In this episode of Faith & Clarity, Dr. Mark Turman sits down with author and cultural commentator Sara Billups to talk about anxiety and how it shows up in our bodies, our churches, and our culture, and how we can respond with faith and wisdom. Sara shares from her own life: caring for aging parents, navigating personal and family health concerns, and learning to live well amid persistent worry.
They explore how anxiety shapes our daily lives, influences our relationships, and even colors the way we engage with the world around us. Drawing on her new book, Nervous Systems, Sara offers thoughtful reflections on how to navigate fear and uncertainty with a sense of calm and groundedness, helping listeners consider practical and spiritual ways to live faithfully even in anxious times.
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Topics
- (00:00): Introduction
- (00:42): Introducing Sara Billups
- (03:29): Sara’s personal journey
- (09:24): Understanding anxiety and fear
- (18:33): Spiritual practices and anxiety
- (22:07): Caring for aging parents
- (27:48): Wellness culture and embodiment
- (30:44): Discipleship and anxiety in the church
- (31:49): Non-anxious presence and leadership
- (35:35): Normalizing doubt and embracing suffering
- (37:56): Anxiety and the role of women in the church
- (40:05): Scrupulosity and moral OCD
- (43:36): Cultural anxiety and identity
- (48:05): Spiritual practices for overcoming anxiety
- (52:31): Ignatian spiritual exercises and indifference
- (59:09): Conclusion and final thoughts
Resources
- Ask Us Anything: [email protected]
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
- Support Denison Forum 2025
- Sara Billups
- Sara Billups | Substack
- Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics
- Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home
- That’s The Spirit – Podcast
- Sara Billups (@sara.billups) • Instagram photos and videos
About Sara Billups
Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and others. Sara writes Bitter Scroll, a monthly Substack letter and co-hosts the podcast That’s the Spirit. She earned a Doctor of Ministry in the Sacred Art of Writing at the Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary.
Sara works to help wavering Christians remain steadfast through cultural storms and continues to hope for the flourishing of the Church amid deep political and cultural division in America.
Her first book, Orphaned Believers, follows the journey of a generation raised in the 80s and 90s of evangelicalism reckoning with the tradition that raised them and searching for a new way to participate in the story of God. Her second book, Nervous Systems, is now available from Baker Books.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, the Faith & Clarity podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to Faith and Clarity. I’m Dr. Mark Turman, your host for today’s conversation here at Faith and Clarity. We want to help you do a number of things such as speak the truth in love, and to live faithfully beautifully. Sometimes we say abundantly as Jesus said, and to do that in a particular way, living by faith rather than by fear.
So today we’re gonna jump back into a conversation we’ve touched on at different times about anxiety and overcoming anxiety. The. Pandemic, if you will, of anxiety that is sweeping across our lives and our culture and our generation in many ways. And we have a new friend that’s gonna help us with that, and that is author and cultural commentator, Sara Billups.
She’s done some new work on this that we want to tell you about, but let me tell you about Sara. Let me just first tell you how we got to this conversation. My wife and I are in our early sixties and we [00:01:00] have been for the last number of years kind of helping steward our parents toward their entry into eternity with Christ.
And we’re still doing that. And so I just ran across an article. I can’t remember if a friend recommended it or how I got to it, but I. Came across an article that Sara wrote about the journey she has had with her parents, and she may talk about that some. And it just captured me. And then we both have a mutual friend named Curtis Chang that we ended up in a prayer group with him.
Some of you part participated in that a few months ago. A few weeks. And so that kinda led to the opportunity of today’s conversation. She is based in Seattle and does her ministry from there. Some of her writing has appeared in places like the New York Times, Christianity Today and other places.
She has a monthly substack newsletter that you can find called Bitter Scroll, which is an interesting name for a newsletter. Sara she also has a [00:02:00] podcast called, that’s the Spirit. Love that name. She has a doctor of ministry degree and I, I, I have never seen this before either. Sara. She has a doctor of ministry degree from Western Seminary in the Sacred Art of Writing through the Peterson Center.
If you’re not familiar with that, that is named for. The very iconic pastor and writer Eugene Peterson. The Western Seminary is the kind of the center and the steward of Peterson’s writing and letters and notes and archives. All of those things can be found at Western Seminary. And so that’s the connection there.
And Sara just works diligently with her husband and through her church, as well as through her writing and other expressions of content to help the church live in a flourishing state in these challenging times. And Sara, welcome to the Faith and Clarity Podcast.
Sara Billups: Thanks, mark. It’s so good to be here and it’s so fun to hear you talk about Western and the Peterson Center.
That was [00:03:00] an amazing few years for me.
Dr. Mark Turman: Right behind me on my bookshelf are a number of books by Eugene Peterson at at least three of them relative to what it means to, to lead a church. As a pastor are books that get read over and over and over again. Yeah,
Sara Billups: that’s right. Kind of
Dr. Mark Turman: alongside Paul’s pastoral epistles in the, in the scripture as just reminders of this is this is really the healthy way to look at ministry in and with and through a local church.
And so Yeah. That’s right. Have deep appreciation for that, for sure. Hmm. So tell us a little bit about Sara that we can’t get from the resume and just our people usually love getting to know new people and, and understanding a little bit of who’s. Sharing with them through our podcast. Tell us kind of a brief overview of your story, your faith, and some of the journey of you and your husband into ministry, vocationally, kind of in midlife.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Sara Billups: Yeah, thanks Mark. You know, my husband and I moved to Seattle, I guess a little more than [00:04:00] two decades ago now. I grew up in Indiana, in Fort Indiana. Drew’s from Baltimore had always been really fascinated with the Northwest. We were. Grew up in evangelical churches and Christian homes we’re also very creative kids.
Loved poetry and art and literature and ideas. And we had this very kind of mythical kind of imagination around Seattle and the Northwest. And we thought, could it be a place where we could live out our full expression of faith as followers of Jesus, as well as find real creative kind of depth and aesthetics and beauty.
And so when we moved out in the early to mid two thousands, it was a difficult time to land in Seattle. There was a lot of complicated dynamics with the church. And Mars Hill was growing here, which ended up being a really interesting season because in the city there was kind of a palpable tension around churches and Christians.
So we landed kind of having a lot of big ideas about. Or Cohousing or starting a church. And [00:05:00] pretty quickly we became disillusioned and kind of, disoriented a little bit. After two years we had moved out with a lot of friends. We just, our intentional community kind of disbanded. A lot of friends began to identify as language we would use back then as spiritual, but not religious.
People may use the word deconstruction now, although that word is used in many different ways. So it’s hard to find clear language. But it just became a time where we wondered what we were doing here and what God was up to and why we left our home and our community in the Midwest at the time. And it really took a long time to kind of ground ourselves and try to figure out how we could be anchored the whole time.
