Sacred Thorns

In the season one finale, Rachel explores what it means to live in the sacred middle, the long, uncomfortable space between unanswered prayer and resolution. Inspired by a listener's question about navigating infertility while holding onto faith, she turns to Elisabeth Elliot as a guide, a woman whose life was marked by devastating, repeated loss and who spent her life wrestling with the quest...

In this episode, Rachel explores what happens to our faith when the prayers we've whispered for years seem to go unanswered, and Heaven stays silent. She shares the personal moment of standing in an empty bedroom after a third adoption fell through, realizing she had finally run out of words to say to God. She unpacks the difference between prayer as transaction and prayer as abiding, challeng...

In this episode, Rachel challenges the spiritual hierarchy we've created around valleys and mountains, assuming that God primarily dwells on the mountaintop and only "still" remains with us in the valley. She explores what it means that God doesn't just tolerate being in the valley with us, but actually dwells there. She unpacks the popular "you were assigned this mountain to s...

In this episode, Rachel explores the whole Christmas story, not just the comfortable parts with angels and shepherds, but the violence, grief, and impossible circumstances that surrounded Christ's birth. Through her own story of refusing to put up a Christmas tree for three years during infertility, she examines why the Church places the Feast of the Holy Innocents right in the middle of Chris...

In this episode, Rachel explores what it means to wait well during Advent—and what we've lost by rushing past this season of preparation. Through the image of a rose blooming out of season, she shares how to engage your actual season rather than the one you wish you were in, why Mary's blessedness came from her faith rather than her fertility, and the difference between passive endurance a...

In this episode, Rachel explores the concept of "already and not yet," a biblical idea that God's kingdom has come but isn't yet fully present, and how this perspective transforms our understanding of gratitude in the midst of ongoing suffering. She shares how genuine thanksgiving can coexist with honest grief, how transformation happens in liminal spaces, and how to navigate painf...

When you're carrying the cross of infertility or childlessness, you've likely been pointed to the same biblical stories: Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth. But what about all the women whose stories don't end with miracle babies? What about the women God used mightily who had no children at all? In this episode, Rachel uncovers the biblical women we've overlooked—Judith, who saved a nation,...

Building on Episodes 1 and 2, this conversation invites you to see the spiritual dimensions of your struggle and discover how God transforms our deepest wounds into weapons of grace. When you're living with ongoing suffering—chronic illness, infertility, caregiving exhaustion, grief, or mental health battles—there's a dimension to your struggle that often goes unspoken: the spiritual battl...

What happens when the theology we've been handed can't hold the weight of ongoing suffering? This episode explores how prosperity gospel thinking—even in subtle forms—crumbles under long-term pain, and discovers that God meets us not always with answers, but with presence.

My infertility journey became inseparable from my spiritual journey. In this first episode, I share how years of unanswered prayers, medical challenges, and a pivotal baptism moment led me to discover a God big enough to hold both faith and questions—and why sometimes the miracle is in the sustaining, not the healing.

Season One Promo