What happens when your dream and God’s plan for you don’t line up? Kelly Minter is a popular writer and Bible teacher. But she had wanted, and worked very hard for a different dream. Kelly talks about the loss of a dream, and embracing what God had planned for her.
Show Notes:
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Transcription:
Steve Sunshine:
We live in a time of unprecedented comfort. We value safety and security, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy for us to be shaken when the straight road we’re on takes a sudden curve and seems to be pointing us in a direction we don’t want to go. Welcome to the Shaken podcast. I’m Steve Sunshine. Your confidence, your mood, your perspective, even your faith may be shaken, because of something that’s happened in your life. Jesus told us we’d have trouble in this world, so we’re shaken, but not surprised. He also said, “Take heart, I have overcome the world.” In this podcast, you’ll hear honest conversations with people who have or are going through life-altering hard times, and have found that God was with them in the midst of it all.
You can be anything you want to be. That’s so encouraging. The only problem with it is that it’s not true. How do I know that? Well, if it were true, I’d be retired from the NBA by now. I thought I was going to play for the New York Knicks. I thought I was going to be 6’2″. As a little kid, I didn’t realize that that’s not really as tall as you want to be in the NBA. It doesn’t matter though, I’m just shy of 5’8″, and you could say I didn’t put in the work, and you’d be right. But I know it wouldn’t have mattered. I follow college basketball and I’ve seen talented hardworking players, great athletes, not quite good enough for the NBA.
This is not to say that having a youthful dream is a bad thing or that they never come true, but what happens when your dream and God’s plan are different? Kelly Minter is a popular Bible teacher and writer. That’s not what her dream was. Kelly was an aspiring Christian music singer/songwriter and things didn’t go the way she wanted, because God, as he often does, had a better idea. Kelly, you had an interesting trajectory in your life. It wasn’t what you expected. You started out as a Christian singer/songwriter. How did you decide that that’s what you wanted to do? What led to that, first of all?
Kelly Minter:
Yeah. Well, I graduated high school and my senior year of high school I had a basketball scholarship that I was really looking forward to and playing basketball. And through a series of events, ended up not getting that scholarship. There were some injuries on the team, and they switched who they were looking for and it was a really disappointing experience. And looking back you think, “Okay, it’s not that big of a deal.” But when you’re in high school and you’re planning to go to a certain school to play basketball and to have a scholarship, it just feels like your whole world.
So I ended up commuting to school, because it was too late to kind of figure out where I was going to go at that point, when I found out about this lost scholarship. And I ended up playing some music with some people from my church and they had a band and I just started, I think, pouring some of my sorrows and my questions and my wonderings into music. And so, I started writing songs and started playing music, and kind of all of my passion that I had had for sports got moved over into music.
And it was a few years later that I ended up signing a record deal in Nashville and moved from the Washington D.C. area. I grew up right outside of D.C. in northern Virginia, moved to Nashville, signed a record deal. And then, that kind of started a whole nother path for me, but that was kind of how I got into music.
Steve Sunshine:
So you didn’t look back. Did you miss basketball at all during that time?
Kelly Minter:
Oh, I did, I did a lot, especially the first couple years. But then, kind of my life and world began to revolve around music, but those first couple years, yes, very much so, until I got more established with music and then I realized, “Oh, wow. I love this so much. This is definitely what I want to do.”
Steve Sunshine:
You get to Nashville, Music City, what was your initial reaction or experience like in being in the music business?
Kelly Minter:
Well, it’s very compelling, it’s captivating, it’s exciting. To me, the music business kind of represented everything that this world has to offer. But then, doing Christian music, you had a blend, so you had a lot of what Christ and his church and community has to offer, and in a strange way, it was blended with celebrity status and trying to be known and self-promotion and money and fame and all those things. And so, it was an odd combination, and the tension, I think, for me, was making a lot of the same mistakes that I made in basketball, which was kind of putting all of my identity into who I was as an athlete.
And then, I moved that over thinking, “Well, okay, I’m learned that lesson, and now I’m in Christian music, so I must be free of all of that,” but it really just transitioned. It just moved into, “Okay, now I’m finding my identity and my worth in my music and in who I’m friends with and who wants to be friends with me, because of my success.” So all of my identity was wrapped up in that. And so, yeah, I mean, it was a really tough road, it was a really, really tough road.
