Humble Beginnings #3
GOD'S TURN (July 17, 2023)
In 2019, my life was turned upside down when I realised my marriage of just about 12 years was over. In the middle of my worst storm, God rescued me and started me on the most incredible journey.
It was in the midst of this storm that I was prompted to reach out to my mom. “I need help” has long been the most difficult thing for me to admit or ask of anyone. For the first time, I told my mom everything! She reached out to my sister-in-law who connected me to a Kingdom counsellor, a warrior woman of God! She took me through deliverance and broke off so many strongholds over my life.
During one of our counselling sessions, I got word from a trusted prophetess friend of her’s. God’s word for me was: “you have made your decisions in the past, now it is My turn.” That was exactly the truth and the tipping of the scales that I had been praying for!
But my storm wasn’t over yet. I still had to go home to my then husband. We were getting ready to move, my 36th birthday was coming up and he was on his way out of the country for a month. When he returned to South Africa in 2020, Covid hit. I was to be in hard lockdown with him for what turned out to be 3 months!
I was at the end of myself, emotionally exhausted and totally surrendered to God. It was in this place of my life, God gave me His peace! It was a peace that surpasses all human understanding. A peace so out of place, so out of sorts in my situation, so supernatural that I knew it could only come from God!
And so, God turned my lockdown into the most creative and growing time of resting in Him! He started ministering to me through Youtube and led me to many men after His own heart such as John Paul Jackson, John E Thomas, Troy Brewer, Shawn Bolz... He led me to worship music that not only fed my spirit but was also an outlet and place to let go of built up emotions, unforgiveness and even find my self-worth and identity in Christ.
It is only by the grace of God that I am here today. Having always been a really private person and someone who didn’t want to burden anyone else with my problems, I kept my struggles, marital problems and depression to myself. I became so good at hiding my feelings and issues, that friends and family were shocked when I finally started sharing that I had gotten divorced and moved back in with my parents in May of 2020.
Fast forward to 2021, my mom sent me a prophetic word one day, the link went straight to an ebook called the Science of Dreams which led me to joining Raising Royalty, an online Kingdom academy bent on teaching the truth of God’s word to the children of God! Raising Royalty led me to a group called Kingdom Warriors (an NFT project with a mission of taking ground for God in the mountain of arts and entertainment by producing Kingdom content) in April of 2022. I received an email inviting me to join a challenge and I just felt the Holy Spirit nudge me to do it, so I did! It started the very night I signed up and I found myself immersed in the Kingdom Community I had previously been praying for! I just never thought that it would be online.
About a month later, I started working for Kingdom Warriors as virtual support and also helped with their onboarding process. Five months later, God moved mountains to get me on a call that changed my life and set me on course for His will in my life.
This is how it went down: After numerous tech issues, missed zoom calls and then a colleague falling ill, I was put on a call with a guy named Ryan. After a normal onboarding call and helping him set up and explaining all the protocol, we ended the call. What happened next had me baffled! I couldn’t get his face out of my mind and as we had just started a new challenge (which I helped run) and Ryan was on this challenge, I kept seeing him on my computer screen. He was everywhere! To the point where I was pacing the floor asking God, “why? why are You highlighting this guy to me? Am I supposed to help him with something? Is he supposed to help me with something?”
It didn’t take long for my communication with Ryan to become more personal as we started to talk with one another outside of the challenge and business of Kingdom Warriors. We were both taken aback at what was going on here as we lived on opposite sides of the globe, it was just crazy! We both felt that this was God at work and as neither of us were looking to be in any kind of a relationship at the time, we decided to just take it one day at a time and see what God had for us.
When God moves in a way that is undeniable, and you are in a place of complete surrender to Him, you come into a place of alignment with His Spirit that is just so indescribable! You just know, that you know, that you know! I had no idea why, but I knew that I loved Ryan and almost let the words slip many times.
It was maybe a week in and Ryan and I were constantly on the phone, for hours, everyday. Then we would be on the same zoom calls with Kingdom Warriors and this particular Warrior Wednesday call, Timothy Morgan(the marketing expert) was heading the call and asked each of us to give some background to who we were and what we do. I shared my Kingdom Warrior testimony as it encompassed how God had moved in my life and was using my talents as a graphic designer and social media VA for the glory of His Kingdom.
Timothy pried at me for a bit and asked me to share “My Story” . He really put me in the spotlight, but I began to share about having studied as a Textile Designer and how I was a self taught graphic designer, etc.
Soon as the zoom ended, my phone rang! It was Ryan, he was so excited! He told me the whole story of how he came to call a style of shoes Yo Dad’s to such an extent that he had rebranded those shoes to the people in his life, how his niece had spoken a prophetic word over him creating Yo Dad’s. Of how he had been on a zoom with Eric Sheldon, founder of Kingdom Warriors who had spoken a prophetic word over Kingdom entrepreneurs about how God is opening doors for kingdom products.
