Lauren Ranzino: Have you ever doubted your faith? For a long time, my doubts me a lot of anxiety. I feared that if I gave any one of them too much attention, my entire world might fall apart. Over the years, I've come to really value my doubts, even embrace them. But big topics like belief and doubt can be tricky territory for anyone, myself included. Even the greats in philosophy and theology have been debating this stuff for centuries. Take Aristotle. one of the OGs of philosophy. He was what's called a foundationalist. Meaning anything that we believe to be true is based on other things that we believe to be true. A foundation. Aristotle thought knowledge worked like a building. Anything we know rests on other things we know. And eventually you reach the foundation. Bedrock beliefs that don't need anything underneath them at all. and everything else we believe to be true gets built up from there. For example, the reason you believe a diagnosis is because you believe the doctor. And you believe the doctor because you believe the stuff the doctor studied. And on and on it goes, building each and everything we believe right on top of the last. Centuries later, a French philosopher named Descartes came along. He was a foundationalist too. But he took it even further. Descartes wanted to know if there's anything we can believe to be true beyond doubt. Descartes proposed that the ultimate bedrock of what we can know for sure is the fact that humans can think at all. And on that, we build our structures of belief. Hence the phrase, I think, therefore I am. Okay, I know we're getting heady here, but stay with me. Fast forward another few hundred years, and there's this American guy, Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw things very differently. See, Peirce lived through the Civil War. He'd seen how beliefs built on absolute certainty about slavery, about God, about who deserved what. Could send a generation of young men to die for their beliefs. And he traced the problem all the way back to those OG philosophers and their foundationalism. Especially Descartes. He was like, you trust your brain to be the foundation of literally everything? No, no, no, no, no. Beliefs are not things that are built on foundations at all. That's not how humans know things. He said when a human is born, they're given the beliefs of those around them. But the way for a person to really know things for themselves is to poke, to doubt. To purse, it's not certainty that allows us to believe things. The vehicle to discovering our beliefs is doubt itself. And think about it. No matter how hard you try, you can never think your way into knowing anything for sure. You've got to experiment, read books, fall in love, test your beliefs against the world. And even then, you're not done. You're just closer. Pearse called this way of thinking fallibilism. Knowledge is something you strive toward, not something you build upon. And this isn't relativism where there is no real truth, or skepticism, where knowledge is pretty much unattainable. No. Fallibilism is saying there is truth. But when it comes to our beliefs, we might want to try having a little humility. Many of us who grew up in evangelical churches were taught ideas that sound a lot like foundationalism. We were told everything's built on a set of beliefs that are unquestionable. So we put the weight of life, experience, joy, heartache, creativity, tragedy on a single foundation. But when life happens and we find ourselves questioning those beliefs, We were told we shouldn't question. What other options do we have than for the entire building of our faith to come crashing down? That's what happened for me anyway. It's in leaving that crumbling building behind that I found something more like what Peirce was talking about. Turns out doubt was just the beginning of getting to know something more. Which makes me wonder, what would it have been like for the church to look at doubt as a way of knowing, rather than a sign of crumbling faith? I'm Chris McLeod, and this is wholly uncertain. Lauren Ranzino, welcome back. Welcome back, Chris McCloud. Season two. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. How you feeling? Feeling good. Got a much needed break hiatus. We've been working really hard this whole time in the background. But it was nice and refreshing to get some of those hard deadlines off our to do list. So feeling really, really excited. Love hearing the response from our episodes in season one. Yeah. And now I'm just like like so excited about season two. We're starting at square one today, right? We're talking about just straight up doubt. What do we do with it? How do we look at it? How do we handle it? It's kind of a back to basics a little bit, like, hey, it's okay to question, like that's okay. Yeah. And I wonder, thinking back to like the story I just shared and like, man, what if it could have been different, you know? Yeah. Like what if I could have experienced doubt without the shame that comes along with it. That would have been nice. That would have been nice. Wouldn't it have? I mean, as a person who also is a human that asks questions and doubts and also was raised in a very similar way to you, I also didn't feel like there was a lot of openness to questioning and doubting. Yeah. It definitely wasn't an open dialogue. In that way. And then there's the like when to voice it, when not to voice it, not voicing your doubt because you feel that shame. You know, it's you also have to like frame it in a way that's like, but I'm still Team Jesus. Right. Or please am I? I wanna be. Which is so sad. I mean, yeah, it sucks that you almost have to have a little bit of dishonesty to even get to like the truth of a question. It's like that's just A shame. But have to. I don't think it has to be that way. Totally. Have to is not the right word. That it happens. That people feel that they need to move when we doubt, we don't ask for it. We don't control it. It's just the questions that arise in us, right? Right. And then however we're taught to like hold questions and hold doubts, that's kind of where we start with those questions. And so they can come from a place of like fear and shame and and trying to hide away, right? Depending on what our framework was. Or the hope would be that we would have a framework that wouldn't produce that when questions come up. And for me, there is no question that is beyond God. God is infinite. God can handle it. You know? And so if we're having the question, let's talk about it. Yeah. And that's I think the table that we want to set in this episode and this podcast is Come in, bring your questions. There's no shame. It's normal. It's even developmental, like a necessary point of growing up in adulthood. Yeah. And so I think that it's really, really important to investigate those assumptions that we were given as kids. Because while we might not be kids anymore, we are a product of all of these experiences that we had growing up. The muscle memory is still there. When questions come up sometimes that might produce fear, might produce shame, any of these things. And so being aware of some of these assumptions and frameworks that we're given and maybe finding a healthier framework for it moving forward, I think is like a really healthy thing for all of us to do. Because of that, there was a particular guest that we have on today to ask some of these ⁓ really hard questions to. Lauren, tell us about our guest. Yeah, I am so, so, so excited to talk with Meredith Miller today. She is a pastor and writer with over 20 years of experience in ministry. She's the author of Wonder 