[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado. I am a licensed professional counselor, owner of a counseling center and a sacred space holder for fellow therapists. This podcast is for those who want to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. I create intentional space to explore your own spiritual path, a space that allows doubt, questions and curiosity without the judgment or shame, a place to hear another story and dive deeper into how to have a genuine connection with God.

For my fellow therapist, listening, I will often pull back the curtain of our layered inner world that comes with our profession. I bring an authentic and experienced way to engage your spiritual journey in order to connect you with your deepest values for true renewal and soul care. But really this podcast is for anyone listening who’s desiring a deeper and genuine connection with God. For those of you wanting to engage your spirituality in new ways, Faith Fringes is for you. Welcome to the podcast.

Welcome back to Faith Fringes podcast. This is Dawn Gabriel, your host. I’m so excited you’re joining me today and we have a special guest with us. Her name is Lindsey and Lindsey is the author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: What chronic illness can teach us about healing a burned-out world. Lindsey is a writer and speaker who lives in Charleston, South Carolina. When she’s not reading theology, she’s playing with her rescue dog painting badly or making coffee to share with friends on her porch. Welcome, Lindsey, to the podcast.
[LYNDSEY MEDFORD]
Thanks for having me Dawn. This is exciting.
[DAWN]
So I know we were talking before we started recording. I feel like there’s so much we can talk about, but I think it’d be helpful for my listeners just to hear a little bit about you and more like what drew you to faith Fringe’s podcast? It sounds like we have some things that overlap a little bit.
[LYNDSEY]
Yes. Well I was thinking about deconstruction and how feeling on the fringes and feeling lost and finding my way again, is something I have found myself doing in the last, over the last, like 10 years, multiple times, which I think might sound scary but it’s something you get better at, which I wish would’ve known when I started. I studied theology in my undergraduate degree. So that was the first place where I encountered ideas that sort of upended how I’d always been taught the world in God and the Bible had to be. Then I had served in different charities and social justice organizations. I went to do a master’s degree in theology and continued to learn things that blew my mind and upturned my world for a while.

Then after my theology degree, I got married, moved from Boston to Charleston, South Carolina, got a puppy applied to PhDs, it didn’t get into degrees and then I lost my full-time job. Then my childhood chronic problem came back likely, probably in part as a result of trying to do so much in so little time. That was another place and time where the way I expected things to go, the way I expected God to show up, the way I moved through the world and looked at the future and the past all had to change. So now it’s five years later. That’s my story that I get to share in my book that’s coming out next year. That experience was what really I wanted to share with you all.
[DAWN]
Wow. There’s so much to unpack in there because I think, I mean, you just listed so many things, but what struck me is that yes, you’re saying, and one of my favorite themes is that like a story of how painful experience physically, emotionally, mentally has turned into a huge learning experience as well for you, it sounds like, but like you were in the middle of deconstructing your faith, did it sound like at the same time, or did the actual event start the deconstruction of your faith?
[LYNDSEY]
Well, I would say one of the things that had come out of a previous deconstruction was a really strong commitment to expecting God to show up and to speak even particular things through the physical world and through my body. Then this disease that had impacted my life as a child that I’d almost forgotten about in the last, in the 10 years, previous, roared back into my life. All of a sudden I was being told again, that my body was attacking itself. When you’re told that you’re in a fight with yourself, it’s really hard to also square that with a belief that bodies are good and that God shows up and loves our bodies and wants us to have a good relationship with them and that God speaks through our experience and through our physical being. So that was, it sort of was a place where one change of mind had to bleed into another or cast a new light or lens on a new part of my life.
[DAWN]
What can you be more specific about that new lens? What did that actually, yes, from where did it go to over here?
[LYNDSEY]
Well, six to nine to 12 months going to the doctor and waiting for the doctor to fix my body and being like really angry and impatient the entire time, trying to cling to the remnants of my old life, where I was very physically capable. I didn’t sleep for 12 hours a day and spend the rest of the day on the couch where I could run after my puppy that I’d just committed to taken care of. I spent a lot of time really not being, almost not being able to recognize that that life was already gone, at least for the moment. It was like sort of a weird combination of starting to realize that I needed to learn more about my condition to be able to cope with it and also to participate in the whatever process of healing might be ahead of me. A weird combination of that research and spending a lot of time in prayer being like, God, what are we doing here? You were supposed to fix this by now. Why did I go through all this time trying to convince other people that all our bodies are good and now my body just speaks real bad?
[DAWN]
Speaks against me.
[LYNDSEY]
Yes. I started to question the narrative that my body was attacking itself, actually and having to tie in sort of a third source of input to this story, I had experienced pretty major depression in college, and after, I had been able to get through that without a lot of help except for the help of my friends. After that had come, looked back on the experience of being extremely depressed and realized that my brain and body had been trying to tell me something through the experience of depression and then my life needed to change. When I couldn’t take care of myself, my body shut down to try to preserve itself. I started to wonder if this was also what my autoimmune, something it was trying to tell me. I didn’t even, I wasn’t even sure I believed it, but the traditional, like throw a lot of pills at the weird girl with the weird disease wasn’t working.

