Well, hello and welcome to our time together on the Live Out Loud podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Kirkfleet, curator of the space, ellieandtheboys.co over on Instagram.
I'm a mother to four full of life children.
I'm a wife, a home-schooler, a homemaker, and someone who is just walking through life
experiencing one day at a time just like you.
I am not here to tell you how to live your best life or how to live at all.
I am here for conversations and to get us thinking about how to do life as best we can
with the wisdom we have gained through living this life.
All right, good morning and welcome back to today's recording, which I tried to do yesterday
and I kept getting interruptions from the kids, which were absolutely fine because
one of my kids came and called me quickly as I was recording.
He's like, mom, you have to come see.
So I ran outside to see and he wanted to show me this beautiful sunrise, I mean, sunset.
And it was, the sky was brilliantly alive with colors.
And then on the other side was this beautiful rainbow.
And I thought it was so precious that he wanted to share that moment with me.
So I welcomed the interruptions, but here we are again today together.
And I'm hoping to get this one recorded and finished so we can just enjoy the next few
minutes together. Episode number one, the idea of living out loud. Let's go.
Have you ever read a story about someone who is truly inspiring, where you almost can't even
put the book down because the pages are full of moments lived in an all out way.
We are just pulled into these heroic stories where people overcome their circumstances and
then the ones where the underdog wins or where someone stands up for justice,
even when they're the only ones fighting.
We have a book that sits on our school bookshelf and we like to read it occasionally as part
of our morning collective.
And in these pages we find stories like Cory Tin Boom and Martin Luther in the 1500 and
Helmut Hübner from World War II and then George Mueller and Wesley Powell who fearlessly
explored the Colorado River canyons.
And then we take stories that we read that we just want to sit and watch them on our screen
because they are truly inspiring.
We take the book of Shackleton and his crew from The Endurance.
They faced circumstances that most of us would never be interested in facing.
I know I wouldn't.
The idea of living on a waste Iceland for a couple of years before seeing another human
being outside of their own party and having to sleep in disgusting sleeping bags and soaked
through no food, eating blubber for days, I am not interested in that.
Yet I find myself wanting to read more and more of the book because the lessons of leadership
and teamwork and endurance are heavy in the pages of the book,
which happens to be the same name of the book, The Endurance, and if you haven't heard it on
audio or read the book, oh it's so good.
And then there are these stories like Elizabeth Elliott and all the things that she faced in
her life after she lost Jim Elliott and her husband when they were living in South America
and how easy it would have been for her to step back into her comfort zone, into what she knew,
but she didn't.
And her books are so intriguing and interesting to read because of the way she lived life.
All of these stories have a common thread running through them.
Every person in those books, the books we cannot put down and that we have to keep reading about,
lived life in a way that is bigger than themselves.
The common thread through all of them is that people who were facing life,
they were facing it in an all out way.
They weren't holding back, but they were living a common thread through them.
They were living all out.
And that is the idea that I want to talk about today on this podcast with you,
about the idea of living out loud and what that really means and bring it home as we take inventory
of our next year and we're looking at New Year's resolutions or making goals, making plans and our
dreams and our hopes.
I think there's even something powerful in how we think about these things, how we make resolutions
and how we set goals because I can often look at my list or look at the things that God has called me to
and think they are so much bigger than I am.
And we are right.
They should be bigger than we are.
They should scare us in some way.
If it is a God size dream, it should scare us because I cannot accomplish it on my own.
But whenever I decide to just live out loud, it is me saying,
okay, I am going to step into whatever this thing that scares me is and I'm going to go for it.
Even though I have been using this phrase for several years now,
I really want to fully step into it in this next season, the idea of living out loud.
And in a way, it's kind of become a small joke in our own home.
Whenever I am standing at the top of a cliff with the kids waiting to jump in and I'm not
making them a mind to go for it and jumping into those swirling river below me and my husband will
say, what about living out loud?
And we use it jokingly in ways.
But the truth behind that is that so often in life, we are okay with staying in a comfortable spot.
We would rather conform to these small spaces that we have already outgrown by making ourselves
fit the confines of what was instead of just stepping into the unknown where growth can happen.
We sat around with the kids on New Year's Eve and you know what's amazing about living on the West Coast
is the fact that you can watch the Times Square midnight countdown and the ball drop live well
before 12am. You don't even have to stay up till 12 with your kids and you can all watch it.
We watched it in our living room and had the best time and then we can all go to bed at a decent
time. We don't have to wake up extremely tired and if you are a parent over 30, you know that
it's important to get in bed at a decent time. Anyway, we had gathered together as a family in
our living room sitting on the floor on the couch and just had a special moment together of looking
at the next season and then we took time to pray over the next season together.
As we were praying, I was listening to the kids talk about thank God for the last season that
we were in and where he had brought us and what he had done and the blessings that he poured out
on us and his mercy and grace and on and on and it was beautiful to hear their hearts behind them
and then to hear them cry out to Father God to just take us through the next season well.
And I was just again overwhelmed at the thought that God has given us life for today. He has given
us a chance to live in this moment today. In 2024, here we all are and as my turn came around to pray,
I asked for boldness for this next season for every one of us to step into life with boldness,
into our relationships, our conversations, our interactions, our daily moments with a boldness
that is just beyond us and that is what living out loud truly is, is just living this life
with a boldness that is not our own. It's living in a way that is bigger than ourselves.
And as one of my sons put it when we were praying together was God help us live life with you because
we cannot live it alone. We cannot do this on our own and it comes back to when we do step into
living out loud and living with boldness it is saying I'm not enough. I cannot do this on my own
but I want to step into everything that God has for me. And so as we look over the promise of this
new season, the new year, as we take inventory of the next year and write out our hopes and our
dreams and maybe some of us make resolutions or maybe we find a word that speaks to us,
I hope that we are open to what is to come. Saying I will live out loud invites just an
openness to stepping into what God has before us. And this openness comes with a willingness and this
willingness has to be there because so often God calls us to things that are way outside of our
comfort zone. I mean hello we're sitting right here doing this podcast something that is so
outside of my comfort zone into what seems normal in our little world but I have found that living
out loud allows me to say yes to more opportunities than saying no to them. It would be so much easier
to say no but I can say yes because of the mindset that I'm in the openness that I have allowed
to be in. And I don't want to forget that not all things are big some things are small like talking
to the person in line behind me at the supermarket or writing a small note to my child to put on
their pillow. I have to be willing to say yes to the things that will be set before me and before
I know it I am going to be living in an all out way. Have you ever seen your kids interact in a
group setting and you can tell whenever one of them is holding back but because you know their
character and personality you just want them to fully shine and to show everything they are and
not hold back. I have to think that that's how God the Father thinks about us. He created us in such
a beautiful way and whenever I hold back I am not allowing what he created me to be to shine forth
and and I think that he would say just go for it put yourself out there live boldly because I am
living through you I am going to shine through you and that's just what I want to live out loud
to live this life fully so that at the end of my life there was nothing left on the table. I took
it all just fully expectant as to what God was going to do with my small attempts knowing that
he was going to carry me through. I want to live with intention for the kingdom of God
and so as we start this next season together let's stand up in boldness and go for it whatever
that looks like for you because it will look differently for each of us but if we all live
out loud we can impact the world around us in a much bigger way.