078: Seeking Hope in Anxious Seasons with Sara Billups

How do you find hope when there are a million reasons to worry?

In this episode with Sara Billups, she shows us ways to recognize and calm our anxieties around our bodies, churches, and politics. We talk through her latest book, Nervous Systems, which is full of spiritual practices for those seeking personal and collective peace. If you have been taught negative connotations around your anxiety, in this conversation, Sara helps reframe and normalize it—believing that Jesus meets us there with hope, not demand.  We also talk about the anxious reality that many people with spiritual abuse face when re-entering the church or community. Sara shares how she has moved from suspicion and cynicism to slowly trusting again. 

Guest Spotlight ✨

Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and others. Sara writes Bitter Scroll, a monthly Substack letter and co-hosts the podcast That’s the Spirit. She earned a Doctor of Ministry in the Sacred Art of Writing at the Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary.

Sara works to help wavering Christians remain steadfast through cultural storms and continues to hope for the flourishing of the Church amid deep political and cultural division in America.

Her first book, Orphaned Believers, follows the journey of a generation raised in the 80s and 90s of evangelicalism reckoning with the tradition that raised them and searching for a new way to participate in the story of God. Her second book, Nervous Systems, will be released November 4, 2025, from Baker Books.

Links & Resources 🔗 

Website | Instagram | Bitter Scroll Substack

• Nervous Systems by Sara Billups | Amazon | Bookshop
• Orphaned Believers by Sara Billups | Amazon | Bookshop
• A Body of Praise by David Taylor | Amazon | Bookshop
• On Being with Krista Tippett episode with Nick Cave

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• 077: Seeking Wholeness in Low Seasons Justin McRoberts

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Episode Transcript 📄 

Sara Billups
I think like a lot of people right now and how wellness culture, more broadly, can have implications for pressure and what it might mean to be a Christian living well. I was reading this New York Times magazine article about this all-inclusive wellness retreat in the Catskill Mountains. It just talked about on the website how your life's stresses can melt away. Everything just feels very golden, lighty, and idealized. The website said, How would you like to move or rest? I just was thinking, How I like to move or rest. I don't think that it's through buying a retreat weekend. I don't think it's through a prescriptive class or program. In my imagination, I began to think about this healthy way of real spiritual wellness and not something that you can necessarily buy.

Brian Lee
Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Broken to Beloved Podcast. If you're looking for practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse, then this is the place for you. I'm I'm your host, Brian Lee. I'm an ordained pastor and spiritual abuse survivor, and I know what it feels like navigating life after spiritual abuse. I also know what it's like to want to prevent anything from happening to the people you know and love. It's why Broken to Beloved exists. And we can't do it alone.

We need your help. We're looking for just 80 people to join us by setting up a donation at $10 a month. If you would consider joining us, just click the link in the show notes to donate. Today, Today, gosh, what a conversation we're having with Sara Billups about ways to recognize and calm our anxieties around our bodies, churches, and politics.

Sara is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, and others. She writes Bitter Scroll, a monthly Substack letter, and co-hosts the podcast That's the Spirit. She earned a Doctor of Ministry in the Sacred Art of Writing at the Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary. She works to help wavering Christians remain steadfast through cultural storms and continues to hope for the flourishing of the church amid deep political and cultural division in America.

I so deeply appreciate her work, and I think you will, too. Here's my conversation with our friend, Sara. Sara, welcome to the podcast.

Sara Billups
Thanks. It's so good to be here. I feel like it's been a couple of years since we last talked, so wow, time's bendy sometimes. It has.

Brian Lee
Well, and I was going to say, I want to set the table for the conversation because people who are listening to the podcast may not know that we have talked before. I think it was two years ago after the release of Orphaned Believers for our 2023 Summit.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
And so much has happened since then.

Sara Billups
Gosh, in the world and life, it just keeps happening.

Brian Lee
All of the things, yes. It does just keep happening. Congratulations. Nervous Systems. How are you feeling?

Sara Billups
Thank you. Gosh. Well, as we record, I'm Just about two weeks shy of launch day. So right now, it's very much a day-by-day, checking it off the list thing. But I'm feeling great about the book and tired about the big journey of when you write a book in the basement for three years. It's a little different than the marketing hat. I love getting to talk to folks about it, but it also can be a lot for introverts like me. I'm feeling tired but hopeful, I suppose.

Brian Lee
I appreciate the honesty. Orphaned Believers, which I love so much and still love so much, you write how that book looked back on the seismic forces of end times culture, culture wars, and consumerism in the '80s and '90s, and how in nervous systems, the vantage point is on the here and now. I love the way that you break it down to three ways that anxiety manifests in our body, in our church body, and the body politic. I deeply appreciate that it's not just to give us more reasons to be anxious, but to understand its source and to find healthy resources in the Christian story to serve as anecdotes. That's right. I can't tell you how many sermons I've heard and how many churches I've been in that talk about Jesus saying, Do not worry, and that it's in the Bible 365 times. So once a day, it's a reminder for us and all these things. I love how honestly and aptly you point out that, Do not worry in today's context sounded less relevant than ever.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. Totally.

Brian Lee
Tell us about that posture.

