The Best and Worst Advice

you know, Joyce, I have the rare opportunity to get to pick your brain all the time. So as we’re talking, I just love to ask you a lot of questions and so that’s why these candid conversations I think are are so good for people to be able to hear some of those things that are so applicable in all of our lives. So today I was thinking I would love to hear what is the best advice you ever got and the worst advice you ever got, I had, I had to think about it, you know, for a little bit, because you, throughout your life, you get a lot of advice. And so, um, I would say that the worst advice that I ever got was when God called me into ministry, people telling me that it wasn’t God, it wasn’t, it wasn’t God you’re not, first of all, you’re a woman. And secondly, you don’t have the education who do you think you are, you haven’t, you haven’t been to seminary, you haven’t, you know, I graduated from high school and uh people told me I had the wrong personality, my voice wasn’t right, it was just like, there wasn’t weren’t very many people that encouraged me and that that was challenging and we lost a lot of friends, people that just said, if you’re going to do this, we don’t really want anything to do with you because we feel like you’re wrong and I look back now and it’s like I’m marvel that I was able to make that decision to go with God and just let everything else against go against against all odds. It’s like God really does. I think give us a gift of faith to do things, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know that I fully understood what a gift of faith was until I looked back and realized God. I mean, I couldn’t have done this if God wouldn’t have given me a gift of faith to it. I mean, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any connections. You know, there was no reason in the world for me to think that I could do this, except I did. And I guess I’m just I’m kind of bold and gutsy and so I just a little bit stubborn, which is a good thing, a little stubborn. But just just imagine if I would have taken that advice, yeah, we wouldn’t be here today and all these wonderful opportunities I’ve had to help people, I wouldn’t have had. And so you really, you know, you don’t want to be the kind of person that will never listen to anybody. But if you really believe down deep in your heart that God is asking you to do something, you really can’t let people make the decision for you because when it all comes down to it, we have to make sure we’re God pleasers and not people pleasers. Yeah, that’s great. And as long as you’re seeking God all along the way, he’ll redirect and help you anyway, no matter what other people say and open the right doors. So that was the worst advice you ever got. What was the best advice you’ve received? Well, Dave gave me the answer to this when he said, the best advice you ever got was to marry me, I said, I’ll be sure, I’ll be sure. And tell everybody you said that thanks, Dave. I think the best advice did actually come from Dave. But Dave was always, even when he was a kid, he was always good with money, He would save money. He actually hid it in his socks. He had a lot of brothers and sisters and he’d he’d work and save money and first car, nobody paid cash for it. And he just, he he always had the ability to be patient and saved and pay cash for things. And so yeah, when we uh started to build this building, you know, we didn’t have the money to build the building. And of course, normally when you need that kind of money, you get a loan. But Dave said, we’re going to build it cash with cash, we’re not going into debt. And I thought, gosh, so that meant for me that I was gonna need ask all the time people to help us build this building. And uh, and that’s the way you’ve been doing the ministry all along. Yeah, we never had borrowed any money or I always say the only thing we ever made payments on was a copy machine, a used copy machine that we bought from a baptist church. And it was $500. And we asked if we could make $1050 payments. It’s so funny when I think about it now, it took us 10 months at $50 a month to pay off. That used copy machine. We we saved the money for the first van we needed and we got $1600 together and it had bald tires and rusty wheel wells, but that’s what pulled our little bubble trailer and he just never wanted to borrow money. He just said, I want to go cash. And I, you know, he would have when we started building our building, if we would have gotten to the point where we had no money. He said, I’ll just stop building until we we saved some more. And we were, we were so overcrowded where we were at. I mean we that 1700 square feet that we had rented that we thought how in the world we ever filled this up. I mean, we had desks in the hall. We had, we had people everywhere. You could possibly put a human being. And so we really needed the space. Well, at that time our ministry is growing so fast that by the time they’ve got done with the plans for the building, he realized that it was already way too small. So I had to go back to the drawing board and double the size of the building and therefore you need more money and therefore we need more money, you know, twice as much money, but we did it all in cash. And our ministry has never made a payment on anything. We’ve never paid a penny and interest. And boy, what a wow, what a relief and a freedom that is. You know, to not have that hanging over our head that we owe maybe millions of dollars on a building. And so I’m very thankful that they’ve just persisted and insisted that that we do that. I mean, I suppose if I would have just gotten, you know, aggressive enough, I could have talked him into borrowing some money, but I’m so glad that I listened to him and didn’t do that. So what good things did that advice lead to? What did that teach you about the way God works or or the ministry that you don’t have to be in debt. You know, that? And I know that probably sounds almost impossible to some people. And I’m not, I’m not judging anybody else about how they handle their finances or what they do, but I think that people automatically assume that to have anything, they have to be in debt. And I understand that to buy a house. You know, most people are gonna have to make a payment on it are like, people assume they could never pay cash for a car, but you could, if you saved for it long enough just to wait on things and not, not to be, not just to think because you’ve got a bunch of credit cards in your pocket that you have money because you’re gonna get the bill. And I just hate to see people under the pressure of debt and so many people are and Dave and I had been there and it’s just, I think that it’s really God’s best to not be in debt. But people are so impatient and the world makes it so easy now for everybody to to borrow money and they encourage borrowing money and, and they, you know, now it’s down to, you can buy something, not make a payment on it for two years or three years. And that’s such a trap for people because eventually you are going to have to pay for it. It’ll come around and half the time you don’t even know what you did with it by the time you get around to to paying for it. And so that’s not being in debt is very wise if you can do it. And like I said, I’m not judging anybody else how they handle their finances or or what they do. But I think anybody would like to not, not being dead. And you know, there may be people listening thinking, well that must be nice for you, but we don’t have that kind of money. Well we didn’t either. You know, and it wasn’t nice for us if you want to know the truth. It was hard because we had to wait a lot longer. I think it was one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got. Well, I love the way that both of those bad advice, good advice. God takes all of it, and he teaches us so much through it and he does have a plan that just guides and that there’s so much that we can learn from your experience. So thank you. We’re very grateful. Thank you so much.