Episode 28: The Right Move in the Right Season
An interview with Samantha Franzen
Hear Samantha's 'in process' story of saying goodbye to a people facing successful career, and hello to becoming the Executive Director of Household Operations & Fun.
The Seeds
Name: Samantha Franzen
Age: 35
Where do you call home: Greeley, CO
Relationship Status: Married
Season of Work: Executive Director of Household Operations & Fun
Hobbies: Reading, golfing, moving my body, being in nature, boating in the summer
Jesus Journey: My Jesus Journey began as a baby. My grandfather--papa--was a priest in the episcopal church and he baptized me. This is kind of a happy/sad story, but when I was a kid, I would tell people I remembered being baptized, but I was often teased about this-- by my stepdad specifically--and I think I stopped believing I could have had, and remembered, a Jesus experience as a baby. As I reflect on it as an adult and dig into my childlike faith, I do believe that was when the seeds of Jesus were sprinkled into my life. Something special happened on that day, and while sadly, my papa died just before my first birthday, I never got to learn more from his depth of knowledge. But I have to imagine my papa and Jesus smile at that passing of faith.
While the seed was planted during infancy and watered through childhood and my young adult years, I don’t believe I came to fully know Jesus until I was almost 33. I knew of Jesus. I “believed” in Jesus. But I lived out much of my life as a kind of “orphaned” child never fully receiving the depth of the Father’s love. I attended a women’s retreat called Camp Well and the love of Jesus, and the activation of the Holy Spirit I experienced there forever changed my life.
The Branches
In 2018 you decided to change course, curtail a successful career outside the home, & switch up how you showed up in the world. What does your life currently looks like?
In 2016, I started working with a direct sales company focused on getting cleaner beauty products into circulation. I joke that I’m a little hippy mama at heart, someone very passionate about healthy living, and the mission of the company felt in alignment with something I could support. This was also on the back end of spending the past 4 years being in what I can only explain as the “drowning” season of motherhood. My daughters were born 22 months apart, and when my youngest was born in 2014, my husband and I were in the worst financial position we could have been in. This had our family down to a one-car family. Mind you we live in a very “need a vehicle to get anywhere” community-- barely scraping by. We’re talking, I went to the grocery store and had my card declined at the checkout, on what felt like a weekly basis, with my two babies in tow, kind of scraping by. The isolation of motherhood, and the stress and shame in financial struggle, combined with the inauthenticity of wearing a facade of “everything’s great, I’m fine, we’re fine, life is great” had me in an incredibly unhealthy space in my life. I felt I had to do more, I had to find a way to take care of myself, and avoid the embarrassment of another trip to the store with a declined purchase. It pushed me to find a way I could “contribute to our family” and the allure of the “work from home, on your own time, as much or as little as you want” seemed like the perfect answer.
Being an enneagram 3, I quickly found success, but my desire to be affirmed, and seen, and recognized, continued to push me to achieve at a greater level. I wanted to “diversify” the products and messaging I was working with and decided to “brand myself”--at the encouragement of every guru in the direct sales/network marketing podcast realm--rather than a specific company and branch out. I had a website built with the aim of simplifying healthy living for women overwhelmed by the process, and I dove headfirst into developing intense digital content. My whole life was about creating for monetization and praise. It feels so gross even writing it out, but it’s also why I say I was living as an orphan in the Kingdom of God.
The career change came as a total blindside. I signed up for Camp Well in the spring of 2018 anticipating an opportunity to refresh, regroup, and hit the next stride in my business. What God had for me instead was a complete abandonment of my business and a message to go home and “Love My People Well”. I obediently laid it all down and began pouring into my family. I started showing up for my family FIRST. And everything changed.
Now I’m homeschooling my babies with a glad heart--I would have died laughing if someone would have told me I’d be doing this 2 years ago. I’m finding joy in supporting my husband on our homefront, so he can go out and do what he does best, which is to dream for our family. And we’re in a season of joy, prosperity, and abundance emotionally, spiritually, and thank God, also financially. It feels like such a clear example of the importance of “running your race” but in alignment with a good and loving Heavenly Father.
What prompted this change in how you showed up in the world?