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture and Woven, Nurturing Our Faith our Kid Doesn't Have To Heal From. And I know those sound like very like parenting specific books. And Probably a lot of our listeners don't have children. This is not a conversation about parenting today. No. It's about what do we do with the faith we were handed as kids? How do we make sense as adults? How do we unpack these questions, these doubts in ways that are less anxiety ridden? And Meredith does such a wonderful job of identifying some of the ways that we were taught to approach our faith. And questions and what a better framework might be. She frames questioning and doubt in a way that just feels so natural and developmental, and really what it is, it's human. It's human to doubt. And so I thought it would be a really meaningful way to ground season two as we begin exploring the Christian faith again and and asking questions that might make people feel a little destabilized. But hopefully we can put some of those anxieties to rest. in this episode a little bit more to be able to help people come along on this journey with us in a place of peace. So Lauren, you're gonna be talking to Meredith today. Then I'll come back on the other side and we'll chat at the end. Cool. Should we let Meredith in? Yeah, let's let her in. All right. Hi Meredith. Hi. Thanks for talking with me today. Thank you for having me. In your book, Woven, you lay out how to build a base of faith that children don't need to recover from. I think a lot of us are recovering from things we were taught as children about God, myself included. So I wanted to talk with you today about how we as adults can grow a stable faith that we don't have to similarly heal from. Yeah. So one of the things that I think Has happened for a lot of folks in my generation that are kind of like these elder millennials and give or take some Gen Xers as well. Really rigid faith systems and really high control faith systems basically decided that what it meant for a person to have strong faith was for them to have foreclosed faith, for them to accept what the authorities of the religion say is true and best and right, and to just like fall into lockstep with that. And doubt became something to not just be afraid of, but to like actively shun. Right. So you talk in your book about these psychological stages of development called foreclosure and moratorium. Can you explain what those are and how they relate to our faith? Yeah. So that comes to the work of James Marcia and he was trying to help think through the way faith formation tends to happen for most people. And There are more stages than those two, but those two stood out to me because foreclosure was the sort of young phase where a person is given things from the authority figures that represent their faith tradition and they just accept what they are told. And so it's the place where you just lock in with whatever is being handed to you and accept that as how things are. It's really common for kids. It's really common for people who are new to faith in those early stages to find somebody ideally trusted and trustworthy and sort of roll with them for some season and let whatever you're being told sort of be what it is. Moratorium is the process of everything in your faith world going on pause. You kind of turn it upside down and inside out and decide for yourself what stays and what goes. And That isn't necessarily a sign to a particular age, although it often happens in emerging adulthood. It is this necessary and normal process of moving from I accept what I've inherited into the sifting stage where everything else is just kind of on pause and all that one is doing with faith is like, do I believe this or not? And like, does that hold up or not? Yeah. Moratorium is different and maybe scary or unfamiliar, but also not a cause for panic. It's like, yeah, this is a super normal thing. Ideally for young people, it's something where the adults who are around them are like, ⁓ we've been preparing for this. Like we are ready. You have tools. We are with you. Let's do this. But I think that a part of why we're seeing the deconstruction conversation take the flavor it has in the last few years is it is not been people's experience to have that chance to do a moratorium season, let alone for it to be something where adults ahead of them were like cheering on that process. And so instead it just got pushed down the field until midlife came and it was like, ⁓ no, I really want to do this. If I wasn't given permission before, then tough, I'm taking it now. Yeah. What was your relationship to doubt and faith growing up? I grew up in a church that was really wonderful in a lot of ways. And I would say I saw a lot of like thinking people. Like it was just really pretty normal for people to be one, thinking for themselves, and two, like occasionally changing their mind. And so, in that sense, like doubt was not this like boogeyman that anyone was afraid of. It was just part of the process. And so It it doesn't stand out as anything significant because I didn't grow up in rhetoric that like talked about hyperbolic symbols of strength in faith. That wasn't like a big part of our our language or the way we thought about things. And so you changed when you needed to change. Yeah. Wow. That's the most refreshing thing I've ever heard in my life. It was really good. I have one other friend who's like, I didn't grow up in the same way within the churches you did. So I don't have all the same baggage. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have like growing up church baggage. I broke up with the church in a lot of ways in like my adult life as a pastor who like worked on staffs, but my growing up years were terrific. Looking at what a healthy faith might look like really shines light on the areas that maybe were not a super healthy way for us to have been taught. Or for us to learn, you know. For so many people, we have gone through that very natural stage in private because communally it isn't super accepted. But we're like communal people, right? We're meant to like live life in community. And so it makes sense that then people would feel shame, even around the questioning, because they feel like they need to hide this thing about themselves. Like maybe there's something wrong with this thing about them that they cannot help. Because it's a natural stage of development. Yeah. You know, I don't think that it was always from a bad place, right? I think the hope was to give people a healthy faith. And so where do you think some of that shame or rigidity like in staying in that foreclosure state comes from? If you look back in the last fifty-ish years of conversation around kids and faith and how much that shaped what Christian family life was meant to be. But fundamentally you see an organized, concerted effort for all families to be the same and for them all to follow the same formula. And that created this sense of prescriptive life for every parent that didn't allow for their kid to be different. If their kid is different, their kid is disobedient and wrong and suspect. And it was fundamentally theologically like a giant project in sin management of just like starting from a theological assumption about sin that then meant the project for a parent was to save their kid. And so out of that, then you see a lot of these things like hyper focus on Bible memory verses or apologetics for young people. You see catechism moving younger and younger. And so something like a confirmation catechism process that used to be in. The age 12, 13 range, because developmentally