Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
285. Living Authentically: Embracing Our Present Selves
Imagine the delicate balance between life and death, embodied in the metaphors of stardust and clay. In this segment, we dive into the complexities of personal grief—from the struggle of being unable to have children to the intricate emotions tied to familial loss. Lore Ferguson Wilbert, author of "The Understory," emphasizes the importance of living in the present, urging us to embrace who we are now rather than who we once were or who we might become. Through the lens of spiritual formation, we delve into the discipline of accepting our current reality with all its joy, pain, and beauty, much like the wildflower seeds that bloom into a sea of poppies, symbolizing renewal and hope. Close with us in a moment of gratitude, embracing the wisdom of Lore Ferguson Wilbert and the call to be our magnificent selves.
Order Lore's magnificent book: The Understory
Visit her site: LORE
Follow Lore on Instagram: @lorewilbert
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A reading from the Understory, an Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor by Laurie Ferguson Wilbert. She writes Last week there was an earthquake along the border of Turkey and Syria. On the morning after I read there were 5,000 dead. Now, a week later, that number has climbed to nearly 50,000. All the news, photographs and videos coming through are devastating. Last night I watched the rescue of a small girl whose legs were crushed and would need to be amputated. She barely cried as they removed her.
Speaker 1:Yesterday I saw a video of how the earthquake created a canyon right in the middle of an olive grove. On either side of the new gorge are green lawns and speckled groves of trees and there, like a fresh slice through perfect skin, is now a canyon. It is not like the canyons we know red and blue and golden sides, worn smooth by rain and wind, but someday it will be. If the earth could bleed, she would be gushing. The cut is deep and wide, full of boulders and dirt land never seen by human eyes before. This is sometimes how I think of pain in our lives, even if our bodies and lives are a landscape of hurt and healed wounds, because we are humans and we live in a story as unique to us as our fingerprints or DNA. Every cut is new and foreign, never before seen or experienced. The question isn't yet how do we navigate this new landscape? But how does this landscape even exist? We are not at the living with point, but at the did this really happen? Point. Or is this really my life point? In the video, three or four people stand near the edge of the new canyon looking into it. Maybe it is the farmer, maybe it is a neighbor, maybe it is just a curious passerby. All around them, 50,000 lives have been lost, and yet this cavernous opening in the earth is where they stand and look. And why not? Maybe it is sometimes easier to look at the pain of another than that of our own.
Speaker 1:I used to believe that God causes our pain, intends it in order to shape and refine us, but this view makes God not only unkind but also pragmatic and refine us. But this view makes God not only unkind but also pragmatic, and I no longer find that view compatible with the God I see in the Bible. I am no deist either, though, believing that God created all this and us and then stepped back and brushed off his hands, leaving us to navigate the whole world and life on our own. Instead, I believe there is some beautiful synergy between God and us. He beckons, we follow, we plead. He answers. He gives, we receive, he withholds, we grab it anyway, it anyway. I also believe that, however awful and terrible our pain is, god redeems pain. God doesn't cause it as much as he allows it, because it is his prerogative to do so, just as it is our prerogative to choose against him.
Speaker 1:As much as it pains me to admit this too, the most life-changing moments of my life have come through the most pain. When I look over the landscape of my life, I see that the seasons of concentrated pain caused seismic shifts. I have moved over the fault lines that weakened me and been strengthened in the times of crushing. I have been bent and broken, but never destroyed in the midst of it all, and that is a miracle. I see now my favorite writer. She continues. Madeline LaEngle says a similar thing and helps me not feel so alone in this view.
