Episode 8: Let God Love You with Danielle Shroyer
Listen and subscribe
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
Danielle Shroyer
Danielle Shroyer is an author, speaker, spiritual director, and former pastor. She has been a chaplain in a retirement community and on a university campus, walking alongside people through very different stages of life. Danielle has written three books: Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place, Where Jesus Prayed: Illuminations on the Lord’s Prayer in the Holy Land, and The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise. She, her husband, and their two children live in Dallas, and when she’s not working, you can often find her at the yoga studio or in her taekwondo dojang.
Explore more about Danielle on DanielleShroyer.com.
“Like a mother who opens her body for her child to be born, God creates space for us to come into our full existence.”
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
ADVERTISEMENT: Have you ever felt like you were living a narrative that someone else wrote for you?
Maybe your story was written by your family, your church, or your culture.
You may be asking yourself: “What is my story and how does it uniquely fit into the story of the gospel?”
At The Allender Center, they believe that your story reveals God’s wild goodness in a way that no other story can. They have helped thousands of people understand and live their unique stories. Start engaging your story with the free guide at theallendercenter.org/story.
DANIELLE: You can always come home to God. And God can always be found wherever you are. Right at the center of your soul. When you stop and listen for the love, it is there.
SARAH: Hi friends, I'm Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu. Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. So Sarah, to start out, I wanted to tell you I recently discovered a new show. It is called Ted Lasso.
SARAH: Are we going to establish, like, this recurring segment on this podcast called Welcome to the Party, Jeff. Between this and Derry Girls, you're like our cutting-edge pop culture reporter from the past.
JEFF: I think that Welcome to the Party could be an entire incredibly boring podcast. All my close friends know that if they ever start a question, “Have you ever seen” fill in the blank? Chances are the answer is no. And the contrarian side of me really hates watching shows when everyone else is watching them. But anyway. I have discovered a show called Ted Lasso, and I think Ted Lasso is great. And I was thinking about Ted Lasso this week because we're going to be hearing from Danielle Shroyer today. And so much of what she has to say to us is about love. About feeling love, believing in love, wrestling with love.
SARAH: Right, this might actually be the talk from that year, from 2019, that we have revisited in our conversations more than almost any other one. And there's a couple of lines in here in particular that have almost haunted us.
JEFF: It's generous of you to say us when you actually mean Jeff. So.
SARAH: You know, you're welcome.
JEFF: I suppose the reason I was thinking about Ted Lasso is because that show, subtly and hilariously, features all these different people who are desiring to learn how to love and be loved. Yeah, it's a comedy, but the characters are complex and flawed and vulnerable and so human, and you just see them flailing their way toward loving and toward being loved. It is such a moving commentary in its own quirky way on that aspect of the human condition.
SARAH: Well, as Ted would say, I don't—if that's a joke, I love it. If not, I can't wait to unpack that with you later.
JEFF: Well played, Sarah Bessey, well played. Football is life, and football is also suffering if you're an England fan like I am. But we can probably come back to Ted Lasso in about three years when I finish watching it. So in the meantime, let me do Danielle’s bio bit so that we can hear from her: Danielle Shroyer is an author, speaker, spiritual director, and former pastor. She has been a chaplain in a retirement community and on a university campus, walking alongside people through very different stages of life. Danielle has written three books: Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place, Where Jesus Prayed: Illuminations on the Lord’s Prayer in the Holy Land, and The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise. She, her husband, and their two children live in Dallas, and when she’s not working, you can often find her at the yoga studio or in her taekwondo dojang.
Here’s Danielle Shroyer, speaking to us from Evolving Faith 2019 in Denver, Colorado.
DANIELLE: The famous psychologist Carl Jung used to ask his patients, “What myths are you living by?” By myth, he meant the symbolic story that shapes our understanding of human existence. And more personally, a myth guides the way that we write the story of our lives. What myths are we living by?
For those of us in modern Western culture, we have lived often unconsciously by the myths of original sin. We have received the message, whether blatantly in our churches or subconsciously through culture, that there is something inherently corrupt in us, something that makes us unworthy and untrustworthy.
This myth of original sin has wound its tendrils into every fabric of our communal being. Under every advertisement for fuller hair, better skin, nicer houses is an endless whisper of not enough. And think about it. We live in an economic system that is by definition insatiable in its greed. Greta Thunberg recently called it a fairytale of endless economic growth.
