Toni Collier
16 min read ⭑
“God isn’t counting on us to be the most powerful and perfect. He’s counting on us to surrender so that he can be the most powerful and perfect force in our lives.”
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
I grew up in Houston, Texas. I love Texas—I think it’s the most important thing about me. Okay, we Texans are a little crazy, but I think we do everything big, and it’s amazing. What I love so much about Houston is that we’re an incredibly diverse city. There are so many different types of cuisines. I grew up eating all sorts of dishes, from Hispanic food to Asian. As a result, I think I have a pretty good palate.
But one of the main foods that remind me of my childhood is breakfast burritos. There’s just something about them—more specifically, the ones that my dad made because he tried his best to make them just like the ones in the food trucks we had all over our neighborhood.
Unfortunately, we probably have some heart issues because of that habit. But sitting down with my dad, waiting for him to slap together lots of butter, eggs, and meat and just sit down and enjoy this meal—that’s important to me.
You see, my dad usually made breakfast burritos when my mom was in the hospital. It was the go-to he made for us for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the in-between snacks. That’s why they remind me of my childhood, Houston, my neighborhood, and just being with my family. So buttery breakfast burritos with my dad are my go-to meal.
George Bakos; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
I actually sat down with a life coach and talked about my replenishment cycles, which are closely connected with spiritual renewal. It’s what you need to live on the offense and not the defense. And I’m going to share my top two.
My first one is trying new food because I love it so much—it’s my thing. Like I always say, if ministry doesn’t work out or if I have a moral failure or something, I’m going to be a food blogger all the way. I love it. It’s amazing. I love trying new foods. I have a good eats food list that I like to add to. My friends know this about me, so when they visit a city, they ask me, “Hey, what’s your list for this city? What are the top three foods?”
The second activity is anything in all things nature. I grew up in Houston, Texas, but my family is from Louisiana and my dad has a tractor business. So I grew up with fields and fields of grass, bush hogs, tractors, and mowers.
Because of that, I just have a thing about nature. I love riding my bike or kayaking on someone’s lake. Anything that has to do with nature, I’m there. And the scarier, the better, honestly. I’m always saying things like, “Let’s go skydiving” or “Let’s go bungee jumping. Let’s go crazy with it.”
So those are my top two for sure.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So, what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
First of all, I think that we all have one thing that just gets us every time—the one thing that robs us of Eden and goodness. And my one thing has always been pride. I don’t know what you believe about the Enneagram, but people say that I’m the Achiever—a Three on the Enneagram. Maybe it’s because I like to win. I want to be the best. I want to be seen and known for crushing it every single day. And it’s a gift, but it has a shadow side as well. And the shadow side is pride. It’s wanting to be seen for my own gifts and talents and not for what God has put on the inside of me. Pride has reared its ugly head in so many toxic and broken ways in my life.
In my first marriage, unfortunately, I was pretending. I was a youth pastor at the time, and I was pretending everything was okay, but I was facing a toxic and abusive situation at home.
I was pretending everything was okay because I wanted people to look at me and see perfection. I wanted them to cheer me on with my amazing marriage and this amazing ministry. And the shadow side of that left me broken—it left our home broken. My marriage ended up in divorce because we didn’t really seek the help we needed. We were just lying.
And so that’s my thing. That’s my kryptonite. Wanting attention and wanting the spotlight to be on me. And I really try not to hide it, honestly. I talk about it quite often. But I would say if there was a way that I hid it before, it was just by doing. Doing more and trying to get people to look at all the things I was doing so they wouldn’t notice how broken I really was or my insecurity—which is just a deeply rooted form of pride—regarding my situation.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
What breaks my heart, what I want to do for the rest of my life, and what I want to spend the majority of my time on is convincing people that their brokenness doesn’t discount them. I want that more than anything.
I’ve done so many different interviews talking about this over the years, but every single time I talk about it, it just gets me. Usually, the things that break our hearts have broken us before. And for me, it’s this idea that God wouldn’t use me because of the divorce, abuse, addiction, and all the things I carried that are in my story. In my mind, they were just too much.