Sara Billups
I think that as a person that was born with anxiety, and it's something that I've always dealt with, that the volume has been higher or lower in different seasons, I think that verse had only stoked anxiety in me, honestly, Brian, as opposed to made me feel hopeful. I think that especially as a kid, I felt like I was doing something wrong or maybe the better Christian, the more faithful person could be able to really embody or practice those words of Jesus, which are so beautiful and visual and simple and calming in a way. But then when you try to apply them, there was just this dissonance between the way that I experience life and those words that I wanted to understand, because I believe if Jesus says, Do not worry, he means it. But I think that I, for a long time, had to understand as an adult that has some pretty complicated things going on, like so many of us, what it really meant to hold anxiety. I I think it was something that I wanted to figure out how to erase, but now I've realized, and the spoiler is in the first chapter, that God can meet us in its very presence.

Brian Lee
Yeah, I love all of that. You share so much and so generously from both your own personal experience and from the research that you found, I mean, over seven million adults in the US with generalized anxiety disorder, how very real it is and not imagined, like so many of our churches tell us. I imagine that some people might consider it their anxiety as maybe just a nuisance while others experience it as utterly crippling. Yeah, that's right. I think that most people who deal with anxiety probably consider it something as negative or bad. And so I love the way that your spiritual director refrained anxiety in talking about our shadow side. And you come to this conclusion. It's like, if I wasn't so anxious, I wonder if I would be as faithful to the people I love.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. I thought that was a really important moment when Dan, my director, talked about that. I began to see certain threads in my own life, and I think a lot of us can see different sides of the coin. For example, if I didn't experience this anxiety. I think it's linked to my creativity. I think a lot of times if we have imagination, that's usually because we possibly can be worried a little bit, too. I don't know that I would be as a creative thinker, as an imaginative thinker, if I wasn't also which is just the way I'm personally wired. I think about how with my anxiety, there's an invitation to empathy or to think about how other people may be experiencing the world that I'm not sure that I would see in the same way. I really began to see that it's quite more complicated, and there's a lot of ways in which I think it draws us into community.

I think there's a way to resist anxiety so that it's not isolating, but actually can be something that we can carry together. It's been a really interesting experience in Then I write in the book about how I have a kid with anxiety and being able to then learn how to parent someone through that. I think my own anxiety story has given me a lot more understanding about how to talk to my child.

Brian Lee
Yeah, and I think it's beautiful and redemptive in ways that most people who live with anxiety would never consider. We just had a conversation with Justin McRoberts and him and Scott's book, In the Low, and just like, if you didn't deal with depression, we wouldn't have this gift for the rest of us who also deal with depression. Yeah, exactly. If this wasn't something that you are walking through and walking with, we wouldn't have received this gift of having these prayers for these seasons that we will all inevitably go through.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Exactly. The other thing, I was talking to my friend who pastors a church up in Toronto named Kevin Mekins, and he said, I don't struggle with anxiety as much personally, but when I think about how you're writing about the worry the system as a pastor, that's something that's really, that I can really resonate with and that I'm really curious about. So hopefully folks that may read the book, even if it's not a season of anxiety, I think we're all anxious in general. But if it's not a heightened season, there could be some interesting pieces when we think about anxiety more broadly in the church and in politics. At least that was the goal.

Brian Lee
Agreed. Well, I would think that even for people who think that they don't deal with anxiety, maybe this a beautiful window into the lives of people around them and understanding them just a little bit more.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. We all have somebody anxious in our lives, even if it's not us. Totally. Yes, we do.

Brian Lee
Yeah, that's well said. For me, it's like, I come from such a posture of judging people. I'm just so good at it, naturally. I hate it, but I'm so good at it. It's just like, I will look at you, I will size you up, and I will judge you based on what I think of you. Man, it's so unfair and it's so wrong.

Sara Billups
It's so human, though.

Brian Lee
It's so human, but it's learning to undo all of those things. It's like, if I could understand where you were coming from, if I could understand what the anxiety is about, if I could understand why this specific political thing or spiritual thing or body thing is so bothersome to you, maybe I would have a little more empathy. Maybe I would have a little more compassion. Maybe I would have a little bit of any of those things.

Sara Billups
Totally. I would argue in an era where it is becoming harder and harder to reach across difference or to see people that believe something differently than we do politically, specifically, or that live in a different geography. I think that there really are central human pieces of us, anxiety, depression, also positives. There are certain core pieces of our humanity that can maybe be a window or a hand that reaches out across to try to understand someone else. That may be optimistic, but I believe it. I do believe it. Yeah, same.

Brian Lee
Sara, there is so much that you cover in this book that it probably deserves three or four episodes to cover it well. We obviously don't have that time. We're just going to tell everyone, go get the book and read it for yourself. In being selective about what we cover today, I just wanted to acknowledge how much of the book, especially the opening chapter is about being a caregiver for your parents, is so deeply beautiful and also really difficult and uncomfortable, almost visceral for me as I read through it, just feeling the weight and the pain and the tension and the beauty and all of the pieces.

Sara Billups
Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you saying that.

Brian Lee
It deserves attention. I say that because it's not what we're going to talk about and the questions I have for you. Totally. But it's going to sit with me for a really long time, that whole first third of the book. I just want people to go read it, especially if you find yourself in that place or you can imagine yourself as being part of that sandwich generation of I'm caring for my aging parents while also bringing up kids of my own and the absolute toll that it takes.

Sara Billups
Totally. Yeah. That's a quarter of American adults right now are in the sandwich generation. So one in four of us are there. If we're not there, we maybe will be. So something to put in your back pocket.

Brian Lee
Absolutely. In spite of all the research, in spite of being part of the sandwich generation, in spite of everything gestures wildly to everything happening in the world, you somehow write that you are literally less anxious, and you offer an invitation to hope. It's something I've been reading and hearing and trying to find out for myself and for our community because I think we so desperately need that hope. Tell us more about hope.

