Hear Where You Belong

What if fear isn’t the enemy but a misunderstood guide? In this powerful episode of Hear Where You Belong, host Dia Irby sits down with Emmy Award-winning life coach, bestselling author, and founder of the Fearless Living Institute, Rhonda Britten, to uncover the truth about fear, belonging, and resilience.Rhonda’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary. At just 14 years old, she witnessed an unthinkable tragedy—her father murdered her mother before taking his own life, leaving her grappling with guilt, abandonment, and an overwhelming sense of not belonging. Her battle with self-worth led to years of pain, addiction, and three suicide attempts before she had a life-altering realization: fear was controlling her life. From that moment on, she committed to rewriting her story.In this episode, Rhonda shares: ✅ The Power of "Stretch, Risk, or Die" – A game-changing tool to help you break through procrastination and take action. ✅ How Fear Sabotages Your Life – The hidden ways fear keeps you stuck, even when you don’t realize it. ✅ Belonging Starts Within – Why true belonging isn’t about external validation but about accepting yourself first. ✅ The Journey to Fearless Living – How embracing your struggles can lead to transformation, purpose, and impact.Rhonda also opens up about the mystical experiences that shaped her path, the importance of community in healing, and why even in our darkest moments, there’s a way forward. Whether you’re struggling with self-doubt, fear, or the need to belong, this episode will challenge you to step outside your comfort zone and claim the life you deserve.#HearWhereYouBelong, #PodcastGuest, #FearlessLiving, #SelfGrowth, #PersonalTransformation, #OvercomingFear, #MindsetShift, #GrowthJourney, #PodcastInterview, #SelfImprovement

What’s the secret to 52 years of marriage?

In this special solo episode, Dea Irby — host, belonging strategist, and wife of 52+ years — shares the five principles that have held her marriage to Tom together through every season. She calls them the Five C’s, and the fifth one is the most important of all.

Whether you’re thinking about marriage, newly married, in a rough season, or celebrating decades together — this one is for you.

The Five C’s:

• Commitment — You’re not just promising each other. You’re making a covenant before God.
• Communication — He is not thinking what you’re thinking. Say the thing.
• Compassion — That annoying tick? It’s what makes them them.
• Comedy — The first 50 years are a challenge. Then you get to enjoy the next 10.
• Christ — When you stop arguing and start asking, the answer doesn’t belong to either of you. It belongs to Him.

Belonging isn’t just found in a church or a community. It’s found in a marriage — when two people choose each other, over and over, for a lifetime.

You belong. This is Dea Irby. Bye now!

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What if the people the church thinks need the most help are actually the ones the church needs most?

David Heflin spent 25 years as a pastor — and it took his own diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn’s disease to finally understand what the hurting people in his congregation were living through. Surrounded by a loving family and church, he still felt profoundly isolated. He went looking for a Christian-based chronic illness support community and couldn’t find one. So he built it.

Today, David is the founder and executive director of Broken and Mended, a ministry connecting people living with chronic illness and pain to Jesus and one another. What began as a Facebook group and a local support group in 2018 has grown into a global movement — with hundreds of groups across Kenya, South Sudan, Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, and beyond, materials translated into Swahili and Spanish, and a book released in May: Purpose and Pain: Rediscovering God’s Purpose Through the Pain of Chronic Illness.

In this conversation, Dea and David explore:

• How drifting from community at 17 taught him what belonging truly means

• The decade of pastoral ministry before chronic pain arrived — and how it changed everything

• His diagnosis with ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn’s disease, hip surgeries, and what daily pain really looks like

• Why he couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, and learned to fantasize about his couch

• How a support group request from Kenya sparked a movement across East Africa

• His favorite quote from C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces — and why God himself is the answer

David also hosts the podcast In the Seams and lives in Northwest Oklahoma with his wife Katie and their three children.

#HearWhereYouBelong #YouBelong #DavidHeflin #BrokenAndMended #ChronicIllness #ChronicPain #PurposeAndPain #InTheSeams #AnkylosingSpondylitis #ChristianCommunity #BelongingBegins #FaithAndSuffering

What if the season that felt like it disqualified you was actually the season God was using to prepare you?

Tammy Corwin spent 30 years in prison for a murder she says she did not commit. Abandoned by her birth mother at age 2, left in a deer shack with four siblings with the door nailed shut, adopted at 3, and then imprisoned at 22 — Tammy's life seemed marked by loss, rejection, and injustice. Yet inside those prison walls, she encountered Jesus, earned multiple degrees (including a Master of Divinity), ghostwrote for publishing houses, and began building what would become a flourishing career as a best-selling author, television producer, and publisher.

Today, Tammy is the founder and CEO of Words Matter Publishing and WMP Multimedia Network — a TV network she literally built so her authors could have free advertising. She is the voice behind the I Am Dragonfly movement and her powerful message: Rise to Thrive.

