INTRO
Hello friends. Over the past few weeks, we've had the opportunity to sit down and talk with a few authors that have something worth sharing.
And so while we work on the next series for you, we're going to move slightly outside of our typical format, and pretty much just share those conversations.
This week we’ll talk with Julie Carrick— an author, recording artist, and the person behind the Carrick Ministries Foundation. She’s also someone who’s prayed for miracles and received miracles… and not received miracles.
In our conversation, this cradle Catholic presents a view of Christ’s ongoing and very tangible presence in the world and how this makes us people who see adversity as something that only magnifies God’s grace. So we hope you enjoy and beyond that we hope you are encouraged and edified by what follows
CONVERSATION
Wilson: So, all right, welcome back to another episode of “All Things”. This is Wil— I’m joined again by Mark Bunnell, one of our folks here at Shema that you've heard from before, and a first time guest on the podcast, Julie Carrick, who is an author, she's a recording artist and she and her husband have founded their own ministry, Julie Carrick ministries, that also supports other authors, speakers and recording artists and, having talked with her a bit, started reading through her book, has a lot, a lot to say that will help us become the kinds of people that could recognize God's grace and God's presence wherever we are in our life.
Um, and just gives me just some incredible firsthand stories about how she's learned to see God's grace and presence, even in the places where we might be most tempted to feel abandoned by God , um. Or to be tempted to think that perhaps there is some kind of evil or some kind of situation that could thwart God's purposes or stop God's grace, but instead has has journeyed through and now is, is somebody who gives a good portion of her time and her energy and resources to helping others see this. So, Julie, thanks for being on. Thanks for joining us.
Julie: Thank you, to it's a privilege and an honor to be with you.
Wilson: Well thanks.
So, one of the things that comes out in your book, and especially as people who are hosting this podcast, it's all about learning to see God reconciling all things and taking seriously that gospel claim that who Jesus is, what Jesus has done, and because of, because of God's character and God's work, God has cleared the way to heal and to reconcile everything. Um. You, being a cradle Catholic, I think have uh some background and some experience to draw from that could offer a lot of us a lot of wisdom about, about what kind of training and what it is to participate in God's work so that we can begin to see God everywhere.
And let's start with just that as being a cradle Catholic let's talk about the Eucharist. And, and what do you think, growing up receiving Eucharist and having it talked about the way that it is in a Catholic mass and to participate in that and receive it. How has that really shaped the whole way you see the world in a way that you see as distinct or different from the way many of us and many others view the world?
Julie: I feel like the Eucharist, because Christ is who he says he is in the Eucharist— and I love to fall back on John chapter 6, verse 53: “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” And I believe that I have life in me because of the Eucharist. Um. A lot of times when people look at me and my ministry, they say, “Wow, you're such a strong woman.”
And I beg to differ. I think those of us who are the weakest need the strongest interpersonal relationship with Christ, and because of the Eucharist and the fact that I've had that physical presence, literally inside of me from the time that I was eight years old, um. Every time I go to mass, every time I receive him in the Eucharist, it's like going deeper into this wellspring of grace.
That he is literally with me, I am never alone. And, in the times of my life, that it would be the easiest to feel abandoned, to feel like I've been left alone, or somehow there's not a deity up there watching over, um, I tap back into that Eucharist and to realize that that incredible intimate embrace that I have with him, um, is the strength that just surrounds me and encourages me even on times when I don't know how I'm going to go forward. It's a wellspring.
Wilson: That’s—I, I keep thinking, well. Two things popped into my mind. As a teacher and as a mentor, one of the, one of the coolest moments that—it happens often with different people, and it's just awesome the different routes that people take to get to this place.
But it's, it's always such a, an incredible moment when someone says to me, you know… they came from either like a really agnostic place, like, ‘I don't know, maybe there's something, but how could we know,” or a really disillusioned place like, “I don't know. I grew up in church and now I'm at a place where I think. I'm pretty sure there's still a God, but that's about all I know, um and maybe, maybe the best way is for me just to make it up on my own, be spiritual.”