And she's right. Because a society that's obsessed with possession and domination does not allow for enough. And people obsessed with possession and domination are operating from a profound sense of emptiness. We are a nation of wealth and privilege and also a nation of addiction, depression, violence, greed, loneliness, apathy, and deep social disconnection.
And though we pride ourselves on being the world's premier workaholics, we have failed to see that no amount of trying harder is going to fix this problem. We have oriented our whole lives around the false idea that we are not enough. I'm reminded of when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and says, “If only you knew even now, the things that make for peace.” And beloveds, original sin does not bring peace.
It brings discord and disintegration. It convinces us to see the world through the lens of scarcity, which brings fear and anxiety to us. And we are naive if we do not see not-enoughness as the root of every act of violence and hatred on this earth. The Buddhists tell of this creature they call a hungry ghost. It has a thin neck in this wide empty belly, and its neck is so thin that it makes it nearly impossible for it to swallow anything. But even if it did, it's not like its ghostly stomach could digest the food anyhow. A hungry ghost is unable to take in what it desperately needs. So it's stuck wandering the earth with an insatiable hunger that never goes away. Beloveds, this myth of not-enoughness makes us into hungry ghosts unable to take in what we desperately need.
We're unable to digest it no matter how many times we cram our mouths full of things that are good and worthwhile. We just get stuck at the neck, unable to embody this goodness in any way and unable to make it our own. So maybe it's time we lived by a different myth. What if we discovered that there is a better story, an older and more ancient story than not-enoughness? Why does all that endless striving, all that searching outside of ourselves, all that shame, has distracted us from the one truth that has been waiting at the center of our souls this whole time. The story has been known by many names, but I'm partial to the way that Matthew Fox described it as original blessing. Rather than believing we are not enough, original blessing says we are loved beyond measure, and that love is the steadiest and most powerful force in this universe. And it's a love that remains even as we wander. And we couldn't break it if we tried. And believe me, we've tried. Have you read the Bible? We've tried.
Do you really think a piece of fruit could break a love like that? And listen, if crucifying the Son of God didn't do it. We have to ask ourselves, when will we trust that love wins? Rather than seeing our humanity as a hindrance to our faith, original blessing says it's through our humanity that we connect with God—mind, body, and soul. Rather than telling us we cannot trust ourselves, it tells us the problem is that we haven't learned to cultivate our divine intuition. And original blessing does not demand our humiliation. It doesn't ask us to see God as a punisher or withholder. It instead asks us to humbly accept that God loves all of creation more than we could possibly imagine. And to yield to that love instead. Original blessing confers inherent dignity upon all of creation.
You see, we've envisioned ourselves as separated from God, but the complete opposite is true. And I want you to think about this. Every spiritual breakthrough or epiphany anyone has ever had has said that the truth of the universe they experienced is union. Oneness. No one has said, “I've seen behind the veil y'all, and it is a fractured mess back there. Don't go. I don't recommend it. It's violent and awful.” No, they come back and they say things like light and love and connection and unity. Because the deepest truth of reality is there is no outside. We are in God. That is the state of things. And like a fish in water, sometimes this presence is so pervasive that we don't even realize it's there. But beloveds, if you have breath right now, it is because God has given it to you. You are breathing the oxygen of relationship. And the spirit of life gathered the fertile topsoil of the earth into her hands and exhaled. And here you are, one of many billions of life forms God has loved into being.
We are in God and God surrounds us. God loves us. And God also is the love. Every human who has ever been born desperately needs to be loved and to belong. And original blessing tells us that love and belonging is our home. No matter where we go, no matter what we do, we can always come home to God within us. That's the beginning of the story in Genesis 3. It's not the story of a fall. It's the beginning of a grand and necessary adventure where we practice coming home to God no matter where we roam. You see, somehow we also imagine the Garden of Eden as this place of utopian perfection, where everything stays the same and nobody ever died and nothing ever went awry. Whose life is that anyway? What in that story was ever going to help us out here in this mess? Right?
Scripture is given to guide us and so it tells us the truth of things. And the truth is this: The Garden of Eden is not a forever place. It is a womb. It is a holding place, a circle of belonging. It's an idyllic, joyful, loving childhood beginning. But we were always destined to grow up and leave home. We must because the fertile fields God created beyond the garden has always been our intended home.