early adolescence is a great time to invite a young person to think for themselves about what we believe and why we believe it in a question-based process. And instead, it becomes higher levels of memorization and pushed younger and younger and younger, so much so that you see like these catechisms for very young children that really hijack their developmental process. But if you are fundamentally afraid that your child will go to hell, if they don't believe a certain thing and And go through a certain ritual by a certain age, then of course you fall in and you do what experts are readily telling you you're supposed to do anyway. And so much of the publishing industry side of family life and the focus on the family and company got really loud in parents' ears about how young people are supposed to be. And it wasn't just relevant if a person was a parenting person. It was like this is what we're all trying to aspire to. This is part of where people who were single in the church increasingly felt left out. This is part of where once you're done parenting, you were sort of useless because you're done and we're focusing there. Like it rippled into all these other seasons of life and other sub-communities within a church. Yeah. One of the central concepts of your book is this idea that faith is a web rather than a tower. You know, a tower is this like idea if you like pull like the wrong brick out, then the whole thing might topple. But I think what you were just talking about, well, if once your kids are raised, you've already built the tower and so you're done building. So your job's done here, kind of thing. Yeah. Can you talk about the idea though of faith being a web rather than this perfectly constructed wall? So when we use construction kinds of metaphors for faith and we treat faith as if it's brick by brick. These are the Bible stories you need to know, and these are the doctrines you need to understand, and these are the apologetics you need to be, whatever those things are. There's nothing there to accommodate the stress that is our regular life a lot of the time, whether that is because crisis comes and these really tidy things I've been told suddenly don't feel like they're relevant to the thing I'm going through. A lot of times in that rigid construction-based model, that also includes a lot of like certainty about beliefs. And so then what if I change my mind? The Bible works this way. Well, what if I learned the Bible has a whole bunch more complicated stuff going on? It includes usually specific faith practices. I came from like the world of quiet time. The quiet time was the be all and all. Everything else was maybe extra credit. And then what if you go somewhere where doing that practice doesn't work anymore? All these places where things start to give. And if you're constructing a tower, then like bricks pop out every time something doesn't work, every time there's a question that doesn't have a great answer, every time there's a practice that suddenly fails you, and eventually that all just crumbles. And webs. have this flexibility for stress that I thought was a just very beautiful image for how much of life just has that in it. And what if this thing can hold on to you while you are experiencing life's inevitable stresses of various degrees. It also has a plan for breakage, right? When spiders' webs break because a stick comes through a bird flies through or whatever, the spider just tends to the broken section. And the rest of the web sort of provides the strength they need until they can tend to the section that isn't there anymore. And a lot of how we come to know what we know about anything important in our life. It is not because a whole bunch of information was given to us, truth upon truth upon truth. It's because a combination of that information, but also our experiences, our close relationships, our seasons of question, our on the ground time, like those things layer over each other far more like a big tangle of threads in a web than they stack on top of each other truth upon truth upon truth. It's just part of how we actually come to know things that matter to us. But all the more with faith, we need a mental model for something that will inevitably change. And webs can take breakage and then they can tend to those places and usually be stronger for them. At the literal level, like if a spider had to rebuild their web from scratch every time it was damaged, they would die. They like physically can't support the energy that it would take to start from nothing. I think a lot of times when we come to a place in our faith where nothing works anymore or what is hard feels just too big. We have that sense. Like I can't start over figuring out what I think about God and faith and the Bible and church and whatever other pieces. This effort's gonna kill me. Trying to rebuild my whole faith is gonna kill me. When a web has these anchoring spots, these things that give it strength. And if we're thinking about not having to worry about brick by brick, the strength gets to come not from the things we know and the things we believe and the doctrines we have just right and all the Bible memory verses we have tucked in our brains. The strength gets to come from who God is, that it's actually anchored to the characteristics we know to be true of God. God's grace and love and goodness and justice and compassion. And that's what really holds on to us way more than just right beliefs or just right behaviors. All the ways that our faith comes to life, that's the internal stuff. That's what gives each person's faith its own shape and beauty and texture based on who they are and where they live and what culture they're part of. But the strength, it comes from God. That's what holds it all together. Well, I mean, I think to this idea of like a a house or like a wall or like this like Construction metaphor comes from the story that Jesus told about building our house on the rock. Right. And so it's like this building metaphor. But he's not saying, like, and then you take the doctrine of this and you build it on this, and you take the doctrine of this and you build it on that. He's saying, put where you live, where you find your stability, your home on me, the rock. It's a person. It's a person. It's a person. Or when Paul talks about construction metaphors and Christ as a cornerstone, it's a person. It's a person So occasionally the book got some critics of like, but the Bible says our faith is like a building. And I was like, and then the Bible says that the foundation of the building is a person. Yeah. It doesn't actually say your faith is on a build. It it's actually saying you are the building that is on the rock. Yes, that is on a person. And that is on a person. person, a person. And that's the whole thing is if it's a web, if that's more of a helpful way to think for us, it's partially because then that's oriented around I'm getting to know this person and who they are and what they're like and whether anything they claim holds up. And if I can come to this place of believing that the person of God is trustworthy because of who God is, then I can work out for myself what it looks like to bring that to life in like really ordinary sorts of ways. And that That process is a fundamental inversion of the way, especially a lot of children are introduced to faith, where everything becomes about you're gonna believe these things and you're gonna behave this way. And it sort of falsely assumes that if kids do that enough, they will come to see God as trustworthy, like through sort of the benefits of that system of belief and behavior. But it doesn't