Reveal Series: Episode 1- Deconstructing My Christian Faith

This is a transcript from Reveal Series podcast episode #1. You can listen to it here.

Hello friends. Okay. This is a big one. If you are new to the captivating we confident podcast, welcome! I'm so thrilled that you're here. My name is Kim Ludeman and I am the host of the Captivatingly Confident Podcast. I wanted to preface this episode with a disclaimer or a warning, kind of a little like flashing red light just to see that this is not a normal episode. I have felt called with this podcast to go a little bit deeper into some of my own personal struggles and I was going to do a separate podcast and I don't think I'm going to. I had this whole plan and I was gonna move forward with all sorts of stuff with the reveal podcast. But I think what I want to do instead is to bring it to this show, to bring it to you, my current audience, because one, you've asked for it, and two, it's important.

It is important to share stories and trials because that is how we alchemize our own pain. That is how we connect, that's how we built community. That's how we feel seen and supported. When someone shares a story and you resonate, you feel connected, you feel seen, you feel a part of something. You feel grounded and that's what I want to offer. So we're going to have special episodes called Reveal episodes and these are episodes that are focused a little bit more on internal struggles. These are conversations where I imagine you sitting across from me with a cup of coffee or tea and we're just chatting and we're sharing life together and we're taking a moment away from the busy-ness and the chaos, especially this time here and we're just talking, we're sharing stories. So I've got my cup of coffee right here and I'm so looking forward to talking with you and sharing this with you.

Now that's sad. This episode is about faith and I feel so many emotions and feelings. I'm probably going to cry. I might swear, I might yell. I don't know. I'm just going to leave open space for this conversation because as I've shared just ta teensy little bit, there's been a huge response and I know this conversation needs to be had. And I'm terrified and excited and nervous and I just trust that you're going to get out of it what you're going to, what you're going to need. And I invite you to take it with a grain of salt and to just just listen and know that so many people are in this place and you probably know of people in this place, they just haven't talked about it cause it's hard. It's hard to talk about faith so hard. Some of my favorite episodes from my favorite podcasters, people like Maddy Moon and Megan Hale have been about their experiences with faith as well.

And they are some of the most influential episodes I've listened to. So, I invite you to grab a cup of coffee, grab a cup of tea if you're on the treadmill or doing dishes or driving in the car just to have an open mind as we enter into this really interesting conversation. So, let's dive in. I have been an evangelical home, non-denominational Christian since I can remember. I remember being five sitting in the floor of cool church kid's church and Tori was our female pastor and I can still remember the feel of the carpet tape. My heart was pounding when pastor Tori said, "does anybody want to ask Jesus into their heart"?

And my little five-year-old hand shot up in the air because I wanted to be loved. I wanted Jesus to be my friend. That sounded really cool. I wanted in on that and so I prayed the prayer and I remember asking Jesus into my heart and being saved at five and it only grew from there. I am a passionate person, friends, and when there is something that I believe in, I go all out. Like I don't half-ass anything. So I took my faith very seriously. My mom and I went to church anywhere from two to three times a week, whether that was Wednesday night youth group or Bible study or like a mid-week service opportunity. And then Sunday we went to church. Sometimes we'd go Sunday night too.

Like we were hardcore, me and mom. My dad worked nights and wasn't really into the Christian faith so it was just us two and we were in cahoots. At first we were at an AG church, which is Assemblies of God, and I went through the Missionettes program, which is basically like Christian Girl Scouts and that was a huge accomplishment. I did that for six years and I graduated as an Honor Star. Has you ever heard of Missionettes? I feel like I talk about it and hardly anybody knows what that is. But it was a really intense program and it meant a lot to me. And I graduated at 13 and then we moved churches and we started going to adventure Christian Church in Roseville, California. And they were meeting in a high school at Rocklin High and you know, we'd sit on the cold folding chairs and listened to Rick Steadman who was the pastor.