Sara Billups
Yeah. I mean, it's such a good question. For me, I think that I'm in my mid to late 40s now. As you mentioned, it's been a really difficult and heavy season of caring for people in my life that are unwell. I don't have siblings. I've had a really interesting last few years. Then, like all of us, going through what's happening in the political arena as well as post-COVID, there's just, AI, there are so many external stressors that there's not a lot of reason to hope unless we begin to look a little more carefully. I decided that in my own life, I needed to experience something that would help me sit and be a little bit more quiet and listen for God and try to listen a little bit more actively. My normal prayer pattern, which was waking up and having a little bit of quiet time, doing pray as you go, which I do now in love or whatever. I could tell that there was a hunger for something more and also a deep growing sense of despair and wanting to understand how God can meet us in the middle of these places. I decided to do the Ignatian spiritual exercises in this season, which I avoided for years.

At our church, there's a couple that run something called Soul Care Seattle. It's a really amazing house and center where they do half day retreats, spiritual direction, some other really cool pilgrimages. And so I had done some of that, But I knew that there was this looming nine month spiritual exercises that they did every year, and I would think about it and then think this wasn't the time. But really, Brian, something in me knew that there was an invitation to try to go deeper and see if maybe there is a way that God could meet me in a little bit of my deep worry and sadness. And so I decided to go for it basically in a world where we can go away for a 30-day retreat. So the Ignatian exercises can be done 30 days, hermitage style. But that is certainly not the reality for many of us right now. I did that not modified retreat called the 19th Annotation, where you pray an hour in the morning, meet with the spiritual director once a week, and go through this series of exercises that Ignatius lays out, a series of prompts, reflections, prayer. It ended up being by far, clearly, without question, the most impactful and powerful thing I've ever done as a person.

I have been following God my whole life, but it was a well-timed and very, very powerful experience. The thing that came out of it, for me, it all led to this idea of holy indifference or Jesuit indifference. This idea of the idea that all things have the ability to glorify God and whatever the binary might be. Ignatius talks about if we have a short life for a long one, illness or health. He talks about fame or disgrace, whatever may come, can we have our hands open in that posture? And it ended up being completely transformational for my anxiety. It's something that I still think about several times a day, every day. It is very active with me and has been It's been amazing. That's what happened, and that's what led to me writing the book, really. I just wanted to explore it more and think about it and share it with people.

Brian Lee
Yeah. I felt the impact of it when I read that statement. That's the quote that I have saved under this question. It's like, that you learned this posture of a Holy indifference. And notice that the more you pri open your hands toward a posture of acceptance, the less you worried.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. It's really the practice of holding all things open before God and releasing what might be hindering us to be able to really receive God's love. It was just this way to say, I think Ignatius says, to choose what better leads to God's deepening love in me. It's really a way of freeing ourselves. I think that when people hear indifference, they may think apathy, and that's certainly not what this is. In fact, I think it is key inner work to then free us to do outer work in service of our neighbor and in work of justice. I think that they pair together and it's quite important. It's a way of self-care that then gives us more energy and focus for the work that we're called to do in the world as people that follow Jesus.

Brian Lee
Yeah. It can feel so counterintuitive or almost like a paradox. It's like, the way to let less anxiety is just to let go of things.

Sara Billups
It's like we feel our fist around all of it. Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
I want us to end there. It's my last set of questions, But where I would love to go next is that idea of embodiment. Because you write so beautifully about it. I'm learning so much about it in the last year or two. And this idea, and I think it's your quote. I don't think you're quoting someone else. Just like, I don't know how to understand Christianity without considering the body.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think that the experience of inhabiting a body, I mean, Christian embodiment recognizes our humanity and our physicality, and also the fact that we were created by God. I think that I realized that I had this idea of what it looked like to be an embodied person. That was just not very much how I see myself. I imagined this woman in the woods, barefoot, wearing maybe a linen tunin. I'm being funny, but somebody that was very earthy and very aware of nature. I love linen and nature. That's not really what I mean, but I've never really felt. I've felt a little bit more awkward or a little bit more restrained. And so I think that I didn't really understand what it meant to practice anxiety. If we're like that or a little more introverted, I feel like this idea I had really wasn't what embodiment was is at all. And so I just began to think about Jesus who cried, probably had his feet hurt when he walked around, made fish, he slept. Jesus fully experienced life in a body. Those were things that I could very much relate to and begin to help me understand it a little bit differently.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Well, and you quote so many beautiful things like Dallas Willard and Tsh Oxenrider and all these people. Yeah.

Sara Billups
Oh, totally.

Brian Lee
I love the way that you pair embodiment to the vibe of wellness culture and capitalism. Yeah. That was so good. Tell us about that. Because it's like what you're saying. It's not just self-care, it's not just the linen and the the flower reads, but like...

Sara Billups
Yeah. Well, I began to notice how... And then in Orphaned Believers, I write a lot about consumerism and how I could see that traced into my '80s, '90s childhood and see how it shows up in the church today. I just began to be really interested, I think, like a lot of people right now and how wellness culture, more broadly, can have implications for pressure and what it might mean to be a Christian living well. That's a coded thing. There's certainly typically an access financially to have this life or image. I remember that I was reading this tea magazine, New York Times Magazine article about this all-inclusive wellness retreat in the Catskill Mountains where people can pet goats and have massages. And it just talked about on the website how your life stresses can melt away. Everything just feels very golden lady and idealized. And the website I'd said, How would you like to move or rest? And I just was thinking, How would I like to move or rest? I don't think that it's through buying a retreat weekend. I don't think it's through a prescriptive class or program or Peloton community. I think what I really need is not something that I can buy, but I think it is actually just to sit and to be with Jesus and to imagine what that might be like.