Speaker 1:As I look back on 50 years of this work, I am forced to accept that my best work has been born from pain. I am forced to see that my own continuing development involves pain. It is pain and weakness and constant failures which keep me from pride and help me to grow. The power of God is to be found in weakness, but it is God's power. I love that. La Ingles says. Lori writes my own continuing development involves pain. She doesn't say I choose pain in order to develop or God gives me pain to develop me. Instead, she acknowledges that pain is a part of development. She learned to walk through the difficult, muddy places of her life instead of around it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to part two of my conversation with Lori Ferguson Wilbert and her book, the Understory. She is teaching us so much about rootedness and what she observed from the falling of tree 103 upon the forest floor and, when we look down, what we can find and hope for how that will help us to grow. Sometimes we will go from vertical to horizontal and Lori helps us to understand that. That doesn't have to mean that we are now dead, because by all means Tree 103 is not dead, but it just means that we are becoming something new and we are offering our life's wisdom like Tree 103, in a whole different way, to propagate a brand new, resurrected life. For many other things it's so powerful and it has taken me much time to think about it, meditate on it and process it. She starts, too, with a beautiful quote by the poet Wendell Berry. He writes In this place, where I am more myself than anywhere else, I'm also more painfully divided from myself than anywhere else.
Speaker 1:I offer that. That, too, is how I feel in the current situation of finding a church home. I know I belong in a church community. I have been in a church community since the birth my birth and pre-COVID and then, through COVID we experienced a COVID stripping, you might say find our footing in a new church home. And it is challenging for me and I'm trying to write about it and speak about it in the maturest way, because it is such a part of my spiritual formation. I do feel that this time is perhaps one of the greatest spiritual awakenings in my life. Perhaps one of the greatest spiritual awakenings in my life. Even though I am not in a church community, I do have great community around me. So I know that church life okay, the body of Christ is the place where I feel more myself than anywhere else. But currently, in this season, I do feel more painfully divided from myself than anywhere else. But currently, in this season, I do feel more painfully divided from myself than anywhere else.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, this conversation in part two will help clarify that a bit or at least will bring you to a deeper thought, because that is where this podcast is going to entertaining more remarkable conversations with thought leaders and great thinkers, authors, writers, speakers of the day who can help us move into a deeper relationship, a more authentic relationship with our faith and with God himself. I am so looking forward to the direction that we are moving in and I'm finding it personally so gratifying and it is deepening my faith in God so much. So let's welcome Lori back to the show and grab that journal and a pen, because I think there are going to be many great thoughts to write down. What does that mean to you, like even post writing? As you've probably been in so many interviews and talked about so many different things, I'm just wondering what the story is beneath that story.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm 64. I feel like a matriarch of the church, I do. I feel like, okay, I'm an elder. I'm in Elder's Grove now, I think you know. And yet everyone that's leaned on me has now caused me to go horizontal. I'm not vertical anymore. I believe the wind of the Spirit has uprooted me from the church culture. Currently I am not, I can't be in it currently, and so you know COVID brought a lot out, it took it out, it showed me what was an error in my life, right.
Speaker 1:You talk about, okay, the stripping of titles, stripping of that's where I got my identity, it's where I made my money. A lot of different things. How did that strip you? You know, I've written down here disintegration of our former selves. You've talked a lot about that. So what are we learning? What are you learning?
Speaker 2:Help. Yeah, yeah, you know, wendell Berry is a beautiful writer, one of my favorite thinkers in the world today, and he writes this statement about going home and he says you know, in this place where I am essentially like more myself than anywhere else, I'm also more painfully divided from myself than anywhere else else. I'm also more painfully divided from myself than anywhere else. And I think that quote really sort of resonated with me because in a lot of ways, you know, my husband and I moved back to this place where I had spent most of my formative years, my twenties. We moved here during the early days of the pandemic and I think I thought, coming back here, I would come back not necessarily with a title that's not what I was after but I would come back a changed person. You know, I'm 42 now, I'm not 25. I'm scarred, I'm not fresh, I'm changed. I'm not. You know, I'm not this person. I was in my early 20s and I came back and found man, I just wasn't vertical anymore, like I just got knocked out, and for a multitude of reasons, I think the pandemic was part of it, I think the politics were a big part of it. Still, yeah, the then, in the midst of all of that during.
