Beyond the Quick Fix: Embracing Sadness as a Rational Response to a Broken World 🌧️⚓

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian.

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Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian and doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ben Matthew. He is a professor of counselor education at Columbia International University, and we're going to be continuing our conversation about faith and culture. I'm sorry, not faith and culture, faith and mental health. It is sort of a cultural conversation, I suppose, so I won't count that as a complete and total biff. But today we're going to be thinking about the issue of sadness and how it's a rational or maybe even a theological response. But I think probably the best place to start with this is to differentiate a little bit, like what's the difference between just feeling blue occasionally and actually being depressed? Like, are there are there sign posts that people should be watching for where they would say, I'm not sad, I actually might need some help here.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think there are some helpful ways of looking for indicators right, yeah, warning signs of sorts. My wife has a newer car, so she's at all these bells and whistles. But my car, I think, is twenty three twenty four years old right now, and it's still running, so I can't, in good justification get rid of it, even though, and every once in a while these little warning lights come on to let me know, really, you know, this car is two decades old. For the most part, they're not really serious, but every once in a while, a more serious red light engine break like something red comes on. It would be a foolish of me to, you know, pull a hammer from my back sat knock the you know, dash light out, and say, oh, look I fixed it. No, not really, because the indicator is actually not the problem. The indicator is an indicator of something underneath the hood that's really going on. The sadness depression. You know. Some of the things that we're talking about here are indicators, and it's important, especially in our I think in our Western context, sometimes we just want to get rid of the indicators altogether. We think sadness means something, that sadness needs to be removed, and I would argue that that's missing the opportunity. That's punching out the light without actually dealing with what's underlying it. Because sadness is an indicator that life is not going the way it should. Now, whether that's a right response or not, we can get into that. And sadness generally is that initial response to perceived wrong in justice, personal preferences not being aligned to the ways that I should. The question becomes when does it become clinically significant? Within a clinical lens, we look at things like duration, is this just in terms of the moment? Listen, having a bad day. We all have a bad day. We all know what that feels like. Sometimes that it may extend even to a weekend where the situation just continues to be like a cloud hovering over you. But more often than not, when that situation has kind of gone, is no longer ap pressing reality, but the indicators of sadness continue to persist generally over a couple of weeks. That for me is a red flag. That's another indicator. I'm like, okay, it's not just situational. It's tending to hover. And then I start asking questions of my clients like what is this doing in terms of your relationships. What is this doing in terms of your work? What is this doing in terms of your sleep? What is this doing in terms of your appetite. I'm looking for consistency across life that it's not just I hate work, but everywhere else is great. Well, I can kind of tell you the problems probably work there needs to change. But if a client tells me I'm really struggling at performing at work, my grades are really struggling. If I'm a student, I'm lashing out at my loved ones, my sleep is really bad. Like when I start seeing a prevalence of problems across life, that's another indicator that we're moving away from just situational sadness or relational sadness to something that's a little more clinically significant, that is not necessarily connected to a situation or relationship. It's at that point where I start asking the questions whether or not it's starting to affect thoughts and affections and behaviors towards things like suicide and suicidal ideation. Have you thought about hurting yourself in a way that would end that's suffering? That's at that point we start recognizing there's a shift now it's not just normal sadness. We're starting to get into areas where an individual is having persistent negative reactions without much explanation, and it's negatively affecting life towards the development of solutions. I'm using air quotes here for those of you that can't see it, like suicide, that is really not a solution, but for those in the moment of depression, it feels like the only thing they can do.

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Speaker 1: So when we think about these indicators, a question came up when we didn't talk about this one before the podcast, So it'll be a little bit of a curve ball, but.

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Speaker 2: I'm sure you can handle it.

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Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned you know, sadness is an indicator, and it's sort of one of the primary emotions that we would feel when something just doesn't go right. I'm wondering if you're seeing any shifts in that given some of the trends we're looking at in the digital world. So the digital world tends to breed anger, frustration, like not exactly sadness, but almost like I would want to say rage. Rage isn't exactly the right word, but it leans that direction. Yeah, so you may be sad about it, but you're also expressing maybe that sadness through anger.

