Welcome to the Jesus Calling podcast. Today we talk with two women whose lives were touched

by painful struggles and can now see despite their pain that God has a plan to use their stories for good.

Author Rachel Hollis and Cancer Activist Gil Shenzel.

Rachel Hollis is the number one New York Times best selling author of Girl Wash Your Face.

Rachel is a top motivational speaker and C.C.O. of the Hollis Company, a media and lifestyle company,

plus a mother of four. She shares some deeply personal tragedies

and triumphs along her journey to success and the motivation behind why she

desires to challenge women to reach for a better version of themselves each day.

I am Rachel Hollis. I am an author and a lifestyle influencer and a speaker and a mom of four I do a lot of a lot of things

so I actually grew up in Bakersfield to California which is about two hours north of here

and is very much like you picked up West Texas and dropped it into Southern California.

So everybody, almost everybody works in agriculture, drives a truck,

whereas Wranglers, the whole thing.

My father was a Pentecostal minister. My grandfather

was a Pentecostal minister, so I grew up Pentecostal in a small country church with maybe 200 people attending and 187 of them were family members.

So I was a baby of four children and I grew up I think as the baby you are oftentimes

attention seeking so I the way that I kind of learned to get attention or notice was performing. I grew up doing theater. I

You know always wanted to make people laugh. I always wanted to tell stories. My family on both sides from Oklahoma.

So we have a long history and Irish.

So we have a long history of like storytellers and like, you know,

the fish tale that gets bigger and bigger every single time the daddy tells it that kind of thing.

Yeah, so that was church culture was a huge part of my life growing up.

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