Have you ever worked harder at your faith than you have in any other season of your life, and still felt like you were failing?

The more you studied, the more you prayed, the more you tried to bring your mind into submission, and it still did not shift. Not because you lacked faith. But because what you actually needed was not a better spiritual discipline.

There is a name for what many of us were doing in those seasons. Scrupulosity. The obsessive, anxiety-driven need to achieve moral and spiritual perfection through compulsive religious practice. From the outside, it looks like devotion. From the inside, it is torment.

In this episode, we are going to talk honestly about what it costs women when the framework they were handed skips presence and goes straight to correction. We are going to look at the woman caught in adultery, at Romans 7 and 8, at what Jesus actually said about logs and specks, and at what we owe each other when someone in our life is suffering.

The framework you were handed may be the problem. Not your faith.

Scripture References

John 8:3-11 — The woman caught in adultery

Romans 7:15 — For I do not do what I want

Romans 8:1 — There is therefore now no condemnation

1 Peter 5:7 — Cast your anxieties on Him

Mark 9:24 — I believe, help my unbelief

Matthew 7:1-5 — The log and the speck

Psalm 103:14 — He knows our frame

Romans 2:4 — His kindness leads to repentance

2 Corinthians 12:9 — His power made perfect in weakness

Resources

Free ebook: What Are You Really Feeling? A guided reflection for women who are carrying more than they can name. betweengriefandglory.com/What-Are-You-Really-Feeling-Opt-in

The Story Behind the Pattern — $37 ebook. A structured process for tracing the thread from your past to your present patterns, brought before God. betweengriefandglory.com/offers/oCowbkW2/checkout

Connect with Paris

Website: betweengriefandglory.com Instagram: @betweengriefandglory Podcast: Lament & Light on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Coming June 16

A Summer of Sorrows begins on the Lament & Light podcast. Twelve episodes on lament, the suffering saints, and the beauty hidden in sorrow. Subscribe now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you do not miss a single episode.

Next Episode

A Summer of Sorrows, Episode 1. June 16.

🎨 Join Paris for Giving Shape to Sorrow — a guided grief art retreat, June 13 (online, 90 min)

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠

✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠

Nobody told you what to pick up when the old tools stopped working. They just kept handing you the same ones and wondering why you weren't getting better.

This final episode of Through the Wall is for the woman who is still in it — and needs to know how to stay without performing her way through.

Paris walks through six practices from the contemplative tradition that are not about productivity, measurable growth, or spiritual discipline as you have known it. They are shelter. They are the practices that keep you tethered to God when the usual tethers have gone slack.

Psalms of lament. Prayer of relinquishment. Silence and solitude. Receiving beauty. Lectio Divina. Receiving spiritual care.

None of them will fix the wall. All of them will keep you breathing until the light comes.

You are not behind. You are not failing. You are being formed in the only way that lasts.

For a long time, I could not read James 1:2 without feeling worse about myself. 'Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials.' If you have ever been handed that verse in the middle of something genuinely hard and felt like you were failing it, this episode is for you.

Today we are sitting with what James is actually saying — and what he is not saying. We are going to the garden with Jesus, who asked to be spared three times and still walked toward the cross. And we are going to talk about what it means to hold real anguish and settled trust at the same time. Not as a performance. As a formation.

You are right to ask God why. You are right to ask Him to take it away. And you can keep walking in faith at the same time. Holding that tension is not weakness. It is exactly what maturity looks like.

Scripture References

James 1:2-4 — Count it all joy

James 1:5 — Ask God for wisdom

James 1:17 — Every good and perfect gift

Matthew 26:39 — Jesus in Gethsemane

Matthew 27:46 — My God, My God

Hebrews 12:2 — For the joy set before Him

Psalm 22:1 — Why have You forsaken Me

Romans 2:4 — His kindness leads to repentance

Connect with Paris

Website: betweengriefandglory.com

Instagram: @betweengriefandglory

Podcast: Lament & Light on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Coming June 16

A Summer of Sorrows — 12 episodes on lament, the suffering saints, and the beauty hidden in sorrow. Subscribe now so you do not miss a single episode.

🎨 Join Paris for Giving Shape to Sorrow — a guided grief art retreat, June 13 (online, 90 min)

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠

✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠

One of the cruelest things about the wall is what it whispers: everyone else's faith is working. Yours is the one that broke.

The historical record says otherwise.

In this episode, Paris introduces you to the people who have been here before you. Elijah under the broom tree, asking God to take his life. Paul, writing that he despaired of life itself. Jesus in Gethsemane, sweating blood. John of the Cross, writing about the dark night from a prison cell. Julian of Norwich, whispering all shall be well from inside her own suffering. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, who went into the wilderness not to escape — but to find.

They were not weak. They were not faithless. They were faithful people who hit the wall and wrote it down — so that someone like you could find it one day and exhale.

You are not crazy. You are not uniquely broken. You are not the first.

You are in ancient, holy, hard company. And you are held.

The Story That's Been Shaping You Behind the Scenes

Something happened this week in a relationship that matters to me. A trigger surfaced. My body felt it before my mind had words for it. And for the first time in a while, I could name what was happening before it named me.

In this episode we talk about the difference between head faith and embodied faith, how the brain stores and recalls patterns from your past, what bodily resistance actually is and why it feels almost uncontrollable, and what becomes possible when the story that has been shaping you behind the scenes finally comes into the light.

