Life with God: A Renovaré Podcast

Writer and editor Julia Roller joins Nate to talk about how God uses books to guide us into transforming ideas and encounters and shares about the book that changed her life.Julia Roller is an author and editor living in San Diego, CA with her husband and three children. She is also the MomCo Coordinator at Point Loma Community Presbyterian Church. Julia's most recent book is Mom Seeks God, but some of her other books include A Year with God (with Richard J. Foster), A Year with Aslan, and 25 Books Every Christian Should Read. Connect with her at her web site, juliaroller.com, or on Instagram Julia (@julialroller) or Facebook.Julia's suggestions for continued reading:In “How Should We Read?”, Christopher Hall discusses some ways to slow down our reading and ruminate over the text. I love that although Hall’s thoughts are inspired by a desert monk (of course they are, Chris!), one of his suggested techniques involves his smartphone. I can’t think of anyone who’s written as much about spiritual reading as C.S. Lewis, and Zach Kincaid’s “A Reading Life” post on the official C.S. Lewis site is an admirable compilation of some of Lewis’s best thoughts about reading. Lyle Smith Graybeal and I wrote “How to do Spiritual Reading”, an excerpt from the introduction for 25 Books Every Christian Should Read, to offer some practical ideas for spiritual reading as well as some reasons why we should all engage in it.Richard Foster reflects on the books that shaped him as a young man in this article from Leadership Journal, “How Significant Books Become Good Friends.” Many of these books made the cut for 25 Books Every Christian Should Read. My discussion with Nathan inspired me to look critically at my own all-consuming reading practice. In examining my lifelong love of reading, I had to ask the question: “Is Reading Bad for You?” (See if you can guess my answer.) 

Deep relationships take time. Renovaré board and ministry team member Margaret Campbell shares with Nate what she's learned through the years about the slow and beautiful unfolding of true friendships — with people and with God.

Joe Davis and Nick Page have been friends for over 30 years and co-host The Mid-Faith Crisis Podcast. They share with Nate about disagreement as a productive part of friendship and faith that helps us work through concepts that impact our ability to love God and others.Show NotesThe Mid-Faith Crisis PodcastSome of Nick’s Books Nick Page on microblog

South African Spiritual Director Adri-Marie van Heerden talks with Nate about making friends cross-culturally, the need for humility, and learning to see others as God sees us — with great regard.Adri-Marie's organization is called Tending the Fire. You can contact her at a3mvanheerden@gmail.com.

Nathan talks with prison chaplain John Paul Westin about the penitentiary as parish and learning to see each person there as God's "friends and special ones."Show NotesA few annotated book suggestions from John Paul:Cur Deus Homo — Anselm of Canterbury thinks about why God needed/chose to become human.The 3 Colors of Community, Christian A. Schwarz — How highly flawed individuals can use their propensity to sin to help build healthy Christian community.Fearfully and Wonderfully, Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancy — The human body (sick or healthy) can show us so much about the wonder of God and our human nature.The Shack, William Paul Young — God can heal the deepest wounds and betrayal.John's Gospel, John son of Zebedee — A look at life through the eyes of the beloved.Life of the Beloved — Henri Nouwen's beautiful consideration of the nature of Jesus' friendship.The Brother's Karamazov — Fydor Dostoevski's brilliant and crazy story of God's presence in a chaotic Russian family life.The Heart of the Parish, Martin Thornton — Seeing wherever you are as your parish and your life as filled with your neighbors and parisioners. Everyone.Hearing God — Dallas Willard's encouraging challenge to believe Jesus when he tells us we really can talk to God like we talk to one another.Reading the Bible with the Damned — Bob Eklad's believes that people on the margins often have intense experiences of God's involvement in their lives that are of biblical import.Letters and Papers from Prison —Dietrich Bonhoeffer's reflections on seeing God's loving presence in prison and how it transformed his thinking.

Authors Elizabeth Moore and Audrey Elledge discuss the power of liturgy and friendship in deepening one's relationship with God. They explore the formational impact of liturgy, finding solace in turbulent times, authenticity in faith and friendship, cultivating imagination as a spiritual practice, and crafting liturgies with honesty and inspiration from scripture and poetry.

This meditation by Nathan Foster on Luke 22 invites us to the Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed “let this cup pass from me.”

Trevor Hudson shares reflections on the influence that Desmond Tutu had on his life — as a friend, colleague, cellmate, and “contemplative in action.”Show NotesDesmond Tutu's Nobel Prize biography pageMade for Goodness by Desmond TutuBooks by Trevor HudsonOther Episodes With This GuestEp 47: Trevor Hudson — Friendship with GodEp 73: Trevor Hudson — Holiness is Better Than You ThinkEp 131: Trevor Hudson — Listen to the GroansEp 154: Trevor Hudson — Meeting Christ in Our TearsEp 153: Trevor Hudson — The Litmus Test for LentEp 215: Trevor Hudson and Jan Johnson — What Is Spiritual Direction?Ep 239: Trevor Hudson — Seeking God

