[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that makes total sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes eludes us that makes total sense, is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Okay, so I'm already embarrassed. Janai, good morning.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Good morning.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I just might. I might have a kid who lives in my house who's like, mom, don't cry. It's so awkward and. But, you know, when we're teenagers and preteens, everything is awkward. And this is what many of my friends and family know about me, is that I'm just a crier. So I'm kind of hoping, like, for the sake of this microphone and, you know, that snot doesn't sound good on recordings, that maybe I'm done, but maybe I'm not. So with that, I'll say, welcome, Janai, how are you?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: I'm good. I'm good. And I'm good with tears, too. I think the tears are good. So if they come up, we can roll with it.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: We can.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: And I'm grateful for that.
I'm grateful for it.
I just finished your book, othered, so I'm going to say the full title, othered, finding belonging with the God who pursues the hurt, harmed and marginalized. And that title and subtitle could refer to a lot of things. And I think that there's a lot of circumstances that people could find themselves othered. And you allude to those. Specifically, though, you weave your own story of otheredness, of othering as it relates to.
What's the term you want to use? That's kind of where I want to start with language. There's a time when I would have previously used church hurt. Now I kind of want to use spiritual abuse. But what would you use to call your experience in the church where you were wounded?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say predominantly. It was a lot of spiritual abuse that resulted in othering and leaving me othered and fostered religious trauma. So, I mean, it really did start out as a book on spiritual abuse. And I thought it needs to be broader because spiritual abuse doesn't just look this one way. And so I thought there are so many people who don't give themselves permission to use the term spiritual abuse because for whatever reason, you know, for some of us, it might be racism for other, like, racism within the church specifically or for others of us. It might be a sense of ableism or. And so really, it was spiritual abuse. And I make the argument that spiritual abuse exists because there's so many normalized instances of othering within the church. Kind of like how we see that sexual abuse and financial abuse and all of the other more criminal instances of abuse in the church exist because spiritual abuse preceded those instances to kind of groom and, like, pave a way for these other egregious abuses to happen. Othering in the church kind of is the gateway through which, like, the moment you start to believe that other people can be or are less than someone else, then that justifies spiritually abusive actions. And sometimes we don't name them spiritually abusive. We just call them faithful. This is what faithfulness looks like. This is what differentiates me from them. I am faithful, and they are not. And so I think my story specifically was spiritually abusive. The other thing that I experienced wasn't necessarily or explicitly racialized. Um, I do believe it was. There was a gender like dynamic, for sure. Um, but I would say it was spiritually abusive, and it resulted in othering.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, thank you. Now my mind is going in a million different places. I admitted to you before we got going, I'm like, I don't really have a lot of notes right here. There's a lot of processing. So I have. I have tons of notes inside my copy of the book, but I didn't have a ton when we. When we first signed on this morning. But that is where I wanted to start was with language.
When you were talking about othering, though, I want to. I'm going to pause there for a minute, because I so, admittedly, the reason there were tears this morning is because I.
My experiences, I resonated with a lot of what you said in the book, and I, you know, much of what I experienced that was pretty. This religious trauma happened, you know, five plus years ago, and I have processed with my therapist, and my husband and I have walked and I have cried, and we have, you know, done all of the things, but I tend, just by personality, to be an internal processor. So I kind of wasn't anticipating for this to hit me the way that it did. Although, as you point out, this healing process really is a process, and it's a journey, and it's ongoing.
But when you mentioned this othering, I thought, okay, I wonder if there could be a pattern that I felt was maybe something I saw in my experience, which was there's, there's an experience of othering that feels maybe not as.
I don't want to say it's not harmful, because it surely is, but maybe feels less significant to those who are of us who are kind of used to it. So for me, I would say as a woman, as a mixed woman, and you reference some of those experiences in your own story as well, where there's the kind of, you laugh it off when someone makes a joke about your ethnicity or you just kind of want to fit in, see, whatever. So that's othering. And then I think, for me, in my story, I'll name it for my story, I probably just grew accustomed to that to a certain degree. And so then when the spiritual abuse came, it was kind of like, oh, this, this is, this is part of it. This is like another level of it. But then after that came, like another layer. Layer of othering. It's like an oreo kind of. And so then it was like you were out of place to begin with because you're this, you know, mixed woman. You know, you were out of place to begin with because you weren't as financially, you know, well off as them, or you were, you know, in this place because you weren't as talented or you weren't whatever. And then you, you know, I experienced this traumatic incident, and then I get othered again.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Because then I didn't respond the way that I was kind of, in scare quotes, supposed to respond. And so it's like, othered to be abused. To be othered.
