S2:E22: What you make of it
Thursday, February 25, 2021
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Before we start this episode, we want to tell you that our story this week mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, there is always help. Call the free, confidential National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255. This episode also briefly mentions sexual violence.
This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Justin: It starts as a high school kid. I'm in a speech class with Mr. Ross. I'm talking to the kid behind me and he says, “Mr. McRoberts,” and I walk towards the front of the classroom. And he goes to this prop closet, opens it up, and he has this large inflated cactus, and he sets it down next to me. And then he walks out and sits down in my desk. He says, “okay, Mr. McRoberts, you clearly like to entertain. The floor's yours for five minutes.” And I was frozen. I don't know how long I was standing there with nothing to say. The kid goes, “Oh gosh, come on. Just pretend like you're in the desert. It's just a cactus.” And Mr. Ross says, right to me, he says, “no, it's not. It's whatever you make it.”
And that little seed got in my head. I transitioned to theater. Performance became something more than communication. Seth Godin says that art is anything you create that facilitates connection between people. It was never about theater in and of itself. It was about connection. It was about how do I use the gifts, the talents, the strengths and whatever I have in me to form connections with people?
Laura: “It is what you make of it.” That phrase could be used to describe so much of life in the pandemic. Come to think of it, it could be used to describe so much of life. We don’t get to choose our genetic makeup, or our families, or even our temperaments. As much as we would like to believe that we are self-made, the truth is that our ability to change our circumstances has a lot more to do with what we’ve been given than who we are. But we can still decide how to respond. My guest today is someone who has thought a lot about this.
Justin: My name is Justin McRoberts. I live in Martinez, California, the birthplace of--apparently--the martini. I’ve got two kids: a ten-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl.
Laura: Since that day in Mr. Ross’s class, Justin has been anything but frozen. Over the past twenty years or so, Justin has been an artist, a church planter, a pastor, a podcaster, a teacher, a coach, an advocate, a singer-songwriter with eighteen albums, and the author of five books.
Justin: In all of it, I'm really kind of up to the same thing, which is I'm trying to pay attention to what's happening in the lives of the people around me and the culture around me, and then feed that back. And that's always been what I've done. I'm just trying to pay attention as best I can, see what I can see, and then feed that back in ways that I hope can be helpful to the folks I'm talking to.
Laura: Justin has been a consistent and noteworthy contributor to the independent music scene since 1999. His Wikipedia entry reads “he is one of those rare artists who blends artistry, honesty, and humor seamlessly.” He describes his own work as “passing on lessons and practices learned about making something good from what you’ve been given rather than simply accepting things as they are.”
Before he began making albums and writing books, Justin was on staff with Young Life, a faith-based youth organization. On Young Life’s website, it says this: “We invite kids to follow Christ, care for them regardless of their response, and change lives in the process.” I wasn’t a Young Life kid myself, but every Young Life Leader I’ve known has echoed that statement. They understand that kids need adults who care about them--regardless of what they believe. It was through Young Life that Justin came to faith himself, and it’s an organization he still supports and believes in today.
While he was on staff with Young Life, Justin began writing songs that would eventually land him a record deal with 5 Minute Walk Records. Most of the music you’ll hear in today’s episode is Justin’s. The year he was signed was a tough one for Justin; in May of 1998 his father committed suicide. Even as he was touring with bands like Five Iron Frenzy, the W’s, Caedmon’s Call, and Jennifer Knapp, Justin was grieving. His second album two years later was a lament of that loss.
On his website, Justin writes, “the arts help us to see ourselves and our world as part of a cohesive, Divinely-orchestrated story.” For Justin, that day in Mr. Ross’s class was the beginning of a journey that would weave faith and art together for life.
