Can you walk us through that image? Like what does building a wall and a wall approach of faith look like versus, uh, weaving a, a web instead?

Yeah.

The wall-based approach, a construction kind of metaphor, starts from a blueprint that has been given to you from the outside in order for you to construct what somebody has already determined you need, and then we have a sense of rigid, strong things.

So there's a foundation, and then you're gonna go brick by brick.

And often for young people, this is a certain amount of Bible verses they might memorize or a certain number of Sundays they're supposed to be in church, and some of you are like 100.

100 Sundays is how many I'm supposed [laughs] to be in church each year.

Sure

... decide to follow Jesus or make certain professions or participate in baptism.

Yeah

... to me, and how you're also promoting stepping into our potential and our purpose, and that's really what I help people with is bridging the gap between trauma and purpose.

So my angle is coming from a holistic per- perspective, the body, mind, spirit.

So that includes the spiritual aspect of healing from abuse.

I tend to work with people who come out of family systems and multiple adult relationships that were abusive.

It tends not to be physical abuse.

It's mostly emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual, financial, sexual as well, but it's very rarely physical abuse.

Yeah

And so I joined that

team as a research assistant.

And that was massively shifting for me because we got to this point in analyzing the data from our students and hearing how their views of God were changing, often in ways that were becoming more expansive.

God's more than I thought.

God's more dynamic than I thought.

Like those were some of the encouraging answers, but also some of the ways that reinforced other research that was happening in faith formation spaces.

So this is also around the same time that Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, I believe is her name, and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, they're sociologists.

And why this is so important is right now we have people so biblically illiterate in power who are making decisions about our country and about our planet to go to war with other nations based off of poor readings and that is why this is not like a nice to have type of thing like i think this is so essential that this message is brought out like correct biblical reading and biblical scholarship is brought out to the masses Because lives are actually dependent on

Yeah.

And one thing I love about that story with children is not only is it a chance to see Jesus, you also have all these other points of view that you can start to imagine.

What is Jairus thinking and feeling when he's forced to wait? Is he able to take that with patience 'cause it's Jesus after all, or is he fuming 'cause he has way more power and how dare this person? Ritually, her touching Jesus is supposed to transfer her uncleanness to Jesus, and now he's unclean.

Will he no longer be able to help his own daughter because now Jesus is unclean? He can't even go into Jairus' house, except we're gonna find out that isn't how it worked and that it doesn't get transferred to him.

But, but because our narrators don't tell us, we just get to imagine.

There's no right or wrong answer for a kid.

And this idea of coming to scripture, helping kids be allowed to play in the spaces where there's not a right or wrong answer, and to activate their imagination, and to take on the points of view of you're the crowd.

[laughs]

If that's okay

...

I was living a life in the system, totally miserable, hated my job, hated my life, and, uh, on Halloween weekend, I was coming back from a party dressed in a disguise, and I got into a car accident coming off the highway really close to my house.

And all I remember was a car swerved into my lane, my car went flying, I saw a green flash of light, and the next thing I knew I was standing next to my car looking down at my disguise and this wig and asking myself, "Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?" And this question began sort of this dark night of the soul that haunted me for years after.

It wasn't until two and a half years later that I had this out-of-body experience in which I recovered all the memories of what happened in the near-death experience in the car accident.

But at the time, I was so spiritually dull and had no capability of remembering grounding what happened, that it was just darkness, and there was so much darkness.

For a long time, I got blamed for the car accident, and I was angry, and so many things happened.

So how do we, how do we recognize that, and how do we get out of that, I guess? And how do we handle the other side, that, that, uh, people that wanna push their, uh, authoritarian measures on us, I guess? I mean, I don't know how, how deep we wanna get right away, but that kind of gives something to start with.

this item, this lesson?

Well, and so what I've thought about as I've known more and more parents on the other side of their deconstruction journeys is sometimes I hear them thinking that what that mainly did was teach them about things they don't want for their children, and so they are personally really committed to trying to do their level best.

But they haven't really thought about how the whole process, that story is a gift to their kids.

That in time, sharing with their kids that they have changed in some really significant ways, like, identity level ways, and how did that begin? How long did it take? What was some of the gift and joys and freedoms of that, and what were some of the losses and struggles of that? Just this, the real story.

It is, it's not just that what you learn from your deconstruction is a lesson that will make you better for your kid's sake.

It is that your process of deconstruction and inviting your kids to hear that story will also be a gift to them.

Partially for religious purposes of just how do we think about our faith, religion, spirituality, but also there are other big identity level topics where your kid might have a similar process.

Anyway.