We attended a church called Grace Presbyterian Church, P Church. Tim Keller returned to the city kind of Winsome era and so loved that church, but was not very engaged besides Sundays. Then at the same time I began working and publishing and, and media and doing a lot of kind of fun kind of urban creative [00:06:00] work.
But there was a big disconnect between my identity as a follower of Jesus and kind of how my life showed up here. Not in, not in actions, but in terms of like values or just a real tension and it gotta the point. I remember I was in my early thirties where I was praying one day and I almost felt like I had a, like a heavy bag on my shoulder, almost like I was carrying a bag of rocks because I was trying to maintain these two identities as a person that loved being in the city and was created in a person that was trying to follow Jesus and something had to change.
And during that time, drew went to Fuller. My husband kind of had this new main idea. He was curious about ethics and theology and got a MAT degree. I just didn’t know what I was doing for a while. And then got to the point in 2016 where I think like a lot of people, there was a lot of clarity around, okay, if I’m gonna identify as a Christian and pursue this life, I’m ready to take it seriously and I’m ready to have kind of more of a wholehearted identity because I can’t kind of keep [00:07:00] living for the rest of my life.
And it’s like I, but when I would read a verse about being lukewarm or the light being under the bushel, I would viscerally react in my body because I thought this is, this is me right now. So something really changed for me around that time. And another big piece is that we began to get really engaged at our church.
A woman named Debbie Taki Smith joined our church as a spiritual formation director. This is around 2000, the early 2000 tens. Like a lot of churches in that time, we became really curious about contemplative practices. Tio Dina, we examine spiritual retreats, silent retreats. So I began to kind of really explore my faith in a much more depthful way, number one.
Number two, getting very engaged at Grace, joining the leadership team as a deacon. And then me just Jesus meeting me in a profound way to say, Hey, there, there may be a way to actually wholeheartedly be free in who you are, and let me show you. And when that happened, everything kind of shifted.
Honestly. It was a pretty big, pretty big deal. So that’s a little bit of my story. You know, now, 20 years later, I mean, on the, our trip is [00:08:00] now Anglican. That’s a whole other story. But on the best way, our church and leadership drew a priest. And I, we work together to really love, believe in and long for the flourishing of the church here in Seattle and certainly in every EV and everywhere, all over the place.
Yeah. So that’s a little bit about, a little bit about us, I suppose. Not anxiety related, but kind of otherwise.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. It may made me wonder if kind of listening to you describe some of that in writing and here this morning as. You wake up some mornings going, I never thought I would wake up and be married to a priest.
Sara Billups: Yeah. It’s so weird. It’s awesome. Yeah. I mean, it’s so right, but I think that the idea that I had of a priest, like growing up was very different than what I now know. That it sounds very smells, bells robes serious. I don’t think I even knew as a kid that priest could get married because I just thought that it was just Catholic priest.
I, I just had a lot to learn.
Dr. Mark Turman: I, I come in my family origin, I come from a Roman Catholic background
Sara Billups: [00:09:00] okay, sure.
Dr. Mark Turman: We, we have a lot of conversations about now how did you get to be in the, you know, come from the Baptist root of things, and so like, how did you get from that to this? And
Sara Billups: yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: And then some of the, some of the journeys back toward that in some ways you know, just through different experiences and conversations, yeah, that’s the way the Lord. Keeps his sense of humor going, I guess, in some ways. Yes,
Sara Billups: that’s right. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: So let’s talk about, you’ve done some great work talking about anxiety and fear in our individual lives.
The church and gen in the general culture as well as we try to live together in reasonable ways. But just thinking through this, our mutual friend Curtis has written on this out of his own experience, some, when you think about this, do you think about fear and anxiety as being the same thing? Do you think about fear more as an event anxiety, more as a disposition?
Kind of how do you just gut level define the terms?
Sara Billups: Yeah. When I think about fear, it is very [00:10:00] much situational, reactive to the moment something that we can carry. But I, when I think about anxiety, I think of a chronic unease. Something that we may feel physically, something that could be about.
If I’m studying for a test, how will it go? Or job security or the budget. It could be about something more practical, but oftentimes it can also be very existential, very forward thinking about something that maybe hasn’t happened yet, can involve ruminations. And so obviously we’re, we’re all anxious people naturally.
I mean, when we were, you know, thinking about kind of the cave scene when we’re trying to defend ourselves from a predator, like there’s a healthy, natural internal response of course to being protected when we’re in a situation of fear. But then there’s something different for many of us, I think, where whether or not you have a generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis or just kind of lean, anxious where there’s something a little bit deeper and older in us that sometimes we even can trace back to [00:11:00] childhood.
And that’s a little bit about what I talk about in, in nervous systems.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, so I remember this was probably three or four years ago when one of my older siblings called me and talked about some of the things he was going through and the therapist that he had been to see and that his therapist said, you know, to my brother, he said, you’re really good at catastrophizing and Sounds familiar.
Sara Billups: Yeah. Yeah. It was really the
Dr. Mark Turman: first time I ever heard the term. And then the term rumination yeah. Can you kind of unpack those two words as kind of indicators, symptoms kind of go along? The idea that kind of defining and understanding what anxiety is and how it works can help us to get some handles on it.
Yeah. And those, those two things, rumination and catastrophizing have been particularly helpful to me over the last five, six years of just understanding the difference between, you know, event driven fear.
Sara Billups: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great question. So when I, when I think of. [00:12:00] Catastrophizing, I think of the idea of looking at whatever your sort of situation or current state of being is and imagining that it’s actually in reality, very much worse than it may be.
You know? And so then I, and I think that that’s a, a common kind of very human experience. Something that I think when we are catastrophizing miracle, a kind of gentleness in kindness. And also curiosity. Like what? Because it usually, Tom Petty has this line I love most things I worry about never happen anyways.
It’s what, what is the actual kind of root of that? I think it can be an interesting arrow to kind of look in and understand, but then think rumination can be a little bit more complicated. I think about it as this repeated excessive focus on a feeling or a negative kind of thought that plays in our head.
But that it’s oftentimes without kind of a healthy journey towards an answer or relief or solution, I think that there can be an almost a comfort sometimes kind of a perverse comfort in kind of [00:13:00] staying stuck in a kind of thought loop, because I think then there can be a safety that comes maybe I’m not able to get out of this loop, but I understand it.
It’s kind of like a smallpox blanket or something. So I, I think about those things a little bit differently. I think in my own life, an anxiety with anxiety story rumination is certainly something that’s become a, a familiar kind of unwelcome friend. And I think that’s because anxiety, catastrophizing, ruminating be being in a state of fear, whatever that looks like, is oftentimes all kind of unrooted in this uncertainty, this invitation to accept and receive that we’re not in control.
