Episode 1: Time to Build

Erin Davis: Okay, Portia, the people listening to The Deep Well need to know your travel story. (laughter) So you and I are here in Michigan—even though neither of us lives in Michigan—and your travel was not exactly smooth.

Portia Collins: Driving from Mississippi to Michigan is about a ten-hour drive, regularly, but when you’ve got a three-year-old in the car with you, oh man!

Erin: And those who don’t know sweet Emmi might not know that you call her your three-nager.

Portia: My three-nager.

Erin: Which is, she might be like a teenager, but she might be like a three-year-old all in one, or it might be both.

Portia: I have one kid, but I feel like I’ve got ten. (laughter)

Erin: So you and your mom and your three-nager loaded up for what should have been a ten-hour road trip.

Portia: We didn’t get to our room until, like, 5 a.m.

Erin: I was waking up, and you were laying down.

Portia: I was laying down. And Emmi, at that point, was wide open.

Erin: Because she’d been sleeping in the car.

Portia: Yes. She had gotten her beauty rest. So she just turned the bedroom into her own little playground, and she was crawling all over me.

Erin: And you didn’t get to sleep a wink.

Portia: None.

Erin: I’m sure you thought, “Why am I even bringing her here? I could have done this on my own.” But you did it with purpose.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: Why did you bring Emmi on the trip?

Portia: I brought her with me because, first of all, I want her to love Jesus. And I believe that everybody here at Revive Our Hearts, we all love Jesus, we love serving Jesus in the ways that we do. I want her to see and experience that.

And so, for me, it’s really about setting her on a path to see what Mommy’s priorities are in life and why she’s doing this. And to see when Mommy travels, what she’s doing. Even though she’s small, I just want her to have this experience to know that Mommy loves Jesus; Mommy loves teaching God’s Word; Mommy loves God’s Word, and that God is King.

Portia: Welcome to The Deep Well with Erin Davis, a podcast from Revive Our Hearts. I’m Portia Collins, and I am super excited to be with Erin as she explores the topic of time. Specifically, we’re going to be looking at the phrase, “in a little while,” and discussing what it means to set godly priorities.

Erin: Erin.

Erin: There’s a yellow Post-It note taped to my computer monitor. The adhesive lost its stickiness a long time ago, and the corners have all started to curl. I’m not at home as I’m recording this season of The Deep Well, but I can picture that Post-It note. It’s been a permanent part of my daily landscape for months.

This is what it says in red ink: “In a little while—Haggai 2:6–7.”

Now, I realize that might not mean much to you. It means hope to me. There have been moments when my work seems impossible. “In a little while” gives me fortitude. I guess it’s become my version of “stay calm and carry on.”

Sometimes the pendulum swings in the other direction, and my work feels futile. I think, Does what I’m doing even matter? “In a little while” keeps my hand on the plow.

Then there are personal problems. We all have them. Relational strains, physical limitations, financial pressures, daily disappointments. That little, yellow Post-It note has often soothed the aches and pains of life for me.

Of course, it’s not really the Post-It note that makes the difference. Those words, “in a little while,” are God’s words. It’s kind of a brass-tack summary of a series of truths about God and time that, if we believe them, will change how we think about us and time.

The goal of The Deep Well is to help you fall in love with your whole Bible. I do that by taking you into the nooks and crannies of your Bible you might never have traveled to before, because you will never love your Bible less by reading it more. The reverse happens: The more we know it, the more we are sure to love it. The more we eat it, the more we digest Scripture, the hungrier we are for it.

Sometimes it’s a book of the Bible that grabs our attention. Sometimes it’s a character. Sometimes it’s a chapter. In this season of The Deep Well, it’s a phrase.

For me, that phrase, “in a little while,” has been like a glint of gold in a mountain stream. You have to really be paying attention. It’s subtle. It’s not going to scream at us from the pages of our Bible. But I started noticing those words, “in a little while,” popping up all over.

It’s in the prophets. (We’re going to dig into one of those prophets together in this episode.
It’s in the Psalms.
Jesus Himself said, “In a little while.”
It’s a phrase we find in 1 Peter and in Revelation.

And like the lens on a magnifying glass, “in a little while,” is something we can look through to see God and time with new clarity.

So let’s jump into the book of Haggai. We’re going to start with the passage written on my Post-It note and then dig into the whole book of Haggai. (Don’t worry, it’s just two short chapters.)

