“Awake” with Jen Hatmaker

Show Notes:

“It’s so interesting how grief shows itself in sometimes surprising ways that you just can't expect.”

A New York Times best selling author and speaker Jen Hatmaker joins the Weight to discuss her new book, “Awake: A Memoir”. She shares her journey of unexpected divorce after twenty six years. Hatmaker discusses rebuilding her life, and the steps along the way.

Resources:

Get Jen Hatmaker’s new memoir here.

Visit Jen Hatmaker’s website here.

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:01

Hi. I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:02

I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today we are talking to Jen Hatmaker. Jen is a

native Texan. She's a mother of five. She's a New York Times best selling author, podcaster,

and she's written a new book called "Awake," and it's a memoir. It's a hard book, but it's a

really, really beautiful book in a lot of ways. It was great to have her on the podcast today.

Eddie Rester 00:27

She tells her story of the dissolution of her marriage after twenty six years. Very public. She

and her husband planted this church. They had a kind of a national platform with writing and

different things, and it fell apart in 2020 and she tells the story in the book, and she's honest

and she's vulnerable in the book. And what I found in her is that it's not she doesn't write of

anger or bitterness or trying to prove anything. She's expressing what she's learning as she's

now growing and rebuilding and finding life again.

Chris McAlilly 01:08

If you've experienced divorce in your family, or maybe you've experienced it personally or

among your friend group, I think that Jen's book can perhaps give you language. It certainly is a

witness that you're not alone. And she just narrates this journey, kind of navigating the memory

of how things came to be and how she moves forward. She's hilarious. She's very wise and the

conversation today was so rich, so good. What's your takeaway from it?

Eddie Rester 01:50

Well, I think just that, you know, she leads the way and showing us that it's okay to be broken.

It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay not to be okay, and that life returns. You know,

she was at the church I serve in Dallas, about a month ago, Chris, you were out here, and she

preached an amazing message about resurrection, and it was captivating. And I think what she

expressed that night is at the heart of what she talks about, which is that out of death comes

resurrection. And I'm thankful for her witness. I'm thankful for her and her friendship with our

church.

Chris McAlilly 02:35

I hope you love the episode, and if you do. share it with someone that you know, that may

benefit from it. We're grateful that you're here, grateful that you're with us on The Weight and

yeah, hope you enjoy.

Chris McAlilly 02:48

[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to

navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems and

unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.

Eddie Rester 03:05

As Christ centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy, and the marketplace, we all

carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.

Chris McAlilly 03:16

But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of

wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.

Eddie Rester 03:26

That's why The Weight exists. To create space for the conversations that challenge our

assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.

Chris McAlilly 03:36

Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness and tradition,

and responsiveness to a changing world.

Eddie Rester 03:44

So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a

nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of

Christ centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Eddie Rester 04:00

We're here today with Jen Hatmaker, Jen, thank you so much for your time today. It's great to

see you again.

Jen Hatmaker 04:07

Oh my goodness, just same, same, same. I'm delighted to spend a little bit of time with you.

Thanks for asking me.

Eddie Rester 04:12

Yeah, it was about three weeks ago you were here at Lovers Lane in Dallas, Texas, and at that

time you were kind of tailing off the end of the book tour, which I know has been just

unbelievable and amazing in a lot of ways. Staying busy, I know you're about to take some time

off, which I'm thankful for. Talk to us a little bit. We're gonna talk about the book a lot of things,

but talk to us a little bit, just about your experience of the book tour and all that went on, how

was that for you and what did you learn about over the course of those months, six, eight

weeks, however long it went.

Jen Hatmaker 04:51

You know, you can probably relate to this in a way, because writing a book is such a solitary

endeavor. Ever. And it's not unlike how much time you spend in a given week writing a sermon,

and so you're listening, you're locked away in your brain, in your thoughts, you're crafting,

you're forming, you're chasing some rabbit trails, you're editing and condensing and so much of

that is largely just solo endeavor. And then you get to come to Sunday and get in front of the

folks and say all those words out loud, and watch and hear and observe the way that they are

landing on human hearts, on marriages, on families.