Like, that sucks. Like, that sucks. But I want to go back to this question. The first question I want to say, I want to ask is tell. Help me, though, with language and talk about maybe the differences of church hurt. I really liked how you defined that in the book versus some of these other things we're talking about. Spiritual abuse, religious trauma, othering, things like that. Because I remember you've interacted enough with my husband, at least online, where he's, he's, he's kind of a red. We call. He just says stuff. Right?
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: And I, which is great, but for people who are not like me, I'm like, do you have to say that? But I, I said something about churcher, and one day he was like, I wish you would quit calling it that.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: He was like, it was spiritual abuse. And I'm like, I'm not ready to say that. And he was like, that's fine. You say what you want to say. But when I'm talking about your experience, I'm going to name it and say it was spiritual abuse. And then when I read your book, I was like, oh, he's right. What I experienced wasn't church hurt her. Church is a thing. Yeah, but it's not the focus of this book. It's not what your experience was. It's not what mine was. And I think there are probably other people out there maybe similar to me that you address in your audience who'd say it was church hurt. And we go, no, let's just name it. Like, let's actually just use this language.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and for church hurt, there are a lot of people who are like, I don't like this term anymore, because it hides something greater. And to that point, like, I would agree in part for the people that tend to use it, they are using it kind of as a defense mechanism.
In terms of, I know the phrase church hurt is polite enough that it won't get me scapegoated in some particular social context. So if I go up to any of my neighbors, and I'm talking about me personally, if I go up to any of my neighbors who don't know me very well, and I, and they ask me what I do, sometimes it's easier, like, if I want to try to, to maintain some sort of relationship, it's easier for me to say. I write about, sometimes I just keep it 30,000ft in these sky. And I, like, I write about church culture, you know, and not getting into the hard stuff if more of them start to ask questions. And I talk about, like, well, I write about different experiences of church hurt and, and even that they're like, oh, okay. That doesn't really raise their back or raise the hairs on their neck. And so it's a socially acceptable way to kind of talk about pain in the church. The moment I start talking about, I write about spiritual abuse in my, that, like, they, you know, there are ways in which to, it's me kind of gauging how much can this person across from me handle right now?
And that's, part of that is like, you know, as a mixed woman, a filipina american woman living in Texas, it's code switching. I'm trying to find the language to meet you with where you're at so that we can continue to have a conversation.
I know that if I show up as my authentic self and I come out, like, really fast with the abuse talk, there's a likelihood that I'm going to be rejected or they are not going. And that has happened. Sometimes I think I don't know if this is a relationship that I want. I'm just going to let them hear what it is. And then, sure, sometimes I actually keep hearing back for some people, and sometimes I don't. But we use church hurt because it is a easy way to kind of convey a wound. But we're not showing them the whole wound. We're showing them the band aid. You know what I mean? They don't see what's underneath. They see the cast. They don't see everything that was broken.
And I think church hurt. I don't shame or. I don't poke or prod anyone to use other terms, because really, like, they're using the words that are available to them and sometimes cognitively, they can't take. They might not be able to accept, or it might be confusing to even name it spiritual abuse or to even name it as racist or especially when it comes from people you love. So I. I make room for church hurt. And if anything I say, if that's where your starting point is, that's fine. Let's start there.
Because I called mine church hurt for a while. Actually, someone named that for me, and I was like, okay, I guess I can use that. That is our culturally acceptable way to talk about this thing. But so often, if I have a relationship with a person, I'll ask them, like, tell me what you mean by church hurt.
Do you feel like it? How long ago was it? Does it still hurt? Do you think? Something that is kind of a. You know, a bruise hurts? Like, is it church hurt? Or if it's something that's changed and tainted the color of your life and, like, kind of colored the way through which you view the world, could it be something more? And so, yeah, I write it in the book. Like, spiritual abuse is a really hard word to reach for when you've never had to reach for it before and when it's with people you love, you know?
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: I don't even remember what your question was.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: I just put it riffing. No, it's good. It's good, I think, in the book, too. I think if I'm remembering correctly, and maybe I'm not, but I love everything that you just said, and I think it really. It colors in some of the lines for me, maybe to church hurt. I think maybe it's also, like, you know, can be just kind of honest, relational stuff that happens, you know, in the context of church. Is that. Am I remembering, you know.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like, based on someone's subjective experience. I quoted Doctor Raquel Anderson.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: You did church hurt. So it's like based, but everything spiritually, like, it's all subjective and it's all oriented on how you experienced it. And the truth is spiritual abuse. I was the one experiencing the spiritual abuse and from my, and that's why I think we need to give people agency to name their own stuff because they are the one that experienced it.
So many of us want to name it for them. And again, you're just not ready to for whatever reason. And so it is based on a person's subjective experience and how they perceive that, that wounding or that particular rupture.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to hang out where you, where you ended the previous section when you said it, just especially when it's someone you love.
And I think that part is, has been one of the things that's been really key for me.
