From the earliest days of dreaming about the podcast, Steph and I knew we wanted to have Dr. Jill (Steph’s psychologist) as a guest. The long-awaited day has arrived! Dr. Jill joins us for a conversation about the kinds of people we can all stop wasting our emotions on. This is a great conversation about narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy, and more. …
Ash Wednesday Reflection
More like this from Beth: Lent Isn’t About You The Compassion of Christ The Reality of Lent
Discovering Our Scars Podcast, Episode 112
Let’s face it, no one gets through life without some brokenness. We don’t choose our brokenness, but we can choose how we react to it. Do we see our brokenness as something ugly, or can we see the beauty in our healing and recovery? We aren’t saying we are broken but nonetheless beautiful, we are saying we are broken and …
Discovering Our Scars, Episode 111
Some words trigger an involuntary reaction or feeling in us. In this episode, Steph and I share personal experiences with words that bother us. For me, it’s hearing someone claim the Bible CLEARLY says something. For Steph, it’s being called GIRL. For both of us, it’s being told we SHOULD do or say something. Sometimes trigger words are a minor …
Discovering Our Scars, Episode 110
When Ryan was a little girl, she told people that when she was all grown up she wanted to be a chair. When she was sixteen, a car accident left her a paraplegic. She wouldn’t be a chair, but she would live life from a wheelchair. From the days immediately following the accident to trying out for the US Paralympic …
Discovering Our Scars Episode 105
Sandy was just a teenager who loved her church. It was a place she felt accepted and celebrated. When a new youth pastor was hired, he saw Sandy’s love for the church and used it against her. He started grooming her for a long-term abusive relationship before her sixteenth birthday. When the abuse was finally discovered, the church moved the …
Seeing God?
I once heard someone say that when she experienced an unexpected moment of goodness, she thought of it as a love note from God. When she experienced something especially sweet, or when something she expected to be hard turned out to be easy, she felt like she received a love note from God. I like that, don’t you? Maybe you …
Community? Squad? YOUR People!
Discovering Our Scars Podcast, Episode 104 The pandemic has caused some of us to live in a sort of hibernation. Instead of spending time with friends in real life we’ve either not spent time with friends or we’ve settled for Zoom, social media, or some other slightly disconnected form of connection. As Steph and I spend time with friends again, …
Building a Mental Health Toolkit
Discovering Our Scars Episode 103 When we aren’t feeling our best, it can be hard to know what coping mechanism to reach for. Having a plan in advance is like preparing for a hurricane. You can stock your mental health toolkit with a list of healthy coping mechanisms, to reduce the chance that you will default to an unhealthy one. …
The Disciples Rejected Children, And So Did I
One of the gifts of reading the New Testament, especially the Gospels, is that we get to see how often those closest to Jesus get it wrong. The disciples are his partners in ministry, but many times they don’t seem to understand what Jesus is really all about. I wish I didn’t find them quite so relatable in those moments. …