And so in my imagination, I began to think about this healthy way of real spiritual wellness, which I think is wholeness, thinking about the incarnation, thinking of the way of being, and not something that you can necessarily buy. I started to look into a little bit in the book, just some other ways that people are selling wellness people sell. There's this silk bracelet thing that you can buy for $115 called Highline Crystals, where you can have an altar kit that has various pieces for cleansing. But then I thought, Oh, wait, don't I do that myself in my own way? I mean, maybe I don't have a wellness culture that I buy, but I have my own rituals that might look strange to someone else, sitting in the room praying, having a cup of coffee, using a certain blanket. I realized, I don't know, I think in this way, we all have our own way that we interpret wellness and maybe even internalized it a little bit. I thought that was interesting to work through. I talk about that a bit in the book, and then Also just being, again, in my mid to late 40s, I talk a lot about how, as a woman, seeing my body change, just thinking about just skincare and, oh, gosh, just all of the ways in which maybe we're told if we try one more procedure or one more thing, we'll be able to be a little bit closer to you, and how that, I think, is very much in contrast to the way of Jesus, where we are certainly not asked to be focused on things that fade.

However, just to be honest, Brian, there is still a real tension as a person living in the world right now in some of those things. So I try to really honestly grapple with and talk about that stuff a little bit in this part of the book.

Brian Lee
Yeah. And I think that's what I connect and resonate so deeply with is naming those things as part of the life, feeling them as true, and dealing with them rather than just passing it off. You mentioned the internalizing of it, but I think it's also like we're outsourcing our embodiment.

Sara Billups
That's good. Yeah, totally. Right? It's like, whether it's the wellness culture. Embodiment for sale. Whether it's the wellness culture. Yeah.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Embodiment for sale. It's like, get this kit, do this thing, join this gym, join this cult of Peloton or Orange Fitness or Orange Theory or whatever it is.

Sara Billups
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Lee
And rather than just finding the practices that work for us that we probably already have available, we go looking for the thing that we can buy that makes us part of something else.

Sara Billups
I think the other thing that I realized is that the way that I see my parents' bodies changing and aging, the way that I'm seeing their bodies start to shut down and my mom's mind changing with advanced dementia and Parkinson's. I think that there is also sometimes for those quarter of adults like me and the salmon generation. When you're watching someone you love move closer to the end of their life, of course, we want to cling to youth even more, even if it's not for a reason that we might think as being a stereotypical because I need to feel sexy or whatever, marketable or whatever. It could just be that we don't want to die. We don't want to see our end in that way. There's a very human natural pool, too, that I hadn't thought about until I've been in this season of my life. I think it's a call to be gentle with ourselves, too.

Brian Lee
Yes, very much so. I would love to shift gears a little and talk about that sense of connection and relationship that we need to make it work, especially when we carry this anxiety, when we carry this embodied nervous system that is telling us to react to all of these things rather than choosing thoughtful responses.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
I'm thinking specifically of our community who have felt so damaged by their connections and relationships, especially in a faith context. You share quite a bit about your experience at Grace and in churches, and this almost disembodied sense in terms of the church body of what you call your lukewarm engagement.

Sara Billups
Yeah, totally.

Brian Lee
It serves your husband's introversion. It serves your anonymity until it doesn't.

Sara Billups
That's right.

Brian Lee
I love the way that you write it. It's like you say you became increasingly lonely, even while you're surrounded by community, while missing the ease of community. I resonate with that tension and that I imagine a lot of our listeners do as well. You eventually share the story of visiting a church in Western Michigan, and you're taking it back at its more overt Christianity that's in the air and in the atmosphere.

Sara Billups
Yeah, totally.

Brian Lee
But I love the reflection that you have, the observation, the self-awareness to say, there's a warmth I wouldn't let myself feel because I was suspicious that it wasn't genuine. I probably othered myself in that cafe to feel in control of my perceived outsider-ness. I Tell us about that moment, if you would.

Sara Billups
I did this Doctorate of Ministry program at Western Seminary at the Peterson Center called The Sacred of Writing, which is really where I started writing a lot of the book. I'd go out for low residency weeks once every season in spring and fall for a few years. I live in Seattle, which is a place where it is certainly not common to go to church. If you drive a half hour outside of the city, there's plenty of churches, but it's certainly not a common cultural thing. You certainly would not see somebody reading a Bible in a cafe. That would be very odd. If you did, it would look like you were trying to signal or message something for a reaction. The most we see is maybe outside of a mariner's game, there's somebody with a loud megaphone saying wild stuff. That's the public example of Christianity here. Going to Michigan, I went to this coffee roaster one morning before the class started it for my program, and there were people just sitting around a Bible study with Bibles open. And then when I walked in the cafe, they just looked up and stopped for a minute, almost like they weren't really sure what I would think.

