Bible Verses for Waiting on God | When Your Life Goes Completely Off Script

"Some plans don't just change, they get taken apart completely, and there's no clean explanation for why while you're standing in the middle of it.

Two versions of "off script"

Blake's came first: a football career mapped out at Mississippi State, thriving, leading a Bible study, plugged into a coach who believed in him, until a coaching change left him labeled a practice player. He left with no school to go to, "collegiately homeless," working on the farm and asking God if football was even part of the plan anymore. The answer came as a phone call from a coach at Austin P. Years later, he says, it was unmistakably clear that was exactly where he was supposed to be. Mickey's script changed differently, a move to Nashville that was supposed to be temporary work, a life in Aberdeen, Mississippi that never happened. He didn't know at 24 that the move was pulling him out of a cycle of generational dysfunction in his own family. He only understood it decades later.

Building it right, then losing it anyway

In 1997, Mickey built a sports mentorship camp on 200 acres outside Franklin, full football fields, a pool, a gym better than most colleges. A mentor told him, "if He gave you this, do it in perfection," so he did. For over a decade, it ran full, 600-800 kids a summer, leading teenagers to Christ. Then 2008 happened. By 2012, the financial damage from the crash had caught up, and Mickey had to shut it down. He gathered everything, every letter, every photo, more than a pickup truck could hold and burned all of it in a fire pit.

"I sat there and I was a weepy-eyed guy, but I cried like a baby, and I fussed to God, why would you give this place and now you're gonna take it from me? ... It was yours anyway, so I'm going to burn it, send it all back to you."

He put the property up for sale the next Monday.

Calling time out isn't the same as walking away

Mickey describes what came after as a sabbatical, not a departure. "I traded my Bibles for a fifth of Macallan 18. I called time out." But when Blake pushes on whether that's really different from walking away, Mickey's answer is specific: he never blamed God, and he never stopped believing, he just needed distance.

"I never walked away from Him. I got to know Him really well. And He could take care of his own stuff right then, and I just needed to know Him a little better.""

He spent that time asking a harder question than "why did this happen," he asked whether he'd disqualified himself. He watched friends' ministries take off around the same time his was ending, and wondered if he'd done something to cause it. Looking back, he's not sure but he's also not sure that failure wasn't its own kind of protection: "If I had been successful in that ministry, would I have been like a lot of pastors that get to believe in the press report, and then they fail? Maybe God protected me from myself."

The plan and the present moment

"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you." — Jeremiah 29:11-12

Blake separates the two verses deliberately. Verse 11 is the long view, the assurance that there's a plan at all. Verse 12 is what you actually do in the meantime: call on Him, pray, get in alignment with the plan instead of white-knuckling your own. "No matter how hard I'm trying to white-knuckle and get through whatever I'm going through, whenever we take that time to submit to God, what do you have, what are your plans? Then we have that peace."

If this is you

If your life doesn't look anything like what you thought it would by now, that doesn't mean you've lost the plan, it might mean you're standing in the part of it that hasn't made sense yet. Write down where you actually are, and see what The LifeLine Tool has for you. Watch Mickey and Blake talk through this in full on The LifeLine Radio Show → BIBLE VERSES FOR WAITING ON GOD | WHEN LIFE GOES OFF SCRIPT

