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It's not about what you believe. Anita Wing Lee dives deep into the layers of grief and trauma that pushed her to leave the Christian faith as a teenager and kept her away for years.
Anita Wing Lee has spent a decade as content creator -- blogging, filming, snapping, live streaming, editing and publishing her way around the world. Since the age of 21, she's told stories from dozens of countries, confronted inequality and injustice, shared her spiritual journey, and aspired to be a voice for good.
But behind the Instagram and YouTube videos, there was something she never talked about: God had let her down.
A supernatural encounter in 2017 forced her to stop traveling, demolished her fledgling career, and left her with no option but to come back to Toronto where she found herself working at church.
When she enrolled in a Master's of divinity at Tyndale University, she wasn't trying to become holy or a pastor.
It was just unfinished business.
They call it deconstruction. She calls it seeking the truth. This is her story.
Anita Wing Lee 00:00
Heavenly Minded Earthly Good deals with topics including but not limited to drama, self harm, suicide, grief, and other painful issues. Listener Discretion is advised.
Anita Wing Lee 00:16
I knew I had to find a church. It wasn't that I wanted to be a Christian again. I was afraid of this intelligent cosmic being who had found me in Eastern Europe. While I was living my dream, destroyed all of my plans and forced me to come back to Toronto in the summer of 2017. And because I grew up Christian, I assumed that this being was named God. If I didn't want to get on God's bad side again, I better go to church. Serendipitously, one of my friends also rediscovered God that summer, under circumstances completely separate from my own. We decided to go church hopping together until we found one that we liked and would commit to. For several weeks, we visited churches all around the Toronto area, and assessed things like their worship, the lobby, the seats, the pastor sense of humor.
Anita Wing Lee 01:10
Oh, hi, everybody, and welcome to our service today. And I am so glad that you're able to join us.
Anita Wing Lee 01:15
I settled on a church about 10 minutes from where my parents lived. It was good enough. But before committing to attending this church every single Sunday, I thought I'd make one last Google search to see what was out there. I typed in four words, Toronto church, young adults. Up came the website of a church called Catch the fire. Their website was polished. I have never heard of this church. But it must be big, big enough to have a nice website. I scrolled to the bottom of the homepage and noticed a link called careers. The churches that I grew up in weren't big enough to have a careers tab on their website, let alone a nice website. Out of curiosity, I clicked the link.
Anita Wing Lee 02:04
There was one job posting for a junior website graphics designer. As I read the bullet point descriptions, my jaw dropped. What everything that they were asking for in the job description was something I could do. Because of the years I've spent as a traveling content creator. This was for me. I came back to Toronto ready to quit being a content creator. I was ashamed and confused about everything I'd ever produced and posted online. Maybe God had other plans for me. The deadline for the job application was two days ago, so I didn't have time to think. I emailed over my resume and waited. After a few days of hearing nothing, I thought I should send them an explanation. After all, my portfolio was full of yoga videos, and promos or retreat centers, rather hippie looking places, not exactly church material. So I wrote up a testimony and told them what had happened to me in Montenegro, how I had surrendered to God and waited again. Three weeks later, I walked into the offices of catch the fire and picked up my staff badge.
Anita Wing Lee 03:28
Tyndale University presents Heavenly Minded Earthly Good. Deconstruction is the word commonly used for the process of critically dissecting your Christian beliefs.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 03:39
For some in the church deconstruction is kind of the new bad word of backsliding or apostasy or heresy.
Anita Wing Lee 03:47
Churches tend to assume that deconstruction is an intellectual issue. But it's intertwined with all these other layers of what makes us human.
Dr. Helen Noh 03:55
What makes up a person is things like their cognitive layers, right? Their emotional layers, their behavioral layers and their relational layers.
Anita Wing Lee 04:04
And this podcast follows my personal journey through deconstruction. Along the way, we're going to chat with professors, pastors, psychologists, researchers, historians and artists.
Tara Jean Stevens 04:16
But I was still really struggling with the fact that if I was wrong, I might be going to help.