And so as a person that historically as a kid and has been up wanting to very much be in control to feel safe. That has been an amazing journey to kind of unpack and really that’s that very tension point. The desire to be in control and to not actually as people be in control is, is very much the door in which Jesus can then enter, I think, and offer some, some relief.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. I just have, have found myself in my own [00:14:00] opportunities reminding people that we are all control freaks. And that, that, that really kind of stems from the, from the garden of eating Eden in the fall of man, that our ambition to be equal or like to like unto God or to replace him really goes to this issue of power and wanting to be in control as a way of securing ourselves.
And That’s right. Coming back and saying over and over again, we’re, we’re not nearly in, in control as the way we think we are, but we know a God who is in control and he’s good to us.
Sara Billups: And amen. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Sara Billups: That’s right. Talk
Dr. Mark Turman: a little bit, Sara, about how this gets framed sometimes. Poorly framed in the, in terms of faith that anxiety, fear, worry is sometimes just put in this bucket of sin.
Getting ready for this conversation. I was, yeah, I was thinking about how Paul says to Timothy, God has not given us a spirit of fear. Somebody gave us one and we yeah. Have a lot of, of difficulty shaking it. And then [00:15:00] sometimes, you know, sometimes the church can appear to be trite. When it says, you know, Jesus said not to worry, and it’s a sin to worry.
So just repent of it and get over it. Talk about it has in that frame and how sometimes scripture and the church doesn’t speak to us as clearly as maybe it should.
Sara Billups: Yeah, I, that’s such a good question. It reminds me a little bit of the prosperity gospel of kind of naming and claiming of if we were a little bit.
Confident, a little bit of the better Christian. If we could just let go a little bit more and really believe in Jesus extra, extra, then maybe we wouldn’t be anxious. It’s, it’s just been such a, it’s such a source of, of shame and a source of, I think othering. If you think about the idea of someone telling us not to be anxious because because Jesus should be able to take away anxiety, like that person is the kind of deliverer of that message in a way that has a really it really welcomes the other person that receives it to feel [00:16:00] failure and shame.
And, you know, I, I write in the book about how, as a kid hearing the beatitudes, and it’s such a beautiful image of Jesus saying, you know, don’t worry, like the birds don’t worry like the like the flowers. It was just as a child, this kind of beautiful, comforting image until it wasn’t, because I realized I couldn’t figure out how to not do that.
Even as a young kind of tender Christian coming up, like wanting so much to believe that to be true, but then in my own life, having such a different experience modeled by my, my dad and my family and genetically and just our household was really a lot and heavy. But an anxiety, you know, is not inherently a sin.
It is an emotional response. It is a way of thinking. It is, it can very much lead to worry in a way that does not welcome God and welcome Jesus to come. But I think that the idea [00:17:00] of what I’ve learned so much, mark, I mean I’m in my late forties now. The last 10 or more years of my life has certainly been about, oh, it is very much in our places of weakness.
It is in our worry and our sadness. We a connect with each other, build understanding, and and can really meet each other and talk about God in a way that’s honest. And, and secondly, it’s this way that we understand more why we’re in need of Jesus and grace and his love. And so those, those together have made me realize that I think anxiety instead of something to be shamed about or if we were the better Christian we could overcome, is this something to really understand is I think a gift in that we can connect to others and we can possibly offer something up.
And the other thing I, I, I think about and talk about is how I, there’s a couple of sides to it. I think if I wasn’t an anxious person, I probably would have less of a imagination. I think I might. I think that if we’re anxious, we may be able to kind of empathize or think about other people or different situations in a more creative way.
So there’s, I think, [00:18:00] two sides of the coin to anything. So I try to think about that, that as well, but really that central tension, what do we do with Jesus saying, do not worry and then worrying is a, a central frame to the book. And spoiler alert, what, what I talk about in the first chapter is thought. Did not remove my anxiety, but it very much met me in its presence.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And just working with God, working with scripture and with other believers about how God can redeem that anxiety into, into something more beautiful.
Sara Billups: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah,
Dr. Mark Turman: and just you know, a lot of times we wish he would just remove something. Let me, so let me something in my head is making me want to jump ahead to spiritual practices, so maybe we’ll maybe we’ll jump ahead and then jump back. Great. I’m wondering if from a standpoint of spiritual practice, you know, this, this idea of, you know, some percentage, 90% or whatever of your fears don’t ever come true. I’m, I’m wondering, have you, have you ever found a spiritual practice in which you stop and just say.
I’m at this point, but, [00:19:00] you know, a month ago, a year ago, five years ago, I was afraid of these five things happening. And did they happen or did they not happen? Has that been a part of your journey at all? I know. I just, in thinking about it, I don’t do that very much to say, you know what?
I thought I feared I was anxious about, I prayed about these kinds of things. But yeah. Did any of them actually happen? Yeah. You know,
Sara Billups: As a, as a writer, I do that. This is funny, I, I should change the name of this file, but I have a. I have my sort of normal, you know, December 20, 25 journal that I’ll write on every day.
But then I have a special file that I, that I call mileage and receipts because I think, oh, I don’t want my kids to somehow look around and see, this is like my anxiety file. So again, I should change the name. But I have, I have a place where I’ll just kind of like dump a lot of kind of very active thoughts about what I’m worried about, be it something with my parents or my family or my own life.
And it’s very interesting [00:20:00] because sometimes I do go back, I go back, this goes back to before the pandemic, and I think, oh. Looked at how here are specific listed things that I was worried about, something about my body or like a health symptom because I struggle with that kind of stuff, whatever. And seeing how many times I met me, how many times again and again, he brought consolation or relief or I moved past it almost in, almost despite myself.
Like I think I made it even harder than I needed to be. So I can almost just see this kind of breadcrumb trail of how so many times things pass again and again in my life. Or other times where things have happened. For example, a worry about my mom and her, her body, and something that’s coming up or an illness or a diagnosis.
And then see, see then still, even if it does come to pass. A sweetness and its complexity and its difficulty, but still see then this like seed of something new and how my mom has changed or grown, or how I have. So [00:21:00] even if it’s, even if it’s a no or it has happened, I see more fully what that looks like, I suppose looking back, I think a lot of us do.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah. And just recognizing that some of this is just the, the, the reality of life and not, not necessarily a always boiled down to a battle between sin and holiness. That’s right. It’s something other than that, or more than that. That’s right. So the, the book Nervous Systems breaks this out into three significant sections about confronting and redeeming the anxiety in our bodies, our churches, and in the bo Body politic or the culture generally.