Jen Hatmaker 05:40

And it's so meaningful to get to have that experience on the on the end of the thing, having

crafted and created. And so that was how "Awake" was for me. It was longer, it took me, I don't

know, like maybe a year and a half to write it. And it was a hard story to write. And so so much

of that was just back in my little cave, my little hidey hole with dirty hair, wondering if I was

going to have the guts to keep writing this book. And so there was such a delay between the

creation and all that vulnerability piece and the being in a live room with the people who are

reading it, and so having just kind of finished it up, I am just absolutely overwhelmed with

gratitude. I'm so humbled to notice what's happening now that it is in the hands of readers, you

know, it becomes something new. It becomes theirs.

Chris McAlilly 06:45

One of the things you said, I had an opportunity to come out to Texas and be there with you

guys at Lovers Lane. And one of the things I heard you say was that this book, and I don't know

if it's- it probably is the case, just for the genre of memoir, when you're taking memoirs around

really, really powerful stories, stories with a lot of authenticity and vulnerability, that they

become the word you used that I just was attracted to was magnet. It's almost like a magnet

that attracts a particular kind of individual who's experienced perhaps something similar or that

they find reflected in your story. Talk about that a little bit. Why is it that you are drawn to that

metaphor for thinking about the power of the story that you wrote, or maybe just the genre of

memoir more generally?

Jen Hatmaker 07:42

I probably come to that metaphor in one of two ways. The first way is as a reader. And so other

people have put their book out into the world, and it has acted as a magnet for me,

unbeknownst to them. They don't know me. They don't know my life, they don't know my story.

They're just doing their work. But whatever it is about their experience or their observation

doesn't matter. It has acted as a magnet to me, drawing me in, going- variety of things.

Somebody else feels this way, somebody else had a similar experience. Somebody's

challenging me on an old held belief or position, and it just draws me in.

Jen Hatmaker 08:36

And so I've noticed, as a writer, that putting a book out like this that has a pretty specific

storyline to it, it is its own magnet, and so it's kind of just like holding it up in the air and going,

pick your thing here that you are drawn to because there's more than one through line. There's

a half a dozen through lines, pick your thing and come on in. And I noticed then I am now the

receiver of their stories, their versions, their experiences. And I just think this is the magic of

the written word. It always has been. The sum is greater than its parts, always, and to watch it

sort of expand and connect out in the real world. I'll never get over it as a writer, never. It will

never cease to amaze me. It will never cease to stun and shock me. And I'm just so grateful

that this is my one little note to play in the song.

Eddie Rester 09:45

One of the things that you talk about, the magnet places that really, when I read it was a

chapter that was a page, but it was about your kids, and basically said they're part of the story-

I can't remember exactly how you put it. But I'm not telling their story. And I'm a child of

divorced parents. I was in college, so I related, again the magnet piece. I was a freshman in

college when things fell apart, and so just hearing that and appreciating that they've got their

own journey through this, and it's theirs. And I just appreciated that kind of comma as you told

the story.

Eddie Rester 10:26

We're gonna talk about this story. But one thing that I just kept thinking when you were

speaking and as I read through the book is the amount of courage it took to gear up to tell your

story in a very real way, because you didn't have to, you could have skipped across the surface

of it, and people would have loved it. They probably would have bought the book. But I think

the power in your telling of the story is that you really decided to be vulnerable and hopeful at

the same time and telling your story. So how did that decision come to be for you? That I'm

going to step deep into the story to let people really get a sense of all the pain and the terror

and the fear and the grief of it.

