In this episode, Belinda Pollard, Donita Bundy and Alison Joy interview Billie Jauss, author of the books MAKING ROOM and DISTRACTION DETOX. Billie speaks across America and hosts the Family Room Podcast. She shares what she’s learned about finding God’s purpose in our writing – even when it’s surprising – and finding real solutions to toxic busyness, self-doubt, shame and distraction.
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In conversation in this episode:
- Billie Jauss, podcaster, speaker and author of MAKING ROOM and DISTRACTION DETOX
- Belinda Pollard, author of mainstream crime novels, writing coach, accredited editor with qualifications in theology, writing and publishing blogger at smallbluedog.com, and Gracewriters founder
- Donita Bundy, writing teacher, preacher and author of the Armour of Light supernatural fiction series
- Alison Joy, romance author, former early childhood teacher and mother of 4 adult children
Topics covered in this episode:
- Being “dragged kicking and screaming” into writing. How Jesus opened unexpected doors and provided support.
- How 10 years of writing devotionals for a baseball website evolved into authoring a book.
- The secret blog Billie began when she became an empty nester.
- Adapting the devotional structure and content to create chapters of a book.
- Learning new writing skills through reading books and blogs, and observing what she liked and didn’t like about other people’s writing.
- Tackling imposter syndrome after the too-fast publication of her first book, and how it stopped her writing with purpose.
- Writing a list of negative thoughts that arose, realising she was her own worst bully as she would never say those things to someone else. Challenging each negative thought with the truth of scripture.
- Being too busy, and how to learn to say no so that there is time for God to speak into our lives. How we get in the way of someone else’s calling if we do the thing they are supposed to be doing.
- Finding moments of pause and listening to God. Listening to the Bible while exercising or driving.
- Changing popular culture by loving our neighbour.
Find Billie Jauss online
Billie’s website: https://www.billiejauss.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/billie_jauss/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/billiejaussauthor/
X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/billiejauss
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billie-jauss-847872106/
Check out Billie Jauss’s books:
Find links to Billie’s books on her website here: https://www.billiejauss.com/books/
Or click the titles below to find out more on Amazon (associate links that help earn a few cents for Gracewriters):
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Audio
Video
Transcript
Belinda Pollard: Welcome to the Gracewriters Podcast – Christian Writers Changing Popular Culture. Hit subscribe on your favourite podcast player so you never miss an episode and find show notes, useful links and a full transcript at gracewriters.com.
Today on the podcast, Christian non-fiction author, mother of three and baseball wife, Billie Jauss.
I’m Belinda Pollard. I’m an author, editor and book coach with a theology degree and 20 years in the publishing industry. I blog for writers at smallbluedog.com and you can find links to my books, blogs and online courses at belindapollard.com.
Alison Joy: Hi, my name is Alison Young. I’m a former early childhood educator with four adult children. Aside from writing, my other passion is photography and as part of the media team at my local church, I have the privilege of capturing God moments, both big and small. I write contemporary romance under the name, Alison Joy, and you can find out more about my books at alisonjoywriter.com.
Donita Bundy: Hi, I’m Donita Bundy. For the past 20 years, I’ve been using my theology degree to underpin my preaching and more recently, to inspire my urban-fantasy series, Armour of Light. You can find out more about me and my other endeavours like my book cover design and my blog at donitabundy.com.
Billie Jauss is the author of two books, Making Room and Distraction Detox. She speaks across America and is the host of the Family Room Podcast which provides practical Biblical guidance and challenging motivation for women who want to accomplish God’s best in their faith, family and friendships.
Billie, and her husband Dave, a professional baseball coach, spend the baseball season on the road and the off-season in south-west Florida.
Welcome to the podcast, Billie!
Billie Jauss: Thank you guys for having me.
Alison Joy: So, Billie, to help our audience get to know you a bit better, we like to ask our guests to answer the rapid-fire five questions. Are you up for that?
Billie Jauss: Oh, yes! Let’s go. Let’s go.
