Gold Digger Show: Finding God's Gold in Every Story

In part two of my conversation with Lang Charters, we discuss how a tragic accident which almost took his life actually led him to a fuller life beyond his imagination.  How does God use absurdity and tragedy to resurrect the lives we were meant to live? Tune in for this powerful conversation. 

If true and lasting transformation comes from God alone, how do we access it?  Join me for part one of my conversation with author and yoga teacher, Lang Charters, as we discuss how he learned to plug his heart into God's heart amid painful trials and a near-death experience. 

Psychiatrist and author Dr. Curt Thompson once dropped this bomb in his book Anatomy of the Soul: the more you try to figure God out, the further you move away from trust.  In part two of our conversation on inner transformation, Jen and I discuss the incredible power of asking God open-ended questions. Could this be one of the keys to lasting change? 

We often think of transformation as something we can make happen on our own. The reality is that real and lasting transformation is a lot like a long, excruciating surgery of the heart. Join business owner and entrepreneur Jen Sloniger and I in part one of our conversation about the nature of inner transformation. 

Often we long to change, we crave inner transformation, but we never go beyond that longing. We stop short of mustering the courage to find out the nature of the necessary changes and what it would take to experience them. Welcome to our 10th episode of the Gold Digger Show in which we will explore inner transformation through contemplative exercises and insightful interviews with wise guests.

With so many legit reasons to be hopeless, this last episode of Season 9 focuses on how finding the evidence of God's work in our lives helps us tap into the "super power of hope." Let's end this season being "married to amazement," in the words of poet Mary Oliver. In finding wonder once again, we find our hope resuscitated. 

Hate is a buzzword of our cultural moment; one with which most of us do all we can to avoid association. Yet, hate continues to be an issue of the human heart, no matter how enlightened we think we become as individuals and as a society? Why? Simply put, hate serves as an energizing and creative force in protecting us from harm. Unforgiveness is rooted in hate and will give birth to full-fledged h...

When we find ourselves in the middle of a God-ordained, God-orchestrated -- or, at the very least a God-allowed -- circumstance that happens to also be terrifying, we rightfully ask: Dear God, what are you doing?  If God truly expects us to be able to live free from fear, which the Bible clearly indicates, then what is God doing when we are in the midst of situations in which fear is the only reas...

Today we finish our conversation with writer and teacher, Lisa Cooper, who converted to Catholicism after living most of her adult life as a pastor's wife in the charismatic Word of Faith tradition. Lisa discusses how, after her faith was left in tatters from spiritual abuse,  God led her into the desert to become intimate with him. We look closely at what God might be doing when we feel we have n...

Today we're in conversation with writer and teacher, Lisa Cooper, who converted to Catholicism after living as a pastor's wife in the charismatic Word of Faith tradition for most of her adult life. Lisa's story is filled with pain and joy, consolation and desolation as she tells of how God showed up in the most unlikely of places and in the darkest of times. 

The Gold Digger Show marked a major milestone today as we celebrated 20k unique downloads! Join us for this intriguing episode as we enter into conversation with best-selling author and speaker, Katie Shugars, about her newly released book on the intersection of mental health and faith. Katie shares with us her experiences in finding God's work in the middle of the darkest moments of her life. 

On this episode we ask: Dear God, what are you doing when I'm enduring a profound season of suffering? We draw connections between Christ's suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and our suffering when we yield our own will to God's. 

Today's episode is part two of a conversation with Loren Romeus -- writer, preacher, and Executive Director of the T & T Project. We discuss the Ravi Zacharias scandal as well as the controversial podcast chronicling Mark Driscoll's conduct as the pastor of now defunct Mars Hill in Seattle. We dig into the possibility that God is at work in these scandalous circumstances, digging new ground in the...

When scandal hits the Church, as it seems to do so often, it's difficult to imagine any good that can come from the pain, humiliation, and brokenness of these situations. Recently, as the Ravi Zacharias scandal made headlines and the investigative podcast "The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" gained a large audience, we are faced again with questions of why and how and what now ? Writer, Bible teacher,...

As we make our way through these strange times, and as confusion over what's right and true mounts, we find ourselves asking: Dear God, what are you doing?  This season we will explore the value in uncertainty, the hope in catastrophe, and the solid foundations upon which we can stand in confusing times. 

This entire season has been a reminder that there is no much we do not know, even when we think we do.  We are constrained by our humanity. Our automatic brain processes, our insufficient categories, our implicit biases, our sin nature – all of these things and more work to keep us in reduced cognitive capacity even when we feel like we know so much. In order to understand our fullest meaning, we...

The longer and more often we rehearse the connections and meanings we've made of things, the stronger those connections and meanings become. If those meanings are true and healthy, we have goodness that sticks. If those meanings are untrue and unhealthy, we have damage that sticks. Rehearsal is like cognitive glue and that's why it's so important to stop and consider the scripts we've been repeati...

We quite literally can tell ourselves a story that will become our reality because of the telling. The meaning we make of our stories determines everything. How often do we box ourselves into rigid categories? How often do we do this with God?

When we float through life trusting our automatic brain processes, we're literally unaware of how our story is taking shape. This sort of unintentional and incurious approach to ourselves and to others produces rotten fruit. When we don't understand our stories, when we have accepted false realities and even false identities, we aren't really living. We are existing and, most of the time, pretty m...

Scripture makes clear that humankind, while made in God's image and capable of extraordinary goodness and genius, is also corrupted, limited, and to a large extent blind. Repeatedly, Jesus emphasized the importance of praying for eyes to see and ears to hear the truth because the bend of every one of our hearts is away from the truth and not toward it. When it comes to making moral meaning, the co...

It's not an exaggeration to say that meaning making is one of the most critical acts with which we'll ever engage and that this is terrifying because we are fallible human beings with limited capacity and understanding. Also, most of us muddle through life without ever questioning the meaning we have made of our stories and how that meaning is impacting us and so we continue making meaning without...

Join my guest and dear friend, Tammy Jones, and I as we finish our conversation on the disillusionments of motherhood. There will be no tidy bows here, friends! We let the tension sit as we find God's gold in the realities -- beautiful and raw -- of motherhood. 

I don't know about you, but Mother's Day comes with its complications. It's not that motherhood isn't meaningful, beautiful, and worthy of acknowledgment and celebration. The truth is, for many of us, motherhood has been far from the fairytale we'd imagined. As it turns out, we are much more imperfect than we understood and our children are no angels themselves. What happens when you realize one d...

When Jesus was resurrected, he emerged victorious over death and hell. He paid the penalty for human sin in full, once and for all time. His resurrection both vindicated and validated him as Messiah and Lord of all. Theologian N.T. Wright explains the implications for the church in that the early Christians identified themselves as a resurrection people. For them, and for us, Christ's resurrection...

Today's episode will focus on the spiritual battle Christ faced in the days leading up to his death and on the battle we, as his people, continue to face in this world. Often, we frame our spiritual struggles in terms of US versus the evil in the WORLD or US versus our sinful FLESH. Indeed, many of our battles do take place in those realms; however, there is a third, and significant, battleground...