Haggai 2:6–7 says this:

For thus says the LORD of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of hosts.

I hope as you’re listening to this season, you keep your Bible handy. And when you come to that phrase, “in a little while,” I hope you underline it or circle it.

That passage feels good, doesn’t it? We get the sense that God’s going to do something; that He’s going to do something big; that He’s going to reveal His glory. And He tells us when He’s going to do it—“in a little while.”

Well, that’s true. But what do the prophet Haggai’s words teach us about God and time?

Let’s do a quick background check:

Haggai was an Israelite, meaning he was one of God’s chosen people.

Haggai was a prophet, meaning he was someone appointed by God. This wasn’t something he applied for. He didn’t get the job based on his impressive résumé. He wasn’t voted in by the majority. The prophets were hand-selected by God to speak His words to His people.

Now, there are lots of prophets throughout Scripture. We tend to clump them into Major Prophets and Minor Prophets. In case you didn’t know, that just speaks to the length of the book. Haggai is a minor prophet because his book is so short. It’s not like major league baseball and minor league baseball where one group is more important than the other.

But speaking of baseball, Haggai was on a team of prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah were four prophets who prophesied about, or after, God’s people, the Israelites, being taken into captivity by the Babylonians.

If you know the story, then you know that in 586 B.C. the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the central hub for God’s people, and the Babylonians destroyed everything, including the temple that Solomon built. They took the Israelites that survived that siege and invasion into exile.

About fifty years later, the political tides turned, as they tend to. Babylon was overturned by Persia. The Israelites who wanted to were allowed to return to their homeland and rebuild the temple.

Haggai and Zechariah were likely among the exiles who returned to their ruined city to rebuild.

So let’s try to find some empathy in our hearts for these ancient prophets. They had endured tremendous widespread trauma. What they had endured was cultural trauma.

I’d never heard that phrase before, but several years ago I traveled to Alaska to teach the Bible to the Aleutic Indians. That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “cultural trauma.” They used it frequently to describe something that they had experienced as an entire culture and as individuals.

Haggai would have experienced cultural trauma. What he would have been prophesying into would have been a whole group of people who had experienced, or were just one generation removed from: the invasion of a foreign army, of the destruction of their homes, being carried off as slaves, and living in a pagan nation as refugees. It had been made very clear to this group of people that God is in control, and they were not.

They must have longed for their captivity to end. It must have gone on much longer than they’d hoped it would. It went on for decades. No one wants to endure captivity for decades. And here they were, allowed to go back home, and it didn’t feel like home at all.

One thing we can glean from the book of Haggai and the story of the Israelites in captivity and their return to Jerusalem is that God’s timing is so rarely our timing. (We’re going to talk about that a lot in this season of The Deep Well.) It usually takes much longer for God to move than any of us are comfortable with.

So here’s some honest questions for us to wrestle with:

• Is God’s clock broken?
• Is our clock running fast and His clock running slow?
• Why is our bent to perpetually accelerate the hand of God?

We get a glimpse of the “why” here in Haggai.

The book of Haggai records that Haggai received four messages from the Lord, and each one is precisely dated. (I think that’s important for us to look at as we’re considering God and time.) Let me read you those four messages or those four visitations from the Lord.

In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest. (Hag. 1:1)

In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet. (Hag. 2:1)

On the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet. (Hag. 2:10)

On the twenty-fourth day of the month, the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet. (Hag. 2:20)

If you believe, as Scripture encourages us to, that all Scripture is God-breathed, that all Scripture is useful, then that means we have to believe that these dates, this timeline found in the book of Haggai, is not accidental, that it matters.

As we study God in time and Scripture, what we won’t ever see is that God doesn’t care about time. Time matters to God. God created time. We see it at creation.

Genesis 1:2 tells us that “the earth was without form and void.” And then God created celestial bodies—the sun, which marks our days. The twenty-four-hour day was God’s idea. (I’ve often asked God to give me a twenty-eight-hour day, or a thirty-two-hour day so that I can get done what I need to get done, but the twenty-four-hour day was God’s idea. It’s His mercy that He doesn’t give me more time than I have.)

God created the moon, which marks our calendars.