Well, as I mentioned a lot of the change happened at Camp Well. One night I had the privilege of sitting next to Vivian Mabuni at dinner, and that day she had given us her brand new book “Open Hands Willing Heart”. I had started reading it before dinner and in the first chapter, I was struck by a story of a woman in complete surrender to the will of God. That was becoming a common theme for me that week, I kept finding myself face to face with stories of women who had fully entrusted their lives to Jesus, and the freedom and ease they experienced on the other side of that surrender. The idea of living in a state of “flow” with a good Heavenly Father was otherworldly to me. So here I am getting to speak to Vivian herself, someone intimately familiar with this kind of living, and she started talking to me about being pruned by God. She talked about how all grapes are pruned differently--white grapes, are different from red grapes, etc--and then she said to me “And sometimes you have to cut away a fruit-bearing limb”. I don’t remember the entirety of the rest of our conversation, but it was almost an instantaneous feeling of “God wants me to cut away my fruit-bearing limb.”
When I went back to my room that night, I told my roommates that I believed that message was meant for me in my business. And I think that was the first time I entered into a state of surrender to God’s will.
It’s like my entire life I’d been trying to run this marathon with a giant rucksack full of everything I thought I needed instead of trusting there would be relief points along the way. Like, here’s my tent, and these combat boots just in case, and all of this water, and don’t forget the food. But one day I cracked that rucksack open and discovered it was full of rotten BS. That there was nothing that would serve me inside of that pack. And at Camp Well, I finally threw that stupid rucksack off a cliff and started trusting in a good God who would show me, and provide for me, the relief points in this marathon of life.
Now mind you, I’d made this decision without any consultation with my husband, so I was rather nervous to get home and be like “hey, here’s this thing that is contributing to our family income, and I’d like to go ahead and NOT anymore”. But shockingly, when I told Brian of my plans, he said to me, “I’m so happy to hear this. I have been feeling this in my heart for a while now, but I didn’t want to crush your dreams.”
This all ended up being a pretty huge marital moment for us because we were not living in a fully authentic and transparent manner with one another. And once this shift happened, it’s like we stopped being bumper cars in life and we settled into running our races well.
Often God asks us to step out into new and/or uncomfortable waters. In what ways has it been hard to be obedient to what God has asked you to do in this season?
This is such a great question because there is absolutely NOTHING easy about staying obedient. It’s a daily surrender if I'm totally honest. We live in a world very focused on doing “the big things”-- big dreams, big achievements, big bank accounts, big houses, big cars, on and on and on. We don’t often give credit to the achievement of things that don’t carry a monetary value. The intangibles of the world don’t often get recognition. And as someone who spent my entire life dying for recognition, and attention, stepping into the “intangibles” of home life--raising good humans, keeping my family clothed and fed, keeping our schedules organized, cleaning the kitchen for the gazillionth time-- felt, and some days still feel like I’m unseen and my efforts aren’t big enough.
But this season of life I’ve been in, without sounding overly dramatic, has cured me of striving for worldly praise. I can’t fully explain it, but I don’t care what the world says about me anymore. And I believe with my whole heart, this is God's desire for each of us. It’s almost like we know we’re on the right track when the things of this world stop being so shiny and tempting, the hustle stops being our pursuit, and instead, we begin pursuing Him.
Stopping a successful career and being “less visible” (as it relates to social media & working inside of the home full time) can be seen as counter-cultural. What has this shift honestly been like for you?
It has been hard. It has been a season of serious anonymity--no one “sees” what I’m doing. And as I mentioned, for someone who spent her entire life performing for others so they could affirm how good and valuable she was, to go ahead and jump into anonymity, if I can borrow a few lyrics from the Fresh Prince himself, “this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down.”
But a sweet woman, and Olive Us sister, Cari Trotter, actually walked me through a bible study the summer after my first Camp Well using the book “Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years...And Yours” by Alicia Britt Chole and it completely reframed what it means to walk out this season. Jesus spent the first 30 years of his life waiting for God to tell him “the time is now” and the agony of the waiting had to feel crushing some days. And yet, during that season of anonymity, Jesus was putting down deep roots, he was laying a solid foundation in God’s truths, so he could do the work God had ordained for him.
And so, in that same spirit, I’ve made this season of anonymity all about getting to know the Father. As Dr. John Perkins puts it, my entire life pursuit has become to know God, know myself, and make God known. And it’s my firm belief that you MUST walk out each step of that journey. You can’t jump to making God known if you don’t know yourself, and you certainly can’t jump into making God known if you don’t know Him. I want people to know Him because it oozes out of me. And my daily prayer for my family is that we will “be shiny beacons of light in this world that God loves.” That is truly all that matters to me anymore.
Currently, in our culture, it seems that we are highlighting some spiritual gifts, some vocations...over others. When we look at scripture (particularly 1 Cor) and talk about the Body of Christ it is quite clear that all parts are necessary and needed in the Kingdom of God. What are you learning about your spiritual giftings and how the Lord has made you?