Alison Joy: Okay. So, who is your target audience?
Billie Jauss: My target audience is women between 30 and 45 years old who love Jesus but just don’t feel like they’re where they’re supposed to be.
I’d like to say that I’d love to help them find peace in the chaos, wherever they are and also, to show the love of Jesus to others wherever God’s put them, with whomever He’s put in front of them.
So, it’s sort of finding that rhythm as a mom and wife.
Alison Joy: So, what is your main genre?
Billie Jauss: I write non-fiction. So, I write spiritual growth, discipleship. I want to challenge women to find God’s best in their life whilst seeking Jesus wholeheartedly.
Alison Joy: What is your optimum time for writing?
Billie Jauss: Bah! Whenever the creative spirit hits me. It could be at anytime!
I love writing in the afternoon, evenings is my best time. I am not a morning person. Might be a side-effect of being at baseball all these years but I like writing in the early afternoon, early evening.
Alison Joy: So, do you have a favourite place where you like to write?
Billie Jauss: You know, it’s so funny. I have an office here that I’ve been blessed with now that we have an empty nest. I have an office in my house.
So, I have a lot of my writing stuff in here but I often find myself sitting on the couch with my feet on the coffee table and just writing away.
Alison Joy: So, can you briefly tell us how you got into writing?
Billie Jauss: Kicking and screaming while Jesus dragged me there!
Belinda Pollard: Oh, gosh! That’s fabulous.
So, you maybe didn’t want to be a writer, Billie? We’re just picking that up!
Can you tell us, how did the first book come about, then?
Billie Jauss: Yeah. I had been a stay-at-home mom. I was an ICU nurse. I’d been a stay-at-home mom for a lot of years, home schooling my kids because with my husband’s job, we travelled a lot. We’ve lived in 15 different cities and towns in the US, Dominican Republic and Venezuela and we dragged our kids to all those places.
So, I had been a stay-at-home mom, chasing my husband with three boys along the way and my baby boy was in his junior year of high school and a friend of mine contacted me and said, “Do you want to help be guinea pig for this book?”
She was writing a blog, she was a home-school mom and she wrote a blog on how to write a novel in ten minutes a day because she had five kids, she was home schooling. I don’t know how she did anything! But she blogged and she writes novels in 10 minutes a day and so I said, “Katherine, I’m not a writer. Why are you asking me to help?”
And she said, “Haven’t you been writing devotions for Baseball Chapel” which is baseballchapel.org has daily devotions for women on their website. She goes, “Haven’t you been writing those for 10 years?” I’m like, “Yeah, but I just write it on a Word document and send it to a lady and she makes it look good and she puts it out there.”
And she goes, “Billie, that’s what a writer is.” And I was like, “I never thought about it.” It was just baseball experience. A Scripture, what Jesus did in my life, how to apply it to your life and I didn’t realise the whole time that I was writing these devotions. I know that sounds odd but I guess in my scientific mind I didn’t really think about it. I was busy with the kids.
And then I started with her and just started falling in love with writing and my son’s senior year of high school, last year of high school, I started praying, “Lord, I don’t know who I am without my kids in the house,” because as a professional baseball coach and when my husband’s on the field with a major league team during the season, he’s gone eight months and he doesn’t come home. They don’t have very many off days so, we pack up and go to him. So, anything done between February and October is done pretty much alone with the kids except for June, July, August when we’re with him.
I didn’t know who I was. What am I going to do? What’s next? Lord, what do you have for me because I’m lost in this. I don’t know who I am and He said, “Write.” And I’m like, “Man! You and Katherine, what is this with writing? I don’t know!”
So, I started an undercover blog. I didn’t tell anybody about it. It just started picking up some traction with some other people that I was meeting through writing and the Lord’s like, “I want you to write a book.” And I’m like, “Yeah, right!”
I grew up in North Carolina in the United States and North Carolina where I grew up is very rural, very country and my accent now is not what my accent is when I’m with my family. It’s much more of a country southern accent and I said, “Lord, I don’t even speak English. How am I going to write it?”