So it was like, what if it’s this other way? What if I pretended that my body had something to say to me? It turned out that it did okay. In the process I came to experience so many things that I had thought were normal, had actually been slowly eroding my physical body and even my emotional life and my ability to be spiritually present as well. So over a really long time of starting to change how I ate, starting to change how I approached my schedule and stress and sleep and even eventually the way that I talk to myself and the way that I prioritized relationship with other people, those were all steps in my ability to live well with the chronic illness.

They have not fixed me the way I wanted to be fixed. Like many days would still be very happy to be fixed, but they have brought me into, I will say, greater integrity with myself and more right relationship with the world and sort of thrust me into a life that is really different from those of a lot of people around me, but also one that I’m grateful for and that I think has along with the lives of other chronically ill people and either, even disabled and other marginalized people I think our lives have a lot to teach all of us.
[DAWN]
Wow. So I’m hearing a lot of like tuning in to your body almost on an instinctual level, not listening to what everyone is saying and saying, what is my body teaching me? I’m tuning into that. What is it teaching me about my mindset? What is it teaching me about relationships, about what I eat? Like just a lot of tuning in, it sounded like in order to figure out the next part, which seemed like there was some acceptance in that too well, grieving, and then acceptance. I’m hearing a lot of like change and shift as you’re saying. It’s a journey, for sure.
[LYNDSEY]
I was really, really lucky to find a doctor who works in functional medicine, but like very closely with conventional medicine so that I didn’t feel like I had to like declare the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry, like 100% evil in order to also bring in these other approaches and slowly move towards shifting, supporting my body rather than declaring that my body had this, this, and this problem and this and this, this and this outside solution were going to fix it, which had not worked. So yes, it became a very slow process of saying, well, let’s try this now it’s a month later and you’re 10% better. Let’s try this. I think, even when I started that I expected it to be I’m going to find the exact recipe to be like a real healthy person forever.

Instead I learned those skills and the tools and the inner sensitivity to be able to continue to do that from week to week and year to year in a process that hasn’t ended. I guess, now I’m saying that I think that mirrors what I was saying about deconstruction, that this is a process we can learn and that we don’t have to always be afraid of and that we can go back to our skills and tools and our relationships and our learnings and our prayer practices and the things that God has told us in the past to do it again, and to not have to be afraid of it, but to experience that life is always changing. Life is always a process. We just really like to resist that and pretend it’s not true a lot of the time.
[DAWN]
We struggle so much with trying to control our situation, whether it’s our body or external situation, but yes, like the lesson of, okay, what am I, and what am I not in control of here and what are my options? But it’s so hard when your body, you feel like your body’s turning against you and you’re not operating the way you used to, but yet you’re like, I have to figure this out. I can see the tension of that moving forward, but you’re saying it’s a journey. Tell me more about how it intersected with your spirituality. How did that impact your relationship with God?
[LYNDSEY]
Well, I remember having, I wouldn’t say I experienced God, like speaking words to me very often. But I did have the same conversation with God multiple times when I was first sick. We had just moved to this new city and we didn’t know anyone and I had lost my job and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I’d just always been a very busy person and I liked it that way. I was like, God, I’m supposed to be busy here. I have all these things to do. I just can’t believe that you would’ve brought me to this city, new city, like just to extend all of my energy, taking care of this puppy and not be able to do anything else.

God just kept being like, well, I don’t know why I’m not allowed to do that. Would it really mean that I didn’t love you if I had brought you to this city just to do that? When I thought about it, I was like, not really. I just have like a higher opinion of myself than that. I’ve been sort of socialized to expect a certain thing out of myself, out of my mid twenties. There could be something here for me that I’m missing the whole time I’m resisting the way things are.

