Are you being obedient and stepping into the path God is calling you to? God is always calling us and guiding us to follow the path that He wants for us. He loves us and every intention He has for us is to heal our pain to give us a fulfilling life.

show notes:

In this episode, Heidi speaks with Katie Hendrick, a certified Christian life coach, a Jesus-loving coffee-drinking joy-filled wife, and mom of three. She also hosts the Stepping into A Joy-Filled Life podcast. She explains how she went from a man’s business world to finding her calling in pouring into the lives of women.

Listen in to learn how to allow God to heal you from your past spiritual brokenness and find fulfillment in Him.

“It is not about religion; it is only about your relationship with Jesus Christ.” -Katie Hendrick

Top Takeaways:

• How to listen to the voice of God and step into the path He’s calling you to.
• How to find your healing and a better way in the Lord through coaching.
• Having a realization that God loves you and only has good intentions for your future.

What you will learn:

• [3:40] Get to know Katie Hendrick!
• [6:15] How God called her to start pouring into the lives of women.
• [9:35] Katie narrates her story- from emotional and spiritual brokenness to finding the love of God.
• [16:25] Religion vs. relationship- why your relationship with God is what’s important, not your religion.

Relevant Links:

• Website: https://katiehedrick.com/ 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mskatiehedrick/ 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MsKatieHedrick 
• Podcast: Stepping into a Joy Filled Life™

NEW SHOP ITEM!

I want to make sure you know about my new and amazing Bible Verse Memory Cards for girls! I have 4 girls and the one thing I want them to know is how much God loves them. I designed them with my 7 yr old in mind and I would love nothing more than for them to bless your daughter too. That they become written on your daughter’s heart as she grows. That she develops a deep knowing of who God is, how He works, what matters to Him, and that she knows who she is in Him from the start. That as you train and teach her about God and His character, that she loves being in His presence and becomes confident of her trust in Him. You can shop today and the first 20 people will save an additional 20% off + FREE shipping when you order 2 or more sets.

You can shop at bit.ly/godsgirlscards and use code FRIENDS20 to get 20% off. But hurry as I have limited number of coupon codes!

Detailed Transcript:

Speaker 1:

All right, yay. we are back with my sister friend Katie Hendrick from Sterling, Iowa. She is a certified Christian life coach, iced coffee drinker, lover of the color purple wife and mom of three. As you can imagine, she spends her days chasing her kids and her dreams and helping other moms to do the same. We met through our podcasting community, and we have the same podcast coach. And I knew I just had to have her on the show to share her story, her tangible tips for living a joy filled life and all the things. She has a beautiful heart for the Lord, moves powerfully in helping renew mindsets, and I can’t wait for you to hear from her firsthand. So welcome, Katie.

Speaker 2:

Hey, sweet Sister, I am thrilled to be here. I so appreciate you and your message and your podcast and how you serve. And just how you love the Lord and how you pour that out into other women.

Speaker 1:

Thank you! I’m so glad we were able to connect. So if you wouldn’t mind, just telling us a little bit about you, what lights you up, what your hobbies are and how you like to spend your free time.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. So I describe myself as a Jesus loving coffee drinking, Dream chasing joy filled wife and Mama of three. I’ve got one little girl and two little boys. So I’ve been doing the mom thing for almost 13 years now, which is just so wild. Time goes so fast. But I love to spend time with my family. We love to travel, we love to explore nature together. Visiting the national parks is one of our favorite things to do together as a family. We love to go hiking and just see all the beautiful things that the Lord has created. And I also absolutely love spending time digging into God’s word and just spending time with him just visualizing myself curled up in his lap, as his daughter as his little girl and spending that time with him and growing in His Word and His goodness

Speaker 1:

That’s awesome. And we can all just feel your energy popping through this microphone, this audio, this phone, however people are listening. So fun. And so you mentioned how fast time flies, I cannot agree more. My husband and I were just talking about this the other day. It’s amazing how fast 10 years can go by. It’s crazy.

Speaker 2:

It really is right? The Bible says that we’re here but for a vapor of time that life has been a vapor. And I’m finding that it’s really true. Everyone always told me as you get older time goes faster. And you know, my younger self was like, “Yeah, yeah, right.” And then here we are now I’m in my mid 30s. And it’s like, “oh, wow, there was some validity in what they were saying with that.”

Speaker 1:

For sure. Alright, so tell us a little bit more about what you do for a living. You’re a certified Christian life coach. And so tell us a little bit more about that and your journey to getting to where you are today.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I am a podcast host, I host the Stepping Into A Joy Filled Life podcast, which is super fun. I’m also a certified Christian life coach, like you mentioned. And it’s really been just an interesting, exciting and wild journey. So my husband and I, we’ve been married for almost 15 years. And we run several different businesses totally unrelated to what I’m doing now. And I say that I kind of lived in a man’s world because all of our other businesses were related to the Commercial Roof coating industry. So very much a man’s world.

