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What if the secret to finding joy, purpose, and strength for life's hardest challenges isn't doing more, but creating space to breathe? Tommy Thompson, author of "Space to Breathe Again," shares his remarkable journey from driven entrepreneur to advocate for intentional margin in our lives. Tommy's naturally extreme personality once led him to play 120 holes of golf in a single day. That same tendency toward excess eventually caught up with him when, while juggling multiple businesses, churc...
What if the secret to finding joy, purpose, and strength for life's hardest challenges isn't doing more, but creating space to breathe? Tommy Thompson, author of "Space to Breathe Again," shares his remarkable journey from driven entrepreneur to advocate for intentional margin in our lives.
Tommy's naturally extreme personality once led him to play 120 holes of golf in a single day. That same tendency toward excess eventually caught up with him when, while juggling multiple businesses, church leadership, and family responsibilities, he experienced what felt like a complete breakdown. Lying in bed one night with his world spinning, Tommy realized something had to change—though he wasn't doing anything "wrong," he was living without margin.
The discovery of the concept of Sabbath transformed Tommy and his wife's approach to life. Beginning with the seemingly impossible practice of taking an entire day off each week, they gradually built rhythms of rest into their daily lives. Little did they know these practices would become their lifeline through their daughter's six-and-a-half-year battle with stage four kidney cancer, which ultimately led to her passing in 2016.
Throughout our conversation, Tommy shares profound insights about faith tested by adversity. He and his wife learned to "rehearse the goodness of God" even when they couldn't see evidence of that goodness in their immediate circumstances. This practice of creating space for reflection, prayer, and rest became not just a survival mechanism but the foundation for deeper purpose.
Tommy believes our culture's epidemic of anxiety stems from lives "choked out" by constant noise, busyness, and distraction. The antidote isn't found in more effort but in intentional pauses that allow us to reconnect with what matters most. His podcast "Space for Life" continues this important conversation with guests who have discovered the transformative power of margin.
Ready to breathe again? Visit TommyThompsonorg to access Tommy's podcast, weekly reflections, and practical tools for creating life-giving space in your overloaded world.
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Thank You for Listening, I hope you enjoyed this episode and that it encouraged you. Please like, share, and leave a review.
00:00 - Meet Tommy Thompson
03:51 - From Seminary to Business Owner
12:15 - Finding Space to Breathe Again
18:20 - The Sabbath: Learning to Rest
26:38 - Navigating Faith Through Adversity
32:48 - Creating Space to Overcome Anxiety
35:14 - Space for Life Podcast and Closing
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Hello everyone, thank you again for joining me on another episode of the Dorsier Show.
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Today we have a special guest with us.
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His name is Tommy Thompson.
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He is an accomplished entrepreneur, executive coach, consultant, blogger, husband and dad and avid golfer.
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He loves to teach, always bringing personal experience, deep reflection and mixing in personal application.
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His first book, space to Breathe Again hopefully overloaded and overwhelmed shares specific tools to help people navigate the difficult path of finding a balance in a world overrun with distraction and excess.
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He graduated from Davidson College in 1980.
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He obtained a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary and promptly went into business with his brother.
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Over 30 years of partnership together, the manufacturing, retail, human manufacturing, retail service and real estate works.
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His experience crossed every function possible, including CEO, cfo and sales.
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Tommy, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
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Well, thank you so much for having me on the show, Dorsey.
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I've been looking forward to our conversation together.
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Yes, definitely.
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I read in one of your promos and on your introduction that you once played 120 holes of golf.
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How did you manage that?
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Well, it was actually.
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I think it shows a little bit of my personality, which can be prone to extremes, which is also probably why I had to end up writing a book like Space to Breathe Again.
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But it was a charity event where it was designed for people to play 100 holes of golf in one day, which is about five and a half rounds in one day.
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And I was playing with my brother and they would give each one of us a golf cart so you could move around quickly, but you had to play a round of golf in about two hours, which normally takes about four hours, so you're really speeding along.
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And my brother and I happened to be playing so fast that we finished and we still had about an hour and a half or two hours of daylight, so we, crazily enough, weren't tired, so we decided to keep on playing as long as the sun was out and ended up playing 120 holes in one day.
