Hear Where You Belong

What if fear isn’t the enemy but a misunderstood guide? In this powerful episode of Hear Where You Belong, host Dia Irby sits down with Emmy Award-winning life coach, bestselling author, and founder of the Fearless Living Institute, Rhonda Britten, to uncover the truth about fear, belonging, and resilience. Rhonda’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary. At just 14 years old, she witnessed an...

What’s the secret to 52 years of marriage? In this special solo episode, Dea Irby — host, belonging strategist, and wife of 52+ years — shares the five principles that have held her marriage to Tom together through every season. She calls them the Five C’s, and the fifth one is the most important of all. Whether you’re thinking about marriage, newly married, in a rough season, or celebrating decad...

What if the people the church thinks need the most help are actually the ones the church needs most? David Heflin spent 25 years as a pastor — and it took his own diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn’s disease to finally understand what the hurting people in his congregation were living through. Surrounded by a loving family and church, he still felt profoundly isolated. He went looking f...

What if the season that felt like it disqualified you was actually the season God was using to prepare you? Tammy Corwin spent 30 years in prison for a murder she says she did not commit. Abandoned by her birth mother at age 2, left in a deer shack with four siblings with the door nailed shut, adopted at 3, and then imprisoned at 22 — Tammy's life seemed marked by loss, rejection, and injustic...

He preached open-air in Turkey as a teenager — wearing a letterman jacket that said "Jesus is Alive" on the back — and thought he might get arrested. Then grad school happened. And for a season, he couldn't even sing a hymn with meaning. In Episode 113 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Jason Tatlock — professor of history, ordained minister, author, and co-founder of...

He walked into church drunk, high, and on his way to his fifth suicide attempt. He raised his hand for Jesus because he was too obliterated to put it back down. And the moment he prayed — boom. Instantly sober for the first time in three years. That was 1973. And David W. Ebel has never stopped since. In Episode 112 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with David — Christian...

She started drinking at 14 to numb the hurt. Thirty years later — her dad went to get her. In Episode 111 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Robert Ruesch — author, writer, husband, and father whose family has walked through more than three decades of addiction, heartbreak, hope, and ultimately recovery. His award-winning book The Long Road Home: A Family's Journey...

She was just another baseball mom. Until Kelsey Billingsley got curious and asked a question. What followed was the story of a woman who survived a civil war, fled in the middle of the night after her father was killed, spent five years in a refugee camp digging through bread every morning looking for poison — and built a beautiful ordinary life that nobody around her knew anything about. When Kel...

What if the most powerful thing you could do today was slow down and sit with a few extraordinary words? In this special solo episode of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby does something she has never done before — she pulls back the curtain on 17 of the most powerful, memorable, and soul-stirring quotes shared by guests across the seasons. Words she has been carrying around, writing do...

Divorce. Widowhood. Leukemia — twice. Multiple brain surgeries. A bone marrow transplant. Any one of those would shake most people's faith to the ground. Cheri Baugh Woods has walked through all of them. And she is still standing. In Episode 108 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Cheri — author, speaker, retired educator, and International Impact Book Awards Author...

Do you rewrite a text three times before you send it? Say yes when every part of you wants to say no? Feel like you have to earn your rest? That is not who you are. That is a story you absorbed somewhere along the way. And it can be rewritten. In Episode 107 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Carlene Marie — master mind power coach, keynote speaker, and author of Enoug...

At 14 years old, Tom Vander Well had a vision — standing in a pulpit, hearing God say: you are going to proclaim my word. He just had no idea what that would actually look like. In Episode 106 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Tom Vander Well — CEO of Intelligentix, Amazon international bestselling author, speaker, actor, playwright, and host of the Wayfarer Blog and...

What if every seemingly random moment of your life — the teacher who handed you a piece of paper, the girl you met in an ice cream shop, the photography class you never meant to teach — was never random at all? That is what Jason Ward discovered standing on a mountaintop in Oklahoma, coffee in hand, asking God: how did I get here? And God answered. In Episode 105 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast ,...