And my mom said, you know what? This is where we need to be. And so we stayed with Adventure for years and it was right around age 12-13 that my parents started to see some changes with me struggling with being who I thought I should be versus who I really was. And so they put me in a Christian school. So from seventh grade through high school, I went to Forest Lake Christian School and it was an hour away from my house. So I rode the bus two hours a day, five days a week, and made some really good friends. And I loved that school. I loved it. So it was being inundated with Bible and theology and worship songs and communion and Bible studies and Christian language, Christian music. I even worked at Family Christian Store when I was 16 I got a job and was slingin' Christian music CDs and categorizing Amy Grant lcassette tapes and imprinting Bibles and wearing as many WWJD bracelets as I could fit on my wrist.

I was a leader in our high school youth group and I worked summers doing LIFE Sports Camp, which is this camp that my mom started and we took inner-city kids from Sacramento and we brought them and we played basketball with them and we went swimming and we braided hair and we just more present with these kids. And it was incredible. It was an incredible program and everyone that was a part of it loved it. I mean everything about me was about my faith in Jesus and I felt Oh, huge burden to share Jesus with everyone. If you weren't saved, we were having a conversation about your sin and how you needed to get right and how you needed to ask Jesus into your heart. You needed to accept Jesus so that you would be saved because he loves you. This was my life friends.

Like if you could put on a scale the percentage of Christian that I felt that I was, I was 110% I was "on fire" as we used to call it. I listened to Christian music. I listened to Christian rap. I remember when my friend introduced me to, Oh, now I'm totally blanking on the name. It's the Christian rap group. Do you know what I'm talking about? Well, that's going to drive me crazy. It'll come to me (It was Grits, btw). I read Christian books (even Christian romance novels). I can't explain to you how much it was a part of my life and has dictated everything that I have done. I went to a Bible college after I graduated Christian high school, straight to Multnomah. All of my friends went South down to Southern California and I went North. I think one other person went to, Oregon and my friends were like, what are you doing? Multnomah Bible College?! But I knew that's where I needed to be because that is where I was going to find my pastor and I was going to be a pastor's wife.

Oh yeah. This was the thing. This was the plan to trade in my BS for my MRS. See what I did there?? Ah, and every year there was this thing called the pink mist and it's where all the cherry tree blossoms on campus would bloom and the blossoms would be falling. And if you got hit with the pink mist, you either started dating someone or you got engaged and Multnomah had this whole like ritual around people getting engaged. It was crazy. And I loved it. And then something happened. So the end of my freshman year of college, my mom was going through her first year of chemotherapy and radiation for cancer. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Uterine and Ovarian cancer right at the end of my senior year of high school. And at the end of my freshman year, she was really sick.

So I went home that summer and spent the summer working and doing sports camp and my mom died. She was given a year to 18 months. That was her prognosis when I came home and she was gone three months later. My best friend, my rock, my wing man, my idol was gone and it rocked my world. But because of my Christian upbringing, I knew that God had a plan and that he gives any takes away. There's a worship song, I think Chris Tomlin sings it where you know, "He gives and takes away." He gives and takes away and I would sing songs like "blessed to be the name of the Lord" and "I surrender all" and that's, that was how I coped with the loss of my mom was that God had a plan. She was in a better place. She wasn't in pain anymore and I believed it when people would say those things to me. I believed it.

So I was a Resident Advisor my Sophomore year of college. I still feel bad for those girls in my dorm section. I was not the best RA. I felt like my identity had shifted with this huge loss. And I was at this RA retreat on the coast and had my Bible and we were having quiet time and I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't, I tried, believe you me, I tried. I was not looking for attention. I was not trying to get sympathy. I just literally was crying. My mom had been gone for two weeks at this point and I remember one of my "friends" coming over and saying, "Kim, you have to stop crying". And I was like, what? I can't. And she's like, "you have to, you are making everyone else uncomfortable and you're ruining this."

And it was that moment where I learned that grief and tears separate/isolate you, they alienate you. They make everyone else uncomfortable. So I sucked it up. From then on I would cry at night in my dorm room, I would cry in the prayer chapel. I would cry in the corners of campus where no one would find me, isolated and alone. My church, nobody really knew. So I just hid it basically and I didn't let anybody see my grief because it made people uncomfortable. So I got stuck. I got stuck in grief and this is a Gestalt therapy concept that if you don't allow feelings to come up and to take up space, you cannot move through them. The only way out is through and I got stuck in the through and I couldn't get out.and so for good seven years, I churned inside just this churning of having to depend on this idea that my mom was in a better place, that God had a plan and that everything was going to be okay. That even though I had lost my childhood home, my dad had sold off a lot of our family possessions and moved and gotten married that it was still okay.