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Oh, wow.
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One of my other things I like to do is ask an icebreaker question, and today's icebreaker question is if you could give your 18-year-old self some advice, what would that be?
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I think it's somewhat based on where I am now.
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I think I would encourage myself to live more boldly and take more risks.
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You know I was.
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I'm a measured strategic person kind of by nature, and while that serves well in a lot of different ways, I think that my 18-year-old self would have benefited by hearing someone say you know, don't be afraid to take risks, put yourself out there.
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You know, take chances, and I think that would have been helpful for me.
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Okay, did you always want to be an author and a podcaster?
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We see, as I read in your bio, you went to seminary.
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How did you go from going to seminary to doing all the business and then now that you're an author and a podcaster?
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Yeah, it's a pretty circuitous route with it all.
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I went to seminary Largely I'd love to say that it was out of this intense sense of calling, but it was largely because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and my life revolved around my faith, which is the most important thing to me, and so I had kind of received a lot of positive encouragement around teaching in different Bible studies and large groups in college and so I thought, well, I'll give seminary a try and got my Master's of Divinity and at the time was also teaching in a private school and coaching and just found myself in conversations with my brother who was an entrepreneur, just really drawn to the challenge and the excitement of the entrepreneurial world, and so decided to join him in that.
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And you know, we spent 40 years in partnership together across a lot of different businesses.
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But at the same time I really kind of never lost my particular love and passion for teaching.
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And I remember back in 1992, I was in my early 30s, going through a process of developing a personal mission statement and I was in the midst of running businesses and as I began to just discern in a lot of quiet what I felt really called and passionate to do.
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I came up with this phrase, which I expanded upon a lot, but that I felt like God had called me to be a teacher of life, and so I began to lean into that, teaching a lot in church and I just found such incredible joy and purpose in that and teaching in pretty much every venue that I had the opportunity to do.
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And so, after about you know, 40 years of entrepreneurial life, and then, on the backside of you know, the biggest storm in our life, which was my daughter's journey of cancer, which we could talk a little bit about, I determined at age 58, I just really wanted to give my life to what I was most passionate about, and that was teaching.
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And so, in the midst of that, podcasting and writing and blogging and coaching just all seemed to be great platforms for me to share and to teach about things that are meaningful and can hopefully help people live fuller lives.
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So it was kind of roundabout to come back to a place I started way back in seminary to say I just want to give my life to just trying to help people grow through, you know, teaching things that I've learned.
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Right, did you teach in schools?
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Did you teach in colleges or in churches or Bible studies?
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But I led and taught a large adult Sunday school class for about 15 years at our church, taught everything from a year-long class of material I developed on marriage to a class that went on for a couple of years called Outrageous Living just all of these different things about how do we find life and find life in our faith and in God.
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So I did that for about 15 years and at the same time often helped people by leading and teaching strategic planning, you know, in business contexts, different contexts outside of the church, so all sorts of different contexts, and I also led Bible studies and mentored people.
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That was a great avenue to me to kind of be able to teach and help people.
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So really anywhere I could find an opportunity where people were interested.
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I just loved doing it and I loved actually the creativity of it, which was what led me to podcasting, as I guess I was probably when I started the podcasting about 60 years old, so not the typical thing for a 60 year old to delve into, but I just love the creativity and the spontaneous nature of it and just the opportunity to just have amazing conversations like this.
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Right.
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Can you share with us your story and how God finally showed you how to create space in your life?
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Yeah, it really came out of my nature, which is a nature that leans towards drivenness and excess, as you heard, with my golf story of 120 holes.
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And, you know, in my early 30s my brother and I were running four different businesses and at the time I was also teaching weekly, you know, the adult Sunday school class at our church.
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I was an elder in our church.
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We were beginning a family, beginning of family, and I reached a place of just extreme overload in my life.
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And I can remember vividly lying down in my bed when my daughter was one years old at the time and businesses were struggling a little bit, and I've just felt almost like I was having a mental breakdown.
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Like you know, this excess, I'm just going to drown underneath of it.