And He just kept putting me in front of people that I could ask questions and I learnt more and more and 18 months later I got a book contract which was terrifyingly too fast because I didn’t know what I was doing. And that whole thing sent me in a tailspin after that first book came out. I was kicking and screaming and Jesus kept opening doors and putting people in front of me to help me and to teach me and I love to learn so that was another thing.
Belinda Pollard: And what was the technique that you used for writing?
Billie Jauss: I honestly wrote like I wrote devotions. I would write chapters and I still write that way because that’s like my comfort zone of writing.
I start with a story. I have a scripture and a teaching and then practical steps as to how to apply that to your life because I love Jesus with all my heart but sometimes when people say to me, “Oh, just pray about it. Oh, just read God’s Word.” I’m like, “Yeah, but how do I put that faith into steps? How do I move forward in this?”
So, I’d love to challenge people and have practical steps, practical tips, practical things that they can apply what we’re reading in the bible to their life.
So, my first book, Making Room, it was about external distractions, all the busy stuff in our life, and that came about in that sense of trying to figure out how to write and how to go through that process.
Belinda Pollard: What worked and what didn’t? Did you kind of test and adjust as you went, on the process itself?
Billie Jauss: Yes, I did. I read a lot of books on writing. A lot of different books on writing. I followed a lot of blogs. I looked at different people’s styles and one of the things when I was home schooling my kids, we got a writing program out of Canada and I loved the way that it taught my kids how to write. Terribly so, because it was basically plagiarism. You take someone’s writing and you make it better.
In teaching my kids that, I became very good at looking at someone’s writing and figuring out the style, the breakdown of it. What I liked to read and what I didn’t like to read. The flow that I liked in it. My books are very conversational. I want someone to pick up a book and feel like they’re sitting in my family room with me with a cup of coffee just chatting.
My podcast, same thing, I just want you to be my friends and hang out and let’s learn to love Jesus more and find peace in that chaos and move where Jesus wants us to move. Finding the best in our lives of what God wants to do, in and through us.
Donita Bundy: Regardless of what kind of writing we do, a lot of us suffer from negative self-talk, insecurity and internal discouragement. Did you struggle with these and, if so, how did you overcome them?
Billie Jauss: Yes. So, after my first book, I told you I struggled a lot. It happened too fast. I really didn’t know what I was doing or what was expected of me. I just fell into imposter syndrome.
Somebody’s going to write a review on my book and tell me that I’m a horrible writer. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know what I’m doing. Some theologian’s going to come by and say, “You have no right to talk to people about the bible.”
All these things that came up in my head and that’s the beginning of this downward spiral that I went into that held me back from writing for a couple of years. It stopped me. It stuck me in a place that I knew God did not intend me to be. I knew I was not wrong in that God had called me to write but all those negative thoughts in my head were driving me crazy. I knew it was wrong but I knew I was having those thoughts and I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do and knew I needed to take care of it.
So, I started through a process in the writing. I never really stopped writing. I just stopped writing with purpose. I’d still write this, that or the other. I’d still sit down and write a silly story or write something that had happened to me but not with purpose to publish it for anyone to see it, for anyone to know.
I really got to that deep negative place and I said to my husband one day, “This isn’t right. I’ve got to do something.” I was becoming critical. I was becoming just negative. Everything was negative. What was in me was negative. What was coming out of me was negative and so, I sat down and I thought to myself, “I’m going to write down all the negative thoughts that I’m having writing again, right.” I’m just going to write my negative thoughts. All day, every day, for seven days. And I had a little notebook and it’s in here somewhere. A little notebook and I carried it around with me, with a pen attached to the spiral, and I’d write down every negative thought I had and I wouldn’t look at it.
And on that seventh day, I was at home, it was a Sunday night and I was sitting there alone and I opened that notebook and I started reading all those negative thoughts and that’s when I realised, I was my biggest bully.
