COURTNEY: Welcome to the Women & Work podcast, the show that inspires you to confidently step into your God-given calling and view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. I’m Courtney Moore.
MISSIE: And I’m Missie Branch. No matter if you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, on staff at your church or a stay-at-home mom with little ones wrapped around your ankles, your work matters, and God wants to use you right where you are for His kingdom purposes.
COURTNEY: Each month we’ll introduce you to a woman who is living her calling to the glory of God, and we pray these conversations will inspire you in your own calling to honor God, to image Him to the world through your work, and to leverage your unique potential for His glory.
MISSIE: And make sure to head to womenwork.net after the show to download your free copy of this month’s Women & Work Going Deeper Bible study where we take content from today’s episode back in the Bible, where you will study and gain a biblical foundation for the show’s topics.
COURTNEY: Along with that resource, we’re thrilled to offer you the Women & Work Podcast Discussion Questions. Our vision is to help lead you and your friends from work, your neighborhood or church into meaningful conversation that will help you take the next step of faith into your God-given calling. Thanks so much for joining us today.
GUEST INTRODUCTION
You guys, we are so excited for you to get to know our guest today! Today we have on the show, Michele Rigby Assad, and you really won’t believe her story. Michele, welcome to the show.
MICHELE: Thank you so much.
COURTNEY: Alright, guys, let me just tell you a little bit about her before we jump into questions. So first of all, Michelle was trained as a Counter-Terrorism specialist and she served the United States for 10 years as an undercover officer in the National clandestine service of the CIA. So basically she was a secret agent. She also worked in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Places so dangerous, in her book, she’s not even allowed to tell us where she lived.
And it actually gets better- after she retired from service, and really right in the middle of some of the most dangerous times with ISIS, she and her husband Joseph, who is also a former agent, helped lead an incredible Rescue Mission to relocate Iraqi Christians to Slovakia, protecting them from persecution and danger, which is truly, truly amazing.
One last thing, she is an author, she has her book, it’s called Breaking Cover: My Secret Life in the CIA and What It Taught Me About What’s Worth Fighting For. And you guys, when I tell you it is a page-turner, it really is. So we have made it easy for you, we’ve linked to the book in our show notes, so you are definitely gonna want to grab a copy of that. Michelle, Missie and I are just so glad you’re here.
MICHELE: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m very excited to speak with you today.
MISSIE: Yeah, well, we really can’t wait to share with the world, well not with all the world because your book is shared with the world, but we’re excited to share with our little corner of the world what the Lord has done.
But before we get started, a thing that we like to do with all of our guests is to ask them three rapid-fire questions, just quick questions to get to know you. Are you up for that?
MICHELE: Right, I am ready.
MISSIE: Okay, the first one. So I know in your book, you said you’ve never dreamed of being a spy as a kid, but as a child, what did you dream of doing when you grew up?
MICHELE: First of all, I wanted to be a Rockette until my mom told me I’d never be tall enough. Then I decided I would like to be either a pediatrician or a pharmacist, and I worked in a pharmacy in high school and thought that’s definitely what I was gonna do after I graduated High School, but God had some very different things in mind.
COURTNEY: Wow. Yes. Okay, so that was actually probably our second question, what was your first job?
MICHELE: First of all, probably babysitting, but this will make you laugh. During high school, besides being a helping at a pharmacy as a pharmacy assistant, I also had another job, which was quality control for a company that created those little plastic tags that go on clothes if you try to steal them, that the dye breaks. And my big job at that company was looking at thousands and thousands of those tags to make sure they were printed correctly.
COURTNEY: Oh my goodness.
MISSIE: That was excitement on end, I’m sure.
MICHELE: Almost like being in the CIA right there.
COURTNEY: So was this in Florida, because you grew up in Florida?
MICHELE: Yes, in Central Florida.
MISSIE: Wow that is unbelievable. Wow, that’s a great one. I don’t know if I could top that one.