Anita Wing Lee 04:24
We'll explore the questions so many of us have about Christianity. The stuff you probably didn't feel comfortable bringing up on Sunday at youth group or small group. I'm your host and guide for this journey. And Anita Wing Lee
John Arnott 04:40
When he said, If anyone would like prayer, just come on up. And I'd be happy to pray for you. And as people sort of, yeah, I think I'll go up and they went to stand up and it was like a bomb exploded in the room.
Carol Arnott 04:54
We figured out what it meant to have the Holy Spirit fall. Chaba because he fell sovereignly people at the back at the front, everywhere, where we're flipping in their seats in between the the rows in the aisles.
Anita Wing Lee 05:15
That's John and Carol Arnott, founding pastors of Catch The Fire. It's a church with a peculiar history. On January 20, 1994, the Holy Spirit showed up during a church service. And people fell to the ground laughing, crying, stuck to the carpet and unable to get up all of what you have. They call this a move of the Holy Spirit, and it turned into a worldwide phenomenon known as the Toronto Blessing. During these revival services, people experienced miracles had their bodies healed, people would fall to the ground looking like they passed out, but wake up a couple of minutes or even hours later, saying they had a life changing vision with Jesus. News of these events spread around the world, drawing praise and skepticism. Some were critical of what was happening, saying that it was demonic, and others were excited that the Holy Spirit was showing up in Toronto. Here's how Dr. James Tyler Robertson, author and assistant professor of Christian history at Tyndale University explains the impact of the Toronto Blessing.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 06:29
The week it left, the influence that had was truly massive. It was a revival that lasted for 12 years, six nights a week people had these crazy and I don't mean crazy in mentally dismissive. I mean just like almost inexplicable interactions with the Spirit. It was powerful. It inspired the largest revival in American history, which is huge. It captured the attention of Europe for a Canadian expression that's very rare to have such an influence over America and Europe. It inspired churches all across this land, it was truly a global expression of charismatic Christianity.
Anita Wing Lee 07:09
Charismatic Christianity is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including healing prophecies speaking in tongues and miracles. charismatics, pursue baptism of the Holy Spirit, which can manifest in all kinds of supernatural ways. The Toronto Blessing put this church, which was known at the time as Toronto Airport vineyard church, on the map around the world. It was so famous that at one point, it topped the rankings for Google search when someone typed in church. Today, it still exists as a network of churches called Catch The Fire Partners. And while the things that happen at a typical Sunday service today aren't quite as bizarre as they used to be, it's still unique compared to the churches that I grew up in. But I didn't know any of this history. And when I got the job, I was so clueless I thought charismatic was an adjective like, you know, charming, mesmerizing, loud, outspoken. I grew up in reserved Chinese churches, it was rare to see someone lift their hands and worship, whereas the catch to the fire, people were dancing in the back. I learned about this church's history through the marketing materials that I had to create, by God, the sense that God had put me in this church for a specific reason. It was like he was reintroducing himself to me. I got to know a side of God I had never known before.
Steve Long 08:43
But our new vision statement is this encounter God's transforming presence, that's our new our new words encounter, God's transforming presence,
Anita Wing Lee 08:53
At catch the fire. There's a lot of talk about encountering God. Here's a clip from a promo video I produced for the church. And it's how I figured out what an encounter is.
Various Pastors of Catch The Fire 09:05
Encounter is a defining moment in your life. It's where God crashes in on us and we're never the same again when he meets me face to face and I feel accepted.
Steve Long 09:18
Encounter is the moment when God becomes very real, very tangible. You feel him with your physical body, with your mind with your spirit.
Anita Wing Lee 09:29
Think of Paul getting blinded by light and hearing the voice of God on Damascus Road, or Mary Magdalene getting freed from seventh demons or Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. The Bible is full of stories where the supernatural intersects with this reality. Something that catches the fire calls, encountering God in the churches that I grew up in no one ever expected God to physically show up, knock people down or heal cancer instantly. But at this church, not only did they expect God to show up, they really wanted it to happen. I told a few people at the church about what happened to me in Montenegro. And no one was faced. It was like they knew, Okay, you had an encounter with God. Many of them had stories of their own strange experiences where they encountered God and their lives changed.