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Speaker 2: How do those any ideas on how those might relate.

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Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting. Yeah, I don't do a lot of work with kids, but I know developmentally speaking, anger for kids more often than not is an outward expression of inward depression. And what I mean by that is because kids don't have necessarily the emotional language or maturity to know how to express themselves in a if I can say in appropriate ways, what often comes out is anger. Write this sudden outbursts or this throwing of something, and sometimes it could be anger, but a lot of times for kids, they just don't have the band with to be able to express the sorrow. I kind of use that as a bit of an analogy to what we see online. Yeah, that in a lot of ways, I think there's some real heartache, some real if I can use the word sorrow over life situations, context of our society. But what often comes out is to the social media is it's like a little kid who just wants to rail and just vent because they now have a platform where they can vent. And it's a lack of communal maturity, communal vocabulary, communal resistance to let our base or impulses go forward, where again, when we don't have a space to then share the lament over something, the only other response we think is anger, and it has a self fulfilling prophecy in that those of us that view that those videos on constant loop through doom scrolling, we then kind of develop our own response. Well, heck if I ain't angry too, Yeah, that's right, and the rage machine continues to polarize, continues to feed into the algorithms, and we know the whole crazy cycle that goes from that. That's one of the first things that's start thinking about when you mentioned that there's there's a correlation of source between how little kids respond to depression and anger and kind of what we're seeing online as well.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, because it feels like there's sort of a you know, and you mentioned like little kids don't have the vocabulary necessarily to verbalize exactly what they're feeling. They can't express it. And I think maybe even an adult part of that that could be part of the problem, but I think even the bigger part of the problem is that we don't feel like we.

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Speaker 2: Can do anything about it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, and so we're we're almost being conditioned is a strong word, and I don't mean that in sort of a conspiracy theory sort of way, right, but we are being maybe enculturated a bit into thinking that this sort of rage is an appropriate response to our frustrations. I remember I'm doing a different series with a buddy and he was talking about we're talking a little bit about biblical masculinity, and we got into aggression and he said one of the things that I believe it was Winston Churchill said about Gandhi, right when Gandhi was doing his nonviolent resistance of the Great of Great Britain. He said, you know, look at the effeminate leader that they have. He's not even going to fight back. And you're just like, how interesting. Yeah, right, because you think about, you know, some of the things that Gandhi did, and it's like he's into this more passive resistance, like he's just not going to play the game that everybody wants him to play, and in that is an active resistance. But as we just think about that comment, it's like, that's what it feels like we're supposed to do now, is the way to get things done is to take this more aggressive stance toward whatever it is that we're railing against and really punchbody in the mouth, whether it's you know, verbally or physically or whatever like.

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Speaker 2: That's the response.

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Speaker 1: It's not a reason I'm going to step away from the fray and do my own thing. It's nope, this is an appropriate response right now. This guy's an idiot and everybody needs to know it. Kind of I do.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Oh that's interesting because I mean, unfortunately it works right when I give those verbal jousts.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I get.

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Speaker 3: The likes, I get, I get the clicks, and it continues to monetize our attention in a way that again fulfills what it's designed to do. But to your point, yeah, it doesn't necessarily create a compassionate response towards those realities in ways that I think are in line with Christian virtues.

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Speaker 1: And it may be masking a sadness, is what I'm kind of And I don't only put works in your mouth, but what I'm kind of hearing you say is it very well may be masking a sadness underneath. It may not actually be angry at this one particular thing, but this one particular thing is just sort of piling on to this deeper existential anxiety, deeper sadness that we have about the way the world has turned out for us and maybe for others. And now when that one other thing piles on, we don't respond with a lament, We don't respond with you know, those sort of tools, right, we're actually expressing this deep sadness and disappointment at the way the world is.

