Revive Our Hearts

Robert Wolgemuth: When you apply for a job, you put your best foot forward. You stress your strengths and your accomplishments. The late Robert Wolgemuth said that in the job of life, God is equally interested in the parts you might think are less attractive.

God writes the resume, and as you grow in your relationship with Him and as you take life a day at a time, you realize those things that you thought were huge impediments or even failures, God uses them for His glory.

Dannah Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of "You Can Trust God to Write Your Story," from March 20, 2026. I'm Dannah Gresh.

Just a little note before we begin. Today's episode was recorded a few years back. You'll be hearing from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and her late husband Robert, who went to be with the Lord this past January. It's such a joy to still be able to hear his voice and soak up his wisdom. Okay, let's get to today's episode.

If you're on the younger side of life, you might not even recognize that sound. But those of us who are, let's say, more mature, know that sound very well. In fact, some of us hear that sound and it brings us back to the memories of all-nighters slamming out term papers the night before they were due.

The typewriter replaced the pen as the tool of writers for a couple of generations. Now, of course, personal computers have taken over. Today we have some authors in the studio. Not only are we joined by our host Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, but also by her husband, author Robert Wolgemuth, both of whom I'm sure are acquainted with the typewriter. Nancy, you've written just about twenty books now?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Just about twenty, yes.

Dannah Gresh: And Robert, you've written...

Robert Wolgemuth: More than that, a few more, but haven't sold as many copies.

Dannah Gresh: Well, this though is your first book that you've written together. And I'm talking about "You Can Trust God to Write Your Story."

Robert Wolgemuth: And you can trust God to help you write your story with your spouse. We had to trust God to help us write every book, but to do it together, that's a challenge at times but also a lot of joy in it.

Dannah Gresh: You're such a great storyteller, Robert, that it comes alive in the pages of this book. And Nancy, the teaching...

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: If you see bullet points, chances are I drafted those.

Robert Wolgemuth: This is actually the conversation we had the night before we started this project. Nancy said that. I really hadn't thought about what I do when I write and what I'm particularly good at. But she said, "You're a good storyteller in writing, so why don't you shepherd that part of the book and I'll take care of the bullet points, the doctrinal stuff." So we shared it back and forth, but that was our assignment and it worked great.

Dannah Gresh: Were there any tough spots that you can tell us about?

Robert Wolgemuth: Every day. Every single day. The thing is, when you write, you can't compromise. You have one word and you have another word, but you can't say, "Let's pick something in between." You have to pick one or the other. So, Nancy says it all the time: you breathe grace in, you breathe grace out, word by word. And that's what we did.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: What was really rich about this experience was that we were talking with friends, people we've known for a long time in most cases, who have been through really hard places and have found the grace of God. God has transformed them through the hard things.

Now they're beautiful people and you say, "I want what they have," but I don't know that I want to go through what they went through to get that. So we were listening to these stories and being deeply moved, deeply touched, and saying, "How do we steward that story? How do we tell it in a way that is helpful and meaningful?" Many of them we didn't use their real names because they're people whose child is still a prodigal and that's not our story to tell. Other stories are many times still in process, which I think is so brave about the book.

Robert Wolgemuth: Nancy used the perfect verb there: steward. The story in the Gospels of the master who leaves three of his servants with stuff, we felt like we had been given five talents from these people.

When we'd hang up or walk away from these conversations, we would say to each other, we'd often pray and say, "Lord, help us to be good stewards of a precious gift these people have given us." They were honest, they were candid. Like Nancy said, most of these people we knew, but even so, it was really a valuable thing that they had entrusted to our care and we did our very best to carefully manage that gift.

Dannah Gresh: You did it beautifully. Story after story, it's just a refueling of your trust in God. Now here's the thing that's interesting to me. As we read a fiction book or as we watch a great movie, we love those plot twists. We love the conflict. We love the drama. But when it's our own story, we don't quite want so much of that on the pages of real life. Give me a boring life with all the happily ever after you can muster.

But that's not really how God usually chooses to write our stories. That's probably why we love the conflict and the drama and the plot twists because deep down in our spirits, is it possible that we know He is unfolding something beautiful?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Not only that, we know that He is unfolding something beautiful, but we also know that He uses those hard things to change us. That's what trials do. That's what affliction does. That's what suffering does. It changes us, it softens us, it deepens our trust in Him.