Justin: Gene Luen Yang--he's a graphic novelist and a writer, a national book award winner--when he was in college, he went to his writing professor who was a Buddhist, and they'd been in conversation about him writing about his faith. And he took an offense to it because it was like, “Whoa, you're this Buddhist. You're telling me as a Christian, not to write about my faith.” She goes, “no, you don’t understand, you need to write about your life. And if your faith is real, it will show up.”
I think what art as a practice has done for me--if I'm a hundred percent honest that my evangelical training did not do for me--is it actually weaves those things together. In other words, I don't really get a choice as to whether or not my faith shows up in my art. I can choose to hide it. But if it's actually true of me--if I really do have a fundamental relationship with the divine architect and Redeemer of all things--if that's actually true and I am my most authentic self, then that's what it is. I'm not offering albums, I'm not offering books, I'm not offering quotes, I'm not offering posts, I'm not offering poetry--I'm offering me . . . in music, and in stories, and in poems, and in sermons, and in podcasts. And if what is most fundamentally true of me is that I am beloved of the divine, then that's what it means to offer me. And art wove that together for me philosophically in a way that my evangelical training just didn't. This is what great art does: it exposes in us the things that are already true.
Laura: My own journey in both art and life has echoed this statement. For a long time I tried to keep my faith out of my art because I thought they didn’t belong together. But at some point I realized that my faith and art were representations of the same longing: I wanted to know that my life had meaning and purpose. I wanted to know that in some important way, I mattered.
Justin: I want to be loved. It's like the thing I'm chasing all the time. It's never not. And every expression or corner of my life, the core desire in me is not just to be received. I want to be cherished. That's true because we're designed to have a relationship with God, the earth, and one another. I do know this. When I've been able to articulate that longing to be beloved, I'm more able to use what I've got in order to serve. How do I put this in a position that this is actually useful to other people? It's not actually satisfying for me to just express and hope people like it. I want to love well. And knowing that that's my journey has actually given me a plan to learn how to offer myself to my world better.
Laura: Though we met on Zoom just a few months ago, Justin is one of those people I’ve been aware of for years. His name would pop up in conversations about music. I’d see one of his books on a friend’s coffee table. But mostly, I knew about Justin because of a place called Shelter.
Justin: Shelter was/is a community of people--we called ourselves a church--in Concord, California, that I helped plant with a dear friend of mine, that he and I co-pastored for just shy of two decades. Beautiful community. I don't know that I would call ourselves necessarily cutting edge, but at least around here, we're kind of tip of the spear. A little bit more experimental. We were deeply connected as a group of people, which was a beautiful thing.
We weren't generationally diverse. If you know folks who function in addiction culture, what they'll tell you is that your sponsor can help get you sober, but it's the people you sponsor that actually keeps you sober. And so the sense of passing on responsibly and healthily who we were becoming--we lacked that as well. Had we had elders and inter-generational disciples, it would've made a pretty significant difference, but we didn't.
Laura: Shelter sounded a lot like what we’re trying to create here at Shelter in Place: a place where all kinds of people could explore important ideas and dream about how to do things better. But Justin says that all of that began to fall apart when the church began having disagreements about one very specific issue.
Justin: The thing that happened to us is the thing that's happened to a lot of churches in evangelical America, which is that the questions around LGBTQIA membership, belonging, leadership, et cetera.--they're really, really good questions, and I would suggest it's a really beautiful work that God is doing, has done, (and) will continue to do among us as a whole family, is to say, “hey, these are your sisters and brothers. Y'all need to work this stuff out and I will help you, but you need to want it.”
I'm coaching pastors now in different parts of the country who want to be in that conversation. And the thing I keep saying is like, “hey, that's good. It's a beautiful conversation to be in. I think it's necessary. And. Sister, brother, everything that's not okay is going to come to the surface. It exposes frailties and fault lines in communication, in trust, in leadership. We are the thing that breaks in the tension that comes with that conversation. And that's what happened with us. It exposed fault lines between myself and Sean, who was the senior pastor at the time. It exposed fault lines between myself and dear friends. It exposed fault lines in communication. It wasn't like, “oh my gosh, gay culture is taking churches out.” That's not what's happening. What's happening is that we don't know how to answer these questions healthfully and well and we are imploding under the weight of our inability to do it.