I found out that my dad has a mental illness after my mom died, but I still believed that you had to honor your father. And so I would put myself in situations where I was hurt over and over again,: my dad attempting suicide or being verbally and emotionally abusive and saying, okay, but the Bible says I have to honor my father and I keep getting hurt, but I don't know what it looks like to honor him any other way. And I got stuck and I ended up on my Christian therapist's couch saying, I believe it, but I don't feel it. And that was kind of the fracture point for me with my faith. And after that, it got a little bit harder to be sold out. It got harder to believe.

And I went to church and I went back to Bible college after a few years of like wandering, trying to figure out my life and not really knowing what to do. I dated someone that, Oh, I really liked him. It was incredible, but he wasn't a Christian and I went back and forth on should I date him, should I not? He's not a Christian but decided to date him and then he said, "you know, sex is really important to me. I believe that it's a really important part of relationships. I'm not saying we need to have it now, but I'm not waiting until I get married to have sex". And I was like.....uh oh. I had gotten my purity ring when I was 13 years old. That was my birthday present was this note that my parents had written that we had made a covenant that day. The four of us, God, my mom, my dad and me, that I wouldn't have sex before I got married. That I would be pure and Holy and perfect for my husband when he came along and I was torn. This is when I was like, I think I was 21 or 22. I was torn because I wanted to be with this person so badly, but he wasn't a believer and I was waiting to have sex until I got married. So we broke up and I was heartbroken and devastated. And this was just an example of how my faith shaped my decisions, not what I wanted to do, but what I felt like I should do. And I'm not saying that choice was right or wrong, and this is actually the first time I've talked about it publicly.

Vulnerability. I'm going to have a huge vulnerability hangover after you listen to this, lol. If you don't know what those are, Brene Brown talks about when you're vulnerable, afterward you feel a little hung over because you've just put yourself out there before you've opened yourself up to criticism and judgment and all the things. But it's okay. And so after that, I went back to Bible college cause I decided, okay, time to get my life back on track. I'm going to recommit my life. And I broke up with a boyfriend that I had had off and on for three years. We had a really Codependent relationship that was awful. He was an incredible man. But we both, together, just not good at all. And so back at Bible college, that's when I met my hubby and I finally traded in my BS for my MRS.

So Tim was doing career counseling in the career class that I was taking and he was like 25 and he had his own car and a house and like this full time job and he was a counselor and I just was smitten from the get go. And my friend, Kerrin, worked across the hall from him in the student services building. One day I told her, "Kerrin, I think I like him". And she was like, well, if you do, you're going to have to ask him out cause he's not going to pursue you. I asked her why not? She said, well, cause he's staff and you're a student.

I said but I'm a Christian and I'm a woman. The man is supposed to pursue me. I can't ask him out. That's like not even scriptural like friends, I'm telling you 110% Christian here. And she said, well then you won't date him. And I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it. I prayed about it, I journaled about it. You should read the journal entries. Oh it's hilarious. I still have them. And finally I said, okay, I'm going to do it. So I went up the hall, got my big girl pants on, and I walked into his office and I said, "Hey, so I'm not coming back to school next semester and if you ever want to go out for coffee, I'd probably say yes".

And if you know my husband at all, this part will make perfect sense to you. He leans back in his chair. He kind of puts his chin on top of his hand. And he looks at me and he goes, "huh". He just sits there and stares at me while I'm like shaking. I'm right by the door ready to bolt cause I just asked out a man. I stepped outside of my Christian comfort zone and asked out a man. Finally, after years of silence he said, "can I have your number?" So I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote my number really big and gave it to him and it took him a week. Friends, it's okay. Seven days to make the call. It was the longest seven days of my life. I remember I was working at Costco at the time and I was quizzing my customers as they came through my line.