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I could almost feel the bed spinning, like you know, everything is just falling apart and I didn't know what to do because I wasn't doing anything wrong.
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I was serving God, you know, in the midst of all of this and trying to lead my businesses with integrity, and I couldn't figure out what was going wrong in the midst of all of this.
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And, you know, by God's grace, he led me to a book just shortly after that night, called Margin, by Richard Swenson, and Richard Swenson introduced to me the idea that God does not mean for us to lead overloaded, overwhelmed lives, that life and purpose and joy and relationship come out of margin, out of creating space in our lives.
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And it was the first time, and I remember as I read that I just felt this tremendous weight come off my shoulders as I realized that God had a better way for me, and so my wife and I began just taking baby steps into creating space.
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And it began for us by, for the first time in our lives, practicing Sabbath and taking one day of the week and saying we weren't going to work and it made no sense.
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We couldn't get everything done in seven days.
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How are we going to get it done in six?
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But we just did that as an act of obedience and we began to lean into creating this space and we began to re -experience some joy that was lost really in our journey.
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And where that became so critical was about 15 years later, 2010, as our kids grew up, and March 4th 2010, I get a call from my wife, who was visiting my daughter at college she was a sophomore and a half year journey with stage four kidney cancer that my daughter went through.
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She was an amazing woman of faith and joy and realized at that point that God's lessons of creating space in our lives was the very mechanism by which God allowed us to survive one of life's hardest storms.
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And that's the difficulty we were going through in my daughter's battle with cancer.
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And after six and a half years, through some amazing journeys amazing journeys of joy, but also just of immense pain and suffering she died the day after Thanksgiving 2016.
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And at that point, in creating space, I'd backed off of most of my work in the businesses and that was when I really made the decision.
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You know, I've got one season don't know how long it'll be, but ahead of me and I really want to give it to what I feel like I can do to have the most impact.
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And that's when I really kind of made the shift from running businesses to coaching and podcasting and writing the book Space to Breathe Again, which is the story of that journey to margin and that story of my daughter's battle with cancer and our survival in that.
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And I just believe that you know, almost like that parable of the sower that Jesus taught, that you know the growth and the fruitfulness happens when we create soil that has space and richness in it, and so that's become, you know, almost the framework with which I look at all of life is that the best of life happens when we create space, space for God and space for relationships and purpose.
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And so it's.
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You know that first book is telling a lot of that journey yeah, well, hey, I'm sorry for your loss and you know for what you had to go through.
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You know, especially with your I appreciate that.
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you know god uh, it was.
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It was a a journey that was horrible beyond description, but also a journey in which god met us and showed his goodness in so many ways and his power in so many ways, and so we have seen that, even in the worst of life, god shows himself as redeemer in powerful, powerful ways yeah, absolutely going back to you know, uh, creating space and, you know, taking off the day for.
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You know, for the sabbath, you know we read in the bible that it does say you know, take off a day for the Catholic, take a day of rest.
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What did that look like for you and for your family to take that day off?
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Well, it was actually very humorous at the beginning when we first started to do it, because we were so exhausted at that particular time.
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We were now kind of had three small children and it was kind of in the early days of our children and having children, and we were so exhausted that, honestly, the day just looked like we went to church and we came home and my wife and I just took turns taking naps.
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One would take care of the kids while the other one would go take a nap, and we'd never taken naps in our lives before.
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But we were so exhausted we just needed a chance to catch our breath.
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And so she would take a nap for a couple hours and I would watch the kids and play with them and then she would wake up and then I would take a nap.
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And you know, our only kind of rule of the Sabbath was, you know, we can't do work and we can't do chores.
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You know, anything that qualified in our minds as work was not allowed on that day.
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But we could play with the kids and we could.
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If we needed to, we could watch TV and if we needed to we could take naps.
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And so we just began a long journey of figuring out, initially just catching our breath, but then, initially, as it talks about, we found the joy in the Sabbath of now it's our favorite day we look forward to of, just, you know, enjoying creative, different ways of the day and it becomes I don't even know how we existed without it.
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Now, after having practiced the Sabbath very, very imperfectly, but practicing the Sabbath now for, you know, 30 years, I don't know how we existed without it.
