice, not three times, but again and again and again. Otherwise we will forget. So even though your kids might now in this moment be saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I know, I know. What you know is that they’re going to need to have heard that so many times for that to really stick and fort to internalize it for them to know that it’s true in the same way that we’ve got to come back to God over and over again through his word to hear it. Otherwise, we will forget. We know that we are true. So
you know, and I think we get so caught up in the mundane and hearing these things from the word of God. Again, God is love. God loves you. Jesus died for you again and again. We hear that if you’ve been raised in the church or you’ve been to any church, you’ll hear those messages again and again, and the devil can deceive us by this rote memory of, well, I’ve heard that so many times, and we can just be like, I know. I know. I know. And we don’t let it affect our lives. We don’t pursue, we don’t allow the veracity of transforming power of God to penetrate our hearts because we think we already know until adversity hits us. And then our actions betray our beliefs. Our actions betray our beliefs. Yeah. It’s so true. We all want to have this amazing relationship with God that sustains us through difficult times, but the reality is our society has so many people on anxiety medications.
You know, cannabis just got legalized in Oklahoma and it is blowing up. I get several calls on this. I don’t even, I don’t prescribe, they don’t do any of that, but I get calls from people wanting cannabis and it’s created this, this buzz, because we have so much pressure in America. Yeah. And so I wanted to go over some, some traits, two traits that are evidence of somebody who is going forward with God. If somebody who is living at a faith and not allowing the culture to define where they put their beliefs, where they put their identity. And there’s two traits that if we see these at play, we know that God is at work. It’s fake. It’s fearless and free. Now, but by say fearless, I don’t mean you never are afraid because that’s just not real, right? I mean even for a guy like you who’s strong and May, if you saw this guy, you think he probably was in there, you know the professional bodybuilder world, Haman Rashawn can, you know, be workout buddies.
Probably [inaudible] got a book 40 you go that or that or cage fighting. One of the tee, one of the two when cage fighting. You could buy absolutely cage buddy. Yeah. Cause he’s fast and agile writes skinny Joe Buck. He could jump off the fence. So I’m just thinking about what does it mean to be fearless. It doesn’t mean that you don’t experience fear. It means that you refuse to allow fear to determine your outcomes of your decisions. If you refuse to let fear determine how you’re going to love your kids, how you’re going to go for or not go for a job opportunity, how you’re going to not allow when your kids disrespect you or your kids at teenage years, or there’s something hard in your marriage instead of checking out, you check in.
Well, it’s so good, but fear does keep so many people down, right? Because we’re always worried about what it’s going to look like. If we take that step forward and we step out of that place of security or whatever it might be, whatever we think the foundation is that’s keeping us safe, that constant fear, right, of whatever that is going away and we don’t know what we’re going to do, which I think goes back with the anxiety we’re looking for the cannabis or whatever it is to cure that temporary anxiety cause we don’t have a deep and everlasting sense of security, right? So operate from this place of fear and we’re looking for a quick fix and there’s a scripture. First John Four eight says, there is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.
Your fears is not made perfect and luck. Now some of you may say, well, I’m a Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond so I should never have anxiety. I should never have fear. But the reality is the scriptures there because God knows that we’re gonna face these situations or we are overwhelmed by fear where Tim tempted, if you’re attempted to live in anxiety and we have a choice, how will we handle these situations? We’ll be pressed through, you know, I say there’s an eight second rule, five to eight seconds where you have five to eight seconds to be courageous. If you want to go talk to somebody you’re afraid to talk to, if you need to make a phone call, that’s difficult. If you need to have a conversation that’s challenging, well you have five, eight seconds and once you jump into that space, you’re there. There is no safety net, right? Except for your trust in God because you’ve, you’ve had enough faith to say, you know, I don’t know the outcome, but I know my faithfulness of my God
and that’s you moving forward. Yeah, but you got to do that, don’t you think a at least a few times to see that work itself out, right? To move forward out in faith and then to know and see that God is true to his word, right? He will make us perfect in love. He will show up in those moments.
Faith is a muscle. It really is. The more you exercise it, just like we talked about a euro big time rider, you’re exercising your faith muscle through writing is a constant refining of your skill and developing of your skill. Now, even with Rashawn, I, the first book you put out was not even comparable to the way that he writes today. He’s more coherent. It’s because he’s been coached just because he’s been diligent because he’s persevered daily. He puts his phone and everything up and he does his writing because that’s where he wants to be. He wants to be known as an author. Did we want to be known as somebody who loves God. If somebody who’s fearless, then we have to also take those steps daily and it might, it might just be getting up reading your Bible and the in the fearless movies. Well, I don’t have a great memory.
It doesn’t matter what I read your movers, I’m trusting you God, that whatever I read, it’s going to go somewhere. Just like I don’t remember what I had for breakfast on Tuesday, the 25th of June last year. I have no idea. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect the way that I felt didn’t effect my capacity to either go all day or to be, you know, not sustained by energy cause it was a bad choice of foods. And the same thing is true what we feed our minds with. And we think about this with fear in my own life. You know, it’s a little known fact that I started the Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond counseling practice, New Vision counseling and consulting. My mom paid half my first years or half of my rent for the first six months in my practice. Wow. And she could see me struggling. She goes, no son, I will pay half of your rent for the first six months.