My husband invented a piece of roofing equipment, it’s called the Roof Rabbit. It’s pretty awesome. We patented it and we sell that. So we’ve got all that going on. And through all these years, you know, I have been doing personal growth and all these things. I’ve been presented some opportunities to do some public speaking because in one of our businesses, we actually had a team of people. So I was doing some you know, personal growth, leadership training and public speaking and that type of thing. And God just opened doors and oftentimes after I would speak, I would have the women that were in the room, the wives of these men, these contractors would come up to me and just pour out their hearts to me. And they would tell me how what I shared spoke to their heart.

And so I began to see like, “Hey, you know, the Lord was like, Katie, I’ve got a place for you to pour into the lives of women.” And so more doors of opportunity just opened over the years. And then in 2018, I really felt the Lord whispering to my heart, you know, it’s time to use your voice to really focus on serving women exclusively. And it was so funny because I’m the most non millennial millennial that you’ll ever meet, right? And God speaks to my heart, start a blog. And I’m like, “a blog and a website?” Girl, I didn’t even have an Instagram account in 2018. Like, that’s how little I knew about all the tech side of things. And so I remember coming home to my husband and telling him, you know, I said, “Chad, I think that God is asking me to start a blog,” and I was hoping that he would say, “you know, that’s crazy, you know?” And all he said, he looked me in the eye and he said, “Katie, so do it.” And I was like, “Oh goodness.” So I dove in. I learned all the things I did not know. I built the the first website and the blog started and all this stuff.

And then let’s see last summer, so summer of 2020, God opened doors again and asked me to start a podcast, the Stepping Into A Joy Filled Life podcast. And so I didn’t really know what that looked like. Again. I had no clue how to do that sort of thing. But I stepped forward again in obedience, learning all the things that I did not know. Actually through the podcast I was introduced to well, by now it’s been a very large amount of wonderful women, yourself included Heidi. The podcast has opened so many doors to cultivate relationships with just some really awesome and wonderful women. And through that I made some other new girlfriends and they started talking about life coaching. Well, the next thing I know, God was opening a door for me to step through to become a certified Christian life coach. So I finished my certification in December of 2020. And that just brings us to where we are today. I’m just getting ready to launch my one on one life coaching programs out into the world. And it’s just a really exciting and fulfilling thing to be doing. I love it.

Speaker 1:

That is so fun. I love how God just intervenes in the least expected moments of time. And really just it’s our Yes, he’s just looking for Yes, like, we don’t need to be perfect. We don’t need to know everything. In fact, I feel like he thinks it’s funner when we don’t have your strengths and all these areas. Yeah, we’re gonna kind of go over here and use these for now. Oh, okay, God, sure.

Speaker 2:

Amen.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he’s just so not boring. Like, he loves the unexpected and fun things that he gets to do with us. And as we develop deeper and our relationship, we see that and it just, it gets to be really fun. The Kingdom is fun.

Speaker 2:

I couldn’t agree more. And I think he has a sense of humor, too, you know, and it is just so fun to watch this whole thing called life play out. And really, you know, when we’re when our life is in his hands, you know, we may not know what the future looks like, but we know that he holds our future and that it’s good. So we step forward and take obedient action. And that’s what is blessed.

Speaker 1:

Definitely, you can expect your yes to come with a little bit or a lot of adventure, that’s for sure.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yeah. You bet.

Speaker 1:

Alright, would you mind sharing a little bit more about your testimony? Where does your story begin?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. So I grew up in the heart of the Midwest, in really the middle of nowhere Iowa, on a little tiny farm. And I have this picture from when I was a little girl of my older brother and I bottle feeding a baby calf. And our farm dog was there beside us. And there’s like, there’s straw and hay all around us. And we’re down in the barn. And you know, it really, it appears happy, which my brother was and still to this day is one of my very, very best and dearest friends. But the thing is that there was something else going on under the surface, my parents were actually in the process of walking through a divorce. And it was really a heartbreaking time for me at five years old. I remember walking into the kitchen. And I remember just seeing my mom sitting on the floor, the kitchen floor, and she was crying. And I didn’t really understand why she was crying or what was happening. But myself at five years old, you know, children have this natural, innate empathy. And I remember that I just sat down beside her and cried with her. And I look back and that’s really like spiritually representative, as I look back at that now, as we look at Jesus, you know, when he was walking on the earth and feeling these really human emotions, and he was very empathetic.