Laura: This is not the first time that churches have split over a difference in doctrine. All you have to do is look at the myriad of denominations in the church to see that historically when people have disagreed over important issues, they’ve left and started their own thing. It’s almost always easier to find people who agree with us than to work through differences that feel irreconcilable. And of course there are situations where leaving is the only appropriate response. No one should stay in a toxic or abusive environment.
But in the case of shelter, the thing that departed was what made it such a great place: that sense of community and belonging.
Justin: I lost my father to suicide in my early to mid-twenties, and it was terrible. I experienced nothing remotely like the depth of depression that I did after I'd lost my church, because I had invested all this time and then these people just freakin’ bounced when they felt like it was time. And I felt used and I felt discarded and it was horrible. And it's not them to be honest. And it's not the institution. Those are choices I made because I set myself up for it. That sucked real bad.
For the better part of 18 years, I was regularly placing myself in positions in which I thought it was my role and responsibility to give absolutely everything I could to anyone who was around. And I didn't like drawing lines and I didn't like setting my own boundaries. I wanted to be the person who everyone's got my cell number. It's 2:45 AM. Hit me up, I'll be there for you. That sounds great in my head, but in the depths of my soul, it was awful and I was tortured.
I would love to go back in time and stop me and say, “You know why this hurts? This hurts because you care more about it than they do, and that's fine, but you're giving your best to someone who's not ready for your best. So pump the brakes a little bit and back off and save that energy for folks who are asking for your best.” I wish I could do that. I'm so ready to hand myself over and serve as best I can and entertain and I’ll give you my hours, and it's not good for them cause they need to learn better boundaries. And it's not good for me because I need to be investing more and folks who are asking for it.
Laura: What happened at Shelter isn’t unique to the church or even the LGBTQ+ community. It happens in corporations and sports teams and neighborhoods and families and countries. We live in community with others--by choice, or circumstance, or both--and maybe for a while it’s great. We have a lot in common. Maybe we even love each other. And then something happens and there’s conflict. Sometimes we’re able to work through it. In the best situations, that resolution makes us closer and more connected.
But sometimes it’s not so simple. Sometimes that conflict feels impossible. Sometimes it exposes wounds that were there all along, but that we either weren’t aware of or had been able to ignore. Sometimes we’d rather not talk about it. It casts a shadow on the past, and makes us question even the good parts of that community.
Whether we’re talking about a church or a friendship or a country or something else, we can choose to leave that community and start over somewhere else--or we can stay and try to live with those differences. Either way it’s going to be difficult.
We’ve been calling season 2 Pandemic Odyssey because while we’ve been creating these episodes, my family and I have been on a journey that has taken us from our pre-pandemic life in Oakland, California to a life where very little is known. Since September we’ve temporarily relocated to Massachusetts to get help from extended family, and we still don’t know how this story will end. At different points along the way we’ve tried to make a decision about our future. Will we double down at stay in Oakland long-term even though the cost of living and wildfire season make life sometimes feel unsustainable, or will we cut our losses and start over somewhere else? We’re coming up on a year of the pandemic and we still don’t have answers. The best we can do for now is to accept that we’re still on the journey even when we’re a long way from home.
When Homer’s Odyssey begins, Odysseus has already been away from home for ten years--but as he leaves Troy for Ithaca, he seems strong; he’s got a crew of 600 and 12 ships for the journey. But as it turns out, his journey is far from simple.
In their book We Followed Odysseus, lifelong sailors Hal and Margaret Roth chart and travel the course of the Odyssey and bring to life details from the journey. Odysseus’s twelve ships had to be pitched with tar almost daily so they wouldn’t sink, and they were so flimsy that every single one of them was eventually destroyed. Of the 600 men who began that journey, Odysseus alone survived the trip. When he finally arrives in Ithaca after twenty years of being away, it’s to a house divided by prewar politics and a wife who has to be persuaded to take him back.
