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Here humans craft and share their personal, compelling, beautiful, sometimes difficult 17 minute story of when God got real in their life and how that experience changed them. Following their story, they consider with host Sarah Hollar how their experience continues to affect them in their relationships, their sense of self and their way in the world.
Happy New Year, dear ones. Here's hoping you are well this day.
Here's hoping you have located calls for hope in 2026.
This episode is my story of how and why this podcast came to be and how sometimes
we become aware of God getting real in our lives over time.
Sometimes it's not
a prayer for medical intervention or the
absence of catastrophe or a
vision or a family trauma
redeemed or an awakening
to a deeper connection with God Sometimes we see God's hand in an idea that
comes upon us and won't let us go that lies dormant and then returns and comes
to fruition in unexpected,
strangely effortless ways.
Sometimes God gets real for us when away in the wilderness of our wanderings
and musings and wouldn't it be nice ifs become clearer and more than we imagined.
The conversation following the story is between me and my friend and colleague, Deborah Warner.
We met at a serious conference and on breaks, laughed at each other's BHAG.
Here's hoping you find your time here encouraging and well spent.
In the beginning. In the beginning is a great phrase.
It's expressive, direct, and familiar.
It sets us up to hear something important.
It's also timeless. It's a phrase that tribal elders would use when the hunters
and the gatherers and the healers and the children came around the common fire
and leaned in to hear their origin stories,
leaned in to hear how the world came to be,
leaned in to hear the who, the what, that was responsible for their life,
all life, and the order of their universe.
In the beginning is a unique feature of the human experience.
We are thus species that has a concept of time, of beginnings and endings,
of befores, and the consequences of the afters.
In the beginning signals we are about to hear a story, an event that happened
in time, was witnessed, and had meaning and matter to real people.
In the beginning of this podcast idea, I was a little girl whose father was
studying to become a professor of American literature.
Because he loved good stories and me, he told me great tales, the classics.
Because I loved him, I listened and came to love those stories.
Even more than any particular story, I came to love the idea of stories.
They taught me how the world works. They taught me how humans interpret the world.
They taught me how humans are complex, complex, extremely complex beings.
I got taken to church, and there I heard fantastical stories.
Some engaged my imagination. Some brought me comfort.
Some confused me.
Interestingly, I never felt easy asking about the confusing ones.
I got the sense that their meaning was meant to be self-evident,
and somehow I was lacking in not getting the meaning.
I wished I had been braver with my curiosity.
I think I would have grown deeper and faster in my faith if I had asked the
practical application of pigs running off the edge of cliffs.
Maybe not, but I'm guessing I would have accepted the inherent mystery of faith easier and sooner.
Later, after studying psychology and sociology and having lived longer in the
world, I understood more about our species and our shared humanity.
And I still love stories because they gave real-time, real examples of how our
brains, hearts, and souls work.
I became a true fan of TED Talks and the Moth Radio Hour.
I was moved and curious and elevated by people's capacity to weather struggles,
to evolve, to forgive, to extinguish grace, to examine their failings and foibles,
to locate their passions and skills,
to begin again, to imagine new ways of doing things,
to change perspectives,
to persist, to grieve, to risk, to love.
I found that data and research inform me, but stories, stories transform me.
So, about five years after seminary and ordination, and serving the church,
and loving God, and loving God's people, it came to me.
We studied the Bible together. We experienced the sacraments together.
We baptized and confirmed and married and buried.
We held hands in hospitals and sighed in pastoral conversations.
We were connected. We knew about each other's families and jobs and skills and hobbies.
We had a sense of each other's faith. and we had never told each other our stories
of when God got real for us.
We hadn't shared the event, the circumstance.
The time when out of nowhere or from somewhere unexpectedly timed,
God showed up in a perceptible,
undeniable way, showed up in that way that moved us or changed outcomes or showed
a way forward or saved us or a loved one from harm or folly or gave us a flash of insight.
We hadn't shared that thing so real and true and meaningful with each other.
I wondered, why not?
The reason for our relationship was a shared belief, a shared value,
that there is a God, and that God is active and interested in our well-being.
So, why hadn't we told each other the events when God proved and satisfied our
need for active presence?
Did we not remember the occasion? Did we not trust our interpretation?
Did we not trust each other to hold the story respectfully?
Did it not matter? Or did it matter too much?
Did we not know how or when to share our story?
Ah, maybe that's the answer.
We don't sit as communities around fires under the night skies anymore.
We don't have skilled, trusted, designated keepers of the stories anymore.