I was a cashier and I said okay to any man that came through. I was like, Hey, so can I ask you a question? How long would you wait to call someone if they asked you out and you felt like there was a good connection and a spark and most of them said 24 hours. I was like, Aw crap, every now and then I would get the like three to five day answer, man. Nobody ever said a week. So I thought for sure we were doomed. And then he called!!! He called while I was at work at Costco and you could hear from the break room this like this huge scream and you know, all my coworkers knew. And so we, we dated for 13 months and got engaged January, 2009 and married in April, 2009.

My husband is a believer, in fact, as I record this, he's actually at church right now. He helps out once a month with security at Imago Dei church. And that's where he and my kiddo are at right now. And I'm at home standing in my pajamas in my closet with my cup of coffee talking to you about faith. So ironies. So that was 12 years ago. And yeah, I have struggled mightily with what a good Christian wife should be. And what I've turned out to be there has been this juxtaposition between the Proverbs 31 woman and Kim . And it has fractured my faith because I know that Paul in the Bible teaches a lot about submission and how the man is the head of the family and the head of the wife and the wife is submissive and there's so many interpretations of that. But for me growing up, that was what I was taught is that you save sex for marriage, that you are your husband's property to become one and that that is how it is supposed to be.

And as we get into this later part, I beg your indulgence as I strive to articulate the struggle and the story the best that I can. And I might fumble my words and there might be some pauses and I might struggle a little bit because I haven't fleshed this out for very many people yet and it's not as polished as other parts of my story are. So I beg your indulgence and your patience with me. So, it's been a struggle. My marriage has been a struggle. Parenting. Oh my gosh. Parenting has been a struggle. And connecting with other people has been a struggle and especially because I live in Portland, Oregon, where we're like the hub for the LGBTQ movement. We are the hub of the trans movement and homelessness and legalization of marijuana. All of these issues that my faith speaks very strongly about have come up in the last, especially the last 10 years.

I feel like there's been some really hard questions that I've had to ask myself. One of my favorite people in the world who, God bless him, he loves Jesus. He loves the Bible. He loves Jesus so much. He served at church relentlessly, has beautiful worship albums. He loves Jesus. And he has tried so hard to love women, but he doesn't. And he recently found his soulmate who was a man and I say recently, it's actually been years, but he found that person. And I remember asking myself how, how does this work? Because the Bible says that sexuality is a sin and I've been taught that you can't be saved if you're gay. How does this work? And my mind metaphorically and exploded. I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know how to love these people who chose homelessness. I didn't know how to minister and to witness to people who we're struggling with their gender and deciding that who they were born as is not who they wanted to be anymore. And my mind was like, but Genesis says he made them male and female, right? In the Christian world there was a a joke, which isn't funny at all, but when something along the lines of God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and literally that's like what my brain thought. I don't know how to do this. And so I've wrestled with that and as I've wrestled with it, I felt like I went from sprinting through my Christian life to kind of jogging to walking to one small step at a time. And eventually I just stopped moving forward at all.

And I remember sitting in church and feeling conflicted because I wanted to be out hiking. I wanted to be outside. I love hiking. I've never felt closer to God than when I'm out hiking. There's something about it. That's what I'm created to do. My body does it well and that's where I feel most connected. Yet I was told that I needed to go to church to worship through song and friends, I don't sing. I remember being like 10 or 11 and there was this episode of Touched by an Angel. Did you ever watch that show? Yeah. Touched by an Angel and the actress Roma Downey, was upset and she was drinking this like Irish coffee cause she's Irish and thought didn't realize it had alcohol, but she got drunk and she was sitting at the bar and she was crying and the angel came and was like, why are you crying?

And she's like, I just want to sing. I just want to praise the Lord with my voice. And I can't. I have a terrible singing voice. And I remember identifying with that so much. I don't really like to sing out loud in front of others. I never have. I don't have a good voice. I mean, I can carry a tune, I think, I don't know. But it was always a conflict for me in my adult life because we would sing, we would have group singing. If you've never been to church, most churches have worship time where you sing. There's a band and a worship leader who typically wears plaid, but we won't talk about that. And you sing and that's how you worship God is through song. There's no other way to worship God. You have to sing. I remember being in church one time and this church serves coffee and so a lot of people have coffee in their hands and the worship leader gets up there and she says, "now everybody put your coffee down so that you can really worship the Lord". And I just stood there and I clutched my coffee with both hands and I decided at that moment, I'm done.