No one had ever said those things to me. I would never say those things to my children, my husband, my friends. I wouldn’t even say most of those things to a stranger. It was just horrible the way I was talking to myself. And that’s when I knew, I had to do something completely different because I would have a thought and it would just spiral down.
So, I’d have a thought of, “You’re not a good enough writer,” and then the next negative thought would be, “You’ve never been good enough. Nobody cares about you. Nobody wants you. You’re dumb.” I couldn’t believe it when I saw it all together.
And so, I started a process, -told you guys I’m a process person – and I started a process of really digging in my bible reading about our thoughts and I’ve never been a big fan of “Take the thought captive. Take that thought captive,” because that’s in our abilities and we don’t have the ability to take that thought captive.
So, when I went through this, I went through it one at a time and looked at the thought, evaluated it, like where did it come from, why do I think this, what’s the surroundings of it? Is it about my writing? Is it about me being a mom? Is it about me being a wife? Whatever it was, and I evaluated it. How does it make me feel? Where’s it taking me? Is it making me be challenged and move forward or is it keeping me stuck?
Is it encouraging me? No! It’s really breaking me down and that’s when I went digging into scripture and finding scripture that gave me the truth rather than the lies that I was telling myself.
Belinda Pollard: That’s fabulous.
Billie Jauss: After I started going through that process of figuring out what those toxins where, evaluating them in the sense of how they’re going to make me feel, where are they coming from? And some of them, I don’t know where they come from and some of them, I did.
A high school teacher told me in ninth grade that I didn’t understand books when I read them. I didn’t read another book until I was 26 years old. So about ten years, let’s say, and I never read another book because she told me I didn’t know how to understand them and here we found ourselves in Venezuela at the time that everything was Spanish speaking, TV, everything. I was learning Spanish but, in the afternoons, when the boys slept, I had nothing to do.
So, I found a little store and they had a lending library in the corner and there were American books, English speaking books there and she challenged me to take one, a sweet German lady that was living in Venezuela. I took the smallest book I could find because I thought, “Maybe this small book, I’ll be able to understand.”
And that winter, I read 71 books. Now, some of them were tiny but I read 71 books over that time ending up reading longer books because, all of a sudden, I took what that lady said away and began to read. And that’s where I wanted to be in these negative thoughts.
And that turned into a book because what happened was, I went to Facebook and I was like, “Hey, people, my friends, do any of you struggle with negative thoughts like you’re not good enough? What are you struggling with?” And boy, the barrage of information I got back, I could have written three books!
They fell into three very distinct categories: fear, doubt and the third category being two things, but I don’t think you can do one without the other, is shame and guilt.
Alison Joy: So, was that your second book?
Billie Jauss: That is my second book, Distraction Detox, and it’s removing emotional barriers to realise God’s best because we can’t find God’s best when we’re telling ourself we’re not good, we’re not loved, we’re not accepted, we don’t belong, we’re afraid of everything.
I’m afraid if I write that and put it out there, somebody’s going to say something wrong about it or that I don’t know what I’m doing or I don’t have a theology degree so I can’t write about Scripture and the Bible or I’m not a life coach, how do I help people move in a direction. And those doubts keep us, the fear of comparison. I put comparison under fear because we’re afraid that we’re not going to match up to someone else.
Don’t we all compare? Even when you guys were going through yours, I’m like, “Oh, she’s so good at that. I’m not good at that!” I was like, “No, I’ve got to stop that thought.”
And that’s where, in that process, of as soon as I have a thought, and I’m not great at it all the time. This book is not a ‘one and done, get over it, move on.’ It’s learning the habit of when you have that thought, stop it and replace it with a Scripture. And when you replace it with a Scripture, your mind goes to a different place. When I’m lacking confidence, I have all these Scriptures on my wall, Hebrews 10:35-36: “Do not throw away your confidence. It will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised.”
Not awards and accolades, but in your confidence, you’re going to do what God’s asked you to do and you will receive what He has promised, that peace, that fulfillment, that acceptance from Him. All of that lies within us being able to be confident in what we’re doing and what we’re writing.
