On Track
On track- is a dynamic podcast that was created with the intent of providing guidance to listeners on exploring what a purpose-driven life requires.
Creating a community that is safe, loving, and healing for all that may be lost or may not understand the direction their life is headed. This space is where we dig further into our mind, body, and spirit figuring out our purpose God has intended for our life.
We will cultivate skills required not only to answer these questions, but also assist in navigating everyday obstacles.
We want to provide mentorship, showing vulnerability through personal experiences we've dealt with throughout our life and marriage, and speak with those of influence within our community.
Our Goal is to provide clarity through the storm, cultivate a healthy/ healing lifestyle, and continuing to move forward in the purpose God has provided YOU specifically!
This is our intention behind shepherding the community that's created, and these are the words behind our acronym in order to do so!
S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D
S - Safe
H - Hope
E - Equipping
P - Purpose
H - Healing
E - Encourage
R - Redirecting
D - Dependable
On Track
Unearthing God's Blueprint: Begin Discovering your purpose
Have you ever felt like Moses—called to something greater but weighed down by insecurity or a sense that you're not qualified? In this first episode of our "Planning for Your Purpose" series, we unpack the profound truth that God has designed you with intention and purpose before you were even born.
We begin by reframing the familiar story of Moses through a modern lens, revealing how his journey mirrors our own search for identity and purpose. Despite his speech impediment, his mistakes, and his insecurities, Moses became one of history's greatest leaders because he ultimately surrendered to God's direction. Your story might look different on the surface, but the principles remain the same.
Through practical exercises, we guide you to identify your God-given strengths, passions, and the things that bring you genuine joy—all potential signposts toward your unique calling. We explore critical qualifiers to test whether what you're pursuing truly aligns with divine purpose: Does it align with God's will? Does it use your gifts? Does it transform you to become more like Christ? These questions cut through the noise of well-meaning but potentially misguided ambitions.
Perhaps most importantly, we address the challenging reality that your calling might require you to operate in areas of weakness, make significant sacrifices, or experience periods where progress feels painfully slow. Brandon vulnerably shares how following God's call meant uprooting his entire life from Minnesota to San Diego and joining the military—a difficult transition that ultimately aligned with God's greater purpose. Your purpose journey will have both moments of celebration and periods that feel like "pushing a truck uphill," but the key is persistent obedience through both.
Whether you're just beginning to explore what God might be calling you to or you're seeking confirmation about a direction you've been sensing, this episode provides both biblical foundation and practical next steps toward living with divine intention. Download our accompanying resources at our Instagram (@ontrack_official) and join us next week as we dive deeper into adopting God's attributes as you pursue your unique purpose.
Essentially, moses was a man that followed the direction God wanted to take him and, ultimately, god had purpose over his life before he was even born, despite him not knowing his identity. Hey guys, welcome back to OnTrack Podcast with your host, brandon and Isabel Diamond.
Speaker 2:Hey guys.
Speaker 1:We look forward to inviting y'all into these upcoming episodes. As we previously took the time to outline our desires for where we want to take this podcast Moving forward, we'll be breaking up various concepts into multiple part series in order to be as thorough as possible and to allow the information to be digestible. The five-week series we are diving into first is called Planning for your Purpose. This will ultimately leverage greater personal awareness of your own God-given purpose and outline practical steps and tools to implement to make that purpose come to life. In today's episode, we'll be discussing the plans that are set before you in accordance with what the Lord says in scripture how to realistically apply the things taught and grow into the man or woman he is calling you to be. We hope you are able to sit back, relax and enjoy this week's episode.
Speaker 2:I want to share a portion of my friend Sarah's story because it highlights what we want to dive into on this episode. So my friend Sarah, she came from a family that didn't have a ton and they were kind of in a lot of various crises growing up, and so when she was born, she ended up being put for adoption very early on after she was born and she was adopted into a family of wealth and power and she was never disclosed ever, even as an adult, that she was adopted, and so throughout her life she kind of felt this like identity crisis, where she knew she was out of place but yet she didn't have any information or evidence to believe that she should feel out of place. And because of the wealth that she was born into, she actually got a position in her grandfather's company and her grandfather basically ran this massive company overseeing so many different employees. And, yeah, sarah had a lot of different responsibilities within that. But over time she started to realize that there was just kind of a lot of corruption within the company and she didn't care for that at all, and so she ended up doing something that put a target on her back and actually ended up getting an employee injured in some ways and a lot of the people within the company, not recognizing what she was doing, ended up just like, yeah, not having it, and she felt like she had to leave the city because of the issues going in or occurring within this company and her grandfather was very upset at her as well and so she ended up just leaving everything that she knew and shortly after she ended up meeting her husband and having a family and just kind of having this sequestered life until the Lord powerfully encountered her and she had never heard the Lord's voice the way that she had in this moment and nor did she ever really understand what having a relationship with God looked like.