They don't model the sharing. They don't call us to follow their example.
It came to me that TED Talks and the Moth Hour provide a platform and offer
powerful human experiences,
but they rarely, if ever, explicitly evoke the name of God or a divine presence in their experience.
That's not their discerned mission.
I thought maybe, maybe, maybe I could follow their protocol to the letter and
make a God-in-my-life model available.
I tested the notion out with a few friends and colleagues, and they were polite.
A couple of folk were even enthusiastic.
Like me, some wondered about the overhead and the funding and the marketing.
And then there was a new church building to be built and a new ministry,
a bold out-of-our-comfort-zone ministry to launch, soon interrupted by a pandemic.
And I got tired or complacent or maybe unconsciously,
definitely unconsciously, I was waiting on the Lord.
So no movement on sharing stories of God active in our lives until there was movement.
The week after this Easter, I was working on the next Sunday's sermon,
and my mind wandered to how in the world did the good news of Jesus Christ ever
make its way out of Jerusalem?
Everything in the narrative suggests it should have died right then and there.
Ten original, all-in followers were locked in a room devastated by the murder of their leader.
Shot, legitimately fearing for their lives, ill-equipped, under-financed,
no supportive resources or institutional legitimacy at their disposal.
Outside those doors, they faced cynics, skeptics,
disinclined authoritative figures, and severe penalties for speaking disruptive messages.
To my mind, there is no logical human rationale for their continued discipleship.
God, God had gotten real for them.
They had these inarguable experiences that were significant and true, true for them.
They could not, could not do other than share their stories.
They had no control over how their stories would be received.
They had no control over the ongoing effects of their stories.
It was their mighty truth, and it shaped their lives and their relationships until the day they died,
and their story lived on thereafter.
It is my deeply held belief and my lived experience that God is present,
actively working for good in all lives.
It is the essential nature of God to be about that very thing.
How we recognize, how we make meaning of God's active participation in our lives is between us and God.
It seems to be the nature of God is to come to us in ways that align with how
God has wired each one of us.
Our stories are true to us.
It is a wonder and a mystery that our experiences of God getting real in our lives are so varied.
This is a testament to God's vastness, God's expansive ability to love each
life uniquely and sufficiently.
It is a wonder and a mystery worthy to be contemplated.
Our stories, personal and distinctive, are gifts.
Gifts to be treasured. gifts to be shared for encouragement and for recognition
of a common human experience.
It is not the first or the most dramatic or the most significant time that God got real in my life.
But that sermon prep musing led to a few 3 o'clock a.m.
Wake-ups and a nagging urge to pursue collecting stories and inviting people
to make connections with them.
And to make connections between their own, like, and others' dissimilar stories.
From a persistent musing to a side dinner conversation with a national church
mover and shaker to a 90-second elevator speech with another innovative,
resourced churchman to conversations with an astute, less can be enough podcast producer,
to a call to trusting friends.
Will you trust God in this and share your story? Came there brave, yes.
In the beginning, in the beginning was God.
And the beginning was so good, it was sufficient.
And God said, we need not keep this goodness contained unto ourselves.
So, life was brought forth and the stories, the beautiful, encouraging, heartbreaking,
worrisome, angst-provoking, redeemed, reconciled stories followed.
And the stories remind us who and whose we are and the stories give us hope.
In the beginning, it was good.
We need stories to remind us It continues to be good.
Thank you so much, Sarah, for the honor of sharing this conversation.
It's really a privilege to see you in terms of into your soul through these
kinds of conversations.
So I love the way you begin.
I love how you say in the beginning because those are such powerful words.
So, Sarah, what are some of the beginnings in your life?
Ah well it's interesting to me because i hadn't thought about this before but
i when i think of the most important beginnings in my life they are when god
got real moments so i have this great story,
great to me, of when I was seven, and it involves a tiara and a wand and a pink tutu and a chicken pox.
And I have a beginning, that was the beginning of me understanding God being present in my life.
I had this beginning when I was a sophomore in college, and I took a psychology
course, and part of the requirements was to write an autobiography and predict
where we wanted to be in 10 years.
And I wrote something where I had no idea that I had been thinking about that.
And it changed the course of my life, but it was like 25 years later.
And I had a conversation on a family vacation on the beach, the North Carolina beach.
And I had a conversation where God issued a real call to me to the priesthood.
I had a beginning when I had worked my way through a trauma with a family member
and had a real sense of the theology of surrender.
And that has continued, understanding that has continued how I lived my life in the world since.