And I think, just as a side note, it doesn’t really matter if you’re in Christian music or if you’re in Christian writing or if you’re a pastor of if you’re a Bible study writer, like I am, or if you’re president of a Fortune 500 company. The human heart is always in the middle of all of that, in our desire to make ourselves God of our own life, to worship the things of money and fame and all that stuff. I mean, we never get out of that, and I realized that my own sinful heart, broken heart, selfish heart, whatever, it followed me right into the middle of Christian music industry.
Steve Sunshine:
So I think if you’re any kind of a professional Christian anything, you’re dealing with that.
Kelly Minter:
That’s right.
Steve Sunshine:
Pastors. I’ve worked in Christian radio for 20 years. I think people have the best of intentions. Egos and self-motivation for success still kind of weasels its way in there, even though nobody really wants it.
Kelly Minter:
Yes.
Steve Sunshine:
And so, yeah, it’s a hard balance, and I know, also, that in Christian music or in any music, any popular music, there’s a lot of people trying to get in, and a lot of people trying to stay in, and not as many opportunities for that success as you would like. So you ended up experiencing, I guess, that reality as, I think, probably more people have than haven’t, who’ve tried to get into that particular business.
Kelly Minter:
Yeah, and you hit on a great point, too. You just said something super important, that people are trying to get in, but then people are trying to stay in, and that’s important, because even when we have success, even if we get the success, then it becomes about keeping the success, staying in. And I think that’s such an insightful phrase, because we deal with that. Even now, as a Bible study writer and as an author and a speaker, there’s been a certain level of, I’ll put it in air quotes here, success. But now, it’s like, “Okay, now how do I keep that? How do I stay?,” and it’s that same thing, right?
And so, going back to the Lord and saying, “Okay, Lord, my life is yours, my talents are yours. You use me the way that you want to use me. And that doesn’t mean that it’s this slog and we’re not fulfilled and we’re miserable and we’re constantly having to mortify our sin nature. I mean, it’s a joy when we get to that place where we’re really serving out of our desire for the Lord to be glorified and for us just to know that we are co-laboring with him. It’s get exciting.
Steve Sunshine:
I interviewed a guy who was a punter on a football team that won the Super Bowl and he said the feedback he was getting on the streets, it was an Indianapolis Colts guy, of Indianapolis was, “That’s so great. Congratulations. That was so cool that you guys won. Really looking forward to you guys doing it again.” That was basically the consensus, and he was talking about how brief success can be. So God is watching all of this, as he always is, he’s in it, and he knows that he’s got something really amazing in store for you, and at this point, obviously, you don’t know that. Tell us a little bit about how that transitioned happened, because the stuff that he did with you after is pretty amazing.
Kelly Minter:
Yeah, so you’re right, that’s the hard thing about these hard transition periods that we all go through, where we’re struggling and we don’t know what the Lord has, and he doesn’t typically tell us what he has, and I think partly is that we would then put our hope in what he has coming, instead of putting our hope in him and putting our hope in who he is and I think that’s really important, because we tend to lift up the blessing even more than the blesser, than the one who gives us these gifts. And so, I think, partly, as I was moving from music into what I’m doing now as a writer and a speaker, I was getting to know the Lord on a much deeper level, and one of my very first Bible studies is called No Other Gods: The Unrivaled Pursuit of Christ.
And basically, it was how the Lord takes these modern day idols that we have, because we think of idolatry, a lot of times we think of drugs or pornography or materialism or something, but really so many of our false gods that we put our hope in, really they’re good things, they’re relationships, it’s a music career, it’s a sports career, it’s a Bible study teacher, whatever it is, but then, as Tim Keller would say, when they become ultimate things, then they become idols, then they become in the place of God.
And so, here I was doing music, and that wasn’t working very well, and the Lord was tearing down these idols, so that I could get to know him and recognize that my life is not bound up in my success and your life is not bound up in your success, no matter what it is. It really is bound up in Jesus Christ, and yet, at the same time, we know that Jesus has… God, in creation, he has created us to do things and to matter and to have purpose and he has created us for good works, we know that from Ephesians.
