Episode Details...
Let's Pray
Exactly Enough
Shelley Ringstaff, social worker, missionary, and pastor's wife, joins Season to share how God has guided her through poverty, bullying, and seasons of uncertainty. She reflects on simple, honest prayer, the power of compassion shaped by hardship, and a remarkable story of God providing food for refugee communities during Covid.
In this episode of Let's Pray, Season sits down with Shelley Ringstaff, a social worker, former Adventist Community Services director, pastor's wife, and mother, who shares a candid account of how God has led her through every stage of life. Growing up in poverty, with parents who came to faith as teenagers, Shelley describes learning to pray from her grandmother and leaning on simple, raw prayers like "Jesus, help me."
Shelley and Season explore the themes of bullying, bitterness, and the spiritual formation that comes through suffering. Shelley reflects on how being bullied out of her early Adventist school experience, rather than producing resentment, shaped her deep empathy and her instinct to seek out the overlooked. Her son's observation that difficulty drew him closer to God echoes her own testimony: that dependence on prayer grew precisely because life was not easy.
The episode also examines Shelley's professional journey through Adventist Community Services and disaster response work, and her current season of "floating" through different departments at Adventist World Radio's headquarters. A centerpiece story involves her coordinating food relief for Rwandan and Burmese refugee communities during Covid, where beans, sweet potatoes, and rice appeared through a rapid chain of unexpected provision, leaving exactly the right number of packets for every family served. The episode also touches on the nature of joy as strength, honest faith over performative Christianity, and Jeremiah's promise of a future and a hope.
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Shelley Ringstaff, social worker, missionary, and pastor's wife, joins Season to share how God has guided her through poverty, bullying, and seasons of uncertainty. She reflects on simple, honest prayer, the power of compassion shaped by hardship, and a remarkable story of God providing food for refugee communities during Covid.
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Justin Woods, a long-time Hope Channel team member, shares his remarkable journey of waiting on God through years of unanswered prayer. From a dinosaur dig in Texas to a surprise call to India, Justin recounts how bold, specific prayers led to unexpected doors, a career in Christian media, and a family he never imagined he would find in Maryland.
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