Jen Hatmaker 11:18

For better or for worse, I have built my whole career, all my work, as essentially just a member

of the community I lead, so not from up on a stage or from out front, necessarily, but beside

that's just not doing a thing. I'm not doing a shtick. That's just who I am. I don't have any other

way I know to be in the world other than just my ordinary self. Which means this is my regular

family. These are my regular friends. This is my regular life and and that has always been

absolutely integral to the way that I have written and communicated, and I suppose led. And so

I guess it would have felt almost bananas to me to have led my community for almost twenty

years. Had lost a marriage in front of them in 2020. A marriage that I had talked about and

written about for fifteen years.

Jen Hatmaker 12:38

That they knew that they had been a part of. I had invited them into our story and into our

family. So the idea that when I was finally able to pick up a pen again and write that I would

just have left that out or left it behind is just bonkers. It's just not the way I have ever, ever

been a part of my own community. And so I knew that this would be something that I would

write in order to serve the women that I lead. I knew that it would, and I knew that I could, but I

made sure that I did not write it too soon. I've seen those. I've read those. I never want to be

that person, never. I don't want to write from a wound, right? If I had written this even a year

earlier, I think it would have been a little bit of a different version of the one that's in the world.

Jen Hatmaker 13:42

So when I felt confident that I had done enough interior work, enough self examination,

ownership, responsibility therapy, paying attention to my own behavior, my own patterns, my

own complicity, all of it, when I felt like I was able to be honest and not angry and not vindictive

and not passive aggressive, and all the things that I would have been too soon in the story, I

knew I was ready to write it. And I feel like I have stayed in my integrity, even in this memoir

that's so deeply personal.

Eddie Rester 14:29

Go ahead, Chris.

Chris McAlilly 14:29

No, you're good. One of the things that is so striking to me about reading the book is the

structure of it. Actually, I was really drawn to it, and I found myself thinking about some of the

other things I've either read or kind of discovered over the last few years. We have a friend who

teaches preaching at Princeton. Her name is Kim Wagner, and she talks about preaching in the

wake of mass trauma, and she talks about the way in which trauma or traumatic events... The

phrase that she use is "fractures narratives," and in the wake of that, one of the tools that she

gives preachers is this image of the shattering memories that used to be a part of a storyline

that had a beginning, middle, and end. They become almost like a box of snapshots that can be

dropped out on a big table.

Chris McAlilly 15:27

And then she kind of talks about walking around the table, circling the table, picking up one

snapshot, looking at it, asking the question of, what does it mean? And then setting it back

down, and then going around and finding another snapshot and picking it up, maybe crying

around that particular memory and setting that back down. And I found myself just thinking,

this is what the structure of this book is, is really teaching somebody, is modeling how to pick

up the fragments and consider what they all mean. And I felt like, even in the midst of it, you're

it just was so lovely because it's just little bitty fragments of memory that you're kind of picking

up and allowing us to kind of see as you're trying to kind of make sense of them. I wonder if

that lands with you. And you know, how you were thinking about the structure of what you

were trying to do.

Jen Hatmaker 16:22

I love that. I feel like you just described it to me using a different word, the word I've been using

when people have asked me about format, is scenes, scenes and memories. But I love

snapshot. That maybe even gets to the point a little quicker. I've never written in this format to

your question. This is a brand departure from the way I've always written, which has been long

form, long chapters, much more prescriptive in nature, taking an idea and having really worked

it out, and then kind of handing it to my reader, like, here's the conclusions, here's what you

do. Yeah, here's what you think, I've done the work for us. And I knew that this story didn't lend

itself to that. I wasn't going to write a "how to". I wasn't going to write a manual of divorce or

even recovery, for that matter, and this, this whole story is, it's fragile, and it is now.

Jen Hatmaker 17:27

It has its own version in the lives of readers, there's not a single through line that I could hook

into and have that ever make any sense for anyone, because every family is different, and

every story is different. Every marriage is different. And so I just knew that wasn't going to be

the way that I did not want to come in here as an expert or as an authority, or even as

someone who's been through the thing and now has a lot to say about and in conclusion. And

so hence the snapshots. And so I always have described this book as kind of a small story

within a bigger story. And the small story is the story of my divorce of, twenty six years of

marriage and that loss and that grief and then that recovery and that rebuilding. So that is the

small story.