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Speaker 2: We just get angry.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. And I remember one of my boys, he's probably all a four years old. I went to go pick him up from Sunday school downstairs, and he was having a grand time, loved being with his friends, loves being at Sunday school. And I said, okay, buddy, it's time to go. And he looked at me and said, no, I don't want to go. I said, no, it's Sunday School's done. We got to go go. He grabbed his little jar of a plastic jar of crayons and threw it as the room and the thing just went. And I remember everyone, myself, the shide school teach, all the kids went what do we do with this? It was just this outburst. I remember, obviously trying to be calm, and picked him up and walked him out. And had to deal with them accordingly, and later in conversation said, Dad, I was just so sad. I loved my friends. I didn't want to leave them. Yeah, to hear to hear him respond that way rightfully, I was discouraged by his initial response. Sure, and yet I wanted to how can I even say this, even applaud him for the sorrow of leaving behind his friends, Like, there's something good that I want to foster in that that he loves his friends, that he wants to be with his friends, and he feels heartache when he's not with his friends. Yeah, that's good. Like that there's something good there that I wanted to foster in him. Now I want to help mitigate his response when he doesn't get those things right. Yeah, obviously we need to work on that a little bit more. But being all of four years old, I kind of get you don't have them wherewithal the maturity, the insight, the vocabulary. How do we build that? My concern paralleling to us today in our culture is that we highly reward the vocabulary of anger in the midst of real sorrow, and sometimes you need to get angry, I realize. I think Jesus flipped a couple of tables from what I've read here and there, and so there may be times for that. If there's also a lot of weeping over the city of Jerusalem too, and one is not more biblical masculinity than the other, I think they're both in that sense, truly biblical masculinity.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I mean, there's a sense in which I think we've denormalized sorrow to normalize the lament, and it's only appropriate in certain spaces, right, you know, broken limbs probably okay to cry and be sad about. You know, that's a that's an area of vulnerability. We're okay with funerals, totally fine. You know, weddings, you know, my daughters, when my daughters get married, I'll be I'll be a mess.

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Speaker 2: I'm sure, Like there's no doubt in my mind.

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Speaker 1: So, I mean, we have these sort of corners where it's okay to express that that sort of deep, non angry emotion. But you know, you can envision someone getting online and just sort of lamenting the way the world is and being in true sorrow sackcloth and ashes sort of right, and just look him and go and it's weird, like why, Like I mean, I even know what my response would be. It is just not something we're used to seeing, and so we tend to either oh, that's great for them, and then go about our merry way, right, as opposed to recognizing it as a true expression of something that could actually be helpful and maybe even sort of you know, help us pull away from the depressive attitude, might actually make us less sad. Yeah, Like, if sadness were appropriately expressed.

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Speaker 2: We might actually end up being less sad.

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Speaker 3: There's something so good about that, James. The ability to articulate, to voice, to give space doesn't lessen the severity of what got you there, but it does give you space to deal with it a little more holistically, right, the ability just to kind of let it out. There's times in counseling with clients where, especially with some of my male clients, when they do start showing emotion, maybe even tears. And that's not the goal of counseling per se. But how many times I've heard clients say, I'm so embarrassed, I'm so sorry. I don't mean to be emotional. I'm like, dude, if this isn't the place to do it, then.

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Speaker 2: Like where right?

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Speaker 3: And that response that they feel shame or they feel embarrassed. I remember hearing the first time that phrase at a funeral, I think one time, someone asking, well, how so and so doing, like the spouse or the kids. Oh, they're doing well, They're they're keeping a stiff upper lip, right, they're holding it together.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: And I remember thinking I didn't even hear what that meant, that phrase meant. But the idea that you're not even letting your lips quiver for fear of showing emotion at a time that I'm like, but wouldn't that be appropriate here? Wouldn't this be a normative context that even here at the death of a loved one, they're doing fine. And even the moralizing of it, right, that to not do fine means that you're kind of losing it, but to do fine means that you're keeping it all together.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: And I've done this experiment, this thought experiment with some of my clients, especially those who are a faith when we talk about Jesus in the garden, Like, what's the mental image you have of Jesus in the garden praying to his father? And nine times out of ten it's this stoic Jesus looking into heaven single tear down the face and I'm like, sorry to burst your bubble, But most likely in the engineer's context, he's on the ground like full on weeping, probably most likely what we would call out of control. But that was an appropriate say. And I'm not here to say one is necessarily better than the other, but I think there is an authenticity that we need to allow for in those moments, especially in our context where there is this real existential dread that I think is a proper response. But how it can move sometimes when we don't give space for it. I think this is when it goes back to your earlier question, when can it start getting too much where we tried to keep it in and it starts affecting life, It starts affecting relationships, it starts I think what I see in some context of what is clinical depression in terms of a diagnostic criteria, it's just the fact that a person hasn't had this space or wherewithal to have honest reflection about the hardships that they, if not society is dealing with.

