Unconditioning Love

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Relyssa, one of twelve siblings, grew up structuring her whole calendar around convention season, but she and Lydia spend a lot of this first half talking about the thing that kept her steady inside that structure: sports. She did taekwondo, wrestling, and track as a kid who was also dealing with trauma and abuse at home, at a time when the meetings openly discouraged outside activities as potential idols. She's convinced it's part of why she's still here.

That "one identity" teaching comes up directly, the idea that a person is only supposed to belong to the church, nothing else, which is part of why anything outside that narrow lane got treated with suspicion. Relyssa connects it to a recent breathwork session where she realized, almost to her surprise, that she had spent her whole life not letting herself take up space, a pattern she traces straight back to being taught that anything outside a very small box wasn't allowed.

She and Lydia talk about the slow unraveling of the meetings-equals-heaven equation, which for Relyssa came into focus around three years ago, once she started building real adult friendships with Christian women outside the church and realized they were living more genuinely Christ-centered lives than she felt she was inside it.

One of the sharpest threads is the church's handling of divorce and remarriage, particularly for women leaving abusive marriages. Relyssa describes watching people lose their full standing in the church, unable to take communion or speak in meeting, simply for protecting themselves and their children, a double standard she says she could never reconcile with a God who supposedly created intimacy and connection as real human needs.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with Relyssa drawing a parallel to Jesus sharing communion with Judas, fully aware of the betrayal already in motion, and extending love anyway. Part two picks up next week.

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This week Lydia goes solo on a single word that carried a lot more weight growing up than it should have: fellowship. In the meetings it meant Sunday and Wednesday testimonies that were technically vulnerable but never actually felt safe, more like a sterile hospital room than real trust, where the point was sounding good and getting approval rather than actually being known.

She traces how her definition has cracked wide open since leaving. Real fellowship, she's found, shows up constantly now, in long spiritual conversations with rideshare drivers, with strangers, with basically anyone willing to go a layer deeper, once she was no longer taught that only people who looked and believed exactly like her were safe to connect with.

The turning point came from her own grandfather. After she told him about a new friend, another homeschooled woman who'd grown up in a different fundamentalist sect and was also deconstructing, he told her that fellowshipping with an unbeliever was essentially fellowshipping with Satan, and that it meant she wasn't in the right spirit. Hearing that judgment aimed at someone she actually knew and loved was the moment the whole pattern became impossible to unsee.

Lydia unpacks the strange contradiction at the center of meeting culture: testimonies that never felt safe enough for real vulnerability, paired with a total absence of boundaries around everyone knowing everyone else's business. She talks about the Bible study group she and Ryan started right after leaving, and the people who reached out afterward not out of curiosity but to interrogate who exactly she was "fellowshipping" with now, a question she now recognizes immediately as a boundary violation dressed up as concern.

She closes with a picture of what fellowship looks like on the other side, including the Sunday meditation circle she co-hosts with a rotating group of women, and a reminder that wherever you are in your own deconstruction, deep, unguarded connection with other people is still very much on the other side of it.

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Sara grew up calling it simply "the truth," in a New Jersey home with no written doctrine beyond the King James Bible, and even as a small child she couldn't reconcile a loving God with the constant message that she was unworthy. She describes the feeling as a quiet internal knowing that never quite went away, even when questioning it out loud got her scolded.

She and Lydia talk about the aha moments that chipped away at that framework from the outside: overhearing a beloved family friend justify the church's exclusivity by pointing to the Holocaust, and a small child at a convention being told the classmates he'd once believed were "God's children" actually weren't. But the deeper catalyst was mothering, in both directions. Sara's own mother, a convert who'd quietly given her real, unconditional love, died when Sara was twenty-three, and the community's response to her grief was to tell her she wasn't being faithful enough, going so far as to discourage her from seeking therapy.

Around the same time, a worker pulled her aside to tell her she should be hitting her children as discipline. She refused, and it became one more piece of proof that the people dictating her choices as a mother had no experience mothering at all.

Sara left officially at twenty-eight, sitting down with just her father to explain her decision. No one else from the church ever reached out. She talks about the years afterward spent quietly reclaiming the parts of herself that had been stifled since childhood, including an intuitive, energetic sensitivity she'd never been allowed to explore, and how she eventually found an unexpected spiritual home in a Unitarian Universalist congregation that welcomed exactly the questioning she'd once been punished for.

She closes the conversation by reading Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese aloud, a piece she says captures the permission she wishes someone had handed her as a child: that goodness was never the price of belonging, and that she was allowed to simply love what she loved.