Jen Hatmaker 18:16

And then the big story also includes snapshots which go back to elementary school for me, little

memories from all along where I knew the reader can observe this snapshot, and they are

smart enough to figure out how that fits into the greater story, how that built the house. And so

it was a bit of a gamble for me. And nothing is long. I think the longest entry in the whole thing

is maybe three pages. Everything is just vignettes. And so thank you for giving me another new

word that I can now use snapshots. I will give you credit.

Chris McAlilly 18:57

Well, no, you can give Kim credit. Kim did...yeah.

Eddie Rester 19:02

She's fantastic. One of my favorite snapshots, vignettes, is your oldest son, when he comes

home after driving through. He was mudding, is what he was doing. And kind of tore down a

fence and all of that. But as you go through that story, at the end, you talk about memory, and

that the shared memories, they get lost. And I see that so often, not just in divorces, but when

an old people, one of them dies, or child dies, there's this thread of memory that suddenly

unravels because you don't have the other person on the other end holding that thread

anymore. We are this bundle of memories and snapshots, whatever you want to call them. So,

how is kind of recovering that sense of memory been a part of the movement over the last four

or five years for you?

Jen Hatmaker 20:09

Grief is so weird. You know, you think it's going to look one way. You can look at my story on

the page and go, oh, a divorce and kind of a public facing marriage, having spent an adult

lifetime of ministry and church planning together, you can kind of see where the fault lines are.

You go, oh, I can see where this would hurt and this would hurt and this would be hard, and

you're right on all counts, but it's so interesting how grief shows itself in sometimes surprising

ways that you just can't expect. And that was one of them for me, this loss of my institutional

memory partner. I mean, twenty six years and five kids, we've got a mountain of stories, a

mountain of memories, and we alone hold them entirely like we were the only two there. And

so I wasn't even prepared for how lonely that would feel, when I just would catch myself

wanting to go, hey, remember that time? Hey, remember how he used to say this funny way of

this word? Hey, remember? And there's no one there at the end of the line, and I feel like I'm

having to be the keeper by myself.

Jen Hatmaker 21:19

It's interesting, because I've had another fresh wave of grief just in the last two months that I

did not see coming either. I mean, I'm five years out from divorce. But at the very end of

August, my oldest son, he and his wife had their first baby, and this is the first grand baby. And

I was stunned with joy, but I was also really surprised to feel this tsunami of grief go over me,

because I never expected to do this part by myself. I always expected that our kids would bring

their babies home to us, and we would rock them on our porch, and this would be their forever

home and the soft place to land. And all of a sudden I had to go through yet another phase of

grief, going, that dream is over, yeah? And I'm by myself in this new role, and that felt really

sad.

Eddie Rester 22:35

Yeah, I do think that story line it didn't continue. Yeah, go ahead, Chris.

Chris McAlilly 22:38

One of the things that does come through the book is just how you navigate that sense of kind

of, renarrating your life, but doing that, not in terms of shared memory, but in terms of kind of

your own individual. It's meaning.You're having to do that again from within the context of your

story. One of the powerful threads throughout the entire book, to me is, I think we see it

reflected in some of our lives. We have a lot of friends that have been through divorce, and one

of the things that you see is the power of friendship. There's so many little stories that I think

are so powerful. I think it was Shauna who says... Is it Shauna? Was that the person who comes

to you and you essentially say, if she thinks I'm okay, I think I'm still maybe myself, or some

version of that. And then there's the friend who buys Starbucks, $25 a week. I think maybe my

favorite story was the one of your friends coming in and fixing up your front porch. Would you

maybe tell a snapshot of that story? It's just so beautiful.

