Faith & Feelings

Have you ever struggled to name the pain you’re experiencing inside? When we don’t have language for the pain we carry, we can create other names for it — names like “not good enough,” “unworthy,” “broken,” or “wrong.” Many of us often avoid naming and validating our pain out of fear of being overwhelmed or feeling stuck in it. But what if the opposite is actually true? What if this is actually th...

So many of us long for transformation, but we feel discouraged and defeated by the issues that keep coming up... over and over again.  We pray, read our Bibles, go to church, worship, and yet still feel stuck. Why is this? Often the tools we're given within the church leave us wondering if we're missing something or if something is wrong with us. Is it us? Is it them?...

As we practice receiving and remaining in God’s love, the question becomes this: how are we responding and loving Him back? And not necessarily in the big moments, but in the small and ordinary moments of every day life.   We all move in patterns that we have set up over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately, who and what we worship. So what...

What if you could walk into every room knowing—deep in your bones—that you are safe, seen, soothed, and secure? Not because of the what’s happening around you, but because the face of Jesus is always turned toward you? Always attentive. Always connected. This is what writer, artist, and soul care provider Stephanie Stewart and I talk about today. Stephanie invites us into her own journey of d...

We all have these complicated tangles of belief, identity, and narrative, and one of the early stories many of us often begin telling ourselves is a one of our own scarcity.   “Maybe I don’t matter.”  "Maybe I’m not good enough.”   “Maybe I’m not worthy of love, belonging, and joy.”   When we bring these stories of scarcity with us into our relationships with God, we may ache f...

Even though you’ve heard God described as full of compassion and always present, do you sometimes feel confused as to why you experience him as distant, disapproving, or absent? Our experiences, from childhood to adulthood, shape the internal pictures we hold about God—sometimes in ways we don’t even realize. In this episode, I share stories of 4 different women, and how they each came to experien...

So many of us long to rest in God’s love, but we feel at war with actually receiving it. Why do we resist the very thing that we claim we want? This is what author and spiritual director Sharon Garlough Brown and I talk about today. Sharon graciously invites into her own story of exhaustion and striving to meet her perceptions of God’s expectations for faithfulness, to learning what it looks like...

Just like any other relationship, intimacy with God isn’t something that can be forced or manufactured. It’s the byproduct of a genuine desire to know God and be known by Him. But before we can really desire God, we must have a clearer understanding of who God is and what he is like. Our experiences shape our experiences of God, often forming and informing a flawed or incomplete vision of who God...

Have you ever felt like you know about God—but you don’t really know Him? Like you’re going through the motions of faith but longing for something deeper, something real?   In this next podcast series, we’ll explore what it means to move beyond conceptual knowledge about God and into personal encounter — to truly experience God’s presence, hear His voice, and be transformed by His love. We’ll...

What messages did you receive about self-awareness as a child? Many of us grew up in environments that did not nurture self-awareness. Over the years, we’ve practiced disconnecting from our tears, grief, desires, or sensitivity. And not only disconnect, but we’ve learned to reject or criticize these feelings or experiences within ourselves.  In this episode, I talk about how these ruptures th...

At the heart of the spiritual journey is relationship. Growing in self-awareness is not an end in itself, but the heart and the means to deeper intimacy with God. As author and ministry leader T.J. MacLeslie and I talk about today, Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. In this episode, T.J. generously invites us into...

"You're not good enough.” "You need to try harder." "You’ll never keep up.” “There isn’t enough time.” These are the sorts of voices that can hum just beneath the surface of our minds, pushing us to act in unsustainable and frantic ways. So many of us long for the peace that comes with a life marked my internal calm and groundedness, but we feel gripped by anxiety. We don’t know what to do with th...

God designed our bodies to tell us incredibly important things when it comes to growing and healing. In fact, I believe that one of the primary places we can grow in self-awareness is not books or podcasts or personality tests...but learning to listen to our own bodies. Why is this? Our bodies know more than our minds often do. And they are constantly speaking, revealing truth about what’s happeni...

While the work of self-awareness begins with pursuing a better understanding of our lives and stories, so many of us can stop there.   As licensed therapist, author, and professor Chuck DeGroat and I talk about today, we often keep this awareness in past-tense, not understanding how our bodies are still holding these stories. We can ignore symptoms and bodily sensations like hypervigilance, s...

For most of us, feelings are messy.   Oftentimes, we don’t have words for what we’re feeling, and we get stuck in a dark and painful place. Because emotions can be complicated, we have so many strategies to not feel what we feel. But this often leaves us with a sense of numbness. We feel confused and chopped up inside.   Giving our feelings language is like turning on the lights. It’s ho...

While Josh and his family was doing ministry in China, he was detained and interrogated by authorities and had no idea if or when he would be released.   In this week’s episode, Josh graciously shares some of his journey with self-awareness, and how this unexpected crisis led him to a deeper encounter with with himself. While few of us will share the particularities of his experience, I think...

One of the things that I’ve learned about self-awareness over the last few years is that self-awareness is something we can choose, but it’s also something that happens to us. It comes at certain points in our lives without our consent, experiences of pain and crisis often becoming the catalyst for this deeper awakening. While I don’t hold to the idea that God causes crisis and suffering, I do kno...

When I reflect on my own journey over the last 7 or 8 years, I can’t think of something that has changed my life, my relationship with God, others, or even myself more than self-awareness. I truly believe that pursuing a deeper understanding of our own hearts and stories is one of the most spiritually formative and transformative things we could ever do. That’s why I’m so excited to invite you to...

How well do you know yourself?   Growing in self-awareness is probably one of the hardest, but most important things we could ever do. Why? The short answer is this: you can’t change what you don’t know. But one of the trickiest things about self-awareness is that most of us are on autopilot and don't even know it. So many of us are moving through life and not paying attention. We’re living b...

I think that everyone could testify to how imperceptibly incremental our spiritual growth can feel in some areas of our lives.   If you’re like me, you’ve often felt a disconnect between the theology that that you believe and the reactions that leak out of you in everyday life. Even though you know something is true in your head, it doesn’t seem to be shaping your heart or steering your hands...

So many of us have experienced a before and after. A “before” you knew that life was fragile… and an “after.” When you can’t go back. You can’t un-know. You are changed.  In this episode, my friend Jess joins me to share about her recent miscarriage journey. Although Jess shares about the loss of a child, she speaks to the emotional undercurrent of loss in a way that I think will deeply reson...

One of the hardest questions to answer in life is not “Does God exist?” but “Is God kind?” Sometimes, unspeakable things happen at the hands of others. Trauma of any kind often shatters are capacity to trust ourselves, God others, and the world around us. When we feel left in our pain, holding more questions than answers, it can feel like we’ve been given the raw data that God is not good. In this...

How we walk into room will always carry evidence of our formation. The way we act, if we get big or small, whether our voices soften or louden, if our shoulders hunch or straighten, whether we anticipate acceptance or brace for unbelonging...it all tells a story. A story about something we’ve lived. In those moments when it feels like you don’t fit in and that shame-filled question wells up inside...

Have you ever wondered why you get dysregulated? Another way to describe this term is the inability to control your insides. It’s those moments when everything seems out of sorts. All of us experience emotional dysregulation. But, so often, we can get dysregulated without even realizing it. So, how do we begin to notice & listen to what are bodies are trying to tell us? In this episode with li...

With 2024 coming to a close, I’ve been reflecting on this first year of Faith & Feelings.   What a year. I just want to say how grateful I am for this community. Thank you for sharing this podcast and inviting others to be a part of it. Because of this, we are ending the year with tens of thousands of downloads and an actively growing community of listeners. And I just want to say thank y...