Now here’s the funny bio. I had shared an office with some other counselor and she paid the other half. So basically I paid a fourth of my rent for this first six months. And so it’s okay if somebody, God uses a real person to help bridge that gap. And even when I was counseling for many years, I thought, you know, God’s blessed us, me, we’re making our bills supernaturally. Cause I didn’t have any connections. I didn’t have somebody that was mentoring me. I really didn’t like this whole walk of counseling has been a faith journey that I kept. One of the thoughts that devil were constantly harassed me with was, you know, you’re doing it while you’re doing great today, but you know, probably next week somebody that’s really hates Christians, it’s going to find you on the weather going to something and they’re going to find some mistake you made through paperwork or something that you said that was too Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond.
Or maybe you were too nice to somebody because you know, in our field, if you treat people like they matter, you can get in trouble and get in trouble. If you are more than a jellyfish, there can be an indictment against you because you have character. And so I really was just have been harassed by this. And over time I said, you know, Lord, I’m going to trust you for this week. You sustain this, this far, and if something happens, then it happens under your jurisdiction, but I’m not going to live with this burden. And I literally every day had to just fight that. Okay, this is, this is a great week we made it, but next week the end is coming.
Mm. Yeah. You ever had a situation like that? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, uh, I know our listeners have ever not had a situation like that. Rashawn and I were talking yesterday, I don’t think I’ve literally ever gone into any of the different careers that I’ve had, knowing how to do it when I started. And what I’ve discovered each and every time is that God will equip where he calls. And so if you follow and you take that leap of faith and you move into the fear and be okay with the fear and you trust that God is going to go along with you, he doesn’t send us out and then say well just do it on your own. Right. He calls us to go and then he goes alongside and he equips us as he calls and I’ve never been left out to dry right in and just been on my own and had to figure it out on my own.
And the thing that you said, which is interesting too, is that your, your, your, your mom came alongside and paid part of the rent and then another counselor was paying part of the, we’ve got to pay attention, keep our eyes and our ears open to who? God sins alongside. Cause this is often how he works right through other and to recognize that your mom’s showing up in that moment and the other counselor, that’s God working in your life and sending provision. Right. And we’ve got to stay sensitive and open to that and hear that again, like we were talking earlier, this has got to reminding us he’s a good father and he loves us and he’s going to take care of us. It’s so easy to forget
and you know, I think that we can have a set template of how we expect God to operate and if he doesn’t operate within those parameters, we tend to forget how much he loves us because we’re looking for very specific boxed in ways that God has to move. Right. And so I think, you know, even even for me, if you can, you think of anybody you know that lives a fearless life. I know your listeners out there, think of somebody you know that lives a life of faith that just goes for it. You know, I have a friend named Steve Milky and he used to be a pastor at a local church here, and that’s a big time church. You would call it a mega church, maybe not from Texas because Texas is, I think you have to be like a million to to be a mega church.
To Oklahoma. You guys are doing pretty good up here. We knew, all right, well he worked at this church and I said, Oh, you took a vow of poverty. He said, why would you say that? I said, well, you have four kids and you make under $40,000 a year. To me that’s a vow of poverty, maybe not for you. And He, and he just took that to heart and we had conversations forthcoming. We became best friends while him and his family were here. Yeah. And this guy was always going for some multi-age marketing this or some career in here, but he’s kept the same job with this church for awhile. Then he left and went to here, but he constantly went for it and he was constantly saying, Shauna, just feel God’s calling me to more. God’s calling me to more. And he, he got had so many harebrained ideas, but one time he had this idea of this coffee business and because I loved my wife said, honey, you never take risks like this.
You are so calculated and measured. I’m like, yeah, that’s called wisdom. Yeah. But she gave me such a hard time. I invested money in this company and we got our first, don’t laugh. It was bubblegum coffee or something crazy. Oh Man. Yeah. And I thought it was ridiculous but it was so outside of my radar and he was so passionate about it. The first box I get to open the box and it’s like the like the box it comes and you’ll like the Amazon box and ships in and it’s a, it’s a cloud of coffee grounds. It just comes out man. And I pick up the coffee thing, there’s coffee grounds on it, the stickers halfway fallen off the bag. I’m like, oh is there a way to get our money back? Cause if this is your first impression, it’s typically not going to get much better than this.
Well translate that to today. This guy has been so blessed of God. He found his niche in a career and he jet sets all around the world. Yeah. He like, not that you have to define everything by by financial means, but he started out with almost a, a a poverty level job because he had so many kids. I remember some of our other friends would bring them deer when we go out to dinners and things or you know, I’d always want to pay or help them out because there’s such a great godly family and he’s kept his relationship with God. But now he’s been given access to billion, B I, l, l, I, O n, billionaires and the people that are moving and shaking right in books that you and I have both read and he’s there as a Christ follower next to some of these high, highly influential people. Because he had a fearless lifestyle. Doesn’t mean he didn’t fail. That doesn’t mean he didn’t, he didn’t have all this stuff he shouldn’t have bought. Try to go for this and go for that. And it meant that he never quit trusting God.
