Building Your Four Walls

Ever wondered if you're building additions on a house with cracked foundations? That's precisely what many of us do in life, and it's the powerful metaphor at the heart of the Four Walls Podcast.

Your host Toya introduces a revolutionary framework for understanding the four foundational areas that support a fulfilled, God-honoring life: spiritual walk, physical health, relationships, and finances. These four walls provide the essential structure we need before adding life's "amenities." When we try to skip ahead—pursuing romantic relationships without healthy platonic ones or tackling complex financial ventures without mastering basic money management—we create instability in our lives.

Drawing from her background as a registered nurse, certified lifestyle coach, and financial technology student, Toya brings diverse expertise to these conversations. What makes her approach unique is her refreshing transparency about her own struggles and mistakes. This isn't a podcast about perfection—it's about progress, honesty, and allowing God to reshape us. Through the powerful metaphor of the potter and clay from Jeremiah 18, listeners discover that past failures don't determine future potential. God specializes in taking marred vessels and creating something entirely new.

The upcoming "Lady in Waiting" series will explore relationship readiness, while a special four-part series addresses why bad things happen in our nation and world. Whether you're struggling with broken relationships, financial chaos, spiritual dryness, or health challenges, this podcast offers both practical wisdom and spiritual encouragement for rebuilding your foundations.

Ready to strengthen your four walls? Subscribe now, share your thoughts in the comments, and join a community committed to growth and transformation. New episodes release every Monday!

