Episode 17: “Ask Us Anything” With Jeff and Sarah
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Show Notes
Co-hosts
Jeff Chu
Find Jeff online: @byJeffChu on Instagram or @JeffChu on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter, Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer on Substack.
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or @SarahBessey on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Jeff’s Fried Rice
Grace abounds: There are as many variations of fried rice as there are cooks. My version, modeled on my grandmother’s, is unlike what you get in most Chinese restaurants. For instance, the restaurant variety typically has visible bits of egg; the egg is scrambled separately, diced up, and thrown back into the wok. I crack the eggs straight into the pan, so that it softens the rice and coats the meat and veg.
“You're not broken, and there isn't anything wrong with you. And in fact, we often end up in the wilderness precisely because we were the ones who were all in. … You often end up here not because of your faithlessness but because of your faithfulness. And I've come to understand it's often an invitation from God.”
— Sarah Bessey
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
JEFF: [Ad] We’re grateful for the support of our friends at Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. Why do people say the worst possible things when you are facing something difficult? Doors are slamming but apparently, windows are opening? Everything’s supposedly happening for a reason that no one seems to be able to name? Divinity professor Kate Bowler debunks these cultural myths in her podcast called Everything Happens where she talks to people like Richard Rohr, Glennon Doyle, and Barbara Brown Taylor. We can find beauty and meaning and truth, but there’s no cure to being human. Listen to Everything Happens wherever you get your podcasts.
SARAH: Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu. Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. We are on Twitter and Instagram as @EvolvFaith. And we’re on Facebook as Evolving Faith. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are delighted that you're here.
SARAH: Today is actually our penultimate episode for this whole entire season, and to celebrate, we thought we’d try something new and different but also completely in keeping with the spirit of this wider community: we decided to hear from you all through an Ask Me Anything, or I guess this would technically be an Ask Us Anything. And so Jeff posted a topic in the Evolving Faith community, asked for your questions, and you all showed up! We had way more questions than we could possibly answer within our attempts at time constraints, but we’ve done our best to choose a good cross-section for today’s episode. This just shows that we’ll probably give a run at this again or try to do this again next season, assuming this isn’t an unmitigated disaster.
JEFF: I think we’ll be okay. Sarah, actually, it occurs to me that maybe we should post the questions that we got from the community in the Evolving Faith community after-party group too, so that other folks can chime in with their answers. Because obviously, we’re not experts. And, friends, if you haven’t joined the Evolving Faith online community yet, please do find us there. You can go to community.evolvingfaith.com. We would love for you to come join us.
SARAH: So let’s go ahead and get started with a question from Lori, who asked about a subject that a lot of us within the community have wrestled with or had a conversation with one another about, and that is: “What prompted your deconstruction? How did you deal with the emotions and the conflict? What were the tools and resources, the people or books that helped you redefine your faith? How do you get past the feeling that I'm wrong for deconstructing, but I know what I'm leaving isn’t working either?” Which granted, that is more than one question, that’s probably about a half a dozen, but we’re going to take a run at it.
JEFF: Yeah, so I feel the angst and the struggle that so many folks feel, not just who have found their way to the Evolving Faith community but also in the broader church, around deconstruction and reconstruction. But one challenge for me is that I have never really used these terms when it comes to my own experience. And even if this language had existed when my faith began to shift, I doubt I would have gravitated towards it. Because it depicts the process as linear, and I don’t think it is. Deconstruction and reconstruction—they’re essentially metaphors. They stir images for me of, say, building a house. One thing happens and then another and then another and then you’re done. And I don’t think the experience of faith, at least for me, has worked like that at all.
Many folks know that the garden is one of my happy places, and perceiving of my faith in terms of the seasons of cultivation feels much more appropriate for me. There was this stage where I was learning how to grow things—you could think of that as my childhood, when my faith was much more inherited than owned. And then I started to cultivate on my own, maybe mimicking what my grandparents and parents had taught me. And then I left the family farm entirely for a while. And then I came back and started to figure things out for myself, and I’ve kept some of my ancestral knowledge, I’ve drawn on a lot of Christian tradition that I’ve learned, I’ve chosen to shift my growing philosophy in some areas, and I’ve had to think for myself and puzzle some things out as I tend to the soil I’ve been given. But also, none of these stages was discrete and stand-alone. Some of them I’ve returned to in various ways. So, you’re always composting, weeding, sowing, and amending the soil. It’s much more a cyclical picture than a linear one. That suits my experience of faith better than deconstruction and reconstruction.
But anyway, back to the core question. I know a lot of folks have found this deconstruction language helpful to them, and that’s great. What doesn’t fit sometimes I guess, is that the deconstruction language just replicates some of what was troubling to me about how I was reared spiritually. We were told that things were set up in a pretty simple way, and if you just prayed this prayer, and did X, Y, and Z, and didn’t do a much longer list of things, and defended the faith to detractors and evangelized, well, then you were a good Christian. One worry that I have is that with deconstruction and reconstruction, sometimes it seems as if the list is just swapped out—and you hear people claiming that they are “farther along” in their deconstruction than others. That makes me uncomfortable. Because you only have to look at the experiences of so many characters in the Bible—the book we’re told to love—and we see that faith journeys are rarely that simple or that straightforward, even in the relatively brief sketches we get. Even those who were fortunate enough to know Jesus while he was ministering had their profound moments of doubt, and none of it seemed really particularly linear at all.
