So you say you wanna do things differently from the world, right? But you're not sure how. Maybe you're having trouble having problems with boundaries and helping people understand that you're actually the one making the decisions for your pregnancy and birth, and you're doing it a little different than they may be used to.

​This is gonna be the episode for you. These are the rules both for your birth and for this podcast. I hope that piqued your interest just a little bit. Let's dive right on in and find out what I'm talking about.

If you're listening to this podcast (or reading this blog), I'm gonna go ahead and make an assumption—and that thing that I'm gonna assume is that you are wanting a different outcome.

You want something to go differently maybe than what you've seen in your friends or maybe what you've seen in your own birth. Maybe you've had things go wrong and you want it different, but that's hard for many of us to do because we know that when we are fighting a system that has things going one way and we wanna do it a different way, that can lead to conflict.

And a lot of us are uncomfortable with conflict. Many of us are just, you know, sweet ladies trying to have babies and grow our families, and we're not really into having the fights.

​One of the big things I wanna be able to equip you with through this show is the tools to be able to make good decisions and also defend them if needed. But I didn't want you to have to have those fights—I want you to be prepared in a way that the fight is dealt with before it ever happens.

You can understand what a blessing it was when a friend at church gave me a book a week or so ago. It really hasn't been very long, and it's called The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon.

If any of you have read that, you're gonna probably know where I'm going with this, but my gut tells me that most of you probably have not read this book.

She actually gave it to me not for me, but for someone else in my life. But I decided to read it first and—oh my—as I read it, light bulbs are just going off right and left.

​I started taking notes and writing things down, and in my head developed this line of rules that I think are gonna help you all a lot.

The story is about a bus driver named Joy and a rider named George. The “rules of Joy’s bus” that George learned over his time of riding the bus were all about attitude and direction.

I don’t want to go too much into it because it’s such a good story, and ladies, it is such an easy read. I highly, highly recommend you either buy it off Amazon or check it out from your library—read it on the Libby app, something like that—so that you can see what I'm talking about and how it applies.

This was actually a business story, but it can be applied to so many different things—and you’ll see how we’re gonna apply it here.

I decided that we need some rules for this community so that we can stay on the path to doing things God’s way and not get knocked off course by people who maybe aren’t always looking out for our best interest.

Rules give us boundaries—which are healthy and helpful.

So these rules are for you to use to set those healthy boundaries around your pregnancy, your birth, and even the time after that, when people may look at you cross-eyed when you tell them how you did things.

But guess what? It’s also for this podcast.

I know that what I'm sharing here goes against the grain, and I know that some people aren't gonna like it, and that what I share is gonna seem counterintuitive to a lot of people with medical minds.

So these rules are for my listeners too—especially some that may hear what I'm saying and think, “Uh uh, that doesn’t make sense.”

​I want you to listen to these rules before you tell me I'm wrong. You'll see what I mean as I go.

What is “What About-ism”?

That’s when you tell somebody a way that you're gonna do something, or you tell them a story about a certain thing, and they're like, “Yeah, but what about when this happened?”

Or, “What about in my birth when that happened, and my baby would’ve died if I had done it that way?”

Have you heard those stories yet? If not, hang in there—you probably will.

You know that birth is different for everyone. Pregnancy is different for everyone. We all, of course, have different circumstances.

But here's the deal: you can spend your time telling me why something won't work for you, or you can instead glean what nuggets you might be able to use from anything that I share with you, because very few things in life are all or nothing, right?

There's usually something you can get out of it.

I know that some people have different circumstances. I know, y'all—I’ve taken care of them. I have been the provider for all of those circumstances. I have been the one seeing them firsthand.

And yet I still see that a different way of doing things very, very well might have led to a different outcome.

It doesn’t change all the different circumstances of all the things that can go wrong—it doesn’t change the general truth of God’s design and His plan.

We have so many factors in our culture that are messing things up before we even get to start thinking about having babies.

And that's what I want to get you to understand—that if you’ll make different choices early, you’ll have different outcomes when that baby comes around.

We've been sold a lie that the things we see happen in our care, our pregnancies, and our labors just happen by chance—and yet while some might happen by chance, often there’s a cause we don’t see.

So we want to spend our energy removing whatever causes we can through what we learn over the course of this podcast and over the course of your pregnancy—so that we can slowly draw nearer to God's design and further from the world's broken system.

Don’t “What About” me. Examine you. Spend that energy, instead of coming to me and saying, “Yeah, but what about this and what about that?”—rewind in your head. Think about all the factors that led to that moment that you feel maybe wasn't even preventable.

Is that true? Are you sure? Take some time and examine it before you automatically write it off.

​When it comes to your family around you, if they come at you with “what abouts,” tell them the same things I just told you here. Yes, everybody's different and everybody's got different circumstances, but you are making decisions that are best for you and your baby and your pregnancy.

Own them.

This is a tough one, and it's all about being grown up—taking responsibility for your actions.

We live in a world where nobody takes responsibility. Everybody wants to blame somebody else or try to get over on somebody. Don't do that. Own your decisions and take responsibility.

It’s easy to blame, but what does that accomplish? Realize that every action has consequences—some are good and some are bad.

I just had this conversation with my 8-year-old the other day about how everything you do leads to some result, and good actions are much more likely to get good results.

Bad actions, bad results. You get it? This isn’t hard, but it’s hard to apply.

What you gotta do is just educate yourself and do the best you can with the information that you have—and then own what comes from it.

​Once you've educated yourself thoroughly and you’ve made your decision, then whatever becomes the result, own it.

The word enthusiasm comes from a Greek root—entheos—meaning “inspired or filled with the divine.”

Think about that! That enthusiasm, that excitement for having a baby the way God intended, is filled with the divine. The divine is Him, ladies. That enthusiasm, that positive energy, that excitement—it’s Him coming through you, seeping through your pores as you think about how He made you to do this.

Focus on being enthusiastic, and your energy will do the talking.

Did you know that every cell in your body beats to the frequency of the heart? That’s something Joy talked about in The Energy Bus. Every cell in your body beats to the frequency of the heart—and everyone around you will beat to your frequency.

You are the heart of your family, and that’s what matters. Anyone else who chooses to get on the bus will have to adopt that excitement and enthusiasm—or maybe they just need to stay off the bus.

That goes for this podcast, too. I’m excited if you can’t tell! I love sharing this information with you. I love helping mamas realize the beauty of what they can have for their birth, their pregnancy, and their motherhood after the baby’s here.

​If that’s not your gig, that’s fine—but don’t bring us down. We’re here to have a blessed time in the Lord as we grow our babies and look to Him for our model, our strength, and our courage.