Speaker 2:But God made it very clear what her calling and her purpose was in this season, and it was to go back to that city that she was born in and to basically shut down her grandfather's company because the company was just really bad for the employees, really bad for the city. It was just, all in all, yeah, not good, and so she felt incredibly ill-equipped. She had a speech impediment and so that enabled disenabled her from feeling confident in like standing up for herself and also taking on this big task. But she ended up, confidently to some degree, going back to the city and talking to her grandfather and trying to convince him to shut down his company. But every time her grandfather denied her request, and whenever that happened, there was just something like eerie. That happened within the city or within the company where, like, either a lot of people got severely sick or there were just like severe weather conditions that put a lot of people in closed down quarters, or some people ended up dying as well in some instances, and her grandfather ended up getting personally affected whenever he would deny Sarah's request, would deny Sarah's request, and so after a while, it just became super taxing and the city became just like less, like not well off, and just started to depreciate, and so eventually, sarah's grandpa allowed the company to shut down and a lot of the employees were able to leverage freedom that they had never experienced before, and they ended up leaving the city entirely because they just needed to get away. And this led Sarah on her next journey, where she was basically, in a lot of ways, shepherding and leading all of these people for a very, very long time, and the Lord actually gave her some instructions on how to lead these people that allowed just more order and more wisdom, and it took some time, but eventually a lot of these people from this company were able to get to a completely different place, and that place was called the promised land.
Speaker 2:And my friend, sarah is not a real person. It's more of an illustration of the story of Moses. So Sarah is Moses in the Bible, and if you've never heard of the story of Moses, you just did. And Moses was a really, really incredible human being. But he was also very much so similar to you and me. He was very normal and he experienced a lot of things that we all experience Lots of personal doubt, lots of grappling with his walk with the Lord and navigating and hearing his voice and leading out the calling over his life.
Speaker 2:He had to make so many sacrifices to be obedient to God and he had a lot of insecurities as well, like the Lord told him to let all these people free, let all these people free.
Speaker 2:Moses had a speech impediment and he felt ill-equipped to lead and speak, to leverage this, and so, yeah, there was just a lot in and through that.
Speaker 2:But, all to say, god still used Moses, even though he actually ended up killing one of the Egyptians out of rage because he just saw how the Israelites were being treated as slaves. And so, yeah, moses did a lot of things that he wasn't proud of and he did struggle with identity because he was adopted and he wasn't an Egyptian, he was an Israelite. And so, yeah, there's a lot of things to relate to in this story and we'd highly encourage you to explore it in scripture, but we share it just to reel you in to say, hey, there's a lot of things to relate to in scripture and there's a lot of similarities with these big people that we think are beyond what we could be. You know, moses, god used Moses to part the Red Sea, to part an entire ocean for people to cross. Like that's insane, but those stories and those stories can still happen today and God is still as powerful. So, yeah, we just want to segue into kind of how that relates to what we want to share today.
Speaker 1:Essentially, moses was a man that followed the direction God wanted to take him and ultimately, god had a purpose over his life before he was even born. Despite him not knowing his identity, he was able to walk and listen to the Lord's voice and continue down this direction. He felt incapable of achieving, and I think that's what a lot of us feel when we are going after our purpose or not really understanding what it is we're meant to do within this lifetime. So I think it's crucial for us to understand the story of Moses in order to then understand the different qualifiers but we'll go through that later in this episode of what qualifies me to live out my purpose and how am I going to understand the desires within my heart that are from the Lord. So here's the definition of a purpose. God-given purpose is not about personal desires or achievements, but aligning one's life with God's plan and contributing to his kingdom.
Speaker 2:That's great, and I think it's always valuable to look at scriptures that highlight this even further. So we have our classic Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future, and this verse is often cited to show that God has a specific, intentional plan for each life Ephesians 2, 10,. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. This clearly states that we were created for a purpose To do good works. God has already planned In Proverbs 19.21,. Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails. And again, this shows that, even though we make plans, god's greater purpose for our lives ultimately stands.
Speaker 2:And it's important to recognize in all of these scriptures and even with us having an ultimate purpose, is that work is good.