Let’s talk a little bit about anxiety and the physical. Realities that accompany that. That really was some of what I drew from that initial article that you wrote, that I came across that I love that this emphasis comes back again, that we are holistic, embodied beings, and that you, you can’t just compartmentalize anxiety into some box [00:22:00] in your life.
Talk about that and talk about it, particularly how that showed up in the responsibility of caring for your parents. That’s been part of my own journey of confronting not only their aging, but my aging, their illnesses and mine, and, you know, their eventual death as well as my own. Talk about how that’s kind of unpacked itself for you and how you describe some of that in the book.
Sara Billups: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That book. You know, yes, I talk about collective anxiety, but also personal anxiety in my own, in my own life, and also very much in the lives of my mom and dad. My parents, my parents my dad was diagnosed with the treatable but not curable blood cancer, the first fall of the pandemic.
And he passed very recently. But we had a very, very intense five years of many twists and turns and ups and downs, caring for him and loving him through. As his body began to begin to kind of give out slowly but pretty consistently. And then my mom a few years before that was [00:23:00] diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and non, so she has, and that has just been a very different journey, a very slow.
Loss of, you know, physical ability and then also obviously cognition. And so the ways in which they had required care, the ways in which they worried about their diagnosis or worry about them. In my mom’s case they’re very different. But there’s a certain grounded like universal through line with all of it, which is that boy have, have my family and I needed Jesus.
Like there is no, where else would we go. There was no other place to go because the idea of it, it’s just to, just to be honest, like holding in my heart and in my spirit, the true and real belief that Jesus can choose to heal, that Jesus does heal, that we can pray and that it’s good and well to pray for healing and restoration.
Holding that in one hand, and then on the other hand, seeing the, the, again, the [00:24:00] tension there of my. My dad’s body just sort of, it’s stopping. Like he wanted a new body. Yeah. When he passed, he was ready. You know, and then thinking about my mom, and it’s there’s a point in which it almost feels you don’t stop praying for healing, but you, you pray for like restoration.
You pray for the longer story, you know? And the idea of my dad now being whole and complete with Jesus, man, that’s such a beautiful picture. And honestly, mark, I haven’t had a podcast conversation since he is passed. This is kind of a newer frame for me, but it, I just feel such a sense of like hope and gratitude that he is with Jesus.
And of course, the hard part now is missing. Yeah. But the, the anxiety that came through, what it meant not just to help care for them physically, but also to make sure that they were in facilities and spaces that were, that were safe, that they financially were provided for. I mean, it’s a, a whole different rabbit hole.
Talk about kind of. You know, spend downs and Medicare and Medicaid, but boy, I think I could have received an [00:25:00] associate’s degree in elder care management by the, by the, you know, in the last few years.
Dr. Mark Turman: Which is, which is a whole aspect of it, right? If you’ve never spent, if you’ve never spent 30 minutes to three hours on the phone with an insurance company Yeah.
Dealing with Medicaid or Medicare issues, then you just, you’ve never really lived. And you were doing this you were doing all of this, you know, at the same time being a wife and a mother had, you know, kind of definitely that sandwich generation experience. Yeah, totally. Of raising children at the same time, caring for parents and yeah.
Yeah. And all of that reality, I just, it all these conversations take me back to a, a, a message that my pastor preached when I was a young Christian. He, he chose for his sermon text one Sunday, a passage out of Paul’s letter where Paul’s talking about his friends in ministry, his partners, and he says of a guy named Hamus.
He said, I left Hamus sick in my elitist, and I thought, what is he gonna do with this? And he said [00:26:00] we know at least a couple of things. Sometimes Christians get sick and sometimes they stay sick. Yeah, that’s right.
Sara Billups: Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: And we know that Jesus ultimately heals us in the final analysis, but we sure wish it would sometimes come quicker and sooner.
Sara Billups: That’s right.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. We we’re,
Sara Billups: goodness, we’re
Dr. Mark Turman: living in that tension all the time.
Sara Billups: Yeah. And Mark, I’m glad you mentioned the sandwich generation. I mean, I think the status, a quarter of a quarter of adults in the US have, you know, are caring for kids and then parents that are 65 or over. Certainly a large and very much a growing cohort.
And so then I also read a bit in the book about just parenting a kid through some anxiety and specifically OCD and very much from the perspective of what a, what that is like as his mother and loving him through. And so then kind of managing, and I think this of course because of the pandemic was very much a generational, certainly, I mean, we all know about the anxious generation in Jonathan Burg.
I mean there’s this whole other dynamic then of, of Sam Wet being sandwiched and caring for your child [00:27:00] in a time of crisis as well as your parents. And that there were times when it very much felt like too much. And I realized that I had to understand something about what it means to be embodied because the incarnation is a beautiful example of that.
And the idea that Jesus having a full experience in the body while my mom and dad specifically bodies were, were changing, and while my son going through puberty was changing, it was just a very important lesson that I think I’d become a little. Detached from, I just realized that embodiment grounds us from the inside out.
And so I really write about how I had sort of a misunderstanding of what the embodied person might be and how that Jesus is the ultimate example and very much what I needed as a model in those, in those days and these days.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah. And, and well described, described in in the writing, in the book for sure.
You talk a little bit about confronting and dealing with wellness culture. So both on a personal as well as a ministry level. That is something that kind of keeps coming around. And just wanted you to talk about that a [00:28:00] little bit. What do you, what do you mean by wellness culture and what are you, what’s your concern that you’re trying to address in this area?
Sara Billups: Yeah, I think, I mean, wellness is obviously a positive thing, but when I talk about wellness culture, I just talk about the industry that has kind of built up the market, kind of how consumerism has really crept in. And I think that message is being received by Christian women, women people in general right now.
The idea that if I maybe do another retreat if I do a little bit more of a like exercise or yoga or whatever, if I drink, I have a funny part, I think in the book where I talk about trying to do like a dry, where, you know, I sometimes have a glass of wine before dinner. I gave, gave that up for a minute to see if I, a month to see if I felt better.
But I just felt the same. Just a lot of kind of trendy social media driven practices that maybe we can get better. Become a better version of us. You know? It’s always like this, like this sort of tree with this [00:29:00] fruit that’s really sweet and rip. We can never quite reach, you know? And so I began to see how as a person of that very much tries to center my life around Jesus.
There was this tension between this other part of me, these messages I was hearing from other women, other peers, people in the church and outside of it that there may be ways that I can optimize myself and that in doing so, maybe I can be younger a little bit longer. Some of these things wait at vests, for example, in Seattle you’ll see, you’ll see many people.
Maybe this is everywhere. I think it might be like circling, like GreenLake here with their dog and weighted vest could build muscle mass. That’s an excellent thing. I have a weighted vest. I’m eager to keep my muscle mass strong, but it is more about kind of the culture around that that I’m very fascinated by.
