That small sting is where this conversation begins. Change always costs something, and a lot of what it costs is relational. Over the past several years, both of us have moved a long way from the faith we were raised in. For Ryan, it was a shift from searching for the one true story to asking how to live well when no one really knows. For Jennie, it came through years of being told no, wait, or move over, until she finally said, "I can't do church anymore." She was in her last semester of seminary, writing a capstone paper arguing that community was the missing element in spiritual formation, while we were walking away from ours.

We didn't only leave a church. We moved into a different world from many of the people we love. Distance like that is rarely announced. It shows up in a forgotten detail, or in a question like "Who's the common denominator?"

Not changing would have cost us something too. We would have kept our heads down, ignored the pain, and kept living within limits on who we were allowed to become. And change has opened things up. Jennie describes it as walking out of a slot canyon onto open plains. We see people and their stories differently now, with curiosity instead of an agenda.

What we're still learning is how to stay close to people who are still where we used to be. We don't think the two worlds can be fully bridged. What we can do is notice when something hurts, ask why, and keep showing up as the people we want to be. Maybe that's what grief asks of us: not to forget what we've lost, but to make room for it in the life we're living now.

Moments

• 0:00 — A dimmed smile on a FaceTime call
• 3:48 — "I don't think anyone knows, so now what?"
• 9:53 — Writing about community while walking away from ours
• 18:18 — The difference between a pastor and a prophet
• 21:33 — "What should I do?" and what no one can promise us
• 28:33 — Out of the slot canyon, onto the open plains
• 31:18 — Staying close to people still inside the system
• 35:50 — Grief as integration, not forgetting

Questions to Sit With

• What has a change in your life cost you, and what did it make possible?
• What would it have cost you not to change?
• Where do you feel distance from someone you love, and what might that distance be asking of you?
• How has someone else's change landed on you?

Mentioned in This Episode

Todd
A mentor who once told Ryan there's a big difference between a pastor and a prophet.

Pink Floyd, "Is There Anybody Out There?"
Stuck in our heads by the end.

Keep Reading

• Why are Questions so Threatening? — Episode 2, which this conversation keeps circling back to.
• Lose the Script — Jennie on her dissertation defense, the UNFOLD Model, and the ordination question.
• Whatever Purity Meant

In this episode, Jennie and Ryan talk about the very different lessons we learned about questions growing up. Jennie learned early that questioning could mean challenging authority, and that doing so might come with a cost. Ryan grew up almost on the opposite side of that, encouraged to question things and slow to realize that other people might experience my questions as threatening.

From there, we get into what questions can actually do. They make us look more closely at the stories, beliefs, relationships, and systems we inherited. And once we begin to really look, change becomes possible. That can be freeing, but it can also be deeply destabilizing.

We talk about Jennie’s experience growing up in conservative evangelicalism, Ryan's history of questioning authority, the ways those patterns have shown up in our marriage, and why lasting change seems to require more than simply deciding to think or behave differently.

Eventually we find ourselves asking what makes it possible to question and change without immediately becoming defensive or retreating into certainty. We come back to trust, curiosity, relationship, and the willingness to believe that another person might have something to teach us.

Maybe part of learning to live the questions is becoming open to being changed by our encounters with other human beings.

On Unfolding: Learning to Live the Questions is a conversation about faith, family, therapy, culture, and the stories that shape who we are and who we are becoming.

Learn more at https://theunfold.ing

The conversation moves through evangelical Christianity and faith deconstruction, attachment, Internal Family Systems, parenting, mental health, identity, and the ways our relationships shape how we understand ourselves.

Along the way, we return to a few questions that have become important to us:

What kind of person do I want to be?

Who am I becoming?

What am I responsible for?

Who are the safe people in my life?

What stories have shaped the way I understand myself?

How do we create space for the people we love to grow and change?

We also talk about childhood experiences that shaped our relationships with certainty, Jennie’s experience of interpreting panic attacks through the language of spiritual warfare, Ryan’s memories of stealing Micro Machines as a seven-year-old and the way his father later helped him see that story differently, and a conversation with our daughter about the difference between the loud stories we tell about someone and the quieter stories that can get lost.

Near the end, we talk about one of the ideas at the heart of this project: creating a safe place for others to find their own lonely way in the world.

Life can be lonely, even inside good relationships. Sometimes what another person needs is not an answer or a solution. Sometimes it is simply someone willing to sit beside them and say, “I’m here.”

In this episode

• Learning to “live the questions” and Rainer Maria Rilke
• Growing up with religious certainty
• Faith deconstruction and learning to trust yourself
• Attachment, safety, and relationships
• Internal Family Systems and adaptive behavior
• Shame and the stories we tell about ourselves
• Spiritual warfare, panic attacks, and competing ways of making meaning
• Parenting adult children and listening without becoming defensive
• The stories parents tell about their children
• Loneliness, connection, and why we are making this podcast

Mentioned

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Thomas Merton
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Attachment theory

Read the show notes and full transcript at theunfold.ing.