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"Understanding is the essence of love" (Thich Nhat Hanh).

The quiet before wonder can change everything. We move through Advent by stepping into the story of Saint Nicholas—not the myth, but the young man whose hidden generosity saved daughters from slavery and modeled a love that protects dignity. From that spark, we explore how real love is trained, not assumed: a discipline of attention that seeks to understand first, then act with compassion, joy, and freedom.

I share why understanding is the essence of love and how it becomes a practical way forward when relationships feel stuck. Drawing on Thich Nhat Hanh’s wisdom, we test our affection with two questions: Does this love bring joy, and does it protect freedom? Then we get tactical with Nonviolent Communication, reframing conflict from a win-lose standoff into a process grounded in connection before strategy. You’ll learn to name needs clearly, separate needs from solutions, build trust through empathy, and translate requests into positive, actionable language—skills that can change your family table, your marriage, and your holiday gatherings.

Threaded throughout is a faith-centered reminder that no human can meet every need we carry. Rooting our belonging in God lightens the load we place on those we love and helps us set boundaries that honor both safety and dignity. With stories of courage, hard choices, and repair, we map a path to wholehearted living where generosity is quiet, presence is powerful, and hope is stubborn.

If this conversation helps you breathe deeper or love better, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help others find the show. What relationship will you train your heart for this week?

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Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

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A storm-tossed sky lantern lands in a front yard with a daughter’s message to her dad, and a simple response turns into a global moment of shared grief and hope. That story becomes our gateway into the real Saint Nicholas—an early Christian bishop who noticed the vulnerable, met practical needs with courage, and quietly changed lives in a collapsing empire.

We sit down with author and screenwriter Matt Mikalatos to explore his devotional, Praying with Saint Nicholas, and the surprising history behind a figure too often flattened into myth. From Patara to Myra, we step through persecution under Diocletian, the pivot of Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea, where core beliefs were hammered out amid risk and conviction. We revisit the famous dowry rescue that inspired stockings, the confessor tradition that modeled reconciliation after failure, and the gripping moment Nicholas halted an unjust execution—mercy with a spine of steel.

Threaded through it all is a practical Advent invitation: become a noticer. Pair 1 John 4:7–21 with small daily acts that restore dignity in your neighborhood. Slip generosity where it’s needed, listen deeply to someone who feels invisible, and choose sustainable compassion that protects your mental health while expanding your capacity to love. We also clear up confusion around venerating saints, reframing it as asking trusted elders in the great cloud of witnesses to pray with us, not instead of us.

If you’re longing for an Advent that feels grounded, historic, and fiercely hopeful, this conversation offers both story and structure. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who needs encouragement, and leave a one-sentence review to help others find the show. Your voice helps carry this light further.

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Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

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Sharing a Thanksgiving Prayer/Meditation of Gratitude: Ask for Something Greater. Matthew 7:7 heralds a beautiful message: "Ask and keep on asking, and it will be given to you; seek and keep on seeking, and you will find; knock and keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you."

This week's question: "What if your prayers are too small for the life you’re meant to live?" In this focused, six-minute guided meditation, we slow down, breathe, and move from timid requests to bold, honest asking rooted in God’s generosity. We open with a calm invitation to welcome God into the room, then step straight into the questions we often avoid: 

• Am I afraid of being disappointed? 
• Do I feel unworthy? 
• Do I doubt that God will help?

Naming these barriers out loud becomes the first act of courage.

If this moved you, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who needs courage today, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. What “greater” are you asking for this week?

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Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

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"Learning to say no to good things so we can experience better things may sound easy, but it can feel really hard - hard to know when it's the thing to do, and hard to do it. Yet there's a healthy vulnerability that comes with saying no."

-Dr. Arianna Molloy, Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work

Silence and emptiness emerge as surprising allies. Drawing on Thomas Moore, we treat emptiness not as failure but as space for meaning and healthy detachment. Emptiness quiets overcontrol, loosens ego-driven giving, and clears room for wisdom. In today's episode, I offer practices you can start today: guilt-free hobbies, shorter lists, pauses between tasks, and a single-page heart journal.

Join our growing community that prizes thoughtful dialogue, empathic listening, and actionable hope. Connect on Heartlift Central (Substack) and our private Facebook group to share your reflections, your haiku, and your next brave step. If this ad-free work serves you, consider a tax-deductible donation at janellrardon.com to help spread the influence of the podcast. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a gentler pace, and tell us: where will you create space this week? 

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

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"You're allowed to stop."

In this conversation, I explore rest not as a luxury or reward, but as a sacred practice woven into the very heart of creation. We dive a little deeper into Dr. Arianna Molloy's book, "Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work."

If God rested, why is it so hard for us?

We'll discuss the pressures that drive us to perform and strive, the stories we've inherited about productivity and worth, and what it means to honor our humanity by slowing down. 

This is an invitation to step into living a life from a place of rest, not when everything is done, but right now, right where you are.

Order Dr. Arianna Molloy's Book: Healthy Calling
Visit Taylor University's Center for Scripture Engagement
Read Hebrews 4:9-11: biblegateway.com

Listen to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on E. 93: REST
Listen to Eryn Lynum on E. 318: REST
Listen to E. 273: Nurturing the Soul with Forest Bathing
Listen to Asheritah Ciuciu on E. 183: Everyday Prayers of Rest
Listen to Asheritah Ciuciu on E. 182: Everyday Prayers of Rest
Listen to E. 14 with Janell: REST: Collecting Strength

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

Send us a text

Have you ever been asked, "What is your calling?" In Episode 344, Dr. Arianna Molloy, author of "Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work," shares her research and helps us answer that question from a beautiful place of understanding and maturity.