MICHELE: It was very exciting all the time. Every hour of the day.
MISSIE: Wow, okay. Well, then my next question for you is, what kind of work do you dream of doing when you’re 80?
MICHELLE: Exactly what I’m doing right now
MISSIE: Wow, That’s beautiful.
COURTNEY: Very cool. Well, Michelle, I thought it was really interesting how as a child, there were some things maybe that even as a child, the Lord was doing in you to give you sort of a heart for different cultures. And so at one point in the book, you mentioned that you love seeing the images of National Geographic and hearing from missionaries at church, and so I just think it’s really interesting even for some of our listeners to look back at- and just really paying attention to maybe some of the threads that God was leading in each of our own lives of what is fascinating to them as children or teenagers, can you just talk about that some, about really how you began to love other cultures and did you ever think you would be working for the CIA?
MICHELE: Oh my gosh, no, I had no idea that was an actual real job, so I could have never even conjured up in my mind doing something of that nature, but I was so intrigued by National Geographic magazine, by the photographs and the stories, and I would sit on the floor for hours at my neighbor’s house after I watered her plants, she was up North, she was a snowbird, and I would sit in front of her bookcase with just hundreds of National Geographics and I would just… I just couldn’t put them down.
And it’s interesting how God can place an interest in your heart, even though my family didn’t travel and we didn’t have passports, and I had no kind of an international life, but that one little seed that was planted with those magazines, a seed of: Look how big the world is, look at these fabulous, interesting cultures that are so different than your own.
And then I think also, when missionaries would visit church and talk about what it was like living abroad, what it was like operating in a foreign culture, it SO intrigued me. But I will tell you, I never felt called to be like a preacher or missionary, but something deep down inside me told me that I was going to be doing something abroad, but I just had no context to what that could mean.
COURTNEY: That’s so interesting. And even your husband is from another country… Right?
MICHELE: That’s right, yes. He was born in Beirut and grew up after fleeing the war as a child in Egypt.
COURTNEY: I think that’s fascinating. Wow.
MICHELLE: Yes, and so yeah, when he came along when I was 17 years old and I met him, I was like, Holy cow, this is so interesting! This gentleman (at that point it was this young man) is from Egypt. Just to tell you guys how very limited my world was, I’m admitting to you that I didn’t know Egypt was a modern country. I knew the Egypt of the Bible, and I knew Ancient Egypt from National Geographic, but I said “it’s an actual real country? And there are real people called Egyptians?” So yeah, that’s how much I knew about the world.
MISSIE: Wow, it’s surreal to see how far the Lord has brought you in there. Well, one of my questions is, Courtney and I talk a lot about women confidently stepping into their God-given calling, but it’s not easy always to do that. In your book, you talk about one of the biggest lessons in your life being… When you’re seeking God’s will and you’re seeking to align yourself with it (obviously we miss the boat from time to time because we’re human and because we’re fallible) can you talk to us how you overcame some of your struggles and how the various struggles that you had to overcome were necessary in aligning yourself with God’s will?
MICHELE: Yes. So the reason why I love telling my story so much is because none of it was easy and the path was so confusing and difficult and full of rejection, and I think it’s really important for people to acknowledge how sometimes it’s so hard to find out what you’re supposed to be doing and where you’re supposed to be.
So for me, I could not get a job after graduating college. I had the hardest time, all my friends were able to get jobs, and the door kept slamming in my face over and over and over again. When I look back now, obviously at the time it was the most painful thing. And you think, “Oh my gosh, there’s something wrong with me. I’m just not employable. Everyone else is, and I’m not.”
But what I know can see very clearly is that the hand of God was literally closing all these avenues because he didn’t want me to go in the wrong direction, and that he was preserving me for this calling on my life that I didn’t even know existed. So I think for me, it’s hard to tell people to step into your calling, when often times you don’t even know what that is, and so you literally have to trust that God will reveal the next step to you when it’s time and for some of us it is anguishingly slow revelations of what the next step is with actually no idea where you’re ultimately headed.