Jen Hatmaker 23:58

Oh gosh, it's such an embarrassment of riches these people in my life, I don't think I'll ever get

over it. I'll never get over it. Really the degree and the depth to which my friends and my family

loved me, kind of back to life in the... I lost my marriage in July of 2020, so do you remember

that year? It was rough. So we were only three months in the pandemic. That was back before

we knew anything. We still didn't have all this shared language. We were still just so isolated

and confused, and that was such a scary time. So in April of that year, just a couple of months

before I knew what was true, although all signs were going on in the house that things were

deeply wrong and deeply off and deeply broken, I couldn't source it. I couldn't figure out what

was going wrong. I just knew that everything was. And I came out one day in April, and my

husband, at the time, was crow barring up our front porch.

Jen Hatmaker 25:16

And we're on a parebem house, so we're three feet off the ground. So once the porch is gone,

we can't access the front door. I mean, I heard this racket, and I came out, and I was like, what

are you doing? And it was like, don't worry about it. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix it this

weekend. Well, fast forward to July, three months later, it's still the same gaping hole it had

been for three months. And I just thought, boy, this is a metaphor. We literally have a broken

home, broken in this blaze of dysfunction. And so I called my friends after the first few weeks

and just said, guys, can you help me fix my front porch? I feel like this is a metaphor for my life,

and I need this porch fixed. We've got to fix this home. So my girlfriends, who are handy,

handy, handy, handy, they whipped this porch into action.

Jen Hatmaker 26:18

We had a carpenter, we had an order, we had stain, we had a plan. I mean, in no time flat, they

rebuilt my front porch. They painted it, they staged it, they decorated it, they made it so

beautiful and so stunning. And I remember standing back. This is in the heat of the summer

too. This is August. I remember standing back and looking at that porch and thinking, this is a

metaphor. This is a metaphor. And these people put this back together with love, what was torn

apart in dysfunction and it was more beautiful than it was before. And so that sort of became

my... I hung on to that story. And as I had to keep moving forward, everything can be rebuilt.

Chris McAlilly 27:09

And I know Eddie wants to jump in, but on the back of the swing, they inscribed their names, as

I remember right? They say something about Jesus. I don't remember what it was, but it's...

Jen Hatmaker 27:24

My girlfriends had a custom Porch Swing built for me. I had been asking for ten years to have

one, and so they had it built. This big, beautiful, porch bed, and they wrote on the back of it,

something like we hope that you feel the love of Jesus every time you sit here, and that you

feel the love of your girlfriends, because we love you so much, and that this is the scene of a lot

of joy, and by golly, it sure has been. I cannot count how many hours I have sat on that porch

swing in prayer, in gratitude, in connection, in love, in joy. It became this place for me to go,

and I mean, who deserves that kind of love? It's so it's almost embarrassing. It's almost

embarrassing how beautifully my friends loved me and loved me.

Jen Hatmaker 28:28

Well, although I will say this, at the end of the first year, we got to that first year when the sun

kind of came back out again. Finally, and I had long since bypassed the expiration date of being

a real bummer, and I was still that. So a year later, they stuck by me, and my girlfriend Jenny

was like, we've made it. You made it. We made it together. But then she looked at our other

girlfriends and said, nobody can fall apart this year. That's it. We have reached our capacity.

Everybody. Take care of your marriage, check your health, go to the doctor, wear your seat

belt. We just got to lock it down for a year.

Eddie Rester 29:11

But one of the things when in the book that comes through very clear is that group of friends

and your family, from like moment one in the middle of the night, arrived, showed up, stayed

with and you talked a little bit about that when you were speaking here at Lovers Lane. And I

remember some of the questions after were about how I don't have that. How do you build

that? I mean, several people were asking, how do you do that? And you said something that

night, that was so... I wrote it down. It was so important to me. It said, "Whatever you build in

the daylight will be what you have in the darkness." It made me start thinking about... because

right now my life, I can't complain about it. But what I'm putting in place, whether it's my faith

or in my marriage, with my kids, my friendships, yes, it matters right now, and you don't realize

it. So if someone's listening and is thinking about, I don't have that band of women or that

group of men who would redo my porch. I mean, what's, what's your encouragement to them?