And I just was realizing, this would never happen where I'm from. And why do I react with suspicion? Why do I react with judgment? Why do I assume that that is a cultural thing? I was noticing myself, like you mentioned earlier, a lot of assumptions, a lot of judgment that I really didn't like. I think it's in this way because deep down I realized, Oh, I want access to that. I don't know if I necessarily take it being my Gen X cranky person, but I think it would be nice to know that I could certainly, freely do that. That just brought up a lot of questions about why does it matter? Why am I centering self to begin with? Why do I have essentially an anxiety response either way? That was really interesting. Then a cafe in Grand Rapids, the same thing. Somebody was reading a Bible or so much Christian radio. I'm so attuned to cultural Christianity that then seeps into political rhetoric I'm so aware of it and almost defensive about it that I began to realize that I might be missing something really sweet or actually genuine or pure because of my posturing or anxiety response around it.

Brian Lee
Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I I think that a lot of people in our community also carry that sense of suspicion. The other word that comes to mind is cynicism. That it might be something genuinely beautiful that's happening over here, but I just feel cynical about it because of the way that I've been harmed in the past or because of my own experiences. Then I also think of quotes I've heard from other... Hope for Cynics, is it Jamil Zaki, I think? Then I've heard Carey Nieuwhof talk about it. It's like, cynicism isn't just the negative thing that defaults to that, but It's born of a deep sense of hope that was just denied or broken.

Sara Billups
That's good. Yeah. I'm a cynic because I used to hope and dream for something, and it just didn't happen.

Brian Lee
So it's just easier to be cynical about it. And so I think for people who have been harmed in church or in spiritual spaces or who come from communities where overt Christianity is not a normal thing. I love the Willy James quote that you include. And then you say, God meets us through other people, but we must be willing to be met.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's raight. That's a hard lesson sometimes.

Brian Lee
It's so hard because I would much rather keep people at arm's length. I've been attending the church I'm at now for almost three years, and I'm just now starting to learn names and recognize faces and be like, I think I would be okay smiling at you from across the lobby.

Sara Billups
Yeah.

Brian Lee
You tell the story of being at Grace for, what was it, 10 plus years before you start dipping your toes in things. Well, but it's also not.

Sara Billups
It took forever.

Brian Lee
Because we move at the pace of whatever we have capacity for because it would also be easy to just carry the shame around it. You say it as like, Well, a better Christian would do this differently.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. Kind of like a better Christian would believe that when Jesus says, Don't worry, then we can actually do. Yeah, that came up a lot. That's right. Yeah.

Brian Lee
Well, I think in a lot of people in our community's case, it's like a Christian who hasn't been broken would do better, or someone who hasn't been through what I've been through. We start shaming ourselves like, Well, I should just be able to go. I should be able to...

Sara Billups
I really feel that.

Brian Lee
I should be able to have this relationship, right? We had this anxiety of connection, of doing church right.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
I love the invitational nature that you provide for us in naming the anxiety. And just saying, yeah, sometimes it takes time, and God wants to meet us through other people, but we have to be willing to be met. Sometimes we're not ready for that.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. I have been going to Grace for 21 years, and it took So long. And part of that, as I read about, like you mentioned, is because of my own introversion and my own suspicion and cynicism. Those things are so true in me. And part of it is also because of Seattle. Grace is a church where it's really good. It is easy to be anonymous. When Mars Hill imploded in 2014, our church doubled in a weekend. I mean, it exploded with people. And that's because it's a good place to just be for a while. And I love that about the church. But I think that that also meant that for a while, maybe a little too long, I could stay anonymous until I just began to feel really uncomfortable. And I finally dragged myself to a women's retreat, which, of course, I avoided the because I felt like it wasn't necessarily going to be a place that I could connect. I think, again, I had a lot of judgment, which was really fear and anxiety about belonging, which is so human and really tender if I look back in that season. But I go to the retreat and there's small group breakouts after an evening session.

A woman says to me, let me introduce ourselves, and I say, Oh, I'm Sara. The group leader says, How long have you been going to Grace? I said, Oh, I've been going for eight years. She said, Why haven't we seen you before? She was friendly. There was not an implied meanness to it, but just hearing, Why haven't I seen you before? Feeling invisible. Was just a very heavy and sad thing. I thought, man, I've got to either think about if there's an invitation to actually connect or think about what I'm doing because something's not working anymore here. So that was, again, eight years in, which is wild. And I feel like some people could hear this and think, what church would let somebody be anonymous? It was actually, in some ways, what I needed. And also, I think I was just longing to belong or connect, which is really like a school pattern, too, like a lunchroom pattern. It's nothing necessarily specific to church, except church just makes it even more emotional and feel freakier sometimes. But yeah, finally, we began to connect more started to find our people. And really then, I don't know what, I think it was around the time Mars Hill imploded and we had our big doubling, there was a woman named Debbie Taki Smith who joined.

Grace had always been liturgical, but she really introduced a lot of contemplative practices to us. And this was in the water in the mid 2010s. In a lot of churches, Grace was certainly not special in that way. But talked about Lety or Divina doing half day retreats, listening prayer. And that's when I really began to feel invited by God to a deeper sense of self. And that really freed me up in this way to engage with community in a way I hadn't been able to. It's a little mysterious as to why, but I think I just calmed down, became more centered, a little bit more trusting, and then could look around and see my place in the church a little bit differently.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Again, I love the beauty of being invitational to things and recognizing the sting of shame. It's like, Oh, well, why haven't you seen me here before? And trying to drive away feeling that. It's like, and you've brought your baby with you at the time, right? So it's in the middle of all of that going on at the time, too.

Sara Billups
All of those first months, yeah.