COURTNEY: I think that is so right on, Michele. It’s so true. And one of the things that I just loved about hearing your story, and it was… I was reading your book, is you talk a lot about… You had applied for the CIA, you thought it went really well, and then they turned you down. And then you went through all this struggle, but you struggled a ton with just believing that you were smart enough. You had a lot of self-doubt, and I just feel like that is so relatable to so many women like you. There’s some type of intimidation we feel and we look at this amazing possibility of what could be and think somehow, I don’t measure up. And you talk a lot about that in your book, I thought it was really encouraging.
MICHELE: Yes, again, I think it’s really important for people to understand where you came from, so if you look at my bio, you’re like:Wow, you are an intelligence officer, you did counter-terrorism work, you served for the CIA”- it all sounds so impressive. And so people will often say, “Oh my gosh, you just during the most confident, fearless person in the world” and the truth is: I’m not… And I wasn’t. Maybe now I am, I’ve become a different person in the process, but I’ve always been very intimidated by new things- this was my constitution as a child, and my mom often had to push me into trying new and different things, and thank God I had a mom who did that.
I had a lot of drive but I lacked confidence. If I hadn’t done it, I didn’t know if I could do it because I had never tried it before. And so I think that so much fear I was able to walk through as God led me step by step, because this is what I thought. Yeah, it really is weird for me when people are like, “You just have to believe in yourself!” But you know, honestly, don’t… You don’t have to believe in yourself, because sometimes he takes you to crazy places and you don’t know.
So if God opens the door for me, he obviously believes that I can do it and knows that I can do it – not believes, He KNOWS I can do it, so I have to trust the God who made me more than I trust my own feelings. And whether I have confidence or not.
COURTNEY: That’s really good Michele. The other thing that’s so interesting about your work is that it’s really, And this is another reason why I love your book, it really takes us behind the scenes of what goes on in the CIA. Because most of us, I mean, I love the Jason Bourne movies, but that is basically my only premise for what goes on in the Central Intelligence Agency, and so… Can you just tell us a little bit about your day-to-day, what your work was and what did your main job really consisted of?
MICHELE: Oh, I love that question so much fun because it’s so fun to peel back the onion and show people what it really is, and I think that if you hear, “Okay, every day, This is what we did..” it doesn’t sound that exciting, but I’ll run through it with you.
So Joseph, my husband and I worked on the front lines, meaning in the field, and our job was to collect intelligence, and what that means is you are identifying and recruiting sources, clandestinely meeting with those sources, gathering the intelligence in covert meetings, packaging it and then sending it to Intelligence consumers.
And it’s quite honestly, that sounds super exciting, and in the every day of it, you’re reading and processing so much information, I’m talking like hundreds, if not thousands of reports: you’re reading, you’re processing, you’re looking at every single day. And of course, the more that you understand about what’s happening in your area, the better cued in you are to either your source is giving you good information or potentially bad information. So either they’re a fabricator or double agent, so it’s a very interesting process because fundamentally, you are not a martial arts expert who shoots people and are involved in explosions. Literally are just face-to-face with another human being, and so really espionage is just so fascinating because really it’s psychology and it’s a basic human psychology.
COURTNEY: Wow. Yeah, it sounds interesting. I mean, was it scary, you’re meeting with these people and you don’t know, you’re learning what they’re about, but what were your emotions during all of that?
MICHELE: Because we were living and working in pretty dangerous places, we always had to assume that the people were meeting with don’t always have our best intentions in mind. So you always have to assume they’re a double agent or a bad guy, unless you can prove otherwise. So there’s always an element of danger and dealing with these guys, and then secondly, even if you’ve got a really good source, you’re holding a covert meeting so that means you’ve gotta take every precaution to make sure that you don’t endanger their lives.
So if someone follows you to meeting with your source and you blow your source, they could be killed. So there’s a lot wrapped up in to making sure that what you do is safe and that you’re protecting yourself, your colleagues, your sources, your information. So it requires a lot of focus and ability to handle really big amounts of stress.
