Island Boy J Music hello friends.

Welcome to Activate, a podcast consisting of purposeful conversations aimed at encouraging listeners to embrace both the beauty and chaos of life.

I'm KB and I can't wait to share valuable insights on health, fitness, nutrition, aging, faith, family, and everything in between to help you level up and activate your life.

I'm a former network marketing hater turned top leader in my industry.

I'm a certified life and nutrition coach, helping women to break the same chains that once kept me stuck.

I'm so happy you're here.

Let's do this.

Hello friends.

Happy Monday.

How are we?

I hope that you're great.

I am doing good despite six days of rain in the forecast.

Today is day three of rain and actually we had a beautiful day.

The rain is just starting.

It's about.

It's actually 6pm on Wednesday, deadline day.

Here we are again, and the rain is just starting to come down.

Yesterday was a full downpour all day long and I had myself kind of in a tizzy anticipating all of this rain.

And by the grace of God, we got a beautiful day in the middle of it.

So I'm hoping the rest of the days also include some midday sunshine because that is just what my soul needs.

So, first of all, I just want to thank you for such kind feedback after Asher was my guest on the podcast last week and just so vulnerably sharing about his experience with anxiety.

And he did such a great job.

He's so well spoken.

I was so proud of him.

He said things that I'd never even heard before and I hope that it blessed all of you, but if not, it blessed me.

It was such a blessing to me to have that conversation with him and just, you know, hear how he's feeling and the things that he's gone through and what, what helped and what didn't help.

And if you haven't listened, go back and listen.

And if you have and you know somebody who could benefit from hearing it, please share.

That would be.

That would be a blessing so to them and to me.

So I would sure appreciate that.

But again, the outpouring, I got so many text messages and messages on social media and I'm just so grateful for all of you that tune in and listen and care about my, my little family today.

So first of all, I just want to say, well, I guess it's second of all.

Second of all, somebody asked me, how are you really?

And the truth of the matter, the answer to that question is, I am so good.

While I'm always, I'm always over here struggling with something.

But as far as my health and how I'm feeling, I'm really, really good.

And I do, I struggle with a little bit of pain.

I'm not sure exactly what's on, going, causing it.

It's like concentrated on the right side.

It's always the exact same spot it's been for months now.

I've had a CT scan.

They say everything looks fine.

So I'm just moving forward as if everything is healing the, the way that it's supposed to.

I've been told by my surgeon that I have no restrictions.

I'm free to do whatever feels good.

I still cannot do.

I can do a lot.

So I'll say that I'm able to go to CrossFit.

I, I do.

Currently I'm doing four days of lifting.

So I do a shoulder day, a back day, a glutes and quads day, and a glutes and hamstrings day.

Now, lucky me, I pulled my hamstring last week.

Jonathan had pulled a hamstring like two weeks before, three weeks before playing baseball.

And my sheer lack of sympathy for the pain that he was in is surely to blame for why I now have my own pulled hamstring.

But so I do those four days of lifting and then I incorporate two days of CrossFit.

So on, on the day that I do shoulders, that's not.

You can't lift a lot of weight with shoulders, so typically that's kind of my easiest lifting day.

So I'll do CrossFit as well on shoulder day.

So I actually did that today.

I did CrossFit this morning, then I, then this afternoon I hit shoulders and then I do one day of just CrossFit.

So I have two full rest days every week.

But I'm back to working out.

I'm working out five days a week.

It feels great.

CrossFit is infinitely scalable, thank God.

So like I can always figure out what to do.

So there are several movements.

Anything with chest I can't do.

I am not comfortable in a plank position at all.

I can't do a push up, I can't do a pull up.

I can't do, I can't hang from the rig at all.

So I can't do like toes to bar, kipping, pull ups, anything like that.

But I can do so much.

I can't do wall walks, I can't do handstand push ups.

There's, there's, there's a handful of things that I'm not capable of just Yet.

But like I said, you can scale any movement, and I'm loving it.

I'm having so much fun getting back into it.

Today I did.

They did deadlifts today.

Butcher girl with the hamstring.

I did a strict press, and that was great.

I'm getting strong.

I did one rep.

No, I did two reps at 90 pounds, so that was pretty dang good, I would say.

You know, I, I, I feel good.

The one kind of thing that I struggle with a little is that I'm never gonna know what caused it.

So I do get a little bit of fear when I'm lifting.

