Katie Lanning

David W Ebel: Welcome to the God Says Yes podcast. You are welcome here. Welcome to another episode of God Says Yes. This is the episode of of Love. We're here to encourage people to meet you where you are, to care with you where you're at, and to help you become all that God has planned for you. Doesn't matter where you've come from. Many of the people who come in view who come from places of pain. They've either been betrayed or belittled. ⁓ they've been somehow they've been shortchanged by life. ⁓ some people have been lied to, some people have b loan money and never got it back. They've gone to church and someone at the church acted out and splashed ugly on on an innocent situation. And church hurt happens unfortunately because the church really is the emergency room of the body of Christ. And if you ever go to an emergency room, not everybody in that emergency room is happy to be there. Some of them are kipping kicking and screaming. They don't really want to be there. And some people before they find out who Jesus is, showing up at church means they're unhappy now where they're at. And they tend to splash off some of that unhappy on on our innocent hearts. On behalf of the body of Christ, we apologize for that. That's not what God's plan is. God created you to love. He created from the inside out, custom made. And he's always loved you, always will love you. And you can't do anything so bad that he won't stop. He'll never stop loving you. He'll always be there for you. So forget about the people and how you got there. Let's pick up today and where we're going for for today and what will happen tomorrow. is we trust God once again. For some people it's coming back again, but we want you to come because God wants you closer to Him than ever before. Well, today is a is a special day. I have Katie Lennings and she's an amazing young woman and she's got a an amazing story, a story that ⁓ a lot of people are going to identify with because they they too have struggled. And ⁓ we we want Katie to be able to To take that time that necessary and help us to understand who she is, where she's coming from. And we'll we'll start with welcome, Katie. Hi, thank you for having me. And Katie, tell us a little about yourself, please. Yes, so I am joining you from North Carolina. I've lived here since 2022, now with my husband and our Bernese mountain dog. I work full-time as an occupational therapist. Wonderful. Now ⁓ I'm I'm I'm grateful that we see the this your generation still falling in love with Jesus. Because you know it's not as easy ⁓ is in in our more complicated world to even hear the message as it used to be. So I'm glad you're there and you're shining his love. So what we're going to do is we're going to invite you to start us off with who you were before Jesus. Yes. So Looking back on my life, I was exposed to Christianity from a young age. So I grew up, I guess, what you could call a cultural Christian. That is, Christianity was what we identified with and what I called myself to be, but I was cultural in the fact that it was just something I was doing because the people around me were doing that. It wasn't something that I had genuinely in my heart. So I was exposed to going to church pretty often, almost every Sunday, even Wednesday nights. I did Dawana, I did all the Bible studies, but I just had so many other insecurities in my life that were really preventing me from receiving and believing in the gospel message. My background is that my dad is in the military, so growing up we moved very frequently and he would also be gone for long periods of time. And so my mom was an amazing mother and she still is. And she really did her best to take care of my sister and I, but it was challenging. It was hard for her to take on that role by herself. And so I struggled in not feeling like I needed I had the emotional connection that I needed to really thrive. And so that was something I really internalized. And there were many other things as far as moving and having to constantly make and lose friends. Just not really knowing who I was and where I stood. And so I really carried a lot of that insecurity from a young age on. Yes. By the time I was a teenager, then I decided that I didn't want to be a part of the church anymore. So I had decided to turn away from that and stop going. And at that point, that's also when I was ⁓ vulnerable as a young girl and I didn't ex get into my first relationship. And that relationship very quickly turned from something that I thought was fun and romantic and exciting to something that was incredibly dangerous. The relationship was abusive ⁓ physically, mentally, sexually, and that was very traumatic. And it went on for about a year and a half of my life. And so it ended when I was about close to 18 years old, just shy of 18. And instead of taking the time that I really needed to process what had occurred during the span of that relationship and what I had been through, I really just moved on to the next part of my life, which was going to college. And so at that point I really just wanted to get as far away from where I went to high school as possible. So I went to school a few states away. I went to school in Virginia. And I went to a really big school. I went to Virginia Tech and I just really kind of threw myself into that culture. I joined a sorority as soon as I could rush. I became very ⁓ interested and active in party culture and alcohol and drugs were readily available to me. And they were very normalized. It was something that was, you know, frequent and common in the people that I was hanging out with. And it did serve a purpose in that. It was fun at the time and I it helped lessen my social anxiety. It helped me feel connected. It helped me kind of forget and mask about the struggles that I had with men particularly. And even in those moments though, I was just continuing to just add to dysfunction, shame, and really using those external ways of coping with it, which was just making the problem worse. But It was interesting because even though that was one part of my life, I also was very strong