Speaker 2:It was three days after my stepfather was dead, died very, very suddenly with a heart attack. We're literally at his funeral grieving and we get a phone call from one of my family members who you know. Cps had just shown up at their house and had the police had come and taken away my brother. And it turned out that he had. I'm going to be conscious of your listeners right now, but there had been some abuse in their home a few years previously that hadn't been reported. The church knew about it. Their church knew about it, hadn't reported it. So it was suddenly reported and so we came back home and just for the next, I mean it, just, it decimated me in a lot of ways. I mean it decimated me, it's alarming.
Speaker 1:It's traumatic at the capital T.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, it decimated me to the surface with that, but then just all of this other complicated stuff with the church and with how do we care for the vulnerable and how are we protecting systems of power and title over protecting the most vulnerable?
Speaker 1:It's my heartbeat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so all of these things are happening in a very short period of time and it just decimated me and I just thought, how am I going to? How?
Speaker 1:am I going to make it through? It's still there. There's still lots of.
Speaker 2:Oh, so much pain, so much pain so much.
Speaker 1:I can see it on your face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so much pain. So, many you write a lot about grief.
Speaker 1:This is a book of grief, yep. So many. You write a lot about grief. This is a book of grief, yep, which is so powerful because, quite honestly, uh, that's hard to explain and you do it well, you do it well and you're still doing it, you know, and grief is so mysterious, and grief it's not just five stages, and now they've added a sixth stage, and I could add a seventh and no, you.
Speaker 2:One of the things I say in the book is, like, learning to live with grief is learning to live with what has been subtracted and never added it again. And I think there's this idea that, like, time heals all wounds, like, eventually you won't feel that, no, you feel that forever. You never. You know, I had a younger sibling who was killed in an accident in my early 20s. You know I had a younger sibling who was killed in an accident in my early 20s and, like, for the rest of my life he will not be a part of my life. That which is subtracted is never like. You cannot put tree 103 back up on her stump and make it work again. So you have to figure out what am I going to do? How am I going to live in subtraction? How am I going to live without?
Speaker 1:No one teaches that, though, lori. No, you do know that, right? Yes, it's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think the way that we learn it is we look down, we stop trying to tell people.
Speaker 1:Can we please talk about looking down? You tell us to look down, I'm looking down. What you tell us to look down, I'm looking down. What am I looking down for?
Speaker 2:Open our eyes. Cause everybody's, I get to look up. Look at the look at the canopy of trees. Look at you know. Look at hope. Look at you know it's not going to last forever Time. I mean, it's just these tropes. Yeah, you know, I can't tell you what. What's going to happen when you look down. Know it's not gonna last forever time heal, I mean it's just these tropes. Yeah, you know, I can't tell you what what's gonna happen when you look down, because what's what's underneath your feet is different than what's underneath mine.
Speaker 1:Yes, this is what I love.
Speaker 2:What did I see? Yeah, I mean if you would yeah, I saw crushed ferns, flattened dandelions, decomposing logs, fungi, death, but also like an incredible amount of life, I know.
Speaker 1:I know, but it looks like death. It looks like death.
Speaker 2:It looks like death.
Speaker 1:Oh poor see I would go. Oh you poor crushed dandelion.
Speaker 2:Poor thing. It's beautifully alive, yeah, but it's not a would go. Oh you poor crushed dandelion.
Speaker 1:Poor thing. It's beautifully alive, but it's not a poor thing.
Speaker 2:No no, it's part of you know. One of the big themes in the book is that I am here, yes.
Speaker 1:There's so many things. I told you it's going to be so hard, Lori.
Speaker 2:That idea that, like we are always here and not in some sort of like Today I'm here, yeah, but like we are always here and not in some sort of like I'm here, yeah, but like we're always here and we go from here to here to here.
Speaker 2:This idea that, you know, god creates us from clay and dust and bone and also scientists tell us that there is stardust as a part of our dna like this idea that there's just sort of like eternal. This, this matter is like not created for nothing. This matter is like it's always being created and recreated into something new. It's a new cellular arrangement of things, and so just this idea that, like, I can look down and see all that death, but there is also life happening and there, like it is, it's maybe not the life that I actually wanted, it's not actually my life that is going to flourish from all this death that I see, and that's really hard because we care about our lives, but life is coming through all of this fallenness and death and decay and um, I'm sorry that that's not better news, like no, I think it is the news, I think it's the necessary news, it is the uh, timely news, it's the kairos, it's the prophetic, it's the word for now yeah, it's like how do I live in now?