And, um, and I know that 1 rep maxes are in my past.

Even though my doctor has cleared me to do everything, I'm not comfortable with straining that much, if that makes sense.

Um, I'm not gonna be lifting £300 in a deadlift.

I'm just not gonna do that.

So I try to keep it to, like, higher reps, like five or more for the most part.

Um, so I'm not straining so hard with heavy weight, but because I'll never know what caused it.

Like, was it, was it the car accident?

It could have been.

Was it some fluke thing?

We know there was no genetic component, at least of the things that they tested for.

Could I have done it lifting?

It's possible.

The doctor did say after my surgery, immediately after my surgery, when he spoke to my husband, he said it was caused by trauma.

That was his feeling after looking at the aneurysm.

The way that it looked to him, it was caused by trauma.

And he said that because of the way it was facing.

So, you know, I, I've racked my brain.

When I was 20, I jumped from a moving vehicle.

I jumped out of a car that was going 55 miles an hour.

And it's, it's possible, it's possible that that's the only thing I can think of when they say trauma, aside from the car accident.

And so I'll just never know.

So it does.

I do have a little bit of fear sometimes.

Like, am I doing this to myself?

Could I make this happen again?

I couldn't imagine, you know, going for my scan and them saying, oh, no, we see another aneurysm, or, you know, that feels scary to me.

But I'm choosing to believe that will not happen.

And I'm trusting in God if it does, that he has a plan and I'll get through it.

And I have to live my life.

And I'm doing that.

And so ultimately, I'm really, really good.

Aside from that, you know, I'm doing the brand building thing that I've been telling you about ad nauseam.

Probably at this point every week, I feel like I get another idea, like another Holy Spirit, like, just idea that I want to pursue.

And then I'm like, okay, Lord, I'm ready.

Like, I'll do what you want me to do.

I trust you and I want to be obedient.

And so that kind of leads me to what I wanted to talk about today.

And that is, you know, these rainy days have inspired me a little.

And then just this idea of trusting the Lord and being obedient to his plan lands has made me think of the story of Noah's Ark.

And this is just a little aside.

So in, I guess in my faith journey and in, you know, I just knew so little.

Even though I grew up in church, I just knew so little.

And it made me insecure.

It made me insecure about sharing with you.

It made me insecure about, you know, having conversations in real life because I was always like, oh, no, I don't know enough, or I'm going to feel dumb if they asked me something.

Like, there are things that maybe baby Christians learn that I don't know or that I haven't learned or that's new to me.

Like, I learn something new every single day.

So of course I've heard the story of Noah and his ark so many times, but there's always something we can learn from a Bible story.

And I also just love the idea of sharing it with you because maybe you don't know the story of Noah's ark and maybe you feel the same way I do.

Like, you just don't know enough and you want to know more, but you're not exactly sure how to learn.

And I will tell you, I think that the thing I did that moved the needle the most was Bible Recap.

I'm on my third time through the Bible using the Bible Recap.

I had read the Bible cover to cover one time.

Before that, it took me two years, and I learned barely anything.

Even though I was using a Bible that had, like, descriptions.

Bible Recap was a game changer for me.

And if I'm being really honest, the year that it really changed everything was the first time I did it when I read the scripture.

I listened to the podcast, and then I wrote notes while I listened, and then I recorded it for you guys.

So I recorded on Instagram every single day the Bible Recap for a whole entire year.

And I retained so much.

But that doesn't mean I, by far don't know everything there is to know.

Like, I don't think I'll ever know everything there is to know.

And I love that because I get to just keep learning.

It gets to be something that I do every morning for the rest of my life.

I spend 90 minutes to two and a half, three hours every single morning.

And I know everyone doesn't have that luxury.

I fully understand that.

But that's just how I start my day every day.

And when I tell you I'm so excited to get up and learn something about God that I didn't know before, it's just like I have such a hunger for learning and sharing and I don't know, I just think you got to dig in.

You can do devotions.

I mean, I've encouraged people to just start with a kid's Bible and just read the Bible stories.

Wherever you need to start, just start.

So I want to talk about the story of Noah and kind of what we can learn from it.

Like, what can our takeaway be from this story of Noah and his ark?

So Noah lived in this wicked, wicked generation.

The Bible says the earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence.

In Genesis 6:14, God tells Noah directly, make yourself an ark.