Full conversation transcript

Blake: Hey guys, welcome to the Lifeline Tool Show. I'm Blake Mitchell, and this is Mickey Mitchell. Mickey: Op, Op, I can introduce myself. My name is Mickey Mitchell. Welcome to the Lifeline Show. Blake: Okay, my bad. Mickey: You're forgiven, but remind them to go to the Lifeline Tool YouTube channel so that they can subscribe and become a member. Blake: Close Mickey: The Lifeline will get you online. Blake: Just cut me off when you want, boss. Seriously, whenever you want to jump in? Mickey: When you need help, you need help. Blake: On the day of the episode, we're to be talking about when life goes off script. Have ever found yourself living life, you've got a plan, you know the steps you have to take to get where you're trying to go, and then chaos happens, and you see that that's not necessarily the plan that God has for you. Today, we’re going to be talking about those moments in your life. Hop in whenever you’d like, homes. A little tequila and we'll get after it. Mickey: I'll bet you what, if we did have Macallen before we started, I would be willing to bet you that this thing would blow up with likes. Blake: If we had Macallen before this started, I don't think I'd say two words. Mickey: Really, I’d say more. Blake: I don’t think we could get you to stop telling stories. Mickey: Macallen 18 man I would ya’ll better have batteries on all these cameras. Back up batteries. Blake: Keep dropping the Macallen 18, potential sponsor. Mickey: That’s an incredible topic, that when life goes off script. And whenever you think about that, you think you could talk about it every day of your life. Where does it fit in our spiritual life? How does it grow us? You know, whether you're driving in traffic, or you're launching a new business, or you're looking for a new church, or you have a friendship. So, I think this topic could be looked at broadly, don't you? Blake: Absolutely. You see time and again, marriages that start, and people think it's look one way, and when you're engaged and you're not living together, you have this whole picture of what it’s going to be like to live with this person, and this is going to answer all my relationship issues.And then most people get married and that's whenever they see that maybe that person, there’s more quirks, there more to then than what they expected. I think that’s one example of everything. I mean from jobs to schools to you name it. Life rarely works out and looks exactly the way we planned for it to. Mickey: Life goes off script. What would have been the time in your life that felt like you were on this path and life dealt you a hand that took you to another direction? What would be the biggest thing in your life? Blake: The first thing that comes to mind is just my college football career. A few guys wind up playing at three schools and usually that's no one's plan. My plan coming to high school is to play college football at Mississippi State, be a stud there, wind up in the NFL, wear the same number as my dad and do a lot of cool things while I was there. My first two seasons there, that was the way everything was looking. I was playing good, I had a coach that liked me, it was tough to play for, but he was making me the best lineman he could. And then when that staff left, it was like, it left me feeling lost, because the new staff came in, I played in my third season there, and realized that these coaches saw me as a practice player. And that was a tough realization, I had to leave. And I had all these steps in line. I was playing at Mississippi State. I was around people that knew you whenever you were playing there, it was just such a cool experience. I was plugged into FCA, being the leader of the school’s FCA, and had Bible studies once a week together. I felt like it was a place I was growing. I started a team Bible studies at my house once a week. I was like, God is, I'm thriving here, and God has his hand in it. And after those first two seasons, everything felt like it fell apart. And it left me where I just announced that I was leaving, with nowhere to go. And came back home Nashville with to go, just kind of asking God, am I even supposed to play football? What do you have for me? I don't know where this is going, but I had this plan, and it seemed like you were blessing every step of the plan. And I wound up, you know, collegiately homeless, with no school, and I was at home working on the farm, and that was whenever, you know, I a call from Mark Hudsmith, who was a coach at Mississippi state, taking the head job at Austin P, and called me to come be a center. And that’s at the same time, I'm sitting at the farm just thinking, what's next? And God made it clear. And years later, even today, it was very clear that was what he had for me. Mickey: One of the times was during the crash, and I lost my mother, which was huge, and then I was losing lots of money, and I was selling real estate for half of what it was worth, just to keep another year renewal, and whenever one real estate deal fell through, so I went to get a closing done, and then I'm thinking, I'm toast. Blake: Well, one thing as a side note, I think you've told that story verbatim. Mickey: Well, I pinned a statement many many years ago, but I don't say a lot, but I say, I say a lot. So, all you guys looking out there, you're going to have to listen to the same story. Blake: Get ready for next week, when you get to hear this story again. Whenever he tells this story again, you can take