So we think, "Couldn't I just trust God if everything were going well in my life?" Well, the truth is, we don't. We become idolaters, we cling to the things of this earth. If the sun's always shining, we've got money in the bank, and you never have a spat with your mate, you never have a problem with your child, why would you need God? We wouldn't think we needed God. But when the rug is pulled out from under us and we're in a crisis, where do we look? We fall to our knees, we look up, and we say, "Oh God, I can't do this." In the process, we are transformed into people that He can use to further the gospel message.

Dannah Gresh: That reminds me of the promise we find in the book of Romans. It says we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And we want the hope and the character, all the good fruit without the first part, the afflictions and the tribulations. There are no shortcuts. I think of our dear friend Joni Eareckson Tada, whose story is in this book.

Anybody who's heard her name or has seen her, you know she is just so full of Jesus. She's a praising, thankful, grateful woman. She's always singing hymns and she just has this amazing, grace-filled life. But then you think, where did she get that? It's fifty-some years bound to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic and we think, "I'd like that fruit, but don't put me through something like that."

Dannah Gresh: It's beautiful fruit. Nancy, one year at True Woman she was speaking and I had this terrible, awful migraine in the middle of the day. I had been working with the teens all morning—I don't think that had anything to do with my migraine. But I came to the lunchroom where all the speakers were eating and I just had to get in the corner, put a jacket over my head so that I was in darkness, and be still. I was nauseous and in excruciating pain.

As I'm laying there, I felt someone touching my hand, rubbing my hand gently, like a mother or a grandmother would. So I peeked out from my jacket and it was Joni's assistant. Joni was up above her saying, "Sweet sister, I just felt so burdened for your pain. I heard that you're in pain. Can I pray for you?" I thought to myself, what beautiful fruit has come out of this woman's life because of her suffering and pain.

Would she have had that sensitivity, that tenderness, that ability to comfort others if she'd never needed the comfort of God? No offense against any of the other speakers, but they weren't there. We were all in the room. It was her battle with suffering and pain that had produced such strong empathy that she would come over to a woman with a headache. I had a headache and she was in a wheelchair. That's the kind of fruit that trusting God produces in your life, not only in us but then through us to others. So we get hope and then we're able to be purveyors of hope to others because of what we've been through.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Exactly. The stories in this book are riveting. There are stories on trusting God when your marriage is in trouble, when you lose your health, when you have a prodigal child, when you have financial struggles. Robert, you talk about the loss of your business.

Dannah Gresh: That was a really big story for me. Can we just stop there and talk about that? Because so many women I meet, their families are in financial crisis for one reason or another. I think that's one of the ways that God produces the endurance and the character and the hope in us. So take us back to Thursday, February 28, 1992. You were in the Christian publishing world. You're kind of a big deal in the Christian publishing world, Robert.

Robert Wolgemuth: To my mother I was. To a lot of other people too. I represented lots of people as an agent, I'd written books, I'd been on the publishing side of it. But that particular day in February 1992 was my 44th birthday. I will never forget it.

I'd started a business with my buddy Michael Hyatt and we had a publishing company. We had been in business for five years, had published about 150 titles, and we had debt. We were carrying debt. Just so you know, the book publishing business is a cash furnace. It burns it up.

I got the phone call that every entrepreneur hopes he'll never get. My note was being called and it was over. There was absolutely nothing I could do. So I went into Mike's office. Actually, I sat down on the floor under my desk—I had a table for a desk—and cried. Because that was it. I had leveraged my home, everything. My financial status was zero.

Dannah Gresh: When you say you leveraged your home, how'd that work out?

Robert Wolgemuth: I had to move. I had a car that had a loan and took it back. Two daughters, one in private high school, one in college, private college. They both came home. It was over. This was severe ground zero financial loss. And it's not only you going through this, but it's your wife walking through it with you and your children.

I never heard Bobby say, "Well, there you go again, leveraging everything against this and now what are we going to do?" So we listed the house, sold the house, all those things. The girls came home from school.

It was a huge challenge. There was a sense in which, even without really knowing what we were doing, the Lord had prepared us for hard times. The story of an entrepreneur is the story of a person who has to be willing to face this or he should never go into business. Because you have no safety net. You're out there doing the backflips off the trapeze and if you slip and fall, you're toast. It's over.

