Be anxious for nothing, but everything by prayer… let your requests be known to God… And the peace of God which passeth understanding shall guard your heart and mind (Philippians 4:6-7).

It’s a great promise, you just need to do it. But it is easier said than done. Yet it is a command not a suggestion.

It’s not God’s intent for you to be anxious, give your cares to Him and don’t be stressed.

Today we have Jodi Howe with us who is passionate about helping people overcome anxiety.

Jodi was once having been overwhelmed with debilitating anxiety to the point of struggling to eat, breathe, and move. A relationship with God has allowed her to overcome this anxiety and so much more.

If you are a habitual worry wart all the way to struggling with debilitating anxiety listen in and find encouragement along with practical steps to take to start your journey away from anxiety.

In this episode:

Three truths to start fighting anxiety:

1. Your anxiety is not from God
2. God can most definitely heal your anxious heart
3. Western medicine is beneficial for physical aspects of worry

Steps to take today to fight anxiety:

1. Get a full physical evaluation to rule out any physical factors that could be causing or promoting anxiety
2. Evaluate your habits and change those factors that promote anxiety
3. Take care of any hormonal imbalances you may have
4. What is left is spiritual, give it to God (Philippians 4:6-7)

Overcoming anxiety is like getting physically in shape. It takes time putting in good habits that will grow stronger over time.

God will take care of your anxiety, but you have to know Him first. Get to know God and you will find He is strong enough to help you with everything.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

               Honor God by living in integrity and by the authenticity of His Word. When you take God at His word, you show to the world that God can be trusted.

One challenge from today.

               Do a heart check daily to see where you are in your relationship with God. Walk with God and seek to live out the fruit of the Spirit every day. “Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance”  Galatians 5:22-23

More About Jodi Howe

Instagram @jodi.b.howe

Facebook: Jodi Howe

www.jodihowe.com

More About David Schmidt

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Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

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David:

[0:00] Paul said in Philippians 4, 6-7, Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication. With thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which passes all understanding and guards your hearts and your minds. Stress and anxiety and temptation for us is a constant pressure for all of us, and especially in leadership and business. And when we are anxious, we make bad decisions, and we make decisions we regret. it. And I would venture that most of us would be affected by it and understand the negative effects of it. Even though God has told us not to be anxious, we do. We get anxious and we worry about stuff. So today I brought on Jodi Howe to talk about anxiety, the effects of it, and basically how to detect it and how to overcome it. And she's written a book called The Air That I Breathe. It's a daily devotional. I think it's about a three-week devotional, but yeah, it's something worthwhile to check out.

David:

[0:58] So Jody, welcome. And to start off, to spur us on, could you tell us one way you have found how to honor God in your business?

Jodi:

[1:08] First and foremost, hello, David. We have been working to try to get this together and I'm so glad to be here. So thank you so much for that. And the best way I think we can honor God is through authenticity of his word and through authenticity of who we are as his daughters and sons of God himself. And so I try to think about the word integrity, biblical integrity, character integrity the way i operate as a mom and as a daughter and in ministry and through friendships that's a lot of what i try to implement into my daily walk with ministry is am i walking into any situation with authenticity and integrity of god's bible yes i have to use that because some people have a different version of that but my version is I follow Jesus Christ and what that looks like.

David:

[2:04] Yep. To the best of our knowledge and ability. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you for that insight.

David:

[2:12] Please take a few minutes to explain a little bit about yourself and maybe the book you've written and why you are writing about anxiety. What makes you an expert in that?

Jodi:

[2:22] Oh, thank you for calling me an expert because I've actually never thought of that.

David:

[2:27] Experting that you learn how to handle it. I mean, I'm an expert at worrying, but yeah.

Jodi:

[2:32] Well, with that said, I appreciate that. And the good news is if I hadn't have encountered anxiety as a physical and spiritual disability, I know that was the Lord coming into my life to show me who he was and how he had a purpose. And I was a chosen daughter to do ministry. And this was the sort of the stepping stone to getting my, you know, knowledge of him out there. And of course, it's been a growth process. But it was about 15 years. I'll give you a quick snippet because it is in the book.

Jodi:

[3:10] That I all of a sudden got very, very sick to the point where I couldn't eat, sleep, or breathe. And it was debilitating. And it was anxiety. I kept going to doctors and they were doing this head-to-toe workup and they were coming up with nothing.

Jodi:

[3:23] And I, well, eventually it was, you know, medically diagnosed as anxiety. And so it came down to going in a place where I know the Lord was sort of nudging my mom to tell me to go, which was a walk with Jesus. And it's a beautiful story that my mom, who is a believer, but wasn't exactly walking with Jesus at the time, felt the nudge to send me over to a friend's house who was walking with Jesus to sort of explain my situation, be prayed over, offer an opportunity to be in a Bible study. And it just started from there. And it was this incredible experience, journey, and just beautiful evolution of a walk with Christ, which helped me to eliminate the walk with my own flesh. And so as I started to heal from anxiety, praise God, of course, the passion, the passion of wanting to get out there in ministry to tell everyone about this good news, this good news that saved my life, this Jesus who saved my life.