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Yeah, when you did it or when you continue to do it.
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Do you do it on the same day each week, or do you say, figure out, I usually have a pretty full week.
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Monday through Friday and then Saturday I take to kind of do the chores around the house and the household stuff.
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We try to finish all of that up and then take Sunday for the Sabbath.
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I don't think it has to be on Sunday for people, and what we've often found works best for us and it's very much in sync with the way the Jewish people practice the Sabbath is we begin the Sabbath at kind of sundown on Saturday and so it creates this space for us to have a delightful kind of date night on Saturday night, space for us to have a delightful kind of date night on Saturday night, and then we just let that linger all into Sunday, all the way until about dinnertime on Sunday, and then Sunday night if I need to I don't always need to I can kind of just check my schedule and make sure I'm set for Monday.
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So I like the idea because the Sabbath for the Jewish people begins at sundown to sundown, and for us we found that often gives us a particularly delightful way of beginning the Sabbath with kind of a date night, a relaxed night, and then just let that linger right on into the next day.
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So that's worked for us.
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But I think God gives us the freedom to do it in whatever ways works.
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So for ministers, I think, often taking Sundays for the Sabbath doesn't make sense, so they have to find a different day.
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Right, yeah, how do we if, when we do that and we do it consistently and we start to get into the habit of taking the Sabbath off, how do we not get back into the habit of, you know, cluttering up our lives again or putting, you know, putting too much into that day of the Sabbath?
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I think?
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that the concept of Sabbath, I think, introduces that God desires for us to experience a rhythm of rest, and so what we look to do is to practice rhythms of rest.
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So for us, a second practice that came right behind practicing the Sabbath was really adding a spacious time in the morning for God, and before that it used to be something that I would take five or 10 minutes, read my chapter of the Bible, say my token prayer, check it off my to-do list and get on with what I was supposed to do.
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And so we began to realize that well, no, we needed to create this rhythm in the morning on the other mornings of the week where we could have enough time to center ourselves with God.
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And then I actually work hard to create what I call powerful pauses and to go slowly and to have time, such as before this podcast, where you know I'm not rushing into everything, I have time to breathe beforehand.
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So it becomes again the framework by which I do everything in my life, by which I do, you know I live my day with, you know time in the morning and time before I go to bed to catch my breath, and time before meetings, and I'll often drive in my car without any noise, as a way of creating space and quiet, and I find that the more I create space, actually, the more I live a life of purpose and meaning, you know, the better my relationships go.
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So what began as a one day a week practice amidst six days of craziness has now become, hopefully and I always have to continue to work on it a rhythm of rest and purpose and activity.
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That becomes a way I live my day and a way I live my week and even a way I live my year with, you know, periods of rest and recreation and vacation, and it begins with just believing in your heart that God doesn't need us, that he chooses to allow us to participate graciously in joy and purpose and meaning, and that reframes everything.
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Life is a gift and our time is a gift, and so entering into it takes the pressure off which, as I say, with my driven nature, I need to constantly be reminded of.
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Right.
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Have you seen with taking off the Sabbath and, you know, decluttering your life?
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Have you seen that draw you closer to God and your relationship with him as well?
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Oh, absolutely.
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In fact, I think one of the most significant issues we have within the church is our lack of space, which involves people trying to have this idea of a relationship with God amidst constant distraction, loud, incessant noise and constant busyness, and there's no place for God to fit into that, and I think that makes God actually very sad.
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And so the creating of the space, one of the most important, most significant fruit coming out of that is a deeper relationship with God and with his word and with prayer and with the ability, as we quiet the, to actually hear his voice and feel his presence.
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So I would say my relationship to God is just infinitely better with still so much room to go.
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But that's just such one of the powerful places that comes by creating space, powerful places that comes by creating space, and I don't know that it can, in a sense, come without creating space.
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Right, it would be like trying to be married and say I'm going to have a really just an intimate, special relationship with my wife and I'll give her two minutes a day.
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You know it's just not going to happen.
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Yeah, in what ways did your faith keep, your approach to adversity?
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In what ways did my faith grow through adversity?
