The CrossCounsel Podcast

The episode begins with a remarkable statement:

“I don’t know how to put it. It’s just crazy. After just one session, I didn’t have nightmares again. No night terrors.”

Her story includes addiction, destructive relationships, resentment, and a deep sense that she was unlovable. She knew intellectually that God loved her, but as she put it, “I knew deep down that God loved me, but I just didn’t feel it.”

During one session, she returned to a memory from when she was sixteen and desperately waiting for a man to call. She experienced Jesus putting His hand over hers and saying:

“You don’t have to do that anymore.”

What stands out is that Jesus wasn’t simply giving her a behavioral command. Something deeper had changed. She later said, “That’s not how I have to do things anymore.”

We also talk about why knowing biblical truth and deeply receiving it are not always the same thing—and why we never promise that a particular symptom will disappear, even though in her case the night terrors stopped after that first session.

Near the end, I introduce an idea I’ve wrestled with for years: instead of thinking only about putting God “first,” what if Christ is better understood as the hub of a wheel, with every part of our lives directly connected to Him?

That’s something we’ll explore more in the podcasts ahead.

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What does it really mean to be equipped as a follower of Jesus?

It’s more than knowing the right answers. In the Gospels, the biblical picture includes fishermen mending their nets—repairing the weak places so the nets are ready for the strain ahead.

In this episode, Steve explores why CrossCounsel pays attention to emotion without making emotion the destination, how our present struggles can expose what our hearts actually believe, and why truth needs to reach deeper than our heads.

Then we revisit a powerful 2012 CrossCounsel video featuring men describing what happened when they stopped assuming this is as good as it gets and began inviting God into the places that weren’t holding.

In a world of increasing darkness, we don't just want to know the truth. We want to be mended, strengthened, and equipped to stand.

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Lindsey and Hannah have spent more than a decade walking through life—and the MELT Process—together. In this episode, they share how friendship, prayer, and honest heart-level work have helped them become more rooted, secure, and surrendered to Christ.

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We're grateful to mark Episode 200 of the CrossCounsel Podcast with the conclusion of our three-part conversation with Pastor Shane Holden, Senior Pastor of First Free Church in Onalaska, Wisconsin.

Shane begins by sharing how God unexpectedly led him and his family to the La Crosse area in 2010. But the heart of this final episode is his deeply personal testimony of how Christ's truth finally reached the deepest places of his heart.

After years of carrying hidden childhood wounds and the lies they produced, Shane describes a life-changing encounter with Jesus during a CrossCounsel session. Although he had preached these truths for years, experiencing them personally was altogether different. He recalls it as feeling "like getting born again again."

Today, that experience continues to shape his ministry. When people at First Free are looking for this kind of heart-level healing, Shane and his staff regularly point them across the street to CrossCounsel.

We pray this conversation reminds you that Jesus doesn't simply give us truth to understand—He brings truth to the very places where we need to encounter Him most.

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In this episode, we continue our conversation with Pastor Shane Holden as he reflects on the early years of Mad City Church, the unexpected ways God confirmed His calling, and how our paths first crossed more than twenty-five years ago. Along the way, we revisit stories of God's remarkable providence, lasting friendship, and the quiet ways He often goes ahead of us, preparing what we cannot yet see. It's another encouraging reminder that we rarely understand God's plan in the moment, but His faithfulness becomes much clearer when we look back.

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Steve Freitag and Pastor Shane Holden have shared more than 25 years of friendship—raising families, serving in ministry, walking through seasons of blessing and heartbreak, and watching God faithfully lead each of them on different paths. Though they now serve in different parts of Wisconsin, they've remained close friends since the early days of CrossCounsel. Today, CrossCounsel's Onalaska office sits just across the street from First Free Church—an unplanned proximity that reflects a long-standing partnership. Over the years, many people from First Free have found healing through CrossCounsel, making the church one of our closest ministry relationships.

In this conversation, Shane—whose church welcomed nearly 5,000 people over Easter weekend this year (2026) —shares the remarkable story of how God called him from a childhood marked by addiction, abuse, and brokenness into a life of faith, family, and ministry. It's a powerful reminder that no one is beyond the reach of God's grace and that God delights in writing stories no one could have imagined.

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Bob Jackson is relatively new to CrossCounsel, but the change in his life has been, in his words, a "night and day difference."

In this unscripted conversation, Bob shares how moving from self-protection to surrender has brought a new sense of peace, freedom, and dependence on Christ. Along the way, Steve introduces the "cannonball with skin on" illustration to explore how Jesus experienced every truth-based pain of humanity without ever allowing falsehood to penetrate His identity—and what that means for our own journey of transformation.

A conversation about surrender, peace, and the transforming work of Christ in the heart.

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In this episode of the CrossCounsel Podcast, Steve reflects on emotionally healthy spirituality, hidden pain, and the tension many Christians feel between outward faith and inward struggle.

Drawing from a recent class discussion and the CrossCounsel MELT process, the conversation explores how buried anger, grief, fear, and shame often remain underneath spiritual performance and Christian language. Rather than glorifying emotion, this episode emphasizes that emotions can serve as signals pointing toward deeper heart-level beliefs that need God’s truth and healing.

Topics include emotional honesty, spiritual bypassing, discernment, discipleship, suffering, and the difference between information and true transformation. Steve also shares personally about recent loss, ministry growth, and the importance of prayer during this season for CrossCounsel.

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Steve concludes his conversation with Dwight Clough where they discuss how true transformation begins not with information, but with intentionally meeting with God in the places we most want to avoid. They emphasize that God has a meaningful mission for each person and desires to walk closely with us, bringing both joy and purpose. Rather than running from pain, growth comes when we willingly step into it, trusting that Christ is already present there. They explore how suffering, when engaged with God, becomes a pathway to deeper healing and confidence that we cannot manufacture on our own. The conversation also challenges rigid certainty, highlighting the importance of humility, being open to being wrong, and engaging others with curiosity instead of defensiveness. As trust and understanding grow through listening, relationships deepen. Ultimately, they point toward a renewed expression of Christianity marked by transformation, love, and a shared pursuit of God’s purpose in everyday life.

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In this episode, we continue our conversation with Dwight Clough around two foundational questions: Who are we, and why are we here? Dwight points to the Great Commission as central to our purpose—not as a narrow call to make statements, but to make disciples.

He draws a clear distinction between making declarations and actually loving people well, as Jesus did. True disciple-making begins within, as God brings peace, healing, and alignment to our own hearts, which then flows outward into relationships and communities.

Reflecting on the parable of the talents, Dwight challenges us to consider what God has entrusted to us—and how we are using it in this season.

Ultimately, this episode invites us to think bigger, live transformationally, and love what God loves—remembering that none of us have arrived.

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