Ryan went on to share how he had prayed after that meeting with Eric, as God had highlighted Yo Dad’s to him. Knowing in his spirit that this was a God idea but having no experience in the field of textiles or product creation. He said that when he jumped on that zoom with Timothy and I had uttered the words “textile designer”, he instantly thought that I was exactly the person who would know about designing and making a shoe! God had answered his prayers, He had preordained plans for us and we were watching it all unfold.
We started developing the idea of Yo Dads as a real workable idea and the more we dreamed with God, the more we realised just how limitless this idea was and the impact it will have on all those God moves us to sow into.
Soon after this and about 2 weeks into the relationship, Ryan and I were chatting, Ryan was half falling asleep when the words “I love you” resounded over the phone. We both instantly woke up, kinda shocked! I immediately said, “what…?! wait…I love you too!” I had been feeling this way since that first call but had no idea that he had been feeling the same way! So there it was, we were not just “in love” we loved each other... because He loved us first!
A few weeks later on my birthday, I wake up in the middle of the night to a message from Ryan, a screenshot of his plane ticket to South Africa to meet me and my family in person. We got engaged 25th November, 2022 and started work on my fiancé visa to go to the US so we can get married. Ryan spent three incredible weeks with us in my home country and got to experience it all! Both the beauty South Africa has to offer and the heart breaking truth of the vast impoverished communities.
We had the opportunity to attend a dinner at the home of a local missionary from my brother’s church. Then Ryan shared his mission field experience with me. His earthly father, who passed about 12 years ago, had been involved with many mission trips to Africa and he had been able to go with him to Kenya in his mid-twenties. Ryan pointed out how he realised, that so many of these missions have just become a continual raising of funds and constantly working from a position of lack.
We discussed the fact that there was great need in my country for people with skilled labor but that the multitudes of people in need of work, didn’t have the kind of skills people could utilize.
Later in the trip we walked around the Kleinmond Harbour, a beautiful area with many beautiful holiday homes on the coast all overlooked by a large area we call informal settlements. These settlements are areas allocated to our country’s impoverished communities, some parts have government subsidised housing but the majority are makeshift housing we call shacks.
Ryan, being a guy interested in real estate with a background in rehabilitating properties, noticed a beautiful property in this area that was for sale. It is the most run down property in a couple of blocks boasting new development with thriving shops and restaurants at the centre of this vacation destination area. The both of us saw so much potential in this property and started dreaming with God. The possibilities are endless!
God started to unveil more and more what this idea could become and what this property might look like as a solution to some challenges in the community. We continued to dream with God about this idea over the course of a few days and Ryan wrote down his vision of this self-sustaining mission idea in his journal:
A self-sustained mission teaching Kingdom principles by which to live such as sowing and reaping, money management, tithing, community service, and civic duty with an internship for teaching service-related skills like groundskeeping, maintenance, hospitality, culinary, and management.
All of this built around holiday rental units as the start and the later addition of a restaurant and venue that could actually be income for the mission that took on young people from the community for a time and taught them skills that would be marketable in the area.
Upon returning to the US, Ryan met with Timothy Morgan of Giver Marketing Network on a zoom call. In this meeting he told Timothy of the two ideas that were weighing on our hearts and circling around our minds. Timothy gave him this advice, “I always tell people to either focus on an idea that makes a million dollars or focus on an idea that affects a million people. Sounds to me like you have an idea that could make a million dollars you should focus on in order to fund your idea that affects a million people.”
How amazing?! God brought so many people into our journey with Word to help guide us and confirm what He had established in our hearts!
So, we focused on building a company to sell a product like a shoe from which a large portion of the profits go to building opportunities to spread the gospel and build the kingdom through empowering and discipling nations. From that point forward we have focused on designing and making a comfortable shoe, which is something we all buy anyway. This in turn will enable us to fund missions designed to teach the people to fish and become self-sufficient.
Everything God has so strategically written in this story of our lives, has just blown my mind! It’s like He implanted Yo Dads into both my and Ryan’s hearts! We have the same desires, hopes and dreams for this God-project, the same excitement! Our past accumulated skills and experiences fit perfectly together with who we are now in Christ, in fulfilling our purpose on this earth and in the spiritual realm. God has equipped us with everything we need to steward this project according to His will.
We will make Kingdom Impact!
~ Chané Barnard-Null
And that’s just what we did. Though our journey has taken many turns and Yodad shoes kind of took a back seat for a while, we are back with a renewed vision. Dreaming with God again and ready for the next adventure, but more on this in our next post…
Ryan & Chané
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