academically. I had always been really good at school, really able to be a a high performer and be very functional in that regard. And school had always come easily to me, which almost made me justify the actions I was doing on the side much more because I figured it doesn't matter if I'm doing these things, if my grades are still good or if I'm still gonna be able to go to grad school after this. And so that's what I did. And I think that I also just wanted to have the excuse of having more time in grad school to continue keeping up with these behaviors and not really being fully invested in the real world. But there was also a part of me that that was searching for my own healing and just couldn't find it. And I think even in my decision to become an occupational therapist, Part of that was selfish in the sense that I really wanted to learn how to fix myself. And so I went to school to become an occupational therapist. And once I got to grad school, the academic demand at an entry level doctorate program was significantly harder. And so I couldn't keep up the habits that I was doing in my personal life because they were beginning to interfere with my performance. And also at this time, COVID happened when I was early into my graduate program. And so that had shut down the opportunity to continue to engage in these behaviors from a practical level. Also, my roommate at the time ended up moving out because all of our classes were primarily virtual. So that was the first time that I lived alone in my life. And it's like I just was really forced to see the true state of my mental health and just how severe these habits and outcomes. out of control they had gotten and the implications that that was having on my well-being. So I was in a really dark place mentally. I was just really struggling with a lot of the unprocessed trauma, a lot of the deep-rooted insecurities, the hurt, the dysfunction. And so instead of running to Jesus, which I now know is the answer and could have helped me then, At that point, I really just had to, I kind of forced myself to go on the other end of the spectrum, the other end of the pendulum, where I was like, well, this has gone out of hand and I'm gonna fix it myself. You know, I'm in school to be a therapist. I know a lot about psychology, a lot about self-help. So I'm just going to pull myself out of this rut and I'm gonna do it in my own strength. So I got very into Having such a drastic level of control over my life, where I was very obsessive about my diet, obsessive about going to the gym, obsessive about reading every self-help book that I could find, I even started kind of dabbling in some spiritual based practices because I really just wanted God to be whoever I wanted him to be. At that time I wasn't I was no longer identifying as a Christian, but I was spiritual, so I was open minded. So I was Trying yoga classes, trying manifestation practices, trying energy healing, you know, all different kinds of modalities, but they all had the common thread of I just want to fix myself. And I would have moments where I felt like I was getting somewhere, and then I would have a moment where I would ⁓ backslide massively. Or like if I went out to my front with my friends and thought that I had the ability to just have one drink. And really control it. And then I would take it way too far. It would just be this reminder like, maybe I'm not as self-improved as I am kind of forcing myself to be and proclaiming to be. And I was also really feeling the weight of the hypocrisy that was going on in my life of how am I going to be an occupational therapist and helping people live healthy lives and working with people at some of their most vulnerable times when my whole life behind the scenes is a da is a disaster. So I felt like I was just a hypocrite. And so I had all these internal conflicts going on and I was, you know, continuing to experience so much of the shame of my past, so much of the shame around my drinking behaviors and things that I would do. And just really, really having a hard time with that, which was taking such a huge impact on my mental well being as well. So that's when I really started to struggle with depression, with suicidal ideation. I never had a plan to commit suicide, but I just remember like there were so many times when I would drive and I just remember thinking like I just don't care if this car would crash right now. Like maybe that wouldn't be so bad. And that was a really scary place to be. So that's a lot of what my life looked like before Christ. Okay. And ⁓ that's that's that's a lot. You you really did some hunting. And that's the the one of the difficult parts about hunting is when we're looking for the right thing, we stumble over the wrong thing over and over and over again. And we don't know when we first start. It seems like it might have promise until you really peel the onion and find out it doesn't get sweeter as you get inside. It's it stinks even more. So ⁓ when you get to that place where you really are desperate, that's when you really, really need Jesus. You want to tell us about your your when you met Jesus, what happened? Yes. So after finishing up grad school, I decided to move to Charlotte, North Carolina. I was really just looking for a fresh start. I had no reason aside from finishing school to stay in Virginia because my graduate program was over and my parents were getting ready to move overseas with my dad still being in the military. So I figured It doesn't matter where I live, no matter where I live, they're gonna be far away from me. And I was used to the transient lifestyle growing up in the military of moving very regularly. So I decided to move to Charlotte. I was looking for a fresh start. I was still very much embedded in the self-development, quote unquote, or self-improvement phase of my life. And so I moved to Charlotte and I got into my next ⁓ serious adult relationship. I had been in three relationships before I met my husband, the relationship I was in in high school. I also dated someone for a long period throughout college. And then this was my next serious