The journey of the church and the LGBTQ+ community has been a little like that Odyssey. It begins with what seems like a strong, simple narrative: from dust, God creates Adam in his own image and then from Adam’s rib he makes Eve. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” That verse is usually where people start when they talk about LGBTQ+ inclusion in church membership, leadership, and marriage. When God made humanity, he made man and woman, two beings who fit together perfectly and reflected the divine.
But Eden doesn't last for long. Humanity decides that they’d rather serve themselves than God. God never gives up on them, but from Adam and Eve to Jesus to Justin to me, the story of Christianity is one of searching to fill that longing to be loved and cherished.
Rarely is the journey simple. More often than not there are storms and shipwrecks. Often our own hubris is our greatest enemy.
Many books have been written on the topic of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church, and so I’m not going to attempt to give an in depth history or interpretation of the small handful of verses that have splintered so many faith communities. I'll include links to a few resources that provide a more nuanced understanding of Biblical history that I’ve found helpful over the years.
What I can share is a bit of my own journey, which, like the Odyssey, has been far from simple or direct. Many years ago, a friend of mine lost her father to a car accident. It was the first time that someone close to me lost a parent, and I still remember how awkward I felt when my husband Nate and I brought my friend dinner and sat with her in her dark little apartment. I can’t remember the content of our conversations, but I do remember that I asked her if it would be okay if we prayed for her, and she said yes.
She came to church with us a few times, and when she moved across the country a few months later, she found a church there, too. Through emails from across the country, she told me about how she sat in the back, but liked the pastor, whose Sunday messages felt more like college lectures than sermons. Like so many in the LGBTQ+ community, my friend had been hurt by the church before. But she talked about God differently now, not as a believer, but as someone who had found in herself a longing unfulfilled, and was reevaluating her assumptions.
A few months later, she emailed me to ask me if I believed that she was going to hell. She’d reached out to the pastor and had come away with more questions than she started with. She was told she was welcome there, but that she couldn’t become a member or be in a position of leadership. From what I could gather the pastor was gentle about it, but his basic message was this: God loves you, but not your sexuality. That first relationship God created in the Garden of Eden--the one made in his divine image--was a heterosexual one.
If you want to know how God feels about greed or generosity or forgiveness or caring for immigrants, you can open the Bible and find dozens of verses--in some cases hundreds--to get a clear sense of the heart of God. But only a few verses make reference to same-sex relationships. Often they refer to a very specific situation, like the gang rape that predates Lot’s departure from Sodom and Gommorah.
Justin: It's just really confusing for folks. that there's so much flexibility and openness to conversation about all kinds of other stuff, but somehow here, if we're not on the same page in relationship to the whole thing, that's really confusing for folks.
Laura: It was confusing for me, too. I wanted to give my friend good, solid answers, but the truth was that I didn’t know what to say. At that time the only churches I knew of that were open and affirming--that is, churches that embraced the LGBTQ+ lifestyle and welcomed that community into church membership, leadership, and marriage--seemed to define their values by the surrounding culture and not by something more enduring. My friend had felt this, too. She’d tried going to a few places with rainbow flags hanging from the church entrance, but when she sat in those services, she found the content lacking. She’d liked the intellectual sermon’s exploring faith in the context of history and the Bible.
I want to stop here and be perfectly clear here that homophobia should never be condoned. If we are ever going to have a productive conversation about this long, complicated conflict that is so riddled with misunderstanding and pain, then those of us who align ourselves with the church need to start with confession for the myriad of ways we’ve gotten it wrong, for the times when we’ve played judge instead of loving our neighbors. We need to begin not with interpreting a few opaque verses in scripture, but with the overarching truth of the faith that God is love, and that all are welcome in His house.