What happens when God tells you to put the sole of your foot down from one end of America to the other — and you say yes? Rick and Jane McKinney found out. 2,770 miles. Twenty miles a day. Six days a week. Six months. From Santa Monica Pier to the steps of the Supreme Court. And the biggest transformation? Not in the thousands of people they met along the way. In them. In Episode 104 of Hear Where...

"This episode includes a brief mention of sexual assault. Pat shares her story with grace and hope — no graphic details." What happens when a traumatic experience at 13 years old quietly rewrites everything you believe about yourself — and sends you searching for belonging in every wrong place for the next 17 years? That is Pat Domangue's story. And what God did with it is extraordin...

What do you do when you have been a lifelong lover of books, a dreamer of worlds, and a quiet carrier of stories — but you are convinced you do not belong among the authors whose work fills your shelves? If you are T.A. Thompson, you stop waiting. You sit down at your keyboard. And you write your way in. In Episode 102 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with T.A. Thompson —...

What would you do if your late grandmother showed up in a dream at 2 AM — not fuzzy, not vague, but fully present, her voice, her face — and looked you in the eye and said: write our story? Brigid Kennedy got up, made a pot of coffee, and started writing. In Episode 101 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Brigid Kennedy — author, speaker, and violin teacher — whose jour...

What if the life you were trying so hard to fit into was never actually yours to begin with? That is the question Jessica DeYoung had to answer when she and her family sold everything, packed four kids and a dog onto a 40-foot motorcoach they call Abbey the Adventure Bus, and hit the road full-time across America. Four and a half years. 42 states. Thousands of miles. And one woman finally figuring...

What if the hardest year of your life — the one with the suicidal child, the estranged daughter, the house fire, and the ministry you had to give away — was actually the year God gave you the desire of your heart? That is exactly what Tony Stoltzfus discovered. And in Episode 99 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , he shares it all with a depth and honesty that will stay with you long after the epis...

You can sit in a room full of people and still feel completely alone. Being included is not the same as belonging — and Dr. Stuart Jones has spent his whole life learning that difference from a brother the world often overlooked. In Episode 98 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , host Dea Irby sits down with Dr. Stuart Jones — author, speaker, ordained minister, former university vice president, and...

What do you do when everything around you — the house, the store, the school, the church — belongs to the cotton mill? When your grandfathers started working at age 9? When your daddy quit school in 8th grade because he figured the mill was his destiny anyway? If you are Donald Williams — you go to Clemson. And you do not stop until you have three degrees. In Episode 97 of Hear Where You Belong Po...

What does it take to stop trying to be a duplicate — and finally step into being the original God designed you to be? That is the question Reverend Kevin T. Taylor has been answering his entire life. And in Episode 96 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , he answers it in a way that is going to stay with you. Kevin is an executive strategist, pastor of the oldest Black church in upstate New York, fou...

What do you do when the thing you feared most actually happens — and then happens again? Kathy Rogers knows. And somehow, impossibly, beautifully — she is not bitter. She is not broken. She is a woman whose faith grew unshakeable in the very seasons that would have destroyed most of us. In Episode 95 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast , Kathy joins host Dea Irby for one of the most tender, honest, a...

What happens when success on paper no longer feels like alignment in real life? That is the question Laura Patac spent years avoiding — and then finally, bravely, answered. Laura is a storyteller, leadership speaker, Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths Coach, and author of Whole, Not Perfect — an Amazon bestselling book in spiritual growth that is less a book to read and more an experience to live t...

What if the most powerful thing you could do for someone wasn't give them your advice, your money, or your time — but help them see who they already are? That's the question at the heart of this conversation, and David Ask has built his life around answering it. David is an entrepreneur, inventor, lead coach for the True North Resiliency Program, and author of the upcoming Guardians of Gri...