Hole in My Heart Podcast

A recent survey says that 90 percent of clergy believe it is their responsibility to speak on important social issues, but the top two issues they feel unequipped to speak on are LGBT+ and same-sex marriage. We need help. Thankfully, there are pastors like Bruce B. Miller who are willing to lead us as we lead others. In addition to walking us through beginning steps we can take as a church to better engage conversations around sexuality and LGBT+, we explore questions such as: ​What if the staff/elders/deacons aren't united? Can we be on different pages theologically? Do we have to do a sermon series? (How in the world do we do that?) What if people leave? This is another important equipping conversation to help us lead with grace and truth. (Click the links below for practical next step resources.)   //: Highlights: "To not preach on [sexuality] is to not give people leadership in an area where people have tremendous questions ... You either lead people in confusion or you give people wise guidance as a pastor." --Bruce Miller "We need to start with ourselves and face ... the fact that I am also a sexual sinner. Because every adult past puberty is a sexual sinner." --Bruce B. Miller "It's our bad theology of sex and our bad theology of singleness that undermines the vibrancy of our message to LGBT+ people." --Bruce Miller "If you're not offending people on both sides, you're probably not doing it right." --Bruce Miller //:Do the Next Thing: Find More.  //: Question of the Week for Next Week: It's our last episode of Season 2! How are you doing on your word for the 2019 year? Or your resolution? Where you at?  

One in two women and one in four men have encountered sexual trauma. The enemy's attempts to shred humanity through sexuality is pervasive, but those of us who have encountered sexual assault are not hopeless. Author and teacher, Dr. Dan Allender, guides us through this hope-filled terrain utilizing decades of experience and research in the field of sexual trauma. He unpacks answers to questions like: Why is shame linked to sexuality, and why is contempt often linked to shame? Why and how do repressed memories resurface? How can we engage painful past memories without pushing "eject" on our lives? How can we respond in healthy ways to triggers? ​ Additionally, we explore some of Dan's gospel story out of a life of drug dealing and elicit behavior (as a response to his own pain), and invite him to kindly poke fun at Matt throughout the entire episode.   //: Highlights: "The return on investment for the kingdom of darkness is profound in regard to abuse. [It] disintegrates some level of our faith, our ability to trust, our ability to dream and hope, and certainly our ability to give delight and pleasure to one another." --Dan Allender ​"When we use truth to deny truth ... we are doing what evil does when it quotes Scripture." --Dan Allender "​I've seen it literally thousands of times: People who enter the truth and allow their hearts to receive kindness ... that's the context for the Spirit of God to bring about remarkable change." --Dan Allender   //: Do the Next Thing: Find More.  //: Question of the Week for Next Week: What was your first car and what does it tell us about your personality?

Mark Vroegop, pastor and author who wrote Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, shares how lament is a practiced, musical way of praying through pain. He talks about why lament builds empathy and patience. He explains lament’s common shape—turn, complain, ask, trust—and where to practice it: private, small groups, and corporate worship.

She has a huge platform: Hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of books sold, and many Christians are at least familiar with the name "Ann Voskamp." And yet when Ann writes, speaks, and engages social media, she does not hide behind the numbers. She writes grittily, authentically, and with boldness. How is this possible? How can someone with such a great impact on the world maintain such a humble, vulnerable, and others-focused life? We explore these questions as we engage Ann on living an authentic life. We talk the cost, the gifts, and the practical how-tos. (And of course, because we are the HIMH Podcast, we make time to take a trip to Goofball Island where we finally learn her real Enneagram number.) You're welcome to join us.   //: Highlights: ​"I honestly don't think there should be platforms for writers. Jesus didn't have a platform. He had an altar where he came, he laid down his life, and he died for his friends. Writing is about a place to be brutally honest, have no reputation, and to pray that out of your death there can be people's resurrections." --Ann Voskamp "We either have the mentality of [God as], 'Oh dear, I've messed up, Dad is going to kill me,' or 'Oh, dear, I've messed up, I need to call Dad.' ... David doesn't run from God, he runs to God, and he trusts that when we want a do-over Jesus covers us with un-erasable grace." --Ann Voskamp ​ "We are called to a table-like theology where we not only break bread around the table, but we break open our hearts around the table." --Ann Voskamp   //: Question of the Week for Next Week: What is a funny-ridiculous tradition your culture has? (Perhaps like how Laurie's Dutch family celebrates Tulip Time this time of year in Holland, MI. They dress up in old-timey Dutch clothes and painful wooden shoes and klompen dance.) What does your culture do that is silly like this?   //: Do the Next Thing: Find More. 