Or even coming from an atheistic place, when, when people move from that place to a moment where they say something like, “You know what, I still don't know if I can believe this, but I really want it to be true.” “I don't, I don't know if I can, if I'm ready to trust it, but there's something in me wants that to be true.”
And I think that about, um. At that kind of place, I'll also bring up the Eucharist and just think if it's not just a ritual that helps us remember something that happened way back when, but what if, really, the way you take in food—like, think about that image, that, that the energy that's held in that thing… I don't know. This is I'm starting to find miracles everywhere.
And so I, especially when you think about fast food, like it's garbage, right? Taco Bell is junk. Taco Bell is garbage and that makes it even more miraculous that my body can take that and make it energy.
Julie: [Laughs] Right.
Wilson: Not necessarily the most efficient, but I can still run on that. That's incredible. That you can take that stuff and your body can break it down and, and transform that energy into something that moves through you. That's just food. And, and why wouldn't we want that to be true about Christ? That who Christ is, can get into us that place to be our energy and to fuel our life that way, like…
Julie: So two, if I may, just two quick examples of that in my life, I mean. One of them that was just absolute, um…proof, if you will, if somebody ever just needs that physical proof, “Is he who he says he is?” In 2004, um —and God bless my husband, he is, he has been just such an open book literally to let us share our story with people—but in 2004, we were that marriage that hit the wall.
I mean, we hit it hard. We had been to hell and back in 2004. And when he asked me to sign divorce papers, I said the only way that I would even contemplate signing them is if he would go to the adoration chapel at our church, and that if he would go there with me for an hour, every other day, for a week, then at the end of that week, if God told me, “Okay, go ahead and sign.” I would sign.
And it was because of me even saying that, that he was willing to go. And, we would walk in there and it was like Satan was scraped off at the door. He couldn't come into that space. And within an hour, I saw the light behind my husband's eyes. I saw the man who I'm married to start shining through, and it was the most amazing thing.
And then at the end of an hour, hour and a half, we would walk back out and it was like Satan was waiting outside that door just to leap back on his back. Right. And this went on actually for a couple of weeks, and every time that grace of Christ went deeper into my husband.
And when the turnaround happened, it wasn't just a, “Okay, I'm going to end the affair and I want to work on things,” whatever… It was 180-degree turnaround. Like it was, it was healing to the deepest root of his, of his soul. And not only did it heal him, it healed me that I was able to not only forgive, but desire this life with this man who those months prior had caused the deepest pain that I could feel.
Wilson: Wow.
Julie: And that's one example where just this physical presence of him was transformative. And the other one, which was just… I don't know. It's so hard for me to even share the, the depth of it, but. When my daughter was 20 she was the victim of a sexual assault from what she became pregnant.
She never questioned the life of her child. Her only question for God was, “Am I a mom or am I a birth mom? What do you want?” And she kept asking that question. And, and in the meantime had sought a couple. She had, you know, she knew that if she was placing this child for adoption who that would be, but she didn't know if at that point.
And so it was on a Sunday, late afternoon, we were going to mass together. And from my vantage point on the church, I was able to see, as she came forward to receive the Eucharist at mass, and it was that Sunday that she's like, “God, I need an answer. I need to know what I'm going to be doing with this child.” And as she came forward to receive, that was the first time that she felt that baby—as soon as she had consumed the host, she felt that baby just jumping inside of her, just like leaping for joy, “Mama I'm here, I'm here.”
And I didn't know that right. That was, I learned this after mass. All I knew is that when I looked at her when she received, there was like a light that surrounded her. And all I could imagine in what I was seeing was… she, my daughter, this child inside of her, and Christ literally inside, and this beautiful trio together was just the most intimate embrace that, that you could possibly have.
And right after mass was over, she said, “Mom, I have my answer today.” And when she explained to me the feeling that she was having and that she knew… I mean, it was so absolutely of God. It couldn't have been anything else. And it was in that Eucharistic moment that she knew, and… that's.