So it’s not a bad thing to want to do things, to want to build things, to want to have impact, but it has to be sanctified. And so, I think that’s what the Lord was doing during that time of my music career, was he was just continuing to sanctify me and draw me to himself. And then, yeah, several years into this very, well, hurting career, I went from one record label to another label to another label.
And so, I mean it was a long stretch, and then finally the Lord gave me an opportunity to write a Bible study, and then I ended up writing my first Bible study based on all the material I had lived over that previous decade of losing the basketball scholarship, losing the record deals, all of that hardship, and all the scripture and everything that I had learned, that got turned into a Bible study. And then, that was my very first Bible study. That was 17 years ago, I think, and that Bible study is still in print. No Other Gods is still available, and still being used.
And so, it just shows that the Lord wasn’t wasting any of that. I think that’s another thing, too, we think, “Oh, my gosh. I’m wasting so much time. Lord, come on. I could be doing so many other things,” and none of that was wasted, but the Lord was picking all that up and he was going to put it into something else. It’s kind of interesting to think back and to look back on that.
Steve Sunshine:
It makes me think of that person who makes a practice of just going around and encouraging the people in front of them, maybe they do some unglamorous volunteer work at church or wherever and they’re faithful to what God’s called them to be, your ministry in life, it doesn’t have to be official and it doesn’t have to look like something big by world standards. God only calls some people to be famous and, to me, being famous doesn’t make you more godly, in fact, it carries risk. That’s a different conversation. But that humble work that you do that hardly anybody knows about is honoring God and I hope that you hear that, if that’s where you are.
Kelly Minter:
It’s so true.
Steve Sunshine:
Did you consider yourself to be a writer at that point or was that intimidating?
Kelly Minter:
Yeah, it was, but I was writing songs, and so that’s how the book publisher even picked me up, because he’s like, “You write songs. I think you could write a book.” And it was intimidating, because I didn’t know how to put a book together at the time. And then, that led to a Bible study, and that was intimidating, too, because I didn’t really know how to write a Bible study, I just knew the Bible studies that I had really been encouraged by over the years. So it was definitely a learning curve, no question about it.
But I found a lot of satisfaction from it, and it was kind of interesting, because just a couple weeks ago, I ran into somebody that I hadn’t seen in years, and he was the one who brought me to Nashville 22 years ago. He was the A&R at the record label that I was at, and he was the one that signed me to my very first record deal. And we were standing talking and he said, “You know, Kelly, it’s so weird, because,” he said, “I think back to when I met you 22, 23 years ago,” and he goes, “and I remember you came out from backstage to introduce yourself,” because he was there watching one of my shows, to see if he wanted to sign me.
And he said, “You shook my hand,” and he said, “I knew we were going to work together and I knew there was something special that was happening.” And he said, “But I thought it was music. I thought I was bringing you to Nashville for music.” And he said, “We did, we did some really beautiful work together.” And he’s like, “I’m still really proud of that record.” But he said, “All these years later, now, I realize that I was helping you get to Nashville for what you’re doing now, to teach the Bible and to be an author and a speaker.” And it was just a real moment for me, that I just had a couple weeks ago.
Steve Sunshine:
So if you’re not familiar with Kelly’s story, it’s good, right now, if we were to stop. She, after the music career, became a successful and popular Bible teacher, as a side note, one of wife’s very favorites. But there’s another layer to this, tell us about the Amazon.
Kelly Minter:
Yes. Well, I’m actually heading to the Amazon in a couple weeks and, you’re right, there is a whole nother layer to this story. So my third record deal, my third and final record deal, I signed with a company in England that also had ties to Nashville and was invited by the president of that record label to come to London and to be part of a worship experience at Abbey Road studios where The Beatles recorded. So it was really, really cool.
Steve Sunshine:
Oh, wow.
Kelly Minter:
Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome, yeah. It was so cool. We were there for several days. It was a live concert recording. There was a personal chef that worked at the studios that made meals. I mean, it was absolutely awesome.
Steve Sunshine:
I like everything about that.