pan out. Like if you watch the research findings on that, like kids raised in that system don't fare as well as kids raised in places that are more. Oriented around getting to know God at places that are more normalizing of questions and doubts, those kids end up doing better. Yeah. I mean, I think even just following the logical conclusion of if I do all the things right, then everything will go right for me. Right. That's not ever gonna happen. We're all going to experience at some point suffering. That is a thing that Jesus also says. Yeah. Is a promise, right? Like In this world, you will face suffering, but take heart, I've overcome the world. Again, pointing to himself. ⁓ I guess the question then becomes as we're looking at the web of our faith as adults, looking back, or maybe we are like young people coming into adulthood, looking at this web of faith. You said, you know, some people, their web was based on something that isn't sustainable, isn't going to hold the pressures of life. And you said that that can kill you, you know? What if someone finds themselves in that position where they feel like I don't have anything left? Like, how do I even think about building a web of faith? Like, where does someone start in that place? I I hear ahead of time how potentially cheesy this is gonna sound, but I mean it incredibly sincere. Like you start with Jesus. You try to give yourself space to do something like reading Luke and letting the fact that Luke's a really good storyteller just invite you back in and you bring with you the question, like, what do I notice about who Jesus is and what Jesus is like along the way? And I think paying attention to the versions of the stories that are already tucked away in your mind, the ones you've already heard from those sermons or those influencers or whoever, like all those extra voices. But I think trying to be a little bit cognizant of like, but what do I see? When I come back to these stories, what am I noticing? Not that those people were wrong, but just to be able to dialogue with them in their various findings compared to what you see with fresh eyes when you sort of are coming back to just this basic question of what is Jesus up to? And I think that can be one place to start because the Bible's huge and complicated and nuanced and contextual and all those things. So like Luke to Acts, where you just have a story to sort of give yourself some time in. I think for other people, it's giving themselves permission to take a break. Like rather than worrying about how I'm going to restart, what if God is actually with me as I take the time I need to leave the other stuff behind, to let that stuff go. Like what if God is actually for me in a healing process that involves sort of being allowed to do a little bit of nothing on purpose for a while to see how that goes. I remember decades ago by now, I think, Lynn Heibels wrote a book, Nice Girls Don't Change the World. And it was just her story well before the deconstruction conversation had the rhetoric it did now. Of her coming to a place of just absolute depression. And the God she knew that sounded like the Christian church and scripture and all that was like a heavy handed driver of her utter exhaustion. And she just said, like, I can't carry the burden of you anymore. She was a decade of just like, I'm just kind of done. And she writes about that whole process. But one of the things she says is that in time I came to believe that the true God in grace is the one who gave me the strength to say to the God I thought I knew, I'm done with you. And I I won't do this anymore. I think that that's fairly reflective of a lot of people's process. When they begin to say, any God worth following, any God worth trusting really is gracious enough for me to not have to like restart some sort of activity right away. Yeah. Really is wise enough to know what I need compared to anybody else in their journey. So I don't have to look like anybody else or beyond anybody else's timetable. Any God worth trusting understands why this is hard for me right now. And can take it when I talk about it, right? And so being able to give yourself time in that place instead of worrying too much about jumping to the next program that you think is gonna get you there could be a really helpful thing. How do we identify what is holding our web together? Like if we are starting with a place like Luke and Acts, like getting to know who Jesus is. And I guess we can ask those questions within that, like, what does the justice of Jesus look like? What is the goodness of Jesus? What is the faithfulness of Jesus look like in these places? Like that's who God is. But then there's the rest of the Bible and all the things we've been taught in terms of like right. I just think of the like loaded concept of like justice, right? Right. I mean, part of it is like we need better guides and companions than a lot of were given. Like honest, we just need like better scholars. Like a lot of us need to admit our pastor just didn't actually know what they were talking about. Might have been a real nice guy, but like, dude went to whatever school he went to or didn't go at all. And like there are smarter, better people writing about scripture who can help us if we can like find better voices and being able to look at things that are complicated and then be like, okay, who, who do I want to listen to to help me through this? Because like the Old Testament's always going to hard. Also, John Walton and John Goldengay each are doing so much great work in the Old Testament on why it's the style it is and why the values are the way that they are and how that world is just so different than our world. And it helps ⁓ a lot with trying to understand these really harder stories that we're not as familiar with. It doesn't always smooth everything out, but when you take something like Abraham and Isaac, which trips a lot of people up, and you have a guide walk you through, okay, so this is the story of Abraham not sacrificing his son in a world where every other kind like nation around Israel practice child sacrifice. This is the story of how we know our God is a life-giving God who doesn't want child sacrifice. Because once upon a time, God asked Abraham if he would bring his son. And Abraham not knowing God all that well at that point, and thinking it basically tracks with everything he would see around him, said sure and was not sure what was going to happen next and how it would go. And they get to the final moment where Abraham is willing to do this thing he believes that Yahweh God wants, just like a Molech God wants, and Yahweh God stops him because our God is not like the other gods. And Yahweh God provides an animal instead. Because our God is not like the other gods. And in you remember that you have a oral storytelling culture and a sign act kind of culture where things need to be embodied and done. Like that's the main way messages are communicated. And you remember that the end of the story is not actually your son being sacrificed, which like we tell kids this, we're like, it's Abraham sacrificing Isaac. He doesn't sacrifice him. We've like put the wrong heading on the story, right? It still has hard, complicated cultural layers. You still have a sacrificial system at play, which we don't particularly understand in a lot of ways. You still have the weird vocabulary in the middle of like saying that it was a test. And like, what do we mean by that? And what kind of test? And what would have happened if, you know? But also we have a story of we know our God is a life giver who doesn't require the sacrifice of