Mark: Yeah. I think what what's super encouraging to me in those stories is, in the last handful of years, um… so I guess for whatever listeners don't know, I come from a super Protestant background, um. And… but in the last handful or so of years, around the topic of the Eucharist—and we would just always call it communion—I started asking “Why?” in the back of my head and it wasn't until I started spending time and talking with Wil that I acknowledged and started to actually look for answers to what I was asking for.
But it really came to a head when we were, it was a youth group service, and then Wil had suggested, I think, that we… I was running the service and that, um, that we do communion at it. Cause he said, “It’s important. You got to do it.” And as I was preparing it I was thinking about a couple of the students in mind, particularly, that I knew were… and they weren’t going to say it out loud, but in their heads and be like, “Mark, if this is just a symbol, why don't we just put a poster on the wall?” type of thing and even…
Wilson: Or “Can’t it be Oreos?”
Mark: [Laughs] Yeah.
Wilson: “Or Oreos and soda?”
Mark: Yeah, “Can we do it with crackers that are good, Mark, please?” But then I, then I started trying to like rationalize it and…or make sense of, of what was going on, and like. “If this is just a symbol, this is an interesting symbolic thing…”And really started to chase that question of like, “What is…what’s, what's going on here?” And then talking with some other people, um… Some other close friends have said like, “Yeah, I started to chase that question,” and from Protestant backgrounds, and they're saying some of the, some of the most striking encounters with Christ that they've had have been at the Eucharist table.
So it's really encouraging for me to hear from you, from a very different tradition, or church tradition background, about the importance and just how the transformative effect that the Eucharist has had in your life. And then I'm sure there's a little bit from you, being a cradle Catholic, that’s kind of like, “Well, yeah, you Protestant guys…Come on, come home. What are you doing?”
Julie: No, actually, there's a lovely story, um, from my life as a recording artist—the last project that I recorded in 2019 is a project called “Come to the Manger.” And the most amazing thing in that whole, the whole project was the, the song “Manducate,” which is Latin for the word ‘manger.’ And if you look at the definition of the word manger, or Manducate, it literally translates “to take and eat.”
And, so Christ, the lamb of God, who was born in the town of Bethlehem— and Bethlehem means house of bread— and to have this infant baby who's the King of kings laying in a manger, and the very thing he's laying in means “take and eat.” So that beautiful Eucharistic invitation from the time he was a baby. And so I look at that in my life as a cradle Catholic, and it's kind of funny that the cradle, the manger, you know, was already the invitation.
But when we were recording the song “Manducate,” my band members, most of whom are Protestant— beautiful men in Nashville, Tennessee— we got together in the studio and we were getting ready to record that song, and it was the most striking thing I have ever heard in my life. They played it one time and it was perfection.
It was perfection in one take. And at the end of it, everyone in the room just paused. And they said, “What was that?” And I said, “That was God's invitation to you to the Eucharist.”
Wilson: I mean, it's all over the place. I mean, even. So, manger means “take and eat,” and what do you put in a manger? Food. It’s, it's it, it really is. It's through and through and, and even opens us up. I mean, even if you start from that place—that God offers us that, that God can be that. And I've, I've also told people, I've told my students, “Look, if you, if you really have a hard time believing that God is capable of being present in ordinary stuff like bread, you also have a hard time believing that God is capable of being ord… present in ordinary stuff like a man's body.” Right.
And so if, if you, if you really can't even open yourself to the possibility of like a, a genuine divine presence in something like the Eucharist, then, well, let's also talk about how you think about the incarnation. But, but God's desire and, and promise, God's desire to be that for us, God's ability to be there in such an incredible way in ordinary things and promise to meet us there, I mean, it runs through and through and opens us to such a fuller understanding of salvation. The kind of salvation that isn't just, “Hey, you're all alone in this world. All the bad things that happen, but take heart when it's all over, you can go somewhere better,”
But even more it's “I am with you.” Right.