Kelly Minter:
I know, exactly. I know, I know. And so, after it was over I thought, “Okay, Lord, finally, after all this suffering in the music business and everything, you’ve finally hit it, finally got this big deal, and this is all going to go.” And oddly enough, that record never really got off the ground and nothing really happened after that, but what happened at that event was the president of the record label got up, a man by the name of John Paculabo, and he said, “Hey, I want to talk about some work that I’m doing in the Amazon and if anyone here would like to be supportive, I work with an organization there, and we work along the river.”
And I remember having that thought of just like, “Oh, man. I’m so glad that the Lord has called all those people to the Amazon, and he’s called me to London, for right now.” And then, it was probably 15 minutes later that John walked up to me and said, “Hey, would you ever like to go to the Amazon? I’d love to show you, as one of my artists.” And so, I ended up going to the Amazon in 2009. Amazon River, right there, flying to Manaus in Brazil, get on a boat, sleep in a hammock, it’s very hot, go minister.
Well, my dad’s a pastor, so he came with me, and my siblings, and then later my mom. But when my dad was down there, it was the craziest thing, these Indigenous jungle pastors would find out that, “Oh, a pastor from America is here,” and they would just start showing up in canoes and wanting to be taught the Bible more and wanting to be discipled. And so, my dad said, “We should do a pastor’s conference. We should come here just for that purpose.”
And so, fast-forward 15 years later, the organization I work with is called Justice and Mercy International. And I’ll be there in just a few weeks. We have 180 pastors and wives signed up for, I don’t even know at this point, it might be the 18th or 19th pastors’ conference that we’ve had. We now have three a year with over 100 each time. They come from all over the jungle region. We spend a week just helping equip, encourage, educate. And then, they, honestly, bless and teach us more than we could ever teach them, because they are just living in the kingdom of heaven every day as a reality and serving in obscurity.
So it’s been amazing, and I remember having kind of that epiphany. It was probably, I don’t know, five or six years ago, some of the women who minister in the jungle, I was spending time with them, teaching them, and at the end they said, “How did you ever get here? How did you ever get here in the first place?” And I began to tell them the story, and as I began to tell them the story, I realized that I had been pursuing this stage and this impact as a music artist, and I realized that the Lord had given me the Amazon, and that all that music had eventually dumped into my work in the Amazon and it all made sense.
And I realized in that moment, too, that I wouldn’t have traded the fame of a music career for being able to be with this group of people, and it’s still one of the most sacred things that I get to do every year, is be part of this jungle pastors’ conference, plus all the other things that we’re doing there.
Steve Sunshine:
And you’re talking about, just so people know, this is not a suburb of Rio.
Kelly Minter:
No.
Steve Sunshine:
You are out in a very remote area that you have to get to boat.
Kelly Minter:
Yes.
Steve Sunshine:
I think I’ve read some of that story where, I think, doesn’t it take multiple days on a boat to get there?
Kelly Minter:
Some of the places do. Not always the places I go to, but yes, absolutely. Oh, you could be on the Amazon River for weeks and weeks at a time, and not even touch the… And that’s what so great, is that a lot of our jungle pastors do live days and days and days down the river, and they all come together and it gives them an opportunity to have fellowship and community, which they don’t have very often, because they’re so isolated. They’re so far removed from any kind of civilization, a lot of them.
Yeah, the Lord works in mysterious ways, but I think the encouragement, for people who are listening, is that he doesn’t waste anything that we go through, and he has a way of bringing roads together that we thought were totally disconnected, and building bridges. But I think that we get to know him in the process, as we go, and that is a lot of the joy. It’s not just about what does the Lord have next? What does he have next? But it’s really enjoying him on the journey and trusting him with that journey.
Steve Sunshine:
It really pays to say, and pays is not a good choice of words, but it’s worthwhile, in the end, when you have said, “Not my will be done, but yours,” that moment of saying that, depending on what you’re going through, everybody goes through something. It can be so hard and so painful, and you say it and take it back and all that, but trusting him, I think, means trusting that his plan, when you take the long view, is really what’s best.
Kelly Minter:
Absolutely, and that moment of surrender, that is it. You’re exactly right. I remember with my music career, it was just a mess, and I remember being in my car, it was raining outside, I was sitting in the driveway with a friend just lamenting and just praying and saying, “Lord, it is yours and really just releasing it,” and you remember those moments. I mean, I look back, I mean, it wasn’t like all of a sudden the storm clouds rolled away, the sun came in and my records starting selling.