So, as far as tools and resources go, ultimately I don’t think I read my way to a spiritual shift. I think that’s another trick of Western thought—that you can read and reason your way to a fulfilling and wholehearted faith. So much of this is feeling, and a lot of it is trust. Some of my alienation from the faith I was reared with had to do with grappling with my sexuality in churches and college Bible studies that were anti-gay; some of it had to do with wrestling with being Chinese in churches and college Bible studies that were overwhelmingly White. And a lot of the healing has come through beautiful but hard-won relationship—with friends who have been willing to have those difficult conversations and who especially demonstrated unconditional love as well as relationship with God.
And when I say relationship with God, I don’t want folks to get some picture of me as particularly woo-woo, because I’m not. It was more a shift in perspective and especially in being willing to be vulnerable, I think. So could I begin to see God not as someone sitting up there with a divine checklist but as someone who genuinely cared about me and my flourishing? And could I start to understand God as someone who loves me, but not just me, also everyone around me? And could I put human voices into proper perspective and not let them outshout God? Could I let go of the need to be certain and to be right and just acknowledge that it’s impossible to have all the answers and have that be okay? Coming to a place of faithful unknowing, I guess you could say, has been so key to all this for me. Faithful unknowing is where I’ve landed.
SARAH: I really like that—faithful unknowing. I like the language for that. I think, I think my first, you know, proper experience of what, you know, now, I would, would call deconstruction probably started in even ’01 at the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, which would have been during my, you know, early 20s. And it really intensified [during] the Iraq war or the SARS outbreak, and I felt like I was kind of on this straight freefall until about 2006. And it wasn't, it wasn't just like the geopolitical social justice issues, though. It was also the response of other believers to those very issues. Which feels, you know, very apropos for kind of where we're at right now, even within the church, but I remember being in church services back then, and hearing, like, a pastor say that we should just, you know, kill all the women and children of those terrorists and go Old Testament on people because America had to be protected. And I mean, you just, you can't even make it up.
And so then on top of all of that, you know, the larger question of what Christianity is, and what we're doing here. We were, you know, as a couple and in my own life, we were experiencing our own losses or miscarriage, ministry, which had me questioning a lot of what I had been taught and believed at the time about prayer and miracles and signs and wonders and calling and community and just, you know, God kind of all together, and back then, it was a distinctly lonely experience. You know, I got online around that time, but I didn't really find community until maybe like the mid to late aughts. And so I didn't know you know, terms like deconstruction and a lot of the conversation that was happening in, you know, more academic or seminary or church kind of settings weren't really in our, like, regular churches. So there was a lot of pearl-clutching and panic from the folks who were around us because I was questioning and pushing back and flailing and honestly raging, and it didn't feel as methodical and thoughtful as even the word deconstruction implies. It felt like I was kind of kicking down every edifice that I had ever built for God. And I was just dancing on the ashes of these old fires.
JEFF: Dancing on the ashes of old fires! You are such a good wordsmith.
SARAH: So I'm with you on having some complicated feelings now about the word deconstruction. I don't know if it's necessarily that I mind the term itself, but more maybe what it's become in the discourse even. But I figure you know how, like you said, whatever language helps you feel seen or affirmed or serves you during this process, it's yours to discover and embrace, or even refuse and so some folks do prefer language like reemerge, reimagine, or renovation, or even reformation. I've seen the benefits and, honestly, some of the limits of each of those.
I think the word deconstruction has almost ceased to have a lot of meaning beyond what the person using the word implies. And it's gotten to the point where I almost kind of cringe when I hear it because of all the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of those of us who have engaged you know, kind of in that, that hard work. I have always liked the word evolving, that’s not a huge surprise to anybody, instead, because it helps me do what Father Richard Rohr calls “transcend and include” my faith experiences, both prior to that season and since then. I've said before that, you know, even on this podcast, that one of the odd things about this season or the experience of having an evolving faith, is that it is very deeply unshepherded. And we act like this is a bonkers thing to experience when it's actually a very normal and healthy response to spiritual formation. You're not broken, and there isn't anything wrong with you. And in fact, we often end up in the wilderness precisely because we were the ones who were all in, right? Like we believed, we did the Bible studies, we were all the way in. And you often end up here not because of your faithlessness but because of your faithfulness. And I've come to understand it's often an invitation from God. And so you're allowed to know what you know. And if you know that what you're part of isn't working or isn't healthy for folks, you're allowed to know that.