But I think in the book, I realize, I talk about how our bodies are, I think, have become disconnected from kind of healthy desire and failed by this promise of wellness that we can probably not afford and can never really reach. We can’t reach that [00:30:00] fruit on that tree, and that embodiment is this way to kind of ground ourselves from the, again, from the inside out.
It
Dr. Mark Turman: kind of, kind of feels in some ways a version of the Prosperity gospel. That’s right. Ex Exactly. Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. In a physical sense. In a physical sense. A
Sara Billups: hundred percent. That’s right. You
Dr. Mark Turman: know, I thought the world, I thought the message coming out of Seattle, you just needed to drink better coffee, and that was I,
Sara Billups: so I, I wholeheartedly endorse that one.
That’s the one message that I am, I’m on fully on board with.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yes, me too. Me too. Sara, you talk a lot about how we carry this not only in our bodies, but then we carry it with our bodies, in our bodies, into the places we go as believers, particularly the church, and then the places where hopefully God is leading us to be involved in the culture.
Talk about this as as a discipleship issue. We’ve talked about it a little bit from the standpoint of the frame of sin, but how, how is this a discipleship issue in your opinion?
Sara Billups: Yeah, I mean. I, I, I [00:31:00] talk a lot about the, the church body in the book. I, I talk a little bit about our own story at Grace and what that looked like.
But then I just think a little bit about how the church has been a place that has absorbed anxiety in many cases instead of bearing peace. And so you can really look at any kind of, any issue, any abuse case, any kind of news story. Anything in the pandemic about if you’re a church that you wore masks or you didn’t, or there was a non mask section or a mask section.
If it was something around an issue like gender or women in leadership, if it’s something around, again, a scandal or narcissism or a church leader that has fallen, whatever the. Whatever it is, there’s just clearly this anxiety response underneath it, like a river that flows underneath. And I, I wanted to understand how becoming a non-anxious presence can welcome kind of flourishing community and kind of diffuse some of that response.
So [00:32:00] instead of this collective anxiety response, there was this possibility towards a different way. And Edwin Friedman, this was a rabbi and psychologist wrote this book called Failure of Nerve in 2007. And that was, he, he wrote up most of it coming up to the pandemic. So there was kind of this interesting why 2K kind of, imagination.
I’m wondering around there, because there was a very different palpable anxiety. I was in college then, but remember but he, he talks about how leaders and mark, I’d say that we all, even if we’re not pastors or you know, in professional church roles, I think we’re all leading all the time, leading in our families, in our communities.
And so as leaders, how can we. Take a posture of non, because that very much then again, flows down into people that we’re influencing people in our lives, people that we love, people in our church. And so I just became really fascinated in what that looked like. And I thought of a few ways that being non-anxious could look like in churches.
And this, this idea we talk about at Grace and that a lot of people talk [00:33:00] about is, you know, building walls not fences. And so thinking about how when we’re trying to, when we’re anxious, it’s often normal and human to kind of build up walls, to be like, to double down highlight our position because I think there’s a fear if we don’t, are we gonna fall down the slippery slope if we’re not clear, if we don’t put up clear boundaries?
We’re not gonna keep people in. They’re gonna fall away. What does that mean? But I began to think about this idea that Jesus as a shepherd was really more interested in drawing people into the well of his goodness and grace and love as opposed to kind of keeping them bound. And so when I got past, again, the kind of fear, when I say that, I almost feel even now like a fear.
What does that mean? But I think there’s a way for, to be clear, to have clarity and kindness and love in our church, as well as draw people in because we’re convicted and convinced of God’s love and goodness and kindness. That that’s the conviction. And the other thing I realized is that we would [00:34:00] relax a little bit if we were more non-anxious because it’s not our job to keep the church.
The church is what Jesus left us with. It’s his gathered body of believers. It’s his people, right? And so if we believe that that is, that is true, then we can relax and let Jesus do the work of restoring, reforming, drying people in. So I tried to think about that a little bit too in the book.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And it is helpful.
I love that you brought up this phrase a non-anxious presence. Had a chance to have a conversation like this with Mark Sayers and, and others.
Sara Billups: Oh, his book was so amazing. Yeah, I talked about it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, just a great, he’s awesome.
Dr. Mark Turman: A great thing. And, and it kind of throws me back to my experience leading a church in the season of the Pandemic.
And one of the things I learned out of that relative to an our shared anxiety in church is that we, part of our, our symptom is, is we’re terribly afraid of saying we don’t know. Mm.
Yeah. And I remember having multiple conversations in multiple meetings with leaders as we tried to navigate COVID.
You [00:35:00] know, should we meet, should we not meet? How should we meet? What, all of those kinds of issues. We, we just seemed to have a fear of being willing to say, we don’t know. And what I, what I came to was, was a kind of this moment of clarity of, Hey, it’s gonna take us somewhere between five and 50 years. To know what we’re getting right and what we’re getting wrong about managing this particular situation.
Wow. That none of us have ever been in and we just didn’t like that answer.
Sara Billups: Yeah, that’s right. No, totally. That makes sense. It’s the idea of engaging with the reality of where we are instead of painting a rosy picture. Like we, we wanna, we wanna paint, paint a rosy picture, but I dunno, I think that, that makes me think about how at Grace and how Drew and I talk a lot about normalizing doubt.
Not making it this sort of big enemy, but kind of welcoming it in, especially with our young people and teens. That’s been really, really good. And just this idea how we can really celebrate, maybe not celebrate suffering, but welcome and expect it, and then just give each other the [00:36:00] benefit of the doubt.
You know, I, I was just thinking about this Jamie, one of our priests had this really beautiful invitation one Sunday. She was at the front of the. Church and brought this big heavy stone. I write about this a little bit. You know, we only, we’ve always had about 150, 200 people. We’ve always been the same size.
When Mar Hill employed it in 2014, we kind of doubled in a Sunday. That was a different era, but we’ve always been, there’s been enough of us that we can all kind of stand around the church, shoulder to shoulder on the sanctuary. So she had this big stone and she passed it to the person next to her and said, if you’re comfortable, take the stone and tell the person to your right something that you’re carrying, and then the person can say back to you, by the grace of Jesus, I’ll carry it with you.
And it was just the most beautiful, like visceral embodied practice where we just went around for about 20 minutes and you know, someone took the stone and then you don’t, you know, what they we’re saying. You’re just sort of praying the whole time. And the idea that we carry each other, we carry each other through seasons of doubt.
We carry each other through uncertainty, [00:37:00] through pandemics. Through seasons of anxiety politically through changes and brokenness. I just coming, I think about that all the time as this real visceral example of how we are the church because we are people following Jesus and we’re all broken and we’re all suffering and we’re doing the best we can.