“We enriched each other.” Luci Shaw speaks with Nate about her rich friendship with Madeleine L'Engle and how they made one another better writers and better followers of Jesus.Show Notes + TranscriptNate: Lucy, we get to talk about your friend today. How did you first come to meet Madeline?Luci: Well, Madeleine and I met originally at Wheaton College at a conference on, on literature, and she was a speaker and I was a speaker, and so we just happened to connect at that, at that time, and we discovered we had a lot in common.Madeline had just written a couple of poems that she wanted published. So, since my husband and I had just started the publishing company, Harold Shaw Publishers, I asked Madeline if she would like us to publish her poetry. Which is one of the things we had planned to do, was publish poetry people of faith. So, we did. We published two of her books. One was called A Cry Like a Bell. And the other one was Oh, I can't even remember the name of it. But this was very early on. And we discovered the more we talked, the more we found we had in common. We loved Bach. We loved the music of Bach. We had a number of common friends. That was way back when. Nate: Now, was this before she'd written Wrinkle in Time?Luci: She had written A Wrinkle in Time.Nate: And then you two went on to write some books together.Luci: That's right, yeah, we had our publishing company, and we were trying to publish, books by people of faith who had a literary bent. Anyway, that was the beginning of a really fruitful friendship. We found that, though Madeline had a number of people who were devoted to her and looked up to her, she didn't have many colleagues who were sort of meeting her at the friendship level, not just the sort of worshipful level that she had managed to accumulate.So, the first book that we did together, I asked her to write a book on faith, how faith and literature work together. So she, at one point, handed me this very untidy typescript. Piles and piles of typed notes and possible chapter headings and so on.So I had to just take the whole thing, pull it apart, I emptied my dining room, got the table out of the way, and started making piles. of different ideas that would flow together. We called it the Weather of the Heart. She needed someone who could sort of say, Madeline, you can't say that. You know, that's... not orthodox. We'll have to talk through that one. So, we did. We did a lot of discussion. She came from a very liberal background in New York City. I came from a very conservative background. And we sort of met in the middle and discovered that we loved each other's works. And we learned a lot from each other and through each other.Nate: What did you learn from her? Luci: I learned to be a lot more open about what faith in God was all about. That you didn't have formulas by which to describe your faith. That this was a freeing thing, that the Holy Spirit of God could work in different ways. We just enjoyed each other's experiences with the Spirit of God. We shared so much. We found that working together was truly an act of worship to God. I remember after working through an entire manuscript, The Weather of the Heart, we finished all the copy editing and so on, we spontaneously stood to our feet and sang the doxology, "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow." Nate: What do you want people to remember about her?Luci: I want them to remember that she loved God with all her heart. That she wanted to be God's child and servant. And I think that what I could bring to her was a sense that God was larger than either her understanding or my understanding of God. That God was so magnificent and so wide, in the ways we could reach to God through the Holy Spirit.So it was a very Trinitarian friendship. She loved Jesus, and you know, the fact that God was both Jesus and also the Divine Creator of the world. Nate: How did you see her work influence people spiritually?Luci: I think she asked a lot of questions that people had. People you know, had a lot of questions because God is knowable through various ways, but not always easily understood. And because Madeline had a very great respect for the Bible and for Holy Scripture, and she realized that, throughout Scripture, God speaks to us through metaphors.God spoke to Moses with the Ten Commandments, but also through acts of grace and love. It was, an ongoing, free flowing relationship that God wants to have with us as his children, as his followers, and both Madeline and I wanted to have that characterize our life and our writing.Nate: Mm-Hmm. . Do you miss her?Luci: I miss her a lot. I think I was the only true friend she had at the level where we could be honest, really honest with each other. We rescued each other several times. Once she was in California speaking at a conference and she became very ill and was hospitalized. And I was living in the state of Washington. And she phoned me and she said, can you come down and be with me? So I went down to the hospital in Santa Cruz and spent three weeks. I lived in a motel nearby, and came in and spent time with her, telling jokes, writing things together, just conversing at the deepest level about what our lives were meant to be, and what was truly significant and important for us to believe and to do with our writing. And of course, I was a poet. She's a fiction writer. And sort of, we met in the middle, which was a really good place. We enriched each other at that wonderful level. I also got to know her family. I spent quite a bit of time visiting New York and staying with her in her apartment on the Upper West Side.Most days we would walk over to the cathedral, Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And go to communion there at noon.And that was the sort of thing that we were able to join in wholeheartedly with no reservations. But also, when we had questions, we were able to share our questions with each other and search what the great theologians had to say and what Scripture had to say about topics and about themes.When we had doubts, when we had huge questions about what God was doing in the world. We could share those with each other and pray together. We did a lot of praying. Nate: Sounds like a really special friendship that you two had. What was the role she filled for you?Luci: She filled for me a challenge. She would ask me to move beyond my evangelical faith and open up to various other questions about who we were to be in the world, how we were to reflect the Holy Spirit's wide ranging creativity in the world.So we can be part of that flow of creativity that comes through the Holy Spirit into the created world.Nate: What was she like as a person?Luci: Well, she was quite-- she was, pretty strong minded. Yeah, she didn't suffer fools gladly, but she was very loving to people who were questioning, who were seekers after God.I think one of the things that blessed me was that ...

Amisho “Sho” Baraka joins Nate for a fascinating conversation about George Washington Carver — a man whose faith directed his genius toward the good of others.ResourcesThe Man Who Talks with the Flowers: The Intimate Life Story of Dr. George Washington Carver, by Glenn Clark Essential Writings of the American Black Church, by John HuntTuskegee UniversityHe Saw That It Was Good, by Sho BarakaAlbum: ​“The Narrative,” Sho Baraka, 2016“Bravery to Faithfully Create,” article by Sho Baraka on renovare.orgOther episodes with this guestEpisode 234 : Sho Baraka — He Saw That It Was Good