And so when we were talking about how you can't read your way out of this or intuit or whatever, that did feel a little bit like a personal attack, because we both know that I rarely meet a problem I don't like to throw a book at. And I will say too, like, when you're lonely, sometimes a book or even an online community or someone's blog, right? Their social media feed, even Twitter, like all those things, they matter, and they're enough. But there's a point where we're embodying this, right? You have to live it out of the whole of who you are. Your body, your mind, your soul, your relationships, all of it. And so books have helped me a lot and they still do. And so, you know, if someone's asking for recommendations like Lori, I think a lot of our speakers have work that has served me really well. I'm thinking in particular of this year, we're welcoming Brian McLaren. You know, his book, Faith After Doubt, is really helpful for normalizing and blessing that. Kathy Escobar, who was with us in our 2018 gathering, you could hear her on the first season of the podcast, but she wrote a book called Faith Shift. Even my own book Out of Sorts, you know, explores a lot of this.
But what you said, Jeff, about embracing a more cyclical and generative view of spiritual formation, one that allows for and includes and blesses seasons of doubt and wilderness and unlearning and even loss, it's a key shift that I think brings health to us. It's not this linear, “I'm further along” sort of narrative. That's not helpful, or it's even, it's not even what we're doing here. Like we're hopefully becoming more loving, you know, hopefully what, whatever we learn or label or experience is moving us towards God and towards our neighbors in that posture of love. So, all right, now you all see why we don't have time for a lot of questions.
JEFF: We’re the worst.
SARAH: It takes 10 minutes for us to answer one. Let’s keep going with a question from Tiffany who asks, “What non-Christian (religious or secular) books or art or voices have meant the most to your faith journey or your understanding of Christianity? How so?”
So for me, there are a lot of folks here. I probably put most of that in maybe literature and poetry. So from you know, Mary Oliver to Maggie Smith's poetry, like her poem “Good Bones,” and Maggie will be with us this year. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which I pretty much honestly read devotionally. Like it's so beautiful. It just gave such wisdom but also a sense of wonder. I'm thinking of novels like Katherena Vermette’s The Break or Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, all of which give you such a clear view of like the damage of religion in particular through the residential school systems but also show the full humanity and beauty and healing and love. And I don't, I don't know that I would have had the courage to kind of grapple with the totality of the complicated legacy of our faith tradition without knowing these stories and carrying them now.
I’d probably throw Brene Brown in there, too, you know, for the work of undoing shame and learning courage or vulnerability, even her work on learning how to step out of line well, which I think is something a lot of us are having to learn right now kind of on the ground as we go. I'd maybe add books like Hillary McBride's The Wisdom of the Body, which isn't explicitly Christian, but more about the embodiment, which was helpful for me and healing my relationship and my understanding with my own body. I could probably keep going, but what about, what about you?
JEFF: So I think one thing that would be helpful for people to know is that you read really, really fast, and you have read a ton more than I have, because I do not read as quickly as you do. But I honestly have never really thought about what's explicitly Christian or not in this way when it comes to media consumption, for lack of a better term. For me, one book that does come to mind is Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, which talks about a family that includes a Korean pastor. It is such a beautiful novel, such a beautiful family story, painful at times, bathed in suffering, full of complication. And I think the gift of Pachinko is that it reminds me of the complexity of the human experience, the legacy of war and colonization, especially in Asian lives and bodies but also the beauty of resilience and grace. So if I had to pick one book that I guess should get shelved in literature, I would pick Pachinko.
So let's turn our attention to a question from Dar who says, “My question is influenced by the ‘wisdom stories' chapter of Rachel Held Evans’s Inspired. Although I’ve always thought of questioning God as wrong, and though the churches I’ve attended respond to doubt or lack of faith with ‘Just turn to God and love him. God deserves all your devotion. God is good.’ etc., I’ve begun to wonder about the practice of questioning or challenging God. Jesus asks why God forsook him, Job challenges God, and Jacob wrestles with God, yet I hear so many messages of ignoring all doubt and disillusionment. Can arguing with God be an important or necessary part of faith? How do you even yell at God? I would love to hear what you have to say about this.”
It is a great grief to me that the Psalms aren't used in worship as much as they were in times past. Because the Psalms are such a beautiful guide and a tremendous invitation into all the ways we can communicate with God. So let's just go to that question, right? When Jesus asks, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He's actually quoting Psalm 22. He’s actually joining in a generations-long chorus of questioning the divine. And I hope we see the permission that is there in that. The other thing that's helpful for me to try to remember is that, at least for those of us who believe in a God who knows us intimately—even better, perhaps than we know ourselves—God already knows how we feel. So it's not really telling God anything new to express our deepest emotions. It's just choosing to be honest about them. And that honesty is maybe as much for ourselves as it is for God. And for some of us, the real struggle there isn't God, even though we shift the blame to God. The real struggle might be that we don't want to confront something about ourselves. So what if part of deepening our relationship with God means to trust God enough to tell God the truth? Maybe that's another way of turning to God and loving God because we trust those whom we love. And what if part of deepening our relationship with God and ourselves means that we're more candid with ourselves such that we can tell ourselves the truth?