I had a beginning as a result of the traumatic death of my father.
And all these, I was changed and transformed by these.
But there was an instance when God got real that initiated the beginning for me.
What's so interesting about that is that those beginnings were not endings.
They've continued in one way or another and sort of deepened your sense of understanding
of yourself and your relationship with God.
That there's a deepening, like a digging into the soil of your soul. Exactly.
Exactly. And that's something I'm really fascinated about, that when God got
real incidences or occurrences, they're not one-and-done kind of things.
My experience is, and what I hear in other people's is that,
oh, there's a recognition of some ongoingness about them. Yes. Yes.
Well, one of the things that I really found moving about your story itself was
the fact that it is a story,
that you gather the importance of that.
That stories are key in terms of teaching us something about ourselves and the
world and our relationship to God,
however we understand God to be or not.
It engages our imagination and piques our curiosity.
But I was also very moved by your honesty.
And admitting that you,
early on, you got a sense when you were in church that the meaning of stories,
say parables, stories with a teaching,
they're self-evident.
But I'm just not, I'm just lacking in understanding their meaning.
And then you use this wonderful phrase, you said, I wish I had been braver with my curiosity.
So, what role does bravery play in stories, and especially when one has a sense
of the holy in one's life?
So i think it's really interesting that one of the phrases that gets used over
and over and over and over again in our holy scripture is be not afraid,
Because I think that it is a universal truth of our species of humanity that
we have a propensity to be afraid.
And often it doesn't have to do with survival. It has to do with an unease,
a sense that we're not enough. We don't have what we need to manage the situation.
We have a fear, an unease of not being accepted.
We have an unease about not knowing the outcome.
We have an unease. We don't trust that the bottom's going to hold,
that this event or something is going to overwhelm us, right?
Yes. And all good stories seem to deal with either a conflict or navigating through the unknown.
Yes. Right? So, bravery, I guess, is the essential, I mean,
is a strategy or a quality that deals with that unease, that fear, right? Yeah.
It has, it, it also, the way you describe it, it sounds like the role of that
bravery and trust go hand in hand. Yes.
And, um, so that's, and that's so important, um, to think about, um.
That, for instance, if somebody's going into a dangerous situation and they're
being brave, they're trusting that they will be all right however things work out,
that somebody else will come and be with them or,
heaven forbid,
as the phrase goes,
They will, their family will be taken care of.
There's a very moving prayer for firemen who, that is, it's a prayer that's for firemen.
And it says, you know, if I am not to come home, that sense of caring for my family.
And it's just, it puts it right there. Um, so, um, so I think you're absolutely right.
I think that bravery and trust, um, are partners in this, in this journey.
One of the things you talk about, which is so interesting for nowadays,
um, because we don't gather around campfires.
Um we don't we you know
we will gather around dining room tables sometimes or
strike up a conversation with friends around something
um say it's a
even if it's you know you're waiting for
a plane and you're you know it
seems interminable to the you know
to keep delaying it and all of a sudden people start telling can
tell stories but we don't do
that often um but there are venues
of popularity such as the ted talks and
the um moth radio hour that
are are popular because they do um offer this telling of the story and honoring
that um so um here's a sort of an Interesting question, I think,
because one, it's the nature of the way this podcast is.
The fact that people aren't seeing each other, but they're hearing a story.
Do you think that makes a difference?
I have two thoughts about that. One is, there's research that says,
if you want to know what's really going on in your teenager's mind,
get in the car and drive together.
Because it's intimate, but you're not looking at each other.
You can't look at each other. And there's something else you have to be paying attention to.
And so that sort of takes away a sense of vulnerability.
And I think it certainly may be a little bit easier for the storyteller to just
be focused on the story and not being aware of the reaction of what's being
told. Because you're very vulnerable.
You're talking about something ineffable.
You're talking about something that is all your perception, and it's very, very personal.
I think it is the most—our relationship with God,
whatever that's—or divinity or supreme being, it is probably the most intimate
relationship of our lives.
Yes. And so to talk about it, you know, that involves a lot of trust.
So, yes, I think that the idea, I mean, it may be easier.
Also, it's right now in our culture, the technology we had, it also is very
accessible for people, right?
A lot of people listen to podcasts as they're driving to work and back.
And so just hearing is the medium, the way they received the story. Yes.
So I want to shift now. I want to talk about the role of stories in your life, in the sharing of faith.
So, and when God got real, do you think it's, in a sense, you've talked about
this just now, but do you think it's hard for people to talk about when God got real?
