What if planning your year wasn't about setting goals you hope God will bless, but about asking Him what He wants to birth through you? In this episode, Jewelle introduces Life Visioning—a spiritual discernment practice developed by Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith that shifts the question from "What do I want to accomplish?" to "What is seeking to emerge through me?"

Drawing from scripture, Beckwith's teachings, and Danielle Laporte's Core Desired Feelings framework, Jewelle walks you through how to receive God's vision for you, identify the spiritual qualities you're called to embody, choose a theme that captures this partnership, and build a flexible plan rooted in surrender and inspired action.

If you've been setting New Year resolutions that drain you, feel misaligned with who you're becoming, or fizzle out by February, this episode offers an alternative approach to goal-setting - one that honors both God's sovereign plan and your deepest desires, and feels sustainable, spiritually grounded, and deeply aligned.

🔑 Key Message

When we receive vision from God first, our plans and actions gain clarity, direction, and purpose.

✨ What You’ll Walk Away With

• A deeper understanding of Life Visioning as spiritual discernment—how to receive God's vision through stillness, the four foundational questions, and identifying qualities before conditions
• A new approach to annual planning that honors both God's sovereign plan and your deepest desires, helping you choose a theme word that becomes your north star for the year
• Practical tools for surrender and embodiment—how to release attachment to outcomes, take inspired action aligned with your theme, and live the qualities of your vision daily
  

By the end of this episode, you’ll see how:

• Life Visioning positions you as an instrument of divine intelligence, not the architect demanding approval
• Qualities (joy, peace, abundance, radiance) come before forms (the job, the house, the number)—and focusing on qualities keeps you flexible, open to God's surprises, and aligned with what's truly best
• Your annual theme can become a filter for important decisions, a reminder of who you're becoming, and a daily practice of partnership with God

Meant for your reflection:

As you listen, consider:

1. "Where have I been planning FOR God (asking Him to bless my agenda) instead of planning WITH God (receiving His vision and aligning with it)?"

2. "What vision is seeking to emerge through me this year? What is God inviting me to become, not just accomplish?"

3. "How do I want to feel as I steward God's vision? What spiritual qualities am I being called to embody daily?"

🎧 Enjoying the show? Connect with Jewelle

Follow on Instagram: @jewelletbrown | @eveninthesmallthings

Listen on YouTube: @jewelletbrown

Subscribe to the newsletter: eveninthesmallthings.substack.com

As a companion to Episode 9, this minisode features a guided daydreaming visualization designed to help you rest, connect with God, and imagine a liberated future rooted in safety, freedom, and wholeness. Through breath, ancestral remembrance, and intentional imagination, you’ll be guided into DreamSpace—a sacred pause where productivity and pressure fall away, your nervous system softens, and divine possibility becomes accessible. This practice invites you to honor the women who came before you, reconnect with your intuition, and envision a future shaped by rest, trust, and liberation—one you are already building by choosing presence.

If you are driving or doing any activity that requires you to be alert, you can certainly listen along, but please revisit this minisode when you can safely close your eyes and fully partake in the visualization.

Why is rest so hard for Black women to claim—and what does it cost us when we don’t?

In this episode, Jewelle explores the spiritual, ancestral, and energetic necessity of rest for Black women, naming it not as a luxury, but as a practice of resistance, remembrance, and restoration. Drawing from scripture, epigenetics, Afrofuturism, and the teachings of Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry) and Cole Arthur Riley (Black Liturgies), this conversation traces how rest was denied, criminalized, and extracted from Black women’s bodies—and why reclaiming it now is essential to our liberation, pleasure, and holistic wellbeing.

Through stories of lineage, Sabbath theology, dreamspace, and the life of Jesus Himself, Jewelle invites listeners to see rest as our divine birthright—one that returns us to God, reconnects us to our bodies, and helps us imagine and build liberated futures.

This is a call to stop performing, stop proving, and start resting—not just for ourselves, but for those who came before us and the Black women coming after us.

🔑 Key Message

Rest is not optional for Black women—it is a sacred practice that honors our ancestors, restores our dignity, and reconnects us to God and our inherent divinity.

✨ What You’ll Walk Away With

• A deeper understanding of why rest feels so foreign to Black women and how historical, generational, and spiritual forces shaped that reality.
• Encouragement to release guilt, performance, and urgency, and to see rest as obedience, trust, and divine inheritance.
• Practical tools for embodying rest as resistance, remembrance, intimacy, dignity, and Sabbath—without needing to earn it.

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🧠 By the end of this episode, you’ll see how:

• Rest disrupts systems of extraction and refuses productivity as the measure of worth.

• • Choosing rest honors ancestors who were denied it and rewrites what we pass down.
  • God uses rest, stillness, and dreamspace to heal, guide, and reveal liberated futures.

  
  

  🌿 Meant for your reflection:

  As you listen, consider:

  1. When was the last time you rested without guilt or justification?

  2. What beliefs about rest did you inherit—and which ones are you ready to release?

  3. How might your rest today shape the world Black women inherit tomorrow?

  📲Enjoying the show? Connect with Jewelle

  Follow on Instagram: @jewelletbrown @eveninthesmallthings

  Listen on Youtube: @jewelletbrown

  Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠eveninthesmallthings.substack.com⁠

  
  

  🔗 Resources Mentioned

  Tricia Hersey’s Song “Rest Life”

  Tricia Hersey’s Dreamscape Playlist