a break, go to theLifelineTool.com, download our app, and that will help walk in those times of chaos, step-by-step, back to Father God. Mickey: I got a new story. Blake: We'll see. Mickey: Not new to you. But now, another time that my life went off script is when I got out of college, the hometown construction company owners called me in to hire me. And so they hired me right out of college, and an old superintendent named Willie Bowen was best friends with my grandfather, and he idolized my grandfather. And so for me, to go to work with him, he took me under his wing and taught me everything he could teach me about construction. That was God's man. I know that. It had to have been God's plan. And so I worked there for two years. And while I was down there for two years, the first thing I bought, a lot of people went to buy a new truck, a car, and I bought a new ski boat. And I bought a ski boat, and we water skied everyday you could possibly water ski. And so we wanted to get into competitive water skiing. Whenever I get a call in from my bosses. And after two years down I had bought a farm. I used to work his cows for him, he had sold me one of his farms because he knew I loved it because it had a lot of good hunting and a lot of cotton on it. So he sold me his farm and then financed it for me. So I bought a farm, I had a house that I just renovated, so my wife, my script was to live in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and water ski, and probably marry a hometown girl and farm on the side working construction. But instead, I get a phone call one day, and it was my bosses, and they said, Mickey, would you entertain moving to Nashville just for a while to run a project up there? We're having a little superintendent issues up there. And I went, yeah, I'd love to go up there. Well, coming from Mississippi to Nashville, it didn't take me two weeks to know that I would love to live in Nashville. And after a couple months, me filling in for this guy, they asked me, would you want to stay here? I was like not yes, but heck yes. And so they ended up letting him go, and I moved to Nashville. And so that’s what brought me to Nashville. And so my script changed completely from what I thought was going to be in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and now in Nashville. And so you don't really know why that happened. I moved to Nashville at 25, so I've been 24 years old. I didn't know anything at 24 years old. I just knew I had a dominant dad. I say that we put the funk in dysfunctional. Growing up, suicide, all kind of crap. He was a big old cowman, and didn't think King Kong could whip him. And later in life, right now, but now you hear about it a lot, about generational sin. And so my great-granddad did things that my granddad did that my dad did. God moved me up here to break that generational sin. And so I didn't know at the time, but whenever I landed in church, we moved to another church, and went through this thing called men's fraternity. And then it led me to go to my dad and tell him, listen, these are some things that you don't need to talk about. And so it was some really difficult times, especially with men like him, it wasn’t fun at all but it was able to bring me to a place of going spiritually like I never thought I could. And so that's when life takes you off script. And sometimes, you really don't know why. At 24 years old, I had no clue. At 65 years old, and I see what goes on back there even to this day, now what goes on here, that I fight every day. You and I have talked about it a lot. You just don't allow that stuff to continue on. You pray to God would show you. Blake: I think that's a great story, but I'm just sitting here, remember the one I was going to prompt you to tell, from a time of chaos, a time of, I think a very relatable thing that is in this story is the time of almost being angry with God, or questioning of what's going on here, and I think a part of in your story is whenever you had to sell Refuge. If you just isolate that, and the way you handle that, and the way you went up on the hill and everything, think that's something that's pretty deep. Mickey: I’ll try to make a flyover of it, but in ‘97, I started growing spiritually in ‘92, I was born again in Mississippi, but I didn't start going spiritually until ‘92, and so I couldn't get enough of word, and so by ‘97, God gave me a plan to develop a sports equipment center where I would bring high school athletes from 8th and 9th grade primarily, to a place that I would mentor them into leading them to Christ, and develop them into Godly leaders, so they could go back to their high schools, their junior and senior year and play their high school, to be a certain influence in their high schools across the nation. So in ‘91, I ended up buying that 200 acres down in Franklin, and a friend of mine Larry McTavish, was two to come late over the roof, and he was one of the mentors, he goes, Mickey, if He gave you this, to do this, do it in perfection, so if you went out there, we had a baseball field with rubber coating on the field, we had two football fields, turf and everything. It had a swimming pool, club house and a gym that most colleges would love to have, bondo tracks, and a basketball court and a sport court with a sand pit in the back, unlike any college you see, so I built it right, like McTavish told me to. So we opened that up in 2001, and 2008 the crash happened, and so I kept it up in 2012, and so by 2012, I had been