In our next podcast series, I’ll be joined by my clinical supervisor, Carley Marcouillier, who is a licensed therapist, podcast host, and ministry leader. Together, we’re going to walk through 8 core relational skills that are essential for cultivating emotionally healthy relationships. 

Over the course of eight episodes, we’re going to explore each skill, why it matters, and how to begin practicing it in everyday life. These are skills that we believe can transform the way you relate to those around you. I hope you’ll join us next week, as we talk about what it looks like to grow into people of love, together.

To wrap up our current series, I wanted to offer something a little different today:

A guided time of prayer— called Imaginative Prayer—that can help us enter into a deeper experience of God. This form of contemplative prayer dates back the early church mothers and fathers. When we engage in this kind of prayer, we use our imaginations to place ourselves within a scene from Scripture, particularly in the life of Jesus. I hope you'll join me as we walk onto the scene of Matthew 6:30-42 and ask the Spirit to speak to us through this story.

Did you know that the neural pathways for relationship are developed in the first three years of a person’s life? This is the heart of what’s called attachment theory and affects our relationship with ourselves, others, and even our relationships with God.

I’m so honored to welcome today’s guest, Summer Joy Gross. Summer is a spiritual director, Anglican priest, and writer who weaves neuroscience, attachment theory, and spiritual practices to help us root ourselves in God’s presence and nearness.

In this conversation, Summer walks us through each of the 4 attachment styles, showing us how our earliest experiences of love shape the way that we’ve come to experience God. We talk about the attachment wounds of each style, and how the Spirit actively pursues our healing in these places. Summer also guides us through a beautiful attachment practice in real-time to help to reconnect to God in a more secure way. 

Have you ever struggled to name the pain you’re experiencing inside?

When we don’t have language for the pain we carry, we can create other names for it — names like “not good enough,” “unworthy,” “broken,” or “wrong.” Many of us often avoid naming and validating our pain out of fear of being overwhelmed or feeling stuck in it. But what if the opposite is actually true? What if this is actually the first step towards healing?

This is what author and therapist Monica DiCristina and I talk about today. Monica beautifully shows us that, while not every wound may fully heal, each one can be understood. And that understanding starts by naming and honoring our pain. This is such a powerful conversation on ways that trauma can impact our view of God, how to tell the difference between shame & conviction, and what it looks like to sit well with others…and ourselves…in pain. 

So many of us long for transformation, but we feel discouraged and defeated by the issues that keep coming up... over and over again.

 We pray, read our Bibles, go to church, worship, and yet still feel stuck. Why is this? Often the tools we're given within the church leave us wondering if we're missing something or if something is wrong with us. Is it us? Is it them? Is it God? Why is lasting change so elusive? 

This is what author, speaker, and founder of Healing Care Ministries Terry Wardle and I talk about today. Beautifully blending stories from his own life with modern discoveries in neuroscience, Terry gently dismantles the common saying, “the past is in the past.” Demonstrating how past experiences impact the wiring of our brains in profound ways, Terry shows us why we need healing experiences with God’s presence in our unresolved emotional wounds. 

As we practice receiving and remaining in God’s love, the question becomes this: how are we responding and loving Him back? And not necessarily in the big moments, but in the small and ordinary moments of every day life. 

We all move in patterns that we have set up over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately, who and what we worship. So what habits and practices can we take up that are aiming our love and desires towards God? 

In this episode, I share 7 spiritual practices I’m engaging in right now that are increasing my capacity to receive, remain, and respond to God’s love.  My hope is that they spark prayerful creativity and imagination in you around God’s invitations into deeper intimacy within the rhythms of your everyday life.

What if you could walk into every room knowing—deep in your bones—that you are safe, seen, soothed, and secure? Not because of the what’s happening around you, but because the face of Jesus is always turned toward you? Always attentive. Always connected.

This is what writer, artist, and soul care provider Stephanie Stewart and I talk about today. Stephanie invites us into her own journey of discovering a relationship with God that heals and grounds us. A kind of interactive relationship that is conversational, requiring reciprocity – and just like any other relationship – a turning towards one another. Stephanie also teaches us daily practices to strengthen our awareness and attunement to God’s constant connection and care.

We all have these complicated tangles of belief, identity, and narrative, and one of the early stories many of us often begin telling ourselves is a one of our own scarcity. 

“Maybe I don’t matter.” 
"Maybe I’m not good enough.” 
“Maybe I’m not worthy of love, belonging, and joy.” 

When we bring these stories of scarcity with us into our relationships with God, we may ache for nourishment and grace, but we find ourselves living out of a place of exhaustion and starvation. We come to God’s table with a deep sense of unworthiness, scraps feeling like all we can hope for. Anything more seems selfish or presumptuous. When scarcity has become familiar, goodness and abundance can start to feel suspicious. 

This is what Chesed Dent and I talk about today. Chesed beautifully brings her experiences of growing up as a missionary kid – as well as her current work in higher education – into this conversation, inviting us into her own journey towards deeper rest and trust in God’s care. 

Even though you’ve heard God described as full of compassion and always present, do you sometimes feel confused as to why you experience him as distant, disapproving, or absent?

Our experiences, from childhood to adulthood, shape the internal pictures we hold about God—sometimes in ways we don’t even realize. In this episode, I share stories of 4 different women, and how they each came to experience God differently based on their life experiences. 

These stories are taken and adapted from a chapter in Sensible Shoes, a bestselling novel written by last week’s guest Sharon Garlough Brown. The first time I read these stories, I couldn’t put them down. I found myself in these women, in their stories, and how they came to perceive God… and I think you will as well.

So many of us long to rest in God’s love, but we feel at war with actually receiving it. Why do we resist the very thing that we claim we want?

This is what author and spiritual director Sharon Garlough Brown and I talk about today. Sharon graciously invites into her own story of exhaustion and striving to meet her perceptions of God’s expectations for faithfulness, to learning what it looks like to live out of the abundance and generosity of His heart. She shares such beautiful moments along her journey where God has invited her into prayer, presence, and an enlarging capacity to receive his love. I hope you’ll listen in.