It is. So years and years and years ago, you probably have had similar experiences. We both live in Houston. We have kids who were once way younger, and we have all of these months during the year where we have to find something to do because it's 8000 degrees outside.
And so we used to just live like at indoor playgrounds and stuff like that. And there's one that's not too far from us that's inside of a large church.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: And we're not members of the church, but their playground is open. And so we would go multiple days a week sometimes. And, you know, kids in preschool and all that kind of thing. Anyway, and I met this gal who's, who also had several kids like me, and her husband was on staff at a church and they had moved to the Houston area for her husband to be on staff. But at their previous, in their previous state where they lived, they had experienced like a, like a church wide situation where the pastor, I think the language she used at the time was the pastor had a moral failing.
And she talked about, and this was, I mean, gosh, this was probably like maybe 20, I don't know. I'm guessing right now probably before 2015 or something like this. So probably more than a decade ago. And meaning they were in the news, but not as much as they are these days. Right. Things like that. And I just kind of didn't get it. You know, she was talking about how awful it was and for the church and the community, what the community was going through. And normally, generally, it's not terribly difficult for me to empathize with people, but I just couldn't get it. Like, I just didn't really understand.
And then it wasn't too many years later that we were in a congregation where the leader, you know, is kind of one of those upfront, very public, from the pulpit situations. And we were, like, looking at each other, my husband and I, like Darren headlights, like, what in the world is going on? And it was in the aftermath of that that when it happened to me, you know, where I was like, oh, my goodness, this is awful. Like, now her words were, you know, finally making sense. But I think this is. This is the key, is that I just hadn't ever experienced that the people who are tasked with caring for and loving and pastoring would betray that responsibility.
And what an effect that has on the people who trust them. I just didn't. I just didn't get that at all. So I want you to elaborate on that, whether it happens individually or it happens as a community, but the harm that's felt, like the wounds that are inflicted when the people who have been tasked with caring for people end up doing the opposite.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, and I quote, and I pull a lot from the work of doctor Jennifer Fried. So she is the one that many people, if they're familiar, she's the one that coined the acronym Darvo, meaning deny attack, reverse the roles of victim and offender. And so she also talks a lot about betrayal, trauma theory, and how betrayal only happens within the context of a relationship. So betrayal only happens whenever there's trust to be betrayed. So something has to be, you know, there's got to be trust there. And that is so to trust someone, to trust a caregiver, to trust a shepherd, really is a foundational framework in the lives of us as human beings. It's how we make sense of our relationships. So much so. And I also pull from the work that, like, attachment theory and attachment science, that, like, that's how we're formed as human beings. Like, when you come out of the womb, you are totally dependent on caregivers. Our first relationship as a baby is with that of a caregiver, and some of us don't have very good caregivers. And for children, like, they studied attachment science kind of into the ground, like, thinking about, like, how do we raise?
How do we nurture secure attachments? How do we nurture and help people go beyond the insecure attachments that they had? And really, like, that's the name of the game of the human experience, is how do I securely attach myself to people around me? And then it gets harder when you've experienced betrayal of trust and like, a broken attachment. And so really, it is it because it's so foundational to who you are as a person that trusts that? I mean, it's a survival thing. That's why people lived in more, like, larger groups and communities. You know, the village, we need the village. And you assume, like, I get to rest right now because I trust the people who are caring for the village right now. And then when it's my turn to be on, when it's my turn to be. To be the lookout, I know that other people are trusting me to do this so that others can rest. But when someone breaks that trust within the context of a village, especially, or within the context of a faith space or community, then rest is elusive.
Who is free to rest? If you can't trust the person who's looking out for the flock, who's looking out for the village, who's looking out for the community, and if they are continuing to break your trust, and they're saying, I've got this under control, I'm looking out. And then they're not. And not only are they not, but there's this moral failing.
You know, so often we're like, well, give them grace. Give them grace. Give them grace. And we do. We give them grace. But the truth is that the people who were, who have had to live with the unrest of broken trust are still living in that unrest. So grace is not or should not just be extended to the person who broke trust. But grace is actually granting rest to the people who need rest, and many of them are in unrest because of this one person's actions, depending on how, you know, what their moral failing is. And so, yeah, broken trust, betrayal, and within the context of relationships and people you love, it's earth shattering. I can no longer trust people anymore. I can't trust people to look out for me anymore. My rest depends on me always being vigilant. And that is. That's like, for many, like, that defines our trauma. We have to be constantly vigilant. We have to be constantly on.
So, yeah, when this happens in religious spaces, it's earth shattering. It's foundational. It fractures not only the relationship, but it also fractures your own relationship with self, because how was I so undiscerning that I couldn't see that this person was capable of behaving this way? And how can I trust my own discernment in the future to find other people who will come through on their word?
Yeah. And so often I think it sounds really ungracious of me to say that people are allowed to fail.