relationship as an adult. And so that happened very quickly when I moved to Charlotte. And at first, again, very similar story progression to my adolescent relationship, where at first I had met this amazing tr you know, charismatic guy. Who was so outgoing and so charming and so perfect to be around. And then it very quickly went sour. But what was different about this relationship in particular was that he actually brought me to church with him. And so at this point, again, I'm still very open-minded. So I had no problem going to church. I had even dabbled in listening to a couple sermons that were really more like TED Talks or really more motivational, but I liked them. So I just, you know, God is whoever I wanted to be, God can be like this, God can be like that. It just all comes together and it's all about me, essentially, is what my belief was at the time. And so as I was going to church with this boyfriend, it was very much a different experience than what it was like for me growing up because the churches I had gone to growing up were much more traditional in nature. This church was massive in size, it had very contemporary. worship music, that I I didn't even know worship music could sound like that or was allowed to sound like that. It was many people my age, people who looked like me, who dressed like me, acted like me. And I just remember like my interest was peaking, but I wasn't completely sold. I mean, I thought that the messages were nice and there was something that definitely made me want to keep coming back, but it wasn't significant enough for me to actually start. changing my life or to truly have received salvation. I was like, this is just a nice addition to some good moral advice, but I'm not really going to surrender my life. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not going to stop engaging in premarital sex with my boyfriend and living with him. So I was just kind of in that place where I was doing both because I was just open to whichever. And as that relationship continued to get progressively worse and worse and eventually ended. I think that I was so devastated, not necessarily by the relationship ending, but I was just so disappointed in myself because I had promised myself when I was 18 years old that I would never let another man treat me that way, that I would never put myself in a position to be as unsafe as I was. And I had done it. So I had like really let myself down. And so at that point, I think that I had just realized it just became so clear to me like I'm not as far along in this improvement process as I proclaim to be. And that's just continued continued to be made clear. But I had there was something about going to church that had stirred up a desire within me. And something about the people that I had met who truly were following after Christ and loving him with their whole hearts and living their life so differently that had piqued my interest. But I didn't want to go back to the same church that I was going to with my boyfriend because it was not a cordial breakup. It was very messy. It was very painful. And I didn't want to be connected to him or to our friend group anymore. So I decided to find a new church. And unbeknownst to me, Charlotte being the Bible belt, I mean, there's churches everywhere. So just found another one, and this one was very similar in that it was a bigger, more modern church. And I was like, okay, you know, I can connect with some of the people here and, you know, keep giving this a try. But this church was different in that the pastor just preached the gospel with such fullness and with such authority. And I just felt conviction like I had never felt it before. And I think I knew like if God comes back today, or if I were to die tomorrow, I don't think I'm spending the rest of my life with him. Like I just knew that I wasn't close to him and that I didn't have a relationship with him and that I didn't know him and that I had so much to learn. So I felt just this weight. And I remember at this time I really didn't have much going for me, honestly, outside of work. And I had a few friends that I was still establishing my relationship with them because I hadn't been in sh in Charlotte for very long at this point, maybe just over a year. And I had lost a lot of my first connections because I had met my boyfriend at that time so early in moving to Charlotte and kind of had built my life around him and his friends. And so once that ended, I had to start over. So I had a lot of time to spend By myself, and I really spent a lot of that time pursuing the Lord. So for the first time, I bought my own Bible and I started reading it. And I started going back and watching some previous sermons that my pastor had done and recorded. So I watched them and then I found this this ministry on YouTube, ⁓ De Calf De Lafe or Decalfe testimonies. So I started watching people's testimonies. and hearing about their radical encounters with the Lord and their experiences and how he had changed their life. And I just remember there was one specific moment where I was in my room and I had been reading my Bible and I had gone through Exodus and gone to the part where the Israelites had been wandering for so long. realizing that they wandered for forty years when they could have made the journey in like such a s such a short period of time, you know, 10 days, I think it is. And I remember praying and saying, God, like I've been wandering for the last over 10 years of my life. And I know that you could get me to the promised land so much faster. And I'm ready to go. Like I'm so done trying to do things my own. I'm so tired of wandering. I'm so tired of searching. I'm surrendered to you. And for the first and only time I heard his voice and it said, I've been waiting for you to pray that. And it was just like I really felt an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. And I just really understood the gospel message for the first time. And so since that point, in October of 2023, that's when I got baptized, and then I got completely sober. He just removed that desire off of me. I never