Jen Hatmaker 30:27

Yeah, that is a real shared pain point, by the way. So if anybody is listening and they're just

raising their hand going, that is absolutely me. First of all, you're not alone. It is harder than

ever to make and maintain vibrant adult friendships now for a million reasons. Just for a million

reasons. What used to be kind of ordinary way that people live their lives rooted in one place,

extended family nearby people you've known for decades, your whole life, even, up the street.

Eddie Rester 31:01

Kids didn't have a thousand things to do.

Jen Hatmaker 31:03

A hundred percent. No internet to take us out of our real life and into some virtual pseudo life.

There's a lot of reasons for it, but I think what I would want a listener to hear is that it's not that

you've done something wrong. We have to work ten times harder now to build that sort of

community in the world that we find ourselves in. So I would also say this, I think I mentioned

this when I was at Lovers Lane, but you don't need ten. One will do, one will suffice. And so the

greatest two things that I can suggest is that, first of all, create, if you're starting from scratch,

you've moved your transient, some sort of transition or turmoil has gone on, and you're like,

wow, how do I make friends here in the middle of life, or even if you're deciding which ones to

nurture into something deeper, this is not a great place to be risk averse. This is not a great

place to go, oh, I'm scared this might not work, so I think I'll just not try. The worst thing that

could happen is it's not a love match, and no one's gonna die. Like you get a lemon, right? And

so okay, we false started here. But this is not a catastrophe.

Eddie Rester 32:34

It was when we were kids, you had one thousand people you played with, probably, and you

had a best friend in third grade who wasn't your best friend in fifth grade.

Jen Hatmaker 32:42

That's right, one hundred percent. And sometimes one kind of came out of the woodwork and

you went, Oh my gosh. I didn't even know, but we have a connection, and so this is a great

place to take a few risks and take initiative. To say, you want to have coffee? What are you

doing? You want to meet at the park once we pick our kids up from school? The thing is, a lot of

people are lonely. That is a common sentiment. A lot of people are looking for connection and

don't quite know how to make it. So go first. Just go first. Be the initiator. And then, in kind of a

similar vein, if you really want a good friend, be one. Be one like be the person who shows up

with the hammer and the nails. Be the person who shows up with the dinner and the comfort

and the connection. Go first. And so rather tha n waiting around for community to find you

create it, and you'll get both. And so th is is not fancy work. If you can put a pot of chili on, you

can do this, like invite anybody over. Come over for football, come over for brunch. This is is

not fancy. We're not here to impress each other. We're just here to connect.

Eddie Rester 34:04

My daughter, my oldest daughter, when she was a junior in high school, just admitted she was

struggling finding friends. And my wife, who's so wise, said, when you get to college, you get to

decide, you get to restart. And she did. And when she got out into the working world after

college, she became the social director of this locally nod of friends are completely introverted.

Didn't like to talk to people, didn't know how to text people. For the longest... child grew into

this woman who did exactly what... she just started taking risks because she realized it had to

be. So I love that. I love what you say there. That don't think that something's wrong with you.

This is something wrong with our culture right now.

Jen Hatmaker 34:51

That's right. I love that. I love that story about your daughter, because also this is a good

muscle. Start using it. If you start exercising it, this becomes easier. It's less mysterious, less

scary, less threatening. And so it sounds like she has absolutely developed this, and now she's

great at it.

Eddie Rester 35:14

Don't know who she is anymore. I mean, really, we have no idea who she is. Chris, can tell you,

we really, you're getting all the friends together okay.

Jen Hatmaker 35:23

Amazing. I love that.

Chris McAlilly 35:24

What she had then, and what she continues to have, is self awareness. And that's another

theme that I think, that I hear in the book that there are all kinds of ways in which you address

this, in various ways of I mean, the phase that she's in. It's there in the title awakening, or

coming awake, or I'm going to wake up to my life. I'm not going to outsource my life again. You

say it in a variety of ways. I've thought a lot about what are you doing with that, that image,

and I think one of the things that I see is you kind of navigating your own engagement with the

scripts that we're all given to live, and we live in them for a year, we live in for a decade, or,

you know, twenty five years, or whatever. And there is a way in which those scripts, those

narratives that we're given to live in, can kind of lull us to sleep, you know.