Yeah. And that’s so important. I mean, look at the biblical narrative as our good friend grant skeleton likes to say like, find me a character in the Bible whom God called to an easy life. So just because you move right in in that faith and tried to live that fearlessness, life doesn’t mean that it’s going to come easy like your friend, like over and over again. He had to, he had to fall on his face like how many times to get to where God was calling him to go. You’ve gotta be willing to stick with it. It doesn’t mean just because we move in faith and God’s going to snap his fingers and whatever it is that we think right needs to happen is going to happen. It’s going to happen in his time and in his ways. And often times God takes time because we’re not quite ready for what it is we think we want or are ready for and God’s going to form us and he’s going to shape us. And many times that’s going to come through what we would call failure. But when we see it or try to see it from the perspective that God has seen it, he’s forming us, right? It’s not, and that’s not always failure. The world may see it as failure, but it’s formation and he’s preparing us to be ready for failure. Verse Four,
Mason, you know, fail. Your failure is not final. It’s not, failure is not fun unless you say it is. That’s right. If you don’t get back up, if you don’t get back up, you know, people ask, how do you perceive your, how do you do? Look, it’s not because I’ve been extraordinarily skilled in some area or I’m more brilliant than the average Joe or anything exceptional about my lineage. It’s because I get up one more time. All right, fall down. That’s right. That really is the defining factor of, of I would say my own life is, and that’s part of how I can counsel people so horizontally and see them eye to eye and I’m not above or below, it’s because I really see all of us around this journey and by the grace of God, I’ve been able to sustain it this long. But if God removes His grace, he removes my opportunities.
He removes my capacity, right. Lose my gifts, and when we live that way, then when we have these failures, they’re not all us. Oh, we can see them through the Lens of God. It wasn’t this, but you’ve got something better. That’s right. It wasn’t this, but you’ve got something better. So that fearless is a profound move. One of the traits that marks a person that has going for it, and it’s, remember it’s not the perfection of not having fear. It’s the ability to get up and press through when you do. That’s right. Trusting God if he bigger. That’s right. Well guys, we’re going to do part four. I’m going to talk about the other part of this because it’s been a big time. It’s been free with my brother Ryan from Texas. I think he’s my brother from another mother, but with the same father.
Oh, that’s right. That’s right. It’s been so good. Just met this,
the gentleman yesterday at Pandora, or some of you say, Panera bread and this guy is fantastic. You know, how can they hear about you? What’s the way that people can get in touch with?
Yeah, you can find me online. Uh, my handle is always Ryan, Casey Waller, my full name. So I’m on Facebook a lot. Also Instagram, so you can find me there. I’ve got a new website that’s about to be released at [inaudible] dot com so you can find me there for a blogging if you want to find out more about what I do as a ghostwriter, you can and then soon as a counselor. So I’m excited. Yeah.
And guys just say a prayer. We’re trying to get him to move to Oklahoma or even Oklahoma City. Edmond, I’m not real picky. It could be Oklahoma City or Edmond or Sean and I are trying our best. Reframer beseeching my knees are calloused last 24 hours since I’ve met him.
Well, I found out there’s a train from Dallas to Oklahoma City. So I mean easy. We’ll see. I don’t know. I don’t know.
And we, and, and this has been a great introduction from me because I’ve had in my heart that desire write books and I’ve had my brother Sean and some other people encouraging me to write books, but I feel like when we talked yesterday, we have this synergy and so guys, you never know how God is going to move because I’ve started several books that I’ve just never followed them through. They’ve all had about two to 300 chapters because I had trouble narrowing it down. Yeah, they were all different chapters about different things. Hey, this is about anxiety. This is about pairing, this is about marriage. And so I think this has been a beautiful relationship and guys, I would encourage you to think about who in your life is God calling you to step towards who in your life has got a calling you to step away from?
Because one is toward the comfort and even if the comfort is pain of the past, the other one is faith. Pressing through your fears to obtain, obtain the future and identity that God has for you in the present, moving forward into the future. That’s okay. So guys, if this was great, please share it. It means the world to us when you review us and rate us on iTunes, think about who needs to hear this message. And maybe you need to hear it again. So then rewind and listen to it again. But if you say, Sean Ryan, I need your skillset. I need something more than just a Christian and premarital counseling in Edmond podcast. You can go to nutrition counseling.live. It’s nuvision counseling dot l I v E. Dot. Live. Don’t live what up. And you can find out more about us as counselors. We have a counseling practice with so many people that are skilled and we help you through biblical principles, married to cutting edge counseling techniques, helping you scalper what better looks like for you than equipping you with the tools to create it. Well, God bless. Ryan, do you have any parting words? The last
man, it’s just a joy to be here and like you never know what the outcome is going to be. So be open to what God has for you to be open to the relationships because you just don’t know. Amen. God bless guys. Talk to you again, really sad.