And that's when, Julie, time and time again, it comes through in your book: “In, in incredibly dark difficult situations. I am with you. I am with you.” And I don't know. Maybe just give you one more opportunity to speak about a story or an instance that you think might be edifying for people to hear about like your life being a— I guess the subtitle of your book is, is “how adversity magnifies grace” and to pull those things together for us in a concrete story.
Julie: So I, I, as you were saying that I could just picture one of the miracles where, I believe in my heart of hearts, if I weren't walking this closely with God, that I would have missed one of the greatest opportunities to let him reveal himself, and it was when I was pregnant with our second child. We were living in Germany, and as I was going into the, I was going into the ER, actually, I was having severe abdominal pain, and it was before I knew I was pregnant.
I went into the hospital. I was having this horrible pain, they did a ultrasound and they said, “You're having an ectopic pregnancy. And we need to do surgery to remove that tube before it bursts.” And I panicked, I panicked. And I said, “I can't, I can't let them do that. I'm pro-life,” right. I was like, just like in this moment of just panic and I, I ran across town.
Drove as a maniac across town, and got my husband who was in the army, and I was like, “Honey, they want to do this surgery.” And as we were coming back into the doors of the hospital, the Catholic priest, who was our chaplain was coming out, Father Clancy. And we explained very quickly to him what was happening, and he said, “Okay, so you need a miracle, you need a miracle.”
And I said, “We do need a miracle. I don't know what to do.” And, and we stopped and he just, he laid hands on me. And he just prayed for maybe five minutes. And during that time, the pain had stopped and I was grateful. The pain had stopped, but, being very immature at that point in my faith as far as an adult relationship with Christ, I, I assumed that the tube had burst and that I better get in there and let them, you know, so me up before I bled to death.
And so I went into the back end of the hospital, the doctor kind of chewed me out. And he said, no, we need to finish the rest of the ultrasound and we need to do surgery immediately.
And so he started the ultrasound again, and then he went kind of back and forth between right and left. And he said, “Where was your pain?”And I said, “Well it was on the right…” And he goes, “Well, that's strange…” And then he, then he went to the left and back to the right. And he said, “Well, whatever it is, it’s gone.”
And. Then they finished the ultrasound down into the uterus, and the exact same mass that was in the tube was now safely nestled in the uterus where she belonged. And that is Heidi. And she was born safely on March the 23rd, 1986. And…. just the beauty of accepting that gift of grace and knowing that this priest who just, just expected because of that relationship with Christ, just to be with us.
Um. It, it was like he revealed himself to me just as a gift, you know? Just as a pure gift to say, “I’m going to spare the life of this child and let you, let you have her here this on side of heaven.” And, I don't know. It sounds like so far fetched, and yet it's a reality of my life.
I mean, it's, it's something as simple as just doing morning prayer, and it’s something as extreme to show his love as to save the life of my child and to let me keep her. And I don't know. It's it's it just, he is who he is. He's, he's amazing. And he loves us so much.
Wilson: Um. I w-I would just maybe ask for others who have been in a place and prayed, and haven't got the miracle, right. I know you've been there too. And so, so what would you say about the grace that's there in the miracles and when you pray for them and ask for them and then you don't get what you prayed for or asked for.
Julie: Absolutely. So, the total opposite end of that spectrum, um. My husband and I, after our daughter, Heidi, was safely born in 1986, it was a few years later, I had the sad loss of a child at five and a half months into the pregnancy. And just the spontaneous miscarriage and, um. By the time we got to the hospital, that baby, there was no way that he was going to make it.
And he was perfect. Like he was this perfectly formed, amazing child. And, I couldn't understand why on one hand, God would give me the miracle of letting me keep my daughter, and then just a few years later take a baby home far too young, far too soon. And it didn't make sense to me for a while. I'll be honest.
It didn't make sense to me. And… but in my love of God, I thought, “God, you've got to have a purpose here. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I love you enough to know that you're journeying with me. And so for now, I'm going to kind of just let it, let it go,” right?
Two years later, the same thing happened. I got to that five month mark. I miscarried that baby boy, and I couldn’t, again, understand why would God just take these children home? And it wasn't until I was able to start telling the story of their lives and that this incredible spark of creation in God's design when a human being is conceived in the womb of his or her mother, that— it's true,we don't know the number of our days—but sainthood is real. The soul is eternal.