Chris McAlilly 36:24

And I think that what I see you doing is getting attuned, or re attuned, or developing a deeper

level of of self awareness. There's a large thread of the book that's you trying to reconnect with

your intuition or even with your body, but there are other ways in which you are navigating this

kind of journey towards awakening or self awareness. Would you maybe speak to that

dimension of the book?

Jen Hatmaker 36:56

It's true. I think any given space can become a place of slumber, if we just decide to never stay

curious, to have ongoing examination evaluation, if something that we have held for some

time, all of a sudden, has some competing data that we are observing, and there's a bit of

cognitive dissonance to me. It is the mark of maturity and emotional intelligence and even

spiritual curiosity to go, let me examine this. I'm less committed to my camp, my silo, then I am

to maybe what's true, or what's more true. This takes on a lot of criticism, sometimes in a faith

setting, in a church setting, where, to some degree, we have largely prioritized certainty that

has been a mark of faithfulness and spiritual authority. And we've got it, we've nailed it down.

There's no dialog important here. There's no other interpretation to consider.

Jen Hatmaker 38:29

Somebody else's disparate experience is going to have no bearing, because we have. We're

locked. And I grew up in that, that that was a mark of obedience, really. I feel much differently

as an adult, where now I find spiritual curiosity much more interesting and much more true. We

grow up in a myopic space. We just only know what we know. We've only seen what we've

seen. It's my experience, is kind of one note. And so the older we get and the world becomes

more expansive, and people's experiences start threading into the story. I love this idea of

going, I'm not threatened by that, you can't threaten divinity. It's solid. I don't think God's up on

His throne about to fall out of the sky, because we listen to different ideas, right? Or ask new

questions

Eddie Rester 39:28

...asked a new question, it's going to cause the whole thing to fall apart.

Jen Hatmaker 39:32

I mean God bless God. How has he made it this long? You know, like it's a wonder. He's kept

the universe together. He's not that fragile. And I always thought of God as fragile. I thought of

faith as fragile. I thought of all of it like I was its protector and its defender and I was handed

the tools to be that. So that was overt, that was on the nose. So I'm more interested right now

in a broader understanding of how God is at work in this world. And turns out he is.

Chris McAlilly 40:06

I like the way you say it outside the structure. I discovered that Jesus is less fragile than I was

told, not rattled by geography or denominations or the F word. Let's see. So Dallas Willard, you

quote as saying, when describing Jesus with one word, what would that word be? And Dallas

Willard said, "relaxed". That's just fantastic. It's so good.

Jen Hatmaker 40:35

So good, so instructive for me. Someone who grew up pretty committed to the rules and the

marks. That's my personality. I'm first born type A. I always liked to be good, and I was good at

being good, and I kind of wanted to please the authorities in my life, and I just wanted to get

things right, which meant I spent a pretty good deal of my life being fairly afraid of God. Afraid

of the retribution or the punishment, or really even to be more on the nose, just His constant

and chronic disappointment. That's how I felt. But what a constant disappointment I am to God.

He must be sick to death of me. And so when I read that, that Dallas Willard would have

described Jesus as "relaxed", the way that stuck in my crawl. I just thought, tell me more about

this God.

Eddie Rester 41:34

Because that's not the Protestant way. I mean, it is, do more, work harder and yes, only have

just enough fun so that you can say you had fun. Don't go do fun. Do don't go have fun for a

whole week, just enough to check that little box, check the box on Saturday, show back up in

church and be glad on Sunday. I know we're got a couple more minutes with you, and I want to

say something to you. You preached and taught here at Lovers Lane, and Chris and I were

sitting there together. And you have such a gift of expressing the faith in an honest and real

way. And I just want to thank you for that. I think that how you have awakened, and the

awareness that you have is is a gift.