When I was a little girl, we had this illustrated picture Bible, and I was absolutely transfixed by the picture of Adam and Eve being banished from the garden. Probably should have been a clue that I would grow up and spend a lot of time in this story. There were these flaming swords and then there was angels pointing, and it all felt very palpably tragic. And I remember feeling in my heart this sense of "What will they do without God?" It felt like such abandonment to me, and it felt like it went against everything I had experienced about God as a young child. I wish I could go back and tell my childhood self that this Bible was illustrated by people who got the translation mixed up.
That word that most of our Bibles translated banished more accurately in this context means sent out or sent forth. It shares the imagery with the word benediction, where after we are forgiven and fed and blessed, we are sent out into the world in peace to love and serve the Lord. God did not banish us, beloveds. God benedicticted us and sent us out.
Like a mother who opens her body for her child to be born, God creates space for us to come into our full existence. It's not a fall. It's not a disconnection. It is a birth. It is an opening that ushers us into our becoming. Now this is beautiful. It's also hard. First comes with pain, you know, for the mother and for the baby. It's an upheaval of the way things used to be. But every transition is this way. Every transition carries within it, both an ending and a new beginning. Life is an endless cycle of little deaths and little resurrections. This is why Heidegger once said that “we are custodians of deep and ancient thresholds.” And what's essential for us to know as we cross the threshold from the garden to the fertile field is that we carry within us the same wholeness we were born with. Sometimes it's hidden, but it's always there. And if that feels idealistic, it's only because we've become so conditioned to see ourselves as broken. I much prefer the way Ken Wilber sees things. He says, "We have wholeness and we also belong to bigger wholeness," in fact, a bigger wholenesses. So a letter as in the alphabet is complete within itself, but it also belongs to a word, which belongs in a sentence, and on and on and on. You see, we are whole, and yet we belong to this great nest of being, a vast web of interconnection. The world is designed in mutuality, you see, not competition. And competition belongs in that story of not-enoughness. This mutuality is the story of blessing.
And in this community of creation, we are so deeply intertwined that every action we take and every word we speak reverberates throughout this nest. For better or worse, we belong to each other. And this is both a burden and a holy responsibility. When we disconnect from our own dignity, or when we attempt to disconnect others from theirs, we betray the belovedness. And that costs us all.
This is why God gives blessing not just as a divine gift but also as our vocation. When we awaken to the inherent belovedness of all, it changes the way we treat each other, and our belovedness actually equips us to confront sin in ourselves, in others, and in all the principalities and powers of this world. When we are secure in love, we can do that work. But we cannot do this work without that blessing and without wisdom. And wisdom requires us to wake up, both to the joy and the suffering in this world. Which brings us back to Eden. We didn't lose our goodness in the garden, dear ones. We lost our innocence. But as painful as this may be, our naive innocence had to go in the mysterious ways of God. We cannot receive the knowledge of good without also receiving the knowledge of evil. They are a package deal. And wisdom comes from the tension between these two ways of knowing.
We have to drop our innocence and realize the world isn't as simple as we thought. And shoot, for that matter, we aren't either. Because even though we don't have a sin nature, we do have a human nature. And that means we are capable of both immense good and terrifying evil. And we are incomplete if our awareness does not include them both. So we must learn to come to terms with all of our potential, all of that vast potential, and realize that there is beauty and danger in every kind of knowledge that we hold. God sends us out beyond Eden because our God is not a helicopter parent. Make it a bumper sticker. Remind yourself. God sends us out beyond Eden so that we may begin our journey toward wisdom. That's the whole shebang. We have to leave home and start practicing the hard stuff.
And listen, wisdom encompasses a whole lot of things. But you will get there if you remember just this one thing. You can always come home to God, and God can always be found wherever you are, right at the center of your soul. When you stop and listen for the love, it is there and it will guide you. The great mystic Hildegard of Bingen—I love her—she said that when we're born, God gives us wisdom like a golden tent. And our task in life is to set it up so that eventually we may live in it. And because wisdom is a journey, we should trust that failure is to be expected. It's necessary even. I don't think God is surprised about this, right. And when we're out there, the real question is whether we find in our failures the wisdom that is waiting for us there. Along the way, it's inevitable that we will stumble. We will lose sight of our wholeness. We will wander from God's steadfast heartbeat of love. But if we're gentle with ourselves—please be gentle with yourselves—if we find a little bit of compassion, we might also find our way back home. And we can learn to be gentle and compassionate with our fellow travelers too. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen says, "Everything unborn in us and in the world needs blessing." She says, "When we blessed someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well." The word religion literally means to put things back together again. Did you know that? It's derived from the same root as the word ligament.