And it wasn't until I felt the loss of these children that I could truly have empathy for women and men who've lost children. And knowing that God was calling me to a life of ministry, it was like I was allowed to have both the experience of the loss to love them even more. And it made me realize that these saints are with God and heaven. I mean, they are literally with him— these babies, as they were miscarrying, my husband and I baptized them, they were… I know that they immediately became a part of the communion of saints, and…
And to give kind of a lighthearted end to this part of the story was, it wasn't until we had our son, um, a couple of years later— so now there's a seven and nine-year age gap between our children, so our, our two daughters and then seven years when we have our son Paul—and I think Paul was about seven… He was six or seven, and his sisters were just into those teen years, and we were at dinner one evening and the girls—and this is how old they are—they were asking for beepers, right? They wanted beepers. If you don't know what a beeper is, it was before cell phones. So—
Wilson: I remember begging for a beeper, I had a beeper.
Mark: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that.
Julie: And so we were having this argument at dinner, and they were like, “Mom, I need a beeper,” and I'm like, “You're not a doctor. You're not a lawyer. You don't need a beeper.” Right.
And so finally our son chimes in and he says, “Mama, I think I know why God took Timmy and Clancy home early…”
And I was like, “Really? Why do you think?”
And he said, “Well… he knew you were going to need two more saints to help you with these girls.”
And I thought, well, you know, there's some wisdom there, um. Yeah, it's, it's not always, you know… our prayers are not always answered the way we think they should be answered, but in God's plan, when we allow ourselves into his life of grace, he does eventually reveal what the purpose is. And, and sometimes the suffering is just literally bringing us closer to him at the cross and to appreciate all the more, what he was willing to suffer for us and, uh, and enter into that.
Wilson: While you were talking, Julie, I thought of two things— I thought of now Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and the desolation that she felt after she said yes to Jesus and went and carried out this mission. She felt, she felt spiritually abandoned and desolate. And the conclusion that she and her spiritual director came to, and that she lived on, was that God was giving her the grace to experience what the people that she ministered to every day felt—that she wouldn't be coming from this place of like privilege and, and just power top-down, but she would be one of them in the midst of that.
And for her, that would also be ultimately a chance to know God's grace and power even there.
Julie: Yeah, absolutely.
Wilson: And so our story is, Jesus didn't like go to the cross to kind of like, make some kind of magic portal through or around, but to make a way through it for us.
So then no matter where we go, no matter how dark it gets, we find Christ there bringing us back to God. And so there's that other thing that I thought of, is the resurrection. That when the— when the disciples encounter Jesus on the other side of the cross and the grave, they don't just see like some wispy spirit. Right.
Which is how you would tend to imagine some sort of life beyond death, but it's Jesus. Like they, they can fall down and grab his feet. And he eats fish. Right. And Taco Bell with if that was around… Right. But like ghosts don't eat, but Jesus eats. And in that, the victory is not just that something will survive, but death gets nothing. And that's what we hold on to, is no matter how bad—even losing a child, right? God is there too. And, and God's presence and grace and power there means death gets nothing.
Julie: Yeah.
Wilson: And so that, isn't the last word. Death has not ultimately stolen anything from God. And the promise—and I like to think of it that way is, you know, having a, having a bit of insight…
“Oh, it's so you've got some saints to help you with these difficult children.” I have children, and I, you know… I welcome, right, all the prayers and help I can get from living in dead folks. Anyone who's there and available to pray for me and help me, I will take it, you know? And so like the insight, the insight that's there is, is a good one, but that's always like, we always get to like…God's graces is bigger than we can imagine.
So don't think that's it, it wasn't just so that Julie could have this moment of insight and a funny story. Like that's a sign of a promise of what heaven fully is when it becomes clear to us death got nothing.
Julie: As you say that, I’m thinking, in fact—there's an image over my shoulder here, is the Pietà, when Christ is, is taken down from the cross and he's laid across the lap of his mother. I mean if anyone can understand this, it's Mary, you know?