children in order to be good to us because we have this origin story of our God not doing that. We can't get to something like that without better guides and companions who can like help us see behind the curtain into this very different world. And Thankfully, like a lot of the stuff they write is not like big, hard, hat, fat, heavy textbooks. It's the Bible for everyone series, is John Golden Gaze. And they're small and they're along the way. And sometimes I think we just need to like give ourselves some time with somebody like that who's just a little nerdy about a thing that we find really troubling and like let them help us. Yeah. That feels doable. I mean, I think I that holds true to even my own experience. I think it is. Hard at times coming from backgrounds that tell you what we've been told is truth. But I I think it's really healthy and important to remember like every person who told us a truth is a human who has the very strong capacity for not getting it right, just like we do. And that that's like inherent in this system at large. And and that I think to your point though, is A little bit besides the point, the getting it right part is not the point of our faith, right? The point of our faith is this relationship, this interconnectedness with God. Yeah. And it's hard because there are certain subsets of faith cultures where the human mouthpiece of interpreting scripture is not seen as a person just like you and I, who's trying their best and maybe gets it wrong. There are cultures where someone might look back at their story and be like, no, no, no, we were told that the words Of the sermon were fundamentally the words of scripture, right? That these are one and the same. And so they are truth with a capital T. And so when I'm troubled by a text, I'm the one who just has to deal with it. Right. You'll see this even now. You know, you'll see popular folks say something and people will start to engage and say, I'm not so sure about. And their their clap back will be, argue with the text. And it's like, but that isn't the text. This is us talking about the text. And that's actually part of how we take the Bible. seriously is to talk about what's going on and ask, well, are we sure? And keep being curious about it. That is part of what it is to be serious about this story and the God whose story we believe is told in it. But that idea, you know, argue with the text is an example of spaces where people then aren't given freedom to say, Well, I expect that you and I are in dialogue over something that is hard to understand and where we're both trying to seek it out. Instead, it is that this authority figure is giving you truth with a capital T. So don't you dare. Right. And it does take a little bit of courage to say, I think I'm allowed to also be discerning in which trusted voices I let in without having to let them become scripture to me. They're just other voices. Well, and even trusted voices are not gonna have it right 100% of the time. And they should be trusted if they're okay with you recognizing that, I think. Right. Which I think is part of why for me personally, like scholarship has been such a big part of my faith. Journey and such a helpful and encouraging part. Man, my professors are so much sharper than anybody on social media, and they are so humble and so kind and so gracious. I had a professor who used to just regularly be reamed by John Piper and company in various writing spaces, and he'd bring articles in and he could just chuckle as he read critiques, you know, and then he just kind of talk and unpack things. And the critiques coming at him were like vitriolic. They just came from. that camp who thinks that like being mean is acceptable. And to watch his choice for like how to engage with that and then how to let that be a tool for talking with his students and inviting them into conversation. When I think about fruit and who I want to trust, yeah. At a character level, yeah. Who do I want to look like in this journey of trying to get to know God and be in this story? Like I'd pick these people. Yeah. And I I like think about this idea of like attachment styles too. Like if we look at Your professor versus like a more aggressive approach to like policing belief sets? One feels like a a secure attachment to God, your professor. And the other feels like an anxious attachment. How do you, as a person who was raised in a secure attachment style to God, how do you navigate the mystery, like the uncertainty? Of God. There's some things we're never gonna understand. We're just not gonna get our heads fully around. How do you navigate that? I think over time I've leaned harder into the parts that I think I do know. And that's created more comfort with the many, many things I don't. I would say that I look at my own faith now as a forty something person and I have more personal ease than other seasons when I was trying so hard to make God so happy. Because I thought that's what God wanted. But that's not because I personally am just like, I want it to be happier and lighter. It's because I have started practicing trusting that Jesus meant it when he said, Come to me and I'll give you rest. And my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And it it was just a long season of like, what if he meant it? Like I've just been in a lot of spaces that treat Jesus like he didn't mean it. Like pat him on the head, like that's real cute that you think that there's this learning from me that is gonna be easy and light. Like, Jesus, this is faith we're talking about. Come on, get real. But then I'm like, but but what if he meant it? And I love that it's a yoke image, even though it's unfamiliar to us now, because it's a side by side image, right? A pair of oxen would be side by side. And there's a company keeping element to taking Jesus's yoke upon yourself, where then you'd find that that would mean you'd be walking alongside Jesus. And yet that experience is somehow going to be Gentle and humble and light and restful. Yeah. So that must mean that God's gonna hold me through whatever life brings in a way that I did not think was true when I was younger. I think when I was trying to figure out faith for myself in my early adulthood, I really thought I had to get it right or God would be a little bit less happy with me. And ⁓ was shaking some of that off, I think, from just, you know, the parts of you that that sincerely love God, that sincerely want to please God. And then you find yourself spinning and spinning and spinning. Yeah, I think part of that comes from, and you talk in your book about this, this idea of if we're looking at like scripture, like looking for the moral in every story, which then leads to where is the act of obedience in it. So, like if I'm looking at Ruth, it is to just be obedient to the place and the call and go leave everything behind for Jesus. Like there's so many. Like when you dig into some of those stories as you get older. They're much more complicated than that. Like if it's David, like because David also murdered someone, he raped someone, he like he did a whole lot of other things, that he's not a super moral person to base your life after. And so you do talk to this, and I found it really helpful. Can you can you talk a little bit about that and how we can frame the Bible at large differently? Yeah. When we come to faith thinking it's all about our obedience, then We're looking for what we're supposed to be and do. And that reduces the Bible down to a morality-producing manual. And every story is about whether the human was a hero we're supposed to copy or an anti-hero that we're supposed to learn