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Lydia's first cousin Landis joins her in person for this one, visiting from North Carolina. Landis is third-generation in the meetings and grew up as a triplet, taught so literally that a Bible verse once convinced her she couldn't braid her hair, and that refusing a classmate's high five on the school bus was a matter of sin rather than a ten-year-old being cautious.

She and Lydia dig into the anxiety baked into professing at a young age, the pressure to eventually speak in front of thousands at convention despite being an introverted, self-conscious kid, and the classism that runs underneath the meetings' language of inclusion, especially sharp for Landis as the child of a mother who hadn't been raised in it. They also revisit a verse about heaping coals on your enemy's head that Landis, like Lydia, had once heard taught backwards, as license for quiet vengeance rather than what it actually describes.

The turning point traces back to a single conversation: when Lydia told Landis in February 2020 that she was leaving, it upended Landis's sense of what was even possible, since Lydia had looked, from the outside, like someone fully settled in the faith. COVID gave her the practical opening to just stop attending, and when she did, the response from the community was almost nothing, a handful of texts over four years, mostly from her father.

Landis talks about getting her ears pierced just days before recording, a small, nerve-wracking decision that she describes as grieving the version of herself who once believed pierced ears meant someone wasn't serving God, and choosing instead to let go of the reflex to judge people by how they look.

Lydia shares a dream that came to her around the time she knew she had to leave: flowers planted too close together, roots tangled, none of them able to grow, until something moved her and Ryan's flowers into their own plot of land with room to breathe. Landis closes with what she'd say to her younger self if she could, and it isn't a lecture. It's just that she needed a hug, and a deeper connection with the people around her than the meetings ever allowed.

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Shelley is fourth-generation in the two by two system, raised in a divided home where her father was abusive and privileges other convention families took for granted never quite extended to them. She'd decided at eight years old that she was going to be a writer, and she and Lydia talk about the particular clash that created, since in a system where women don't have a public voice, sitting down to write novels wasn't just impractical, it was almost unthinkable.

The tension started early, in things like band and piano lessons that had to compete with Wednesday night meetings, and it followed her into adulthood, including the moment her mother had to correct someone in an audience who called her proud of Shelley's academic award: pride was a sin, she could only be happy for her. Shelley credits her mother, who stayed unconditionally loving even inside that framework, as the clearest definition of love she had growing up, one she kept separate in her mind from the conditional acceptance running through the meetings themselves.

The unraveling came in 1998, when she found Cherie Kropp's website and, in her words, said out loud, why am I sacrificing so much when none of this is even true. She walked away from her job and the church in the same stretch of time, keeping only her husband, her home, and her writing, the only three things she'd ever felt good enough within.

She went on to earn an MFA in writing popular fiction, sell her thesis to Harlequin, and years later take a six-figure deal to write Amish romance novels, work that draws directly and unexpectedly on the very upbringing she once had to leave behind.

Shelley and Lydia close on what she'd most want to hold onto looking back: the female friendships that carried her through it, and the family connections that keep quietly resurfacing now that she's willing to use her voice.

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Bailey grew up with a more flexible version of the meetings than most, her parents never barred her from friends outside the church, even as the culture around her quietly pushed the opposite. She and Lydia talk about how that gendered double standard showed up everywhere: men could leave and come back with barely a ripple, while women carried visible markers, the hair, the skirts, the pierced ears, that made every step of the journey public.

She professed at ten, and she's candid that it wasn't really about God. It was about people-pleasing, wanting to be seen as good enough by workers and peers, a pattern she calls herself a "recovering" version of to this day. Even as a kid, she couldn't reconcile the God who supposedly loved her unconditionally with the constant undertone that she might never be good enough to escape hell.

One of the clearest turning points had nothing to do with theology. It was watching how warmly professing people treated her now-husband, who is Jewish, right up until it became clear he wasn't going to convert, and then watching that warmth disappear entirely with nothing on his end having changed.

Bailey and Lydia dig into why workers are handed so much authority over marriage and parenting despite having taken vows that rule both out of their own lives, and how that shapes advice that's rooted in conditional love without either of them realizing it.

Rather than a dramatic exit, Bailey's leaving happened quietly over several years, no announcement, no confrontation, just pierced ears and tattoos as the only outward signs, and a definition of unconditional love she arrived at on the other side: genuinely meeting people where they are.

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This week Lydia goes solo on something that touches everyone eventually: grief, and how little room high control religion leaves for it. Feelings aren't good or bad, they're meant to move through the body, but when anger and sadness get labeled forbidden, they don't disappear. They lodge in the body and wait.