Speaker 2:instead of trying to like get back to? Because I think for the first, I would say, last eight years has been like pretty a lot, full of a lot of people. For me, and but especially the pandemic, there was just a sense of like how do I get back, how do I get back to? And then it was this realization, like not only could I not get back, did I want to go back like, did I actually want the ignorance that I carried, the bias that I carried, the sense of control or individualism that I carried within me, that I didn't even know I carried? Do I want that back? And the reality is like no, I don't, I don't. But I'm also like not looking towards some future.
Speaker 2:I think in the past I used to look toward like well, what's going to happen in a few years or what's?
Speaker 2:You know, my husband and I have not been able to have children and, and that's been, there's been layers of pain in that.
Speaker 2:But I think one of the things that's like sitting with us more recently as we're you know, he's almost 50 is just like man we're, we won't have grandchildren, and that, I think, feels more difficult for us than not having children is like, wow, we're not going to like grow old with little babies and grandchildren, and just like this, this sort of wave of of the future that feels truncated in some ways, and so that's just one thing. But it's just this. This awareness has been coming to me that's like, yeah, I cannot live in some sort of unknown future. I cannot live in that space of like what we won't have in the future. I have to live in today and what we do have and what we don't have today, and that's. I think that's like. I think that's a spiritual discipline that is severely lacking. You know, we in the church we have so many ideas about what are spiritual disciplines and I have a degree in spiritual formation Like I care about our spiritual formation.
Speaker 2:They always say as well yeah, but like, I think one of the most neglected areas of spiritual formation is the reality of like this is where I am, this is what I have, this is who I am and is what I have. This is who I am and not who am I going to become or who was I, but like, who am I now and how am I going to live? With faithfulness and grief and joy and pain, like in tandem with who I am right now, as I'm here right now.
Speaker 1:Please, please, teach us, write us, write for the. You know, that's what God is stirring in your soul, from such grief and layers of grief that you, you know. I'm so sorry, you know, but I have heard you say like, with the loss of your brother you know you don't wish him back in the sense it's that's.
Speaker 1:I will put that conversation that I listened to on our show notes because it was something I will actually want people that I know in grief to listen to. You say, you know, because my mother died in COVID. You know we had a very complicated relationship so it isn't like I really want her back, but there are that even that has like layers of like like terrible like you're just a horrible person, but no, you share.
Speaker 1:I have other things. I really, really want you to continue sharing your heart, because you know they can listen my listeners can go to that but it's like he taught you that taught you things you would not be who you are today. There is a time I think the scripture that just continued. I was washing, walking into the grocery store, still listening, you know, to that episode, and what I kept thinking was john 12 24. Unless a grain, unless a seed falls into the earth and dies, you know, is there a? Is that relative there Can?
Speaker 2:I say that no.
Speaker 2:I think. I think it. You know we have. We live on the river and we have, thank you. I mean, we're about to sell our house but I'm gonna buy it. Um, but we have like 120 feet of riverfront and I planted. I threw a bunch of wildflower seeds last, like november. I threw them out on the on the bank and I just thought, I don't know, we'll see what happens, you know, over winter, and it is a sea of poppies, like bright red poppies Right now. I'm looking at them and they're just like there's thousands of them Looking out your window at the river. I'm looking at the river and the poppies and you're moving.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's another story for another day, that's another story for another day.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, just this idea that, like, so much of life is about death, and I know that's a stay, but like you cannot have life without death, you, you cannot have life without death you know.
Speaker 1:So how is that relative? Let's go back to tree 103, because I'm I'm just not done gnawing on that yet, because you know she's not vertical anymore. It's so prophetic.