In this conversation, Dea and Tammy explore:

• How abandonment planted a lifelong search for belonging — and where Tammy finally found it

• The God encounter in a coma that changed everything

• How her father's challenge to "change your legacy" became the turning point

• Why the dragonfly — which spends its life hidden before it flies — is the perfect picture of God's hidden seasons

• The discipline of Dragonfly Mornings — starting every day with Jesus before picking up your phone

• How Tammy launched a publishing house just two months after leaving prison with $300 to her name

Tammy's favorite quote: "You have to rise to thrive."

Her books — Dragonfly: Where Faith Takes Flight, Dragonfly Declarations, and the new Dragonfly Mornings: Coffee with Jesus — are available everywhere books are sold.

#HearWhereYouBelong #YouBelong #TammyCorwin #RiseToThrive #IAmDragonfly #DragonflySeries #PrisonToPurpose #FaithOverLabels #WordsMatterPublishing #BelongingBegins #FromSurvivingToThriving #DragonflySeries #ChristianPodcast #FaithPodcast #BelongingCulture #GodWhispers #DragonflyCoffeeWithJesus

He preached open-air in Turkey as a teenager — wearing a letterman jacket that said "Jesus is Alive" on the back — and thought he might get arrested.

Then grad school happened. And for a season, he couldn't even sing a hymn with meaning.

In Episode 113 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby sits down with Jason Tatlock — professor of history, ordained minister, author, and co-founder of King on a Hill Ministries with his wife Krista. Their mission: shepherding the shepherds — building discipleship networks for pastors and leaders around the world in Uganda, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, Bangladesh, and beyond.

Jason opens up about the intellectual crisis of faith that hit him in grad school — and how his wife Krista stood by him even when she didn't sign up for it. The debilitating anxiety that left him unable to drive, work, teach, or go to the grocery store alone — and the two men who stepped into the mess with him and changed everything. The moment God told him He was stumping him — cutting him down so the tender root of Christ could grow up more fully. And what happened right after the hardest season ended: the ministry exploded globally.

He also shares miraculous stories from his recent trip to Pakistan and India — a woman freed from years of chronic pain in an instant, a man's eyes cleared during prayer, a cyst that disappeared overnight — and what Acts 4:33 means to him now in a way it never did before.

His devotional With: More Than a Word — a 31-day Word in the Word series — is available on Amazon and through Wipf and Stock publishers. A free study guide and free Zoom small group sessions are available at makespaceforgod.org.

Parting word: We've got to be with Him — so we can be poured out for other people. 💛

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He walked into church drunk, high, and on his way to his fifth suicide attempt. He raised his hand for Jesus because he was too obliterated to put it back down. And the moment he prayed — boom. Instantly sober for the first time in three years.

That was 1973. And David W. Ebel has never stopped since.

In Episode 112 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby sits down with David — Christian life coach, pastor, evangelist, author, chaplain, grief and trauma counselor, disaster responder, photographer, Salvation Army officer, church planter, and the first Christian master clown recognized by Ringling Brothers professionals in the history of the world.

Yes. You read that right.

David opens up about growing up with birth defects and chronic pain — bullied, depressed, alcoholic, suicidal — before Barbara the candle shop girl flirted him into church on a Tuesday night in Detroit. He shares the moment a youth pastor supernaturally knew his name, his birth defects, his hemorrhaging ulcer, and his plan to kill himself that Saturday — and said God did not want him to die. He talks about 12 years on the road with the Kids Celebration Circus — 49 youth camps, global ministry, 100 conversions on a New Jersey boardwalk including four rabbis and two Sikh leaders — before his birth defects finally forced him off the road. And the 28,000 square feet of debt-free space God built through a man who had never built anything more than Lincoln Logs.

His slogan is the one I want ringing in your ears:

God did not send His second cousin Louis to the cross. He sent His best. How dare we offer less?

And his parting word — straight from Romans 12:1-2 — is the one that has been his compass for fifty years of faithful, fearless, full-throttle ministry.

The greatest distance in the world? Twenty million miles — and seven inches. From the head to the heart.

Find David at GodSaysYesPodcast.com — and download his book When the Doctors Say No, God Says Yes FREE when you join his mailing list. 💛

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She started drinking at 14 to numb the hurt. Thirty years later — her dad went to get her.

In Episode 111 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby sits down with Robert Ruesch — author, writer, husband, and father whose family has walked through more than three decades of addiction, heartbreak, hope, and ultimately recovery. His award-winning book The Long Road Home: A Family's Journey Through Addiction is available on Amazon now.

Robert opens up about the prayer he prayed on a Monday night in tears — and the letter from his high school sweetheart that arrived on Friday after twenty-five years apart. The midnight phone call telling him Jennifer had stopped breathing — and the four doses of Narcan that brought her back. The code messages, the garbage bags, the two squad cars outside the house in San Antonio the morning they finally brought her home. Teaching his forty-eight-year-old daughter to drive. And the periodontist who restored her smile for a fraction of the expected cost.