Anita Wing Lee 10:26
People or catch the fire would often use the phrase God crashed into my world or his world or our world. And I understood that here and counters were seen as a good thing. People who didn't have encounters wished they could have won, wait, hold up. encounters with God, are a good thing. My encounter with God shattered my life. Whereas most people told stories about how their lives got better after their encounter. Most people felt this overwhelming sense of love. I had felt this overwhelming sense of terror. But the end result, some kind of revelation about God was similar. I got the sense that God had brought me to this church so that I could understand what happened to me. If I had ended up at another church, it could have taken me much longer to find this language of encountering God. Did I just get into a funk in Montenegro? Did I just have a bad trip with no drugs? No. It was an encounter with God.
Anita Wing Lee 11:39
Maybe I was blessed to have this encounter. Young adults flew in from around the world to study at this churches school of ministry. Pastors made annual pilgrimages to our conferences, to be refreshed and filled in the spirit of North America's most famous Christian leaders raved about the impact of the Toronto Blessing and catch the fire. Now I was right in the center of it all. Like God was telling me here and Anita rest. Take your time, slow down. Yeah, use some of your creativity, but mostly just get to know me again. Catch the fire gave me a basic explanation for what happened in Montenegro. Okay, it was an encounter with God. It made it seem less strange and even a good thing. But having an explanation for it didn't change the part of me that felt sad and disappointed. I felt this perpetual sense of loss. Like I lost something that was precious to me. And I didn't know what to do about it.
Anita Wing Lee 12:58
I sat down for a conversation with Lyndsay Thompson, a registered psychotherapist and an instructor in Tyndale is clinical counseling and thanatology programs. Thanatology is the study of death, dying grief, and bereavement. It looks at death from many perspectives, including physical, ethical, spiritual, medical, sociological, and psychological. I explained to Lyndsay, how I felt conflicting emotions, and asked her if it was related to grief. Heads up, I was just getting over COVID-19 When we did this interview, so I sound hoarser than normal.
Anita Wing Lee 13:36
Because I almost felt like in Christianity, the whole concept of salvation, you're not like once you're saved or something, you're just supposed to be grateful to God. Like I should be grateful to God, but I'm not allowed to be sad about what what I lost and what was precious to me. And I felt like we're
Lyndsay Thompson 13:54
Or there's like this type of loss that like, only those people are allowed to be sad. So yeah, I'd say that that's grief. Grief is the process of, yeah, our body feeling or going through the process of experiencing a loss. Again, I don't think loss is death related or has to be completely death related at all. I think it can be anything that was meaningful to us that in a way has changed or is no longer and so you are describing dreams purpose, community identity, thoughts for your future are all either lost or drastically changed.
Anita Wing Lee 14:44
Lindsay explained to me that the process of grief is not at all linear. It can take a long time, which might explain why I sometimes felt like I was making progress and I would feel better and hopeful, only to have other days where I felt hurt. Have you with sadness?
Lyndsay Thompson 15:01
Back in the day, Kubler-Ross had this idea that grief had these like stages, stages of grief, right? So she was like, Okay, it's a sort of linear process, and you go through one stage to get to the next to get to the next and then you move through it.
Anita Wing Lee 15:15
And those five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Lyndsay Thompson 15:21
That's kind of been dispelled at this point. And we're realizing like grief is not linear at all, right? It is not this straight line. And then when we make it to the end, we all feel good. It's like this completely different. Like, I'm moving my hand around that's like squiggly lines, like it's all over the place. So first of all, I think that there is this place for permission, to feel and to not expect things to have to be linear. And I think that doesn't mean like wallowing and self pity, and there's woe is me state, but I think it is saying, like, offering yourself a bit of self compassion going, Hey, this is hard. This doesn't make sense. I'm going to pay attention to it, I'm gonna honor it, I'm going to feel it. I'm gonna work through this. But to also give yourself space to go, Hey, this might take some time and it might not make sense. So sort of juxtaposing that thought onto this deconstruction is like, as you're going through the process of deconstruction, which is crazy in and of itself, like putting on top of that, hey, you're gonna feel a ton of emotions and the fact that like, that's also crazy, is okay.