Speaker 2:It's just maybe I'm the only one that feels this way no, I mean, I felt it when I was walking back there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you write this and, by the way, I've already told you this laurie but your study guide is fantastic for this book and it's free, like thank you, yeah, for making it. And it's free, like thank you for making it free. And it's simple and succinct and I am going to just be using it as meditation work. But the key quote from chapter one is Eke Adsem, eke, adsem, and it's used to say, in a sense, I recognize my place and what is to be done from it or with it. You have already quoted the Benedictine monks which I just got to go to a Benedictine monastery in Belgium, in Bruges, belgium. Just walking through the archway was just you could feel like what had taken place in that place, yeah, and I had already snapped a picture and then read a sign that said no pictures Because they want you to be present.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I stood in the middle of that place, right by a church, and I said I want to live because there's this row, like white, with a little door. I said I want to. That's my assisted living right there. Yeah, I want to live. I want, before I die, I go vertical, not vertical anymore, I want to live in that space and walk across and go to church there. Anyway, it's such a beautiful place if you can ever go to Bruges, belgium.
Speaker 1:Okay, they used to say or they say it this way the Benedictine monks I am rooted, yet I am clay, malleable and movable. What does that mean? I recognize my place. So Tree 103 recognized her place. She got a title from being in that place. And what is to be done from it or with it? Help me, how do I make that a part of my spiritual rhythm, my new way of being in the world? Because that's kind of where I feel like I am, and I hear a lot of women my age saying this. I hear even younger women. I knew I was going to come out of the pandemic. I would not come out the same, I cannot come out the same, but yet patterns are so deeply rooted and rich and rugged, but now it's like no, no, no, no Okay.
Speaker 2:I think there's like in the Christian faith, there is so much emphasis on being sort of solid and immovable and just believing yeah, unshakable, and believing the same things your whole life. Um, because, because we, because they're, because we, we pretend that they're sort of external beliefs like these are objective, external beliefs that have nothing to do with me or my feelings or any of those things, but here's the reality. Reality God did not create us to be a bunch of statues, robots, indifferent to our circumstances and indifferent to our world. We are subjective creatures, we are malleable creatures, we are moldable creatures, and even in the fact that God used bone and dust earth to create humanity, there's a message in that that says like hey, something is a little, there's earthiness here.
Speaker 2:Yes, there's energy, there's light. This is not stone, and even stone itself is not forever. Nothing created is forever, and so we don't make a lot of space for that. In the Christian faith, we want people to be, we want them to have resilience, but we want them to have resilience. That's in like our way of thinking and being. We don't have a lot of space for people who are shifting or changing or moving or or what what a lot of people are calling like deconstructing or renovating or whatever. We just constructing, whatever reconstructing. We don't want to make space for that.
Speaker 1:That's scary to so many of us.
Speaker 2:It's really scary but that is is what I mean. Human, even the word human, humus, earth, like that is who we are, and the sooner we can recognize that place. This is who I am, this is my place. I am fallible. I am going to be harmed because I am soft and made of skin. I am going to be harmed because I am soft and made of skin and I'm going to harm because I am the wholeness of my beliefs and I struggle to let go of those and those are going to harm people.
Speaker 2:I am those things and I recognize what can be done from this place and I recognize also what cannot be done from this place. I am not God, I am not all powerful, I am not omn, omnipotent, I am not omnipresent, like, I am not capable of controlling my life or the outcome of my life. It's the degree to which I thought I was correct, and so I recognize my place. I'm here, this is where I am, that and I I want to hold that recognition as I go from here to here, to here to here, instead of letting that recognition go the moment I have a moment of success or victory, um, and, and wanting to sort of go back to that place of success or victory and find that identity in it.
Speaker 1:It was your identity, it was your sense of self. I mean, you know, the Inside Out 2 movie is a must-see.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. My husband and I went Friday night. It opened Friday and I said I'm going to go see it. No, you're not going alone, and he's usually not into all the feeling thing, but this movie, I'm telling you.
Speaker 2:I can't wait.
Speaker 1:It is, you must see it, it's so good. Wendell Berry said today I'm here. Or did Wendell Berry say at peace and in place?