Matt and Laurie are doing an impossible thing (writing a book together?!) about their "impossible" marriage. Hear a little bit more about the start of their adventure!

Everything we do—good, evil, neutral—speaks to our longing for heaven. World-renowned teacher of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body and bestselling author, Christopher West, leans into this longing and unpacks it with outrageous wisdom and tenderness. This is one we are all going to be going back and listening to several times. It is that rich. (And don't worry: Those of you who want some of that goofball action, we make sure to talk about rats dying in Wendy's grease buckets. Yep.)   //: Highlights: ​"Here’s the whole Bible in five words: ‘God wants to marry us.’” --Christopher West ​"​We have three choices when it comes to our desire: We are either going to become the Stoic and repress the desire, an Addict and indulge in the finite pleasures of the world that never satisfy, or I am going to become…[an] Aspiring Mystic…someone who opens their hunger to the infinite.” --Christopher West   //: Question of the Week for Next Week: What were you modeled/taught to do with your emotions growing up? Share them? Bury them? Open up and emphasize certain ones? (Like anger?)   //: Do the Next Thing: Find More.

This is the story of a man who experienced attractions toward other men from a young age, found football, found God, found the Air Force (and excelled), and as a ministry leader came to grips with his same-gender attractions--now as a married-to-a-woman man. God helped this man, Mike Rosebush, remove shame about his attractions, but people and circumstances placed him in conversion therapy. A major part of conversion therapy is seeking to make people change from gay to straight. It did not work. However, as a licensed psychologist, Mike found himself in a position of counseling others who had a similar story. Mike had a choice: Follow the script he believed was unhelpful and unbiblical (to idolize sexual attractions as ultimate by making orientation change the primary goal), or find another way. He found another way: the path of sanctification and the path of daily surrender. Hear more of Mike's journey and decision, and his exhortation to pastors and all Christians seeking to engage the LGBT+ conversation biblically and faithfully on today's episode.   //: Highlights: ​ "Dear Friend ... We who have same-sex attraction, who are Evangelical, who devote our life to celibacy, and who absolutely believe everything in your orthodoxy, we are not your enemy." --Mike Rosebush ​ "I was not about to put those [clients] through what I was put through ... My perspective is: 'It's not going to leave. We don't know how it got into us. It's there. Let's live well with it'... [And] I absolutely knew and still know that the Trinity likes me and loves me--just as I am--even with these attractions." --Mike Rosebush ​   //: Do the Next Thing: Follow Mike on Facebook and check him out on his website. We mention a "The Shack" experience We also mention a Barna Study about pastors and leaders engaging the LGBT+ conversation We refer to Mike's letter he wrote to pastors. You can find it here. For More. 

