Introduction (00:00)
Hi. I’m Kayla Wilder, and you’re listening to Love, Faith and the Miles in Between. This podcast is about the amazing ways that God shapes us and the exciting moments on the journey. If your heart is ready for renewal and discovery, this space is for you.
Thank you for joining me on today’s episode. This one is called ‘His Love is Greater’ because I wanted to talk about love today. And yeah, it’s, it’s one of our favorite things to talk about, right?
God’s love is greater. His love is greater than anything that we could have imagined, better than the best thing that we know about. It’s all encompassing. It fills the soul. It fills your body from the follicles of your hair to the tips of your toes. It’s. It’s perfect. It’s perfect in every way.
And I wanted to shine some light on it because I love, love, um, I love love. I’m, I’m a romantic at heart. And I just… I just noticed this about myself not too long ago. Before every trip, I would think about all the beautiful ways that I could fall in love. I think, um, well, I don’t really have anything or anybody to blame necessarily. It was definitely my own thing.
But for sure, Emily in Paris, I watched that before I moved to Europe and that that show it like turned my, my, um, my romantic imaginations up to ten. The next thing I knew, I was imagining like, you know, a silk dress blowing in the breeze as I like, held hands with, with somebody and, and we like walked down the beach and I was thinking about like running into a guy at a cafe and us just like, I don’t know, just having like that kind of “Oh, like you might be the person who I was looking for and vice versa. Let’s sit down and have coffee together and get to know each other.” And that just turning into a beautiful, a beautiful, um, romantic adventure.
And, you know, maybe, maybe he’s not the guy that I marry, but, you know, when I’m 60, it’ll be like a story that… a story that I get to tell to my grandkids. Yeah.
Oh, I used to be so excited over that. Like that. That one little thing would would lift my heart up. But I got older and I learned that love without God is complicated. It’s complicated. It’s messy. It’s it’s just.
Like it’s fun for a second, and then it’s not fun at all. And then your heart’s broken, and then you put the pieces back together and it’s lovely again. And it’s just this continuing cycle when God is not in the center of it. But when God’s love is your foundation, what I found is that He makes things so simple and so stable.
So I wanted to talk about what He showed me and, uh, help, help, help inspire you, maybe help inspire you to, I don’t know, get curious about what the Holy Spirit has put on your heart. Because that was the big thing that I realized was that the Holy Spirit would put a lot of things in me and I would just kind of ignore it or put it on the back burner.
You know, it’d be like, oh, that’s a good enough idea. Like, I could maybe do something like that. But like, unless God says “Do this thing,” I felt like I could spend my time doing other things, if that makes sense. Um, so yeah, I just want to talk about, talk about what he showed me and I hope that it helps you.
Editor’s Pick
Amour Abroad Hoodie
Carry love wherever life takes you. Our Amour Abroad hoodie is cozy, chic, and made for everyday wear.
The Prayer (4:31)
So yeah, um, I prayed for like, love, you know what I mean? Like, I prayed for a real, genuine, like soul filling love.
And I told God and I think I was 22 or 23 at this time. I told Him, “Lord, if I’m not ready for that kind of love, make me ready.” And I didn’t know what to expect. You know, at 22, 23, you think you’re grown. I, I felt like I had it, I felt like I had it down.
I was like, “Oh, I’m like super self aware, you know, I know what my limits are. I can— and looking back like I’m not mad at younger me, like I, I had an idea, but I, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what God was going to do.
And that’s the beautiful thing about Him, right? Is when we ask Him to do something for us, it’s always different than what we had in mind. It’s always something that we could not have imagined, but also is lowkey, like exactly what we pictured.
Yeah. Um, and so how it went for me was for a year after I prayed that prayer, He and I, we just spent time together. We just spent time together. Uh, and He had the best plans for me. So it was a lot of, you know, the solo travel… self—care situation that people talk about often. Journaling became my best friend. Going to events and concerts and things like that by myself.
But when you make that time about you getting closer to God, it feels like you’re not by yourself at all, really. It feels like– a lot of times it feels like He’s there next to you, and other times it’s like He’s, I don’t know, you feel you feel His Presence, uh, in, in a more, a more physical way, a more physical way than, than usual.