I'm done. I have gone to church every single week since I was babe and I can't handle it anymore. This is not how I worship. The songs that we would sing, talking about blood and sin and sacrifice and the cross and being saved and heaven and not going to hell. Like these are the songs that we would sing and I couldn't do it anymore. And it had been in process working up to it about how I couldn't handle these songs anymore and I wouldn't sing them. I would just kind of stand there while everyone else sang.

And then there's this moment in church where the pastor says the same thing every week: "We don't come alone we come as a community. So turn and greet your neighbor and introduce yourself." I am a deep connector. I don't do a lot of like, "Oh hi, how's it going?" Like I really want to get to know you. And so for me this moment felt so inauthentic to turn and be like, hi. So nice to meet you. I'm Kim. And then that was going to be it. There was nothing further and week after week after week meeting people, but not knowing anyone and that being dubbed community

It's hard for me. And we have gone to Imago for seven years and I know maybe a handful of people now. Part of that is my issue for not going to Bible studies and getting involved. And there's reasons for that when a lot of it, it comes from this feeling of there's not a genuine sense of community. It feels there's cliques and having been in many cliques in church, I know that they exist and they know that there are thing. So worship and the greeting time, that really bothered me. The messages that were taught were challenging for me in a lot of ways because I didn't agree with a lot of what was being said. And I've come to a place where I struggle with the Bible because it's man's interpretation.

It's a book written by men for men and friends, I'm not well versed in this patriarchal movement right now. I'm not a feminist. I don't know very much about it, but I do know that it lacks a female's perspective. And what would the Bible be like if it was written by women, for everyone? And I struggle when I read my Bible I feel like I've lost the ability to read it for myself. All I can read, I can see is what I've been taught through church and Christian high school, Christian Bible college. All I can hear my professors saying this is what Jonah means. This is how we read Genesis. This is what Paul really means when he talks about marriage. This is what it means in revelation. I don't know what to do with the Bible any more.

If you open my Bible, nothing is highlighted to the max. It is like it is a well worn book. There used to be an adage that we used to throw around and it would say something like, you know someone's a good Christian and how by how many you highlights they have in their Bible. And you know, if you looked at my Bible, you'd be like, wow, Kim, Holy cow. I can quote you huge sections of scripture. I know the, the books of the Bible. I can do them forward and backward. I can tell you theological principles. I can tell you lots of things, but I can not tell you how to handle the idea that there are people that are going to perish in hell and there are people who are not. I don't know how to tell you what to do with judgment when one of your dear friends decides that he loves another man. What do you do scripturally you're supposed to call him out on his sin and if he won't listen, then you bring in a witness and if he won't listen to the two of you, then you take it before the elders of the church.

And there are churches who even have, there's terminology around this. It's affirming or accepting a church can be affirming and accepting or they can be accepting and not affirming or they can be one or the other. There's like a whole thing about this and what is a Christian supposed to do. I have, for years, followed Rob Bell who I just, wow, I love Rob. He is amazing. And he was a pastor who stepped back from being a pastor and started talking about a revolutionary concept called Love Wins. And I read his book and I closed it and I cried because I want to believe that there is no hell.

I want to believe that God's love is so big that it's for everyone regardless of whether or not they accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and savior. I want to believe that, but the Bible doesn't say that and I feel like on one hand I have what the Bible says and I have what cultural Christianity says and I feel like I'm in the middle trying to figure out which way to go with this information. And there has been deep, deep shame and guilt because my identity has been based on being a Christian, a believer, a faithful Christ follower, like a Jesus freak. That has been my identity for more than 30 years of my life. What finally cracked for meand I decided to take a step back a year ago when my son turned four.