MISSIE: So you have obviously gone through a ton of training to be in the CIA, and I even read where you said one of the main things that you have to do is one of your main skills is I have to keep a clear head. So my question for you is, how do you take some the skills, particularly keeping the clear head- really thinking through you having to protect your cover and all that- how do you take that kind of thing, that kind of skill and transport it into your civilian life? So as a wife, as a Christian, how do you take some of those skills that you gain from the CIA and use them every day?
MICHELE: They’re totally applicable to every area of life, and people ask me, “How do you focus… How do you handle massive amounts of stress” and let’s just take what’s going on right now, Coronavirus, for example; it’s perfect. Timely, very timely.
The idea is that you do everything you can to prepare for your covert operation or prepare for lockdown during Coronavirus. So you anticipate potential issues: I need to make sure I have enough food and toilet paper, whatever that is. So you think through all of the potential ways that you’re gonna need to provide for yourself. In an operation, you’re thinking through what could potentially go wrong, so you can plan accordingly.
Now, when you’re in the middle of your operation, if you’re not focused on what you’re doing at that moment and you allow your mind to go to the 500 things that could go wrong, you will blow it in the moment. When you’re in it, that’s the time to focus on doing every step properly, and so it’s not allowing your brain to go in 100 different directions. It’s where I am in that moment.
I know a lot of people who are absolutely terrified, and they told me this, my good friends, “I’m just absolutely terrified of Coronavirus, and I’m so fearful” and I just think, Well, I’m not at all maybe because I’ve gone through things that are far more… I don’t know. Yeah, scary like rockets and bad guys and all kinds of stuff. But what you do is you prepare, and then once you get prepared to get to that point in time where you’re just sitting now and you’re doing your lockdown, again, if you let your mind wander to the thousand things that could go wrong, it’s just opening yourself for anxiety, and the thing is you just focus, you go, focus on getting through each day and making the best of what you have instead of thinking of all that could go wrong. That’s where things go south really fast.
MISSIE: Wow, that is very helpful. And you’re right, very applicable to normal life. My question for you, how did you switch back and forth? How did you switch your on the field, you on your husband are operatives and then you wind up at home maybe for a Christmas dinner or something like that, how did you work that out?
MICHELE: That was hard. It’s so hard to be in such a stressful job, such a stressful career, and then you have maybe a home leave or you have an R and R- especially when you’re in a war zone, they make sure you have enough of these home leaves to keep your mental health- but when you are suddenly plucked out of a war zone where you have rockets being shot at you multiple times a day, and you’re running to bunkers, and the earth is shaking, and a car bomb goes off every morning and kills 20 to 50 people and it shakes the pod that you’re living in, and suddenly are dropped into peace and tranquility in the United States, it’s really hard, you can’t quite wrap your head around it.
First of all, you’re just so tense ’cause you live tense, it’s kind of your existence, and for a year in a war zone your natural full existence is being tense and readying for the next explosion or rockets to come in. So it’s really hard to come down off of that weird place. Then you are in prep mode and relax, and so it would take us several days to come down, and then we could finally let our hair down, and then a few days before we go back, we start getting stressed out about having to go back again, so it’s a weird process.
MISSIE: Wow.
COURTNEY: And your family really didn’t know a lot of what you were doing, I assume. Right?
MICHELE: So most of my family, not all, but most of my core family knew we were working for CIA and knew where we were, so they knew, generally speaking, what we were doing, but not on a micro level and certainly not in detail. Until they read the book, and they’re like, “Oh wow, that’s what you were doing!”
COURTNEY: Well, that’s crazy.
MICHELE: But for them, it was hard because we were in pretty dangerous places, so there was a lot of praying going on.
COURTNEY: I imagine. So one of the things I notice in the book as well, Michele, is really just how your job… You are a woman, God made you a woman. And you are working with a lot of males, surrounded by a lot of males, and you talk about in your training a little bit how this one particular instructor you had, you kind of felt like he thought you should be in a more secretarial or support role.