And there’s something like, so honest and real there that I think, again, it can really calm us down and be a way to be non anxious.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It’s such a, yeah. Such a beautiful reminder of what the church is supposed to be. You know, I, I tell people one of the best reasons to come to church is so that you’ll re be reminded that you’re not the only one struggling and sometimes losing your mind.
Sara Billups: Yeah, that’s right. That’s been,
Dr. Mark Turman: and and to just sit among people and, and hear them share like that. And that’s one of the advantages of being in a smaller church is that you can do some practices that you couldn’t do. At a larger scale such as those kind of embodied experiences
Sara Billups: like that.
Exactly. Maybe that’s for a Bible study or something, but you can Yeah, exactly. You can,
Dr. Mark Turman: yeah. Talk a little bit about you, you, you do unpack in [00:38:00] some important ways how this looks, how this shows up as an anxiety problem in the community of believers. I thought it was an, an interesting discussion about just how anxiety is likely driving a lot of this struggle that we’re having in the American church about the role of women.
You know, I, I have come from a denominational expression that at least I thought, and I still believe that that was supposed to be a local church issue and not an issue of fellowship. But some many have raised it to that level. So I, I wanted to see if you wanted to comment on that, and then this other.
Thing called scrupulosity. Yeah. Which I’d never heard that word. I, yeah. I thought, I thought being scrupulous was a good thing. That was a good thing.
Sara Billups: You
Dr. Mark Turman: know, the, the somewhat akin to the idea of pursuing holiness in
Sara Billups: Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: The best sense of the word. Talk about, talk about those one or one or other, one or the other, or both of [00:39:00] those things as kind of symptoms of anxiety that are showing themselves up in congregations.
Sara Billups: Yeah. Totally. Totally. First Mark the question of women in leadership. I mean, obviously this is something that many denominations and many churches are talking about actively. It’s a hot button issue. It’s a political issue. It’s a social media darling, if you are pro or against, it’s very charged.
Yeah. But in the, in nervous systems, I talk about grace’s own story through. Process and through leaving a denomination because women were not welcome to be deacons. And what that was like and how that was disorienting and also very unifying and grounded. And I think we were just really tired because we were spending so much time kind of on polity and in regional presbytery meetings, and there was a defensive posture where we realized, oh, we’re not really pouring into our people.
We’re all just as leaders tired. And so we began a, a very long, like a multi-year process of looking at the, the issue of women in leadership and then also thinking about [00:40:00] denominational change and are now a member of the church for the sake of others. Diocese, it’s an Anglican diocese. So I, I, I won’t, I don’t know that I’d say bore, but I won’t go into all those details, but I tell the story pretty, I think pretty honestly in the book, if folks are kind of in a similar journey or season in their own congregation or have other kind of questions about how that’s been, at least for a church in Seattle, but then the, the issue of scrupulosity, I think is much more personal, but also interesting kind of culturally too, because when I talk about scrupulosity, it’s just a I’m talking about moral oc d the idea of of kind of getting stuck or ruminating on how to kind of, an example. So if you, if you don’t have scrupulosity or moral ocd and that this is this is something my son deals with and I talk about in the book, again, from his perspective as his mom.
With permission in a way that I think is very careful and is really, hopefully shining a light more on the issue, but also saying that it’s a very personal and then seeing it in my own life too, looking back, the idea of, you know, you might think if you go into your child’s room and [00:41:00] they’re reading the Bible, that that’s a beautiful thing to celebrate.
And it usually is, except if you feel compelled to do that. If you feel like you have to do that, you have to read the Bible all the time, or else you’re not really a Christian. The idea of the. Unforgivable sin, the, you know, the idea of can you lose your salvation? These questions the impulse as I think a lot of us had as kids or as I did, at least to ask Jesus in our heart all the time, every night, just to be sure.
There’s these sort of markers or indicators. It may not be a diagnosable level of moral OCD, but there’s this way in which I think being scrupulous ruminating on whether or not you really are a Christian, you’re really good enough. If you’re sinning, what that looks like can become problematic for some people.
And so it’s a really fascinating thing. I think, I don’t know, maybe, what is it two to 5% of people with OCD might experience pulos, not just Christians, all religious denominations. Sometimes if you’re atheist or agnostic, you may have [00:42:00] pulos about kind of like whether or not you really are. So it’s very interesting.
And really there’s lots of church leaders. If you think back, I kind of jokingly ask in the book if being scrupulous is sort of a requirement on the path to sainthood. Like thinking Saint Teresa was you know, in her had, was possibly scrupulous or at least experienced scruples in the way in which she would have to confess Martin Luther.
Would confess sometimes for hours a night and then get back to his room and realize he had forgotten something and so he would confess again. And so there’s all these really interesting historical examples where it’s oh, I think this is, this is a bit of a through line. That’s interesting.
And very much an anxiety response. So that was both the most personal part of the book to write and the most kind of interesting as well, kind of historically, I guess.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And I think it, you know, we, we talk about it in a lot of different ways, depending upon what branch of Christianity we may be a part of.
You know, I, I can remember in seminary learning the story that, you know, Martin Luther had this friend that he would confess to a [00:43:00] mentor spiritual guide who got so frustrated with his trivial things that he said, Martin, go, go do some real sin before you come back here again. You know?
Sara Billups: That’s funny.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just that whole
Dr. Mark Turman: idea that we slip so easily back into a legalistic works mindset and that I said that idea of, I, I’m not enough, I’m just, I’m not enough to be. Worthy in God’s eyes. And the truth is we’re not, but you have to work your way. That’s the point through. That’s the point. Yeah.
To the point. Yeah. Yeah.
Sara Billups: Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Let’s, let’s talk a moment about the culture and then we’ll talk about some spiritual practices to finish up. Sure. I’ll tell you a funny story. So I was recently reading through some of the things you talk about in the culture, how anxiety is driving so many things in our culture.
And you, you spend a little bit of time talking about this phenomenon called tra wives. And I thought, and I, and I’d heard the term before, I had kind of a general understanding of what the term meant, but I, you know, I hadn’t spent a lot of [00:44:00] time dealing with it. So I was learning more from, from that part of your book.
I walk into my house, my wife is home, she’s got dinner started. And she’s listening to Dr. Phil do an episode on Tra Wives.
Sara Billups: Oh, wow. And it really has gotten into the center of the Cold tribe
Dr. Mark Turman: apparently. And she walks, she walks in, the first thing she says is, I’m sorry, I’m not being a good tra wife. And and I’m like, what in the world is happening in my world?
How did this, how did this come about? So I don’t know if it, if the term needs the definition, but larger context, which is,
Sara Billups: yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Our, our culture is also struggling not only with anxiety, but also with identity. These two things are kind of hooked up together whether it’s tra wives or something else.