Here she is this amazing human being, the most amazing human being ever. And as the mother of the Savior of the world, she, if anybody, should have had a free pass. And yet, she not only heard him say,“I am going to suffer and die,” but, “on the third day I'm going to raise.”
I am going to suffer and die. My son who's in the air force. I mean, if he says to me, “Mom, you know this mission— I'm not coming back from it,”
I'd have to join the air force and go, you know… like get in the middle of it and keep them from getting hurt, right? That's not what Mary teaches us. She teaches us that it was through his suffering. It was going through the pain and the agony that he bought our salvation. I mean, he literally bought us.
He, he paid the price for us, and if anyone can acknowledge that, you know, if it could have been any other way—I mean look at, all the way to Jerusalem… All the way there, he kept saying, “I’m gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die.” Right. Then they get there and we're going to celebrate it on Palm Sunday.
Right. And the people praise him. And Mary was like, “Oh my gosh,” just… “Maybe the story is different. Maybe he doesn't have to die after all, look at how they're greeting him,”
And the next day, he's taken from the garden of gets Semini and arrested and, and she watches the whole thing unfold, and teaches us that in, in the quiet and in the acceptance of what we're supposed to suffer, some amazing fruit is going to come out of that. And it's that acceptance of the suffering, um… She teaches us that really, really well.
Mark: So, Julie, as you know, we've been in the pandemic for the last year or so—I think now it's actually been more or less officially a year from whenever— I don't know when we'll release this podcast, but recording this around March, um. So, um. How has, how has your life and your experiences of God's grace—in all the, the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows so far—how has that influenced and shaped the way that you've navigated this pandemic and this last couple of years that we've been in?
Julie: That's a great question. Um. W-what's kind of an interesting way of looking at that is, one of our artists—her name is Liz Owen from Grand Rapids, Michigan—she called me about four and a half months into the pandemic and she said, “I’m…I feel like I'm losing it,” you know, being locked down, not having, not being able to go anywhere and not being able to go to church.
I mean, it was, she, she said, “I feel like I'm losing it.”
And then she had like this, you know, kind of a high pitch, kind of hysterical, laugh, and, and she said, “With everything that you've been through, this probably isn't even phasing you, is it?”
And on one hand, I kind of laughed and I said, “That is kind of funny when you put it that way.”
I mean, when you've been allowed, allowed the gift of adversity, it thickens your skin, you know… it does thicken you a little bit to say, “Okay, whatever is coming, I can handle this,” you know.
And then I'm, I'm always afraid to even say that out loud, because it seems like anytime I've said, “Yeah, you know, we've made it through this and this and this… bring it,” you know. Don't ever say “bring it” because it'll get brought, you know,
Wilson: [Laughs] You're inviting an even worse challenge, right. “Just come on. Challenge me.” Right?
Julie: “Challenge accepted.” And in all, in all seriousness, the pandemic I had, I could write the next, you know… volume of, of “Unfailing Grace,” because during the pandemic, we had some of the greatest joys. Some of the most amazing joys were the gifts that I found in the middle of it was that, because I wasn't touring full time and I wasn't, I wasn't gone every week, I've got to spend an entire year each week visiting with my grandchildren and my daughters and their families who live in the same valley here in Phoenix, where I live in, in Scottsdale. And, so that's been an amazing gift.
The other thing is, God knows the number of our days. As I said, whether, my, you know, the babies went home from the womb at five months, or my grandmother who was 99 before she passed, um. My father died during the pandemic. And… it was very, very painful to, to lose my dad. He's been my daddy my whole life, and just an amazing man of faith, and stronger… I… he's one of these guys that's not going to die. Right. Because he's, he's Ted. And, um. When he died, it was really painful. Still is.
But…. The gift that came out of the pandemic is that God knew when my daddy was going home. He knew when, when his days were finished on this earth. And he knew that my mom was not going to handle that very well on her own that she was going to need more support than what would have been expected, I guess.