I am 100% on board with honoring the limits of humanity. I think for the people who have these huge moral failures, they have them because they refuse to acknowledge their limits of their humanity because power is so alluring, and they don't want that power taken away from them. And so they have these huge moral failings that affect everyone because. Not. Because we're being ungracious to them for not seeing them as human. They didn't see themselves as human. They saw themselves as superhuman. So I I think it's a really. There are layers, you know, so many layers. And depending on a person's context, those layers have different colors and shapes. But that's kind of the gist of it. When someone in power betrays trust in such a way, it shatters more than just, you know, one on one. It shatters a lot.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: It. It shatters a lot. And I think when, you know, when we're recognizing that it's. It is, as you say, like, people make mistakes, there are failures.
One, some language that my therapist gave me years ago, and I hope I'm not going to mess it up too badly, but the picture that stayed with me is, you know, she's. It was of rupture and repair. And so some of the language that we use around our house, that was because it was helpful for me. So I'm like, maybe it will be helpful for my kids, is like, we all mess up, so we're not really looking. And we're talking about, like, you know, sometimes there's sibling blowouts, right? Sometimes there are, you know, things where we say stuff that we don't mean, you know, and things like that. But then the question is, how are we working to repair? Repair that? And I think that that's what we see in those situations where the spiritual, spiritually abusive behavior is ongoing, is that there's not reparative work there or the reparative work isn't meaningful or it isn't sincere.
Where the reparative work is what is. Is what is important. And I think when we see these patterns, like we've seen, like I said, it wasn't in the news as much ten years ago, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention because I was wiping a lot of butts and doing a lot of these other things that were taking my time. But I think what we're seeing now with some of these more high profile situations is, you know, there's. I feel like there's. There almost could be an office pool of, like, okay, how many weeks is it going to be till this guy is back in the pulpit? Or how many is it going to be until this guy is maybe hired by someone else who's, you know, a friend or, you know, someone like a network. Right. And then you don't, um. And I'm not, you know, not saying every work that every single person does should be public, but it's just like there's this pattern of, as you say, like, the power can't be removed from this person, from this network, from whatever. And it really.
It's just.
It hurts again, for people who have experienced that.
I felt like I was going to ask something else, but now I can't remember.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Well, I was going to say you mentioned rupture and repair. I actually just wrote in a paper that I sent to my professor, and I thought, we need more. And this is part of what I try to do in other is we need more language that. That bridges the theological language of sin, of repentance, and we need to be able to bridge that with, like, the clinical language of trauma. And so in my paper, I wrote, you know, one experiences trauma when one is sinned against and then also does not experience repentance, reconciliation and repair. So it's going to be traumatic that the harm itself is traumatic. The degree to which one feels constantly the past of that trauma rubbing up against the present correlates with whether there was repentance, whether there was contrition, whether there was actually, like, a reconciliation. Not a reconciliation of full trust, but a reconciliation and an acknowledgement of what was wrong, the wrong that was done, and by the person who had committed whatever they did, and a repair. And that's not to say that the person perpetuating the harm needs to be responsible for the repair. I think there's this weird, weird language that, like, you know, that the pastor has to be in your life, and I don't think so. I think you need to experience repair. You don't need to experience repair. You need to experience repentance and maybe some sort of reconciliation with the person that hurt you, but they don't need to be in charge of your repair. That's almost like, further ingratiating the power dynamics that already exists that harms you in the first place. So I love what you mentioned about, like, rupture and repair, because it's true. Like, if sin is a broken world, trauma is simply the greek word for wound.
And we have a wounded relationships. We have a wounded, detached relationship with God. We have a wounded relationships with one another. I think trauma is just another way of saying the ways in which sin has affected us.
Yeah. And not, not merely, you know, and sometimes the trauma that we experience actually gives us context for why we sin against others. Why I might be tempted to bite at somebody who is actually trying to help me. It's because sometimes it's the past rubbing up against the present. I didn't know who to trust to care for me, and so I had to bite to protect myself, you know?
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's.
And that's a. That's real. I mean, we're not.
We're not animals in that sense, but we can recognize that in a dog, you know, who has. Who has been abused, or we say, oh, my goodness. They were neglected by their previous owner or, you know, something like that. And we can see that actual. The actual bite sometimes. And.
And often we will have compassion toward that animal and say, oh, my goodness, how can we help? And you're right in that sense, where maybe the new family, the new community is the one who's there to help with the rehab, you know, to help with the learning to trust again and things like that. But we're not.
