Joyce Meyer

I heard, behold, I do a new thing.

Well, I thought, here we go.

Now we're going to the world.

Here it comes.

And so for a year, I did nothing.

There was no door open to me at all.

But God did a lot in me.

And the thing that he did during that year, through some different things that happened, he taught me that I had to be myself.

The devil was telling me, you need to stop all this stuff and just be a regular woman, whatever a regular woman is.

So I tried to learn how to sew and have a garden and all that stuff, and it was just ridiculous.

I hated it.

I couldn't do it.

It didn't work for me.

And God had to get that out of me before he elevated me to teach any more people because he didn't want me to just go out and be a clone of somebody else.

He wanted me...

to be me and to do what he was telling me to do.

And so after that year, we started a new church.

The new church started in town.

They had about 30 people when we started there.

And I ended up working at that church on staff as an associate pastor for five years.