Speaker 2:God created work before the fall, and what that means is that, before sin entered the world, god actually gave Adam and Eve the task of attending to the Garden of Eden and taking care of the agriculture and the animals, and that was a great thing. You know, a man without a purpose, a man without good work to do, is a man that's susceptible to falling into sin and falling into things that are not good for their soul, and so I think it's just important, as we move forward, to not just fall into this pit of like oh my, nine to five is atrocious, or how can I get out of work, or how can I work less, or how can I do something with my life? That's going to make me feel like I can just relax, so to speak. But it's like if you can find something that aligns with your purpose, that is good work, then that's exactly what we're trying to pinpoint. All right, brandon, so you're going to walk us through a starting exercise that we can do to kind of just explore this idea of identifying purpose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so basically, this exercise is just going to be a brainstorming exercise to see your strengths, weaknesses and the different things you're skilled or passionate or want to learn about, in order to really begin to understand what it is that the Lord is calling you to. And I think he does that, has that ability through understanding your own heart and the things that really bring you joy, and he really wants us to be joyful. And so we're just going to take 10 to 15 minutes and, whether you're driving or at the gym or walking, if you're in a quiet space, if you have the ability, either just think through it mentally or put your pen to paper and just jot down the things that you believe you're skilled at, or ask a friend and or ask yourself what you really are skilled at, what you're passionate about and or what you would really be joyful to learn and to understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good, and I think I love doing exercises like this because it really helps me reflect.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes I'm in these perpetual cycles of doing things that I don't enjoy and then I'm trying to convince myself that I do enjoy them, and so it is like a good pause to be like, oh, actually there's some things that I've put to the side that I think could really be more in alignment with my calling, because ultimately, we're all called to different things and the Lord wants you to discover that he doesn't want you to fall within a career or within a job for many years that is not ultimately aligned with who he created you to be and what he created you to do, ultimately aligned with who he created you to be and what he created you to do.
Speaker 2:And I didn't mention this earlier. But the greatest commandment that God has ever given us is to love him and to love others. So, again, there's all these nuances in careers and jobs and things to occupy our time, but ultimately those things will or should align with our jobs and our careers and things like that. And so, yeah, we're going to dive into some qualifiers that Brandon's going to step into just to kind of help us understand a little bit like oh, I'm excited and joyful about this, but does it actually align with what God has for me?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so some qualifiers to understanding what the Lord is calling you to. The enemy is going to really try to wiggle his way in and try to break you down in the things that you really do find joy in and the things that are your strengths. But the things that are strengths is where the enemy wants to work the most. And so there's just three questions you should ask yourself is when pursuing something? And the first one is going to be living in alignment with God's will. This involves allowing God to guide and direct your life rather than you feel the need to direct your own.
Speaker 1:And the second thing is utilizing your gifts and strengths. God gives individuals unique talents and abilities that are meant to be used for his kingdom and ultimately giving him glory, rather than you taking the credit for the things you're doing yourself. And the third thing is going to be coming like Christ. God's purpose for believers is to be transformed into the image of his son. God's purpose for believers is to be transformed into the image of his son, which was the living testimony of what're passionate about. Aren't allowing you to be more like Christ, then that's not necessarily a good reflection, or those desires may not be reflective of God's heart for your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great to just have some baseline points to look back on and say, okay, like is, that are the things that I'm excited about ultimately aligning with, yeah, some qualifiers for what Christ wants for our lives. And then, kind of on the flip side of that, you know, there's some things that we need to keep in mind. Your calling actually might require you to operate in your own perceived weakness. So, for example, going back to Moses, you know Moses had a speech impediment and so he was super insecure about his ability to speak and his ability to lead people. Yet God told him to talk to Pharaoh and to let his people go, and that was extremely nerve wracking.
Speaker 2:But you know why God asks us to operate in our weakness? Because that's how God's glory is really revealed. And, like Brandon said, it's like if we were just operating completely in our strengths, then people from the outside might be like, oh yeah, they're, they're just talented or skillful in that, so that's why they're successful. But if we're able to be used with our weakness, then people kind of look at that person and think, how are they, you know, doing that thing so well? And then we can say, oh, it's because of God working in and through me. And so that's just something to keep in mind where sometimes you might say, oh, this is clearly not aligned with my purpose because I'm not good at it. But it's like, well, actually, you know, God might want to do something in and through that and then your calling might require you to sacrifice a lot up front. You know, sometimes, you know, on a more extreme end, like if God asks you to be a missionary and to like completely uproot your life, you might have to quit your job and move your whole family and sell all your things right. And for Moses, I mean, he had to sacrifice a lot and at one point he left everything that he knew to discover God in a completely different environment. And sometimes you're going to have to do that, but the upfront costs and the upfront sacrifices are going to be so worth it because God ultimately has the best plan for your life. So if you find yourself panicking because you're like, oh, I think I discovered my purpose, but it's going to require me to move out of a city or to make these like big, drastic changes, one thing is just to consult people that are walking with the Lord to really gain clarity on that. But it might not be completely out of the picture, because God often does that for people and asks people to make some really big decisions.