I want to talk about how we're not great at this, Janai, and I think we're not great at this in a lot of. In a lot of different settings. And the first time, it really probably wasn't the first time I heard it, but I think the first time it really started to click for me was in 2020, and I was watching a real or alive or something with Dante Stewart, and he was talking about triumphalism in the context of american evangelical Christianity. And in that context, he was talking about racial reckoning. And, you know, it was after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. It was after the murder of George Floyd. And, you know, and he was basically saying, we got a bunch of christians who were just saying, like, oh, yeah, this sucks. And now look at us. We're more unified than ever. And we're the, you know, and he's like, bull crap. Like, we need to live here, right? We need to live in this space. And I think you talk about it, and I want you to elaborate, but we're bad at this. We're bad at the. As you talk about in the book, we're bad at the holy Saturday part. We're bad at the Good Friday part.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: We're bad at sitting with the heart.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Sitting with the heart about, you know, you talk also in the book about all the characters we see in the Bible who experienced betrayal. We're bad at the wounding, you know, even thinking about it in the context of resurrection Sunday, Easter. As you talk about at the book, I'm like, we want Thomas touching the scars. We want the resurrection day, but we don't want to talk about the 30 pieces of silver. And we don't want to talk about the betrayers after. We don't want to talk about how that must have felt for Jesus to get a kiss on the cheek from his friend. Even when you know it's coming, that doesn't make it easier.
We're bad at sitting with the hard, and I think we're bad at sitting with the wounds themselves.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, and so, in the book, I talk about this idea of nervous system regulation, which is essentially, like, when you experience.
It's the autonomic nervous system is what governs, like, your breathing, your heartbeat, these automatic things that just need to happen for you to walk as a human being in the world. But these are also the systems that are impacted when you start to feel threatened, and our fight and flight tends to kick in. And I guess the word when you feel triggered, these are the system that governs your brain, your hypothalamus. There's all of these elements in your brain that are constantly scanning for threats, and then subconsciously, you are not consciously. Even as I'm talking to you now, my brain is scanning for threats in my environment. And even though I'm in my office, it's a very safe office, things tend to not happen in here. But if something were to happen, my breathing would become more shallow. I would start breathing quicker. My heart would beat faster. I would start to feel the adrenaline rush, because my brain has signaled to my endocrine system to start flooding my system with hormones so that I can flee or fight or fawn, whatever I need to do. And so that just. That is very discomforting feeling. Triggered is a very discomforting feeling. And many of us think, oh, well, you're triggered only when, you know, recently had a tornado in a derecho in Houston. You know, people tend to think, well, that's only so. It's usually in violent situations where you're triggered that you need to run. But your body feels that even in a staff meeting where someone is saying something and it's setting you off and you don't know why, but you know that to run away right now is an inappropriate response. So you sit there and you just listen. You may be triggered, but you feel so uncomfortable. You feel like you're crawling out of your skin. Your nervous system is dysregulated now, that's not to say that we should always be regulated. A good regulated nervous system or a healthy nervous system is one that knows when to dysregulate and one that knows when to stay regulated. Like, healthy response. It's not always calm. An always calm nervous system is also a dysregulated nervous system. But I'm kind of going off on a tangent.
We are not trained to. So much of our christian language has been used to kind of bypass these feelings of discomfort. Instead of being curious about why am I feeling uncomfortable. I think so many people, like, we just use christian platitudes to say, you know, God helps those who help themselves, and we spiritually bypass these wounds because we don't know how to sit with the discomfort. And when you don't know how to sit with the discomfort within you, you're not going to know how to sit with the discomfort of someone else. And so the quickest way is often to, instead of sitting with the tears of another person, you know, how so many people, and maybe you're like this, if you see someone you love cry or someone, a friend, you know, cry, and maybe some of their story is pinging and kind of, you know, resonating with you, you'll start crying, too. It's because we're, we are two human beings talking to one another. But my nervous system is also speaking with and talking to your nervous system. God gave us a wisdom within our bodies to help us be with one another. And, you know, weep with those who weep. He's not talking about, you know, he's not explaining, this is how your nervous system works in that scripture. But he is kind of naming an embodied reality. When you actually sit with those who weep, you're going to start weeping, too, because that's how our bodies were created, and that's how we co regulate with one another. That's actually a part of, like, polyvagal theory. Like a pivotal thing is co regulation being with. But you cannot co regulate with people that you aren't if you're in isolation. And that's why isolation is so harmful. But when you don't know how to sit with the dysregulation and the discomfort within your. In your own wounds, if you don't know how to name those things, if you've just consistently kind of buried them and kept them under the rug, anytime you meet somebody who is hurting, all of that stuff starts to rise to the surface and you don't know how to deal with it. You've not been a discipled or taught how to deal with it. And so instead of dealing with it and or instead of sitting with this person, the quickest way to go back to homeostasis, even though homeostasis is toxic as hell, the quickest way to go back to homeostasis is to quiet the person who's crying.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Shh.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Like, you don't need to cry. That's okay. It's okay. Like, you don't need to cry. Let's find something else for you to think about. Find something. And that really, that's teaching them. I mean, it looks like care on the outside. Oh, they care for me, but really, like, they're doing that also for themselves because they're trying to quiet you so that the thing within them doesn't rise to the surface. And so really crying is. It helps regulate your nervous. You know, how many times have you cried and thought, oh, I feel so much better. I'm so. I mean, like, I feel a little bit embarrassed, but I do. My body feels better.