So that's really what we had done. But the truth is, and you hear this all the time, people saying if I had it to do over again, I would do it just like that. Because as Nancy just said, it's in those experiences that you know the grace of God in a way that you wouldn't have known. I don't like this truth. I'd rather if we'd learn this stuff without having to go through the hard stuff.

For the men or football fans that are listening, years ago I walked through the Dallas Cowboys training facility with a guy named Bill Bates, who was like a rocket ship on the field. He was nuts in terms of the way he'd throw his body at it. So I talked to him about the training and he said, "I do it or I'd die on the field." He worked out six days a week, offseason, on-season, whatever, in order to survive. It's really interesting. You can choose to work out. You can't choose what's going to happen to you, but you can choose to be ready.

So that's the truth of what we're talking about here. In God's Word, in His presence, talking to others about your love for Him, in prayer—that's the training room, that's the facility that gets you ready for trusting God to write your story when there are twists and turns.

Dannah Gresh: In real time, you probably didn't think, "Wow, this is a great chapter in my story," right? But you're now saying, looking back on it, I wouldn't have changed it. Why? What did you gain from that?

Robert Wolgemuth: This is the box score the following morning. Everything looks great in black and white, but in the moment, I am sitting under my table in my office crying. As the days unfolded, other of our team coming into my office without a word, hugging me, crying. They didn't have jobs now. So I felt the weight of not only my own family but the weight of all these other families.

But then if you'd be able to gather all of us together, this is 25 years ago, and say, "Now let's talk about what the Lord has done in your life using this experience." God writes the resume. You don't know when you're going to need to pull that out, but He doesn't make any mistakes in your resume.

As you grow in your relationship with Him and as you take life a day at a time, you realize those things that you thought were huge impediments or even failures, God uses them for His glory. That's His promise. He will take the things that we experience and He will use them for His glory whether we like it or not. So it's a very important principle in this whole conversation about trusting God.

Dannah Gresh: I have a question about your story that's kind of been ruminating in my head since I first read this. What was the most painful part? Was it the loss of your dream, the loss of the employment or the income, the loss of the job for all those families, or was it what your own family had to go through?

Robert Wolgemuth: It's hard to say one, but I'm going to say at least right off the top of my head, the creeping doubt that I have no business doing this. I had no business leveraging everything. Even though my family knew what I was doing, leveraging our home, our cars, everything against that.

So what happens is, I think Satan whispers and says, "You have no idea what you're doing. You are a failure. Go find a job doing something menial. Don't leverage anything against anything." He loves that. I think as a mom, he's constantly saying, "Who do you think you are? What are you doing?" As a mom, as an author, as a wife, whatever I do, that's been one of the taunts that he's loved to throw at me.

This is really where the body of Christ comes in because when you encourage each other, you're speaking truth into each other's hearts even if you don't believe it. So I'm a failure, I should never do anything like this again, and then somebody's voice who says, "I believe in you." A mate is the most important person right there who says, "You know what, you're not a failure. I trust you. Let's live in a double-wide for a while. No problem." When somebody that you love says that to you, then you can begin to believe it yourself.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We ended up in a double-wide? No, but she would have. She would have gone there. We rented a home, we might as well have. We had no equity. You sold your dream home and moved into a rental. Had no equity.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Bob and I went through something like that where we ran into some financial problems and realized that our solution was to sell our home. It was a little home, twelve hundred square feet, little ranch house, but we'd lovingly painted it. I'd gotten the Yard of the Month award from the local newspaper, all that stuff. We had this in-ground swimming pool in the backyard where there were just birthday parties and memories and barbecues and the youth group with the baked bean fight and all the stuff.

As we sold the house, the most painful thing for me was, "But God, what about my kids?" Okay, teach me something. Teach Bob something. We're adults, but don't take this home away from my children.

I think at those times you run to the Word. If you've been trained and if you've done that before, I found this treasure sitting there by the swimming pool that just carried me through the rental. It was Proverbs 14:26: "Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for their children, it will be a refuge." It's the fear of the Lord that's the fortress. It's the fear of the Lord that's the home, the shelter for my children. Times like that really force you to look at what's true.

Well, I'm the daughter who watched my dad as a businessman go through a season of, different than Robert's story, but a lot of financial loss and pressure and strain in his industry. I was in tenth grade. I was in a Christian school and had a world cultures class that year that talked about God's sovereignty and control over the world and our circumstances.

