Episodes
When Brad Klaver was ten, he watched three men in his church get publicly excommunicated for either experiencing attractions toward the same gender or for being in same-sex relationships. He made a vow to himself, "I will never share this part of me."
Twenty-five years later, married to his wife and dad to four kids, God allowed this now-pastor to go through breakdown so he could experience breakthrough. Join us as we engage Brad's journey with his wife, friends, and church in this final story in our broken/beloved pastor series today.
[Also listen in as we get hammered by a rainstorm and g...
It's week two of our Broken/Beloved Pastor mini-series, where we try to break down stereotypes and halt the gossip train when it comes to pastors who leave their positions for various reasons.
Today, we dive into the painful and gorgeous story of Johnny and Amanda McKenna. The middle of their journey includes him almost killing himself to hide his double life of affairs, pornography addiction, and alcoholism--while serving as a pastor.
But there is a beginning and new ending to this story.
Come and hear pieces of the whole broken and beloved journey with us today.
//: Highlights:
"I const...
This episode surprisingly convicted us because, well, we don't think much about food.
But, good grief, what we miss out on when we see food as a way to shovel nutrients (or happiness) in as opposed to a way to know God more deeply.
Food Network star, Melissa d'Arabian, invites us to the table with our creative, creator-of-food God. Through her vulnerable story and experience in the food entertainment industry, Melissa teaches us how to know Him more through eating.
This is a sweet one.
//: Highlights:
"God could have created a nutrition-delivery system that was far less delicious and far mo...
The Church is precious. It's Christ's beloved and broken bride.
But sex and sexuality conversations have notoriously challenged us for the last ... thousands of years.
New York Times bestselling author, Mo Isom, helps guide us through some of these conversations we have forgotten, and does it with storytelling and great passion. (She takes us to church!)
Grab a pew, and join us.
//: Highlights:
"A lot of my issues grew out of the fact that my family thought the church was talking to me about the hard stuff, and the church thought my family was talking about the hard stuff. So really, no o...
Touch can be ... a touchy subject.
Some of us can overemphasize it and others can shun it. When Laurie recently said to Matt, "I wish I could live in a touch-free world," she realized just how touchy (and painful) non-sexual physical touch can be.
Instead of bury it, in classic Hole in My Heart Podcast fashion, we are bringing the conversation to the table. Matt, Laurie, Steve, and guest, Hayley Mullins, toss around questions ranging from what to do when we idolize touch, to how to carefully speak the "love language" of touch with those been affected by sexual assault.
This is another raw a...
How many of us have fought (and do fight) with heart-pumping, air-constricting anxiety?
How can we practically do battle with it? Bestselling author and popular speaker, Rebekah Lyons, helps us put on our boxing gloves to practically combat it.
//: Highlights:
"We don't know freedom until we know bondage. So let's acknowledge we are so hungry for God's rescue, and let's ask Him to do a mighty work." --Rebekah Lyons
"I questioned, 'Am I a fraud?' I thought there was a healing that happened, and I was loud about it. And yet I found myself in a place of frailty and desperation again." --Rebe...
There is intense pain in the world and in our hearts--based on national or personal tragedy.
We may be quick to jump to anger, to text someone, to Twitter, to do something. These actions may not be wrong, but they can be wrong-hearted if we skip an important step: going to the Father with lament that leads to forgiveness and eventual love for our enemies.
It feels impossible--really, truly loving our enemies--but as believers we are called to do the impossible with the One who empowers us.
But how in the world can we do this lament that leads to forgiveness that leads to genuine love for ou...
Therapist Matt leads us through a way we can pray that helps us envision the God who Sees Us and prepares us to lament.
When Laurie was a guest on Moody Radio, the station manager, Jack Haveman, was prompted to share this deeply personal and powerful story of God's breakthrough.
Friends? This podcast thing we do began as an act of obedience to God's prompting two years ago.
We. Had. No. Idea. How. Much. it would bless us and others. No clue.
Listening back to clips together got us feeling all the podcast feels again: Mostly, we felt the desire to fall on our faces and worship God who is knitting together this gorgeous thing called the Body of Christ.
God is on the move, dear siblings in Christ. God is moving in and through the Church, and He wants to move even more through those whose hearts are fully submitted to Him (2 Chronicles 16:9).
Tune in with us as we re...
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 ser...
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...
Lament. We've talked about it. We love it. Let's dig deeper than we ever have into it on this episode.
If we don't lament, what kind of people will we be?
Is there a line of honesty with God we shouldn't cross?
How do we really do it?
Pastor and author, Mark Vroegop, guides us through these questions and more with wisdom that can only come from someone who has suffered much, and has found his way out of the darkness by singing the minor key tune of lament.
Hear his story and practical care for our souls during today's conversation.
//: Highlights:
"People who know how to lament are com...
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...
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
...
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 h...
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 sile...
{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...
{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 expl...