Think about how we quench that, that healing element when we tell people to stop crying, even though that there's an intuitive wisdom in us that knows they will feel better if they cry, and I won't let them. And I don't know why. I don't know why it's become such a normal part of our christian culture, I think because people don't know how to sit with their own wounds.
You know, we're taught, like, don't fear. Don't be afraid. God says, don't be afraid. So anxiety is a sin. Don't, don't worry. Worry is a sin. Trust in the Lord.
And then, but we're not really given language or context. And then we're taught to be fearful. You know, the word, like, don't be afraid. But also don't trust these clinicians and these therapists and these, you know what I mean? Be fearful of them. And I'm like, what do you want me to do? Just this cognitive dissonance of, like, keeping people. It's a moving target. And I think many people in american christian culture, whether they believe it or not, are tired because they've had to chase this moving target of healing, and it's kept them unhealed. And really, they just can't sit with. They don't know how to sit with the holy Saturday moments. They can't sit with. I think so often, like, you know, if Jesus wanted us to get to all the triumphant parts in the Bible, he would have left all the other parts of the story out. You know what I mean? Like, here are the facts. Jesus rose from the dead, and we wouldn't know what that meant unless we had. Because we have the entire story. We know the meaning of that moment, and I think people forget that. I think we're bad readers. I think some people missed the whole reading comprehension.
These are the plot points of a story.
This is like, you know, the climax, the kind of the rupture moment. Once you start training your eyes to see that in the story of scripture, it starts to make more sense.
Like it. I think we've just so often, we've taught ourselves to bury the pain, and because of it, we really never experience the true, full expression of resurrection that God has for us.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: I have no idea what the stats are, but I'm thinking it doesn't matter if we do as you suggest and train our eyes as readers to look for those rupture moments to look for. I mean, as you talk about in this books, the wilderness moments, I just watched just a tiny part of a lecture of a professor, and he was talking about how the law was given, basically, don't miss this. He said the law was given to enslaved people that hadn't even had time for PTSD to set in yet.
I think we can think of that as a triumphant moment. And he's like, no, like, don't. Don't miss, you know, what actually is happening there. Or I took a fantastic class about the theologies of exile, and it talked about Ezekiel as someone who experienced post traumatic stress disorder, you know, and, like, what did this look like for this prophet, you know, who was weird? Who was weird?
[00:42:03] Speaker B: Yeah, they're all weird. And that's. I love that they're weird because I'm like, we need more weird because normal is toxic. But, yeah, they're so weird.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: They're so weird, right. Or even, you know, even thinking about, like, in the gospels, like, before John the Baptist gets beheaded, everyone, right? Like, before he gets his head taken off, he's imprisoned, and his friends and relatives and disciples have to deal with that and sit in it, and we read it as a few verses in a couple of the gospels. But this was, you know, real life. Yeah. For people, you know, think about what it is to be separated from a loved one, but. But separated from a loved one who's been imprisoned, wrongly. Imprisoned. Yeah, these are hard stories, and. And, you know, that. That's one of my.
One of my favorites is, like, that's a hard story. And Jesus doesn't just, like, come and unlock the prison for John, you know, he suffers the loss of his friend and his companion and his relative who's been imprisoned and killed. And that doesn't feel very triumphant.
None of that feels very triumphant to me in those moments. And, yeah, I just think I appreciate you talking about that in the context of the nervous system and also the co regulation piece.
I chatted with a professor this week, and I was just telling her something was going on, and the first thing out of her mouth was she just were on the phone, she just goes, ugh, that's really hard, you know, and it wasn't a huge deal. It was just, you know, but just. I wasn't expecting that. You know, she's a pastor. Um, but she just. Just to hear her even just. She almost said it in kind of the tone I did. Oh, that's really hard.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: That was what I needed in that moment. That was a moment kind of that co regulation piece, like you're saying. She wasn't like, okay, here's what you do now. She did give me advice, but, you know, she didn't rush to that, even with a small, small, little life thing. She acknowledged the complexity of what I had just shared with her, and that was really, really meaningful to me. And I want for us to grow better at that.
And you named part of that, I think, as people who have, and, you know, maybe it's part of our. Part of our job, either informally or formally, I think discipling the community, you know, we can learn how to do this better, then we can disciple one another and practice it and practice that, you know, that co regulation piece that you. That you. That you brought up, and I'm really grateful that you did.
I want.