She just wanted her smile back.

His favorite quote from Hemingway — anybody can write, all you have to do is open a vein and bleed — explains everything about how he finally wrote the book God told him to write.

And his parting word is the one that will carry every parent, every family member, and every person who has ever loved someone through addiction:

Never give up hope. Never. Prayer is the most powerful thing in the world.

There is always a long road home. 💛

📚 Find The Long Road Home on Amazon
🌐 Find Robert at his author page

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She was just another baseball mom. Until Kelsey Billingsley got curious and asked a question.

What followed was the story of a woman who survived a civil war, fled in the middle of the night after her father was killed, spent five years in a refugee camp digging through bread every morning looking for poison — and built a beautiful ordinary life that nobody around her knew anything about.

When Kelsey asked why her closest friends had never heard the story, the answer stopped her cold:

They've never asked me.

In Episode 110 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby sits down with Kelsey Billingsley — wife, mother of three, and host of the award-winning Unspoken Lives Podcast — a show built on one powerful conviction: every person you walk past today is carrying an extraordinary story. And most of them are just waiting for someone to care enough to ask.

Kelsey opens up about the waitress named Miracle — declared brain dead, family about to pull the plug, who woke up the moment they went to do it. The friend who lost her young son and said pain is a microphone. The Uber driver from South Africa who asked every single passenger the same first question: do you believe in God? And the spiritual war dream that woke her up in her college dorm and launched everything.

She also shares practical wisdom for anyone thinking about starting a podcast — from zero experience to award-winning, one Tuesday at a time.

Her favorite quote — carried since childhood, written on sticky notes and given to friends:

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, you rejoice and the world cries.

This episode is for everyone who has been walking past extraordinary people without ever asking. 💛

🎙️ Find Unspoken Lives Podcast at UnspokenLives.com and on all major platforms

What if the most powerful thing you could do today was slow down and sit with a few extraordinary words?

In this special solo episode of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby does something she has never done before — she pulls back the curtain on 17 of the most powerful, memorable, and soul-stirring quotes shared by guests across the seasons. Words she has been carrying around, writing down, and thinking about in the car, in the middle of the night, and while washing dishes.

Some of these will make you laugh. Some will make you sit very still. And some — she is just going to warn you — are going to hit somewhere deep.

From Benjamin Disraeli to Maya Angelou. From Miles Davis to Elisabeth Elliot. From Cheri Baugh Woods to Alison Gieschen. From cotton mill villages to the open sea. These are the words that stopped Dea cold — and she has been saving them just for you.

Quotes about belonging. Faith. Suffering. Purpose. Courage. Comparison. Calling. And the kind of wisdom that only comes from people who have actually lived it.

No guest today. Just Dea. And 17 quotes worth slowing down for. 💛

There are seven days in a week — and someday is not one of them.

Today is the day. Go listen. 💛

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Divorce. Widowhood. Leukemia — twice. Multiple brain surgeries. A bone marrow transplant. Any one of those would shake most people's faith to the ground.Cheri Baugh Woods has walked through all of them. And she is still standing.In Episode 108 of Hear Where You Belong Podcast, host Dea Irby sits down with Cheri — author, speaker, retired educator, and International Impact Book Awards Author of the Year finalist — whose memoir Win-Win: Miracles Still Happen has already traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Book Fair before it ever officially launched in the United States.Because it is not her book. It is God's book. And He took it exactly where He wanted it to go.In this episode, Cheri opens up about the marriage that fell apart six months in — when she discovered her military husband had quietly married another woman in a different state while still married to her, and was engaged to a third. She shares the leukemia diagnosis that came decades later — and the moment God spoke to her in the hospital and said: if I take you home, that is the ultimate win. But if I keep you here — you win again. Because I still have a purpose for you.She also shares the miracle of her brother — a retired Navy SEAL — being a 100% bone marrow match. The surgery that literally changed her blood type from O-positive to A. And why she now calls herself a Navy SEAL by proxy. 😄Her greatest accomplishment? Seeing God use every single chapter of her journey — the ugly ones, the hard ones, the ones she never planned — to give hope to others.Her parting word is the one I want ringing in your ears:Don't mistake the fire for the finish line. This is a chapter — not your whole story.And her free 3-day mindset reset is waiting for you at CheriBaughWoods.com.Choose hope. Your story is not over. 💛#HearWhereYouBelong, #YouBelong, #CheriBaughWoods, #WinWinMiraclesStillHappen, #DontMistakeTheFireForTheFinishLine, #YourStoryIsNotOver, #ChooseHope, #NavySEALByProxy, #MiraclesStillHappen, #LeukemiaSurvivor, #BoneMarrowTransplant, #NewCreationInChrist, #GodHoldsThePen, #FaithThroughHardship, #NewEpisode, #ChristianPodcast, #BelongingInChrist, #WinWinMindset, #KeepShowingUp, #Romans8