Anita Wing Lee 16:29
What if I've been experiencing grief, and not just grief about what happened in Montenegro and what I lost there? But what if I've been grieving for a very long time? I was sad about what happened in Montenegro. Before that encounter with God, I'd spent my years in university and afterwards, traveling the world building the start of a career, I had created an identity for myself, I was my career. I was a filmmaker, a writer. I was my passions. I was my personality. I was adventurous, honest, bold. I was brave. I had created an entire website and online personality that reflected who I was, or who I thought I was. Now, after Montenegro, I had no idea who I was anymore. I felt like God took all of that away, but didn't kill me, and just plopped me in front of a church. I felt like I'd lost my friends around the world, my job. This life I had created making content. And I actually liked that life. So working at a church sitting in front of a computer in an office most days of the week, and spending my mornings on the highway driving across Toronto in rush hour. This was a life that constantly reminded me of what I no longer had. I came back to Toronto in the summer of 2017.
Anita Wing Lee 17:51
But it wasn't until the fall of 2019 When I started working with a spiritual director at Tyndale that she identified, I had been grieving. As soon as she said it, I felt in my spirit. Yes, I have been grieving. And finding a word to describe my emotional chaos, suddenly made all the difference. Once I could see that I was grieving about what happened to me. in Montenegro, I realized the grief ran much deeper. As a teenager, when my parents didn't let me go to Hillsong college, I lost a dream of following what I thought was God's call on my life. I had a sense of what I was supposed to do. And I wanted to pursue that at a Christian college. And instead those doors slammed shut. At the time, I decided I clearly can't trust this God anymore. Because this God who's supposed to be sovereign and good, isn't telling me the same thing that he's telling my parents. And if my parents are pastors, and I can't trust them, and I can't trust God, then I'm going to have to trust myself. And that's what I did attempting to carve my own path traveling the world, creating an alternate career.
Anita Wing Lee 19:13
As a teenager trying to grapple with that situation. I didn't have the words or the ability to recognize that I was grieving something. Nobody in my life had died. And I had never lost someone really close to me. But now I realize I had actually lost the most important relationships of my life. That was when I stopped connecting with my parents. And that was when I stopped talking to God. What conversations about deconstruction in the church myth is that when someone has started to see flaws in their Christian beliefs, it means they're losing their sense of identity. Especially if you grew up in a church and you always heard that you were a child of God, a son or daughter of God. And there's this benevolent great being who loves you and is going to take care of you. When something happens, that fractures that relationship, it can set into motion, a process of grieving the entire way you see the world, who you are what gives you purpose, it all falls apart. This must be what happened to me. This is why when someone asks, Is God even real? Does he even care? It's not a small deal. It has huge repercussions in their psychological life. It's like finding out that a parent has died. This emotional process is going to happen in tandem. When someone is deconstructing their faith. In fact, it happens to be the way God made us.
Anita Wing Lee 20:58
Well, yeah, what difference does it make to acknowledge those emotions?
Lyndsay Thompson 21:01
Oh, so big. So I mean, but this is like, such a massive topic is like, what do we do with emotions and emotion? Okay, and it's feeling okay. So, ultimately, emotions and feeling is like, our body's warning system, like our God given warning system with like, hey, something's happening for you and your nervous system, which is like, basically sensing something outside of you. And our emotions are like, hey, something's up. Pay attention to it. And so the fact that I mean, I'm gonna say this, gently. But a lot of us who have grown up in the church was like, fact and faith. Emotions are like, what are the caboose the train thing of your the train analogy, where it's like fact, leads and then faith and then emotions is like the caboose. It doesn't really matter. But that's not true. Right? Like So paying attention to where our body is saying is so massive. And if we don't, I think that's maybe where are you mentioned the word trauma, trauma can come in, in that it's a it's like our body's response to extreme stress. So not paying attention to your emotions, not expressing it is a I mean, part of being holistic, like I think God intended us to feel and to be not be okay with it. I mean, it's hard, but then be like, expressing those is a way towards Holistic Health,
Anita Wing Lee 22:17
Trauma. That's another word that kept coming up for me as I tried to sort out my feelings about God, the church and Christianity. Did I have trauma? What is trauma?