So now, I’m trying my best to live as vulnerably and honestly as possible about my past and the things I still struggle with so that people can see that even someone like me—this crazy, wild, barely saved girl from Houston—can do incredible things for God and his kingdom. He still wants to use me.
I pursue this mission in different ways. For example, I have a women’s ministry called Broken Crayons Still Color. I love the name because it’s just that. It reminds us of when we were kids when we would color a little bit too hard and break the crayon. What did we do then? We just picked up half of the crayon and kept using it!
And I think that’s what God does for us. He’s not counting on us to be the most powerful and perfect. He’s counting on us to surrender so that he can be the most powerful and perfect force in our lives.
So in this women’s ministry, we come out with devotionals and courses. Through these courses, walk women through their brokenness and then give them resources they can use on their own.
More recently, I wrote a book titled Brave Enough to Be Broken. Essentially, it’s a little bit of storytelling and a whole bunch of roadmap. That was the one thing I needed when I was unhealthy and going through trauma, abuse, anxiety, and so on.
I needed a roadmap. I needed someone to tell me how to find a counselor, and when I find a counselor, what that looks like.
I needed someone to answer questions like, “How do I handle a toxic community? How do I transition to healthy spaces?” I needed somebody to walk me through those things.
So this book shares every tool and every resource that I used to heal, and hopefully, it will help others do the same.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
Let me start by saying this: I know God is moving through me because I’ve done this without him moving through me before. I’ve tried to do it on my own. I was a fan and not a follower of God. For a very long time, I was doing ministry off of fumes. So I started by getting a personal and authentic relationship with God—one where I wasn’t simply a fan in the stands, waving my hands, saying, “Oh, this Jesus thing is so cool.” Instead, I stepped into the valley with God.
One of the things we like to say in our ministry is that we don’t want to get ahead of God and that unity is an identifier of the Holy Spirit. I try my best to yield to the Holy Spirit. I have this natural bent to want to achieve, work hard, close every deal, and pursue every opportunity. But about three years ago, I just started telling myself, Listen, if an opportunity is going to come, it’s going to come from the Lord. I’m going to rest in him and just allow the opportunities to come.
The truth is, I can strategize all day, but the reason I stand on stage is that those opportunities pursued me. The reason I have a partnership with YouVersion is that they pursued me. And I think it’s because I’ve been pursuing the cross with that foundation of living on the offense and not the defense, living in a way that says I’m completely surrendered to the Holy Spirit every single day. I’m confident that I can hear and feel God’s consistent presence. I can hear when he says it’s a hard no and I can hear when he says, “That’s an opportunity to walk through that door. I brought it.”
I also draw inspiration from an incredible speaker named Danielle Strickland. She’s an amazing Bible scholar who talks about the posture of surrender and openness. And she does it before everything—before she speaks on stage and even every morning when she gets up. So that’s what I try to do every time I’m about to get on stage, before I release a book, or before I even write a chapter or a word or even my Instagram captions.
I put my Instagram captions in a note and I pray over them before I post them. I just sit there and I say, Lord, I surrender my gifts and talents to you. I surrender my need and my desire to be seen and known, and I shift the focus to you. Holy Spirit, come. I give everyone and everything to you, Lord. I give it all to you.
It’s been amazing. I’ve seen what I like to call God winks, that is, when he comes and does incredible things. Our team prayed about doing a devotional for six months. Most people might say, “Okay, we’ll just write a devotional.” But no, we want the Lord to open the doors, and we want him to show us what to do. After we had been praying for a while, I got a call from a major publisher who said, “Have you guys ever thought about writing devotionals?”
When we surrender at his feet those little things that we desire the most—the ones God put inside us—I believe he’ll bring those things to us. We won’t have to go searching for them; he will genuinely bring them to us.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?
My team and I learned a strategy called Seven Four One. It’s a spiritual practice we do seven minutes a day, four days a week—plus one day of reflection. I talk about it in my new book, and we share it in all of our courses. We teach this strategy, but because it’s just a shell, it can be changed to meet people’s different needs.
Here’s how it works. We teach women—and men if they want to use the strategy—to meet with Jesus for seven minutes a day, and the first thing we encourage them to do is spill the beans. You tell him about your emotions. In other words, what are you feeling? What’s been triggering you? Where have you been experiencing negative things in your life? What parts of you need attention?