But there are two timelines: the lower timeline, what we see, or, rather, what we see shadows of. I can’t see into the future, and I can’t even fully remember the past. All I can see is the little dot on the timeline where I currently sit. And even then, I only have my own perspective. If we’re honest, we don’t, we can’t have a very good grasp of time.

But there’s an upper timeline where God is at work, and not in just one direction, or even two. But God is at work in every direction.

Let’s go back to Haggai.

What did God say to him when He spoke?

Haggai 1:1–11 is the longest chunk of Scripture in this book where the Lord speaks to Haggai. And the word that God gave Haggai to deliver to His people was that they needed to rebuild the temple.

Now, if you read the whole thing, you’ll see that God’s people had been doing things their own way, and it had not been going well. And so, in this first word of prophecy, God reminds them, “Your crops aren’t doing great. Your families aren’t doing great. Your tires are in the mud.” (God didn’t say that. That’s my words.)

They had prioritized rebuilding their homes and had not yet rebuilt the temple.

Now, there’s lots of threads we could pull on about this passage. God’s people chose to rebuild their own homes before they rebuilt God’s home. Does God not want us to live in nice homes? Well, that’s not what I see in this passage.

My farm—I live on a little farm in the Midwest—is one of the clearest gifts from the Lord I’ve ever received. There is no way in my own strength, with my own resources, I could have made it happen. I never could have afforded it. I didn’t even know to look for it. But God gave it to me as a gift. And the home you live in, God gave it to you as a gift.

So we can’t look at Haggai 1 and say, “The takeaway here is that God doesn’t want us to live in nice homes.”

But what happened with the Israelites is they got the timing wrong.

Let’s look again at Haggai 1, verse 2–4: 

Thus says the Lord of hosts: "These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord." Then the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, "Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?"

Circle the word “time” there. God is saying something about the way the Israelites used their time.

Every single one of us has 24 hours in every single day.
Every single one of us has 10,080 minutes in our week.
Every single one of us has 31,536,000 seconds in an average year.

That’s true of presidents and world leaders, and it’s true of kindergartners. It’s true of grandmas, and it’s true of babies. While we are alive, we are each given the same allotment of time. And the book of Haggai urges us to ask, “How will you use it?”

It’s a reminder that as people of flesh, we have a tendency to use our time for our glory, not God’s glory.

You know how long the exiles lived in their homeland before they rebuilt the temple? At this point, when the Lord appeared to Haggai, they had been home for eighteen years—eighteen years in their homeland without even trying to rebuild God’s temple.

Do you know what we can do in eighteen years? We can raise a whole human. We can give him life. We can teach him the alphabet. We can teach him to love the Bible and to share his toys and to fold his laundry. And then we can launch them into the world.

My husband Jason won’t even let me talk about it. Every time I try to bring up sending our boys into the world, he gets a tear in his eye, and he says, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But I hope as a parent that I can do a lot with eighteen years.

A lot of life happened in those eighteen years for the Israelites, but they didn’t even try to rebuild the temple of God.

Now, the problem was not the lack of a building. Listen to Haggai 2:7 again: “And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts.”

God’s children were content to live without the glory and presence of God in their lives. The temple was where the Lord dwelled. He called them to rebuild the temple—not because He did not like the paneling in their homes. He wanted to do something bigger in their lives and on His divine timeline.

So they started to work. And it took them one month to get discouraged. In chapter 2, the word of the Lord came to Haggai again, and Haggai was inspired by God to ask: “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now?”

Their memory couldn’t be trusted. They looked back, and everything took on the patina of perfection, as it tends to do in our memories. They were just moving rubble, and they thought, We’re wasting our time. This is never going to be like it was in Solomon’s day.

And Haggai asked them, “Is it not as nothing in your eyes?” But listen to what God says to them in verse 4: 

Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, declares the Lord. Be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the Lord. Work, for I am with you, declares the Lord of hosts.

“I am with you.” That’s another phrase you can trace throughout your whole Bible, and it’s meant to give us great courage. (It’s more than a happy thought.)

God inhabits every moment of your life. In your mother’s womb, in what Scripture calls “the secret place,” God was there for every moment.

On the first day at your first job (which was being a McDonald’s French fry cook for me), God was there, in that moment.