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Speaker 1: Do you find when you're dealing with people who have who are trying to cope with sort of just general sadness, right, and maybe I'll put it like this non event based sadness got it right.

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Speaker 2: Like so nobody nothing you couldn't point back to.

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Speaker 1: Man, I know, you know, some tragedy happened in my life and I'm really sad about it, but just sort of that non event based sadness, Like there's something going on. I can't really articulate it, but I'm just sad all the time. I'm depressed all the time. And even if they're continuing to sort of function, right, they're functioning in a in.

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Speaker 2: A way that we would define as.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: Fine, yeah, to use your word, right, but it's clear that they're not elevating beyond fine, right, Like they're getting all the task done that everybody around them needs them to do, but they're not actually fine.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I find it.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I've been married down for twenty six years and it's finally been drilled into me that when i think I'm doing fine, when i think I'm sort of masking the sadness to the frustration of the day, my wife's like, you're doing a horrible job at it, Like there's no chance that you can hide the fact that you are preoccupied with all these other things that you're frustrated, like you don't hide it. Well, I'm like, really, because I thought I was it was great job, right, So I'm functioning right, yeah, but I'm not. She can tell the difference, you know. So how do you how do you think through some of those things with folks and help them get to a point where they could actually express the sadness in a way that is helpful to them.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Now it's good. I mean thinking about even personal context of when I've made changes in work or sometimes even physical location. I remember they're using the phrase our wives, our wonderful helps in this. I use this phrase with my wife where I'm fine or no. How did I say I'm okay, but I'm not okay being okay?

00:21:18
Speaker 2: Yeah?

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Speaker 3: In that it kind of exemplifies what you were just saying, like I'm getting everything done. There isn't like some heavy situation or relational burden. There's nothing wrong with life. I'm okay, right, but there is this sense that if that's all there is, I don't like it and I'm okay, but I'm not okay with just being okay.

00:21:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: And so this has prompted me as I often say I don't drift towards holiness. I don't drift towards growth. And there are those times where you just feel like you're drifting, You're just kind of there. Those are moments that I think can be when there isn't this against situational or existential. It's just this kind of driftingness that I think in itself can be an opportunity to consider, explore, talk about other options. That may mean a change somewhere, vocation, location, that may mean a perspective that needs to be adjusted of saying okay, is if this is the place where I'm at, how do I then maximize flourishing in this context? What needs to change in terms of my context? Again, there's something good about giving space for that drifting frustration rather than just kind of washing over. I'll just get over You've got a good job, be okay with the people that in your life. Just get over yourself already. I want to give a little space for that, because, again, I think, especially for Christians, just drifting doesn't result in flourishing in every sense, theological, psychological, physical. You know this as a trainer, like you don't drift towards health, no anything, you tend to drift towards being unhealthy, and it's the push that tends to motivate towards continued health. I want to give space for that and then use it as a creative energy to say, okay, so what do we do with this? How can we capitalize on this?

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Speaker 1: Right?

00:23:27
Speaker 3: Give it real energy to acknowledge the frustration, but give it some growth towards going back to what we said earlier about telling us right. This idea of meaning towards what you're made for might me meets some adjustment, but it's for a greater purpose.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I find it interesting to think, you know, making sure that we're not masking sort of this underlying existential anxiety, this sadness, this frustration.

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Speaker 2: The passage that always.