But in my experience, churches that hold the Bible as inspired scripture tend to be slow to change. Oftentimes they are part of larger denominations that are even slower to change--and that’s not all bad. It’s easy to assume that the way we see the world now is the best way, but history tells a different story. Faith traditions--and Christianity in particular--have often been counter-cultural. We can now look back in history and see that sometimes the church was right while the culture was wrong, and other times it was the opposite. I’m certain that a hundred years from now, future generations will look back and criticize not just our churches, but our culture for some glaring blind spot that we couldn’t see but that has become obvious to them.
I did the best that I could to lovingly explain to my friend what I perceived to be the sticking point in conversations about LGBTQ+ inclusion: that while I knew unquestionably that God loved my friend just as much as he loved me, the lesson generally taken from that first story in Genesis was that God’s design for marriage--a metaphor that Jesus would later use to describe his relationship with the church--was between a man and a woman. I told her that it frustrated me that the Bible was so unclear on the topic of same-sex relationships. It was the first thing I’d like to ask God about someday in heaven: couldn’t we just agree that God loves everybody and get on with it?
My friend thanked me and told me she’d need to think about what I’d said on her own for a while. Twelve years passed and we remained closely in each other’s lives, but we didn’t talk about faith again. And then a couple of years ago she sent me a note to let me know that an essay she’d written had been accepted and she wanted me to see it before it was published.
“There are a few places that might give you pause or you might want to talk about. ,” she said to me a couple of weeks before the essay came out. “If so, I want to leave the door open to that conversation.”
Her essay was a beautiful, devastating account not just of grieving her father, but losing a faith she never fully found. When she’d gone silent on me, it wasn’t just because she was thinking about what I’d said. She was entertaining death, wondering if her life was worth living if the best she could do was to be something less than God’s ideal design.
I called my friend and said what I should have said from the very beginning: I told her I was sorry, and asked her to forgive me. Twelve years before she’d come to me looking for answers. I’d offered theology and doctrine when what she needed was love and whole-hearted acceptance.
I’d learned a lot more about the topic in that intervening decade, partly because as an elder of my church our pastors had us read three different books with three very different stances. We’d spent a full day discussing those books, trying to understand why there was conflict within the church and why it was so hard to talk about it well. Some of us had family members who were gay; all of us had people in our lives who were dear to us and who were part of the LGBTQ+ community.
I told my friend that the church was changing--slowly--and that since our first conversation all kinds of good, thoughtful people had formed inclusive faith communities without watering down the Bible. I thought there was a good chance that our kids would look back on this time and wonder what all the fuss was about, that this issue that has churches splitting and people leaving the faith might be a non-issue for future generations.
The conversation didn’t make my friend want to return to church, but it was a healing one for us both. She had anticipated awkwardness and maybe even defensiveness. She hadn’t expected me to apologize.
I think if we are going to venture into talking honestly about the church and the LGBTQ+ community, owning the hurt we’ve caused is the only place to start. We can dispute the finer points of theology and spout theories about why in the world this topic isn’t clearer in scripture, but what isn’t disputed is this: even though the Bible is crystal clear that each and every one of us is beloved and cherished by God, for centuries, the LGBTQ+ community has not felt welcome inside our churches.
Justin: If you're any sort of traditional Christian in or part of any sort of traditional Christian space, you believe the God who created all things became an infant, lived a life, was crucified, was dead for like two, three days--depending on how you measure the thing--was raised from the freaking dead, and then ascends into heaven. The number of things you have to believe to get on the same page and be in the same room with these folks--that somehow that's not enough to disagree about five or six verses interpretively. I would suggest that once you're on the other side of saying life, death, resurrection of Jesus--if you're on the other side of that, then there's nothing on earth worth sacrificing those relationships for. Absolutely nothing. (Not) your institutional integrity. The freaking carpet color in the room.