It was his first day in the four year olds class and I dropped him off at Sunday school. (And coincidentally, this was the same day as the coffee worship debacle.) And I picked him up and the teacher said, "Hey, just so you know, we talked about Cane and Able today." And if you're not familiar with the story of Cane and Able, it's about a brother who gets jealous of his other brother and kills him. And I said, "I'm sorry, you talked about Cane and Able?" She said, yeah, we talked about killing and murder and how we don't want to hurt other people. We don't want to be violent. And I said, "I'm sorry. Wait a second. You told my four year old on his first day in a new class about murder and killing, he doesn't even know what those words mean. We've never talked about, but at home before. I'm sorry. Why?"

And she said, well, because it's a Bible story and that was it. Something inside of me snapped. And if you're a mama, you know that if somebody infringes on your child's innocence, you freak out and maybe you don't. But I did. I lost my shit. And I wrote an email to the church and I said, I'm sorry. Why? And as I stepped back and I looked at it and I looked at his artwork that he brought home from church, cause we have it in a little box. And I looked at it and there's pictures of Jesus on the cross. There's pictures of Noah on an ark and people standing outside the ark, people that perished, that died. There's Cain and Abel. And we're telling our kids these stories that are violent, that are bloody. I won't even let him watch anything like that on TV. He is five now and we're still trying to navigate this world of murder and killing people.

I take him to church where he should be in my mind safe and this is why I now have to process this with him. And he probably would have, you could argue, heard it somewhere else, but I don't feel like church should be a place for that. Why are we talking about this? If you wanted to illustrate not harming another person, there are plenty of ways that you can do that. Even using the Bible that don't involve using an Old Testament story about murder. That was the day that I decided I didn't want my son to go to church and I felt like another piece of my identity got chipped away because always I knew I would be a mother and I knew that my child would grow up in church and have a similar experience to what I did.

That all shifted and changed and now I don't want my child to go to church. He's there right now because he wants to be. He asked to go so he gets to go. I'm not going to say he can't. I don't want my husband to go to church, but he does every now and then. I don't want to go to church because I don't know what to do and so from basically that whole year, so that was 2018 , so it was right. September, 2018 is when this, there's a name for it. It's called deconstruction more. I'm taking my identity and what I believe and I'm deconstructing it and I'm pulling it down and I'm pulling it apart and I'm looking at it and I'm trying to figure out what I am and who I am and what I believe about heaven and hell and salvation and church and worshiping God and all of it.

I'm trying to distinctly identify what it is between biblical Christianity and cultural Christianity. Who the heck is Jesus and what does he really say? Who is God? Is there only one? Is it just the same name that we all use for universe? Spirit, source, God? I was cleaning out stuff cause we're getting ready to move and I found a notebook (from College) and the title of it is battling relativism and how to handle discussions with somebody that's relativistic. Essentially, how to have conversations with Kim.

And it's crazy the notes that I have! For every argument that I come up with, I have the answer. I have the biblical and cultural Christian answer for how to handle situations. I'm like, I feel this way. Here's the answer. The problem is is that the answer doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for me. And I don't know what to do with that. So I've been silently deconstructing. There's maybe my best friend and my husband are the only two people that know about my withdrawal from faith. And finally I told my mother-in-law and my favorite aunt. I told them I'm not sure if I'm a believer anymore. And I was met with fear (my perception), which only confirmed for me that I was on the right path. I love them so much and they're just worried about me and they want me to be saved and to stay in the faith obviously. But it confirmed for me why would they be fearful? What do they think I'm going to lose by asking hard questions and from stepping out of what culturally I'm supposed to do to maintain my salvation. Can you lose your salvation?

And I just have hard questions. So for the last 15 months, I haven't gone to church. I've hiked, I've slept in, I've had family time. I've read by the fire, I've walked, I've cooked, I've cleaned, I've worked. And I can honestly tell you that I have grown more in the last year than I ever have before. And that doesn't mean that stepping away from your faith, it means that you're going to grow. I think that I was ready. I was ready to explore what it looks like to not go to church, what it looks like to not be a Christian anymore. To look what it looks like to remove that part of my identity. I think of the movie Inside Out, Disney Pixar movie. Have you seen it? It's this great movie. I love it. Everyone should see it. It's about emotional regulation and all of these amazing psychoanalytic concepts.