The greatest lessons I learned about the meaning of God's sovereignty and His providence, I learned by watching my dad that year go through horrendous stuff in his business and things that impacted us as a family. Not only financially, but also with my mother's health and with our home burning in a fire that same year—when it rains it pours.

I watched my dad lift his eyes up to the Lord and be as grateful and contented in times of loss and pain as he was when he was making money hand over fist and his business was successful and his wife had health and our home was standing. That made a huge mark in my tenth-grade heart that year that really did more to teach me about the goodness and the faithfulness of God than anything I could have studied in a theology class. Because I saw it lived out.

That became a refuge, my dad's and my mom's—because she walked through all that with him—their trust in the faithfulness of God became a refuge for my soul. I had no idea what kind of things I was going to walk through in my life, but as I have, I've been able to anchor my heart in that same faithfulness of God because I saw it demonstrated.

I look at your daughters, honey, and I think those are women now in their forties with families of their own and hardships of their own. We've watched them walk through some hard things. Yes, there's pain, yes, there's stuff you would wish you could write differently, but we've watched them lift their eyes up and say, "God, You are good and You are faithful."

It's the power of an example of somebody who does it faithfully. You can learn two ways: "I'm never going to do it that way" or "I'd love to learn how to do it that way." You can learn by great examples or bad examples. Much easier to learn from good examples. So as parents, this is not intended to be additional pressure that we might feel, but your kids are running the videotape constantly. They're saying, "How transparent is my dad? How willing is my dad to ask forgiveness? What is my dad going to do under pressure?" He can't control what happens, but he can control what happens to what happens.

I'm going to learn from him. So does he have idols? We've talked about this. Your treasure can become your idol and if you learn anything from Scripture, it's that God has a really hard time with idols. So we set these things up and then they get torn down and we realize God's faithfulness in showing us what we were worshipping rather than Him. It always falls short. That's a lesson we learn in trusting God.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And I guess, one of the things that I'm hearing is that not only can we trust God to write our stories, but we can trust God to write the story of our children. Many of the people we talked to said this very thing. When your children break your heart, when they make choices that are devastating to them and to you and to their future and your family reputation, you can trust God that He is working in your children's lives even when you can't see it.

One of the things that these moms and dads have shared with us that it's important not to rescue your children from what God's wanting to do in their lives. Because that's the instinct. You don't want them to hurt, you don't want them to suffer, you want to pick them up and make it all better. Well, they're not three, they may be thirty-three, and they're having to learn. It doesn't mean you push them off the cliff, it doesn't mean you make them hurt, but you can trust that God is working not only in your own life but through your story or through their failures that He's working in their lives as well.

Dannah Gresh: I remember a time when one of my children was just really lonely, living away from home for a summer, working two jobs in college. Lonely, lonely, lonely. I thought, "You know, I can write books anywhere. I'll just go live in their apartment for the summer and I'll fix this." As I was planning that, I remember something in my heart—I'm sure it was God's Spirit—saying, "Maybe this period of loneliness will be what teaches my child to embrace true friendship with Jesus." I just wept because I did not want to trust God with that. I wanted to circumnavigate the pain, but I had to choose to trust. As I watched that summer unfold, what a beautiful friendship with Jesus was birthed out of that loneliness.

Robert Wolgemuth: What a great story.

Dannah Gresh: This is a really special book. I don't want to trivialize it because it's deep theology. You not only share the stories of real living people today, but you awaken the storyline of several people that lived during the time that Jesus did or during the Old Testament times and you bring those stories to life as well.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yes, so many characters in Scripture. These were real people with real circumstances, real hard lives, and people that we're mostly familiar with. But Joseph in the Old Testament, Ruth and Naomi, their story of hardship, Mary and Joseph, their story of hardship—it's not just something on a pretty Christmas card. There was hard pain. She was a single mom, there was disrespect and hurt to their reputation and a whole change of their plans in each of these cases.

We take, we write these interludes throughout the book where, and Robert, you were so good at writing these stories in ways that are true to Scripture but give you a bit more of a sense of what they might have been walking through. So we can see they had to trust God to write their story and they found Him faithful, not only in their moment and their chapter, but then as we can only see now looking back, their story, as it turned out, was part of a much bigger, grander story that God was writing, which is the gospel. It was leading to Jesus. It was leading to the story of redemption. It was all a part of a bigger story.