a lesson from. And we center the plot of the story around that human and what they did or did not do right. And kids' stories are a really easy example of this because they already have to be paraphrased and interpreted down for other developmental accessibility reasons. And so then you look at a kid's Bible and it's very readily on display, how to your point. You're supposed to go be courageous, you're supposed to go be obedient, you're supposed to whatever the things are. And a lot of times when we reduce the Bible story to its moral, we totally miss its meaning because that's not the story it's trying to tell. And even if we just simply look for God as an active character in a story as well, it will shape how that story comes to life in a different sort of way. If we let the human be a regular human who is sort of Sharing the same question we have, which is can God be trusted? And sometimes they say yes and they sort of follow accordingly, and sometimes they struggle, but they don't have to be superhuman, they just get to be a regular human. And then the way those stories sound shifts dramatically, you know. And so you take David and Goliath, and we love this heroic story for children, and go be courageous and woohoo. But also then in that version, David's not allowed to like be scared, which is just ridiculous. If you are going head to head against a champion warrior, you're scared. It is silly that we would think otherwise. When you flip and you say, Okay, they're afraid. And David said, I believe God's gonna be with me. I had these experiences with lions and bears and felt like God was with me and helped then. I think God's gonna be with me and help me now. And sure enough, God was. And then you can ask within yourself, like, how easy is it for me to believe God's with me and helps me? And why? And could I talk about that with God, the degree to which I'm grateful? That I've experienced God's presence or the degree to which I'm struggling because I'm not, because that's the promise within the story is a God who will be with us and help us. That really has very little to do with David's courage. Right. It is also what opens up David and Bathsheba in a whole new way to say, I do not lose anything in my own faith when David reveals himself to be all of these other things because I'm looking for God as a character who sends a prophet to tell the truth. Because when we tell the truth, there's always a way forward. A God who has promised that grace is bigger than any mistake. And now we've got like a real deal mistake on the table in the story. And we still see God show up with grace. So maybe for me, with the real stuff that I'm like, maybe I want to hide that part. Maybe it's too far gone. Maybe it's just too much. I've got a real story I can turn to to say, like, ⁓ there's a God who's not gonna give up on me in that. And this is how I know. While David is still as awful as he actually is. Yeah. He sucks. Yeah. That's an understatement, but go on. No, I right, right. Yeah. And so scripture does what I think it was meant to do in a whole different way, which is to tell the story of God in its time and place and culture and context, making the case this God can be trusted. And here's why we think so. Let me tell you a story. It doesn't make it uncomplicated of a text to be able to come towards, but it certainly shifts because the main characters that we've been given are these pillars of our faith, you know, like these people. ⁓ that are people, you know, like that we we have like deified in the process, whereas they are people. And when we're not focusing on the main character, we're focusing on the minutia, we're not following the plot. You know, like as just as a professional storyteller myself, I worked as a story producer for A very, very long time in television. If we start just following the pizza guy who's delivering the pizza to the house of the person who's the main character, we're missing the plot. It's not about him. And so I do find that so helpful in reframing the story of the Bible, in that it was never about any of these people. It was about who who is God and who are we in relation to God. Okay, I have I do have one kid specific question for you. Great. I'm a Christian. I have been a Christian my whole life. We are very much in Christian community. I am coming to terms with the fact that there is no Christian community that we're gonna agree with perfectly, right? Like there's probably gonna be a lot of things we don't agree with in terms of like the what's and the how tos of this faith, you know? But I do see value in being in community built around this shared belief. But that being said, how do we navigate when other Christians teach our kids things, theology about like who God is, who they are, who other people are, and they teach our kids things that we disagree with. You know, I think that there's a lot of people trying to figure out, okay, I was hurt by this thing that was taught to me. I want to protect my kids from that thing that was taught to me. And so there's this natural instinct to just like shut out and to be like, see you never. But how do we navigate that and still remain in community with people? Part of it is probably being confident in your own discernment as far as like what degree of a issue are we facing, right? We've got minors and we've got majors. And having your own internal rubric pretty strong of like, what are the things that as a family feel like majors? Like, no, we really think this is the heart of what it means for us to be people who trust Impala Jesus. And what are the things that are less important so that you can gauge your response, right? I think being mindful that when it comes to majors, like that's the stuff you're gonna need more alignment in when it comes to your actual regular faith community versus The in-laws and friends you maybe only have to see once or twice a year. And so there's a there's a frequency level with some of that. And the people you're gonna have around your kids most frequently, you probably want more alignment than less. I, for instance, don't know that it would always be a great call to keep your kids in a Sunday school program they think is really fun, where you consistently disagree with the curriculum and that you're doing like a weekly debrief. That said, What kids really need, one is they do need to be in community beyond the family. Like they need at least five adults who are echoing the same core messages they're getting about who they are, where they belong, what they're made for beyond the nuclear family. And so as much as the impulse to sort of withdraw from Christian communities for risk makes a lot of sense, it really is depriving young people of something essential to their faith formation that nuclear families alone, it just doesn't work. Like numerically, kids don't tend to stay in the faith when all they were raised in was a nuclear family who did a faith thing without being part of a faith community. But also the more you're a family that models conversation, then this just becomes one more thing you talk about. And again, trusting your own discernment, you might be talking ahead. Hey, kiddo, you're gonna hear some things today and we don't necessarily agree. So just, you know, notice when they come up, we'll talk about it after. Or it might be that you do it after the fact and you're saying, Hey, I heard so and so say this thing, would love to talk to you more about that. But I think always to then be able to affirm the person as much as you can, whatever pieces you can. To be really curious about what your kid heard, what they walked away