Embracing God's Vision: Ciara Laine Myers' Transformational Journey

What happens when you disconnect from the digital world for a year? This happened to Ciara Laine Myers, award-winning entrepreneur and author of the book, "Glasses Off: Seeking God When Your Vision Is Gone." Imagine the courage it takes to step back from your digital presence, not for a digital detox, but a spiritual one. Join us as we have a powerful conversation with Ciara about her year-long journey of faith and discovery.

Through her book, Ciara shares how that period of disconnection allowed her to discern God's voice better, and in the process, she discovered and embraced a new vision for her life. But it wasn't easy. Ciara recounts a pivotal moment when, in a fit of frustration and anger, she received the title of her book during prayer. Ciara takes us through an exploration of the Bible beyond the pure gathering of information, the importance of daily communion with God, and how being a visionary differs from being a dreamer. Learn from Ciara's seven practical steps on how to embrace and fulfill God's vision for your life.

Ciara's desire to provide value for others led her on a transformative path, and she shares this and more, including her journey into public speaking, with us. With Ciara's journey as a guide, discover how you too can unlock the power of pursuing God's vision for your life.

Order book from Amazon

Connect with Ciara:

Website: https://www.ciaralainemyers.com/

Monthly Newsletter: https://ciaralainemyers.substack.com/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.pt/ciaralainemyers/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ciaralainemyers/

Counseling Services: https://intentional-counseling.com

Counseling YouTube Channel (featuring Paul Myers): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQBREwLFoj0BS0Ta0YT0PHA

Ciara's personal blog:  https://veiledfree.com/

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

I'd like to welcome Sierra Lane Meyers to the Pivotal People podcast today. Sierra is an author, as you know. I absolutely love to read and I have a little rule I can't do a podcast unless I have read the person's entire book. I only had a couple of days to read Sierra's book and I thought, oh, I'm not going to be able to finish it. But I actually couldn't put it down, so I finished it in a day and a half, so welcome. Her book is called Glasses Off Seeking God when your Vision is Gone, and she is also the founder of intentional counseling, so she is an entrepreneur. Her book unpacks the need to find our place in the world and it guides readers to solidify their faith in God, to find their true calling. Love it, sierra. Welcome. Thank you so much for taking your time to be with us. I'd love to hear more about who you are before we launch into your book.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Hi, stephanie. So thank you for spending time with me. I've listened to a lot of your podcast episodes and I'm just honored to be one of the special guests, so I am just a contradiction. You know, I tried to think who is Sierra and I'm going to put it in my author bio and I'm going to write it, and what I came up with was Sierra Lane Meyers is, like you, a beautifully complicated, multifaceted human. She loves her family and friends and she loves to read. Like you, she's not just one thing she's a mother and an award winning business owner. She's both shy and silly, a book and sports type of girl. So I think that probably best sums it up. I have two little ones, I'm married, we have a family business and, yeah, I love the Lord your family, your family business is your counseling practice.

Speaker 2: 2:20

So my husband is a counselor and he was working 70 hours a week and I just told him you know I miss you, I'm having a hard time in our marriage and our kids, and so I basically started a group practice and hired a bunch of therapists and got the space and now we get to help people. Help people, which is really nice, how wonderful.

Speaker 1: 2:41

So you're. You're handling the business end and he gets to be. You know, do what he loves to do as a counselor. I love that my spouses work together and I imagine you have more time for your family then. Yes, I love that. That's great, because there's a lot of ways you could have gone with that. I like that happy ending. Yeah, we like to work together, so it's nice, that's great. And you're in Texas, right? What are we talking about? 107 today, what is the number?

Speaker 2: 3:09

I mean, I think it's still in good, maybe like 97 is feeling great, that's not bad.

Speaker 1: 3:15

I'm in Frisco, Colorado, and it is September 5th and I woke up this morning and it was 37 degrees, but it's going to get up to 65. So it's going to be hot Glasses off. I love the title of your book the cover you're just going to see. It's so cute. It's Sierra, who, by the way, looks like Meryl Streep. It's your first book, so what inspired you to write this book? You've got a couple young kids. You've got a lot going on with your business. Where do you find time to write the book? Having read the book, I can see this was really on your heart. You know you wrote this book for a reason. What was it that got you to do it?