Eddie Rester 42:35

And I just feel like I want to make sure you hear that for me, I think I yelled it at you as you

were walking off the stage in Dallas, but just so in one of the things we could spend, seven

hours talking, I think. But when you talked about just part of that, awareness of the body,

trusting the body as a part of that, and I think when you talk about the church, sometimes

we're taught don't listen to the body, listen to Scripture. Listen to God. Listen to what

somebody else is going to tell you. There's certainty, but ignore the emotion, ignore the

warning signs, ignore all that. And that's really a through line, at least as I read the book, how

can people who've maybe been constrained and told that's not a healthy thing? How would you

encourage them?

Jen Hatmaker 43:33

Thank you for saying that. Really kind compliment to me. I've been to your church twice, and

find it the most beautiful, generous, compassionate, welcoming church and I wouldn't go

otherwise, and I'm just, I'm proud of what you are a part of. I'm proud of what you are building

and how clear and evident it is in the room. I have a radar for that. I mean, I am a lifer, absolute

lifer, and it is real and true and good, and so your church gives me a lot of hope and comfort,

and I'm so delighted that you are serving your community in the way that you are. Really proud

of you.

Jen Hatmaker 44:23

And to your question, it's interesting. I'm having to relearn this because I don't think I ever

learned it. What I did learn was the opposite. I learned that our intuition and our wisdom and

our sense of instinct was highly, highly, highly untrustworthy, that our bodies were not ever a

reliable leader. That we were meant to discredit our own sense of any given scenario or person.

We were just not reliable narrators and thus we must outsource all authority to somebody else

in some place else. But it's so interesting now that I'm relearning this as an adult. It's so silly.

What a silly idea. What a silly spiritual idea. Since the way Jesus came to us was embodied. He

didn't have to do it that way, like came to us in a body. So that body has value. There is

something there that is spiritual and divine and holy, and Jesus literally chose it. He chose to

manifest himself in that way.

Jen Hatmaker 45:41

And so I'm reimagining that maybe when we learn that the Holy Spirit, inhabits our hearts and

souls, that that includes our intuition, our gut sense, our red flags when they are raising and

waving. And so I'm making a new relationship with the leadership of my own body and soul and

mind and thoughts in partnership with the Holy Spirit, and finding that trustworthy instead of

untrustworthy, and then noticing if I'm just going to look at the outcomes. Those instincts are

almost always right. It's either like a green flag or a red flag, right in both cases, or it's raising

an alarm, like something here is out of alignment. This doesn't match. This doesn't feel good.

And so I'm still working on this. This is new territory for me that I am navigating, but feeling

really delighted to have finally started to make peace with my body and its role in my life.

Chris McAlilly 46:58

It's an incredible book. Jen, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you for giving us

opportunity to talk with you a little bit, and not just us. I mean, you've been you've been talking

to people across the country and around the world. We're so grateful to you. Thank you for

what you're doing. Thank you for your gifts and the ways you share it. It's super inspiring, and

thanks. We're incredibly grateful.

Jen Hatmaker 47:21

Thank you. I appreciate you both so much. I am your friend and your fan just south of you in

crazy Austin, and I'm forever on your side and on the side of your church and your people. And

thank you for trusting me to be a part of your community and inviting me there, it means so

much to me. I know I told you that when I was up there, but it just means so very much to me,

and I'll never, ever take that for granted. So charity, one from Austin forever.

Eddie Rester 47:52

Well my wife is down in Austin today, so if you hear sirens going off for lots of noise, she and

her best friend just Yeah, I might need you to bail.

Jen Hatmaker 48:04

I got you, I got you. Holler at me if you need me to run to jail.

Eddie Rester 48:10

Jen, thank you so much. It's awesome. Have a good afternoon.

Jen Hatmaker 48:14

You too.

Eddie Rester 48:14

[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like,

subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 48:23

If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you

can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]