Lyndsay Thompson 22:30
Long and short of it, it's like extreme stress. It's your, your body's experience of extreme stress. So andI Kolber, who wrote this awesome book called try softer, and so she got she says, she's like, okay, there's big T trauma and little T trauma. Big T trauma is things that were like severely life threatening or witnessing it. Right. So I mean, it could be like, violence. It could have been rape, or it could have been like watching violence, that kind of thing, seeing I mean, seeing violence happen, natural disasters, you name it, then there's little T trauma, which is things that we don't necessarily acknowledge as much like bullying, or a breakup, or a loss of a pet or something like that. So either way, it's extreme stress. Again, it's unique to every individual, but it's our body going, Oh, that was really, really painful. And then saying, How do I how do I deal with it?
Anita Wing Lee 23:32
Aundi Kolber defines trauma as what happens when we experience a profound rupture. That could be in safety, relationships, health or reality, and the repair doesn't match the wound.
Lyndsay Thompson 23:46
Okay, so let's let's say like, let's look back on your experience with your parents. What emotions did that leave you with?
Anita Wing Lee 23:56
Betrayal, anger. You like profound disappointment.
Lyndsay Thompson 24:04
Okay, so then what did you do in response to that?
Anita Wing Lee 24:07
Um, I like spiritually and emotionally checked out. Okay. So I like kept going to youth group, but I kept going to church because I had to, but I was just like, like, emotionally like cut off.
Lyndsay Thompson 24:26
Okay. And then what did you do then?
Anita Wing Lee 24:35
I still had friendships I kept going, but that as soon as I like I knew when I went to university, I wouldn't go to church, because I was just like, This is not a space that has anything to offer me anymore.
Lyndsay Thompson 24:46
Okay, so you had this stressor come in. And you felt these really big emotions and as a result of those emotions, your body responds Did your mind responded to say like, I gotta protect myself? And I'm going to protect myself through not engaging? Correct? Okay, yeah. I would call that a little T trauma. You had something happen that profoundly impacted your good. I'm thinking from a neurobiological stance, right, you felt really big emotions. And I think it said to you like, something about this isn't safe. Right? Like, I'm not safe to be I'm not safe to be authentic. I'm not safe to be me. And so as a result, you dealt with it. Right? You dealt with it the best way you knew how it was like, no, not doing it.
Anita Wing Lee 25:48
So I've been traumatized by my experiences and Christianity with the church and my parents. And now I was also grieving, I'd lost my sense of identity, my sense of purpose and security, once as a teenager, and again, after Montenegro. Great. So Christianity has given me a whole lot of grief in life. Now, I was working in a church, the very thing that triggered it all. No wonder I felt so shaken. With all the emotions that were going on inside me, everything from loss to anger, resentment, bitterness, shame. I knew that this wasn't healthy. I was still alive. I was here and I needed to keep moving forward. I had a life to live. So what would it mean for me to not get stuck in grief? How do I move forward? This was the question I kept asking myself. For one, I knew I needed time. One part of me was grieving. And one part was curious, possibly hopeful, possibly hopeful. Working at this church was doing something good for me. It was a place with a lot of grace. The people I worked with were kind good and helpful. I'd always been afraid of toxic workplaces. And it felt like God had put me in the safest place possible. Yeah, maybe I was a prodigal who'd come home and that came with all kinds of mean connotations. Like, look at that rebellious one. But now that I saw how much trauma and grief was a part of my journey, I knew that God didn't look down on me. God had compassion for me. Like the father and the prodigal son story. He had welcomed me home with open arms.