Transcript

The Four Foundational Areas Explained

Host Background and Purpose

Divinely Sculpted by God

Upcoming Series Preview

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome everyone. I wanted to welcome you and introduce you to the Four Walls Podcast. I am your humble host, Toya, and I wanted to take this time to introduce myself and give you an idea of what to expect moving forward with this podcast. So this podcast will focus on what I consider to be the four foundational areas in our lives that when we manage them properly can enable us to honor God and to live successful and fulfilling lives. So what are these four foundational areas? They are first and foremost our spiritual walk, our physical health and well-being, our relationships, and finally our finances. I refer to these key areas as our four walls. So if we correlate this to the homes or the apartments that we live in, the basic foundation is the four walls around us. Now there may be additional bells and whistles in our homes, like a second floor or a basement, a pool in the backyard, a fabulous deck, or some other amenity that we enjoy. But if you don't have the foundational four walls, then your home is lacking security and privacy and safety, and it leaves you vulnerable to calamity. All of the other amenities that can be added to your home should only come after your foundation is established. So this is where we can experience difficulty in our lives when we try to put additions onto our homes when our four walls are not yet established. This could look like us trying to add a romantic relationship to our house when our relationship wall is cracked and weakened, as demonstrated by the fact that we don't have any successful relationships with anyone in our lives. Or trying to take on or seek out an expansive financial endeavor when we haven't really learned how to manage our regular paychecks yet. This is the journey that we are endeavoring to address these critical areas of our lives as God divinely directs us and we allow Him to divinely sculpt us using practical and spiritually sound wisdom so we can live our best life. Throughout the life of this podcast, we will be addressing these issues and it will be concerning both men and women. However, I will point out that my focus will definitely be coming from the female perspective, because this is my wheelhouse. But nevertheless, I invite all to join in on the conversation. So I have been very passionate regarding these areas for most of my life, and unfortunately, I have also made some of the biggest mistakes of my life in these areas as well, as many of you may attest to also. Many of these mistakes, um, well, I won't say many, but some of them I'll be sharing with you. I don't want to scare you off. Um, just to be completely transparent and really just so you know that I'm really authentic about growing in this process and learning from my mistakes and learning from your mistakes, and we can grow together. And hopefully we can help each other in these areas of our lives that we're struggling with. As I look back over life choices and having discussions regarding some of these concerns and issues with friends and family, I definitely see the need for a discussion about this to really address these topics more publicly and shed light on them from a per from a Christian perspective. So the goal is not to really chastise or criticize anyone. And if we bring up a topic that's sensitive to you, hopefully I don't offend anyone, but we're just speaking truth and trying to bring light to areas that we struggle with. And definitely as women and as believers, um, sometimes we need to uncover things that may not necessarily be talked about a lot, um, but we need to put more focus and attention on and really pinpoint the areas that we need to put more effort in, maybe to study more, to improve, to expand our wisdom and knowledge. And we may even find some areas that we just need to completely uproot our current way of thinking or behaving and just start all over and just work on ourselves a little bit more as men and women of God. And that's okay. Wherever we are, the goal is let's improve from here. So I anticipate that this will be a journey of discovery and growth for both me and and many of you as I seek to really explore the wisdom that God has given us. He has put in his word and even in the witness of other believers, um, just to get a broader perspective of some of the topics that we'll be discussing and possibly down the road bring in experts if we really need to delve deeper into any particular topic just to get more insight and further instruction. I believe in this season that God is really highlighting our need to build strong kingdom families and communities within the body of Christ. And if we're honest, our success or lack thereof in some of our non-romantic relationships really reveals that when we do finally transition into a romantic relationship, if if that's what we are looking for or anticipating in this season of our lives, that we will more than likely not be successful based on our track record. And so that warrants us to stop and assess and really figure out what we're doing, why we're doing it, and where we're going in the future. So I know this is a difficult thing to admit, difficult for me to admit, but honesty regarding our shortcomings is really the first step to success. So, how can you fix a problem if you're not willing to identify that there is a problem? So we will not be holding anything back, any truth back during this process, in an effort to free us up and let it and let go of ignorance regarding our relationships, and we will be basing our strategy on what the word of God says and not simply my opinion or the opinions of others. We may discuss things, but the word is going to be our foundation. So we will be delving into these issues and so much more within this podcast. And I look forward to exploring all these topics with you all. So, moving on, just to give you a little background about me, um, I am a registered nurse by trade, um, although I'm not practicing right now by choice. I'm a certified lifestyle and health coach. I'm currently working on an advanced degree in financial technology. And I have my hands in many different pots right now. Um, but I do want to make a note of the fact that I am not a physician, I am not a licensed mental health counselor or therapist, I am not a pastor, and I am not a financial advisor. Okay, so if those are the things you're looking for, I apologize. I may not be the one for you, but I believe that God has shared some truths with me in these areas throughout my life and my experiences that I believe would benefit those who are willing to hear and be honest about where they are in these areas. And I would love for this to be an interactive experience. So feedback is both appreciated and encouraged. So let's begin by discussing this idea of being divinely sculpted by God. Because my task and yours, if you choose to accept it, is to examine ourselves to shine the light on these areas where we have not been successful, where we have been struggling and repeating the same cycles and allow God to re-sculpt us and mold us. And we're gonna take our cue from the Bible. So if we look at Jeremiah 18, 1 and 6, we can really see the foundation for this idea. Um, and Jeremiah says the following uh Verse 1 1 through 6 says, The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, Arise and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and behold, he wrought a work on the wheels, and the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter. So he made it again, another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter, saith the Lord, Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in mind, O house of Israel. Many of us can really identify with this marred vessel in the hand of the potter. We have really been burdened and condemned and heavy laden with our mistakes and our shortcomings in life. Our self-esteem has taken a hit, and we just feel irredeemably marred by life and our circumstances. Many of us feel like we can't come back from some of the mistakes that we've made, that the world is judging our mistakes, that we have been weighed, measured, and found wanting. But I'm here to tell you that before the foundation of time, God already knew that we would need a savior, that we would mess it up. And that is why he sent his son, Jesus, for us to redeem us from all of our sin, all of our guilt, all of our shame, our mistakes, our faults, our flaws, all of our wrong choices, our wrong turns, our wrong relationships, our wrong decisions. And even those of us who have received forgiveness for our mistakes, we look at the battered state that some of our mistakes have left us in, and we feel that we are doomed to be broken for the rest of our lives. Jeremiah tells us a different story. God is telling us through Jeremiah that He could take the marred and battered and beaten and bruised place that we might find ourselves in, and He could do a work in our lives that reveals another vessel, a completely different vessel from what existed previously. But this new vessel seems good to the potter. This is also a revelation for us that we need to stop looking to anyone except the potter to tell us that we are good or we're not good. He is the only one qualified to make that determination because he is the one who sculpted us. Even from our mother's womb, we were sculpted by God. And so he's the one who sculpted us, he's the one who knows what is good, he knows what's in us, and so he's the one that we need to seek to find out what we need to do and how we need to shift or adjust to be pleasing to the potter. And so we can't look to people to get that, we can't look to a relationship, um, a significant other. We can't look to people to gauge what is good for us. We need to seek the potter. When we look at our lives and our situations, we need to look at it from the premise that we are individually and uniquely sculpted by the divine potter. And so that's who we seek for our validation. And after we settle this within our spirit, then we could apply this to those foundational areas of our lives. So in this podcast, we will look at spiritual and practical ways to apply this to our lives as it relates to our relationships, our spiritual health, our physical health, and our financial health. Well, I believe that gives you a good idea of both who I am and what I plan to talk about from week to week on this podcast. I'll be loading new episodes on Mondays. And the first series will be titled Lady in Waiting, and we will be discussing what relationship readiness looks like and how God has desired for us to prepare and present ourselves to enter into relationships. And that series is going to launch within the next two weeks. However, I just wanted to interject in the meantime, before we begin that content, I will be posting a four-part series that speaks to the things that I believe we will begin to see and have already started to see going on in our nation and in the world. Just tackling this notion of why bad things happen. Although this will be a temporary deviation from our normal four-walls topics, I definitely feel that God is leading me to talk about this and what it means for us as a people and as a nation, including the shifts that we need to make in our thinking and our believing because of it. So on that note, I'm so excited about beginning this journey, and I look forward to getting to know many of you and interacting with you via the comments and the feedback so that we can grow in this area together as I'm navigating this journey with you as well. God bless you all and see you in the next episode.