Margaret Agard is an award-winning author, former executive in the high tech industry, and mother of eight children, step-mother to seven (they were never all at home at the same time!). She speaks on giving her life to God by giving her daily to-do list to God.

She is currently writing her third memoir titled Love: Becoming One with Parker, from her house in a forest in North Carolina.

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Welcome to 12 Minute Convos with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, his creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Margaret.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you and parts of the world that you're in today.

I am in North Carolina in the United States on the East Coast.

Were you always from North Carolina or did you eventually get there?

My husband and I eventually got there.

I actually was born in Washington DC and most of my family is there.

Lived in New Jersey, lived in Alaska, lived in Florida.

Now we're here.

What was responsible for you moving so often?

Some of it was God and I'm old, so it wasn't that often.

We spent about three years in Alaska and eight years or 10 years in West Virginia and eight years in Florida because my husband likes to garden and he thought he could garden year-round there, which he could, by the way.

How long have you been married?

30 years.

When you say you're old, what does old look like to you in your mind?

I'm 76, but the experience I'm going to share happened when I was in my mid-40s.

Tell me a story.

Is it how you met Jesus?

I met Jesus when I was very young.

I was in a church one day and I had this feeling that I was in the presence of a being.

I like to say up till then I had learned a lot about Jesus, but that day I met him and since then I have just been seeking that same kind of connection and learned to do that, learned how to hear when he is speaking in my mind, as he does for many people, that still small voice that we learn about in the Old Testament.

But where my life changed with Jesus is when I was in my mid-40s, I was a single mother and I had eight children and seven of them were still at home.

I was the sole financial support for our family and five of them were boys and teenage boys, they eat a lot.

My sons grew from usually in their 12th year, they would go from five feet tall to being six feet tall and they ate a lot.

I was running this business.

I actually decided to go back and finish my last year of college.

I was working full-time going to college and I was the mother to eight children.

Any one of those things could have been a full-time job.

I would get up every day and I was an executive in the high-tech industry.

I would make my list of things I was supposed to do.

I would prioritize them the way you're supposed to.

I was constantly stressed.

I hardly ever went to bed until nearly midnight.

I would wake up in the middle of the night just, what have I forgotten?

What have I forgotten?

Then I mainly got about four hours sleep a night is what I got during this time.

All of a sudden things kept going wrong.

I would go to a client with a proposal and the client would say, oh, we've changed the whole thing.

We don't need that proposal.

I need you to do a different proposal.

Or I would go to class with a paper and this was before online school.

You had to hand it in and it turned out the teacher wasn't there.

The teacher was sick.

He'd say, you're not going to need to hand the paper until Friday.

I think, well, I wouldn't have worked on it if I had known.

I would have done some other important thing.

This is when I started thinking if I just knew the future, I would know when to do things and when not to do things.

Then I thought, well, I don't know the future, but I know who does know the future.

I started going to God with this prayer, which was basically I would take my list at night of what I was going to do the next day and say, what do I really have to do?

What do I have to do tomorrow?

That was my to-do list.

The book I wrote is called that.

I gave my to-do list to God.

He rearranged my life.

He would actually go through my list and I would think, okay, I don't need to do this.

I don't need to do this, but I do need to do something else.

I would write that down.

Then I did only what he said to do.

Some of us, type A's, if we think we have an extra minute, we'll start trying to put other things in there.

It was like, no, I want you only to do what's on the list.

That's how it began.

After just a few days, I could sit down every night at eight o'clock, relaxed.

I got a full eight hours sleep every night.

I didn't wake up in a panic because I felt like, oh, God's got this.

He's making sure I do what needs to be done.

Do you still do that?

I do.

I'm going to share one more thing that changed.

Of course, I took it back because I felt bad that I was handing all this to God.

I couldn't handle my own life.

He was micromanaging me or something.

I got in just as bad a situation again.

I started again, turning it back over to God.

People say, I want to turn my life over to God.

I'm like, well, you know what?

Your life is in your to-do list, so why don't you turn your to-do list over to God?

That's how you turn your life over to God.

But this time, my question changed.

Instead of saying, what do I have to do tomorrow to just get through?

I started asking, what do you want me to do tomorrow?

And then I started thinking, is this biblical?

Is this how I should act?

And so I'm reading the scriptures, and in John 8, 29, Christ says, I am never alone.

I have the Father with me always, because I do always what pleases him.

I thought, well, how did he know?

How he knew is he often went off by himself in prayer, often in the evening.

And then he'd be back and he'd say, okay, today we're going to Capernaum.

I think he was doing that.

And then in the Lord's Prayer, it says, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I think, well, how do the angels in heaven act?

Do you think they're saying, I'm so busy, I'm so busy, I'm so busy, can you help me here, God?

Can you help me there, God?

Or do you think they're saying, we're committed to what you're committed to.

What do you want me to do today, God?

And that's when my life really changed, when I started praying that prayer.

At 74 years old, you're pursuing your degree.

That must be frowned upon by some, and then I would imagine encouraging for some others.

I think it is.

My children are older now.

They're not retired yet, but they're moving up.

And my grandkids are like, well, my grandma's going to college.

I guess I can too.

You know, when you get this degree, and you're open to practice, do you have a plan for what you're going to do?

Or I mean, are you still using the formula?

Okay, here it is.

What next?

Of course, I have plans.

But often, I felt like Heavenly Father's like, Margaret, I didn't say that you had to get licensed.

I didn't say you had to go to work full time.

I said, get the training, which is what I'm doing.

But I see myself working with older adults who are dealing with childhood trauma.

A lot of people are affected by that their whole lives, and they often end up on drugs.

They often end up in and out of jail because they had never dealt with this past trauma they had.

And I just through church and friends with a number of them, I have a couple of jail accounts where I stay connected to people.

And I think that if I could bring any kind of healing, it would be to that population.

What keeps you going?

What keeps you inspired?

My relationship with God is very uplifting when you think about it, right?

Like you have time with him in the morning, and then in the evening.

So in the mornings, I think of it's my time to ask him questions.

I'm reading my scriptures and writing in my journal, I'm asking him questions.

And in the evening, besides looking at my to-do list, what do you want me to do?

Usually I'm thinking tomorrow.

And it's good.

If you're a type A person like I am, it's good to do it at night.

Because if you spend all night thinking about what you're going to do in the morning, and then you go to God and he changes your plans, it can be a little irritating.

I mean, it's not, I'm telling you, it's simple, but it's not easy.

It's simple.

Just ask him to look over your to-do list with you and then change it to what will serve him best, as well as you.

Absolutely inspirational.

Love it.

Love it.

Love it.

Love it.

Five years from today listening to this conversation, this is the message in the bottle here.

What is a message you'd leave for future you?

Keep turning your life over to God by turning your to-do list over to God.

In closing, is there anything else you'd like to share?

I think that for everyone, we are fortunate in ourselves.

This new life we are given has brought us so much joy.

Margaret, a pleasure, a treasure.

Thank you for being on What Is Inspired by 12 Micron Groups.