picked up a drink since then. I've never struggled with the temptation to do it or any other drug. He just completely delivered it. My church also offered a three-month bond, four-month bond ⁓ healing from trauma course. And that course was getting ready to start in January of 2024 and go through March. And I knew that I had so much in my testimony that I needed to process and understand. So I just started writing. And I started writing and trying to recount back as early as I could in my childhood and remember as many details as I could in my experience in high school specifically, which was very hard because I had blocked out a lot of it. And so I really just spent four between October and when the course was gonna start in January, writing out my testimony and spending so much time in prayer with the Lord. recounting it and recalling it to him. And at first I felt so silly doing that because I was like, God obviously knows everything that I've been through. But it was healing for me to take that narrative to him and to have him continue to bring truth and reveal light into those dark places of my life so that I could process them safely in his presence. And so as I started writing, it was just such a cathartic and healing process for me. And then I really knew what I was going to be working on when it came time to be a part of the Healing from Trauma course. And so I was able to, I mean, he put a wonderful counselor in my life who really walked with me through that and met with me and poured into me and kind of really helped me process some of the difficult parts of my story. And then by the end of it, I had the strength to share it with the group, which was Something that I never thought would be possible for me. These were things I had never told anybody, never talked about, had so much shame around. And he just granted so much safety and there was so much healing that came through prayer and through getting connected with a strong community of other believers and women who were also sober or were also survivors of sexual abuse and just being able to lean on them has just been. instrumental in my journey of drawing nearer to him and figuring out who he wanted me to be in Christ. And then he also, of course, brought my amazing husband into the picture during this time period as well. And he has been a physical and tangible representative of what it means to be loved in the way that Jesus loves us because he has a completely different testimony in that he was raised in the church and made the decision For the Lord in a young age and never really had a big falling away or a big struggle, and was just able to really be kept and protected by the Lord, which is amazing. Amen. Just been able to really be faithful in that. And I thought for sure, ⁓ you know, he's not gonna understand my story or where I'm coming from, and he's gonna judge me and reject me, and you know, just see me as. This huge mess up and this huge failure. And it was the complete opposite. He has never once made me feel ⁓ belittled or rejected in any way. And he has just really been a tangible representation of the unconditional love that's offered to us through Jesus. And you know, our marriage isn't perfect, but it's it's glorifying to the Lord, and that's all we've ever wanted it to be. And he helps me serve God with him better together than I could do on my own. So and just to have, you know, that be something that's been redeemed in my story, to be able to have, you know, safety in intimate relationships is something that I never thought would ever be possible for me because of what I had been through. And the Lord has just completely restored and redeemed that. Thank you, Katie. That's that's amazing. Now The last question is, now what? How have you applied that to helping other people? Yes, so like I said, when I was preparing to go through the trauma course, something that really helped me was writing out my testimony. And I had always actually really enjoyed writing when I was younger, but I kind of forgot that that was something that I liked to do. And so when I got sober, I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands because all of the time that I used to spend going to the bars or recovering from hangovers, I now was like, what am I gonna do with this time? And so as I started writing, it was like the Lord just really revived that passion and that gifting that He had always given me that I had just really neglected. And so, like I said, writing my testimony was so cathartic, so healing. And even when I finished it, I just continued to keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. And I had so many thoughts about my own personal experience related in my health journey as also as well as also the struggles that I was seeing as an occupational therapist working in the healthcare setting and the things that I would notice about people coming in and just my understanding of health had become so different and so fully formed because. I think I just really had the realization that even though I was physically healthy on the outside, I was spiritually dead. And that even when I was working in the hospital, I remember I would work with elderly people who had had a stroke or who were recovering from an orthopedic procedure or a TBI. And you could always tell who the Christians were. Always. Even when I was an unbeliever, because they were always agreeable and ready to come to therapy. They always had their Bibles. They always had wonderful community support come in and bring them food and make sure they had blankets from home and love on them. And you could just always tell who the Christians were. And I was like, remember thinking when I was working in the hospital, how is it that these people are healthier than me? As, you know, a woman in my twenties with no obvious outward physical health. impairments even though I had all of the mental health impairments from addiction and depression. You couldn't see those. And so my understanding of health had just really started to open up. So I was writing all of this understanding of that to process it. And then I was