with, what they experienced. Cause sometimes it pings for us because of what's inside of us and it flew right over our kids' head. Yeah. And so being able to be curious first of like, what did you take away from that? What did you hear? And be able to do the adult thing where we can sift, am I reacting because I have a story in me? Or am I reacting because this is really what stuck with my child? And we just learned some of that. And then you can sort of challenge the content from there. Hey, I Actually, think something different. Can I share that with you real fast? And then you say things like lots of people who love Jesus think differently about this. Yeah. And so for us, you're gonna hear us saying things more like this or taking it more this direction, or you say things, you know, of like, yeah, this is one of those things that there are like books and books from professors about. So when Aunt So-and-so said it's just like this, there's actually like super smart Christians who all say different stuff. So we can talk about it a lot because it's not as clear as they made it sound. So sometimes we muddy the waters and sometimes we just do some cultural differentiation and sometimes I think a lot of times we're the ones being gracious in the bridge building in the debrief of like, Hey, we don't all have to agree and that's okay. And inside us we might be like, But I really think you're really wrong. But we're also wanting to model for our kid how we stay in gracious dialogue, how we stay open, how we stay curious and connected. And so we navigate that way. But being the place where the conversation happens. is the most important part. Way more than the specific content, the specific stuff you create the safety for we're a family that talks about stuff. Right. And then whatever they hear, it comes back to you, you get to be part of it. And that's, I think, worth way more than worrying too much about the specific versions that are gonna come. And then you challenge what they hear by degree. Right. If it's egregious, you challenge back strongly of like, ⁓ that's ridiculous. Like I still love so and so, but like, no, that's not a thing. And you trust your discernment on what degree of challenge needs to be offered based on how egregious what they heard was and go from there. So it's a lot of work because it's case by case and it's ongoing. It depends on how many people you have in your life that are lobbing that stuff your way. But but I think in the middle of all that work, if someone can take heart that becoming a safe place where everything is askable is a really valuable thing you're giving your kid in their faith journey. Whether they come to eventually see things the way you see them or they grow up to become someone who sees things slightly differently, like you've gifted them. We think critically, we talk about stuff. You don't have to be afraid to bring something up. And that is an incredibly important space for them. Yeah. You're like seeing our kids into the future. Little Meredith Millers later in life. Who are so well formed and secure in their attachment to God, which is my hope, right? ⁓ my hope is that we can all like shake some of the like insecure attachments. So much of your book honestly is a resource for adults. So I recommend whether you have a child or not to read woven. Thank you for that. I hope that's true. It's 100% true. Especially if you take it from a stance of like, I was a child who was raised. With some form even if you were raised with no faith, you were raised with putting your life, your trust into something. And so where do I want the trust of my life as an adult? And so I find it very helpful for adults. But do you have any resources specifically geared towards adults? I do. So what happened was woven came out, adults began to read it, thinking about the kids in their life, whether they were parents or whether they just, you know, are thinking as a person who's part of the church. And then they start saying, I'm reading it with two minds. I'm thinking about these kids I know that are close to me. I'm thinking about how I was introduced to God, to the Bible, to Jesus, to what church is about. And I'm running both stories at once. And they basically were like, I would love to like reread it and just think about me. I went ahead and wrote a devotional afterwards. That was the first project that came after Woven. It is called Reweaving. And it is 21 days of taking the main themes from the book and giving some reflective space for adults to just be focused on. ways that they were introduced to faith at whatever age that happened and be able to pull those big research themes, pull the big theological pieces and even just to our conversation about, so how do I break things I think might need to be broken when that's scary? How do I decide what I'm still holding on to? It is a companion for that discernment of being able to look at your story and look at where you are and where you'd like to be. It's a chance to kind of lean into that. web metaphor if it's new for someone and be able to think about their story in light of that metaphor and where they might find it helpful. So it is just a digital download style devotional that is exactly for that of recognizing that adults deserve some space to just reflect on their story as much as I also am grateful that they read it in order to be good to the kids that they get to be with. So that's reweaving. I did not know about this. We will definitely have it in the show notes. So you know what we can do let's get your let's get your listeners a ⁓ a discount code. And then they can pop something in and we'll we'll put it in the shop for them. Awesome. Okay. Wonderful. I have one last question for you. What is something that you're uncertain about right now? Whether the church is gonna last into the next five to ten years, let alone beyond. Tell me more. If I'm like as blunt as I really feel, there's a point where I feel like white evangelical megachurches had their shot and they failed. Yeah. Round about 2016, when I worked for Omega Church, which was most of my career until recently, it felt like what we were making in church must be useless because the nonpartisan discernment about having a plan that would care for the poor. Like we can dialogue about the policies that best care for the poor, but to decide to pick someone who just literally doesn't care if the poor go hungry. And so it's time for us to look around for the faithful voices that can lead us forward who probably aren't gonna be. From within white evangelical megachurches. ⁓ I don't know what it looks like for us to collectively be faithful moving forward. Right. Partially because I think there are enough people who are clamoring to continue to be powerful rather than faithful. And those aren't the same thing. And they want influence more than they want to do like the slow, messy local work of figuring out how to love their neighbors. And so there's just a lot I don't know about that part right now. Right. And it makes me sad because So much of what makes this story real is when people collectively live it together. If we actually live like Jesus is Lord. Yeah. I share your uncertainty in the structural American white evangelical church that I was raised in. And I gotta say, I am hopeful that this isn't it. Like, because this isn't it. I am hopeful when I ⁓ look at Some of those smaller, but doing some incredibly big things, people who we can look to for for leadership within the church at large. There, I mean, it's inspirational and I want to be a part of that. And so I'm hopeful in that way, but I don't know what it's gonna