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Yeah, yeah to my faith, uh faith growth through adversity.
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Yeah, um, yeah it.
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Uh, you know it was.
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It was a journey.
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Uh, you know, when my daughter was diagnosed, um, with cancer, it turned our world upside down in in the most profound sense.
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And part of that is probably inevitably a questioning of what you believe.
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Really deeply, and, I think, in a very, very subtle way, I had come to look at my relationship with God and my faith in a transactional way, such that, you know, if I'm obedient, if I'm serving him and if I'm doing the right things, then God will spare me the really hard things of life.
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And I realized, when my daughter was diagnosed with cancer and our life was turned around, that that's not the way God works.
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And so I had to reenter a way of realizing God is so much bigger and even, in a sense, unpredictable than I ever imagined.
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I ever imagined and yet, even though I couldn't understand, it, called me to trust him, even though I couldn't understand what was going on.
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And that was not an easy journey that I say lightly as a cliche it was something that was gut wrenching in every sense, as we walked for six years together, you know, not knowing all the way along the line when this cancer would rear its head in a way that would change everything and what we would even do if she didn't survive.
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It was all just a complete loss of control and a place of.
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We need to just surrender and trust in the goodness of God, and my wife had this phrase from the message translation in Psalms of we would just regularly, on a daily basis, rehearse the goodness of God.
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We couldn't see it in our day of God.
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We couldn't see it in our day.
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Every day was just a battle.
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But we just had to rehearse to continue to believe and trust in the goodness of God beyond what we could see.
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And then with time we began to see that goodness come to the surface in so many ways.
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My daughter was married three years into her cancer journey, against all odds, in the midst of the worst suffering.
00:30:12.546 --> 00:30:19.211
What would you tell someone who is struggling with anxiety?
00:30:19.732 --> 00:30:33.968
um, anxiety to such a large degree um is a consequence of our culture that is choking the life out of us.
00:30:33.968 --> 00:30:44.935
If you think about, you know, that, parable of the sower that third seed is is a seed that is choked out is the words that that it uses.
00:30:44.935 --> 00:30:49.167
And you think about being choked out, you can't catch your breath.
00:30:49.167 --> 00:31:05.176
And I think our culture is one that is so loud and so busy and so full of distractions, and those very factors have created a culture of anxiety.
00:31:05.978 --> 00:31:31.791
And so, for those that I think really battle anxiety, my encouragement would be to do the very things that God called us to you know, in our lack of margin, and that's to you know, trust him and begin to practice the Sabbath, begin to catch your breath, begin to take time with God and quiet your heart.
00:31:31.791 --> 00:31:46.800
And as we can begin these practices, which are practices that I think are throughout scripture, we can begin to see God heal some of that anxiety in our lives.
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But unless we slow down, I think we're going to have a hard time dealing with the anxiety, and that's what I see in so many friends.
00:31:58.993 --> 00:32:26.336
One of the reasons I wrote the book was I saw so many strong Christian friends battling anxiety and stress, and they weren't even going through a storm in their lives, and so that's one of the reasons I wrote Space to Breathe Again is to try to give people hope who are overloaded and overwhelmed, and a pathway, practical steps to enter into that.
00:32:27.646 --> 00:32:30.953
You mentioned that you have your own podcast.
00:32:30.953 --> 00:32:36.854
Tell us about your podcast and what you talk about on your podcast.
00:32:37.335 --> 00:32:38.237
Yeah, thank you.
00:32:38.237 --> 00:33:22.440
I appreciate that the podcast is called Space for Life, kind of not surprisingly given everything we're talking about, and it's really an encouragement, with the practical wisdom of guests and sometimes things that I teach directly about, of how do we create space in our lives, and then also bringing on guests who have dealt with some of the hardest things in life and how creating space has helped them walk through their journeys.
00:33:22.440 --> 00:33:32.530
Through their journeys, I've had quite a few guests who battle cancer.
00:33:32.530 --> 00:34:03.297
I've had guests that have gone through business trials, addictions, certainly some of my friends who are ministers, and we all talk about this common thread that, when it comes down to it, we find life when we create space in our lives, and so, through stories and specific teaching, it's kind of helping to continue this theme of the seed grows in spacious soil.