Speaker 2: 3:54

Well, initially, the title of the book inspired me, so let me give you some context. I was doing all the things and I just felt God telling me to stop. So I was taking pictures for brands, other brands, as well as my blog, as well as doing the practice and with the kids, and I felt him telling me to stop the digital space. And you know just from all of that that if you stop for an extended period of time, I mean it's kind of over, you know. And so I kept thinking it wasn't the Lord, because it just didn't make any sense and I had just started making money as a creative, which is hard to do and it's fulfilling, and it allowed me to be at home, which are both important for me to be creative and to be at home with the kids while they're young. And so I thought, maybe that stop impression was just maybe Satan or fear or whatever, but it just was so persistent for like a year maybe, and I finally decided to obey and I stopped and I thought I'd feel peace. But what I felt was like oh, this is such an irrational decision, I'm going to start my business away. This is what did I just do. And one day I was kind of I'll call it angry praying If you've ever angry prayed at God before, oh, yeah, yeah. And before I could even finish, one of the thoughts he just interrupted me with his voice and his narrative was the book title, and so it was the working title at the time. We've since changed it a little bit, but it was similar. It was glasses off. How does he go when your vision is blurred? Okay, so that's all I got. And so, if you can imagine me in this moment years ago, frustrated, confused, I just stopped what was starting to be successful and I heard that title and I thought, oh no, I'm going to go blind. Because I wasn't a writer, I took that literally God is going to take away my vision. So I started researching all these books without obitometry. How to tell my kids, oh, I'm going to go blind, mommy's going to lose her vision. It was so literal. And then, thankfully, because God is gracious, he was like no, sweet child, I'm not going to take your eyesight away. Like who do you think you are? Paul, you know, you just need you to write a book with that title. So initially, technically, god's voice totally inspired the text.

Speaker 2: 6:23

And then fast forward a year I'm in a writing boot camp and they asked us to summarize our book with one word. And so I asked my husband because he's much better with concise language I said hey, babe, what do you? What do you think the book is about? If you had one, because he'd read it and at that time I had like maybe 36,000 words, so it wasn't finished. But he said it's about vision. Ah, ah, moment, god was talking about spiritual blindness and vision.

Speaker 2: 6:54

So then I scrapped like 24,000 words and started over Wow, and I wrote the book I needed to read. And so, because I had stopped blogging and stopped posting and stopped creating content, the audience was not there, agencies were gone, they weren't going to pay me anymore and God was calling me to this brand new industry to write, which I had no connections, no English degree, nothing to go on other than faith, basically, and I knew I wasn't the only person that needed a book about clarity and discernment and practical steps when God calls you to something. So I wrote the book for the person that feels that tension of like. I know God has something for me, but I can't quite decipher what it is or how to go from there, and so it was really meta, you know, I wrote it while he was writing it with me and I love that.

Speaker 1: 7:49

And what I like about your book is that it's two things. Yes, it's inspiring. I do think it'll make people say, hey, wait a minute, god has something for me. What is it? But it's also very practical because that's a big step for someone to go from what is out there for me and, by the way, I think God has lots of possibilities. I don't think there's just one thing and I think we can. You know we can start taking steps and it can modify along the way. The key is, you know in your book talking about just having trust and faith in God every step of the process, and you know, when we mess up, I kind of think he can go with the flow, he can figure out how to make it work in the middle of what we step into. You had a number of stories. Can you share a significant challenge that you faced as you were on your path to finding your purpose and how you overcame it?

Speaker 2: 8:38

Sure. So when I was younger, like my formative high school years, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, which so I had my first grand mal seizure after prom, in front of all my friends and their parents.

Speaker 2: 8:52

And I went on to have multiple seizures after that. And so just dealing with you know, you're already in a weird age and then medication, side effects for medication it just felt not fun and isolating. But then I guess, as an adult, the most significant challenge that I faced was I found myself in a season of single motherhood in my early 20s, and so I was working and raising a toddler full time, and at that time I just graduated college and so it's in the time most of my peers are networking and building skills and community, and I was just like head down in traffic, working, changing diapers, keeping her up late so we could have quality time together and then rinse and repeat, you know, for years. And so I cried a lot during those times, of course, but I also grew so close to the Lord, so it was heartbreaking but it was beautiful. And then I've had many other challenges, like we all do. There's I've had miscarriage, health issues, trauma abuse, familial problems, things like that. But I will say the challenges made me grow up quickly, it made me resilient, it showed me where my priorities were and then overcoming them.