I mean, it wasn’t that, but it’s looking back and going, “Wow, that moment.” And it does, and maybe even it pays, maybe you’re even using, Steve, biblical language, because it is, right? There’s reward, there’s blessing, there’s a multiplication that we see in scripture and it may not pay in dollars, but man, it is the life that Jesus talks about, no question.
Steve Sunshine:
Speaking of music, do you still get joy from playing and singing and do any writing at all?
Kelly Minter:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I just don’t have time, and that’s been my problem. I do have an event called Cultivate, and it’s a women’s event and I’ve got one coming up here in March in Atlanta, and I will be doing some music there. So I was just on the phone a few minutes ago talking about setting up a rehearsal with the band and everything. So I do love it, I just don’t have a lot of time for it. I’m in seminary and I’m writing and I’m speaking and I’ve got Justice and Mercy International stuff. And then, nieces and nephews, so it’s full. But that’s a great question, I do still enjoy it.
Steve Sunshine:
This may sounds a little sillier, but I’ll ask it anyway, do you get any joy out of basketball? Do you still play?
Kelly Minter:
Yeah. No, that’s not a silly question. I was just saying the other day, I’m like, “Man, I wish there was some league I could go jump in or play,” but my niece and my nephew both play. Well, actually, I’ve got two nephews that play, and so I do get to go out with them and shoot the ball, so I do sometimes just have fun with that. But yeah, I wish I got more opportunities to play.
Steve Sunshine:
What’s next for you? Do you have something coming out that we could let people know about or a new study or anything like that?
Kelly Minter:
Yeah, so I’m just putting the finishing touches on a Bible study on the Book of Esther, and it’s Esther: Daring Faith for Such a Time as This, and it will be out November 2024. So I’m working on finishing that up. I also recently released a devotional through Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, and then through 10 of his miracles, so it’s kind of the teachings and the miracles of Jesus and that’s called The Blessed Life. So those are kind of two projects, one just having come out, one coming out in a bit.
Steve Sunshine:
Very good. Now, I want to end with this, if we could, what do you say to someone who’s dealing with the loss of a dream right now and doesn’t know what God’s going to do with it?
Kelly Minter:
Oh, that is a really big question. Well, for one thing, I would say you get into the New Testament and suffering and pain and hardship is something that, when you read those New Testament letters, whether from Paul or John or James, so much of it is encouraging believers who are going through hard times, and that it doesn’t mean that we’re in sin or we’ve done something wrong or God has forgotten us. There’s that one verse about how get to take joy in the resurrection, but we also get to fellowship in the sufferings of Christ, and I think that when we go through hard things, there is a type of fellowshipping with the Lord that only happens in those places.
So just to remember that you have not been forgotten, you’re not alone, and that the Lord meets us there. There’s that fellowshipping with him that is so unique. And that passage about how the pain in this life is working for us in eternal weight of glory, that somehow what we go through now is directly connected to the way that we will be living life when we are in heaven with our new bodies and when we are reigning with Christ and all of those blessings and the reality of heaven that all of that we go through right now, Paul says it’s just not even to be compared to what it will be.
So I think just to take that, as you had already said, to take that long view of, this is not it. The Lord’s with us now, and it’s going to be unbelievable when every tear is wiped away and there will be no more pain, no more curse, not more suffering.
Steve Sunshine:
One of my favorite verses. Thank you, Kelly. Kelly Minter. And we’re going to share some links on the show notes to get to some of her work. My wife and I, as well, have found them to be very encouraging, and I think you will, too. And Justice and Mercy International is the name of the organization that she works with in the Amazon. And people can go on some of those trips?
Kelly Minter:
Yes, yeah. We’ve got all kinds of trips going, justiceandmercy.org.
Steve Sunshine:
Excellent. Thank you, Kelly. Really enjoyed it.
Kelly Minter:
Thank you, Steve.
Steve Sunshine:
Thank you for joining us, and we’d like to see as many people encouraged as possible, and you can help by liking, sharing, and subscribing to this podcast and by just telling your friends. Find new episodes at purposely.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, and one more thing, if you enjoy Shaken, if you’re encouraged by it, if you think someone else would be, give us a good review.
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