So you’re dealing with that pressure because you’re a woman, and then also, my goodness, you tell this heart-pounding story in the book of interrogating a terrorist who, you know when you meet this guy, he’s gonna have certain thoughts because you are a woman, so… I’m just thinking about the women who are gonna hear this, who are not interviewing terrorists, but they work in male-dominated fields. And so can you just share how you processed, how you were treated as a woman, and then how you chose to move past those things to really step into what God had for you.
MICHELE: Yeah. It’s such a wonderful question. I am constantly underestimated, and that’s just been a thing that I’ve dealt with my whole life, and I think it’s because there’s this assumption that if you are a nice, friendly, outgoing person, you can’t be intelligent. And I think it’s so subconscious, people don’t even know they do this. So if you’re friendly, you lack determination and resilience and a go-get-it attitude, and so people have always underestimated me because I’m smiling or because of my personality.
So when I went and I started training, my first mentor – as you mentioned – admitted to me that when he was in the CIA, women were secretaries and he could not envision me in this role whatsoever. He also said, “I don’t know how it is you think you’re going to do counter-terrorism in the Middle East.” because he was a Latin American specialist, and I think this is right on the heels of 9/11, and if you didn’t understand the acts that just occurred, you were absolutely terrified.
So he’s like, “You’re- look at you, you’re smiling, you’re nice, you’re never gonna be able to do this job with these guys” and it was very…It just kind of broke me because I thought, Wow, what am I doing here? I don’t know if I could do this job. He’s telling me I can’t… He had a whole career in the CIA, he obviously knows.
And so I picked up this weight and I put it on my shoulders and then carried it for about the first half of my career, the weight of, “I’m not good enough and I can’t do this job.” And it took me nearly half of my career before I finally figured out in Baghdad, that actually he was completely wrong. That how God had made me with those unique, deep levels of empathy and my ability to get along with pretty much anybody else, even really nasty bad guys who have terrible ideology- my ability to make a connection with them was a God-given skill and gift that I didn’t even know was something that you could use in the workplace.
It was a mystery to me, like when I figured this out, I was like, “Oh my gosh, Lord, you knew what I was capable of before I even realized that these are hard skills that could be used in the workplace. You opened this door for me, I walk through in faith. I didn’t think I should be there for the longest time, and now I see that you kinda knew what you were doing.” Wow.
MISSIE: What you’re basically saying is that God has created us to be a certain way, and God has created us to work and God in His infinite wisdom has created work that is perfect for each of us to do.
MICHELE: Amen sister, that’s it!
COURTNEY: Well I feel like the conversation, a lot of times in our culture in the world, you hear women pushing down doors that they are determined to get into some of these settings, but that doesn’t sound like that was really your heart at all, it was just like,: Here’s this opportunity, God laid before me, I’m gonna trust him, and even in my fear, I’m gonna, by faith walk forward, and I think that is a huge difference than what- Just the heart of a Christian woman versus maybe someone who’s more self-willed or self-promoting. I applaud you for your humility to follow the Lord in that and be a great example for the rest of us.
MICHELE: I think that one thing that we tend to do is we limit God, especially if we’ve grown up in Christianity or became Christians at young ages, we have this very limited notion about where God can use us and how he uses us. I think my book Breaking Cover just explodes that idea.
God needs us everywhere. He needs people of faith in every career and field, and we are all created so differently and each of us has something very unique about us. God took Joseph and I into the CIA of all places, if that’s not proof that he needs us everywhere, then I really don’t know what is. But as human beings, especially as women, we really tend to limit ourselves and kind of keep blinders on our eyes about where it might God be leading us, or we have some unwillingness to go in certain directions because it just feels “Oh, that’s such a worldly thing.” Well, what’s worldly and what’s godly? He needs salt and light everywhere.