Speaker 2:Wendell Berry says in his poem to think of a life of a man at peace and in place.
Speaker 1:Will you please help us make that a part of our new spiritual rhythm as well. I'm asking a lot of you today, laurie, but be here now reminds me of that. It's like a Buddhist saying you know, be here now, but it is more than just being present. I think one of the things when you were talking before of what's misconstrued- misreceived whatever, that's not a word, but mindfulness you know, even meditation, which is a truly Christian practice. You know is yeah.
Speaker 2:I think something that's really helped me is this breath prayer. That is sort of inhale I'm here, exhale, and you are here with me. I'm here and you are here with me, and I can even change that if I want, and I can say it is. I can pray it as if it was God saying it to me. I am here and you are here with me. I am here and you are here with me.
Speaker 2:I am here and you are here with me, and that really, you know, I say that a couple of times and I breathe as I do it and close my eyes as I do it, and I am reminded that I can be at peace and in place because I am here, I am real and my story matters and the ecosystem in which I have lived and am now giving birth to, in my now horizontalness, is here, it will always be here. It will never not be here and God is here with me. Not be here and God is here with me, and that is. Those are two very, very powerful truths. I think that just start there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think even your heart. I love how you're doing that.
Speaker 1:You're just doing that, even subconsciously, like it's such a part of your grounding yourself which, looking down to me, for me has meant ground yourself. Janelle, it's time to ground, it's time to return. What is it time to return to? You know, there's been just a series of beautiful teachers showing up that are helping me find my way to look down. Thank you that you're one of them. You know, and so I think you know that's how I encouraged my own healing, but also others, is to just put your hand over your heart and in a sense it's like 3-1-0-3,.
Speaker 1:You know, she had her plan and purpose, uh, vertical, but now her plan and purpose is horizontal, and you know, just take that into a meditation and that's what I love about your work. You're not. You know I am begging you for step one to four. I know that I subconsciously am, you know. Can't you find and hear me like okay, so I'm trying to. How can we put that into our rhythm? But really I want you to step one, step two, but no, no, no, that's you're not, but that's that's what.
Speaker 1:That's what I think God is up to. Culture, like you said, is just give me a set of beliefs that I can post-it note on me and spiritually bypass any of my own work I need to do. Yes, am I?
Speaker 2:right wrong on the wrong path. No, I think that's true and I think something you know, we live, like I said, we live here on the river and I love that the water is just moving constantly. But I think, man, I think God is more interested in us sort of swimming in his love, than he is in us, like putting on a costume or, you know, plastering ourselves with post-it notes Like what does it mean to immerse myself in the love of God? And I can't tell. I cannot tell you how to do that. I can only tell you that it's real and it's good and it takes a little work to get there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it takes swimming lessons, for sure, swimming lessons. Yeah, Swimming on a river, for sure, is very different than swimming in the pool in my backyard.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I mean, I just mean like be buoyed up by the love of God instead of by our own sort of post-it notes of how to do better, be better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I don't think we. I mean, I started that journey. I have shared that with the Heartlifters in 1 John 4, a few years, two and a half years ago, right here on this floor, you know, and it says those who know God, those who love God, know God's love. And I was like I obviously don't Because I was just beating myself up so bad.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, you know. Just the shame, the guilt. That's what I see when I when I see tree one oh three that I've not seen, but when I visualize it, like you tell us to do in our study guide, your study guide visualize, visualize. I'm visualizing tree one oh three on, that's me, and I'm visualizing myself horizontal. All the uprootedness, though, is from the up, is shame and guilt and self condemnation and perfectionism and good church girl, and so I just invite, I just invite.
Speaker 2:Doesn't it feel good to be horizontal?
Speaker 1:It feels so good and I am going to just lay down I want to do that.
Speaker 1:It feels, so good and I am going to just lay down. I want to do that. I mean, part of what's going on is I'm so tired and fatigued and burned out and exhausted and that is not God's way for us to live. I know that in my head, but it's the longest journey down to the heart. I know it, I've written it. You know I got nothing. It's just like then go lay down, go lay out in the front yard. Yesterday.