And as you faced tragedy and loss and heartache and embarrassing mistakes and joys and triumphs, you can look back over the highest highs and the lowest lows of your life, and if you could see the upper and lower timelines, you’d see that God was there for every nano-second—not just physically in the spaces of your life, though God existed long before you did. There has never been a time when you were without God.

Here’s what we also know—a source of tremendous strength—there will never be a time when we are without God.

God is eternal. He has no beginning. He will have no end. If our lives are a line, then His presence is the paper it’s drawn on. He’s everywhere, and He’s always.

That means that two years from now, when you’re sitting in a doctor’s office, and you hear the words, “It’s cancer,” He will be there. He is already there.

When you stand at the grave of one of your beloved’s, you can know that He is good, and that He is sovereign in that moment as He has been good and sovereign in every other moment. He’s with you.

When people ask me to pray for them about something that’s coming up, I’ll often pray, “Lord, we know You’re already there.” And it comforts us every time.

So with that in mind, let’s look at the “a little while” in Haggai 2:6–7: For thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts.”

What was God promising through Haggai? By the time Jesus walked the earth, Herod had rebuilt the temple, and it was stunning. But that temple got destroyed, too, in A.D. 70. Through Haggai, was God prophesying about the New Jerusalem? Well, yes, and no.

Those Israelites who rebuilt the temple, they didn’t get to see it restored to the glory of Solomon’s day in their lifetime. And if that was the goal, they were, in fact, wasting their time.

But bend the timeline around what you can see. Know that God is at work in more than one direction in more than one moment.

John Piper preached a sermon on the book of Haggai, and he summed it up this way: “Take courage. You build more than you see.”

If you’ve ever asked, “Why is God moving so slowly?” Or questioned, “Is serving Jesus a waste of your time?” When you’re tempted to order your days in ways that make God anything less than central, hear the fulfillment of Haggai’s prophecy. We find it in Revelation 21:2 and 22.

And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.

There is a New Jerusalem all right. It’s not the one that Haggai and his family came back to. It’s the one that’s coming where the temple is God Himself. Now, they couldn’t see it at the time. We have such a limited view of time.

But God’s people in Haggai’s day were pointing forward to the moment when the lower timeline and the upper timeline are one, when we will be with God forever, and He will be a temple more spectacular than every temple before. He will be central to our lives, and we will be with Him “in a little while.”

Portia: That’s Erin Davis. First of all, I love me some Erin Davis, and I love her heart for God’s Word. I also love that she is not afraid to explore those intimidating passages of Scripture.

She has a whole Bible study coming from the book of Leviticus. It’s called, 7 Feasts: Finding Christ in the Sacred Celebrations of the Old Testament. I want to recommend that you check it out. I know that you will be blessed by digging into Scripture. I hope that it will help you to set godly rhythms and to prioritize your life in a way that reflects that God is King. To get a copy, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/TheDeepWell.

Erin and Portia Unscripted

So, Erin, each episode, I know that we have a little segment called, “Erin Unscripted.”

Erin: We do, but I’m going to change the name for this episode, because you and I were just having some lunch. You started telling a story that I want to capture for the podcast. So let’s call it, “Erin and Portia Unscripted” or “Portia and Erin Unscripted.” Either way is good.

Portia: Okay, let’s do it. Do you know that when you asked me to do this that Haggai is, seriously, one of my most favorite books of the Bible.

Erin: Portia, I feel like I know you pretty well, but I didn’t know Haggai was anybody’s favorite book of the Bible. The Lord knew. That’s kind of an interesting coincidence, because that’s what we’re jumping into in this episode. Why do you love the book of Haggai?

Portia: Because it was a call to take God off the back burner for me. Last year when I decided to make the decision to step away from my full-time job . . .

Erin: I remember.

Portia: Yes. I used to be the Executive Director of an arts-based non-profit.

Erin: We went out to lunch. You were wrestling.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: You knew what you needed to do, but you hadn’t yet quite submitted your letter of resignation.

Portia: I had not. I’m one of those people where if I’m wrestling, I’m like, “Lord, take me to Your Word.”

Erin: I love that about you.

Portia: The place that I ended up was Haggai.

Erin: How did you do that? Did you just open your Bible, and that’s where it landed? Or were you searching for something?

Portia: I don’t know if I was doing a study. Over the past year or two, I’d been in this season of really wanting to dig into the Minor Prophets more. I don’t know specifically that day how I ended up in Haggai, but it was certainly timely, because I felt like it was God giving me the answer that I had been seeking.