look like. Is this a renovatable housing project? Or are do we just have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild? I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for talking today, Meredith. This has been really great. Thank you for having me. Lauren, I loved your chat with Meredith. When she was talking about like how to talk to your kids, like you can sort of like prep them. They're gonna be in a situation that, you know, so and so thinks like this and that's okay. We still love them. But you know, that's not how I think about it. That was really great too. And that's how I try to talk to my kids. And that was like inspiring in that way too, of like, ⁓ yeah, that's a really good way to discuss this stuff. They're gonna have things that are like just lobbed at them all the time, right? And so Really, those are opportunities to model like how do we act as gracious people towards people we don't agree with? Because it's gonna happen. And so then they hopefully can go into the world as gracious people to people that they inevitably at times won't agree with, right? Mm-hmm. But also to think critically, it teaches them like, ⁓ not everyone thinks in one way and that's okay. Yeah. Totally. We've talked about a lot of the really hard things that happen when you when you question and when you doubt, but I'm gonna throw a question back at you. What are the benefits for doubting? Why is it worth it? Do you think? Man, I mean, after talking with Meredith, I feel so much more confident that like if we're feeling doubt, on the other side of that doubt might be the thing that we were always meant to be free from, you know? You don't know until you put it down if it was the thing that's been holding you back the whole time. And as we're exploring this from like the perspective of the Christian faith, that the foundation of it is God, right? That is holding us, that is drawing us, that is all of these things, that gives us life, that puts breath in our lungs, all of these very big theological assumptions that are a part of it all, right? And and that we can trust that like, you know, at the end of it, it's God who holds us and that we can pick at. all these things and look at it and wonder about it and question it. And maybe on the other side of it there's something truer and better and more life-giving, you know, hopefully less shame-filled. Like all of these kinds of things that I hope that everyone can can have in their life. Yep. It's like the metaphor is a web versus these building construction metaphors. Yeah. I think there's two sort of underlying assumptions. One is that God exists, and the second is that God is a person. So I guess the question is, what if you question those things? Like, how can we make space even for that? Or it or do we not want to? Like, do Christians like, okay, no, it's a Christian church. We're not gonna make space for that. Personally, as a person who does believe in a God who interacts with us and loves us and all of those things that are certainly an assertion. That can be questioned and I'm totally fine with people and myself questioning. I believe that God is gonna hold you still. I believe that God is not threatened or insecure to have to for you to have to have it all figured out, you know. I think if things feel not quite right to be able to poke at it and maybe just throw it out altogether. Yeah. She told that story about Lynn Hybels that I thought was cool, that like rejecting that God that she knew to be replaced. For the God that she knows now, you know? Right. And so if we're going a level deeper, questioning everything, I think we can do that in a place of anxious fear that the whole your whole life is gonna fall apart, like a construction model. Or we can do it from a place of like there are things, whether I understand them all or not. There are things that I hold to be true that I believe that even if I question this thing, I'm gonna be all right. You know? Mm-hmm. Everything is gonna be okay. So yesterday I had ⁓ I had like I was in a state of panic for a couple hours. Like it was rough. And I'm sorry. Yeah, it's okay. And the details aren't super important except to say that like the thing that I kept coming back to, it's like every time I thought through these horrible loops and cycles in my brain. It was like, ⁓ no, everything's okay. Like it always just came back to that. And it was a way to like ground like, you're okay. Everything's okay. You know? ⁓ you're going through something, but everything's okay. Mm-hmm. I think that there's probably people listening to this episode that are maybe confronting the fact that they doubt something that they haven't maybe fully accepted. And that's really scary. And so I just wanted to just offer that to to listeners. It's gonna be okay. Everything's okay. It's gonna be okay. Thank you for sharing that. And I think by no means are we trying to like sugarcoat this. It's hard to question fundamental assumptions that are genuinely rising up in us. But to your point, when we do, it's gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay. Gonna get and the and the more that we can do it together and in community, the better. And so I'm committed to There is no question that someone can't raise, that they can't also be in community with me, you know. And my hope is that the church at large can do the same, that we can be a place of support as we explore these questions that are natural. Meredith said, it is like a natural stage of development that we will cycle through again and again as life comes up and it questions what I knew to be true. It's gonna make me think, is this true? This thing that I put my life into. And that's okay. You're gonna be okay. You know? And walking through it is a part of becoming more and more stable in this life. I think the more we push against it is where we experience a lot of that anxiety, you know? Thanks for exploring this stuff with me, Chris, and for trusting us with that story of and you know, just gone. kind of unpacking this stuff together. It's it's important. I think it's important. Me too. Me too. That's why that's why we do this. I think it's important too. And I appreciate you, Lauren Ranzino. I appreciate you and who you are. It's good. It's good. Same. Same, same, same, Chris. I think this is gonna be a really good season. You know, I think we we are never gonna get to the end of all the questions that we have. And that's okay. Mm-hmm. Let's keep asking them. It's fine. Let's keep asking them together and see if we might get to something truer. You know? New places that might be really, really great. Yeah. I'm so excited about the episodes we have coming up. Like I won't spoil it right now, but but we have some just like fascinating, really lovely episodes coming up over the next few weeks. Yeah. It's exciting. I can't wait to share these episodes with people. So ⁓ see you again in two weeks. See you in two weeks. Good episode. See you, Lauren. Happy second season, man. Happy second season. Party. Holy Uncertain, wait, blue blue elevator is a okay. It's been a while. Take a month off and forget everything. Forget how to like say my name. Okay. Holy Uncertain is a blue elevator production. It's co-produced by me, Lauren Ranzino. And me, Chris McLeod. To get a copy of Meredith Ann Miller's Reweaving Devotional. Use the link in our show notes and the code podcast to get 50% off. We know we're not alone in our questions. What are yours? We want to hear them. Email them to questions at holyuncertain.com. Thanks to our co-producer Dave Ranzino, the official tie-breaking vote for minor creative discrepancies.