Speaker 2: 10:06

As far as figuring out my callings and things, I just kept doing the next step, the next right thing, and so it took time for me to figure that out. What transformed my whole mindset toward it was reading a study Bible, reading it out loud, reading the footnotes for context. And then I know, not every, not all of your listeners like to read, as as I mean. Maybe they do, but some people are more musically inclined and so, like my husband's, really good at the drums, so he finds worship artists he can really connect with and he'll worship God that way. Or my daughters can draw really well, and so they'll I'll read them a graphic novel or a comic book Bible or something visual for them. So yeah, for me it was just, it was adversity and it was the word yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:59

One parts of your book that I just loved. You said it so beautifully and I'm paraphrasing this. I'm not reading it. But you talked about how, your daily date with God. But you talked about going to the Bible for information. You know, we dig into the Bible for information and knowledge, and what you actually learned was that you weren't getting information, you were experiencing God, and that's the evolution. And boy did that speak to me. I also am a huge believer in a daily date with God. It gets to the point where it's not a discipline. It's what you love to do, and that you nailed it. I had never articulated it that way, because it's about experiencing God when you get to that point, not just looking for knowledge. You can explain that much better than I can. Can you please talk about the whole daily date with God and what that meant in your life?

Speaker 2: 11:52

I had just been stuck for so many years and I was just. It was just terrible. It's an isolating place to be. If any of your listeners are unsure of their direction or they feel that tension and that pull, and they know they're not lazy, they know they have something to offer, but it's just not very clear. I was just in that the whole time and so the only, my only real option was okay, I need to cling to, I need to read the Bible to figure out who God is, not what I should do. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: 12:28

I'd always read it, even as a kid. I read it like, okay, don't do this, you do this, you don't do this, you do this. I'll just keep reading it and God will show me his will, which he does. But I think the heart change was like when I just started to read and worship and pray to try to discover him and learn him and walk with him. Then the door is open. Then it's no longer about what I can get from the scripture, from the text. It's like, oh, it's all about you, and now I get it. It had never been real for me before. I had heard so many people talk about it. I grew up in church. But once I actually started reading it to just fall in love with him instead of kind of reading it like critically, like I don't know who, kind of like prove you to me when I just started to become open-minded yeah, it was really beautiful.

Speaker 1: 13:24

I love that so much and that's why you're going to love her book. That is just so beautiful. Sierra, you talked in the book and there are so many different terms that we use Purpose, calling, dreaming, vision and you had a really interesting way of talking about the difference between being a dreamer and a visionary. Can you talk about that?

Speaker 2: 13:51

Sure. So this concept was birds from a conversation I had with one of my best friends, sitting on the back of her tailgate overlooking the water in my little small country hometown and I was crying. I was expressing to her my concern for following an idea that I felt was from the Lord, and I told her I don't want to be one of those people that has a dream but then never does anything with it. And she just looked me square in the eyes and said you are both, you are a dreamer and a doer.

Speaker 2: 14:24

And immediately after that I wrote this whole chapter about dreaming and being a visionary, and I had heard Martin Luther King's quote where he said a dreamer has their eyes closed and a visionary has their eyes open. And to me that meant that dreaming was almost a selfish act, like it was focused on the inner self and it wasn't necessarily for the benefit of others. And so to me I thought that they kind of go together, because the Lord does speak to people in dreams. He spoke one time to me in a dream which I wrote about in chapter five, and so I do believe totally in dreams. But then I think the problem is, if we stop there, then we don't actually manifest into vision. So for me, vision is manifesting something immaterial to the material for the benefit of others.

Speaker 1: 15:17

Or the benefit of others. That is the distinction between the two. Dreaming is, I read recently, the whole idea of legacy and history, and history is what we've done. Legacy is what we have leaving for the future. How do we feed into other people, how do we support other people for them to carry out God's purpose in their lives? I love that. So the whole idea of vision is embracing other people in your dream, benefiting other people in your dream, and I love that.

Speaker 1: 15:53

So you actually and I said your book is inspirational because you share so many. I love the real personal stories and you're right, we can all relate to these. You're just brave enough to write about them so that the rest of us can step into it. But you're also super practical, which I appreciate. So your business side is coming out here. You're like OK, I'm not just going to leave people hanging, I'm going to tell them how they can get there too. You had seven practical steps to help readers embrace and fulfill God's vision. I don't know if you can do all seven, but can you talk about some of those to help the people who are listening, who would like to get started?