Alison Joy: Can we just backtrack a little bit to your first book, Making Room? What do you suggest that we do less so God can do more? This sounds great but also, kind of impossible. Can you break it down for us? Explain what this looks like?
Billie Jauss: Yes! When I did the first book, that I was living in a space of so many busy things going on, right?
We have so many things going on and as soon as we get things going on that we don’t want to do, what do we do? We pick up our phones and we start scrolling and we start looking at social media and then we fall into comparison and then we fall into not being good enough. It’s like there was so much going on in my life, at that time.
It’s funny, because one night I came home and I said to my husband, “I have this great idea and we need to do this and we need to do that!” and it was all very good. It was about a charity. I wanted to step in and do some great things with this charity and my husband goes, “You know, you’ve got the right-hand syndrome.”
I’m like, “Right-hand syndrome?” He goes, “Yeah Anybody that says, we need help with…, you go, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll do it!’” He said, “You shoot your right hand up every time.”
I will say, my books are life lived out. I don’t just come up with an idea and do a book. It is life lived out and that’s where making room came in before I was going to write a book, all that time that people were saying, “You need to write. You need to write. You need to write,” I went into and did a 31-day blog series. Thirty-one straight days. It was a challenge someone gave me. I did 31 straight days of blogging and what was I blogging about? Busyness.
I don’t feel like I have enough time for God because I’m too busy. All the questions: am I doing the right thing, am I going in the direction He needs me to go? Am I using my time wisely? Am I stewarding the money that we’re given well? Am I spending time with my children like I should as one is heading out of the house?
All those questions kept getting filled with, “Well, this is on my calendar. I have a meeting at ten. I can’t get up and read my Bible today because I have a meeting. I’ve got to prepare for that meeting and then I’m leaving the meeting and I’m going to lunch and then leaving lunch.”
So, I never gave God time to speak into me. I’d read my Bible. I’d listen to different things. I’d listen to sermons. I’d go to church. I had Bible study but was I truly sitting and allowing the Lord to speak into my life in the places that I could do what He was asking me to do, not what I thought I should be doing?
I really did get my schedule under control and I did learn to say yes and no. I learnt to listen to God’s guidance rather than just me being, “I want people to like me so I’m just going to raise my hand and volunteer for everything so that they look at me and say, ‘Oh, she’s so good at doing it.’”
But I don’t know about you guys, when we volunteer for everything, we get a little overwhelmed with all the things and we also, one of the things I realise is, I was taking opportunities for other people to step up and do those things. So, it just wasn’t about me, it was about the people around me.
Belinda Pollard: That’s an interesting perspective, actually. If I do the thing that is not my calling, I’m actually getting in the way of someone else’s calling.
Billie Jauss: Yep.
Belinda Pollard: That’s really interesting.
Billie Jauss: An opportunity for someone to serve the Lord and I’m a pretty – I don’t know, you guys have probably figured it out by now – I’m a pretty driven person. I’m a pretty big personality and I can just go in and bulldoze and get things done and it doesn’t always mean that’s what God wants me to do. Sometimes He wants me to step back and say, “Hey, Miss Quiet One sitting over here. What do you think about helping with this? I’ll help you if you need help but why don’t you step into this.”
Or my friend, who’s trying to run out the back door because she hadn’t wanted to be around a certain group of people, “Hey, how about giving them a chance? How about just staying a little longer? Digging in, asking questions.”
Whatever it may be, it’s giving people opportunity to step in where God may need them to be, or want them to be, in that moment.
Donita Bundy: There seems to be this theme in the Distraction Detox and the Making Room about finding that place, that quiet place, where we can hear, listen, just learn, get that perspective, get that direction. Can you tell us how you’ve found that or give advice or some tips about how other people can find that quite place?
Billie Jauss: Decreasing my calendar. Getting my calendar under control gave me more time to read God’s Word. I didn’t read it in passing or as writers, if we’re writing nonfiction – or fiction because Christian fiction writers are going to have that scarlet thread through it of Biblical theme. You’re reading your Bible to get information to teach someone else.