We are always building these sub identities or additional identities or alternative identities alongside of, or in opposition to our identity in Christ. [00:45:00] How is that, how are you seeing that? What do you see maybe as some of the dangers in that?
Sara Billups: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think there’s sometimes, as you know, again, I’ve got a couple of teenagers right now thinking about when I was growing up in the, when I was a teenager in the nineties.
It was really, I think a natural and normative part of development to differentiate ourselves to have certain interests. Maybe it’s a team or, you know, an activity that we do. Maybe it’s something like that you love a certain band or my, my daughter is a swifty for better or worse, and that’s, that just is what it is. But she finds a subculture around it. So there’s some parts of that that are fun that are natural, that are just part of being human, you know, a natural part of development. But there’s this other, I think. Way in which there can be kind of a political and kind of cultural kind of insidiousness towards certain trends that pretty quickly blossom into something really different.
And so the idea of a trad wife or a traditional [00:46:00] wife was, you know, kind of, again with various like conservative Mormon women and some other maybe conservative Christian women but usually kind of displayed on Instagram or on social media, usually typically women that may have more financial stability and so they might be able to, to not work or have access to be home if they choose to.
But very much modeling and projecting messages of almost like defiantly in some cases, taking on specific gender roles that are kind of idealized old fashioned ways of life. Maybe it’s homesteading, maybe it’s an attraction for making, you know, sourdough starter and doing bread by hand again.
Great things do we do. So we have sourdough starter and make bread all the time. That’s awesome. We love farming. It is not about the actual thing, but the kind of culture around it as I guess Dr. Phil is now picking up on, has really kind of metastasized into something that I think is being used as a way to kind of other, at points or in some cases make I think a bit of a shame spiral if that’s kind of not who you are or what you’re [00:47:00] doing or if you are working a job to support your family or whatever.
And so I just talk a little bit about what that means and, and how that kind of plays into the church a little bit into culture. And so I also kind of jokingly think in the book like, could I be a child wife? I, I happen to be good at writing, but I’m not necessarily very good with my hands. And so I just kind of, again, play around with this idea of how it’s actually really this beautiful picture of.
Wholesomeness. And, you know, I’m not, I am not critical of the practice because I think there’s a, a beautiful culture around it. But the problem now is that it’s become kind of used in certain circles as a way to differentiate and to kind of better or other in a way that I think can feel pretty bad if that’s not you.
So I think a little bit about the anxiety response of that culture as well in the book.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. There, there’s, there’s this built-in tendency in our lives as centers to position ourselves as being better superior, smarter.
Sara Billups: Exactly.
Dr. Mark Turman: And, and taking something good and elevating it into that [00:48:00] kind of a framework and that kind of a, a mentality, that’s where it becomes challenging.
Sara Billups: That’s right.
Dr. Mark Turman: Let’s, let’s talk a few minutes about some of the practices that you’ve discovered that have been helpful to you. I, I loved when you talked about, hey, I, I, I remember running into this spiritual practice or thing when I was. You know, 20 or 25 or 30, and it meant nothing to me. But now it means a lot to me.
Talk a little bit about you’ve, you’ve encountered, you, you name a, a, a number of spiritual mentors and guides, people like St. Ignatius of Loyola. Yeah. Dallas, Willard, uh mm-hmm. Some others talk about just how those things, how those mentors kind of came into your world. And how, if you were recommending two believers how to seek out some of these opportunities, experiences of, of different kinds of spiritual formation and encouragement, how does, how would you, Dr.
[00:49:00] Address that?
Sara Billups: Yeah. You know, I, I think that a lot of kids that grew up in the eighties and nineties in evangelical church, there was a lot of suspicion around Catholic practices. My mom, Italian Catholic, and her whole family grew up Catholic, in Chicago. But then my mom converted to Christianity pretty dramatically in the seventies.
She converted to, we went to non-denominational church. And so there was always, I think because of my family of origin as well as because of broader our cultural messages, a lot of suspicion around some of these practices and, you know, Catholics weren’t the same. And so we, so we never really explored what that looked like.
So my whole life, I just feel like there was this whole world of, of Christian practice looking at kind of some of the saints and older, historical ways of pursuing Jesus that I did not explore or understand. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties again, when at Grace, like a lot of churches, we started to understand some more contemplated practices and see how that could be so healthy.
Grounding that I began to really look into what I was [00:50:00] missing. And the first thing that happened was I started to explore spiritual direction. I’d heard about it in my twenties. It seems sort of strange or maybe kind of like tangential to Christianity, but what’s kind of like dangerous? What, who was the spiritual director?
Were they like a psychic? I really didn’t understand. Yeah. But now, you know, I, so Debbie, who I mentioned before, was a director. It’s just a, a way of being trained to lead people through listening prayer, to sit with a verse or a piece of scripture and to really pray visually. It’s become such a beautiful, I think if you are a person that is a visual person, if you pray and with some imagination, if you’re able to kind of imagine scenes or scenarios talking with Jesus or engaging, it can be a very beautiful depthful practice to kind of bring in.
You know, so I, I see a spiritual director once a month, which is just a. A Christian man in our church that’s gone through some very cool training. And I go, we sit, he reads, we pray. There’s a lot of silence. We [00:51:00] listen. He reads a verse a couple of times and then he’ll say, where is Jesus meeting you?
And it is a profound and beautiful part of my faith that is deepened my relationship with Jesus so much in so many ways that I think about, pray, about right about after. So I, spiritual direction has been awesome. The other thing that I did a couple of years ago, we have a, a place in Seattle called Soul Care Seattle.
Dan and Renee from our church again, has started this, this house where there’s half day silent retreats, retreat direction. And then they led this thing called the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises every year. And I’d heard about it for three or four years and thought, that sounds really intense. It’s not for me.
I can’t commit to something like that. As my mom and dad got sicker and as my caregiving responsibilities grew and as the pandemic. Happened. I began to feel like instead of not having time for it, it was, it was important and key to make time because I needed Jesus to meet me in a way that I was not finding just through my kind of normal quiet time.
So I [00:52:00] started this nine month program. The Ignatian exercises are typically done if you can go away for a month and this very intense kind of monk, light mage. But for many of us, we do something called the 19th annotation. It’s this adopt it nine month journey where I pray, would pray in the morning for an hour and then meet with, with Dan talking, my director, talking about what I had learned over a glad shown up every week.
It ended up being by far mark without question, the most profound and beautiful way that Jesus has met me in my life as a, a person following him. So it was a big deal and the thing that I learned from it that anybody can apply clearly without having to go take to these nine months is this idea of Ignatian indifference of wholly indifference, which is really where the book drives to and leads this idea of.