Somehow, in this story of not-enoughness, we made religion about taking things apart, separating things, naming things holy and unholy, saved and unsaved. We forgot that the purpose of religion is to rediscover our wholeness.
1 John says, “And we have come to know and to believe the love God has for us.” And you know, that word believe is more like trust, right? We know. And we trust the love God has for us. That's the heart of our wholeness.
So I want us to take a moment to receive it. So take a deep breath. If your feet aren't firmly on the ground, set them there so you can feel the good earth underneath your feet. If you're livestreaming, I mean you too. Put your feet on the ground. Take a minute to shake out any stress or tension that you're holding in your body. Take a deep breath. If you feel comfortable and safe, let your eyes close. Allow your breath to come fully and naturally, and for just a few moments, just do this one simple thing. Let God love you. Don't try to justify it. Don't try to reject it. Just let the love in. Feel it sitting there at the center of your heart. Imagine it like a soft golden light glowing within you. And connect to that place within you that knows this is home.
May we come to know and to trust the love God has for us. Amen and amen.
– – – –
SARAH: If you’ve been listening to and loving this podcast, join us for Evolving Faith 2022, the live virtual conference. It’s on October 14 and 15.
So many of us are engaging in good, hard, holy work right now to cultivate love, and reimagine and build a faith that works not only for us but for the whole world, and to find our way in the wilderness together. We need to be reminded of what matters, who is alongside of us. We need connection, inspiration, good conversations and laughter, and we need some hope too. We are gathering not in spite of these turbulent times, but because of them. So please join us.
We have set a big, rowdy table in the middle of the wilderness, and together, we will have a feast. We’re saving a spot for you.
Go to evolvingfaith.com and register today. You won’t want to miss this moment with this community. It’s pretty special. Okay, now back to the show.
JEFF: "Let God love you." Those four words have stuck with me for the past three years. I have told Danielle that those words have lodged themselves somewhere deep within me, and I keep coming back to them because honestly, I find it extremely difficult to do. I confess that I can talk all day long about God's love, blah, blah, blah, especially when it comes to other people. But to let—let God love me? Yikes.
SARAH: Yeah. To let God love you. I loved it then. I love it now. I think, especially after a few years of really wrestling with it. There were so many moments in her talk that I felt like almost active healing work was happening in the room. And that point that she made there about how our humanity isn't a hindrance to our faith, but that it's how we connect with God, body and mind and soul. So helpful.
JEFF: Danielle is a spiritual director, which is maybe one of the reasons I find this talk challenging, because spiritual directors have this incredibly winsome and nonthreatening way of piercing your soul with a sharp dagger. They are smiling at you, and suddenly you're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm bleeding.”
SARAH: My spiritual director always says she knows she did her job if her directee ends up using the F-word by the end, not that I would do such a thing. Of course.
JEFF: No. You have never, ever been known to swear ever or to lie.
SARAH: Never. I've often said, though, that a lot of that, a lot of our lives, tracks its way back to what we truly believe about the nature and character of God. And I think that's kind of what she means by the myth we adopt. I'm not, I don't know if this is entirely right, but she talks about that teaching of original sin. And how if that's the myth that you start from, you often end up in a very punitive, judgmental, angry sort of way of understanding God and even the universe. And so it's this whole different myth to embrace original blessings. But unlike me, it's come up a time or two on the podcast that you are more reformed. And I do agree with Danielle here. This is a similar origin story for me, and my understanding of the story is one of original blessing. And she's right, that informs a lot of how I engage, but that's not true for everyone. And I wanted to make room for that, that tension, I guess.
JEFF: I guess you really want to make room for the reformed tension. Okay.
SARAH: That's right. I'm trying.
JEFF: Okay. So where we agree, I suppose, is that it is God's love that is our beginning and our ending and our comfort and our salvation in between. Honestly, I think what I sometimes react to is less what Danielle actually says than what her words stir up in me. I want to be very candid about that. Isn't that how we all process and experience stories of all different kinds? We always process and experience them in our own particular contexts, such as, such that they they kind of take on a life of their own in conversation, right. So let me say it this way: It's become popular among some self-help speakers recently to declare to their audience, “You are perfect just the way you are.” And I don't think humanity's perfect. I think we actually do ourselves and society as a whole a disservice when we minimize the gravity of sin, both in our own individual stories and in our collective story. That can be a way of rationalizing our own actions while remaining critical of others.