How can we lovingly engage a world that opposes what we believe?
What is Laurie's ongoing practice to engage pushback?
One word: Lament. Laurie Krieg will walk you through the why's and how to's of what should be every Christian's ongoing practice of "venting to the only One who can do something about your pain."
{Week 8 Core Need is the need to be safe: Unafraid; trusting everything is under control.}
Many of us struggle with anxiety and fear. (Most of us? All of us?) We could shame ourselves. ("Why am I still wrestling with this!? I should know I'm safe!") But instead of shaming ourselves, why don't we look below the fear to the good need driving that fear: the need to be safe?
We unpack this good need to be safe with author and award-winning musician, Michael Card. Through the lens of safety, we explore God's character--His inexpressible hesed or lovingkindness and His invitation to rail on His c...
{Week 7 Core Need is the need to be seen: Noticed inside and out.}
This episode has two gripping stories: One is of a pastor named John Wilson who, at a young age, recognized his attractions to his same gender. Burying the secret led him to hospitalization due to the chronic stress. Slowly, carefully, he came out to trusted friends, and found some freedom as he daily surrendered himself to Christ.
But then he moved far away, started working in a church, and the secret threatened to bury him again in shame. He needed to come out again, but the person with whom he most needed to share was bot...
{Week 6 Core Need is the need to be included: Wanted in this group, team, or partnership; belonging}
It seems as if the good need God put into us before the Fall to belong or be included goes hand-in-hand with authenticity. To belong--truly belong--we must be willing to get real. But how many of us feel we are scoring 100% at the relational authenticity level? Social media tells us we have hundreds or thousands of friends, but do we really belong? This is what our guest, Ethan Renoe, calls the "new lonely," and he wrote a book with the same title: The New Lonely: Intimacy in the Age of Isol...
{Week 5 Core Need is the need for love: Unconditionally accepted}
All you need is love. It's a nice song, but what about the actual experience of love? How can we feel it deeply before we see Jesus face-to-face?
Author and speaker, Jennifer Kennedy Dean, guides us to a deeper experience of God's love that is not tethered to our circumstances (death of siblings, death of spouses, or a deep wrestling with the reality of prayer), but is richly intertwined to the alive and active Holy Spirit in us.
We also play a game called, "Love Song or Worship Song?" and somehow learn a deep lesson based ...
{Week 4 Core Need is the need for rest: Re-centered and reset in mind, body, spirit; includes having fun}
Why is it that it seems whoever is the busiest is winning at life? If you are stressed, busy, but magically not anxious, you hold a higher status?
We talk about this with Adam Mabry, whose wife laughed at him when he told her he was asked to write a book on rest. This pastor, teacher, and author of the book, "The Art of Rest: Faith to Hit Pause in a World that Never Stops," was able to write the book after experiencing what it was like to live a life without rest, and watching it lead t...
{Week 3 Core Need is the need to be affirmed: Overwhelmingly approved of.}
Do you ever wrestle with knowing God wants you to share the gifts He gave you with the world, but not knowing how much you should "market" yourself? Shouldn't the Holy Spirit just do that for us?
We do wrestle with this, so we brought in bestselling author and speaker, Shannon Popkin, who co-wrote the book, Influence: Building a Platform to Elevates Jesus (Not Me).
We explore this conversation in the context of the Core Need to be affirmed. How do we allow God to affirm us while navigating the murky waters of speakin...
{Week 2 Core Need is the need to be desired: Specially chosen--no pretense necessary.}
The idea of mixed-orientation marriages (where one spouse is straight and the other is not) can make people scratch their heads saying, "How does that work?" Today, through the lens of the Core Need to be desired, mixed-orientation couple, Ty and Rachel Wyss, get real about their marriage, their need to be desired, and leave us--married and single--with wise, God-given wisdom to walk well. This is another sacred story you don't want to miss.
The group also talks how we can express needs without being "nee...
{Week 1 Core Need is the need to be nurtured: Cared for; held.}
It's time to dive deeply into Core Needs. What are they? They are good needs God put into us for things like belonging, purpose, affirmation, and to be seen and desired. The Fall threw a wrench in our once-natural ability to get them perfectly met by God and supported by people, however, and now we have natural inclinations to get these good needs met in ways that don't satisfy us and don't glorify God. (That natural inclination is known as our sin nature.) Our default is now idolatry.
Eden Invitation co-founders, Anna Carter a...
Author, speaker, and professor, Dr. Christopher Yuan, brings his authentic self and expertise to the podcast microphone today.
In addition to hearing his story, we explore our favorite names of God (with you listeners), expand on the reasons why it is beneficial to the church that there are more conversations around sexuality and gender in the world, and explore the questions,
"Is God gender fluid?"
"Why don't you identify as gay?"
and "How do you confront the lonely life?"
It's another real life conversation on the HIMH Podcast.
//: Highlights:
"We talk about the world having safe spac...