In this episode, we reframe calling as a living relationship with God, grounded in community and guided by humility, rest, and gratitude. I also unveil a new monthly format that helps us metabolize ideas, practice spiritual skills, and cultivate sustainable rhythms.

Drawing from Dr. Arianna's work on healthy calling, we unpack a practical triad for a sustainable life of purpose: dialogue with God that starts our mornings, interaction that turns trust into action, and maintenance that gently course‑corrects when we drift. We name the third key player—community—and show how burnout ripples outward, while healthy rhythms multiply good in every direction. Along the way, we get honest about enforced rest, health scares, and the sobering gift of learning to move from rest rather than toward it.

Humility anchors the conversation. Not self‑erasure, but clear awareness of strengths and weaknesses without fixation. Not hustle, but a lifestyle of learning and the courage to unplug. Gratitude then becomes humility in motion—remembering whose we are, who we are, and who is in charge. 

Visit Dr. Arianna Molloy's website: Learn More

Order Dr. Arianna's book: Healthy Calling

Watch Dr. Arianna: Meaningful Work; Should You Put Your Phone Down?; What it Means to Walk Humbly With God; More Than Just a Job

Support the show

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

Send us a text

Dr. Arianna Molloy, author of "Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work," shares on "calling burnout" and why it hurts more than standard exhaustion. Regular burnout says, "I don’t like what I’m doing anymore." Calling burnout says, "I don’t know who I am anymore." To find our way back, she offers a practical, research-backed posture of healthy humility: know your strengths and weaknesses without being ruled by either; live as a learner who isn’t threatened by not knowing; and practice the capacity to walk away, rest, and remember you’re not God. This is not self-erasure. It’s a return to sanity, a way to steward gifts without becoming indispensable to them.

We also explore communication as a healing balm for homes and teams. Truthful, kind, and clear messages—spoken, written, and nonverbal—repair trust faster than endless clarification by text. Simple rhythms like visual voice messages, shared gratitude at the table, and sabbath touchpoints keep relationships tender and resilient. Along the way, gratitude emerges as humility in action: a daily reorientation that dissolves cynicism and turns ordinary messes into moments of meaning.

If you’re a mom, leader, creative, or caregiver wondering how to serve without losing yourself, this conversation offers a grounded path forward. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs courage today, and leave a review to help more heartlifters find their way back to the Caller.

Visit Dr. Arianna Molloy's website: Learn More

Order Dr. Arianna's book: Healthy Calling

Watch Dr. Arianna: Meaningful Work; Should You Put Your Phone Down?; What it Means to Walk Humbly With God; More Than Just a Job

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

Send us a text

Pull up a chair at the Dim Sum Table and discover why your story—every tender, tangled part—holds real weight. Janell welcomes Jenn Suen Chen, author of Dim Sum and Faith: How Our Stories Form Our Souls, to explore how faith, family history, and formation weave together, not as a self-help checklist but as a lived way of being shaped by Scripture.

Jenn introduces a four-part arc for spiritual growth—shaping, undoing, awakening, remaking—and shows why the “undoing” we avoid is often where God does His gentlest work. We unpack migration as more than immigration: movement across generations under pressure from war, economics, and longing. Naming those movements reduces shame, expands compassion, and builds what Jenn calls emotional elasticity in our home cultures. Along the way, we sit with a disarming truth from her son: “We don’t get to choose what our brain calls hard.” That single line frees us from comparison, inviting honest prayer: Jesus, show me where You are here.

Visit Jenn Suen Chen's website: Jenn

Order Jenn's new book: Dim Sum and Faith

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

Send us a text

"A heart out of rhythm has a way of revealing a life out of rhythm."

Guided by insights from Tom Rosshirt's Chasing Peace: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience, we explore the connection between breakdowns and breakthroughs. We talk plainly about the difference between happiness tied to outcomes and peace rooted in a state of mind, and we practice language that helps dissolve the ego without erasing identity. From breathwork and boundaries to nervous system care, prayer, and honest community, this conversation offers practical routes back to rest—rest that isn’t a day off but a daily way of being.

We also return to a theme close to my heart: honoring maternal presence as a powerful, often untapped force inside families, churches, and communities. When we mother across ages—biologically or spiritually—we model repair, stability, and hope. My prayer, as I head into a procedure to restore sinus rhythm, is simple: that our hearts would find a God-breathed rhythm, and that our lives would beat with grace, peace, and love. 

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon

Send us a text

In this episode, we explore how trauma reshapes belief, what the ancient story of Job reveals about suffering, and how to become trusted listeners who create safe spaces instead of offering quick fixes. Dr. Michelle K. Keener, author of Comfort in the Ashes: Explorations in the Book of Job to Support Trauma Survivors, gives practical tools for mothers, mentors, and faith communities. Other ideas shared in this conversation:

• Trauma is defined as overwhelm beyond normal coping
• Retribution theology vs compassionate presence
• trusted listener traits and spiritual bypassing
• liminal space as formative process, not failure
• schema theory and the filing cabinet metaphor
• missed encounters, memory gaps, and safety
• mothering through shame spirals and repair
• church as a safe base, partnering with counseling

Visit Dr. Michelle's website: Michelle Keener

Order Michelle's book: Comfort in the Ashes

Support the show

Begin Your Heartlifter's Journey:

1. Support the show: Your Donation Matters
2. Leave a review and rate the podcast: WRITE A REVIEW
3. Make a tax-deductible donation through Heartlift International
4. Visit and subscribe to Heartlift Central on Substack. This is our new online meeting place for Heartlifters worldwide.
5. Download the 2025 Advent Guide: The Great Glimmer Hunt
6. Meet me on Instagram: @janellrardon