And we see in the Bible where he wept alongside others who were grieving. And so I view that as, you know, just with really such spiritual insight now, and I remember just staying with her and crying. I remember just crying a lot. When I was little, and walking through all of this, I felt really broken, confused, you know, heartbroken, sad. I didn’t understand why you know why my family was breaking apart, why I had to spend half my time with my mom and half my time with my dad. Why couldn’t we all just be together? Right? Five years old, you just don’t really understand that thing. And I remember like it manifested, the pain manifested physically.

For me, I had stomach aches almost every morning. And as I got older, I started to experience a lot of anxiety. As I got into high school, I remember painting my fingernails black, which I look back, and I realized that was such a reflection of my heart and how I felt on the inside. And I would date these bad boys and you know, thinking that I could fix them or save them. And the thing is that I was trying to fix and save myself. And so I was then a freshman in college, and I was on a cruise ship headed to Mexico, believe it or not, and I met this man and I say, Man, because he was nine years older than me. And this man was completely unlike any other boy I had ever dated. This man had blond hair, blue eyes, dimples, an ordinary grin, Southern accent and just this charm about him, and he was totally unlike anyone I’d ever met before.

The thing was that I knew almost instantly that I was going to marry this man. He is now my husband. And as I mentioned, we’ve been married almost 15 years, right? So I met him at 19 years old. And here he is nine years older than me. And the thing is that I at heart was just an old soul. I was so weary from navigating my past that I was just ready to settle down and start over. And I had this belief that when I got married and started over all the pain and hurt and brokenness and can from my past that poof just like a fairy tale, it would be gone. So we got married. And guess what did not happen. Everything was not magically fixed. And, you know, I was like, “What is happening?” Like, I thought everything would magically be better, we’d start our life together. And in stark contrast, what happened was, I became more anxiety ridden. I began having more health issues. I actually had to have tests ran on my heart, because my heart would race so bad that I was on the brink of having a heart attack at 20-21 years old.

And it came to this place where I was like, just desperate for something better. I wanted to have a thriving marriage, my husband was a good man. And he was so patient and kind and loving with me as I’m dragging along all the baggage and junk and brokenness from my past. And I desperately wanted a good marriage, I knew that there was a god, I knew that God existed because through all of this, both sets of my parents continued to take me to church. So I knew that God existed, I just did not have a relationship with him, yet. I didn’t understand that I was still in this space of trying to handle and control everything and trying to fix everything myself and trying to make it better myself. And so I just really in in a state of desperation, really is what it was. In 2011, I was just desperate to break free of all of that junk and to live a good, full, abundant life and to have a solid marriage, right, where I could trust where I could love and be loved and feel loved and feel whole.

And so in 2011, by God’s grace, I began to seek Him and seek His wisdom. And I actually linked up with a life coach, which full circle, that’s part of the reason, part of the reason that I felt God pushing me to become a life coach, is because working with a life coach totally changed my life. So I began working with this life coach and learning about the power of forgiveness and gratitude and honor, and relationships and restoration and what it meant to have a relationship with Christ. And I’m digging into the Bible, and praying and just crying out to the Lord, like, “show me your way. I know there’s a better way,’ but I was still just hanging on. And so this went on until February of 2012.

And in the middle of a cold February night, in 2012, the Lord woke me up in the middle of the night. And it was like the Holy Spirit just came over me and I began to weep. And he began to speak to my heart, “Katie, I’ve never left you not for one moment. And if you hadn’t walked through all that hard stuff in your past, you wouldn’t be where you are today, you wouldn’t have your husband laying beside you. And you wouldn’t have those kiddos right next to you. I’ve never left you, I’ve been with you every step of the way. And you had to walk through all of that, to come to this place where you would cry out to me, so that you would grow into all that I’ve created you to be so you come to this realization that I love you. And that I want a relationship with you that you are my daughter, and I have a future for you. And it’s good.” And in the middle of that night, as I’m sitting up in bed, just weeping, I gave the Lord fully my past, my present and the permission to lead me into the good future that he had. For me.

Speaker 1:

That is so powerful. I think that’s something that, you know, when we think about like religion versus relationship, like you said, your parents kept taking you to the church. And so you kind of, you know, kind of grew up in church but didn’t get or grasp the concept of like, he wants a relationship with us first and foremost, above everything else. Yeah, it’s a byproduct of that. It’s secondary. But first and foremost, he wants that connection in that relationship.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and amen. Religion versus relationship. It’s one of my soapbox topics to be on is this thing where people you know, are so proud. And I don’t mean to step on toes here. But people that you know, “I’m so proud. I’m a Baptist, I’m a Catholic. I’m a Holy Roller. I’m a Lutheran,” Girl, that is the biggest lie of our generation. It is not about your religion. It is only about your relationship with Jesus Christ. I don’t care what you call yourself. I don’t care who you are, what denomination you associate with at the end of the day. This is what it comes down to our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the one who loves us, the one who died for us to be free.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Amen. Amen. Yay.