SARAH: That's a whole sermon. You know, sometimes it feels to me like the folks who most loudly claim to love and follow the Bible are the ones who seem most unacquainted with wide swaths of it. And so this is one where I feel like it's very biblical to question God. It's very biblical to argue with God and complain and wrestle. There's, this is a deep part of the stories of Scripture that I, like you said, I wish we heard about more. I think that Rachel did a great job of normalizing that and blessing that for a lot of us.
I think what you said there is actually a really big key to why we avoid that kind of honesty. It's not that we're afraid of God; it’s that we're afraid of ourselves or for ourselves. We've spiritually bypassed our real, legitimate human experience or emotions to the point that we almost distrust ourselves or our truth. And I think that that's sometimes the most revolutionary thing we can do in our lives, to tell the truth. And so personally, I've been, you may or may not be aware of this, but I've got an advanced degree in pretending to be fine. Telling the truth is actually a very spiritual practice as well as kind of like this, this thing we have to, we are invited into. And so I remember reading Aundi Kolber’s book Try Softer that she wrote, that when we deny the reality of our experiences, we don't become more of who God designed us to be but less. And there's no way to have cohesive stories unless we truly embrace all of it, right? The good, the hard, the bittersweet, the sad, the joyful, the lonely, the per- the painful, it all counts. So that was what Aundi said, but I think that counts to God. Or at least that's what I see in my Scripture and in my experience, in terms of how we live that out, I mean, I pray that way. I journal that way. I'm in conversation with God and with my community in that way that leans toward truth-telling, instead of, you know, the practice of pretending to be fine or spiritual bypassing, which I don't think serves anybody.
So next up, we have a question from Jenny who asked us, “What advice would you give to someone who is frustrated by the time it takes for faith to evolve? I’m about two years into deconstruction and desperately want to rush the reconstruction even though I know that’s not how it works or even that will be best for me. How can I have patience with myself along the journey?”
This is such a good question, Jenny. I, you know, I think that's part of it. And you've picked up on something really key here, that it's not how it works. And it's not even what's best, or even what we're being invited into, right? We're not here to give you a nice new set of answers as you're swapping out the old ones, right? We're not replacing one tidy kind of ideology for another. I think some of the best advice that I got during really deep seasons of wilderness was just to allow myself to live into it. We place a lot of pressure on ourselves, and I think people around us also place that pressure on us, to trade one set of certainties for a new set of certainties, which of course is not the point, right? So allowing yourself that space and time and permission, the grace to not know some things, to let yourself breathe and rest and abide in the love of God like Jeff was talking about earlier, allowing ourselves room to be surprised, while also making choices out of our best hopes, and following our curiosity. These are all things that help take the urgency out of the equation.
I think it's really key to become friends with the words “I don't know.” I don't think that any of us are being served by hurry or urgency. In a lot of ways, the not knowing or this in-between liminal space is a healing space because there's unending opportunities to unlearn and relearn love. And I think the thing to remember is that, that it's not an exam and you're not being graded. There's not a rush to a finish line here. That you're already loved. And now you're just learning how to live fully into that.
JEFF: I do want to say I get the impatience, Sarah, because sometimes this process of breaking things down, it hurts, it stirs up such painful memories, or it sparks conflict, and that is exhausting. And maybe part of doing this in a healthy way means exactly what you said, Sarah, allowing room to breathe, and to rest too. Feed yourself something that gives you delight.
Our spiritual growth isn't just another to-do list. This is about our way of being in the world: what moves us and what drives us, what we love and what we're indifferent to, whom we love and whom we're indifferent to. That matters so much. And I guess there's just one other thing I would add, as you said, the person who's revisiting what they once believed and trying to figure out what they now believe and want to believe won't be served by hurry or urgency. But the folks around them won't be served by hurry or urgency either. And my hope in naming this explicitly is to gently remind everyone that this isn't just about you. This is also about how you show up for others and how you exist in community, both with God and with your neighbors and with your family and with your friends and with your enemies. And maybe this isn't the answer that this reader was looking for, but it will be the work of a lifetime.
Our next question comes from Erin, who says, “I left my evangelical church about two years ago. I had quit reading the Bible sometime before this because of ways it was used, out of context, to justify American cultural beliefs, to declare God's victory in all things political, both in sermons and in life by church members. (By me too, if I am honest.) I want to return to Scripture because it was so life-giving at one point in my life. What are some strategies for doing that?”
So this is such a good question. The Bible has been a cornerstone for many of us, especially those of us who grew up evangelical. And one thing I might suggest is to start again by reading the Bible as literature. Read the Psalms as poetry, which they are, and imagine what inspired the writers of these poems to say what they say often more in hope and even desperation than in confidence or certainty. Read Luke and Acts as a work of historically based drama. Read Ezekiel as it is, which is a pretty wild collection of visions and writings infused with the hope of this man who has been exiled and longs for a return home. Read Paul's letters as if you're reading someone else's mail, which you are, and especially if you're irritated by Paul, look for the abundant signs of his humanity. His crankiness, his pettiness, even his sense of humor, but also his tender care for the people receiving his letters. You can read any number of books but particularly the ones early in the Old Testament as documents of a people trying to make sense of their place in the world. And all of these things return these pieces of writing to their original contexts, which is often what folks in the evangelical tradition don't emphasize.