Growing up in Kentucky, Lydia started singing at funerals at eleven years old, sometimes two or three a month. She unpacks how a meeting funeral isn't actually built to honor the person who died. It's built as an evangelism opportunity, a room half full of people who don't otherwise attend, which means grief itself never really gets a seat at its own service.

The cost of that structure became impossible to ignore the day she was asked to sing at a dear friend's funeral and, for one of the only times in her life, said no.

She contrasts that with losing her friend Leo to COVID in 2021, a few years after she and her husband moved to Paraguay and built a new community from scratch. Instead of a service with no room for feeling, she and Leo's sister created their own way to honor him: writing memories on balloons, singing his favorite songs together on the mountain where he'd once proposed.

Lydia closes with a reminder that grief doesn't run on a schedule and doesn't move in a straight line, and that if you don't yet have the tools to grieve well, therapy and other support are there to help you learn.

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Abi grew up in an unnamed, exclusive home church sect defined by its traveling "workers," raised with a little more room than most girls in the meetings thanks to her mother's quiet nonconformity, right down to the day a sister worker tried to confiscate her Harry Potter book and her mom told the woman plainly: I decide what my kid reads, not you.

As an adult, Abi started testing the legalism she'd inherited, keeping wine and a TV in the house, cutting and dyeing her hair, wearing pants, watching to see if anyone would say something. What she found was that holiness in the meetings had never really been about the heart. It was about the externals.

The deeper unraveling started with a memory: professing at ten years old not out of love, but out of sheer terror of hell, the kind that had her sobbing in her parents' room at 3am. That fear-based framework cracked wide open the night she finally understood that God hadn't built paradise to punish people. He built it for people to be loved in.

Abi and Lydia talk about the quieter cost of growing up "chosen": the subconscious superiority that gets handed to you right alongside the unworthiness, and how one phrase, image bearer, undid years of unconsciously writing off everyone outside the meetings as lost. She describes the night she realized how much judgment she'd been carrying without knowing it, and texting old friends who'd left the church just to apologize.

She and her husband left the meetings for good in September 2023, not long after the church's abuse revelations became public, a betrayal she says shook her to her core. She compares the decision to leave to standing at the edge of a pool, terrified to jump, trusting that God would catch her, and closes with a reminder that deconstruction doesn't have to mean doing it alone.

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This week I go solo to trace something I've never fully laid out on the podcast before: the realization that the Jesus I grew up praying to inside the meetings and the Christ I know now are not the same energy at all.

I was an intuitive, empathic kid long before I had language for it, and I picked up on things, including something off in the energy of certain male workers and preachers, years before the church's abuse numbers (close to 700 reported perpetrators) ever became public. My mom, to her enormous credit, took that seriously and kept checking in with us.

Working with a somatic healer later taught me something the meetings never did: how to tell my own energy apart from everyone else's. In a system built on merging rather than boundaries, that distinction changed everything, including how I related to God.

The turning point came through two experiences that felt wrong before I could explain why, a presence during prayer, then a dream pressuring me to forgive everyone because I was about to die. A friend outside the meetings named it plainly: that's not Jesus, that's an energy that has attached itself to the church and is calling itself Jesus.

From there I unpack the distinction that reframed my whole spiritual history: the Jesus of the meetings, fear-based and tied to control, versus the Christ, the higher, loving energy that got quietly edited out of the church's teaching. I tell the story of the moment I tested it directly, at my very last meeting, praying out loud in the name of Jesus Christ, and what happened in that room when I did.

A Journey Within link

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Jane grew up in a small town in Wyoming, born and raised in the two-by-twos — the church some call "the Truth." She was the kid who wore jeans under her skirt and peeled them off on the bus before anyone noticed, who ran track four years straight and made it to state, who wanted, more than almost anything, to be independent. Not unworthy, not unwilling to fit — just built, as she puts it, with "a warrior within."

Her turning point didn't arrive all at once. It came years later, in a parenting class, when the teacher asked the room a single question: were you loved conditionally or unconditionally growing up? That question cracked something open — the realization that she'd spent her whole life mistaking approval for love, chasing something that, by design, could never actually be reached.

We talk about what it costs women specifically to leave a system like this — being asked what your husband will do for income while your own work goes unseen, being told the smarter you are, the more room you give the devil, watching your daughter get ready for meeting in her favorite necklace and realizing you can't do to her what was done to you. And we talk about what's replaced the old, fear-based, always-watching God: something Jane finds now in a river, in a walk in the woods, in a butterfly mid-metamorphosis.

She ends with the advice she'd give her 15-year-old self — a complete reversal of the acronym she grew up on, JOY: Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last. Her version: trust your gut. It was always right.

This is part one of Jane's story — she's coming back for a second conversation soon, because there was simply too much to cover in one sitting.

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