But essentially this 11 year old girl has these core memories that shape her personality and she has these islands of her personality. There's family Island, honesty Island, goofball Island, friend Island. And I feel like Christianity has been one of my islands. And in the movie her core memories get removed and those islands start to crumble down into basically like forgetfulness. And I feel like my Christian Island has crumbled, which wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't so much of a part of my identity. It is a huge deal, colossal deal. And I take it very seriously and I don't talk about it very often, which is why I am not very polished about it because I was afraid. I was afraid that people would judge me. Cause sometimes we out of our own insecurity about things we project on to other people. And I didn't want people's projections. But now that I know that's what they are, I'm okay. Okay sharing with you this struggle. But I have been writing and kind of balancing between what I know to be true and what I don't know to be true.

So now where does that leave me? Hmm. Where does that leave us? So the, the deconstruction community is actually pretty big. There's a lot of people that are going through this and I have no idea. And I discovered some podcasts that are all for people who are deconstructing. There's actually even a conference called Evolving Faith that was held a few months ago in Denver. And it's a conference for people who are questioning and I didn't get to go, but I'm so thankful that there are people who are putting voice to their struggles because this is huge.

This is huge. And I'm so excited to start talking about it because I feel like that's going to pave the way to have more conversations with people. And more talks about it. So what does that look like moving forward? That's a really good question. Especially parenting. It's tricky because a lot of my family members are believers and want to promote and teach biblical principles that I do not believe in. So that's something that I get to navigate and it's really hard and I feel nervous, but also excited to do something different and how I was raised and to remove the burden of needing to be a light. Let your light shine for Jesus so that other people see you and say, Hey, I see that you're different. What do you have? And to be like, jeez us, that's what I have. But what if instead people said, Hey, you're different.

I want what you have. What do you got? And instead to offer something different, not just Jesus. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. And I'm battling this idea of being relativistic because I have stepped into it full and I know what to say to relativistic me and I don't, I don't want to say those things. I want to believe that God's love is big enough for everyone and that the universe or source or spirit or God, it's for you and not against you. That there is no saved or unsaved heaven or hell- that love wins. And what does it mean when we say love? What does that look like? For me, it looks like being out in the wilderness, hiking and backpacking and seeing creation firsthand and experiencing it. It means connecting with other people, sharing space with them, without judgment, without thinking about whether they're sitting or not, to taking that off the table and being able to be present with people and sharing suffering. It looks like sitting next to people who have different faith systems and not worrying about who's right or who's wrong. If you're a Buddhist Mormon monk, well, I mean whatever you are, I want to get to know you because you're a human. You're created, you're on earth, you're worthy of love and acceptance and happiness as you are right now, regardless of what book you base your life on.

That's what I want. I want the freedom to love without judgment. And I'm sure you have lots of thoughts about this and I am curious and so I'm going to be brave and ask you what your thoughts are. Do you think about this? Where are you at with your faith? What is your faith system look like? And if you feel like responding, do it. kim@captivatinglyconfident.com I read and respond to every single email that I get, which sometimes that takes me a little while, but I will respond and I'm sorry that I don't have a tidy bow to wrap this up with and to say. And so here's this, like I don't know. And I oftentimes have thought stuff like, well my gosh, if my mom was alive, what would she say? But I also think that if my mom was still alive, this one be questions that I'm asking.

This probably wouldn't be where I'm at, but it is and she's not. And I get to wrestle with disappointing family members and changing generational stories and healing and learning about what it looks like to be in community without having to judge. And with the ability to sit with people and to love LGBTQ, they, whoever you are, however you choose to show up in this world. Just do it as you Be YOU bravely, however messy it is. That's okay. I'm joining you being brave and we're going to have more conversations like this. We're going to talk about, Oh, lots of stuff. We're going to talk about grief and how to hold space for people in grieving, how to grieve, how to get unstuck in grief.