MISSIE: Yes, Michele, you had the unique opportunity to be a part of something as powerful as helping persecuted Christians escape from ISIS. All of us don’t have quite as powerful opportunity or experience in service to the Lord, but what does it feel like…How does it feel to know that God was using you in your particular vocational skills to do so much good, and how would you encourage women to see where they are and what they’re doing as the same thing?.
MICHELE: Well, I think you spend so much of our lives struggling to get where we need to go. There is a lot of struggle involved, and there’s nothing unusual about the struggle, the struggle is normal, it’s what most of us goes through, it’s part of the process. But there are moments in life when you finally- Things click and be like- Oh my gosh, that’s what the struggle was for… It was to get me from point A to point B, and that struggle produced this incredibly beautiful thing I could never imagine.
And so you come out of 10 years of the CIA, which was… I can’t even tell you how hard that was, how challenging and how difficult and how many times we said, “Lord, we can’t do this, this is too hard.” And at the end of that, God said, “Hey, you know all these really weird skill sets that you have, I actually have another plan for how to use those”- and to be able to take the ability to carry out operations in dangerous places; the ability to vet people and information; the knowledge of foreign affairs and diplomacy; the knowledge of how to work in big bureaucratic agencies or governments-how God took all those wacky things and said, “Here! Here are some persecuted Christians in Iraq that desperately need help. You guys have all the tools I’ve given you over the last 15 years. There you go.”
And then to watch it unfold, it was almost like being outside yourself, because it so clearly the hand of God moving. And to see it so clearly in front of your face like that was almost speechless- We were speechless. I remember praying as we were in the middle of this massively stressful operation, which took about four and a half months, and I was praying, “Dear God, please open the door for these people, your people, these refugees.” And I remember the hearing Holy Spirit- He stopped me and he said, “These are my people. You don’t have to talk me into doing this. I have you here because this is my plan” So it changed the way I was praying in that moment. Like Oh, okay, He’s like “You don’t need to be begging me for this… It was my idea. I came up with this. You’re here because I want you here.”
And so then to see him do that, and you know how you’ve invested in people’s lives or how you’ve helped God move people to safety, it’s just a really good feeling after all the struggle to see something really amazing come out of that at a humanitarian level.
COURTNEY: I mean, it’s fascinating and amazing, you’re right, Michele, and I think about what you said a minute ago about women, how we kind of downplay how God could use this in the world… This is really a prime example of that. When I hear you talk about all of these things and even doing this huge amount of good for these Christians, I just step back and it’s just like… I just see this big picture of God just loving the world he made and in His wisdom knowing exactly where to put who and for what purpose, and it’s just such a beautiful picture that he was able to take all of those things that he put in you intentionally to do good for these people he loves. So I mean, praise the Lord for that.
MICHELE: You made me think of something, and that was all those years of struggle, being told you can’t do something or you shouldn’t be doing it- my attitude and all that was like: Okay, underestimate me. But I’m gonna do everything I can to prove you wrong. So these people do not know the amount of determination, oh, I am one determined person and I might not know whether I’m capable, but now that you said I can’t… Now I really wanna do it.
And so what I decided- it’s a decision- I made a decision: I am going to be the best at whatever. So I became the… I knew everything about my AOR (my area of operations), I read and read and studied, I learned. I became an expert on the Arab world and Arab culture. I got a Master’s degree in Arab studies, I traveled throughout the Middle East. And so the way that I got over the challenges that people threw in front of me was by being really, really good at what I was doing.
And people can ignore you for quite a long time, but there comes a point in time when finally they cannot ignore the excellence and the expertise anymore. So women ask me all the time, How do I get from point A to point B, I’m like, you find out what your passion is, because God gives you passion for a reason, and then you just become the best you can in that area, whatever that thing is.
MISSIE: That is such good advice.
COURTNEY: It is, you have to really work hard.
MICHELE: Now I can’t focus on other people, you focus on yourself, This is what I can control, I can’t control what anybody else thinks about me, but I can control what I do, how I behave, and how I focus on how I get things done.