I'm wondering if, you know, as we kind of start to land the plane, maybe I'm wondering if you would talk about the after.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: We chatted before we hit record with me kind of blubbering over here and saying, I.
For those of us who are the audience of this book, and I didn't specifically ask you who that was, but I'll name it who I thought it was, and that was me. But people who have experienced that othering, and I say there is.
There's. There's an after for many of us. I mean, not. Maybe there's a defining moment, like this is a before and after kind of thing. Maybe we experience something that traumatic. Maybe it is just like, I ain't gonna let that happen again. You know, that, like, I learned my lesson. I touched that hot stove or whatever it is.
Or maybe we've.
This is. Something has happened to someone who's near and dear to us, and we're like, we have to figure out how to live in community again after.
After these experiences. And I really appreciated your kind of, your words of follow up. What do we do now? Where do we go now? What does this look like now? And I say that very loosely. Maybe somebody's now is from something that happened to them five or ten or 20 years ago, or maybe it's something that happened two Sundays ago. Yeah, but, like, kind of what now?
[00:47:14] Speaker B: Where do.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: Where do we go now?
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of what I tend to talk about now is, you know, in these space, these harmful spaces, there isn't space or room to question or grow or become.
You are kind of fit inside of a mold, and within that mold, you have to, like, or maybe it's a box, if people want to say a box, but this is the mold. You have to fit into it. Otherwise, you know, you're. You're a misfit. And it's kind of like that. Those silly ads that I see for, like, misfit market, these are things that were like, they are perfectly good vegetables, but the supermarket doesn't want them because they don't look pretty.
There's not room made for goodness that looks different in the spaces that many of us are leaving. So what does it look like to, number one, heal and learn how to make space for myself? Because we're coming out of these spaces where we're trained to be small. And so part of healing is like, how do I let myself be just beginning? And then the follow up is that is like, who do I want to become? And how do I want to become that person? And how is the past? And the lessons that I've learned from the past, how are those things influencing how I'm becoming? I think that's kind of like the work of what we would call deconstruction today is like unlearning those things that have hyper controlled our becoming and moving forward now, like, it's not tidy. There is no landing place for the book. It's just making space to go from constriction and control and coercion to compassion and curiosity and confidence. There is no, well, if you just take two pills and call this person in the morning, you know, that is another mold. That is another mold that we're trying to fit into. And so really, the back two, three chapters of the book, it was really about, like, how do we not become the hammer that hurt us?
How do we not only not become that, but how do we become as christians the hands that heal?
How do we embody Jesus and how do I not perpetuate the culture of othering within the church? And so really it's just learning, like learning to be secure in my identity. I don't need to perform or pander or try to sell my wares to this person.
You can accept me or reject me. I feel like writing has been a part of that. I've weathered a lot of rejections and it's like, okay, this place has rejected me. That doesn't change who I am as a person. And in the same way I've many experiences with friendships where, okay, this person is rejecting me, that door is closed. Maybe we were friends for a season and that season is now over.
I can mourn the loss of it, but no, that doesn't end who I am as a person. When we move forward, I think it's the work is learning that the world is bigger, that my faith, I could have walked away from the faith in many ways. I thought it would be so much easier for me to just say, like, you know, screw this, I'm going to go do, I'm going to go do me. I'm going to do my own thing. But I came to the church because I was already out in the world and I was already experiencing the hard and the toxicity of the world. I weathered that and I came to the church for belonging and I came to specific churches. But just because I experienced, I'm not going to believe and be arrogant enough to think my whole experience defines the entirety of the church because it just doesn't. I've only been alive for 36 years. The church has been in existence for 2000 years. Am I, I think for me I was like, it is the height of arrogance for me to say all of this is crap because my 36 years sucked. So really it was a, it was almost a work of resistance for me to say, these men do not get to keep my faith captive. They don't get to like, I will, they don't get to hem it in or determine my faithfulness or hold this litmus test up to me to say see within, like to determine with other, like whether I'm not in the realm of faithfulness or possibility or like orthodoxy or whatever my resistance was. I'm going to go to seminary and I'm going to find, I'm going to let other people teach me and I'm going to go to a seminary that's totally unlike the world that I just came out of, I want to find an expansive faith. I want to make room in all the ways that my christian brothers and sisters who hurt me the most did not make room for me.
And I refuse to try to, like, see faith as something to change. I'm not changing anyone's mind. If anything, I want to empower people, and I want to equip their discernment. And I don't, certainly don't want to be famous. I think christian culture, I think that is one way that we are just so tempted to misuse power. I just want to have conversations where we make a more compassionate world. That's the only thing that I want. And I kept thinking, jesus is the most compassionate person in the scriptures. He, in his rage, he flipped tables, not because he was just angry for the sake of being angry. He had compassion on people who were being exploited. He moved toward people who needed healing. He didn't flip the tables of sick people trying to eat, because those sick people were ungracious for saying, this person hurt me. No, like, they, they, he moved to them and said, let me give you rest. You know, the Pharisees and the people who were in power were so frustrated and mad or just livid that Jesus was granting rest on the Sabbath. He is the person of rest, rest embodied, and he is extending rest to people who were living in the middle of a culture in disorder. And he was granting rest on the Sabbath. He was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing as the person he was. And within the. But the rules and the restrictions and the very specific minutiae, like, they couldn't see.