We got this idea from the Internal Family Systems Model by Dr. Alison Cook. She’s incredible. In essence, the idea is there are different parts of our soul and different parts of us that show up. So for me, there’s the little girl Toni on the mat, trying to prove that I can do flips and do everything as well as all the other girls. And that little Toni shows up today and she wants to perform and she wants to be the best and she wants to be better and she wants to be seen to no end.
So during these first seven minutes, we just acknowledge that there are these various parts of us, we bring them to God, and we give them attention. What I tell that little girl Toni is, Hey, you don’t have to perform. You’re already loved if you didn’t do another thing for God. You would still be amazing in his eyes.
Then we move to confession. Within those seven minutes, we say, Holy Spirit, if I feel I don’t have anything to confess, tell me what it is. Because I know I did something wrong. I had a crazy thought.
I’ve done something wrong. Lord, I want to be more like you. I want to be sure that I’m living a life that reflects your goodness, that I am being Jesus with skin on.
Then we simply adore God. It’s not, “I love what you can do, and I love that you did this for me. Thank you so much for this A on the test, and thank you for giving me this deal.” It’s about a heart that says, “Lord, you are good. Your presence is good. Who you are and how you move are perfect. You are the Almighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, and you’re incredible. I love you.” In other words, it’s simply demonstrating adoration for him.
Then we take time to pause and listen. During this part, we pray an honest prayer. For some of us, we haven’t prayed a truly honest prayer. We haven’t asked God a deeply vulnerable question. So at this point, one of the questions I ask God in these seven minutes or so is, “What do you think of me?”
It’s such a vulnerable moment, but it’s beautiful because I believe the Lord wants to show us—and continue to show us—who we are in him, our true and real identity. We live in a world that attacks identity. That’s why we tell people to do this seven minutes a day, four days a week. We also encourage them to write it all down because, on the fifth day, we go back and review our time with the Lord and remember.
So that’s my thing. That’s how I do quiet time. For me, it’s a lot longer than seven minutes now, but when I was kind of new to this Christian thing, I would think, Listen, this is a little bit too much for me. So seven minutes was all I could do, and it’s extended from there. The more I fall in love with Jesus, the longer that time becomes. That structure has been a really good spiritual practice for me.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are some resources that have impacted you?
When I was transitioning away from being married and being in a really toxic church, the book that blew my mind was Fervent by Priscilla Shirer. I loved her idea of having a war room for learning how to pray. I also love her because she’s from Texas like me, is another black woman on stage whom I could look up to, and spoke with Texas slang.
Her book Fervent absolutely changed my life. It’s focused on prayer and on setting yourself aside. And instead of praying publicly and telling people, “I’m praying for this today” because we want to be seen, it talks about praying in the quiet places. It gives you a strategy on how to do it and even offers perforated cards inside to help you get started. Quite honestly, it’s one of the most beautiful things, and it was the first resource that started to change my life.
The second one was Captivating, by John and Stasi Eldredge. Priscilla shaped my prayer life, but this John and Stasi Eldredge book shaped my femininity. Growing up with three older brothers, a dad, and a sick mom I had to take care of since I was 8, I had a more aggressive, manly view of life. I was essentially raised by my dad and my three older brothers, so everything was hardcore, rough, and competitive. I thought that my value in the world came from doing things as men would do them.
But at one point, I went on a six-day spiritual retreat, and the book that they had us read before it was Captivating. For the first time ever, I realized that my femininity is just as powerful as a man’s masculinity because that’s the way God fashioned me. That means it’s a part of the way he is, too. It’s a part of who He is. The line from the book that impacted me most was, “We’re the period to earth creation, the final brushstroke.” I remember thinking, Oh, snap, that’s amazing.