hurt so much financially that I had to let the guys go. And so I had two full-time workers and both of them had been pro athletes. And I told them, listen, put your resumes out after christmas. And if you have a job by February, then it's God's will. If you don't have a job by February, why don't you do the camp again? They both had jobs in the two weeks. And so we shut down. And so after we shut down, shut the camps down, I took all the, that's whenever my script had been rewritten. It had started being rewritten by 2008, but 2010, I don't know if I will make any more. And after the last count, I thought that I was going to lose everything. And so I got all the paperwork, all the pictures, all the letters of the. You know, we had 800, 600 to 800 kids in summer camp. And for 10, 12 years, and so how many letters, you know, God did some crazy stuff. So if you believe the press report, my chest would have swollen up bigger than you can imagine. And I never did. But I did have all those letters and all these pictures and all the stuff the Refuge stuff that would be, a pick up truck wouldn’t hold it all. And I carried it out to the fire pit, locked the gate, and burned every bit of it. I sat there and I was a weepy-eyed guy, but I cried like a baby, and I fussed to God, why would you give this place and now you're gonna take it from me? And I did. I sat there, burned every bit of it, cried and said, it was yours anyway, so I’m going to burn it, send it all back to you. And after it's all gone, the next Monday, I put it on the market for sale. Blake: Let's pause real quick and get these feet uncrossed, your boots are rubbing against the chair. Mickey: You don’t like to hear all that? Anyway, Blake: Just so you guys know what's causing that. What did you do to walk back to Christ after that moment of being angry and putting on the market and selling it? What did that walk back to faith and believe in it? I heard you kind of mention before you were upset. What did that walk look like? Mickey: Looking back at it, it changed, but it was never a walk back. I never left. The only thing is, I called time out. I tell people that I traded the Bible. You remember, I used to keep Bibles in my backseat? And I give Bibles to kids, I’d give Bibles around. And I'm embarrassed to say it. It's true. I traded my Bibles for a fifth of Macallan 18. I called time out. I said, I need a sabbatical. If I don't have the refuge anymore. I've never passed the buck. I've never been the one to say it was your fault. Blake: So when you call time out and you trade the Bibles for Macallan 18, I would, in my opinion, that sounds like somebody walking away. You’re phrasing it as calling time out but what did that look like at the end of the sabbatical? Mickey: Before that point, God had given me this tool called Lifeline. I didn't mean to do that. We're sitting here on theLifelineTool.com. He gave me that tool. And so I was using the lifeline back then. That's crazy. I didn't mean to say that because I really didn't. But He gave me that tool and I was leading someone to Christ sometimes daily. So whenever I had to sell refuge, Blake: Real quick, if you want to experience that tool, just go to TheLifelineTool.com. You can download our app, become a member, and get in our prayer groups. Mickey: At the end of the day, God and I, I never walked away from God. I was with God. But I was kind of aggravated at God. But I never passed the buck to someone who says they didn't do anything. I'm always looking at myself, always. So what I was looking at myself was, I had a very bad marriage. I've never been an alcoholic. I've just been a hard working guy with a temper that sometimes struggled with controlling his tongue. But if somebody had opened my mind up and put it on the video screen, I'd be like, oh gosh, well he’s a pretty good guy, I just wasn't that bad of a guy. But at the end of the day, I was wanting. I thought that I was called to do that. And then when I looked at myself, I was thinking, God, what did I do to disqualify myself? You know? And I would look at a lot of my friends that had started ministries at the same time, and they were exploding. And I'm thinking, I must have done something to can it. Blake: One thing I did want to touch on is you're talking about that when you took that sabbatically from, even today, you're still struggling with that. I think we should dig into that before we move into something else. Is that something that you're still working on? I understand you you never walked away from but I think there's more to unpack there. Sometimes when chaos hits, it looks that much different. Especially when we think we're on the right track. It might be years before we get any type of closure where we can see what God was doing. Mickey: Well, like I said, even back then, whenever I leave people in Christ, whenever I put that sign up for sale. And at that point, I'm like, you know, this part of my life is over with. I just need a sabbatical. And so I went through, and I really felt like I had disqualified myself. So I wasn’t as mad at God, as if it was about me couldn't do that for you? It's more of, you know, I trust you. But it's like, I was talking about college football. If I had been a starter, I might have been a different man. And so if I had been successful in that ministry, would I have been like a lot of pastors that get to believe in the press report, you know, and they failed? So maybe God protected me from myself. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I know that's what happened. And I know that my idea was at the time that nothing was happening, and now today it’s happening. And so he could have used me, and so it may have been me. I don't know. But then there was probably two or years, maybe not that long, that I didn’t lead anybody to Christ. I went from ten years of leading someone to Christ, I bet you at least once a week, maybe more. And then it was probably a couple of years that I never wrote the lifeline out. I never did anything. I say this, but it's kind of true. But whenever I had all the stuff, all the hunting places, all the things, God I had so many friends. I couldn't go hunting somewhere that I didn't feel like I needed to take fifteen people. Whenever I lost all that, I lost those friends too. Every one of them. And then when I got divorced, I lost all the super Christians. And so it was kind of a lonely time, but I'm a loner anyway. I really am. If I'm not with my kids today, I’d soon be in the middle of the woods by myself with a gun or something, or with my bride. But anyway, that's the time that I tell people that whenever you're broken, and I was broken. I lost Refuge, I lost my mother. I knew I was getting divorced. And there's some things that went on in that time period that you can remember, but won't talk about it here. But I don't know that a man could be more broken. And that's the time that me and Him got close. And I kind of thought during that time that, you know, God, and this was my attitude back then. I wrote it in a journal somewhere. God, if you're a God that can blow in clay and form a man, you don't need me anyway. And so the only reason I didn't mean that is because I love you. And so right now, if you can handle that without me, handle it without me right now because I just need to know you a little better. And so really, for a couple of years, I didn't walk away from Him. I got to know Him really well. And He could take care of his own stuff right then and He was developing me into what I hope is right now. Blake: That's an awesome story of a time of chaos. There's a scripture that I think of four times of chaos in my life, and one I'd like to go back to is Jeremiah 29:11-12. And that says, “for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, and not to harm you, plans to give hope in the future. Then you will call on me, and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” Where I think that translates so well in these times of chaos is that we can lean on the fact that He has plans for us. So even in that time where you needed a break, He knows the beginning and the end. He knows what you need, when you need, and how you need. And verse 12 is what really stands out to me. Because verse 11 gives us peace in knowing that He has a plan and everything. But verse 12 gives us the right now. It gives us what step in that time of chaos that you can take. And I've heard one of my favorite sayings is, a man stands all around his knees. And whenever we break down, we submit to His authority. No matter how hard I'm trying to white knuckle and get through whatever I'm going through, whenever we take that time to submit to God, what do you have? What are your plans? Then we have that piece of, he says here, He’ll listen to us. He already knows but our act of prayer and our act of alignment with him, getting in alignment with Father God for our plans and for our plans to be His plans. I think it's so important in these times of chaos. Mickey: This subject, like we started it. We started off talking about how we could relate this to our everyday life or to our big stuff. So what we ended up going through is the big things. The big times that our script was changed. Blake: You want to pray us out and close it out? Mickey: Lord we start, I start so many prayers with just saying we never want to do a zipper prayer. It’s just time to end it and we’re just going to say a quick prayer and zip it up. But Lord, we come to you Lord that we are grateful, and if we had a God that we could understand he wouldn't be a god worth worshiping, so we don't understand all about you. We trust that you are a creator, you are a loving God, and Lord, you sent your son to pay a price because we’re sinful, and we need it, and so we're grateful. And Father, the gift of the Holy Spirit that lives in us, we're so grateful. Thank you Lord. Dear God, we pray today that the message that we talk about today is meaningful to every ear that hears it because of your power, because of what you're doing in this world. And Lord, we're only messengers, we're only vessels, and what we talk about in this episode is that you don't need anything from us, you can do it all. But you sure do love whenever we decide to follow you, and we decide to give our life to you. And so this is what this is about, is us taking our resources, our time, and our lives, and giving it to you in the way that we know how. And so we pray that you use it, you use your power to influence others, and we pray that this will be so instrumental in saving millions of lives in the Bible that we hear about and many going on, and we pray that you use us just as a small piece of what your plan is, that's what our prayer is. We pray for our soldiers, Lord, that you keep them safe. We for our president, Lord, that you would empower him with your spirit to continue to lead this nation in the way that you have it to go. Thank you Lord for this time, thank you for whoever's watching, in Jesus' name, amen. "