And that constant companionship, it sets you up, it sets you up to like, get used to the, get used to having another presence around you all the time. You know what I mean? Like being in yourself and being focused on what you’re doing, but also having somebody else, other people around. And it’s like, you can, you get to, you exist without codependency, I’ll say, or like overstepping somebody’s boundaries or like asking somebody to overstep yours or relying on people too much.
God’s invisible Presence helps you stand up on your own. You know, having done all to stand, stand. And you learn that so gently when… Oh my gosh, I’m in my feels a little bit.
Uh, you learn it really gently. You, you learn it really gently when you’re going on these, uh, excuse me, when you’re going on these solo dates and when you’re doing all of that, it just feels it doesn’t feel like you have to be strong, even though you’re really vulnerable.
Choosing Real Joy (8:06)
So my favorite story about this was that one day I went to a day bar, like a bar that’s open during the daytime. And I didn’t… like it already wasn’t really my vibe just because I wasn’t a day drinker. And this is while I was in Barcelona.
And the culture in Barcelona is that they don’t— and over all, over most parts of Europe, I think they don’t really have the 5 o’clock rule. They don’t have so much of an issue with people drinking in the early or mid—afternoon. So it could be 12, it could be 12 in the afternoon, and you’ll see people out having glasses of wine and things like that. So the day party, I mean, the day bar was it wasn’t like super unheard of.
But the way that this day bar went was that it was like outdoors. And I think, you know, there was a bus, like a double decker, um, tourism bus. And I think that they had gutted out the inside or like they did something, I don’t know, I didn’t go inside because I didn’t really want to be there.
Um, I don’t, I don’t love techno music. I’m not really, I’m not really a techno music girl. And they had the, they had the EDM going and I walked in there and I looked around for a few seconds and I was like, “Uh, I don’t, I don’t really, this isn’t really my vibe.”
But of course, what’s happening just around the corner, there’s this massive carnival happening on the beach. Like the, the, the, the outdoor day bar situation is up on like a parking lot, kind of, that’s overlooking the beach out into the Mediterranean, and in between us and the water is a Ferris wheel and all of the rides and all of the games.
And so I stood there and I thought to myself and I was like, “You know what? I would rather be at the carnival.” So I left, I went around the corner and it led to an entire new world. The carnival itself, of course, was a ton of fun. Um, I guess I’m also a kid at heart too, because I, I love, I love, I love, I’m not great with roller coasters, but I do love getting on them. I also did the the dart throwing with the balloons. I have good aim. I had a good time and I ended the day with a— what is it? Different colored like the rainbow colored candy popcorn.
Yeah, it was so nice. It was so nice. And that was like the first time that I realized that doing what I thought I was supposed to do instead of like, you know, following through with like, the giant sign that God was putting in my face was the thing that was keeping me from true, pure joy.
And from a romantic standpoint, it was like, well, I would hate to be in a situation with somebody where they think that the thing that we’re expected to do is what we have to do, and then we’re both miserable. You know what I mean? This, this was this was obviously the better option.
And so I just I just trusted the Lord and I went and the next thing I knew, I was going everywhere. And 9 times out of 10 people, you know, weren’t going to come with me because they already had prior engagements to the things that we were used to going to. But I, I was like, I think I have to draw a line in the sand.
They did a Michael Jackson reenactment. I got tickets to that and ended up just going by myself. And, you know, of course, that was great.
When You Have to Say No (12:12)
There was another day where I just decided one day that I was going to go sunrise kayaking, and everybody else, they were like, they were gung ho, like, “We’re gonna go out and we’re gonna club until the sunrise and we’re gonna end, you know, the clubbing by jumping into the sea with our clothes on.” And I was like, “Oh, that sounds like a time. That sounds like a good time, but I have to be at the beach, uh, at 4:30 a.m. so I’m gonna, I’m gonna go to sleep.”