00:23:55
Speaker 1: Comes to my mind is the martyrs under the altern Revelation. This is John's vision, and they're crying out to the Lord because he hasn't yet avenged them, and so the world hasn't yet been made right. And even though we're up in heaven, you know, with God. And it's a vision, right, I don't know that it's the exact picture of what's going on, right, So, but it is John's vision. And so it has to make sense on some level. But this notion of there's an appropriate anxiety and expression of a desire for completion, a restoration that all of us should feel, and I think sometimes we're not so attuned to that.

00:24:42
Speaker 2: I know, I'm not.

00:24:43
Speaker 1: I just I'm okay most of the time, just grinding, right, and you know, the world isn't what it is. I know the world's not the way it should be, thank you Plantinka. But like you've got to keep grinding, like there's no there's nothing else to do.

00:24:58
Speaker 2: You just grind. You're just grind.

00:25:00
Speaker 1: It's like, well, but there is something else to do, right. You see these these souls under the altar, lamenting, crying out to God, you know, to sort of bring all of this to a completion.

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Speaker 2: We had that opportunity as well.

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Speaker 1: We've talked about the lament song, the lament psalms and those kind of things like these expressions can be formative for us and help with that drift not away from holiness but toward holiness. They redirect us toward holiness just through the expression. It seems like you see that, you know, the lament salms almost always break into praise, like if that's not drifting toward holiness, right, Like that's a redirection of that drift.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: It's it's good. So I don't know.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it gives honest space for the struggle. But where does my hope come from. I look to you, a Lord Career. There's always this movement towards something, and yet it is the tint right. And I've talked about this with you before. GK. Chesternan has always been an incredibly helpful voice on this to me because of his desire to help the reader embrace tension, not just balance, but tension as a point of the Christian faith. If the paradox of orthodoxy, as he talks about it, that you have these points that should be diametrically opposed to each other, and yet the only way to embrace them in faith is not to balance them. In fact, the greatest heresies of the world have come when they've tried to balance out. Well, maybe he's like fifty percent Man and fifty percent God, and you're like, no, that's heresy, don't do that. I apply that same logic to things like this, that there is both what we said before, eschatological hope. There is a movement towards the mountain of God and the city that he will establish. And we're in the midst of real pain and suffering and languishing. That is, that is our current reality. Who the passage I was thinking about is in Hebrews, after that great presentation of the heroes of faith that more often than not they're faithful in the midst of suffering.

00:27:15
Speaker 2: Right.

00:27:16
Speaker 3: The writer then gives the par examplar of Jesus, who, for the joy set before him, endures the cross. Like it's not it's not an either or. It's actually through the suffering of the cross that the greatest joy is experienced in the sun. There's something about that that I it's hard. Again. We don't like the tension because even the word itself means that we got to resolve it. What if? What if instead that the greater meaning, hope, joy is found in not the resolving of the tension, but by the embracing of the tension, as it means that actually helps us then say, this is not the way it's supposed to be, and there's one who's gonna put it right. I can still cry for the injustice and cry to the one who can make justice right.

00:28:06
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting.

00:28:07
Speaker 1: I mean Chesterton, I've done most of my reading on him in terms of his notions of progress, And one of the things he talks about with progress is, you know, you use that term, but you very seldom know where you're going. Is kind of the gist of it. You know, progress only matters if you have an end point where you understand where this progress is leading you. Otherwise it's just movement. And I think that you know, sort of framing this in terms of that tell us what's going to happen the joy that's set before us. Now, what we can start to see is that the sadness and the suffering are actually progress. They're moving us toward that end goal of joy, and they're not hindrances to it. They're not a betrayal of it. Yeah, part of this sort of move that we make toward it, and in part I think it's because we need to feel it on some level so that once we get to the.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: End, we understand what we have.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: I had a guy on a Bible study one time asked me, you know, why, how do you know once we reached the New Creation? We were studying Revelation twenty one, twenty two. He's like, once we reach the New Creation, how do we know we won't sit anymore? You know, why why wouldn't we make the same choice Adam and he've made in the garden And I just said, well, I think the difference is that they'd only known paradise. There's something unknown about what's on the other side of paradise. Could it have been better? We know the answer to that now, Yeah, it wasn't even Yeah, even when it was presented as being better, Like they didn't know what was out there, So, you know, could God have been holding back on them and this paradise that they're in, Could it have even been you know, that much better for them? Like they didn't know, they'd only experienced the paradise, and so we haven't. We've experience it's the fallen world. We know what we're in, and so by the time we get to the New Creation, we're just going to be elated to be there because there are no tears, there are no pain there, you know, that's wiped away, And so you can sit back and you're like, no, we wouldn't make that choice again because we understand what we're choosing.