For a number of years I’d been wrestling professionally with the things that I was doing. I just felt like so many of my plans were frustrated. That’s what I would call them, “frustrated plans.” I’m like, “I’m going to work this job where I have a good fit. I’m going to do this.” And then I get in there, and BOOM, it’s like . . .

Erin: Tires in the mud. That’s what I see in the book of Haggai.

Portia: Yes. Tires in the mud. And so, as I was reading and studying, I just believed that God was saying to me, “You have spent enough time building your paneled house, doing your thing. I need to come off the back burner.”

Erin: Portia, I cannot believe that story because that’s exactly, when I look at Haggai, what I see.

Portia: It’s easy for us to say, “Well, what can I learn from the Minor Prophets?” or “That’s not applicable.” But this was so relevant and timely to what I was experiencing.

I guess you could say my lack of prioritizing the things of God and the things I knew for certain that God was calling me to do with my family, in ministry, all of those things . . . I was 100% certain about that, but I would always try to fit so much.

What would end up happening was the things of God would be put behind. I’d say, “Well, okay, I’m going to come back around to it.”

Erin: It’s that big rock/small rocks analogy here. Everybody’s heard it. Right? If you put the small rocks in the jar first, you can’t get the big rocks in. Put the big rocks in, you can get the small rocks in, too. We all have a tendency to put them in haphazardly at least, or let the small rocks fill up our days.

Portia: That’s exactly what I was doing. And so, after reading the book, I made the decision that I was going to leave my job. I was going to stop building my paneled house, seeking to do my own thing.

Erin: Building the kingdom of Portia.

Portia: Yes, the kingdom of Portia. I was like, “Okay, Lord. Let’s do what I know You want me to do. I don’t know what this is going to look like, but I just trust, and I’m going to move in faith.” And, honestly, that’s how I ended up here at Revive Our Hearts.

Erin: That’s amazing! If one woman listening to The Deep Well hears these verses out of Haggai and latches on to that phrase, “in a little while,” in the way that it is in these verses and reprioritizes her life so that God is central, then everything that you and I do is worth it.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: I love that story. I love that it can happen. We don’t have to just keep talking about our priorities and keep hoping that we’re going to get it right and keep putting the small rocks in.

Portia: That was such a radical move. I know it was all God. I would never ever quit a job.

Erin: It was a good job.

Portia: It was a good job. That’s been my career for a long time. But, “Oh, just the uneasiness, just the unsettledness.” Like I said, the frustrated plans. It felt like everything I was putting my hands on was just turning . . . I don’t care how well thought out I thought I was putting everything together, it would still end up just not what I wanted it to be, or the desired outcome wouldn’t happen.

Erin: You know how the Lord described it in Haggai 1? “Like putting things in a bag with holes.”

Portia: Yes!

Erin: I love that picture.

Portia: It just fell right on out. He does this; He allows this to happen because, ultimately, it gets your attention. I had to ask myself, “What am I doing? What’s wrong here? What’s going on?”

It’s like the Lord saying, “I have to be first. My things are first. I’m the priority.”

Erin: Yes.

Portia: We see that all in this book—even the temple. I love what you talk about in this episode where you say, “It’s not just about the building, it’s about the priority.”

And really, as I listened to you, the word that comes to mind is: spiritual inertia. To kind of flesh this out, we know that the Israelites had come back, and they did do a little bit. They laid the foundation of the temple, but then they stopped. They started doing everything else that was a priority to them instead of going back to the thing that was most important and central to their faith.

Erin: I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of spiritual inertia before, but objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest.

Portia: Exactly.

Erin: They had directed their energies, or stopped their energies, in the wrong direction.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: So, Portia, I know there are going to be people listening that are going to feel like we just reached through the microphones and we’re right where they are. They feel that inertia. Their momentum, their energy is going in the wrong direction, and they know they want to reorganize those priorities.

What is her first steps? She could sit and spin that around in her mind for a long time, which you probably did.

Portia: I did.

Erin: But eventually, she has to move to change the inertia.

Portia: Yes. It’s really taking an assessment of: “What does God value? What is most important to God?” And then walking in that direction.