SARAH: That's good advice. It's really helpful. I think it's, I think it's completely fine to take a break from the Bible, like I certainly have. I do. God isn't limited to the pages of the Bible. And I think that for me coming from, you know, kind of a Word of Faith or prosperity gospel background, you know, I have a lot of experience, slash probably trauma, misusing Scripture, even while I, you know, like we heard here, I still do it myself. So it's complicated. I really liked how you mentioned reading the Bible differently. That certainly helped me. Sometimes I was helped by something as simple as changing which translation of Scripture I was reading, which then helped me to read it that way with that fresh understanding. Some of the other things that have helped me are reading Scripture in community, you know, literally or literarily, right, with actual people, you know, reading together but also wider, you know, in terms of, like, who I am learning to read Scripture through the eyes of, womanist theologians or liberation theology, queer theology. It gave me back such love for the Scriptures and even gave me permission to not love it sometimes or question it in a way.
I learned to love the Bible better, I think, when I stopped trying to make it bear burdens that it wasn't meant to bear or hold up, like inerrancy. I loved my Bible enough to stop taking everything literally, instead of taking it, you know, more seriously now, perhaps. And there have been great guides for that. I think we talked earlier about Rachel's book Inspired. A lot of the folks that you've heard here on the podcast, like Dr. Wil Gafney, Pete Enns, Lisa Sharon Harper, so many others, right? And so regardless, I think, I think it's good work to do. Even if how you approach it may be different based on how you're coming to the question. But how we, if we unlearn and relearn how to read the Bible, we are allowing room for the Spirit and for one another, to fully enter into the conversation. I think that that's part of how I do that work of learning to not only love God, myself, and one another, too.
Alright, so next up, we have a couple of questions that were especially for you, Jeff. Lisa has asked, “You mentioned in one of your blog posts that you don't like The Five Love Languages framework.” I think was in passing, as a joke that you mentioned it. She “would love to hear whether you dislike the whole idea of love languages, or if you would just like there to be more or different categories.”
JEFF: So my dislike of The Five Love Languages framework boils down mainly, I think, to two things. One, it doesn't explicitly include food, which reminds me how rude it is in a particularly Western way of looking at relationship and emotion and expressions of care. And two, it has been misused, which isn't the writer's fault, but I remember in my college Bible study hearing people after reading this book say things in response to their friends' attempts to love them like, “But that's not my love language. That's not how I receive love.” And the risk of a book like that one is that people will take the reduction literally because our imaginations are stunted and we're obsessed to a fault with how-tos. I'm more interested in the posture and the heart of love than anything else. I'm not sure that adding more categories is really enough. I'd actually like to obliterate the boxes and have us just be a little more imaginative and empathetic and maybe messy about what love can look like. There are not just five love languages; there are as many love languages as there are people on this planet. So let's be curious about people and their stories and their baggage and their flaws and their strengths rather than squeezing them into these allegedly convenient frameworks. Okay, I'm done with my rant.
SARAH: I do like Grumpy Jeff when he shows up. So the next one is also for you. And this one's from Becky. She was wondering, “What’s the best place to visit in Michigan for a long weekend in September? Wanting some lake and good food!”
Jeff: So Michigan is such a rich and varied state. We have only lived here for about two and a half years, but we're finding that it has so much to offer. We especially love the Leelanau Peninsula and the countryside outside of Traverse City. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of the most gorgeous places on Lake Michigan with excellent hiking and beautiful views, great wineries (Greenbird is a favorite of ours), and wonderful food including Farm Club, which grows much of its own produce on the land. Its name is not a lie. And The Cook’s House in Traverse City if you're feeling fancy. So since we're talking about things that are close to home, I saw a question that I'd like to answer from Rebekah, who asks what my favorite way to prepare fried rice is, and then Pam chimed in to ask, “What are the bottom line ingredients for fried rice? What must fried rice contain? Are peas and cubed carrots ever required?” And, “Can it be made successfully in a regular skillet? I have not had great results.”
So we can link in the transcripts and show notes to my recipe for fried rice, which honestly really isn't a recipe so much as some guidelines. Bottom line ingredients: fried rice must contain rice. That's honestly about it. Or maybe, okay, maybe soy sauce. But you can make meat lover’s fried rice or vegetarian fried rice or vegan fried rice. You will never find me putting peas and carrots in my fried rice, but other people love them. And yes, I've done it since I was a kid in an ordinary frying pan. One of the tricks is to make sure that your rice isn't too wet. That's why we usually use leftover rice because it's dried out a little bit. We usually use jasmine rice. Another thing is to be patient so that if you're using egg, the egg gets cooked all the way through and isn't leaving your rice soggy. My favorite traditional fried rice if I'm eating out is one that you don't often find in the US, and most people don't make it at home. It's an egg white and dried scallop fried rice. The egg white makes it lighter than most versions of fried rice. And the dried scallop is such an interesting ingredient because it's briny and it's savory, and it's bursting with flavor. My favorite at-home fried rice is brisket fried rice, which is something that we came up with in our household since I'm obviously Chinese and Tristan is Texan. The fattiness of the brisket is perfect because it melts into the rest of the dish. And then the pepperiness of the brisket also infuses the whole thing, and we just love it.