Brian Lee
And it's so easy for us to hear things that way, even if that wasn't the intent. To do the work of, it's like, Well, what did that mean? Or, Why am I feeling this way about it? Where does that anxiety come from of, quote, doing church right? We're doing the faith right or knowing God the right way or whatever it is. And beautiful idea is not just around our bodies, but like we said, around the church bodies. And I love the quote that you... Is it W. David O. Taylor? Is that right?

Sara Billups
Oh, David Taylor. Yeah, totally. He uses initials sometimes officially, but it's just David Taylor.

Brian Lee
We bring bodies that have been scarred by touch and bodies that have been starved of touch. And on account of the insidious effects of sin, we bring broken ways of relating to our own bodies and the bodies of others who gather with us in a common space of worship. And recognizing those things that you see that bodies seem to relax when we work through the liturgy together. And this idea of restorative worship that happens in community and connection.

Sara Billups
I love that quote so much. I love it. Yeah, David Taylor is a Fuller prof, and he lives in Austin and goes to an Anglican church down there. So I've gotten to know him a bit. In that book, The Body of Praise was really powerful, thinking a little bit more about embodiment. Because, again, he starts by acknowledging, we bring our broken bodies. We bring our bodies as we are. We peel away the layer of posturing of whatever wellness wants to do to us. We just come as we are, and that It was just so disarming. I really love that posture.

Brian Lee
When I love you go on, and I really loved this quote, is that most churches often resemble the body of a pre-teen. Gangly and awkward, uncoordinated and clumsy, to Sure. But such realities invite us to lean into, not away from, that timeless call to be embodied. Yeah.

Sara Billups
That's when I thought a little bit more about worship, which, again, I joke in the book that sometimes at the blessing at the end of our service, we'll have the benediction and be invited to raise our hands. I know that some people can so freely do that. But, Brian, you have to... I pry my... I pry my, even today, I get them off my sides a little bit. It's just I think that I totally got distracted because that made me laugh a little bit. But I think that when I think that when worship is done quietly, we have... So Jess, our worship guy is just Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith-y, but it's really like beautiful music, like string bass. There's not a lot of electric guitar. No one's shredding up there. It feels very, it feels very quiet and invitational. And there's It's just there are some times in worship at church where it seems like we transcend a bit. And even I, the cranky cantankerous, Gen-Exer, can get very much get out of my head and begin to sense the Holy spirit, like a cleanness and goodness. That's really something. That's something special.

Brian Lee
It is. Well, I think I come from a very charismatic Pentecostal background and as a worship leader, so I have the full hands way up in the air, touch down field goal Can you do that now?

Sara Billups
Can you raise your hand? No. Is that what you were... Oh, okay. That was my question.

Brian Lee
I don't now. That's the thing. I've fully changed, transitioned, accepted this also alternative posture of, I don't feel comfortable with that because of the way that that was so manipulated for me. Or because of the way it can be perceived as just being performative. I now also feel extremely comfortable with no hands in the air or just resting the tops of my palms on the row in front of me with my palms upwards. Learning to recognize and accept, it's like, maybe there isn't the right way to do worship or the wrong way to do worship. It's the sense of, do I feel connected to the people around me? Do I feel connected to God? I love the story. I love that you share the question that your son asks at the church. She's like, Mom, is our church doing it? Are we doing something wrong? Because I don't feel God's presence as easily as here. Just that connection that he sensed in that space and to recognize, listen, we're all wired differently. That's right. We're going to sense presence differently. We're going to sense each other differently. Even, I think it's towards the end of the book you share at your church, that whole exercise of circling up and passing rocks around.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that was so beautiful.

Brian Lee
Oh, my gosh. I will hold this with you by the grace of God. It's like, and that would never work in some other churches. But I loved that so much.

Sara Billups
That's right. We're about 150 people, and so it's easier to do. But Jamie, who's one of our priests, one Sunday said, everyone just stand up and we're going to stand around the sanctuary. She had a heavy stone and she said, if you're comfortable, look at the person next to you and share something. It could be about news or politics, something personal, whatever, just something that you're carrying and say, share it. And then the person next to you will take the stone and say, By the Grace of God, I'll carry it with you. And it was just such a visceral, beautiful time. Just to stand in a circle and watch this. It's a very intimate exchange. It was very connecting. Man, that worked like a charm. That was a beautiful thing at Grace. But you're right, another church that might feel awkward, clunky, not mathematically possible with the number of congregants, whatever. But talk about embodiment. That was quite cool.

Brian Lee
Well, I love that you got to share that moment with your son. Because it could have been a stranger, it could have been whoever else was next to you. But you guys had that moment together, and I love that.

Sara Billups
Yeah, he was next to me, and he said something about his anxiety, and it was just such a tender. It was a very tender moment. He knew he was a teenager. Just him being able to be open like that in that space was a really good indicator that it was a very sweet and very lovely thin space-time or whatever. It was very cool.

Brian Lee
It was such an honest moment that could have been passed off as like, Oh, I'm worried about school, or I'm worried about anything else.

Sara Billups
Yeah, exactly. But it was just an honest, vulnerable moment.

Brian Lee
He didn't have to. Yeah. I love your description of a healthy church because I think so many people who are listening are looking for this. You say, If God made the church, let God grow it. That's God's job. It's the church's job to model humility and mend when harm is perpetuated. A healthy church will show up for each other. It will keep breaking others' hearts but forgiving when we're able and navigating individual grief, systemic anxiety. It'll be stable and constant and intentionally making space for the lonely, anxious woman who sits in the back most Sunday. To move forward when she's ready.

