Overview:
Shewanda Riley, author and host of the "Chocolate Auntie Podcast," was set to restart her podcast in 2025, but instead, she realized she needed to "recalibrate" by going back to God and His standard of purposeful diligence. After making this decision, she was contacted by a national podcast network to distribute her podcast, which she was initially skeptical of. Instead of expecting God to ask her to make big changes, she made smaller adjustments based on the standard God had for her.
A few years ago, I created a podcast “The Chocolate Auntie Podcast” excited about sharing the gospel of auntiehood and the amazing experiences of being an aunt. I recorded one season which had a great response and then didn’t record another episode for 3 years. What was my excuse? Distractions like work and life. But I always thought about the podcast and what it could have been. As a result, I began 2025 with a plan to restart my podcast.
However, the more I meditated on how to restart the podcast, the more I kept putting it off. Secretly, I began to doubt that I’d record another podcast anytime soon. However, the more I waited, one word repeatedly came to my spirit: Recalibrate. I looked up the meaning of recalibration just to make sure that I wasn’t jumping to bad conclusions. What I found was that the word perfectly fit what I felt needed to happen in my life. Instead of reevaluating the goal I made just a couple of months ago, I needed to recalibrate.
Recalibrate means to correct a measuring process by checking or adjusting again in comparison with a standard. It’s about tweaking something that appears to be working just fine. For example, you can recalibrate the touch screen on a tablet or smartphone that allows it to work better. When I first read this definition, I thought about the areas of my life that needed to be recalibrated. If I was honest with myself, I had to admit that in the past year I hadn’t become a back slider but things in certain areas of my life (especially spiritually) weren’t working as well as they could. Without realizing it, I’d drifted away from my previous standard of faithfulness and pursuing purpose.
For me, recalibration meant that I needed to go back to God and His standard of purposeful diligence. Isaiah 59:19 says, “When the enemy comes in like a flood, The Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.” For me, the enemy was my life which had become full of what I considered meaningful things, but they were still distractions. So, I had to adjust how much time I gave to those things.
Once I made this decision to focus on God’s standard regarding purpose, an interesting thing happened. I was contacted by the owner of Alive Podcast Network, a national podcast network, about distributing my podcast. At first, I was skeptical but then realized that God was answering my prayer to recalibrate. Less than one month later, not only are they distributing my new podcast episodes, they are also distributing episodes from the first season.
Instead of expecting God to ask me to make big changes, recalibration involved having the faith to make necessary smaller and important adjustments. Though I believed that the standards that I’ve set for myself professionally and personally were good, they were not the standards that God had for me. In other words, I had to recalibrate based on the standard God has set and not the standard that I set for myself.
Shewanda Riley is a Dallas, Texas based author of “Love Hangover: Moving From Pain to Purpose After a Relationship Ends” and “Writing to the Beat of God’s Heart: A Book of Prayers for Writers.” Email her at preservedbypurpose@gmail.com, follow her on Instagram at shewandawrites or you can listen to her podcast “The Chocolate Auntie Podcast” on the Alive Podcasting Network.