SARAH: I can absolutely attest to this method and to that dish. It is amazing. It has changed, even your whole method changed the rice situation in our house too. So there were even a few questions in there about knitting, which made me happy. Molly asked if I was into any other needlecrafts, and the answer is no, not yet. I have always, I have always loved crafting, and I do have very big dreams of learning embroidery and quilting at some point in my life. But that day is not today nor is it tomorrow. She also wanted to know my favorite type of knitted item and honestly, I really love making sweaters, especially for babies and toddlers. It's very satisfying and tender. I knit for new babies all the time. Even for people that I only know on the internet. It's kind of my, my thing. And I really love knitting shawls as well. I do wish that people wore them as much as I knit them. But Molly was also wondering, “What is Fozzie the dog’s favorite toy?”
JEFF: One of the things we quickly learned about Fozzie when he came to live with us just over two years ago is that he doesn't really know how to play with toys.
SARAH: Our two cats are the same. Neither Amy nor Rory have any interest in toys or size-appropriate cat beds. They just want to sleep on the kids’ beds and fight with each other. That’s about it.
JEFF: It’s really interesting to see how these creatures are wired. And at least in Fozzie’s case, I don’t know about Amy or Rory, it makes us wonder what his story was before he came to live with us because we just don’t know. But he did have a whole life before us, so sometimes we make stuff up and talk about how, since he is from South Bend, Indiana, he has some strong opinions about how Pete Buttigieg did as mayor of South Bend. We have a very rich backstory that we’ve concocted for the Fozz.
SARAH: It would actually be a good serialized newsletter: the adventures of Fozzie in our imaginations.
JEFF: He goes clubbing a lot.
SARAH: He did go clubbing a lot. He had a rich night life. So Theo asked us, “Where do you find the amazing people you invite to speak at the Evolving Faith conference? Thanks to EF I’ve been introduced to so many new speakers and teachers that I’ve never heard of before, and I’m so grateful.”
Also, we're glad to hear that.
JEFF: I think our techniques are slightly different. Sarah, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Honestly, I'm just really good at Googling. And I watch a ton of videos of people speaking and preaching. One of our prerequisites, which most people probably aren't aware of, is that we look for speakers who play well with others. In other words, they're just really good humans. We talk a lot at Evolving Faith about defining what you're for, not just what you're against. So we want our speakers to be hopeful. We want them also to enjoy each other's company and be with us not just to do a gig but also to experience this gathering together. I don't know what else would you say, Sarah?
SARAH: That's all true. And I think that we also look for people that we genuinely like and that we respect. I think we try to also look at you all in the community and the conversations that we're all currently having or being drawn towards. And then we try to find good leaders who are trustworthy in those lanes. I think we also try to build a good balance of both speakers that you may already know and love and also some folks that maybe you haven't had a lot of access to or whose platform maybe isn't quite as mainstream. I think I'm always keeping a running list of folks at all times: people that I like and people I want to learn from and people that I encounter in the footnotes of one book and in social media or class or whatever, right. And then we do that deeper work to explore if they're a good fit for us, as Jeff said.
I think one thing that's important for us is that the folks that we invite into the conversations that we're having here at Evolving Faith is that it's also a good experience for them. All of us have done the conference circuit thing to varying degrees. And it is, I mean, I can't speak for you, Jeff, but I’ve found it profoundly draining and tiring. And it's a very lonely time for a lot of folks. And so it has been important to us to do that, to cultivate a space for the leaders and the teachers or the guides and artists who come alongside of us all that is also friendly and kind and personable, even compassionate. We want them to know that we value them and their work in the world. We want to be fully in relationship with them, not just as a kind of one-and-done venue or a gig. Like, we're looking for folks that we trust. And so we don't give a whole lot of direction to them other than the general theme. And we try to choose folks to come into this space that we trust there in pretty much every area.
So next up is Carrie. Carrie is wondering, “What should be next on the must-watch list?” And perhaps the actual question is more for me because she wanted Jeff to know that he's not alone.
JEFF: Okay, for once I have a show. This is probably the only time this year. We recently finished the first season of a show called Slow Horses. Tristan loves reading British mysteries. And this series, which is on Apple+, is an adaptation of a book by the British writer Mick Herron. It's about a group of British spies, MI5 agents who are kind of in this remedial program because they have for one reason or another been found to suck at their jobs. It stars Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, and there is drama and there is tension, but it is also very, very funny in that cutting British way. I don't think I'm giving any spoilers away here, but there's this scene in which a couple of the agents are standing over a dead body and their boss comes along and one of the agents says, “We didn't mean to kill him.” And their boss says, “Of course you didn’t, because if you’d meant to, he’d still be alive.” So I think Slow Horses is great.