Now, he wouldn't have even known what an ark was, right?

I'm guessing ark wasn't a word that was really used back then.

We know.

We know that sin entered the world with Adam and Eve.

And maybe you don't know that, and maybe I'll share that story one day, too, because that's an incredible story, and it's literally where it all began.

It's why sin is in the world and why the world is the way that it is.

But Noah.

So Noah came from the lineage of Seth, Adam and Eve's third son.

So Adam and Eve's first two boys, their first two sons were Cain and Abel.

And Cain became jealous of Abel and he killed him, committing the world's first murder.

Okay, so Cain killed Abel.

Adam and Eve went on to have more children, one of them being Seth.

Noah came from the lineage of Seth.

So the faithful descendants of Seth began procreating with the unfaithful descendants of Cain.

Okay, so this polluted the faithful generation by generation, until Noah.

He faced every single temptation, just like every other person did, but he chose to follow God.

Now, he was by no means perfect or sinless, but Noah was a man of integrity.

God became disgusted by the evil being done through.

Through the free will he gives us.

It all comes back to this free will that God has given us.

He gave his creation free will.

And he was to the point that in Genesis 6, 6 he tells us he was sorry he had made man on earth.

And he was grieved in his heart.

So God tells Noah, at that point, I will destroy them.

He declared that with a flood, everything on earth would die.

Only Noah's family found grace in God's eyes.

And he established a covenant with Noah's family to protect them from the judgment of the whole entire world.

There were no good people left on earth other than Noah.

So at this point, Noah was 500 years old.

Okay?

People lived much longer back then.

So Noah's 500 year old man, God required Noah to make an ark to save his family and go.

Because God is loving, he communicated clearly and he also provided the resources so that Noah could complete the task of building this ark.

So he, he gave him all the resources that he needed and he told him the exact measurements, how it should all be laid out, how he should create divisions.

So this took Noah between 55 and 75 years to build.

So there would be eight people on board the ark.

Noah and his wife and their three sons and their wives, and then all of the animals, right?

And so one thing I didn't know, and I don't know why I didn't know this, it's just a detail I hadn't noticed before.

But all of the animals came on their own at the right time.

So all of the animals from all over the entire Earth came on their own and got on the ark.

Isn't that incredible?

So Noah, when the rain began, Noah was 600 years old.

And the other crazy thing is that Noah had never even seen rain.

So imagine the trust Noah had in the Lord and the obedience when he had never even seen rain.

He didn't know what an ark was.

And God said, I'm going to flood the entire Earth and kill everyone.

At this point, God had only like watered the earth through a mist coming up through the ground.

So there had never been rain.

Okay, so it rained for 40 days.

Every inch of the Earth was covered in water.

Every living thing died.

And the earth stayed submerged in water for 150 days.

The Ark would come to rest on a mountaintop.

And just over one year after the floodwaters came, God spoke again to Noah, saying, go out of the ark.

The first thing they did upon exiting was offer praise and thanksgiving to God.

God then promised to never again destroy the earth by flood.

He offered a Rainbow in the clouds.

As a sign of this covenant, God commanded Noah's sons to be fruitful and multiply the earth.

So his sons were Shem, Ham, and Japheth with.

So the rainbow.

If you didn't know, when you look up after a rain and the sun is shining and you see a rainbow up in the sky, that is God's promise that he will never destroy the earth again with a flood.

That is God's covenant with Noah that you get to see.

So did.

Okay, so this is another interesting thing.

So did you know that?

So fallen angels.

You've heard of fallen angels, right?

So again in Genesis 6.

So fallen angels.

Okay, let me see.

I screenshotted this so that I could share this correctly.

So these are angels that were expelled from heaven for rebelling against God.

So even the angels in heaven were given free will.

Okay?

But they rebelled against God, and as a consequence, they were cast out of heaven and they were reduced to demons and fallen spirits.

So these fallen angels then procreated with humans.

Are you following me here?

So then that created the Nephilim.

And these are described as giants or powerful beings, possibly with distorted appearances.

So the way that God got rid of these Nephilim, these.

These fallen angels that had procreated with humans was the Flood.

So that's why our lineage, we do not come from fallen angels, because God destroyed all of them in the Flood.

Isn't that crazy?

Demons were procreating with humans.

Did you, like.

Do you.

Did you know that?

I think there's so many interesting things that we just don't know.