Anita Wing Lee 27:50
I was still working in media field I always wanted to work in and I had a steady paycheck. Not much, but more than before. And I had the most unmistakable sign that this was a gift from God, the name of the church was on every paycheck. So some days I was grateful, glad to be working and alive. And some days, I felt the emptiness of the life I no longer had. In some days, I was just bored. Because office life isn't quite as exciting as riding a bus across the country. But I was alive. And I was definitely healing.
Anita Wing Lee 28:34
It's important to recognize that every individual's journey through grief, emotional healing, or trauma is going to be unique. When churches keep repeating the narrative that people who deconstruct their faith or protocols are rebellious, we're over simplifying the process, and possibly doing harm in someone's spiritual journey. These days, I have a lot of empathy for people who are going through the process of sorting their beliefs out. The process is long, exhausting, disorienting, and usually invisible. We need to give ourselves more space not only to process, the intellectual questions, but also to process all the hurt that we've been through.
Anita Wing Lee 29:24
After a year of working at the church, my mom suggested, Why don't you go study in seminary? I thought, what's the point? I'm already working in a church. People go to seminary to get jobs at a church and I'm already working in one. Still, as soon as my mom suggested it, I had the sense that I was supposed to go. It felt like unfinished business.
Anita Wing Lee 29:58
Wait, hang on. My mic, oh, I think we're okay. I'm not going to stop, just let it keep rolling. Thumbs up, here we go. Welcome to the unpolished part of the podcast, where I chat with Dr. James Taylor Robertson, and we offer you guys some questions and just talk about what stuck out to us from this episode.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 30:18
Question one, what stuck out for you for this episode?
Anita Wing Lee 30:21
Okay, we're getting right into it.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 30:23
How did you feel about it? It was pretty heavy.
Anita Wing Lee 30:26
Yeah, I actually wanted to address this heavy topic right up front. Sorry, if this caught you guys off guard. I hope it didn't. But I think topics like, yes, we're gonna, by the time you're listening to this, there will have been a trigger warning. I think the topic of grief and trauma like these are really heavy things that to be honest, it's really hard for a pastor to address in a 20 or 30 minute sermon. So personally, I've never heard about it unpacked in church in a meaningful way. But as you can tell from this episode, it took me a couple years to realize that this was happening to me. And it's something I'm still processing. And I think it really needs to be acknowledged, because if you've ever met someone who's deconstructing, or you're doing it yourself, you know that there's a lot of emotion in it. It's not just about the questions, there's like this part of your spirit that is broken, that is angry, and we need to give space for those emotions. And one of the ways that that manifests is through grief.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 31:24
Yeah. Okay. Interesting. That part that stuck out a lot for me, too, is this whole idea about the experience with God, and I liked it, because whenever you read about these experiences of God, for example, in the Scriptures, the first line is always don't be afraid, calm down. And I think I was raised, and we're getting to see a little bit more of how you were raised. But granted, I can build up faith later in life. But I was raised sort of early on that the encounters with God would be very affirming kind of the path, I'm already on it to a certain extent that was, but there wasn't as much dialogue given to the ways in which God upsets your life. Or if it if it was, it was sort of put in almost like a, like a Disneyland sort of frame, like it's going to be God's gonna make you even more amazing. And I was also sort of raised or taught early on that this idea that when you're a follower of Jesus, you're going to have this amazing, full life. But the way that full life was defined, as I sort of look back now has a lot to do with, you know, our western North American, almost marketing culture, it's almost like how to be quote unquote, successful. And I don't know that that necessarily, is the case with you know, I'm a historian and he read some of the greatest people in history have these like periods of darkness. And, and similar to what you're saying is like, I didn't want this, I thought I had a good plan. And it was it was a it was a good plan. It wasn't, you know, self aggrandizing it was, it was something else, I just feel like the carpet coat kind of got taken out from under the carpet, rug, rug, hoof four and a half minutes left, this thing is starting off solid. So question, you fire one question you want people to sort of contemplate and I'll do the same.