And I did, and I went out there. I think I, I think I woke up at like— I woke up early. I woke up early in the morning. I went out there and while I was kayaking or sorry, not not kayaking, paddle boarding! It was sunrise paddle boarding.
While I was paddle boarding, I thought I saw them. Like they were— it wasn’t them. Turns out it was other people who had also spent the whole night partying and finished finished their clubbing experience with, you know, jumping into the sea.
But I was out there on the paddle board, the sun was rising, the waters were so still. There were barely any waves and you could see straight down, straight down into the sand. And I stood there just like feeling the Presence of God, feeling the beauty of His Creation and just enjoying the peace.
And I realized that my friends had what they had, like they needed to have that experience. And I needed to have my experience. And we, we all ended up at the same place at the same time. And we got there in different ways.
And everybody’s way was what God intended for their hearts.
Scripture (14:14)
1 John 3 verse 1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”
Heart Talk (14:30)
And it’s the truest thing in the world. God is love, He is joy, He’s peace, He’s all the fruits of the spirit. And so when your choices reflect the desires that He placed in you to feel that love and to be that joy, the Holy Spirit becomes a constant daily companion. And just a bit of time in His Presence renews you.
And the other beautiful thing about it is that your relationships are so much better for it. You love people in a new way. A way that’s more holistic and true to you and true to what Jesus had in mind for us. Because God uses that time alone to fill in the spaces that you thought were meant for other people.
Editor’s Pick
Amour Abroad Hoodie
For mornings at home or weekends away. Our hoodie brings comfort and style wherever you go.
I think the best part about this entire like solo trip saga for me was, was me and me and my friends coming together and all of us going, “Oh my gosh, I saw you. I saw you on the paddleboard!” “I saw you jumping into the sea!” It was that beautiful, communal realization that even though our ways of spending time were different, we were still going to be together.
And so it’s like, even if even if you’re worried, you know, even if you’re worried that saying no to that event or, um, you know, turning down, turning down this or that, even if you’re worried that, you know, somebody might take it the wrong way, when you trust in the Holy Spirit, when you trust in the plan that God has for you, it can only work out in your favor.
And of course, there’s always there’s always… the truth that somebody else’s salvation is dependent on your obedience. Not going to go too seriously with that though, because like I said, all of these things were things that I had to get curious about and take time with.
God didn’t tell me, you have to go out here and do things yourself. He didn’t tell me to go to restaurants by myself. He didn’t tell me to buy tickets. Uh, buy tickets for myself before I asked people if they wanted to go. Those were things that I felt the Holy Spirit was kind of tapping me on the shoulder about. And so I. I went through with it.
So I say all that to say, um, I don’t know, it might not be that, like it might not be that the advice that you’re receiving on social media is perfect. It might not be that the things that your friends do, uh, to grow a better relationship with God is the same as what you need to do.
You know, your family might have one way of going about things and you feel like it’s not quite it for you.
That’s okay. We’re all unique.
My invitation for you is to just set a date with God. Set a date and you can do whatever you want, however you want. You know, spend an evening painting or, I don’t know, you could go rock climbing or do something absolutely crazy, like buy a plane ticket for a weekend in, like, some remote place that nobody’s heard of, and only tell your family when you’re on the plane back home.
Whatever you want. You know what I mean? Sky’s the limit. But set, set a date for time with just just you and God and see. See what He does. See how He moves your heart. See how He changes you.
There are so many beautiful things that are waiting for us when we trust… when we trust in Him.
Prayer (19:10)
So that’s all for this episode. Thank you for listening in. And wherever you are, unless you’re driving, of course, go ahead and bow your head and close your eyes and we’ll close this episode out with a prayer.
God, thank You for Your love. Thank You for seeing our hearts and always giving us exactly what we need. Give us courage to love, grace to surrender, and eyes to see how Your joy is all around us.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Outro (19:29)
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Love, Faith & the Miles in Between. If you enjoyed today’s topic, please share it with a friend. For this episode’s journal prompts, press the attached link and download your free PDF! Remember to subscribe to the newsletter for more travel, faith and love stories.
From Our Collection
Available on Etsy
Spread the good news near and far.
Leave a Reply