And so, to be here during that time when my mother needed me the most, and to be the one that, you know, I felt like my father's passing was like the band-aid getting ripped off from my mom, and somebody had to be there to let the healing start, and um… in very many ways I was the one that had to pull off the band-aid and be there for that time of healing and to help her transition that new, that new life.
And so, um. I believe in a lot of ways, the pandemic has been maybe a bit more refining, as far as my desire to share the truth with people, my desire to share the faith with people has gone deeper than I thought it ever would. Which is kind of the opposite of what I had expected. One of my pet peeves—and I apologize profusely to anyone that I'm going to insult, because I know I'm going to, um. But it drew… it drives me crazy when I hear people say things like, “Well, I'm going to go to church this morning, sitting in my living room in my pajamas.”
You know, we've become a spectator sport instead of, okay. Yeah. Maybe you can't get up and go to a church for part of the pandemic, but that didn't mean that you couldn't get up, get dressed, look the most presentable that you would be to encounter God—even if you are watching mass or whatever your church service is, or, you know, whatever on television, we still need to put ourselves in that place of accepting his grace and an honoring him as our King of kings.
And, so for me, the pandemic has just taught me that there, there are those who love the feel-good Jesus, and there are those that need to encounter a time of, a time of drought in order to realize that they're thirsting.
Julie: And so in a lot of ways, I'm grateful for the pandemic because I believe as we come back to church, as we come back to groups of people that are there to honor and praise God together, we're going to do it with 100% sincerity and not lukewarm.
I feel like we've gone from John 3:16 to Revelation 3:16, and that would be, you know, “For God do loved the world that he gave us His only son that whoever believes in him will live.”
That's, that's nice. That's pretty, that's comforting.
But in Revelation 3:16, it says, “Hot or cold—but the lukewarm I'm going to spew from my mouth.” And I want to be on fire for God, and I feel like the pandemic has brought me to that place.
Wilson: As you're talking about that, it also makes me think, um. What, what the gift of God's grace to all of us in our adversity opens up and makes possible for us for a fuller life that, without tasting that it would just be experienced as like, as like a burden or a requirement, but now it kind of begins to reveal it to my vision as a, as a genuine opportunity for a fuller life.
Because, like, we all know we come alive when we help. When we bear each other's burdens. And, when, when we've been brought— because there, there is suffering that is just unfathomable, right? And even in John chapter 9, right? When the, with the blind man, the first question is like, “Why? Who, who's responsible for this?”
And, and when you get to that place where you've, you've experienced the unfathomable suffering and the even greater, even more unfathomable, grace of God in that place, it allows you to look around and go, “But that suffering makes some sense and I can do something about it.” If you'll look around and notice, right?
And this, because I'm thinking, you know, in this, how grateful I am, that even just as simple as I have a home to get claustrophobic in, right? The, and that I have kids that can be on top of me in this house all the time and, and drive me nuts… even those things are a grace and a lot of people don't have that.
And, and where God has met me, in that time where I thought, “Oh, good.” Right. If there's any, if there's any way that I could begin to rationalize or justify not noticing and not helping, God's grace not only meets me in that place, but also challenges that, and says, like, “But for them and for you, I am, I am more gracious.”
And so I, I hear this as a—and again, please don't hear this as a burden, and everyone: you have permission to take a deep breath and just rest, because this is an incredibly difficult time. But you take that, and you receive that grace and that gives you permission to know like, “But I don't just have to stop living.”
And part of living is noticing who doesn't have what I have. What suffering is explainable and what could I do? And in what small way could I step out and do that? And that's just another thing, like we're talking about, the—letting the Eucharist, Christ’s life and presence, fuel us and flow out of us to, again, to, just like we're talking about, be a—like you are, and like your book is a testament to, a living witness to, the— a sign pointing to the truth that God's grace and mercy is bigger and is able to handle and overcome whatever adversity we're facing.
Julie: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s, that’s perfection. That is.
Wilson: Sainthood—holiness, right? Christ, Christ’s glory shining through us.