Sara Billups
I love all of that. Thank you. Gosh. Yeah, I know it sounds idealistic, but I believe that it is true and possible. I I still believe, and I think I read about this, in Orphaned Believers, and I still think about it all the time, that church is one of our last best hopes to be with people that are not like us or that we wouldn't choose to be with, and that we learn to love, and that we maybe even believe different things than other people do about various difficult issues. I think that there is a possibility for understanding a cross difference in church. I do. And I think that sounds scary and hard, but I still think that it really is hopeful to me, just circling back to that. I think that healthy churches exist, and I think it's possible to find them. I still do. Yeah.

Brian Lee
I hold to that hope, too, because I have to.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
I wouldn't know what to do without it.

Sara Billups
Totally. If the church is just the gathered body of believers, if that's what that means, if that's what Jesus left us with, we have to believe that there are examples that we can find. But I say that with a lot of tenderness, and just like you, with a lot of people in life that have been hurt repeatedly and that rightly so are incredibly suspicious and should be of what's going on. So I just I say that with eyes open. Yeah.

Brian Lee
Yes. Yes. And I appreciate that. I I wrote down way too many questions, so I'm going to skip a few, but I want to refer to for people to get the book again and read your whole section on Marilyn Robinson's lecture on Theology for the Moment. Of theology that embraces rather than excluding Gosh.

Sara Billups
It was just talking. It's so good. Yeah, she's incredible.

Brian Lee
That whole section is good. And the whole thing about friendship audits. I thought that was fascinating. And we don't have time.

Sara Billups
Totally. Vampire friends. Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
That whole thing. What I do want to ask about is this idea of being religious but not spiritual.

Sara Billups
Yeah.

Brian Lee
Again, you were at the Eugene Peterson Center, and you talk about how he avoided using spiritual as a descriptor because we are all spiritual all the time. And I love it. I know Alison Cook talks about all abuse is spiritual abuse because we are spiritual beings. So when we are abused, it affects us on a spiritual level no matter what. That's right.

Sara Billups
Yeah.

Brian Lee
And you're poking holes in this idea of being religious but not spiritual while wondering if the church would transform if we began to be more religious than spiritual. And I recognize it in a lot of the churches that many of us are part of, it was often painted that being religious is less than or worse than being spiritual.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right.

Brian Lee
So help us understand that more about being religious but not spiritual.

Sara Billups
Yeah. Like a lot of us, I love Nick Cave, and he was on Fresh Air talking to Terry Gross a few years ago. I think in culture, at least people like me look for prophetic voices that may be circling the Christian space or have some curiosity about faith. He talks in that interview really candidly about joy and suffering, about how they're two sides of the same coin, about losing two of his sons. He begins to talk a little bit about church and this beautiful little church with amazing music that he's found somewhere in the UK. Then he goes on to talk about religion and the beauty of it. Then Terry Gross says, I wonder if we aren't thinking about it right. Maybe instead of thinking about being spiritual but not religious, it would be better to think about being religious and not spiritual. Then I thought about that. It just was on repeat in my mind. What does that mean? Because my first bodily reaction is, no, that's not right. Because as an evangelical kid, we are told, I mean, I was told all the time, Christianity is not a religion. It is a way of life.

I was told that as a way of othering or distancing myself from other religions that were in this context wrong. That was just the rhetoric that I was told. I have a very visceral negative reaction to the idea of being religious. I also then think about in culture, the idea of somebody that is religious may be somebody that puts on airs or somebody that has a lot of showy practices or goes to a stodgy service every Sunday. I had so many negative ideas in my mind. But, Brian, the more I began to think about it, the more I realized how freeing in the clarity of practicing religion, how clarifying and how unifying and invitational to think about being a religious person, a person that takes belief seriously. I just think that that is honest and interesting and turns things on their head. Then Peterson, again, doesn't like the word spirituality or spiritual. He does, I think, use it. I think his title that is when he was a prof somewhere in Vancouver was something about spiritual, whatever. It's a little bit shaky. But Peterson talks a lot about that, too. What does that mean to be spiritual?

That just feels not specific, unclear. I think that maybe there's a little bit of kindness that can come by really defining ourselves as being religious. I love now thinking of myself. I consider myself a religious person. I think that is a freeing and cool way to think about my practice. It helps me think about taking my belief in Jesus seriously and with intention. Yeah. So that's a little bit about it. I thought about it just that interview alone for weeks after it was so cool with Nick Cave.

Brian Lee
Yeah, I think that's so helpful because like you and like so many of us, we put our hands up. It's like, oh, I don't know. I don't want to identify myself as a religious person because I've been taught for so long that that's a bad thing. Yeah. And so I love, again, that invitation to reconsider what that means and try it on for size.

Sara Billups
That's right. Yeah. It may be something that helps some people and not others, but it's been helpful for me. Sure.

Brian Lee
I want to come full circle now and go as we wrap up to talk about indifference and detachment. Because like you write, and I so appreciate it, it's not about detachment and resignation or fatalism. It's not about not caring about what happens, but a state of peace with any outcome, if it's in God's God's order. It's the capacity to let go of what doesn't help me to love God or love others while staying engaged with what does. There's this such an interesting tension and counterintuitiveness, again, with detachment and indifference that helps us to move out of these anxious spaces.

Sara Billups
Yeah.

Brian Lee
Help us understand that.