I mean, do we have to kind of put ourselves in that mindset of driving a car?
So I think that it is hard to talk.
I think it's hard to talk about when God got real in our culture today because
we haven't practiced it and we haven't seen it modeled.
And right now, I mean, we're living in a dismissive age and what we don't want
to do is, and we see it in social media, in comments, you know,
you say an innocuous thing,
and the comments come back just very dismissive.
So to open up yourself and say, this is my experience of God and it's subjective and not objective.
You haven't seen it modeled. You don't have any control over the response.
So, yes, I think it's a vulnerable ask.
So how can we find places where that sense of vulnerability can be held?
I know you do retreat work. And so, you know, how do you create that space for
people to be able to share?
Um so one the two easiest ways in my mind is one is um if you're like,
um you know the ease you have when you're with people that uh have the same
vocabulary have the same experience have the same interest yes um i mean it's
just natural you there's a level of trust because you know each other centered around,
you know, some commonality.
This is why support groups like AA and NA and all the A's are so effective.
You go in, you say, this is going to be a safe place for me.
There's not going to be judgment.
They know my experience.
The same thing happens, I mean, when you're talking about faith kind of stories,
the same thing can happen in churches.
I mean, the people are gathered there. There's a commonality right then and there.
But also in your families. I have, you know, grandparents will say,
you know, my, you know, church, well, my relationship with God is so important
to me. My church is so important to me.
And it doesn't seem as if it's being passed down to my grandchildren.
And I think, you know, um.
Church is, churches are a place of encouragement, but they're not the thing.
The relationship with God and your sharing and being in deep relationship is
the thing that makes for transformation and bravery and all those things.
So, telling your story to your grandchildren and asking them around the dinner
table or your children themselves,
where did you see God getting real for you today? Where do you imagine that?
Right? Those kind of easy conversations, so it becomes normalized.
Well, it's true. And I think that that also, for me, points to the fact that people,
one of my deepest commitments over my life has been trying to pay attention
in terms of the natural world.
And people will say, well, how do you convince somebody who doesn't believe
in global warming, for example,
how do you tell them the importance of the fact that the world is changing,
the temperature is going up, and there are radical things that are happening because of that?
And I will say to them, ask them where a place that is very sacred to them and
very special to them to describe it.
Because I think that that is a way of disarming the I'm right, you're wrong.
And you're inviting them to tell you, in fact, a story about a place.
And then I will often say.
And what this conversation is, the importance of this, is so that our grandchildren,
the generations that come after us, can go to those places, can pass those stories
on, can pass the sacredness of that space on.
Because for so many people who don't want to go into the church,
who want to go into a religious building,
to look around, to go on a walk on the beach, to go to the mountains,
or even to see when things seem to be just hard in their lives and they're in
a city and they suddenly,
you know, they see a tree thriving.
Somehow, in terms of that, of the ground.
So, you know, I think that the sense of passing on the story can be done in so many different ways.
It's just being open to passing that on in traditional and non-traditional kinds of ways.
So I just I want to I
think it's probably should and you know
head towards the end of this conversations but I
want to go back to the fact about bravery in
storytelling and trust and
I want to thank you because you um had
a dream about how can you
have these conversations the importance
of those conversations in your life but how can
you invite other people in the sharing of that space
and creating that and so this
idea about this podcast when God
got real that came into being so I want to thank you for your bravery and for
those who are and continue to support you in that work But I also want to end
with your reading again,
how you understand and know God to be a God who holds all,
no matter what it is or who it is.
But God holds all within God's goodness and grace and love.
So would you be so kind as to reread that, please? That's lovely. Thank you. Thank you.
In the beginning, in the beginning was God, and the beginning was so good, it was sufficient.
And God said, we need not keep this goodness contained unto ourselves.
So, life was brought forth, and the stories, the beautiful, encouraging, heartbreaking,
worrisome, angst-provoking, redeemed, reconciled stories followed.
And the stories remind us who and whose we are.
And the stories give us hope.
In the beginning, it was good.
We need stories to remind us it continues to be good.
Thank you so much, Sarah, for this privilege of sharing this sacred conversation
and the sharing of stories with you.
Thank you, my friend. Thank you for your yes.
It's very meaningful to me. So thank you. You're very welcome.
Thank you, listeners and subscribers. Thank you for your time,
attention, and ponderings.
I invite your comments and reviews I also invite you to share your story of
when God got real Send them along to sarah at whengodgotreal.com,
Until next time, breathe and be well.