SARAH: I've literally never heard of it. I look forward to watching it in five years or so. So we just finished the third season of Derry Girls, which is spectacular and brilliant. I think it should be on Netflix for everyone in North America soon. But there is lots of equally spectacular language, so be forewarned if you're squeamish there. But holy smokes, I love that show. We've talked about it before on the podcast, I think, this season. I also tend towards the reality show genre that I have kind of, like, defined as wholesome, kind people being excessively good at their jobs. So things like the Great British Bake Off, or The Great Pottery Throwdown, which is so dear. The Love of Kitchens, The Repair Shop, like, it's this soothing blanket for an Enneagram 9 like myself to just kind of chill out. But I do want to note that you have left out of your answer your deep love for the HGTV show Home Town.
JEFF: I do try to leave out recommendations for shows that came out years and years ago, Sarah, but thank you. Yes, I love me some Ben and Erin Napier. But I will add a content warning for everyone who isn't ready for youth pastor energy with their home renovations. I believe Ben used to be a youth pastor. So he is always ready with youth pastor puns. I just really love how Ben and Erin Napier care about their hometown. They want the world to see that Laurel, Mississippi, is a warm and beautiful place to live. And that is so lovely to me. I also always enjoy that moment in the show where they talk about the person's all-in budget, and it's about $5. And they say, “Well, if you can get the house for $2, we can do a new kitchen and redo the front and open up the porch all for $3, bringing your all-in budget to $5.” These houses are so ridiculously inexpensive, especially for someone who used to live in London and New York City. And I love to live in that fantasy land for an hour.
SARAH: Well, I love youth pastor energy, so that's probably why I like it. So we've got time for maybe one or two more questions. First up is Jenny, who asks something that does come up often, wondering how you deal when your partner isn't deconstructing or isn't on a similar evolving faith journey? And that is a big question that we get from a number of folks. Whenever we open up with questions or even within the community, and it isn't necessarily limited to a romantic partnership, we have fielded questions from close friends and the church communities where we've, you know, perhaps found a sense of belonging before, from parents, extended family. So how do you remain in relationship with one another when we're undergoing, you know, a massive shift in our faith?
JEFF: Can we just go back to talking about home renovation shows? I mean, I guess in a sense, this is a home renovation question but of a spiritual sort.
SARAH: You're not wrong. And it is a complicated one, because it does depend on the relationship, right? Because, this is why I don't love advice giving or even having answers for things like this, because some relationships do need boundaries and space. They may need to end in their current iteration. Like we don't, we don't fully know what's going on in anyone's life.
But if I'm, if I'm assuming that you want to stay in relationship, and that it's a healthy situation, then I would say, you know, for me and Brian, that was definitely our story. We've been married for 21 years, and you know, together for 24, whatever that is. And so for us, I know that we found a lot of goodness in choosing each other more than doctrines, more than churches, more than agreement, more than being in ministry, more than being right. My own deconstruction did come first. And I kind of alluded earlier that it did feel a little bit more chaotic. It was wild and life-changing. It was very scary for those around us and felt intense. It also was added that it was, a lot of it was pretty public at the time because I was blogging my way through it. And Brian's experience did come later in kind of more of a steady and slow, methodical way. And we have rebuilt together. We've actively worked to give each other the gifts of time and space to change without fear or judgment. I think it helped that neither one of us felt the need to make the other person believe and think like each other. But the thing we really wanted was to keep the conversation going, to stay curious together.
Hopefully, life is long, hopefully, and that, you know, change and evolution will be inevitable in our relationships. The challenge is to stay alongside of each other for each new self, and so you know, we got a lot of practice at living, you know, kind of in the in-between. That's where a lot of life happens. And so we wanted to love well, I think, especially there. We wanted to hang on to each other. I think one of the big gifts that Brian gave to me in particular, since I went first and that resulted in kind of the biggest upheaval for our lives and even our vocations and our work at the time, is this: that he wasn't afraid or resentful. And that’s a gift we can give to each other, that he walked with a lot of trust in me and in God. And so because he wasn't afraid, I wasn't afraid. And because he wasn't resentful of me, I wasn't resentful. And we were able to kind of rest there even in those liminal spaces.
And we just talked, you know. We talked a lot; we waited a lot. You know, I think the Spirit was moving me and him, and we were moving together. And so you know, in a lot of ways, now we're in alignment. But regardless, I think it's been helpful for me to remember that just because I think I'm right doesn't give me a pass on the kind of person that I want to be. And so Scripture talks about, you know, like the fruit of the Spirit and that the more that our roots go down into God's love, the more that fruit comes to bear in our lives. You know, we've heard it maybe in Sunday school, right? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, even self-control. And I want to cultivate those things in my life, not just with the people that I like or I agree with or are fully aligned with. Sometimes I practice those best from a distance with certain folks.