Whatever the outcome Ignatius talks about these binaries health or health or sickness, fame or disgrace, a long life or a short life, whatever, whatever the two things are, can you hold your hands open and say, Jesus, I am surrendering. [00:53:00] I only want your will, even if it is not the outcome I want it.
It was a profound shift in the way that I learned how to pray and think. And so honestly, like I think about indifference every day. I mean, I finished the exercises a couple of years ago, but it has been the thing that has shifted how I think about my anxiety and how I think about collective anxiety and the church and politics.
It has actually truly changed how I see the world and how I pray. So that’s been a pretty big one. Yeah, not to talk it up too much, but it’s been a pretty amazing gift that I think God’s been able to kind of bring into my life through this, these new kind of practices.
Dr. Mark Turman: Alright, I, I’m gonna have to ask you to chase it a little further.
Yeah. So I, I could hear somebody saying indifference. I
Sara Billups: know, right? That,
Dr. Mark Turman: that means I just need to come back to the cultural mantra of whatever. Yeah. Just whatever. And, and as I listen to you describe it here and in the book, that it, it is something more than [00:54:00] that, different than that, holier than that.
I think of the, there’s a popular cultural writer who just released a book called Let Them and a friend of mine was telling me he was reading that book. And it just kind of giving permission to people to be who they are and do what they do and not let it, you know, bother you too deeply that type of thing.
Yeah. I’m
Sara Billups: so glad you asked.
Dr. Mark Turman: Just so let’s go down this road of indifference for just another moment of Yeah. This. It really kind of sounds very much like Gethsemane. It, it really sounds like Jesus saying, you know, I, I really am not eager for the suffering of the cross, but I’m, I’m here to do the father’s will, whatever that may mean.
That seems like the core of the spirit of indifference. Am I on the right track?
Sara Billups: I’m so glad. Yes. I’m so glad you said that. Yeah. So Ignatius talks about this idea of detachment. It’s the, the same idea. The indifference is just the ability to let go of [00:55:00] what doesn’t what doesn’t lead you to God’s love in order to receive God’s, God’s will to stay close to God.
It’s a, a way of letting go of the desire for a certain outcome because you are so convinced that God is near and close and actively working and convicting and changing and has a plan for where your life is. Regardless of whether or not that means that there’s healing for my dad or my dad. Pass what, whatever that looks like.
Can we be so convicted that God is so near and present that we can reach this state of Ignatius talks about, of spiritual freedom of saying we’re detached from whatever we might prefer or desire because we want and are convicted of God’s love and desire and that that is a good thing and a near a thing that’s near.
So the first thing that that requires is believing that we’re actually loved by God, which sounds kind of ridiculous to say, except I think it actually is a profound thing that many of us here our whole lives, but don’t metabolize or really ruminate in the healthy way on just to be, just to bring that back.
So I, I took me, you know, [00:56:00] I, I spent I think two years before I did the exercises, just praying a verse every morning for a while about God’s love. Just to really be able to believe and understand that we’re each beloved by God and made by God, and that there’s a dignity in that and a trueness. And so that took a little while, you know, and then the idea of detachment or indifference begins to make more sense because.
You know, St. Theresa OT and her daily offering, which I love says at one point to accept for love of you the joys and sorrows of this passing life. But again, if it’s a short life or a long life game or disgrace so detachment does not mean checking out. It does not mean doing what we want. In fact, I think that it’s this way to kind of ground ourselves inside that we can then better be present for our community and service and showing up for our neighbors.
I think it’s a very much a way to kind of clarify why, why we do what we do as people that love Jesus and energizes us. So I found that to be pretty profound and very practical and very daily too. For [00:57:00] example, this is kind of a funny example, but you know, like nervous systems has been out for about a month now that we’re talking, and it’s been like, as you, you know, bringing out a book feels like a big deal, but like I’ve had to pray again and again and I go on walks and I say Jesus do what you wanna do with this book. I believe, I believe that if you want people to read this and it’s helpful, I give, like I give it to you. It’s just a way of offering what we’re holding, whether it be a small thing or a very, very big thing about the wellness of someone we love or whatever. So it really can kind of scale in a way that has felt like a gift.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah. It, it just, it takes me to a conversation that my wife and I have recurring, which is the conversation about expectations. And what does it mean to let God redeem and sanctify our expectations about small, medium, and big things, you know? Because we, we find ourselves at different seasons of our lives going through experiences of disappointment and how does that color our relationship with Christ [00:58:00] and color our relationship with each other.
You know, I’ve, I’ve passed through seasons of my life of. Thinking at times I’m just not supposed to have any expectations.
I, I’m not sure that’s the proper holy goal because God gave us the ability to anticipate and the ability to dream and part of the experience of hope is expectation.
So anyway, that, that practice and that conversation about indifference plays into that for me and yeah. Is, is helpful. Yeah. I love
Sara Billups: that. Yeah. Yeah. It, it really frees us to, to hope in fullness that we can hope for what we believe is God’s will or desire. And if we, if that’s incomplete or we see a piece of it, or a little bit of the story, that we can believe that Jesus will completely fulfill that in, in, in, in the right time, in the right way.
I think that’s really hope that it’s really hopeful. I think it is very much. A hopeful thing to hold onto. Ignatius talks about the idea of holding onto good things of constellations, like a piece of hard candy, like rolling it around in your mouth. It’s just like the [00:59:00] idea of being more present to where God is working and where there is goodness, because we can see gifts differently in our own lives as well as hard things.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good word. Sara, thank you. We could go on for quite a while longer. I really appreciate the conversation. Wanna let our audience know if you want to read more from Sara on this topic? Her book is Nervous Systems. Subtitle is Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church and Politics.
We need it everywhere because we’re dealing with this pandemic of anxiety. And Sara, this is really, really helpful for the conversation as well as for the book. And just thank you for that. People can find you on substack as well at Bitter Scrolls, right?
Sara Billups: Yeah, that’s right. And
Dr. Mark Turman: and then the podcast is called, that’s The Spirit.
Any other place we should send people to find more of your work?
Sara Billups: Nope. I write, I write sometimes on Instagram as well at.
Dr. Mark Turman: All right. Thank you for spending [01:00:00] some time with us on Faith and Clarity, and we hope to have you back for future conversations and talk some more. I wanna thank our audience for being a part of our conversation as well, and encourage you to rate and review our podcast that’ll help people find us, and always we encourage you to share this with others.
Thank you for being a part of Faith and Clarity, which is a Denison Forum podcast. We hope you have a blessed day, blessed week, and a blessed season of Advent. We’ll see you soon. God bless you. Thank
Sara Billups: you. Thanks Mark.
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