Speaker 2:And then another one is just straight up. You know, being Christian is hard period. It's full of a lot of deep joys, but there are, yeah, just a lot of difficulties being a Christian. Christians are the most persecuted. The enemy doesn't like us because we're on the winning team and of course we'll dive into that even more within further episodes.
Speaker 2:But it's just important to realize that knowing and identifying your purpose doesn't mean that your life's automatically going to seem right or seem easy or start to make sense. It will make more sense once you identify your purpose, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be entirely easy. Another piece of the puzzle to pay attention to is that once you get to a place where you're like, okay, I've identified my strengths, I know you know some weaknesses that the Lord wants me to press into and I have confirmation, you can get super excited and let's just like celebrate for you. But there's also going to be a point where you try to implement or you make these changes and it just feels like trying to push a truck up a hill right. Or it might even feel like a dumpster fire or something like that, and you're like, oh, look, why isn't this happening the way I had envisioned it to happen? Or why aren't things moving fast enough?
Speaker 2:And I think there will be like a testing period of like okay, do you trust the Lord, that he has spoken, and will you be diligent in moving forward with what he's called you to do? And so, yeah, just keep that in mind. And also, things take time. Things are gradual. Change happens does not happen overnight. And yeah, you just have to be kind to yourself and say like, okay, if this is what God's called me, to ask the Lord to be clear with you in terms of, yeah, what does today look like, what does this week look like? In terms, of, yeah, what does today look like, what does this week look like? And we're excited to explore just more practicals in the future when it comes to planning out your purpose diligently, day by day. But, yeah, just keep that in mind that things might feel discouraging after you get to celebrate and get excited about what it is that God's called you to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good, and something that we just previously discussed is life isn't going to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, and I think, to some degree, we expect that to be the case when we're starting something new, but it's going to take hardship. It's going to take hardship, it's going to take failure. It's going to allow us to continually attempt to learn, which is what failure stands for is first attempt in learning, and I think that's just a good continual reminder to keep in the back of our mind is that failure is just going to continue to allow us to keep in the back of our mind is to that failure is just going to continue to allow us to press into the things that we may not be 100% confident in.
Speaker 2:That's so good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just one example from my personal life is moving to San Diego from Minnesota and joining the military and getting out of the circumstances I was in. I didn't necessarily understand the plans and purpose he had for my life. I didn't feel confident in my ability to uproot my entire life and restart all over again. It was one of the most difficult times of my life and I was away from family. I was away from friends, or quote unquote friends that I had at the time, which is very little of few, but besides the point, I think it was really challenging to restart and that's what the Lord had called me to, so I just obeyed and really started to press into my personal relationship with the Lord, rather than it just being a exterior shell that I was putting on.
Speaker 1:And, um, I think it's just really important, uh, when you have a word from the Lord, uh, to listen and think through and get wise counsel and, um, just ask those around you whether or not it's a good idea. But that could be good or it could be bad. It could be really damaging if the people within your life are spiteful or don't necessarily want the best for you. So just be cautious in that area. But it was something that I personally didn't get wise counsel on and I just really felt the Lord calling me to the military and I just bit the bullet and obeyed, and that's how I want to live my life. I don't want to be questioning, necessarily, but, yes, obtaining wise counsel in the things that are impressed on my heart. But when it came to getting out of the situation I was in, that just wasn't the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really good and, honestly, like sometimes we don't have wise counsel at our, you know, right hand, and so you know we talk about scripture a lot. We talk about Moses' story and we bring up some other scriptures as well, and that is a focus of this podcast, because the living word is full of yeah, full of green flags of what to do and also red flags of what not to do. And if the Lord truly does speak to you and make it clear to you what it is he's called you to do, you could read scripture and the Lord will guide you in that process and will allow you to gain clarity and confirmation through scripture. And if you can, if you find confirmation through scripture and, in addition, you like wait on it, pray on it and seek wise counsel, then that gives you all the more confidence to move forward in making those changes in your life that are more in alignment with what God created you to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great place to leave it off with and we just want to plug real quick our new Instagram. It's going to be on track underscore, official, and we want to incorporate within the next coming weeks a link that you're able to go to and find different PDFs that we want to create for you guys that correlate with each episode and allow you the ability to press into practical tools within your life in order to maintain on track. We hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Stay tuned for next week, where we'll dive deep into part two of planning your purpose, dissecting the attributes of God and what it looks like to adopt those. As you grow in exploring your unique purpose, the more spiritually anchored your life is, the more your purpose will become apparent and made clear, and with that we will additionally be providing a clear breakdown of some of the most common ways the enemy tries to ruin the plans and purpose that is set over your life. We hope you guys enjoyed today's episode and have such an amazing and blessed week ahead.