SARAH: No, I think that's fair. You know, I've read Danielle's book that she based this talk of off of original blessing. And I think that's part of why we really wanted her to join us. And she delves pretty deeply into that very thing. I remember her even writing that maybe the most difficult thing about original blessing is to accept just how lavishly God bestows it. And she does grapple with that in a lot more detail and depth there. I know it feels like it has to be one or the other, but she does hold the tension really well and shows a more, like a more whole way, even of viewing that gravity of sin and harm, the realities of our age, and then how our choices, you know, are rippling out from our lives into that.
JEFF: And I think that, that holding of the tension is really what I'm hoping for, right. God's grace is ridiculous and can even seem egregious. That's one of the things that makes me reformed. The conviction that we don't earn our belonging, but that God loves us and blesses us and delights in us just because God is God. That grace is what makes me reformed. And I know people caricature reformed theology, sometimes including people who are on this podcast, and to some degree and in some iterations of it, reformed theology deserves the critique. Where I think it's strong is its emphasis on God's lavished love and God's absurd grace. And Danielle offers an absolutely necessary antidote to the tendency in some theological circles, especially reformed circles, to overemphasize human wretchedness. And the truth is, I don't think we're going to be shamed into wholeness. Only love is going to get us there. I just don't think we should overcorrect by minimizing sin either. And I think God's love and our understanding that God's love is unconditional can create the safety and the anchorage and the steadiness we need to be clear eyed about what's what.
SARAH: You know, I see a lot of your work there, actually. My, you're the one who turned that whole “you’re a worm” theology stuff on its head at our first gathering. Folks, if you haven't listened to that sermon, it's in our first season. But you're right. We aren't—we aren't going to be healed by shame. I think there's a path from what Danielle was saying here, this path that leads towards healing something that the teaching of original sin, and particularly, like you said, that that heavy handed way that certain groups or facets of Christianity have used as a way to scare and terrify and manipulate and control like that, that damages us. It has consequences. And so even if we use a sermon as a jumping off point for her work, we're retelling the story that, as she says, that love and belonging is our home. And it's what puts us back together.
JEFF: For those of us who have struggled with these very concepts, with home and belonging and even love, the idea that love and belonging are home can at once be so gorgeous and also really, really hard.
SARAH: Yeah. Which actually brings me to one of the many, many revelations that I had in this message. You know, those, her words about how we weren't banished but sent out from the garden, not abandoned but given a benediction and a birth kind of at this this path for belonging, which is incredibly hard and, at the same time, freeing and true. It maybe rang a bell for me because it's how I've experienced the wilderness, but I didn't really have language for it. You know, at first, crossing that threshold into the wilderness of faith, this space of danger and uncertainty with less answers, it can feel like you have been banished. And for some of us, you actually were banished. But in time, that realization that there is also this birth, there's this becoming. And I love how she said we didn't lose our goodness in the garden, that we lost our innocence. And that's, that's been the experience for me. It's been an evolution but not an arriving. We realize we're carrying an ancient wholeness in the wilderness.
JEFF: What do you mean by ancient wholeness? I'm not I'm not sure I understand what that means.
SARAH: Well, to be fair, it's a bit woo woo. So I think when I talk about ancient wholeness or what I mean or what I understood is that part of us that has never broken or diminished, the made in the image of Godness of us. Danielle talked about having that wholeness, but it belongs to a bigger wholeness. It's, when I mean ancient wholeness, I mean the part of us that is connected to each other and to God. I think she called it like a burden and a holy responsibility at the same time. Which is which is really true, I think.
JEFF: I just feel like you're getting into geometry. And I really didn't like geometry, but it's fine. I really appreciated Danielle's summons to an understanding of our interconnectedness and the mutuality, to think beyond our individual selves, to love beyond our individual selves, to realize that this is not and has never been about me and myself and I. But about the we and the us in it.
