In their conversation about ways to help people experience the life of Jesus, Kyle and Wayne find themselves contemplating where they found spiritual hunger when they jumped off the performance treadmill. In their early days, spiritual hunger might have been more religiously inclined, in the sense of trying to earn God's favor or increase their status as a zealous follower. How has that changed when the need to earn his favor was displaced by their confidence in his love? What motivates them now to live deeply inside his reality?

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As Wayne has watched God's work of redemption inside Sara's trauma, he's been keen to observe that the soothing safety of Father's love that untangles the darkness, and the anger, threats, and blame make it worse. That is as true of our sin as it is of trauma. Why then does God use so much shame and threats of punishment in the Old Testament to try to get people out of the darkness? Or, does he? Wayne invites Kyle to consider how the prophets saw into God's agony and misinterpreted his words, and so do the literalists of our day.

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Kyle is back and has some questions for Wayne about the process of emotional maturity and finding healing from those emotions that fire from the unhealthy side of our brains. What is the arc of emotional freedom and how do we deal with your failures during that process? This conversation also includes dealing with anger and frustration, disruptions in our established rhythms, the tyranny of the urgent, and how we can lean into tenderness to find the unforced rhythms of his grace.

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In the mid-1100s, Bernard of Clairvaux, a mystic and monk in France, considered how we experience the love of God. He published a devotional called the Love of God, in which he identified four degrees, or progressions: (1) loving ourselves for our own sake, (2) loving God for our own sake, (3) loving God for his own sake, and (4) loving ourselves for God’s sake. In a fascinating conversation, Wayne and Sara ponder these progressions in their individual relationships with God and in their relationship with each other, before the revelation of Sara's trauma and after.

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During Wayne and Sara's recent stay in Austin, he sat down to catch-up with a good friend, an occasional guest on The God Journey, and author, Tracey Levinson. They discuss an email she sent to Wayne in the trial he faced two years ago and get into a conversation about having an unrelenting passion for what's true because of God's unrelenting love toward us. To see what's true about ourselves and about God is the doorway into a life of freedom.

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At the start of their transcontinental trip to Virginia and back, Wayne and Sara pause in Austin, TX, to catch-up on Sara's journey and the continuing work of freedom Jesus is doing from her early childhood trauma. Recently, Sara's counselor affirmed the rare passion she demonstrates to discover the truth about herself and it has served her well in the process. Sara talks about the tools that have been built in her life to give her the courage to stay in that pursuit.

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If you aren't playing with God, you're probably not doing as much for him as you think. In this last podcast before Kyle takes a brief hiatus and Wayne and Sara head out for a trans-national trip, they revisit some of the important themes that have been on the podcast so far in 2024. Through listener emails, recounted conversations, and their own personal journeys, they talk about the destructiveness of dishonesty, active listening, praying for the bride, why religion love our imposter selves, the value of learning to play again, and the importance of not dividing between spiritual and secular in our daily lives.

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"Not my will, but yours be done."  We are familiar with the words and it's easy to tack them on to the end of our prayers as a token to submission. However, the power of these words come not as a tagline but when we let God melt our hearts enough in the whatever situation we find ourselves to choose his past, rather than making it about ourselves. Kyle and Wayne explore the journey of wholeheartedness that wanders through the ugly places where God makes his wonder known in life-transforming ways when we lay down what we think is best to choose what God knows to be.

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"Truth has been weaponized by the enemy to shift the focus from Jesus. The ‘truth’ as many believers see it has been removed from Him who is truth; it’s a talk about Him and His truth rather than with Him in love." Those words in an email from a listener's own journey came at a propitious time in Wayne's life, and processing it with Kyle takes them further into what it means to gaze with God at the events of the world. It has led Wayne to pray for the Bride of Christ and talk to her like he did to Sara in the days of there separation. Kindly and tenderly, is the way God reaches into our delusions to open the way for truth and love to find a home in her heart. 

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"What are you most afraid of in your life right now, and who taught you that fear?" That is a key question to unmasking your false identity and help you discover who God has created you to be on the earth.  Wayne introduced Kyle to a podcast where Jamie Winship, the author of a book called, Living Fearless, was the guest. The podcast rocked Kyle's world and spilled out into two of his classrooms where he helped students process their personal identity and in his words, "Jesus showed up"—in a secular classroom.  They unpack some of Jamies thoughts about identity and worldviews that can help us all live freer and more connected to what ps going on around us.

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