Referenced in this episode:

Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw, Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection (Tyndale, 2025)

Center for Embodied Faith: embodiedfaith.life

Attaching to God podcast: available on all podcast platforms

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

BGG Episode 4.5 (the war zone and disorganized attachment)

Free resource mentioned:

What Are You Really Feeling? — Free guided workbook

https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/What-Are-You-Really-Feeling-Opt-in

Embodied Integration Practices:

https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/offers/4mrQghrR/checkout

🎨 Join Paris for Giving Shape to Sorrow — a guided grief art retreat, June 13 (online, 90 min)

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠

✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠

You did everything right. You showed up. You pressed on. You did the Bible programs, the prayer lists, the accountability. And somewhere along the way — it stopped working.

Not because your faith is broken. Because the container you were given was never built for what you are now carrying.

In this episode, Paris introduces one of the most clarifying concepts in this entire series — the two spiritualities. The first half of faith and the second. And why the wall between them is not a punishment, a failure, or the beginning of deconstruction.

It is a doorway.

If you have been wondering why trying harder keeps making things worse — this episode will give you the language you have been missing.

You are not losing your faith. It is going deeper than it has ever gone.

Most of us were taught the Psalms as inspiration. Beautiful, ancient poetry to lift us when we feel low.

But David was not writing inspiration. He was processing.

He brought his fear, his rage, his grief, his abandonment — raw, unfiltered, completely unpolished — and he voiced it to God. Not the cleaned-up version. The real one.

And what modern neuroscience is now confirming is that what David was doing in those Psalms was not just spiritually significant. It was physiologically significant. He was metabolizing his pain — moving it through his body and his soul with God — in a way that actually changed him from the inside out.

In this episode, I am sitting with something that surfaced powerfully in the last two Seen in the Wilderness sessions. Many of the women in that room could not name what they were feeling. Some felt shame about that. And I want to address it directly — because what was happening in that room was not a spiritual failure. It was a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

We are going to talk about:

• Why so many of us disconnected from our bodies in the first place, and why that was never weakness
• What actually happens when your body starts to wake up during healing, and why it feels like your body is attacking you
• The theology underneath all of this: Incarnation, embodied resurrection, image-bearing, and why your spirituality cannot be separated from your physical body
• What your nervous system actually needs to heal, and why thinking your way through is not enough
• Why the Psalms were written to be sung, not just read, and what music does to your nervous system at a cellular level
• How a contained music practice became one of the most faithful things I did for three years of my life

Your body is not your enemy. It never was.

This episode is for the woman who has been treating it like one.

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce D. Perry

Scripture References (NASB95):

• Psalm 22:1
• Psalm 42:1
• Psalm 62:1
• Psalm 139:13-14
• Ephesians 5:31-32

Work with Paris: Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored — a 9-week trauma-informed formation journey for women ready to do the deep work of healing, story, and reconnection with God. betweengriefandglory.com/storyline

Instagram: instagram.com/betweengriefandglory

Website: betweengriefandglory.com

You do not have to keep carrying this alone. Storyline: Seen, Known & Restored is a space for women who are ready to stop performing their healing and start actually doing it — in their bodies, their stories, and their faith.

Learn more at betweengriefandglory.com/storyline

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠

✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠

You are at the wall. But which one?

Because not all darkness is the same. And if you have been treating your wall like something it is not — applying remedies that don't fit, wondering why nothing is working — you may have been wandering in the right territory with the wrong map.

In this episode, Paris walks through the six types of walls that show up in the Christian life — burnout, spiritual burnout, blowout, personal crisis, faith crisis, and the dark night of the soul — and why knowing which one you are in is the beginning of knowing how to stay.

This is not a clinical checklist. It is a pastoral map. And it might give you the first language you have had for something you have been carrying alone for a very long time.

You are not lost. You are going deeper.

You know attachment theory. But have you considered that the same patterns shaping how you relate to people are also shaping how you experience God?

In this bonus episode — a bridge between the Wilderness series and the Dark Night of the Soul — Paris explores how our early attachment environments form templates we then press onto God. Why you can believe He is good and still not feel it. Why prayer can feel like talking to a ceiling. Why some of us deconstruct, some of us stay angry, and some of us quietly settle into the belief that warmth from God is simply not available to us.

Drawing on Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw's framework from Landscapes of the Soul, and grounded in the theology of the Imago Dei, this episode makes the case that healing your relationship with God requires more than better theology — it requires being seen, known, and held by safe people.

Because you were not made to find Him alone.

 → Storyline: Seen, Known, and Restored: ⁠https://www.betweengriefandglory.com/storyline⁠

→ Pre-Evaluation: Attachment to God Inventory: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccVjB_CYwyzUOZSes6BfVks5iqHTAlKLrSCcb46Rsww8saxQ/viewform?usp=header 

→ Pre- Evaluation: Loneliness & Community https://forms.gle/xNFyg5vBK6bPtZr79 

🤍 Join us for ⁠⁠⁠Seen in the Wilderness — May 13 & 14 ⁠⁠⁠(free, live) 

💌 Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠Notes from the In Between⁠⁠⁠

✞ Learn more & go deeper: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Between Grief & Glory Website⁠⁠

If prayer has felt hollow lately. If Scripture feels like words in a foreign language. If you have gone through the motions of your spiritual life for months — feeling nothing. Not peace. Not warmth. Not the quiet assurance you used to know.

You have not lost your faith. You have hit a wall.

And the church largely forgot to tell you this was coming.

In this episode, Paris opens a brand new series — Through the Wall — exploring one of the most disorienting seasons in the Christian life. The season where the old ways of praying stop working. Where God feels distant or worse — unkind. Where trying harder only makes it worse.

This season has a name. It has ancient company. And you are not failing.

The shepherd does not remove the valley. He walks through it with you.