Yes, this is one of the most imperative parts of our journeys as humans in my opinion: the knowing of yourself as God DESIGNED you, not as the world tells you you’re supposed to be! I have done so much work in this space in the past 2 and a half years of my life. And when I started looking at the Sam Franzen God designed during that time, I didn’t know her. I thought for certain the tools I’d been guided toward to use to get to know myself better, were wrong. And yet, the more that I’ve dug in, the more I see I was living in an “orphaned” state, separate from God, trudging forward by sheer willpower, and not for the kingdom.
For example, one of my top spiritual gifts is the gift of exhortation. I have been told many times that my voice is very powerful, that I have an ability to speak into people or situations in a way that brings clarity and truth. But I struggled to see that in myself. I’d spent so much time in my life working to please people, I would hold back from speaking out of fear I would offend someone, or push people away, or make someone feel not included. And as I look at it now, I see how much I was living for the praise of man.
This brings me to a really important realization I’ve come to in this season: The enemy will attack and silence the spaces of our greatest giftings. So long as the enemy kept me quiet, I wasn’t a threat to the kingdom of darkness, nor was I an asset to the Kingdom of God. This past year, I felt God press the word “brave,” and specifically brave communication, onto my heart. And I will tell you, I have had some of the HARDEST, most brave, and vulnerable conversations of my life in this past year. I’m finding my voice. And the more I listen to God's prompting in these spaces–the more I PRAY about these promptings placed upon my heart–the more I see them bring change, truth, and freedom for the kingdom.
That’s what our natural spiritual giftings are ultimately about: using our gifts to bring FREEDOM for God’s kingdom. And that’s ultimately why it’s imperative for us to be cautious in highlighting or celebrating some spiritual gifts over others–we rob the world of our God-given light.
How do you make sure you stay in your God-given lane and champion other people that God has placed in your life?
Ha! Not always easily. Especially as an enneagram 3, competition and comparison come very naturally. But the more I am confident in WHOSE I am, the more peace I find in being right where MY feet are. And that allows me the opportunity to celebrate with others, ESPECIALLY when I see them walking in alignment with their unique calling. I have also learned to trust that what God has meant for me, the plans He’s laid for me, will always be mine: God is always perfectly on time! So the more I trust His good plan, the more I can stay focused on MY mission, which allows me to walk, or run, well alongside my sisters and brothers doing kingdom work. Eyes up!
What fruit are you seeing from cutting back and cutting things out of your life? What fruit are you seeing?
Well most importantly, I feel like I have broken some generational chains. By cutting out and cutting back, I drew a line in the sand, and said “NO MORE!” And because I am learning to deeply know God, I am getting the opportunity to teach my daughters who He is much earlier in life. I see their giftings beginning to shine through in a way I know will change the trajectory for the generations to come. I see my daughters asking hard questions, but I also see them pause to pray when things are amiss. I see them in our daily quiet time learning to LISTEN to God. And they astound me with the things they write and share.
I have also seen a blossoming in my husband that cannot be explained by anything but God. Because I am running my race well, he is learning to run his race better each day. I see him stepping into spiritual authority as the head of our home, and it is changing what it means to be loved and protected for me and our girls. He is a tangible example of the Father’s love to me and my daughters in a way that has softened me, and that I KNOW will bolster up their confidence and faith as they prepare to enter into their teen years.
God has me right where He wants me, and this was affirmed deeply this fall at my second trip to Camp Well when he gave me the word “ease” which, after following a bunch of different references, lead me to Ecclesiastes 8:15 which says “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
Joy! Joy has taken root in all the toils of my life, and I feel a bountiful harvest is on the horizon.
Olive Us was created for women to share their in-process experiences and their "Only God" moments so that we can remember we are connected through Christ and that we're not alone. Why is this important?
In my opinion, sharing personal testimony shows us God is alive and moving today! Not “back then,” right now! I’m sure you’ve covered this before, but the word “testimony” in Hebrew means “do it again with the same power and authority.” So when we share our experiences, our testimony, I believe it gives all of us confidence that if He can do it for her, He can–and He WILL–do it for me, too. May we believe that to be true!
The Olive Tree
Finish these statements:
God is… worth intimately knowing.
God’s move is the best move because…through surrendering to His will, we find and attain true freedom.
‘Olive Us’ are better when…we are walking out, relishing in, and celebrating in, the unique fingerprint of life that God pressed upon our hearts at birth.