Speaker 1:I walked through my luscious grass under the big tree With bare feet. Oh, with bare feet. It was so cool and I was like I don't really care what the neighbors think. I think I might put a bench here, yeah, even though it's in the front yard, you know. But I just think, does that make sense? That even? I guess? I just really want to clarify, like Tree 103 to me when I first read, it is almost even the church. Yeah, in God's mercy. Yeah, because he loves us so much he just can't let us keep going on like this. Yeah, oh, my goodness, it's His mercy, yeah, and I don't know where it's all going to go. I don't need to know because I recognize my place and what is to be done from it or with it, and so I can't close. I don't want to close, but I have to ask you chapter eight is here is emergence? Emergence is a lot of what they're calling this emerging church, right, this emergence from the covid pandemic, emergence. I love emergence, can you tell? I love this word.
Speaker 1:You write key quote a human is made of flesh and blood. I think you wrote this. I don't have any. You don't have any quotes.
Speaker 1:A human is made of flesh and blood, unpredictable tempers and personalities, heartbreaking stories, wild hopes and dreams. We hold in our hands in this community joy and sorrow, all the old, everything. You can't do life if you don't have both hands open with joy and sorrow. They are a part of an ecosystem. They didn't create and are also creating an ecosystem, simply by virtue of living and breathing. They exist, they are a part of an ecosystem. They didn't create and are also creating an ecosystem, simply by virtue of living and breathing. They exist, they are here. They are not unimportant. They matter. It's the mattering effect. I've been just obsessed with this research on the mattering effect, but their mattering clashes violently at times with our mattering and the things that matter to us. So, as we close, when you were writing that, what were you sensing in your own life and in the life of all of those who are reading your work? I love you so much. You are so amazing. Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I think that you know. There's this quote that I share in the book from this writer in the UK. She says we're social animals. We go with the herd that harms us the least. And I think I'm just like from this writer in the UK. She says we're social animals, we go with the herd that harms us the least. And I think I'm just like when I hear that. I'm like oh yes, that is, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like why would we want to put ourselves in harm's way?
Speaker 1:Really there's nothing wrong. Like you just flashed back to where I wanted to go when you were talking about how we stay in the stories that harm us.
Speaker 2:I'm paraphrasing yeah, I mean we don't, so we don't. Sometimes we don't know we can leave those stories.
Speaker 1:We don't think we can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't think we can, but I think when we become cognizant of it, we we do. We go with the herd that harms us the least. And I think what I was learning while I was writing this book was that I can be resilient and I can look for all the world like I am, being, you know, chopped out at my prime um, and yet there is a sense of like I. I am who I am and I am loved, and I don't need to run away from the people who are different than me. I don't need to only be with the herd that harms me the least. Sometimes I can. You know that chapter is all about weeds.
Speaker 2:It's all about sort of like the craziness, the wildness of the forest and sometimes I can just hang out with those people and that kind of you know, the people that I thought would harm me have actually surprisingly, you know, I've experienced sometimes the most harm from people within the church. The people who the church told me would harm me have actually been some of the kindest people in my life.
Speaker 1:Some of the Do I want to ask you so much more about that? Because I mean, I wrote a whole second book Overcoming Hurtful Words about being harmed in the church. So I have lots of spiritual abuse for sure in the church.
Speaker 2:So I have but like lots of spiritual abuse for sure, yeah, but like when we find when we find our like our resilience and our, our, our space. I am here and god, you are here with me and you love me as I am. I am loved, I am, I am beloved, I be loved, like yes, when we can rest in that place who cares?
Speaker 1:the world is beautiful. And yeah, I mean, oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:Yes, I have found the safest places in the midst of atheist they haven't corrupted me a single bit.
Speaker 1:If anything, they make me love jesus more and feel the love of god more, and and want to share his truth Like oh you, you know, because when you dig behind the stories and you're just, you know, it's my whole concept.