But regardless, I don't want to act like I can use the tactics that were used against us like silencing or spiritual bypassing or cruelty or exclusion, gossip, bullying, and somehow think that I can sanctify those and use them because I'm so much more right than I used to be. And that's, that's not how it works. We're hopefully, hopefully on a journey of being more loving. And it can be pretty messy while we're figuring out what that actually looks like. I need to stop talking. But I would just add that it would probably be super helpful to get yourself to therapy or counseling while you're in that process to discern well how to do that work in relationships or in community, whether it's with a partnership or not, learning how to heal, learning how to have healthy boundaries, learning how to engage in conflict. These are all skills that we can learn. What would you say, Jeff?
JEFF: I come to this question from a totally different perspective, because I'm not sure Tristan even knows the term deconstruction, and God bless him, what a blissful space.
SARAH: Right?
JEFF: He grew up Catholic, and he still identifies as Catholic. So we've always lived in a kind of in-between space where there's a fair amount of overlap in our spirituality, but there's also a lot that we don't share. But as with you and Brian, we love each other. And what you said, Sarah, about a key being whether you want to stay in relationship really rings true for me. Tristan loves me, and I love Tristan, and we want each other to flourish. And we acknowledge that part of that flourishing will require us or maybe a better word is invite us to make room for each other. And the differences in this area are that for folks you're not romantically involved with, perhaps, the key is slightly different. Perhaps it's to remember that wherever they are in their spirituality, they remain equally beloved children of God. That has been crucial for me, especially with folks who have severely different spiritual convictions. And that love, God's love, goes a long way toward helping me remember what it might look like for me to love them in my own fallible way.
SARAH: That's good. So to wrap up, there were a lot of questions that came in about specific theology that folks were wrestling with, whether that was how they perceive sin or evil, atonement, the personhood of Jesus.
I know we don't have a ton of time to do a deep dive into theological understanding or like the shifts that we've experienced in our specifics line by line, as appealing as I'm sure that is to everybody listening. But I did think that we could make some room to talk about how we have approached questions like that, in general, like for ourselves. So if there is a theological teaching or understanding that we once knew that we knew, and now we find ourselves questioning it, what has been helpful to you in that space? So what advice would you offer there? Or what answer would you offer, I guess?
JEFF: Just that you don't have to know. It can be incredibly liberating to be reminded that God is bigger than theory or ideology or human hypothesis. And all the theological books in the world can't contain the beauty and the wonder and the mystery of God. And our assignment is not to master God. It's to enter into ever-deeper relationship with God. And if that God is, as some of us believe, the embodiment of love, then there's a lot of permission to be bold in our questions, humble and even wrong in our conclusions, and open-hearted in our seeking. That's it for me. How about you, Sarah? What would you say?
SARAH: Well, I just want to steal all of that: bold in our questions, humble in our conclusions, open-hearted in seeking. Like, that's, that's good. But you know when it came to, when it comes to specific theological beliefs, you know, I think a lot of us were discipled in the have-an-answer-ready version of faith formation. And so our whole notion of faith was about certainty and right answers. And so when you lose those, you can feel like you've lost God. But that's not true. It's certainly not the same thing. And I think the advice that I would offer is to not be in such a rush to find a nice and tidy new set of answers but, instead, to learn how to be patient, even as we said, you know, kind of at the top of the episode to live into the answers, that it takes some time to be curious and nonjudgmental but also open to new teachers and different voices. And so for sure, I think it's really valuable work to interrogate those things, to learn and study, and not at the same time lose sight of what's really happening here—that we're encountering God. And that looks different than how you were maybe taught to or to expect to encounter God. And so if you've mostly encountered God through certainty and right answers or apologetics for questions literally no one is asking, then yeah, you know, you might lose those first and deeply. So don't dive down after certainty, when that's the thing that's actually holding you back, right? So internally, for me, it was helpful to be curious, instead of judgmental, to give myself a lot of time without a lot of expectations. I think theology really matters because you can track pretty much everything we do back to what we think and believe and know and even hope about God. And so it is deeply important for me then and now to find and name what I was hoping for, to be, like we say often, as resolutely for things as I was against the other things from which I was breaking free.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
SARAH: Well you can find a full transcript of this episode in our show notes over at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. And if you have been listening to and loving the podcast, then please take a few minutes to rate and review us on your podcast app as well as on Apple Podcasts. It is a small and free way to support us in the show, but it's also going to help other wanderers in the wilderness to find all of us. So we appreciate it, especially if you are giving us five stars, but hey, no pressure. And you can always find me mostly at my newsletter, Field Notes, these days. You can find the links for that at SarahBessey.com. And I do still show up on social media now and again as @SarahBessey.
JEFF: You can sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with our colleague, SueAnn Shiah. SueAnn also wrote and recorded our music because she is far more gifted than we are. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
[ Instrumental music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
SARAH: A call to ministry can feel strange and awe-inspiring at the very same time. Union Presbyterian Seminary hopes to support you in your discernment. They equip leaders to live into their calling. With campuses in Richmond and Charlotte as well as a variety of online and hybrid options, theological education is more accessible than you may realize. Contact their admissions team at admissions@upsem.edu to hear more about their community.
