This past year, more than perhaps any other, has challenged people’s faith. Our world and national issues became personal as hundreds of thousands faced job loss, income disruption and all types of family turmoil. And out of that tumult, people are looking for answers.
Evangelist, apostle and author Pamela Christian wants to help people find those answers because she’s seen God bring her through her own time in the wilderness. “To see people who are deceived … living their lives making choices that are going to take them to destruction breaks my heart,” she tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of Greenelines on the Charisma Podcast Network.
Her compassion arises from a season when, as a young and enthusiastic believer, she led a community Bible study in the early ’90s and her husband lost his job. “Of course, the economy was bad, and a lot of people were unemployed,” Christian says. “But it happened that we had just bought a new house. And we were stretched thin, as many people do whenever you’re just starting out. And so he lost his job at the same time that I had sold my property management company to a man who turned out to be a crook because he never paid on the four-year note that we had agreed upon. So both of us had no income for a period that turned out to be four consecutive years.”
But the people in her Bible study reached out to her, Christian says. “My husband was a six-figure income earner, and now we were receiving groceries or checks from people. We learned a whole lot through that.”
And God has allowed Christian to build on her own experiences, as well as the empathy and compassion they bring, to minister to others through her books, her speaking and now her own podcast, Faith to Live By, on the Charisma Podcast Network. Her teaching is Bible-based, she says, and rooted in the idea of helping people have the tools she knows they need to make it through.
“The stock market crashed in 2008,” she explains. “I knew people were going to need help, and I had already lived it. So I put together at that time a six-week course—it’s now a day-long intensive—to help people overcome [unemployment] and the shock that goes with it.
“I don’t know if you realize this, but it’s been researched that people who go through that kind of a prolonged trauma of unemployment, it’s right up there with the PTSD that soldiers experience in combat,” Christian says. “And if people understand that that’s what they’re dealing with, and then they get the help that they need to overcome, and to be healed and find the path out of the situation, then we’re going to do what I’ve been wanting to do. And that’s to help people have a strong faith.”
Christian adds, “As a person who’s been taken low, I want to invest my time, my talents, anything I can to help other people honestly discover and live in life-giving truth.”
To hear more of Pamela Christian’s stories of how true faith can enable you to overcome and find breakthrough victory, listen to the entire episode of Greenelines here, and be sure to check out Faith to Live By, both on the Charisma Podcast Network. {eoa}