Lastly, when it comes to my recognition of brokenness and humility, it’s going to be all things Brené Brown. She created a podcast as a really cool free resource. She’s not only telling her story in a brilliant way, but she also interviews other people who have that same mindset. Her podcast and her books have truly helped me grow. And her initial TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability, helped me grow, too—really, all of her interviews on YouTube have. Her insights have helped me dive into the fact that God does want holy people, but he doesn’t simply want people who know every Scripture. Bible thumping doesn’t help much, especially when people who know the entire Bible are just mean. But it’s important to remember that they’re not mean just to be mean. They’re mean because there’s a brokenness deeply rooted in them that has yet to be healed. So Brené’s resources have helped me pursue not only holiness but also wholeness and healing.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season—and tell us what it’s done for you.
John Eldredge has an app called the One Minute Pause app. With a newborn baby, quiet time can look crazy. I’m like, Lord, am I okay? Am I still in the Word? Do you still love me? But I can use the One Minute Pause app easily while I’m changing my son or feeding him. I can just sit there and listen.
One particular program within the app that I’ve found to be pivotal is 30 Days to Resilient. There’s a morning session and an evening session, and it’s totally free. It’s been a huge help in this season as I’ve struggled with feeling super insecure about myself.
For example, sometimes I wonder, God, I know I’m not spending my normal 30 minutes with you. And are you still there? Are you still present? Are you still close? Have you turned your back on me? Am I now worthless? Those are the thoughts we don’t share publicly.
But this app has kept me on track in this really hard season—and there will be other hard, busy, crazy, wonky seasons in the future! So if I can get just 10 minutes of guided prayer in the morning and 10 minutes at night and not have to think about how to do it, that’s amazing.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
That question has been on my mind all summer. In fact, all I’ve been thinking about on maternity leave is resourcing more women and creating more resources. When I think about my spiritual walk, it’s a combination of physical guidance, spiritual guidance, and practical, tangible guidance. This summer in my therapy group—we call them the “confessional community”—I shared that the best thing that I’ve co-created with God is our women’s course that helps women heal. And I want to create more things like that.
One of the courses we’ve created is very high level. It’s a lot like Brave Enough to Be Broken in that it explains what to do when you’re in a toxic community, how to practice gratitude, how to go deeper in your relationship with God, and how to find counseling. It’s very high level and it’s incredible. But I believe that there are more specific issues that require resources, too.
For instance, I’ve started working on a course for women who have gone through a divorce. It doesn’t help women get through divorce—we’re not teaching people how to divorce. Instead, it focuses on helping women start healing after the divorce. The women in my life who have been divorced say they experienced somewhat of a wild patch afterward—the kind where you go a bit crazy. We’re trying to save women from that wild patch.
Andy Stanley, one of our pastors and mentors at North Point Community Church has a book called The New Rules for Love, Sex, and Dating. And he encourages people to take a year off after a breakup—or two after a divorce. And I think it’s those helpful and practical pieces of advice that divorcees don’t have. So I’m seeking God on this idea right now. I want to try to create that resource for women.
So co-creating more with the Lord and crafting more resources, more courses, and more devotionals—that’s what’s been stirring up within me.
Have you ever gone through a season when you were so busy that your personal times with the Lord suffered? Maybe, like Toni, you had a newborn, and the idea of sitting down for 30 minutes to study the Bible and pray seemed impossible. Or maybe a month of constant overtime at your job made it hard to wake up in time for work, let alone squeeze in some quiet time.
In those seasons, it’s easy to feel distant from God. We may even feel guilty because we’re not putting as much time and focus into seeking him as before. While it’s true that busyness can rob us of much-needed intimacy with the Lord, there’s one thing that it can’t change—God’s love for us.
Ephesians 2:8 tells us, “You were saved by faith in God, who treats us much better than we deserve. This is God’s gift to you, and not anything you have done on your own” (CEV).
Our standing with Jesus doesn’t waver, no matter how busy we get. So as we navigate tough seasons and figure out how to keep Jesus first, let’s start there, knowing we are completely loved—no matter what.
Toni Collier is the founder of an international women’s ministry called Broken Crayons Still Color, which helps women process through brokenness and get to hope. She is also a speaker, host, author of Brave Enough to Be Broken, and consultant who has helped organizations with creative marketing, leadership, student ministry, and strategic planning. She’s had the opportunity to stand proudly, speak, and work with organizations such as North Point Community Church, TBN, Chick-fil-A, IF:Gathering, Orange Conference, MOPS International, and more.