SARAH: Which I think is maybe the poetry of geometry, then. This part of Danielle. I couldn't help it. So. But this is the part of Danielle's talk that has haunted us, right? Because it's been that line that you mentioned right at the beginning of the conversation to let God love you, to not try to justify it or reject it or even reason with it but just to know and trust that. And I talked a couple episodes ago myself about how I experience that and live into that. But I did want to make some space to ask you that question or maybe even ask what it looks like for you to let God love you.
JEFF: So my memory's kind of fuzzy. Did you actually admit in that previous episode that one of the ways in which you experience God's love is by tormenting me?
SARAH: The gifts of God for the people of God.
JEFF: Okay, that's one of my lines, because—
SARAH: I know!
JEFF: You do that liturgical thing. I wonder if it's going to say in the transcript of this episode, "Sarah cackles."
SARAH: I am deeply enjoying asking this question. You're not going to get, you're not going to get out of it!
JEFF: This is a really, really hard question for me. What does it look like to let God love me?
SARAH: Mhmm.
JEFF: It's a really hard question. Maybe some days letting God love me means telling my inner critic to shut up for a minute. Maybe some days letting God love me means walking away from Twitter or Facebook. Maybe some days letting God love me means going back to the community garden and plunging my hands into the soil and reminding myself of the stories that have come before, through the squash and the beans and the potatoes and the sunflowers and the stories that are still to come through the meals we are going to cook and enjoy, and the loved ones who will be around the table. What does it look like to let God love us? I say us because love is relational and communal. So maybe it does mean choosing intentionally not to hold my personal pity party. Which let me tell you, I'm very good at hosting, but to let myself be drawn back, risky as it usually feels, into conversation with a friend or sometimes even a frenemy. Maybe it means texting the person you've been wanting to hear from or initiating that chat or delivering the meal and meditating on the honor of coming alongside another human in the mess of our shared humanity. Maybe it means choosing to remember amidst all the painful memories of a family those treasured but perhaps buried moments of laughter and ease. Or maybe it means refusing to allow the caricature and insistently seeing the complexity. I think I'm giving you all these different answers because the kind of love that we need or want to feel is going to be different depending on the day. Almost as changeable as the weather. Love can show up in so many different ways. Somedays like a bouquet of flowers, other days a knowing nuzzle from your beloved dog or mine, others like a hot meal or a long walk or even the respite of sleep and whatever space that allows that. And I guess a key question for me is "Am I attentive to love?" Both in the receiving and in the giving. Am I ready to offer it as well as to accept it? Am I open? I really believe that loving is a practice and a discipline. Some of us really have to work at it, especially to do it in ways that others can receive. But maybe to be loved, to really allow ourselves to be loved, is a practice and a discipline, too. And for those of us for whom "Let God love you” might feel like an accusation or even a threat, the riskiest, most terrifying, but most potentially liberating thing to say might just be "Okay."
SARAH: You can find all of the links mentioned on today's show, as well as info about our friend Danielle Shroyer and her work in the world, her book on the same subject, as well as a full transcript of the episode and our show notes over at EvolvingFaith.com/Podcast. And make sure that you're following Evolving Faith on social media. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. You can also find me, Sarah Bessey, at SarahBessey.com for all the things.
JEFF: I'm so bad at geometry, I still don't know what to slash and what's a backslash, but you can sign up for my newsletter at JeffChu.substack.com and—
SARAH: I don't think that's geometry.
JEFF: Is that not geometry? It's like which direction does it go? Anyway, you can find photos of my occasionally failed attempts at gardening on Instagram at @ByJeffChu. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Jeff Chu and Sarah Bessey, along with the wonderfully gifted SueAnn Shiah, who also wrote and recorded our music. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast and putting up with our weirdness. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
Throughout our time together at Evolving Faith, there’s one thing we’ve heard over and over from you: We need community. Being in the wilderness can be really lonely. You can feel too isolated—even those of us who are profoundly shy introverts. We all need companions for the journey. We need folks to accompany us and be alongside us.
So we are delighted to invite you to join the Evolving Faith Community online, a new space we’ve created—and that we hope you will co-create with us—for better conversations, deeper connections, questions big and small, and content that we hope will be inspiring and meet you where you are.
It’s free to join the Evolving Faith Community. Our desire is that you might find some fellow travelers in this oasis with whom you can feel a renewed sense of belonging and maybe even some hope. So come, explore, and share. All you have to do is go to community.evolvingfaith.com and sign up. We can’t wait to greet you. See you there.