I said “walking”—not sprinting. Sometimes it’s the little, small, faithful steps. So, for me, the first step was just saying, “I’m going to let this job go. I’m going to let what I’ve known as my professional career, I’m going to let this go and make one step toward reorganizing or reprioritizing my life in a way that reflects that God is King.”

Erin: And let’s not romanticize it, because I was with you on that journey.

Portia: It wasn’t easy.

Erin: You knew you were going to resign your job, and that’s all you knew.

Portia: That’s it.

Erin: You didn’t know if there was another job coming. You didn’t know if you were going to go a long period without a job.

Portia: Nothing. People see everything now. They see, “Oh, she’s fine.” We didn’t have any idea. I didn’t have any idea that things were going to pan out this way. So it was a small step of, “Well, this is the direction I think You want me to go where I really think I’ve been experiencing conviction in this area, so I’m just going to make that step.” And then, “Lord, I trust that whatever the next step is behind it, You’re going to line that up.”

Erin: Well, to take it back to the Israelites in Haggai’s day, they just started moving rocks.

Portia: Yes, that’s it.

Erin: They just started moving rubble. I don’t know that they knew much more than that. But really, isn’t that it? You just start moving rubble.

Portia: Yes. You just start moving rubble. I’m reminded of someone that we listened to the other day that was teaching us who talked about how the Israelites, literally, as they were building, it was, literally, first just like cleaning up the debris. Just like you said, moving the rubble out of the way, moving the things out of the way to get that fresh start.

I think that shows an intentionality. I really believe that God honors that when we begin to say, “Oh, what can I move out of the way? What can I do to be more faithful in the way that I live, in a way that shows or reflects that God is the most important thing in my life?”

That’s what the Israelites had failed to do. This is why He’s fussing at them. He sent the prophet Haggai to say, “You’re doing this, and you’re doing.” He’s laying the law down. It’s not because He’s trying to be a mean, old God, but because He is trying to remind them of who their first love is? Who is on the throne? Who is the one that’s been faithful to them, bringing them through the wilderness, into the Promised Land, carrying them for years and years and years?

Erin: Well, here they were, His people, living in the Promised Land like every other people group around them.

Portia: Yes. No distinction.

Erin: It really was the temple that set them apart—not just that they had a temple, but that they had THE temple, where the presence of God dwelled. Here they were just trying to build a city that looked like every other city. He had every right to chastise them because they needed to live set apart.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: And, really, our priorities should be set apart. If our priorities for our days, our lives, our families, look just like the priorities of our non-Christian friends (and I hope we have non-Christian friends) that should be a little warning flare.

Portia: It should.

Erin: It should be reflected in our priorities.

Portia: It should. I feel like we’re on the other side of Christ coming the first time. So we understand it’s not about the building. But back then, the temple was so central to their faith. To say that “we’re not going to do anything,” essentially, what they were saying was, “God, You are not important.”

Erin: From Haggai, I learned to prioritize God as central.

Portia: Same. He does not need to be put on the back burner.

Erin: He won’t be.

Portia: Exactly. And when He is, you can best believe those plans are going to be frustrated.

Erin: All right. So God, front burner living. You skipped to front burner living.

Portia: Yes.

Erin: What difference has it made?

Portia: Peace. Peace. Flourishing. I still experience hard moments, but there is such a peace about just the direction. I don’t feel like my plans are frustrated anymore, even on rough days. I had a really rough day yesterday with travel and all of that, but I could still see the faithfulness of God. It’s almost like the blessings.

Erin: You’re not putting things in a bag with holes?

Portia: Yes. It’s peace. It’s being able to actually flourish, to prosper in godly, God-honoring ways.

Erin: Hey, Portia, I heard you mention Grounded. There’s probably some women listening who don’t know what that is. We need to clue them in.

Portia: Yes. Well, Grounded is a podcast and a videocast from Revive Our Hearts. We record live every Monday.

Erin: It is live—anything can happen.

Portia: We love to give you all a weekly infusion of hope and perspective. So we encourage you to tune in. If you want to learn more, just visitwww.ReviveOurHearts.com/Grounded.

On the next episode of The Deep Well, we are going to continue exploring this topic of “in a little while.” So, Erin, what are we going to hear?

Erin: We’re going to turn in our Bibles to the book of Isaiah. We’re going to see how that phrase, “in a little while,” applies to God’s anger.

The Deep Well is a production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

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