Sara Billups
Yeah, that's right. I think that I really love the daily offering of St. Therese of Lisieux, where she says, Help me accept for the love of you, the joys and sorrows of this passing life. I just think about Jesus in the sermon on the mount, Jesus praying, your will be done. I think about so many the hymn, It is well with soul. There are so many examples of practicing indifference. And I think that Jesus, who was crucified by empire, I think that is the ultimate indifference. He was so convinced that he was following the will of his father, that he let himself be killed. I mean, that's an extreme, obviously extreme example. But I began to realize that if I chose to focus on my anxiety, If I, for example, my son's anxiety, there's this really beautiful Buechner quote where he talks about how his daughter had an eating disorder, it was hospitalized. He talks about how he would do the things in his life that were normal. He would play tennis, he would go to dinner with friends, but that in his head, he was thinking about his child and that his love for his, his anxiety for his child eclipsed his love for his child.

I think about, and that for a while, when my son was diagnosed with OCD, was certainly true. I think about there are ways, there are ways in which when I am holding on, when I cannot even let myself think about being indifferent, it means that I'm not trusting that God actually has something to do with what's going on, that there is some order or purpose. It means that I'm trying to control the outcome because I'm scared, because I think, what if it's not true? Or what if we're just left on our own? I begin to spiral and spin. And so then to ground ourselves in things like Saint Therese of Lisieux's, to accept for the love of you, the joys and sorrows of this life, to realize that through suffering, going back to nick caves talking about suffering and joy being two sides of the same coin, even if the outcome is something difficult, that there could still be some beauty or some deeper understanding of humanity, deeper understanding of the other, that when you push past the fear and really begin to practice indifference, there is an opportunity to feel more alive while we're here.

That's really been my experience so far. Imperfectly. Gosh, so imperfectly, Brian.

Brian Lee
But authentically and honestly, I think, lived very honestly, at least on the pages to me.

Sara Billups
Thank you.

Brian Lee
I love this idea behind detachment because I would consider, and I think many of us would consider detachment is exactly... It's just like, Oh, well, I just won't care about anything. It's this disengagement. I love that you have this Kathleen Norris quote, that this detachment is neither passive nor remote, but paradoxically fully engaged with the world. Yeah, that's right. It's not about being closed off, but that it's clear that their wounds have opened the way to compassion for others. That compassion is the strength and soul of a religion, which I think brings us right back to being religious and not spiritual.

Sara Billups
That Kathleen Norris quote just destroys me. I love Love it so much. Yeah, but just thinking about indifference as this posture of prayer and of being to release whatever it is that's hindering us from God's love. Like accepting that God's love does not mean things go our way necessarily. It just feels like it was the most real and true thing. So when I applied it to my anxiety, I began to realize I can calm down a little bit. The anxiety, of course, is a control response. Like the root of it is fear of uncertainty, fear of the unknown. Zone. That's the part inside, that deep part that began to settle when I began to practice indifference, when I held my hands open and said, God, if this is real and you're in this, I choose to trust you. I believe, help my unbelief. That's when that deep uncertainty began to calm a little bit inside.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Thank you, Sara. If there's something you hope, we've covered maybe a quarter of what's in the book, so we need everyone to go get it. But what are you hoping someone can walk away with?

Sara Billups
Yeah. Gosh, so much. Jeez, no one's asked that yet, Brian. I think that a couple of things. One, there are many Sometimes in my own story, personally in my life where I have felt very alone, I think there's a way in which we feel that whatever the specific flavor of our worry is, whether or not we're diagnosed with generalized anxiety, the sort where we're just going through a time of worry, there's a way in which I think the enemy of our souls and just sometimes our own selves want to isolate because of fear or because it feels terrifying to talk about or whatever. But man, I hope that people can read the book and see maybe a little bit of their own story reflected in some of mine, and that maybe they can feel a draw to or a compelling question about whether or not community could be a place to go to begin to collectively move move forward in whatever way that may be. I just think that I would like people to be able to think about reaching out more, to consider if church is a possibility. And if that's not the case, maybe that's a friend.

I just I would love people to feel a little less isolated. And boy, I would sure love if we thought about political anxiety, church anxiety, the anxiety in the system. If we began to be able to have language to uncover the fact that the undercurrent of all of that is fear of the other, is rooted in fear, that there is a way to move past it by opening our eyes and seeing what it is. That'd be pretty cool, too.

Brian Lee
Amazing. What an invitation, I think, for everyone. Where can people find or connect with you?

Sara Billups
Oh, yeah. I'm on Instagram @sara.billups, and I write Bitter Scroll on Substack.

Brian Lee
Love it. We'll have all the links for everyone. Everyone, please go get a copy of Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in your Body, the Church, and Politics. We'll provide the links for everyone in the show notes. Sara, thank you so much. I love these conversations.

Sara Billups
Brian, this has been a really grounding and hopeful conversation. I really appreciate how you've led this. Thank you. It's been so cool to talk to you.

Brian Lee
Thank you. Gosh, what a great conversation. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, be sure to follow Sara and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links and all the things in the show notes. Coming up, we have Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Ian Cron, and more. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review or share with your friends. It really helps us to grow and continue providing quality content for you.

And a special thank you to our listeners who make this show possible through their financial support. If you find this show valuable, consider donating today at the link in the show notes. This episode was hosted and executive produced by me, Brian Lee. Editing by Heidi Critz and post-production by Lisa Carnegis. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. Here's to moving toward healing and wholeness, together. I'll see you next time.