The Founder's Call

The call on my life came when I was 19 years old. I am now 62. For over four decades, that call never left me — it simply waited for God's perfect timing.

I have always been a servant for the Lord, but beginning in 2021, He took me on a journey that would change my spiritual life forever. Over the next five years, the Lord walked me through a process I never saw coming — one that would ultimately bring me to the place He had been preparing me for all along.

My path included a Bachelor's Degree from Baylor University, a Master of Business Administration from the University of Dallas, and three years at Dallas Theological Seminary before 9/11 redirected my steps. I felt called to fast-track my purpose in a different way. I am currently finishing my Doctorate in Biblical Studies.

For years I worked in corporate America, and in 2012 I stepped away to purchase a real estate company. That company changed the town it served. It changed the lives of its agents and staff. It was faith-based, and through it, many people in the community — and many clients — were able to achieve their dreams. But deep down, the call placed on my heart at 19 was always there, quietly waiting.

I had several nonprofits over the years. I was always reaching toward something greater. Then in 2023, God said: Come now. No more waiting.

I sold my real estate company and the plans for what would become Living Unshakeable Faith began.

The Lord's call on my life became clear: to work alongside Christ to build a biblical remnant for generations to come. Our world is changing rapidly, and there is no greater role in life than to testify for Jesus and be used by God to raise up a remnant that will remain — no matter what happens in the world.

Until the Lord comes again, we must help believers make the decision to grow to the utmost level of discipleship possible on this earth. Not for our own glory — but so that we can help bring others to that same discipleship. That is the heartbeat of this ministry.

I have been on a long journey the last 7 years. I learned things I never gained in church or from any bible studies or Christian speakers. The growth guides included under our products speak to the journey God led me on, the hardest but most rewarding journey of my life.

I am so grateful you are here. This is not just a ministry. It is a movement. And I believe God has called you to be part of it.

In His service,

Tammye Rushing

Founder, Living Unshakable Faith

Take a moment to look at what I found when I studied my list.

The memories that filled me up fell into three categories:

1. Being noticed — truly seen
2. Pure, uncomplicated joy
3. Affection — feeling genuinely loved

The memories that depleted me fell into three categories:

1. Rejection
2. The absence of approval or validation
3. Not being enough — making a mistake, falling short

The memories born out of performance fell into three categories:

1. Achievement
2. Performance
3. Striving

And then there were the memories that simply came from life — the kind of circumstances that find all of us eventually:

1. Loss
2. Caring for aging parents and family members

Here is what stopped me cold when I looked at this honestly.

Achievement. Performance. Striving. These three categories dominate my list.

And when I sat with that long enough, I understood why.

I learned early — very early — that performance was the language of love in my world. If you did something well, you got noticed. You got a hug. You received praise. People lit up around you. Love, in my experience, was not freely given. It was earned. It was conditional on your ability to perform, to achieve, to make the people around you proud of what you had produced.

That is a heavy thing to carry through a lifetime. And most of us who carry it don't even know we're carrying it — because it works. Achievement opens doors. Striving gets results. Performance earns applause. The world rewards it, which makes it very easy to confuse with something healthy.

But here is the truth I had to face: I had spent decades building an identity on a foundation that was never meant to hold the weight of a life. I was not performing from love. I was performing for it.

I want to be careful here not to sound as though I am cataloguing grievances about my childhood. That is not my heart. What I am trying to do is trace the roots — because roots matter. What grows above the ground is always shaped by what is happening beneath it.

When a child's emotional needs go unmet and unaddressed, those unmet needs don't simply disappear. They go underground. And over time, they resurface in adulthood as patterns — chronic validation-seeking, troubled relationships, an intense and sometimes paralyzing fear of rejection. I lived this. I know it from the inside.

For me, these patterns were a cry for connection. Specifically, connection with my mother. I never hungered for my father's affection the way I did hers. I attended some therapy along the way, but never enough. I always believed — and still believe — that God knew me completely and that He alone could truly heal me. The problem was that during the years these wounds were doing the most damage, I did not yet have the kind of deep, intimate relationship with Him that could have met me there. I was looking for healing but not yet fully turning toward the Healer.

So I turned to books instead. I read everything I could find. And what I learned confirmed what I was living: the emotional patterns formed in childhood rarely stay in childhood.

Boasting in a child can become grandiosity in an adult — showing up as perfectionism, an unrelenting need to be the best, an inability to rest in enough. Acting out in childhood can become drama and crisis in adulthood, as the person unconsciously manufactures chaos to keep people close and engaged. Clinginess in a child becomes relationship insecurity in an adult. Negative attention-seeking in childhood becomes self-sabotage in adulthood — a way of keeping the spotlight, even when the light it casts is unflattering.

My romantic relationships suffered most. I could never fully trust that someone loved me — the real me, beneath the accomplishments and the carefully constructed exterior. I was convinced that if they truly knew me, they would leave. What they loved, I told myself, was what I had built or what I had achieved. Not who I was.

My two deepest wounds were emotional hunger and identity confusion.

Attention functioned like food for me. And I had learned early exactly how to earn it: perform. Excel. Win. So I strived — constantly, relentlessly — in everything I did. I never allowed myself to drift toward negative attention because the fear of making a mistake was too great. Mistakes meant losing the approval I depended on to feel like a real and worthy person.

Without someone else's validation, I genuinely struggled to believe I had value. I was always reaching for more knowledge, more achievement, more understanding — not out of pure curiosity, but because I needed to earn my place. I needed to justify my existence with evidence.

This is what identity confusion looks like from the inside. And it is exactly what this book — Identity: Knowing Who You Are in Christ — is written to address.