Freed Indeed - Going Deeper with God

Peace is easy to talk about when life is stable. It’s something else entirely when you’re grieving a child, fighting for access to your kids, and trying to keep your life from collapsing under accusations you never saw coming. That’s why this conversation with Jan Albicki hit us so hard: he’s walked through loss, injustice, and career upheaval, and somehow he isn’t bitter. He’s steady. He’s clear-...

A fogged-in mountain overlook. A quick prayer. Then the clouds break open, and the Himalayas appear, only for the fog to roll back in right after we leave. That story alone is worth the listen, but what stayed with us even more is what it revealed about God’s grace: it makes faith practical, bold, and strangely unforced. Rich and Kirsten sit down with returning guest Shawn Reinsel to unpack his re...

Silence rarely looks dramatic. Most days it looks like a friendly smile on Sunday, a quick chat about the weather, then a quiet drive home with the same knot in your stomach and nobody who really knows what’s going on underneath. We start with the famous “bystander effect” story and ask a harder question: where are we staying quiet when someone near us needs truth, help, or presence? We talk about...

You can believe all the right things about Jesus and still live like God’s love is a paycheck you earn. That’s the tension we get into with Timothy White, whose faith started early and sincere, then slowly drifted into performance-based religion, people-pleasing, and the constant pressure to “hit the mark.” We talk about how legalism actually grows: not always from bad motives, but from a good des...

Fear is one of those feelings that shows up uninvited, then starts making demands. It tells you to rehearse the problem one more time, to chase certainty, to stay on high alert. But if we’re honest, that “solution” never brings rest, it just keeps us awake. So we sit down and ask a blunt question: is being afraid actually a sin, and why does anxiety feel like an epidemic when life is, by many meas...

Our friend Carol Ortiz joins us to unpack what “identity in Christ” actually means in real life. We talk about her first wake-up call to God through a recurring dream, then ground the conversation in Scripture, especially 2 Corinthians 5:17 and the truth that you are a new creation, not a cleaned-up version of your old self. From there, we get painfully practical about identity amnesia, why one ne...

Buried pain doesn’t politely stay in the corner. It pushes out through the cracks, showing up as anger that doesn’t match the moment, anxiety you can’t explain, destructive habits you can’t quit, and relationships that keep taking hits. In this episode, we get honest about why so many Christians learn to hide the hardest parts of their story, especially in a performance-driven church culture where...

The night feels longest when you don’t know what the morning will bring. That’s where Mandy lived for months—on the couch, next to a bedroom door, wondering if her daughter would survive the night.  Battling the invisible enemies of anxiety, depression, and dark spiritual forces that threatened her daughter, Lauren’s, life, Mandy Donegan fought tirelessly for Lauren. In this riveting sequel to Lau...

Pain has a way of exposing what we believe about God. Lynn joins us to trace the arc from head knowledge to heart transformation, and he does it by telling the hardest story he knows: losing his son on a Colorado 14er and facing the five wounds—deceit and denial, fear, anger, sadness, and shame—that followed. Instead of burying that story, he chose to invest it. What we hide in the dark can be use...

Ever feel like your spiritual life is a performance review you can’t pass? We pull back the curtain on why religion—understood as striving to reach God through our own effort—wears people out, breeds competition, and stifles honest questions. Instead of piling on more rules, we trace a simpler, stronger thread: the gospel’s invitation to follow Jesus, find rest, and experience transformation from...

What if you did everything “right” and still ended up with heartbreak you can’t pray away? We sit down with author and leader Joanna Meyer to talk about the gap between faith and reality—where singleness stretches for decades, infertility closes cherished doors, and a pastor’s family breaks apart. Joanna doesn’t offer quick fixes. She invites us to strip faith to the studs, set down performance, a...

A wise person once said that you can't know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. Shawn Reinsel is a loving husband to his wife, Dana, and father to six sons; he pastors a church on South Padre Island, TX, authors books, and heads up a thriving international ministry. Before these blessings, however, he walked through a heartbreaking season of loss and betrayal.  Shawn joins...

A quiet lie can rewrite a whole life: you’re not enough, you don’t deserve love, you’re better off hiding. Our guest, Lauren, traces how those lies took root in her life, how social media amplified the ache, and how anxiety, depression, and self-harm became counterfeit forms of belonging.  What unfolds isn’t a quick fix or a neat conversion—it’s a slow return to hope through worship, honest commun...

What if the change you’ve been chasing isn’t about trying harder but being made new from the inside out? Michelle joins us to tell a raw, hope-filled story of addiction and shame transformed by grace.  Together, we unpack some tools for sustained sobriety, how to keep pursuing God when people disappoint, and the daily practices that keep temptation small by keeping the truth close.  If you or some...