The crew is back together! ​Laurie, Matt, and Producer Steve dive into their first-ever Q & D (Question & Discussion) podcast. Together, they explore areas they have wanted to dive into more deeply including: More of Matt's story of when he felt so purposeless he decided to end his life in junior high (and then launched into a coping mechanism of pornography addiction) Some of our angst about left/right polarity and clinging to our "rights" as Christians How parents who are fighting with their LGBT+ kids can seek deep relationship with one another How false forgiveness has been used to silence victims And! Things we are looking forward to (including) future episodes with Ann Voskamp, Christopher West, and Dan Allender!   //: Highlights: "I was trying to solidify myself. Eventually, I got to the point where none of the things I was doing made me feel substantive ... Everything I was trying to put in this place of giving me purpose and giving me value it [didn't] work. 'I hate it. And I hate myself.'" --Matt Krieg "If we don't see each other as family, we will throw each other each other under the bus as soon as the heat gets turned up. I am not going to to go the wall for a fellow customer at Walmart. But I will go to the wall for somebody who is a part of my family (even if I don't agree with them about everything), because I love them and am committed to them." --Steve O'Dell ​ "Are we grieving for our enemies? Or are we screaming at our enemies and clinging to our 'rights'? Jesus himself did not cling to his rights, but he considered them nothing and took the humble form of a servant." --Laurie Krieg   //: Do the Next Thing: The podcast episode Steve alluded to about Laurie's talk on how to lament? Find it here. To hear more of Matt's story (as told on this podcast), listen here. For More. 

{Week 10 Core Need is the need for purpose: filled with a sense of profoundly mattering.} Unless we are feeling severely depressed, every human intrinsically feels this need to matter, to have purpose, and to make a mark on the world. Sometimes, this purpose-need gets redirected from receiving our marching orders from Jesus to staring at marriage: It will complete me. Let's bust that whole thing apart with "Breaking the Marriage Idol" author, ​Kutter Callaway. We also explore your responses to what you grew up with as a paradigm for marriage (was singleness an option?), dig into the need to intentionally place women in positions of influence, and try to affirm our working theory that we are attracted to spouses and friends who are opposite to us when it comes to loving or loathing jigsaw puzzles. You're welcome.   //: Highlights: "Let's get rid of ... romance altogether. What are we left with? We are left with these amazing things that we should all be committed to: The welfare of widows and orphans, [and a commitment] to the welfare beyond simply the spouse that I am marrying . . . This is the family that God has called us into: A radically extended and open-armed family--not this sort of closed dyad we get if we start with that myth of romantic love."--Kutter Callaway "I don't think anyone is walking around with a generic, abstract 'call' to marriage or singleness ... To walk into [life with a] Bachelor or Bachelorette vision where, 'I am just going to be with someone at the end of this. It doesn't really matter who the 25 people are--it's just survival of the fittest. You are the winner for my marriage calling!" That is the idol." --Kutter Callaway //: Do the Next Thing: Read the book we explore today called Breaking the Marriage Idol by Kutter Callaway Those new books released this week? Find Deep Focus (Engaging Culture) here, and The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture here. Follow Kutter on Twitter [Our outtakes with the high-pitch voiceover of Jesus comes from these ancient videos. They are worth a watch.] For More. 

{Week 9 Core Need is the need to be unique: delightfully special.} We've explored the need to be included (belong), but how does that interplay with our good need to be unique? We talk through this balance with foster and adoptive parents, Brett and Janelle Beimers. Their decision to adopt and foster models Christ's desire for radical inclusion (belonging), but they still need to cultivate each of their children's unique sense of self. How do they do that? What are the challenges to engaging both needs simultaneously--while also balancing the unique path of foster and adoptive life? We explore these questions with them while, of course, playing a unique game and talking about our (and your, dear listeners) trademark things that make us feel like ourselves.   //: Highlights: "One of our family themes or mottos has been, 'When God is generous to you or blesses you, build a longer table--not a bigger wall.'" --Brett Beimers "You have the space, you see the need, and then you get the call... There are many many reasons to say ‘no’ [to a child], but there are also many many reasons to say 'yes.'" --Janelle Beimers   //: Do the Next Thing: Check out the Jason Johnson Blog Check out these websites: On adoption and foster care: Michigan's Adoption Resource Exchange and Empowered to Connect On child trauma: ChildTrauma Academy If you want to asked Janelle or Brett questions about their foster/adoption journeys, read out to us at podcast@lauriekrieg.com and we will connect you! For More.