Our Guest: Melanie Bedogne
Melanie Bedogne is a native Arkansan, aspiring writer, and simply an everyday Christ-follower seeking to invest her life for eternal impact. Mom to four beautiful girls and wife to Jason, Melanie loves coffee, cooking healthy meals with her family, and the priceless gift of authentic community. Reach out to her on Instagram at @melaniebedogne. She’d love to connect with you!
Key Thoughts and Scriptures:
1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 NLT But we don’t need to write to you about the importance of loving each other, for God himself has taught you to love one another. Indeed, you already show your love for all the believers throughout Macedonia. Even so, dear brothers and sisters, we urge you to love them even more. Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. Then people who are not believers will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others.
- Melanie’s search for approval was an attempt to bring stability to her circumstances in the midst of a lot of uncertainty.
- The Lord changes us because He wants us to be in His image.
- When we ask Him, God will meet us with peace and empowerment.
- God interacts with us on a personal level.
- His work in our lives is a process.
- Melanie began to, in her quiet time with the Lord, journal out prayers and memories, and begin asking the Lord to enter those painful places with her and help her insert God’s truth.
Isaiah 9:6 NKJV …And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
“There was a shift and it was because I had become whole. He had worked a healing work in me that only He could do.” – Melanie
- Being in Christian community is important and impactful.
- Not all of our decisions are big or drastic. But Melanie knew that she really needed His direction.
- God was ministering to her that sense of belonging that she’d struggled with when she was a child.
- It was in the context of community that God helped Melanie deal with her fear of rejection and taught her how to develop deep, caring relationships with other believers.
1 Peter 1:22 NIV Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.
- There are places where we just need the truth of God’s word. We need to encounter Him because there’s places in us that we can’t do on our own and we are broken.
God has met us here and He’s placed us here. – Melanie
- You have to open yourself up and let people know you, if you want to be known and you want to know them.
- First, you have to show up, but not just once, you show up again and again.
- You do it even when you don’t feel it.
- Next, show up with your true self.
- We really can’t develop that deep, authentic community until we’re willing to show some of those vulnerable spaces, those places that aren’t really polished and put together.
- We all have areas of brokenness.
- True community really forms when you’re able to lean in with people in their hard spaces and walk through those places, pray through those places, encourage people in those places and let them do the same.
- Faith community needs to be centered around the Word and around prayer.
- First, you have to show up, but not just once, you show up again and again.
Melanie can look back over hard times and remember being carried by the grace of the Lord in a really precious way.
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- God brings life even in the midst of pain, even in the midst of loss, even in the midst of things we don’t understand.
- “When you lose someone so big in your life, it creates a big hole. And yet, he was simply a reflection of the love of my heavenly father.”
- God is good and meets us in our pain.
- Losses can cultivate in us an eye towards eternity.
- That place of true belonging is where we’re gonna be together forever with our Lord.
- A life that’s poured out for Christ in the world can take many forms.
- True success is about obedience, surrender, and that day in, day out faithfulness.
- In the upside down kingdom that we serve, the one where you’re great when you’re small, our ambition can be to steward what God puts in our path on a daily basis.
- Small things matter deeply and add up over time.
- “What if I dream big about being in a faith community that makes an impact on the world around us simply just by living faithful lives and showing up in the way that God allows us to?”
- Greatness comes through serving and laying down our will to truly tap into the fullness of His purpose.
Esther’s story
- Esther walked into circumstances beyond her control.
- God truly is involved in the intimate details of our lives no matter where we’re placed.
- What can God do with a willing vessel who just simply obeys, who simply chooses to say yes to the Lord?
Ephesians 4 NIV As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all… when you heard about Christ …You were taught… to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness…
- Paul talks about living life in a way that is antithetical to the world’s way.
- And that will cause people to take notice so we can share about Christ.
- Let’s let the Holy Spirit reframe our thinking of how Christ has called us to live.
Colossians 1:9-10 NLT So we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about you. We ask God to give you complete knowledge of his will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding. Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better
Book Recommendation by Melanie:
- So Long Insecurity by Beth Moore
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