00:34:03.297 --> 00:34:06.121
So how can we do that together?
00:34:06.121 --> 00:34:09.014
How can we encourage each other together?
00:34:09.014 --> 00:34:12.811
So I've now been podcasting for almost five years.
00:34:17.139 --> 00:34:22.014
Okay, you know how, about the kind of time that I've been doing it as well?
00:34:22.036 --> 00:34:40.076
Yeah, and you know, I feel like I would imagine maybe you do too, but I just feel like it's such a privilege to walk with people in their stories, in their lives, and I just find it such an encouragement to others.
00:34:40.076 --> 00:34:47.396
You know that we can walk and we can hear and we can and we can live this journey together.
00:34:48.699 --> 00:34:48.960
Right.
00:34:48.960 --> 00:34:55.657
How can people connect with you and your book and your website as well?
00:34:58.206 --> 00:35:47.425
Yeah, well, fortunately my website's pretty easy to find it's TommyThompsonorg, and on there someone can access very easily my podcast, or they can find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify any of the different podcast platforms and Space for Life but they can find it through TommyThompsonorg and I also write a weekly reflection that people can subscribe to and even offer a few tools that I've developed in coaching to help people step back and reflect and create some space to think about where their lives are headed.
00:35:47.425 --> 00:35:51.673
So the easiest overall platform is TommyThompsonorg.
00:35:53.237 --> 00:35:57.514
Okay, well, thank you, tommy, for coming on the show today.
00:35:57.514 --> 00:35:59.974
We greatly appreciate having you.
00:36:02.304 --> 00:36:27.362
Well, thank you so much for having me on this and I think what you're doing is just a great work and I know it's very meaningful for so many people, so I give you just great accolades for continuing faithfully through this process of podcasting and everything that you're doing in your ministry.
00:36:29.485 --> 00:36:36.199
Can you give us one word of encouragement or word of knowledge before we leave today?
00:36:36.885 --> 00:36:45.655
Yeah, I'll go back to kind of that word that goes all the way back to, you know, right around 1990, goes all the way back to right around 1990.
00:36:45.655 --> 00:36:59.951
That, I felt like, was the turning point for my life, even though I'd been a Christian for a good long time, but that God does not desire for us to live overloaded, overwhelmed, stressed out lives.
00:36:59.951 --> 00:37:09.795
That God has joy and peace and purpose for it if we will just enter into the space he has for us.
00:37:10.476 --> 00:37:16.336
Amen, I think we all need to do that, and you know to hear that as well.
00:37:17.186 --> 00:37:19.954
Yes, and I have to remind myself daily of it.
00:37:21.545 --> 00:37:21.786
Well.
00:37:21.786 --> 00:37:24.414
Again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:37:24.414 --> 00:37:41.965
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you appreciate this episode and Take some Reflection from it and encouragement From it, and please like and share this episode and Go and check out Tommy's Information and his website.
00:37:41.965 --> 00:37:46.074
And until Next time, god bless, bye, bye.
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Tommy Thompson
Author
Tommy is a native of Richmond Virginia, graduate of Davidson College with a BS in Sociology, and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary. He has been an owner for the last 35 years in a wide array of businesses including retail, manufacturing, and service, both by way of start up and acquisition. In each of these entities he has served as CFO and/or CEO. Tommy has served for the last 15 years as a partner and CFO of Washington DC South, a land development company actively developing over 2000 acres between Richmond and Washington, D.C..
Tommy is also founder and owner of Thompson Coaching and Consulting which provides coaching, consulting and resources for those seeking to integrate and maximize who they are in all areas of their life. Tommy hosts a podcast, Space for Life, and released his first book, Space to Breathe Again: Hope for the Overloaded and Overwhelmed in the fall of 2021.
Outside of work hours Tommy actively mentors many people and is an avid golfer. Tommy has been married to Weezie for over 42 years and has two amazing sons, Chris and Alex, two wonderful daughter-in laws, McKenna and Nina, and two incredible grandchildren, Brayden and Scottie.