So, instead of the doing, it’s the pausing. Pause. Before I wrote the book, Making Room, I really got my calendar under control and I was spending more time with Jesus but that was in that time that I figured out, “Yeah, I’m spending more time with Jesus but I’m telling Him, ‘Nah, God can’t love me like it says in the Bible because I did bad things in my past. Maybe God can’t use me like that because I’d never read a book in high school.’”
I went through college, I have a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and didn’t read a book. I read texts, I read educational things but not a book like a novel or anything for pleasure. There was no reading of stories.
So, I have all these things in my head that would be like, “That’s good for someone else. Let me pray for you,” but not to sit in that pause of a moment and just be still.
You know the Scripture, “Be still and know that I am God.”
Be still and being still is hard for me. Just to be still and sometimes that doesn’t mean sitting in a chair quietly because, I don’t know about you guys, but as a mom, when my kids were young, I didn’t have five minutes. I mean, I’d go to the bathroom and they’d follow me. As adults, they still do that at times. They may cover their face and be like, “Mom!” “Excuse me!”
So what privacy do we have but it’s finding those moments of pause when we can read Bible stories to our kids or read the Bible to the kids or in the car when you’re playing mom taxi between one sporting event and another or school or dance or theatre or whatever it may be, that you can put a reading of the Bible on your phone now.
I work out. The past three weeks I’ve been working out listening to the Bible because I usually listen to podcasts. I love podcasts. I love listening to lots of podcasts but I’m like, “You know what, I’ve been so busy writing for other people, teaching, speaking for other people, that I need to take that time of pause and listen to God’s Word.”
Alison Joy: So, Billie, the Gracewriters slogan is Christian Writers Changing Popular Culture; what are your thoughts on that?
Billie Jauss: My love is people. I love people and that doesn’t mean they’re all Christians but I never waiver from my beliefs or my thoughts or loving as Jesus does. People that don’t agree with me on anything, I tend to pray for people because I talk to them and I ask them questions about their life and their struggles and I end up praying with them. So, changing popular culture, I believe, starts with loving like Jesus loves us.
Love your neighbour. Who’s your neighbour? It’s not the person living next door to you, only. It’s the person you’re walking through the door, meeting at the door of a café that you’ll never see again but who knows, in that moment, that smile, that thank you, that hello, that good morning, that good evening can send them on a trajectory that the next person may be able to talk to them about something deeper.
We’re not responsible for the entire outcome of changing popular culture, right? I believe we can, one step at a time, one interaction at a time, loving on one person at a time. If that’s for a second or a lifetime.
Belinda Pollard: Thanks so much, Billie. Some great stuff there for us to think about. How can people find you online?
Billie Jauss: The best place to find me is my website: billiejauss.com and on there, also, you’ll find a Distraction Detox Quiz and that will help you figure out what are the three categories you’re going to conquer. I don’t do the quiz saying, “And you’re suffering from fear,” I say, “You’re a fear fighter because you’ve already take this first step into it. A doubt destroyer or a shame shatterer.” So, I have that on the website, too.
Belinda Pollard: That sounds excellent. How about I pray for you and the Gracewriters as we finish up?
Billie Jauss: Thank you.
Belinda Pollard: Heavenly Father, thank you so much for Billie and that she’s come to join us today and for all of her creativity and perspective that you have revealed to us, through her, today.
I pray that you will continue to bless her with her writing, give her inspiration and strength and peace. And I pray for all the other Gracewriters out there, especially those of us who are dealing with fear and doubt and shame and guilt or just immense distraction. And I pray that you will bless us and work within us and guide us as to what it is that you want us to be doing as we move forward in this time, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Billie Jauss: Amen.
Belinda Pollard: Billie Jauss, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you, Donita Bundy and Alison Joy. I’m Belinda Pollard and we will see you next time on the Gracewriters podcast.
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