00:30:22
Speaker 2: We didn't come back to this, and.

00:30:24
Speaker 3: We have a context for that understanding that. Oh, that's so. I just made this point last week when we were talking about the I grew up in an evangelistic tool of bad news. Good news.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Okay, bad news.

00:30:39
Speaker 3: You're a sinner. Good news, Jesus loves you, which is a great truth. I believe both those points. It wasn't until much later that I realized, Well, the story doesn't start at Genesis three. It doesn't start with bad news. It starts with good news. And I was trying to make the point the word fall doesn't even make sense unless you understand and where we have fallen from from right right. What you're highlighting here that I think is wonderful is the other side of that. We can't We can only enjoy more the glory to come because we have experienced what the fall is. It only makes greater sense, It only gives us greater joy. As much as we lost this much in the fall from from creation.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: Right, we're going to gain that much more.

00:31:25
Speaker 3: How much more? I was just gonna say, how much more because we know the pain, and the experience of the pain actually provides even greater joy of what we've gained in the new creation. That's a beautiful thought.

00:31:38
Speaker 1: And I just think there's something as we think about, you know, sadness as this rational or theological response, it just I think there's.

00:31:45
Speaker 2: A texture there that is.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: Our expression, our naming of that sadness, are our deepest experience of it, not ignoring it, not letting it come out as anger or frustration. But that deepest experience of the sadness is part of our sanctification because it does give us a depth of understanding of where we are right now, so that when we are in that new creation, when we've reached the joy, we understand what we've lost. We sloughed off the sadness, like the tears wiped away aren't aren't trivial to us because I never cried anyway. I was always tough, So that doesn't mean anything to me. Right Like, we've actually delved deeply into that emotion as an appropriate theological response.

00:32:37
Speaker 2: To where we are.

00:32:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I just think there's something really powerful about that thought.

00:32:43
Speaker 3: I mean, psychologically, there's a corollary to the construct of what we call grit, this idea of developing resilience in the midst of hardship that psychologists have realized this, your development of grit actually helps propel you because there's gonna be another curveball coming your way, there's gonna be another hardship. The question is what have you learned through these processes that actually gives you greater opportunities for flourishing in the next opportunities. And there's a whole world of psychology and research that has been developed that highlights this is what helps bring about greater human flourishing. But grit can't be developed unless there's something to be gritty about. If I could say it that way, you got to go through something in order to build up something better. And that's kind of what we I mean theologically, that's the word we give for sanctification. There is this process of you've got to go through something hard, but it's not it's not a throwaway, right, It's it's intended to be deeply purposeful and meaningful to not just me, but to the greater tapestry of the grand narrative of what God is doing in history and how we then get to be part of it as well.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's great. Then I think we leave it there, and I think this covers the existential leg of the stool pretty well.

00:34:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I.

00:34:11
Speaker 1: Think we've delved pretty deeply into the existential leg of this stool. So we had the social dimension, the existential connection or the social leg, the existential leg, and now in the next couple episodes we'll talk about the embodied leg, and so excited to get into that and looking forward to that conversation.

00:34:30
Speaker 2: So thanks again, Ben for being here.

00:34:31
Speaker 1: Really appreciate it, and thanks everybody for listening to the episode.

00:34:35
Speaker 2: We'll catch you on the next one. Take care.

00:34:39
Speaker 1: I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.