COURTNEY: That’s really good. Michele, you talk a little bit about the struggle you guys endured on the field, and I’m just curious about your walk with the Lord. You mentioned your prayer life and all of that… Let’s go back- when did you become a believer in Christ, and how did knowing him make a difference on the field and your work?
MICHELE: So I accepted Christ into my heart as a tiny, little, tiny little girl, and I don’t even remember it, but I just remember growing up really, always loving God and… So my parents took us to church and I was raised in the faith. And for me, I think the most important thing was that I trusted God above all elseq. And my ability to say, “I don’t understand.” And actually, in certain times “this hurts, it’s really hard, but I still trust you”- was the most important aspect of my faith in getting me through this life.
Faith in God, no matter what. Faith is really meaningless if things are going well. Faith is what’s critical when you cannot see why and you have no understanding. And so the grace to walk through those moments, and I don’t mean moments, man, I’m talking years or as a not understanding was really important. And I think there were times when I said, “Lord, this hurts” but I never blamed him. I said, “This is awful, I hate it. This hurts, it’s difficult.” And he’s shaking his head like, “yeah, I know”, and “why do you have us here?” and He is like, “Just trust me.” He knew what he was doing.
I would say that there were periods of time where I wish I would like to claim I had a really, really full prayer life and meditation, but in the war on I did it, I really didn’t…There was no time. There was no time to breathe, we hardly slept, so it was almost like you had to have other people interceding for you. There are some moments when you don’t either have the energy or the ability to focus the way that you’d really like to… And that’s when you need the intercession of other people to kind of get you through those moments, and without a doubt, the prayers of our family members and those times were very critical and in keeping us going,.
COURTNEY: It carried you in those. I can’t imagine the stress you guys were under.
MISSIE: Yes, that’s good. We haven’t even scratched the surface. I highly, highly recommend listeners to purchase this book, the book is incredible.
Michele, as we close, what is one piece of advice you would leave with women who want to honor God through their vocational calling? And I know you said you may not necessarily know it may be a grind to getting there, but what would you say through the process, this would be a thing that is key for you to remember or be focused on?
MICHELE: Be willing to walk through intimidation and fear. God can’t take you to interesting places unless you’re willing to do that.
COURTNEY: It’s good. That’s good, it takes a lot of faith. And courage. Yes.
MICHELE: And then the other thing, so the two things that would be number one, number two, I just, again, like I already mentioned, is to become really, really good at that thing that God put in front of your face in that moment.
COURTNEY: I feel like that really is the heartbeat of women and work, to see women confidently step into their calling. It’s the faith aspect of walking for trusting Him, and it’s also just put your head down and do the work, so… I love that advice, Michele.
MICHELE: Thank you guys, I really enjoyed it- This is so much fun.
COURTNEY: Thank you so much for coming on. This is just gonna be such an encouragement, I feel like, to our listeners and thank you also for just serving our country,
MICHELE: It was a privilege. I’m glad we were able to do that.
COURTNEY: All right, don’t forget you guys, check out her book Breaking Cover– you can find it in the link on our show notes. Thanks, Michelle.
MISSIE: And thanks to you, listeners, for joining us today. As we mentioned at the top of the show, make sure to head to womenwork.net to download your free copy of this month’s, Women & Work Going Deeper Bible study. That’s where we take content from today’s episode, back to the Bible, where you will study and gain and biblical foundation from shows topics.
COURTNEY: And while you’re there, don’t forget to grab your copy of the Women and Work Podcast Discussion Questions. Again, our vision is to help lead you and your friends from work or your neighborhood or church into meaningful conversation that will help you take the next step of faith into your calling.
MISSIE: If you were encouraged by today’s show and don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe in Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
COURTNEY: And while you’re there, take a minute to rate and review our show. And with that, we hope you’ve been inspired to more confidently step into your God-given calling and view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. Thanks.