But then when you think about it, too, imagine how people would have mocked and made fun of Noah for spending 75 years building this monstrosity of a boat when none of them had ever even heard of rain, let alone seen it.

This.

The size of this boat was 1 1/2 football fields.

Imagine the trust Noah had in God for him to be obedient to God's calling on his life, to build this ark and to save his family and to save all of the animals of the earth.

So what can we learn?

What can we learn from Noah's story?

So obedience to God, even when it's hard.

Okay, So I find myself in this space even now, like this whole rebrand of Activate that I'm doing that I can't wait to tell you about another, like, another, like, really excited thing, exciting thing that I feel like the Holy Spirit has put on my heart to do also.

Coming up.

And it's very scary, and I'm terrified of failing.

But I'm also going to be obedient to this calling that I feel like God has put on my life.

So Noah obeyed God's command to build the ark, even though it must have seemed strange and unreasonable.

His obedience, despite criticism or misunderstanding from others, teaches Christians to trust and follow God even when his instructions don't make sense to the world.

Have you ever felt God calling you to do something that just didn't make sense?

Do you hear from God?

Do you have a relationship with God where you're able to hear Him?

That's the first place you got to get to.

Number two would be faith in God's promises.

So Hebrews 11:7 commends Noah for his faith.

He believed in God's warning of a coming flood and he acted on it.

Christians are reminded to live by faith, trusting in God's word and promises, even if they haven't yet come to pass.

I mean, there's so much prophecy in the Bible, so much of the prophecy has come to pass, but there's still prophecy that hasn't come.

And I think that's so cool because things were prophesied like Jesus, that have come to pass.

So we know these prophecies are real.

We're just waiting on the rest of them to happen.

But three, God's judgment is real.

The flood demonstrates that God is just and will judge sin.

Christians are reminded of the seriousness of sin sin and the reality of God's coming judgment, encouraging a life of holiness and reverence.

God provides a way of salvation.

The ark is a foreshadowing of Christ, God's provision for salvation.

Just as the ark saved Noah and his family, Jesus is the only way of salvation for humanity.

Number five, Righteousness sets you apart.

Noah was called a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time.

His example shows that living a righteous life, even in a corrupt world, pleases God and can make a difference.

Number six, God keeps his covenants.

After the flood, God made a covenant with Noah symbolized by the rainbow.

This reminds Christians that God is faithful and always keeps his promises.

This is also why the pride flag is is very disrespectful if you're a Christian.

They stole the rainbow.

God's covenant with Noah to never flood the earth again.

And then lastly, God can use one person to impact many.

Noah's faithfulness preserved humanity.

Christians are reminded that God can use a single obedient life to accomplish great things.

Had Noah not built the ark, humanity would have been destroyed.

Every single human, one person, one obedient person can change the course of history.

What if you're that person?

What if the thing God is calling you to do is the thing that changes everything?

Don't doubt that it could be you one day, because it absolutely could.

You have an absolute purpose and calling on this earth just like Noah did.

Maybe you're not going to be building an ark the size of one and a half football fields, but God is using you and the purpose he has for you for the good of the whole story.

And that's the thing.

We only see such a little piece of the.

Of the picture.

And I just think, like, I have a smile on my face that won't go away.

Like, I can't wait till one day we get to see the big picture, to see it all come together and to see what God was doing, how he was using every single thing, whether it seems like the best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world for the good of those who love Him.

It's just incredible.

And I hope that you, if you haven't already, will fall in love with the Bible and the things that God shares with us and the glimpses into eternity that he lets us see.

And just your purpose.

I feel like I've been on this quest to find my purpose.

And the truth of the matter is our purpose is all the same.

We just do it differently.

We have different avenues of getting to the same thing.

And the purpose is to love God and to love others.

That's our entire purpose in this world.

I.

I hope that that was interesting to you.

I hope that you heard something that you didn't know before.

And I hope that you can't hear all that thunder, but maybe at the end of this, I'll see a rainbow.

I hope that you're great.

I love you.

I'm grateful for you.

I hope you have the best Monday and I'll see you next week.

Later.

That's a wrap on another episode of Activate.

Stay up to date by following ristonleighballard on Instagram.

And if this episode made you laugh, offered value, or simply entertained you, please, like, share and give a five star review on itunes.

Thanks for being here.

Love y' all.

Later, Sam.