There is nothing worth sacrificing those relationships for. And it blows my mind that this is a disagreement that exposes in us that there really are things that I will put you on the cross for, ‘cause I don't want to deal with it. It blows my mind, guys. We're literally on the other side of this great big divide about what life and death actually means. What are we trying to gain by kicking these folks out or pushing these folks out? And it's not just conservative folks who are telling gay kids that they can't come. It's also at this point the progressive folks who are saying, “if you're not on the same page yet, then we don't have time and space for you to progress.” You know, “progressive” Christians who don't have time for conservative Christians to progress. What's going on in this conversation? Are you in love with Christ or are you not? That just seems kind of simple to me.
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Laura: Last week began the season of Lent, the forty days leading up to Easter. It’s a time of remembering. You could even say that it’s a time of remembering other Odysseys, like the forty days that Jesus was fasting in the desert, and the forty years that the Ancient Israelites wandered through the wilderness before reaching the promised land. Those Odysseys were difficult ones. Some of those travelers never got to see how the story would end.
Before she died in 2019, author and blogger Rachel Held Evans founded an online congregation for individuals who had felt excluded by the church. The last blog post that Rachel wrote before she died was a piece called “Lent for the Lamenting.” It’s a piece I wish I could have read 10 years ago, when my friend asked for acceptance, and I gave her theology.
Rachel wrote: “As the season of Lent commences, I am aware this year of all who find themselves in a season of frustration, grief, and lament over the church or their place in it . . . . Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t reach out to me, in person or online, to tell me they feel betrayed by their family of faith—by what has been done, and by what has been left undone.”
That phrase that Rachel used, “what has been done and what has been left undone” comes from the prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s a prayer we say every Sunday at my church, and I have always loved it because I think it gets at the more subtle ways that we harm each other and God--not just by doing things, but by leaving the good we could be doing left undone.
If you are listening to this and you have been hurt by the church, I want to say that I’m sorry. All too often in the church, we’ve left undone the first and most basic command: love God and love our neighbors. We’ve gotten lost in the weeds of doctrinal differences instead of remembering that the origin of our faith is the story of a God who never stops loving us--not because of who we are, but because of who He is.
In her book, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Rachel Held Evans casts a vision for a church that embraces the paradoxes of faith and life. She writes, “We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.”
She goes on to say, “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.”
Whether through books or music or podcasts or leadership, Justin’s work shares this vision. And he says that lately--especially during this pandemic--he’s embraced a simpler approach, one that has reminded him that the best thing he can do both in art and life is to reflect the love he’s experienced.
Justin: Everything has needed to be, for me, really small. There's enough for me right now to look around and say, “this is about as far as I need my hope to extend.” My personal hope is that I will continue to slow my life down enough to see and enjoy Christ in me. And in light of that vision, love and care for and serve well and wisely.
What is it that I can be responsible for? What can I hope for? That just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And it's more like, who do I actually have access to?
Laura: One of the people Justin has access to right now is his son. Justin and his son have a lot in common, and one of the ways Justin is trying to love well is to guide his son through the struggles he faced himself.
Justin: He was recently diagnosed (with) ADHD, like I'm ADHD. He experiences a lot of the same things I did, like the depth of feeling. My highs are very, very, very high and my lows are desperately low. I talked to my son about it, because I want him to know that's part of who you are. It's a gift. ADHD can be a superpower. Deep, deep, deep feelings can be a superpower--but they can also super overpower you if you don't have wisdom in it.
He was in a low, so I took him on a walk. I talked to my son about it, because I want him to know “those deep, deep feelings? Like, you're going to have them and they're really dark. And I want you to talk to me about them. And you're never going to feel like you can control them. I've been at it for a long time and I don't feel like I can control them most of the time. So come talk to me about him.”
And then I had to say, “your grandfather? He wasn't aware of this. He didn't have a dad saying, ‘Hey, your lows are going to be really low. So come talk to me when they are.’ He just had to figure that crap out on his own. And then he didn't.”
