Looking for the Real God

Christy shares stories from her past that connect with her current experience as a 5th grade teacher. It's fun to watch things come full circle as she reconnects with an old version of herself from almost twenty years ago. God has made us unique as individuals and we each have passions and gifts that makes us come alive. Christy shares from her own experiences and encourages her listeners to pursu...

Christy contemplates the longings of our hearts, how we try to meet them by ourselves but fail, and the ways those longings point us to our Creator. Religion will never satisfy, good behaviors will fall short, and formulas promising wealth, health, blessings, and success will fail. But the Real God isn't waiting for us to DO anything except turn to Him and seek Him. And in Him we will find that th...

Christy shares some thoughts from her recent Scripture readings in Ezekiel. As she read about the future temple that will be built during the Millennium, Christy began to think back to the way God started out in Eden separating Himself from His creation because of Adam and Eve's sin of disobedience. But despite that separation, God continued to pursue people: Abraham, Moses, the Nation of Israel....

Christy jumps back into the topic of deconstruction. This week she explores what might be behind the purity culture and narrow gender role ideas that have become so mainstream. What if in our desire to fix the broken world we live in, we become fixated on rules instead of a relationship with the only One who can save us? Purity culture, gender roles, and spiritual abuse seem to be the hottest topi...

Christy takes a break from her series on deconstruction and reconstruction of our faith to voice some heartfelt thoughts about her real life. She shares her disillusionment with social media and the Christian celebrity culture. Pursuing a book contract is something that Christy thought she wanted until she realized the pressure of platform building and sustaining was not mentally or emotionally he...

If we are only basing our faith deconstruction and reconstruction on human reasoning then we will miss out on the Real God. God is bigger than our understanding and more than we can comprehend. If we are going to find Him, we need to humble ourselves and realize that we might be wrong about Who He is. As Christy has stated before, we don't get to decide who Gog is, we just get to discover Him. God...

Christy continues talking about deconstructing our Christian experiences and beliefs this week by exploring the Bible. What if the Bible we experienced in the Christianese bubble world isn't the Real Bible after all? Exploring things like hermeneutics, translations, and the fact that the Bible is an ancient Eastern book, Christy challenges her listeners to reevaluate what they believe about the Bi...

As Christy continues to explore faith deconstruction, she turns her attention to church. Church hurt and spiritual abuse are real, and they are being increasingly exposed. After experiencing this kind of painful brokenness within the church, how do we think about church or choose to participate in church again? Christy acknowledges the pain -- something she shares from personal experience -- and e...

In the second episode of season five, Christy discusses the option of deconstructing our faith without deconverting from it. There is much to deconstruct in our experiences with legalism, religion, Christian patriarchy, the purity culture, and spiritually abusive situations across the board. Some of the people who talk about deconstruction seem to think that the only option is for everyone who dou...

Christy begins Season Five of Looking for the Real God by exploring the various definitions of faith deconstruction. Deconstruction really just means to take something apart down to it's individual pieces, but because of people's various experiences it tends to mean different things depending on who you talk to. Christy shares a poem/analogy she wrote about a Lego set to explain the definitions of...

Christy finished her summer series Stories from Camp with the second half of her love story. This young, totally opposite young man had snuck his way into her heart and she wasn't sure what to do about it. Convinced he was distracting her from Jesus and the campers, Christy was determined to give up her crush. It worked for three days. Having never had a boyfriend Christy had no idea how to be in...

Christy is closing out her summer series, Stories from Camp, with her personal love story. It's amazingly strange and beautiful how God can work in more than one person simultaneously. While Christy was learning how to live in the real world and letting go of her religious and cultic baggage, a troubled teenage boy named Josh was being challenged to surrender his life to Jesus and see what happene...

In this third from the last Story from Camp, Christy describes the "rusticness" of her cabins and the little camp she called home for five wonderful growing summers. It wasn't much to look at, but Christy discovered that you really don't need much for a full and fantastic life. She shares stories of some of her most memorable campers. From the wild tale of campers who punished Christy for not lett...

A huge part of Christy's summers at camp was her relationship with Jesus. She would often escape into the woods to walk the trails and process these new experiences with the Holy Spirit. She also had little hidey spots around camp that she called her cathedrals where she spent time with God. Even though Christy came to summer camp still trapped in religious formulas, a legalistic mindset, and plen...

Christy continues to share Stories from Camp with this episode focusing on friendships she made over the years with both boys and girls. These young people had very different backgrounds but they all helped Christy to learn and develop as she discovered what it was like to live in the real world. Some friendships were life-giving, some gave her a new perspective, and some broke her heart a little,...

In today's episode Christy shares some of the relationships that made the most impact on her those first few summers at camp. Coming from a culture where behavior and standards were the focus, Christy was shocked to discover acceptance and grace even when she made mistakes. Her coordinators that first summer and the camp nurse for years afterward were people who loved Christy in ways that demonstr...

Christy tries to explain the wild and wonderful atmosphere of summer camp. A place where you become real and get to know other real people by living together 24/7 in the grit of serving children through heat, rain, lack of sleep, and plenty of sunburn. It's hard to describe, but Christy does her best. When you are encouraged to be crazy, loud, and adventurous -- thanks to skits, songs, and ridicul...

Christy continues her summer series, Stories from Camp, by talking about boys, flirting, kissing, and learning how to appropriately interact with the opposite sex. Growing up in an environment where many boys and girls didn't have relationships until arranged marriages, the whole "how to be friends with boys" thing was very new. Summers at camp allowed Christy the opportunity to learn how to deal...

Christy continues this summer's series Stories from Camp by talking about her total lack of culture or pop culture references that first summer at camp. She had a lot to learn but was able to explore and experiment in a safe place thanks to the great people at camp. From learning to understand slang, listening to Christian Rock, and watching her first PG-13 movie, Christy had a lot of new experien...

Christy begins her summer series “Stories from Camp” by describing her love/hate relationship with camp that began as a child. She then describes the way five summers at camp in her early 20s changed her life. Christian summer camp provided a safe place for Christy to go through the developmental stages she missed while being raised in a cult. This summer of 2021 Christy will be diving into memori...

Christy uses her background in a cultic sub-culture of Christianity to question the popular ideology known as Critical Race Theory. She gives a basic overview of the ideology, raises some red flags from the perspective of a former cult-member, and points listeners back to the truth about this broken world and the broken people in it. Just because something sounds like it could be true doesn't mean...

Christy shares some of her own experiences with patriarchy both from her cult days and from more recent times. She asks questions about the way the church views women. If God created both men and women in His own image than why do so many Christians seem to believe that women are less than men? If the fall is where sin entered the world and part of the curse of sin was that men would rule over wom...

As Christy wraps up her series asking the question, "How did we get here?" she takes time to ponder the ways we allow ourselves to be motivated by fear. Fear is a huge part of our broken world. Unfortunately people who are looking for power and control know that fear is also a powerful motivator. If you capitalize on people's fears you can get them to do anything you want. Christy explores three w...

In this second to last episode in the How Did We Get Here series Christy shares a story about her daughter's imaginary friend Ellen. If God is just a concept, just an idea, just an imaginary friend, then it doesn't matter what we believe about Him or if our beliefs line up with historical orthodoxy. But if God is REAL real then everything changes. We don't get to create Him with our beliefs or cha...

As Christy continues to move through the question of How Did We Get Here, she confronts our religious obsession with morality and goodness. No matter which side of a topic you are on these days, people automatically have a list of behaviors they expect from you. The Church is no different. Unfortunately a fixation on behaviors and the condemnation that follows when you don't measure up has been th...