We're going to talk about food addictions and we're going to talk about emotional eating because this is really important stuff. We're going to talk about sex. Oh, we're going to talk about it. It's so exciting. Nerving Oh gosh. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about relationships in your family, how to have boundaries, what those look like. Spoiler alert. I don't speak to my father and that's a boundary that I use for self care. That is how I care for myself. I can honor my father by having a boundary where I don't speak to him and that's how I honor him. We're going to talk about bat and talk about parenting and the struggle when you don't really like parenting and when you don't really fit that model. Mom, we all have that mom inside of our head that we want to be versus like who we really are.

And how do you give yourself permission to love yourself? Where you're at. We're going to talk about so much. We're going to talk about divorce. We're going to talk about marriage. Oh, we're going to talk about in-laws and talk about money and we're going to have real conversations about some of these harder issues. So these are Reveal episodes and I'm pretty sure we're going to do about one a month. And in the meantime we're going to keep talking about what we've been talking about on the show for the last year and a half, which is confidence and how to be you bravely and stop shooting on yourself and what that looks like. My passion is to help women really step into feeling confident in their choices about diet and exercise and personal style instead of what they feel like they should be doing. How do they stop "Should-ing" and own their own choices and feel empowered and free?

That's what this podcast is all about and that's what I want to talk about. I want to create a safe space for you two, get new ideas to have your mindset challenged to get some practical tools, especially the first link, 10 or 15 episodes of this show. If you go back that far, there's some really practical stuff. We talk about sleep, we talk about nutrition, we talk about exercise very specifically with like tips and stuff and I like to sprinkle those in because those are actionable items and a lot of stuff. I want to give you just like food for thought, things to chew on, and I want to offer encouragement. I want this podcast to be a place where you come and you feel encouraged. You feel seen and heard and connected and supported and loved because you're worthy of all those things. That's what I want for this show and moving forward.

We're going to keep having these discussions and so I invite you to show up for them, whatever that looks like, wherever you're at, whether it's driving, doing the dishes on the treadmill, wherever you, I invite you to come and to receive and to engage. I love it when I hear or when I get emails or Facebook messages or people share episodes on Facebook or on Instagram, not seriously makes my day because I'm human and I'm sitting here going, who is listening to this? Is anyone being impacted by this show at all? And then somebody will message or I'll see a share or I'll get tagged and imposed. And that seriously keeps the show going. As you may have noticed, we don't have any sponsors yet. There's no ads. This podcast is not monetized. I would like to change that because I believe in keeping the show going, but in order to do that, we need to generate some gas for this car.

You know what I'm saying? So if you have a business and you want to be featured on the show and have a huge ad spot, I'm opening up some spaces for that and I only want to have people on the show and to sponsor products and services that I believe in. And so if you feel like, Oh my gosh, can we would be so aligned and your listeners would benefit from this so much and you have a deal that you want to offer, my listeners message me. Let's talk about what that could look like. I'm not going to have random stuff on here that's not going to serve you and that's really important to me and there's lots of exciting stuff coming up too. Lots of stuff. So far we still have five spots left for the reveal retreat coming up in February in Nashville, Tennessee.

Oh my gosh. It's going to be incredible. www.Revealretreats.com you can get more information there. Again, we've got four spots left, do not wait to do this!! This retreat is all about empowering you to make choices about diet, exercise, and body image from a place of self love and body respect. We're going to teach you how to do that. You're going to connect with other women who are on the same journey and probably make some lifetime best friends. I know the five women that are going and they are incredible. Oh my gosh, it's going to be amazing.

Okay, there it is. My very first public account of my faith journey. Holy cow. I'm so excited to see what happens with this. I would love your feedback. Hey, if this episode meant something to you or if you have listened to other episodes, I invite you to share them. You never know who needs to hear what you've heard, and if somebody pops into your brain, just send them a quick text with the link or tag them in a Facebook post. It is so important that we share stories and that we continue to spread this message of hope and this message of being you bravely and what does it look like to be you your most authentic self. Okay. All right. I love you. I hope that you have an amazing rest of your day. May you go forth walking in your truth and knowing that you are worthy and deserving of love, acceptance, and happiness as you are. Right? No, I'll see you next time.