This man is granting rest in his work. He's granting rest. He's totally holistically embodied. And so really, that's what I want to do, is like, I want to embody that. And I also know that if I were to become a member of specific churches today, they wouldn't let me become that person. I would be tempted to fall in line to their model of faithfulness that looks like voting this way or doing this way or whatever. And I just refuse to do that. I refuse to lose my identity in Christ and in God, simply to belong to a culture that supposedly says that they are moving and operating in his name. I refuse to do that.
Moving forward for me is making space for others while also in believing that there is an abundance of room and I can continue to make space for myself. That doesn't mean I don't suffer. That doesn't mean I don't cry or whatever. Like if we are in this with one another, we are going to co regulate with one another and we're going to feel each other's pain and grief.
And I am living now to make a more expansive world so that in my being, in my doing, they see Jesus moving in and through me. I hope that I don't become the hammer that hurt me. I hope I have the healing hands of Christ. So, yeah, that is not a prescriptive, that has to be contextual. And I think that maybe that might piss people off a little bit because it's not like an easy, figure it out. It's a, it is a hard work there. It's a nuanced answer that requires context. And I'm not going to tell people, well, this is what I did. And so you need to do it too, because they're not in my context. Not everybody lives in Texas. Texas is its own flavor of, you know, hard and difficult. That's not to say California or Washington or New York or Florida are their own different. But I can't assume that my context and how I've been shaped in it is immediately transferable to someone else's context. So I don't know if that really answers your question.
I think making room, becoming kind, compassionate, caring, confident, and learning not to, learning to truly love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you hate yourself, you're going to hate your neighbor and it's going to show.
[00:56:35] Speaker A: Well, it did answer my question and it was a gift to me for sure. And I think this is what I heard maybe the most as a thread through this book is like, you may have felt othered, you may have been othered by your community, but this is not how Jesus is present with us. This is not how Jesus loves us. This is not, that is not a picture of the faithfulness of Jesus.
I just felt continually a thread throughout the book was Jesus is near.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: And everything you just said was like moving to me. I heard again, like moving forward with the nearness of Jesus and letting him grant those, the space and healing and the compassion in us in those places where he meets us.
[00:57:38] Speaker B: And Jesus welcomes your weird. For all the ways, for all the ways that you've been made to feel shame or to feel, I don't know, some guilt for speaking up or whatever, like that is the Holy Spirit moving in and through you. We were supposed to be a weird, like christians, we're not supposed to be normative. We were supposed to be a weird people. Our weirdness in our otherness, in our ways of being different. We are supposed to bless the world.
And I just want to tell people for all the ways that you've been othered, I hope that you see your weirdness as a gift, that Jesus really does truly welcome your weird. And I think the Bible shows us that Jesus was weird, too.
He lived as other. He was other. He was killed for being other.
John the Baptist. Like, you can't open the Bible and not see something weird happen. You just can't. And today I feel like even compassion is weird.
So I tell people, be weird. Love your weird. Get to the point in your healing where you welcome your weird too, because Jesus does.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: Amen, janai. I feel like that loving our weirdness is a great place. That's a great place to wrap up.
Okay. The book again is othered, finding belonging with the God who pursues the hurt, harmed, and marginalized. Tell me the release date on that. I know you can pre order now. What's the actual release date for this?
[00:59:21] Speaker B: The release date is June 25.
So we've got about a month from recording this, June 25, and it will be out into the world. There is, you know, ebook, paperback. There is also an audiobook. I don't think it's available for pre order yet, but it is coming and I narrate that as well.
Yeah, so it will be everywhere. Books are after June 25 and after.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: That's so exciting.
I just want to encourage people to grab a copy, and of course, I'll put a link in the show notes where folks can do that as well as to where they can connect with you directly on your socials. But this book really was a gift to me. And I mentioned before we started recording that my hope for the words that you've given us is that they will become a place where people can come back to in the same ways that I hate that people will probably continue to feel othered and be wounded inside of communities. But as long as that keeps happening to people, I just hope that your work here and that these words would be a place that people can and come to in their woundedness and receive hope for healing and receive and draw near to the compassion of Jesus. So thank you so much for this. I appreciate it.
[01:00:54] Speaker B: You're very welcome. Thank you for chatting with me.
[01:00:58] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Bussetti. Be sure to give us a review on iTunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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