Speaker 2:I just feel so much love for them.
Speaker 1:So much love and it's the whole concept of this heart lifter thing Like my whole thing. You know it's like seemed so silly and trite and I'm a heart lifter, but no, it seems so silly and trite and I'm a heart lifter, but no, I am so resilient and I call it restillience. I love that.
Speaker 1:When I come from a space of true rest, which I'm trying to now live, a life and a way of being, of being at rest not just a Sabbath per se, but a lifestyle of rest. I can go into across the threshold of any room or space and you know my mantra is to have a healthy sense of self, healthy communication skills, healthy behavior patterns, and that all leads me to a magnificently healthy sense of flourishing. Like you talk about Andy Crouch and his definition of flourishing, yes, magnificently oneself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he says to flourish we have to be magnificently oneself, and I love that. That's so mean. I'll never get over that. It's the background on my phone still.
Speaker 1:Oh, I got to make it. Oh, my gosh, I love that. I just. That is it in a nutshell. You also quote uh, I don't know that, uh, who said this? You tell me the world. You're talking about weeds. The world is also full of people who would rather pay for something to kill dandelions.
Speaker 2:Wendell Berry.
Speaker 1:Wendell Berry again. I got to read that.
Speaker 2:I'm a dandelion man myself, he says.
Speaker 1:And my daughter has this beautiful subset called dandelion seeds.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's just, it's like, just so good. Somebody and my son is in, you know turf management, lawn care, all that, and so you know he has a very strong opinion about dandelions and I love it. The world is also full of people who would rather pay for something to kill dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. So you say I'm a dandelion woman and he's like I'm a dandelion man. So you know, of course we have to pick them up and they're in our gardens or whatever.
Speaker 1:It's not anything opposed to that, it's not binary. I guess that's what I hear you saying. It's not both. You know it's not either or None of this is. But what you're telling us is that as we nurture our true Jesus person inside right, when we fully embody I can use that language, that language, the beautiful authentic teachings and ways of this man, like that's how I just I remember standing in the circle and this woman just love her so much and she's I am an atheist and I'm like tell me more, yeah, tell me more yeah just tell me like well, my parents were okay.
Speaker 1:What are we so afraid of? I'm not afraid. I never have been yeah.
Speaker 1:I have always been someone more comfortable in that arena but was so shamed, yeah, like pageants and stuff which is, you know, I don't know how I ended up there dance pageants, I loved it and was fully alive, but then that's not where God would have you. You need to be a missionary. So you know, it's just those old stories, those old beliefs, you know. But now the tree is horizontal and I wonder what number tree I am. I know I'm trying to figure out a name and a number. I don't know tree I am. I know I'm trying to figure out a name and a number. I don't know. Tree 64. I'm just going to say tree 64 because that's when I feel felled, love it. You know what number is your tree. So, closing in closing, we don't have to choose the herd that harms us least. We definitely are not to choose the herd that harms us least. We definitely are not to choose the herd that harms us most.
Speaker 1:We are not to close our eyes to the abuse happening. Thank you, thank you, I, I I really thank you for being a voice in my life and giving us this time today. Laurie and I desperately want to come to that retreat you're having and I will put up. There's not many spaces left, guys. I can't because I'll be welcoming a grandchild. I will be tree 64, yep, being an eternal matrix woven through the soil of my family. I will be some mycelium when, at the time, you're having that.
Speaker 2:But thank you bottom of my heart, anything else?
Speaker 1:in your heart, you want to just close us with no I just.
Speaker 2:I bless your listeners. I bless them in the name of Jesus. I bless them wherever they are.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, oh, heart lifters. Wow, I tell you what, what a gift Lori Ferguson Wilbert is to this community. I leave you with the words that she gave us from Andre Crouch True flourishing travels down an unexpected path, being both strong and weak. True flourishing is being magnificently yourself. What heart lifter, does that mean for you to be magnificently yourself? Meet me on Instagram at JanelleRareden or on HeartLift Central sub stack at HeartLift Central. Be your magnificent self. Heart Lifter.