I lost my father to materialism and overwork and depression and suicide. So what do I do with that then? What I can do with that is I can say, “Hey, I get it. Let's talk about that.” That's how it's mostly shaped my life, is it grants me access into some really dark little crevices in relationships. I'm thankful that I have people that I can talk to. If you don't have a friend who knows you that deeply then you've got to have a therapist. You know, we do the thing “unprecedented times” and we're cracking it like a joke.
But none of us has faced the personal pressures, the emotional pressures that we're facing now. Nobody. You've got to process your own stuff, and it's gonna feel like uncharted territory. And it's going to feel like you're out in the middle of the ocean. Well, guess what? It's ‘cause it's uncharted territory and you're out in the middle of the ocean. So get someone to be up there with you.
Laura: No matter where we are or what we believe, we are living through a time of great division and uncertainty. It’s uncharted territory, and it can feel like we’re out in the ocean all alone, like we’re never going to make it back home. In one way or another, we’re all on an Odyssey right now. We don’t know how long the journey will last, and sometimes it feels like we’re trying to make that journey in a leaky boat. There’s so much that we can’t control. But we can ask someone to be out there with us. We can figure out how to respond with love. We can take what we’re given, and decide to make something of it. Justin has a new book about this coming out in June.
Justin: So the book is called It Is What You Make of It. The story I told earlier about Mr. Ross, my speech teacher, and the cactus, is the centerpiece of that book. It's a series of stories and reflections about what's it look like to not move from inspiration, but move from relationship.
What do you do with what you've been given is the core of the book. It is my favorite thing that I've done creatively in probably 15 years.
I’ve been ending each episode of season 2 with an invitation, and so today I want to invite you to look at what you’ve been given and make something good of it. Sit down with with a friend or family member who has a point of view you don’t totally understand. Resist the urge to convince them and instead listen from a place of curiosity, not criticism. Imagine what it might be like to journey with them on this Odyssey, to love each other well even through the storms and sunken ships.
Here at Shelter in Place, we’re doing what we can to where we can to offer encouragement even as we work through the parts of life that are difficult, to transform our communities by first transforming ourselves. Maybe there is someone in your faith community or your neighborhood or your family who is feeling like an outsider. Think about how to invite them in, how to love them well even through seemingly irreconcilable differences.
As Justin says, “We will not be remembered for who our parents were or where we were born or what our socioeconomic circumstances were. We won’t be remembered for our natural talents and strengths or the opportunities we were given or the challenges we faced. In the end, each of us will be remembered for what we made with what we were given.”
Shelter in Place is listener-supported. If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, asking your friends and loved ones to subscribe to Shelter in Place helps Hurrdat find us sponsors and expands our community. Check out our new referral program where we send you gifts when you get your friends to subscribe. You can find that at refer.fm/shelter.
Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks and Justin McRoberts. Eve Bishop was our associate editor for this episode, Melissa Lent was our assistant producer, and Gabi Mrozowski was our assistant audio editor.
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions.
Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing Season Two apprentices are Eve Bishop, Alana Herlands, Melissa Lent, Gabi Mrozowski, Isobel Obrecht, Winnie Shi, and Sarai Waters. Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Outtake:
Laura: I didn't know until this conversation that you were in Enneagram four, but I am also an Enneagram four, which is maybe not surprising.
Justin: I do have this need to be special. I want to be up in front of folks. I want to make noise and make it fun. And look at me, look at me, look at me.
Laura: Was there any shame or were you just like, “yes, I'm special.”
Justin: I was like, that sounds great. I like me! Entertainer? I'm a sea otter!
Laura: An artist!
Justin: Great, let's do it! Please tell me how I work so I can know myself and celebrate me like Whitman.
Laura: Put aside that narcissistic side of the four.
Justin: Yeah. Bury that thing. Let’s move on.