At the end of the day, one of the things that I think helps us in our own hard stories or hard chapters is that really, it's not about me. It's not about my story. It's about God's story and what He's writing and what He's doing. So here's this fourteen-year-old teenage girl who, the angel comes and says, "You're going to have a child," and just imagine the faith that was required to walk into that moment. But she's saying, "Yes, Lord. This isn't the way I would have written my story, but I'm available. Do what You want to do, use me, and I'm willing for You to write Your story through my life." Well, how blessed are we today that Mary of Nazareth said, "Yes, Lord." And who might be blessed a hundred years from now or two thousand years from now if the Lord were to tarry because you and I, Robert, or Dannah, you and Bob were willing to say to God in that hard moment, "This isn't the story I would write, but I'm willing to trust You. Yes, Lord."

Dannah Gresh: You know, it makes me think that we need to stop thinking of ourselves as the protagonist and the lead character because we're not.

Robert Wolgemuth: Exactly.

Dannah Gresh: He is. Jesus is. And we are these extras in the story. And yet He cares about us. How sweet is that, even though it is all about Him, and yet He says, "I care about what's happening in your life and your story."

I feel like this book is kind of a "Chicken Soup for the Soul," but much, much better because it's full of theology and truth that will just carry you through really hard times. One of the things that's kind of a tradition is to dedicate Nancy's books in prayer on the Revive Our Hearts program. I'm wondering if now you could just maybe take a moment and pray over those people who maybe they have been thinking they're the lead character and they're feeling some conviction to begin to cooperate with the big story of the gospel. Or maybe they're going through a really horrific dark chapter in their story and they just feel like where is the hope? God, do You know what You're doing? I feel like praying over this book to dedicate it is also dedicating ourselves to the purpose of the gospel story and trusting Him. Would you pray?

Robert Wolgemuth: I'd love to do that. So Lord, we're thinking about Your story, history, His story. And people that we read about in Your Word, like Esther. And the phrase that comes to mind and is such a familiar phrase is that Esther came to her time for such a time as this. She went through what she went through by Your careful divine providence. And ironically, Your name isn't even mentioned, Father, in the book. But we know it's a snapshot of what it looks like to trust You and to save Your people as a result of the faithfulness of a young lady.

And so we thank You that even today we can do the same thing. We have no idea what You're up to. But You do. And so because You've already been to tomorrow and You're looking back on our now, we completely trust You with what's going to happen. So we dedicate this book. I thank You for my precious wife and the joy, as it turns out, that we had in writing this book together.

And we pray, Father, that You'll use these pages, these words to inspire people, to encourage them to lay aside idols, to give them hope in the midst of absolute terror. And I pray that You will turn all of this into gospel truth, that we know that the cross preceded the empty tomb and that we can trust You to write our story whatever it is.

So we thank You. I thank You for every person listening right now, man or woman, young and old, that You would encourage them, that You would inspire them with the truth of Your Word and with the hope of the gospel that everything that is happening to us is by Your plan, by Your design, by Your kindness and mercy and grace. And so we submit to that, sometimes not too happily, but we know it's right, we know it's true, and so we do so with grateful hearts. Thank You for this book. Thank You for my precious Nancy, who faithfully not just writes books, but does Revive Our Hearts broadcast day after day. And for Dannah and the joy of having her join us. We're very grateful. We thank You for everything that You've brought to us and will bring to us in Jesus' name. Amen.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Amen. Amen. Thank you, honey. And we really are eager to see how the Lord is going to use this book in people's lives and whether they're going through a hard time or they know somebody else who is, or a hard time's around the corner they have no idea of.

Dannah Gresh: Wow. As I listen to that, it hits different than the first time I heard it a few years ago. Because Nancy is in a very hard time, one that she had no idea was coming. Her husband Robert, if you haven't heard, went home to be with the Lord just a few months ago and Nancy is trusting God with the story He's writing in her life.

If you're in a place similar to that, I'm eager to get this resource into your hands. And we're glad to send it to you this month as our way of saying thanks when you make a gift of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. We think it's going to bless you. We think your gift is going to help us continue to bless women around the world. So go to ReviveOurHearts.com, make a donation online, or give us a call at 1-800-569-5959. Be sure to request your copy of "You Can Trust God to Write Your Story: Embracing the Mysteries of Providence."

On Monday we're going to talk more about trusting God's providence. And when He writes twists and turns in our stories that we wouldn't have chosen for ourselves, how should we respond? Nancy will help you answer that question when we come back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.