Speaker 2: 16:31

I'll quickly go over them. I call the seven step system the vision journey. So the number one is recognize the vision. Something fun they can do right now is just write down a list of their ideas that they feel like might be from the Lord and then rape the sense of urgency they feel next to it, ten being the most urgent. So for me, if write the book was the idea open a boutique, things I talked about, have another child. You write down all these ideas. You rate the sense of urgency. Mine would have been a ten. I have to get this book out. It's a ten.

Speaker 2: 17:04

Then the second step is confirm that the vision is from God. So pray for confirmation constantly. We know that if any of us lacks wisdom we should ask God. And then, as I feel like, if we skip this step, from recognizing a vision, to the third step, sharing it with someone, it kind of manipulates what God created it to be. So we need to just meet. We have the recognition. We need to meet with the Lord to pray once he gives us confirmation. Then OK, the third step is let's involve someone else. Let's involve our pastor, let's tell our small group leader, let's tell our spouse because and plus, that just makes you more accountable now that someone else is praying for it and you're like, hey, I'm going to start a small group at my church and you signed the form and you did the background check. Now you're, someone else is watching you fulfill that.

Speaker 2: 18:00

So the fourth step is the dream step, which I call the Mary Poppins step, and I put this in here because a lot of really practical people disarm their creative side and they put God in a box. I do this sometimes. Oh, I can't meet that. There's limitation, that's no, that's not realistic. And then overly analytical people can get in trouble with that, because now you've actually put a limit on God, which we know God has no limits. So I put that in there to just say, hey, what if there were no limits? Let's just throw them out the window. What would you do? What would the vision look like then?

Speaker 2: 18:39

And so then the fifth step is we take those dreamy dream steps and we turn them into OK, what are the actual resources we have and what can we accomplish with the stuff that God has given us today? And I call that the Will Smith in pursuit of happiness, because his dream was Wall Street and it seemed unattainable. But what do you do? He got in a cab with the guy and when he was in the cab he did the Rubik's Cube and it was all those things he could do at the time. And then, number six update the plan as needed, which is basically just being open to redirection, not cleaning so tightly on that what you thought that original dream should look like. And then the seventh one the last step in the vision journey is just to pursue the vision until God decides it's over.

Speaker 1: 19:30

I love that. I love the Mary Poppins step because I mean, I think the older you get, the more you can look back at things. Everything is clear in Retrospect, right, and the more of those you have, the more you say, okay, like you said, you grew up quickly. You grew up quickly Because you were adulting at a very young age. This now explains it to me. I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 1: 19:52

I read Sierra's book and as I was reading I was thinking how does a woman this young have so much wisdom if when I was your age, I didn't have that kind of wisdom? Now this makes sense to me. You can look back at your experiences and you can say you know, why do I doubt God's potential? Why do I do that? Look what he did for me before, look what he did beat for me before. That you're right.

Speaker 1: 20:15

We can't put God in the box. Why do we do that? Because our little minds. I've read before.

Speaker 1: 20:20

This is a brain thing. This is a physiological thing. We cannot Imagine the future. We can dream, but we actually the future is going to happen. We're going to look back and we're gonna say, oh, I didn't see that coming. We just a brains can only look at the present, the past. It hasn't experienced the future yet, but at least with enough experience we can say I don't know the future, I don't know it and I don't have to know it.

Speaker 1: 20:44

I just, like you said, being flexible with your plans. I call that, you know, clinging to your purpose, not your plan. The plan is going to change. Cling to your purpose and that's your North Star, that's God. That's look up, don't get too hung up on the circumstances, because they're going to change and so many times I'm sure you can think, at times when something more amazing than you ever thought could have happened happens. So what if we had been too analytical? But I, as you can see, I just love this topic. You're gonna love this book. So practical steps. You also talked about advice. So you talked about. You know, people feel stuck. They feel stuck, they're unsure. Someone's listening to this. They're like, okay, now this lady's making some sense. What's a simple piece of advice you could give them to just get away from feeling unstuck, to get started.

Speaker 2: 21:35

Well, and I so appreciate what you just said about being older and looking in hindsight. That makes me feel so happy and to look forward to in the future, because right now I'm still you know, you could I have so much fear, I have to work through so much anxiety. I'm working through and it feels hard, so I'm excited for the day that I can very quickly get into that mindset.

Speaker 1: 21:56

That's exciting comes with wrinkles. I'm gonna warn you.