also learning and growing so much by listening to sermons and actually reading through the Bible for the first time and really understanding spiritual principles and understanding God's design for us and his implications for how he now wants us to live life as believers once we surrender to him and how we get to do that out of love for him. And so I had really started being able to combine my personal testimony with my experience as an occupational therapist to kind of help carve out this framework and this guide of like, what is this transformation process actually look like? What does health and wellness actually look like with Christ at the center of it? And how can I make that accessible to people, specifically women, who are looking to experience that radical healing transformation that only comes from Him. And so that writing process has since evolved into a book, has since evolved into a program, has since evolved into a podcast. And so that's what I'm doing now. Okay. So ⁓ let let me enter ask you the questions and you're yeah and we'll we're gonna ask slowly so that people can write it down. Yes. What what is the name of your book? Transformed for Life and it's coming up coming out in August of this year to be available on Amazon. I'm in my final stages of proofreading, editing, and then it will be available. Okay. And then you so you've got that. You obviously you'd have to have a website. Yes. So that's transformed for life dot net. Transformed for life dot net. Okay. And this program that you you have put up put out, is that available nationally or how d ⁓ can people get involved with that? Yes. So that program is called the two five one seven discipleship groups. Two five one two five one seven discipleship groups. ⁓ that's in reference to 2nd Corinthians 5.17, which says that in Christ we're all made new creations. And so on my website, I do open up these groups about on a quarterly basis or so. We meet for approximately 10 weeks. And participants, if you're interested in signing up, you'll be able to download for free your workbook. And then that gets me your email address so I can send you the link to be a part of our Zoom meetings. And ⁓ like I said, we meet consecutively for 10 weeks and we go through the nine biblical steps to transformation. And it's heavily rooted in prayer and discussion questions and practical activities to get these steps ⁓ integrated into your life. So there's always information about when those groups are open or when you can expect them to open on my website and on my social media. Excellent. Excellent. Now, whenever we do these interviews. I always invite our guests to give us a golden nugget. Something that people can take away from the podcast and mull over, pray over, ment meditate over, whatever way you process, ⁓ so that over the next week or two they can they can they can consider what you just sh you'll be sharing ⁓ to get to draw them closer to the Lord. You have something for us? Yes. So something that really grounded me early on in my walk with Christ and continues to now is that God loves us as we are, but He loves us too much to leave us there. And so I think that as believers, there's just so much that the Lord wants to do in and through us. And when we really are able to surrender that over to Him completely, the amount of just abundance that can come from it, and I don't mean prosperity gospel. I'm not saying that you're gonna be healthy, wealthy, blessed in the way that America or the world can think, but just the the richness that comes from having an intimate and deep relationship with Christ and allowing him to use your testimony to bring goodness to you and glory to him. There's nothing more satisfying than it. And I think that we underestimate severely what God can do. with our small acts of faith and our small acts of obedience. So I would just encourage everyone listening to really spend some time in prayer and in reflection with the Lord of what he wants to do with your story and how he wants to use you with where you are and how he's going to bring that in the process of where he's taking you. That's amazing. And thank you so much. So what we're going to do is we're going to ⁓ draw toward toward our close. And so we're I'm going to pray. And then after we pray, ⁓ I'm going to have a closing ⁓ challenge for everybody. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are we're just grateful for this opportunity. We're thankful that you took Katie and you didn't leave her where you started her. You you brought her to a place of decision. Her decision was so s serious that she then decided to make a public proclamation of of that by being baptized and then to live for you. To give her life to you so that she could be changed from the inside out. As a result, then she wanted to tell people. And she's lived her life in open book so people can see the love that Jesus shines through her. I pray, Lord, that that those that are viewing that they'll get something out of this. That if they're struggling, that they'll they'll they'll try again. If they've if they've been hurt, they'll they'll they'll forget about the people and tr reach out to God through Jesus Christ. And let him heal and move them forward from there where they are. Lord, make a difference in the lives of our viewer, viewing, and listening audience. Do something wonderful in their lives. Because that's why we're here. Because God created us to love and he wants to continue to love through his son Jesus. And we ask that you do these mighty things to change lives in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Now, folks, the challenge is seek after God, he will be found. You want to know him better? Jesus said he was the way. Follow his way, and he'll make it clear to you how your life will be changed forever. And that is the greatest challenge and joy of all. You won't even know yourself unless you really begin to live. This has been the God Says Yes podcast with David Ebel. Connect with David, email him at Godsays Yes Podcast at Gmail. You can get his latest book, When the Doctors Say No, God Says Yes, at Amazon.com.