Anita Wing Lee 32:56
I want you guys to think about where is there a moment in your memory. And as I'm saying this, something is going to come up where you can look back and say I think that was an encounter with God, whether it was something gooder or happen or something terrible that happened?
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 33:08
Did you just say gooder?
Anita Wing Lee 33:10
No, I said, good.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 33:11
Oh, sorry, continue for minutes.
Anita Wing Lee 33:13
So, just consider that event in your life. And just hold on to that and over this next week. And as you listen to this podcast, see if that event can speak to you? Or if God wants to reframe how that happened to you. Because that's kind of what this podcast is made doing. Reframing all kinds of events and figuring out was this God? Or was this not God? And what does that mean for my life? So pick something and simmer in it.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 33:38
Ooh, pick something and simmer in it. Threatening and delicious. Okay, so before I get to my question, explain the sort of tabs thanks. We don't want to just sort of leave people hanging, we've been talking a lot about trauma, we've been talking about your early sort of journey out of what you thought you're going to do, and being plugged back into a church that had some certain theology. And we're not, you know, this is just part of your journey. So explain the tabs thing that I'll wrap up with the question I have.
Anita Wing Lee 34:05
Yeah, so every one of these episodes in this show, we're going to be opening up a tab. Think about it, like everything is centered around deconstruction. But we're looking at it from different angles from different topics and lenses. So in this episode, we talked about the idea of encountering God and also we threw in some psychology, a different way of looking at deconstruction, each episode, and then next couple ones coming up. We're going to be coming at it from different angles. But don't worry, in the second half of the season, we're going to be finding landing spots for each of these questions. So we're opening up big questions. But we're not going to leave you hanging, we're going to make sure that we find a landing spot. It's kind of like going through a forest. It's sometimes we're going to talk about here, you got to turn left, you got to turn right but ultimately,
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 34:47
Mixed metaphor. Are we opening tabs or are we walking through forests, Anita? One metaphor and go with it. That's good. I hope that helps you. I currently have seven tabs open. And so sometimes that can be a little bit stressful, but we're going to start sort of looking at these tabs that were opening up, right?
Anita Wing Lee 35:01
Yeah, one by one man, hopefully close them. So you can you know, at the end of the show, close your laptop and be free.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 35:08
We cannot guarantee that that's how you're gonna feel. But in the last two minutes of this rambling, unpolished seven minutes, the question I put before you, and hopefully you're, if you're not, if you're doing this on your own, that's cool. But if you're in a group, let's have some candid conversations about maybe there's ways in which, how we've come to understand the, how Christianity is gonna be lived out with this sort of like success model, how has that sort of invaded our understandings of what it is that we're called to do. And by that, I mean, simply this, the longer I've lived in, I've lived quite a few years more than than Anita, maybe some of you listening to this.
Dr. James Tyler Robertson 35:40
But the longer I've lived, the more I see that deeply faithful, pious people still have tragedies still have crises. I know Christian parents, who've lost children, I know people who have had profound financial hardships. I know Christians who are divorced, and people fall in and out of love, and the experiences of life from those who are quote, unquote, in the world and quote, unquote, believers, from the, from an outside perspective, don't look all that different. And one of the things that disconnects we're finding the 21st century, is that there's still this sort of Christian rhetoric around the superior life that doesn't seem based in evidence, and people are seeing that and they're calling Hang on, on something like that. And part of it is, is our this, this belief that as followers of Jesus, our life will be something spectacular, which it will, but how we define spectacular seems to have a lot is a lot more rooted in, you know, on the crass level houses, cars, money, perfect spouse, perfect family, et cetera, et cetera. It seems to be a very external rather than the ability to walk into any situation no matter what it looks like, and and have a faith that says, God knows me. God has a plan for me. God has a life for me. And maybe everything that's happening right now is ultimately from my own holiness. How can I how can I take this experience and and see faith see God in it? So there's there's that question, we have three seconds left. How do you want to wrap it up in Anita. Too late sorry, that's the buzzer. Okay, everybody, listen to this. That was seven minutes of unpolished stuff. Bye.
Anita Wing Lee 37:28
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