Speaker 2: 21:59

But as far as someone who feels unstuck, I would just leave you with the thought that God gave me at four in the morning when he said it's not about you, it's about providing value. He said it to me 50 times it's not about you, it's about providing value. It's not about you, it's about providing value. And it just over and over again. I felt how can I provide value to someone, someone that really needs it? Once we, all of us figure Out who God wants us to serve, then I think that confidence builds because it we realize, oh, there's a larger point to this thing. There the tension is not for me. The tension and conviction I have is because someone else is on the receiving end of that endeavor and it's actually gonna matter. And so once you kind of get over yourself and let go of that egoic mind, you can just accept those words. And then another thing that he said to me was every day you're anxious, yet every day you're taking care of, and I just thought that's for such beautiful revelations that I can clean on too.

Speaker 1: 23:10

I love that I actually just wrote down what you said and I'm sitting here thinking because I'm kind of entrepreneurial. It's not about you, it's about providing value. That is a coffee cup, that is a coaster, that is a t-shirt Wow, this is what Christ was all about being a servant and the nice thing about and I'm still learning this. I have not. I mean, I am not as wise as my age, so I've got to catch up. But when you think about taking the focus off yourself because that's what fear is right Our fear and insecurity is about ourselves, and if we can take it off ourselves, it's not about you, it's about providing value. I'm excited for you, sierra, because you are going to start getting emails and messages from people it might be next week about how your book has impacted them or what they've done. It might be in 20 years.

Speaker 1: 23:58

I heard a speaker 23 years ago. I heard a speaker and an author at my church and she inspired me to start something and it ended up being successful. It was my great, wonderful God journey. I'm super thankful for it. But you know, I never even told her and it wasn't until last year. I reached out to her and I said I just want to tell you. I listened to you 22 years ago and here's what happened, and you know what she said. She said she was just starting a new initiative. She's a pastor, but she was thinking maybe her time was out, maybe her time was done, maybe she was too old. And so she prayed and she said Lord, will you please, if I have made an impact anywhere, will you please let me hear from someone who I've impacted? And she got my email a couple days later and it still gives me goosebumps every time I tell that story, because on this side of heaven, none of us are going to know about the value that we provide others. So two lessons from that. One is you just have to trust that people are experiencing value, and the other thing is for the rest of us, you know what I learned Reach out and tell people. It's never too late. 22 years was not too late, and it got me to sit down.

Speaker 1: 25:11

This podcast is called Pivotal People because it's made me reflect on the people in my life who've impacted my journey, and I've reached out to a dozen of them, and you might think, oh, that's kind of cringey. What if they think you're weird? I can tell you that not one person thought that Everyone appreciates hearing if they've impacted your life, so we can encourage each other just by looking back and saying wait a second, you can find them, my gosh. You can find them on LinkedIn. You can find them on any social media platform. I had no trouble finding anyone. So you might hear from someone in 20 years, or you might hear from someone next week, and if anyone reads Sierra's book and you love it, just reach out and tell her, because that is so encouraging as an author. So you're an author. Are you doing? Speaking, tell me and tell me. You talk about being a creative. I know what that means. You have a very large Instagram platform and you're a blogger, so how can people hear from you? Read what you're doing? Do you have ways to connect?

Speaker 2: 26:13

I am open to speaking, although I would like to hide in a cave and just write, because public speaking is a fear. But I'm working through that and I feel like I need to speak life over that, not death. I'm speaking life over that. That's what the Lord told me the other day. Speak life over this, not death. So I'm open to anything, but my Instagram is Sierra Lane Myers, my pen name. They can find me on Amazon, Barnes and Noblecom and Apple Books.

Speaker 1: 26:44

The book is available now, right? Yes, yes, so you can order it. I will have all of Sierra's contact information in the show notes, but go find her now and start following her on Instagram so you can see all the updates. Sierra Lane Myers, yes, I want to thank you so much for spending some time. I said I felt like I knew you so well because of reading your book. Just to have a face-to-face conversation with you was such a privilege and I am really looking forward to watching you and watching your journey. So when we do our 13th podcast interview with your 13th book, we can look back and reflect on this. In hindsight. We can talk about this conversation.

Speaker 2: 27:26

Thank you so much, tiffany. I appreciate it, and I love listening to your podcast, so I feel like I know your voice too, so it's been nice. Oh, thank you.