Jodi:

[4:30] I kept looking for something to help me really understand anxiety. I didn't necessarily need to understand it on a clinical level. I had done the research to understand it on a clinical level. I wanted to understand it on a spiritual level. And so as I did my research to try to find what is out there, I couldn't find anything. And so the Lord laid it on my spirit, write the book that's not out there. And why I do a three-week devotional was because I didn't want anything I'm not a big C.S. Lewis fancy writer and I love C.S. Lewis and I love his wisdom but that Shakespearean kind of like intellectual writing doesn't always really work well in me because I'm just kind of like a sort of short you know short attention span person we're.

David:

[5:20] All different we're all different different. Absolutely.

Jodi:

[5:23] Not necessarily with the Bible, because I certainly want to know the word of God, uh, fluently, authentically and truth, truthfully. But I, I needed to know that from the God, the God that laid this on my spirit, our God that laid this on the spirit that I could just write it very tenderly and very honestly. And so that's basically what I wrote. And the reason why I wrote a three week devotional, 22 days, which is kind of a weird number. Typically, if you look at the Bible and you've got, oh, we have seven days, we have 40 days. We have a lot of significant biblical numbers. Well, I wrote that because it took about three weeks for me to really go from debilitated to starting to breathe again. And so that's kind of why I chose that 22 day. It takes about three weeks when you recognize it. You work through medical professionals. You work through spiritual professionals. You work through all professionals. And that's when I started to actually breathe again.

Jodi:

[6:19] And that's just, that's basically why. And again, back to the short term, I don't want it to be too complicated. What I'm, what I'm giving you in this book is I'm giving you day and night. So essentially it's 44 tips about what you need to do to eliminate anxiety. But of course I glorify the Lord in it because I start off with scripture and I end it with a prayer because I believe that that intentional muscle that we're, we're utilizing every single day through prayer, through, you know, understanding God's word and fruit. Implementing that in everything we do, every single day, every day, that of course is its own healing. And so I had to be able to honor the Lord by saying, okay, I'm going to give you a tip. Don't drink an energy drink if you're having anxiety attacks, but also let me bring some word of God into your spirit and let's give it to him at the end of this discussion or the end of this chapter, if that makes any sense.

David:

[7:13] Absolutely.

Jodi:

[7:14] So that's kind of where that came from.

David:

[7:18] Yeah, no, that's good. That's good. So I'm a quality engineer and we have quality management systems, which is a whole world in and of itself. But in there we have PFEMAs, but we talk about a risk priority number. And basically you have different steps in your process. And for each step, we rate them based upon severity, occurrence, and detectability. If something were to go wrong, If you're machining a part and this particular aspect of the part didn't get machined correctly, that's severity. How would it affect the patient occurrence? How often does it happen in detectability? I thought it might be interesting to go down that route with anxiety. So starting with severity is how I know how bad anxiety can be. But what's like what's the range? What's the minimum it can do to you? What's the maximum it can do to you as far as severity goes?

Jodi:

[8:16] Based on my particular journey with this, it was very severe. And so, and ironically, I met people along the way of this journey with anxiety that had it as severe as I had it, where it takes your whole physical body down, that eating food, sleeping.

Jodi:

[8:36] Interacting with people is hard. And for some people, it's actually become to a place of debilitation that it's social where they couldn't leave the house. And I know that maybe you've heard stories, maybe some of your listeners have heard a lot of stories out there where people just are so socially anxious that they can't even leave the homes. And so it became this recognition that I was a severe case of it. And there's so many different opinions right now in the world of mental health but i believe that you have to be able to obviously give this to the lord and through his wisdom he will direct you where you need to go to be able to find that healing and of course his word prayer his presence but i i i find it to be somewhat irresponsible to ever be the person that says prayed away because it is a physical ailment. It isn't listed under the mental health category as general anxiety disorder. That's specifically what I deal with, which means I was anxious all the time. I was prone to panic attacks. And if you've never had a panic attack, I'm so happy. And that thrills me because they are the most horrible attacks that you can experience. Now, obviously they, they come and they go.

Jodi:

[9:55] But anyone out there who knows what a panic attack feels like, it feels like a heart attack. And it feels like everything is shutting down and everything is just over, everything is shutting down in terms of your ability to control your body, but it's escalated where your heart rate and you sweat and you feel like you're going to just die. And it's an awful feeling. And so There's so much involved in the anxiety world that it's very important that regardless if you're very severe or even if you're just generally every day a worry war, number one, it's not of God. Number two, he most definitely can heal it. And number three, there is Western medicine out there to help as well.

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