That has been, I think that has been the biggest, the biggest thing that I continue to learn and what drew me to the, to really think and research and learn about burnout is that having a chronic autoimmune illness, I could not move forward in any aspect of my life until I accepted my limits and accepted that God gave me my limits and that God gives us commands to rest and to embrace limitation and embrace interdependence and to steward our resources well that allow, that give us the tools and the faith and the love that we need to be able to live within li limits.

I would say that’s been the journey I’ve been at for like years and years is coming up against another thing that’s like, I should be able to do this. The fact is it doesn’t matter what I think I should be able to do. I can’t do it. Even watching other people go through that cycle, where you think you can, if you just make it through the next six weeks or whatever, but the entire time you are borrowing from the future, borrowing from tomorrow and ultimately borrowing resources, you don’t have, that’s not a way that God ever teaches us to be.

That’s a way that capitalism teaches us to be, that I would argue white supremacy teaches us to be. That’s totally the normal way to be in our world, especially in my like upper middle class, white world. That’s not actually in line with who humanity is created to be, I don’t think, and it’s a way that often we are congratulated for it and told that we’re doing a lot of good in the world, but some of those resources we are borrowing from sort of nowhere in our, that we think are coming from nowhere are actually racist resources. We are stealing.
[DAWN]
Can you be more specific destructive? Can you be more specific on the resources, like the future resources? What do you mean by that?
[LYNDSEY]
Well, I do mean like when we are running on empty and we just keep going, we are like stealing from our future selves. But I would also argue that when we don’t have time to take care of our friends and neighbors we are stealing from our communities in, when we are over consuming to self soothe or just because we don’t have time not to, we steal from the earth. I don’t want to say any of that in a guilt inducing way because I’ve been through a lot of that guilt and I have never found it very helpful, but it, actually, when I feel guilty about resting or about saying no to things or about not working full time so that I can buy more stuff or whatever, I think I’m supposed to be doing it’s helpful to me to realize that this is, God is no better one that has ever said to be a real adult human is to have a full time job at least to like, be stressed out all the time or to be running on empty or to be doing the most at every moment. That’s a message I’ve gotten from a lot of other places, but really never from God.
[DAWN]
I love that. I love that you’re tuning into what you are hearing him say, like internally to you. I think the first thing I heard you say that you heard from him is that he said, would I not love you even if I brought you to this place to just take care of a puppy? It’s like your love is not equal to what you’re doing for me. His love is unconditional. So I love that that was the first message. Then I’m hearing now even like the way God views us, it’s not again on the hustle, in the doing, like being a human and being part of this, His creation, His love for you is again, unconditional based. It’s not based on what you can do, how fast you can do it. It’s based on different things. So, I mean, is that what you were saying?
[LYNDSEY]
Yes, exactly. Also, I think it’s something we, I hear more people saying these days and you get a lot of kudos for saying and also something that we really desperately want to believe. But it becomes one of those things that, at some point you can believe it, but you’re not going to like fully experience it until you it to the test. That’s when it becomes really, really difficult and where you, it’s another one of those things that is like, I don’t know if I believe this. I’m just going to spend a little while pretending that it’s true and see how that goes. Because it’s one thing to talk about rest, and it’s another thing to actually let go of all the things we think we’re in control of for a little while, or it’s one thing to talk about saying no to yes and it’s another thing to let someone else be disappointed when you do say no. It’s one thing to commit to simplicity in your life and it another thing to not try to keep up with the Jones’, just completely on instincts.
[DAWN]
Yes, so it’s a lot of countercultural stuff, I hear you talking about, at least the United States countercultural.
[LYNDSEY]
I think so. Yes, yes.
[DAWN]
Anytime you go to another, like a third world country, you feel it too. Like the life is slower there. I just think of when I’ve traveled, like you can see it differently in other countries, the slower pace of life.
[LYNDSEY]
That’s the life in Italy, a little heritage or the different heritage at very least.
[DAWN]
So what would you say if someone is listening and they’re like either in the middle of burnout or they’re just finding out a chronic illness or they’re in the middle of it, or they’re like burned out and they’re still trying to push through, push through? What would you say to them, like a practical thing they could do or a few practical things to do? Because I feel like a lot of this stuff we’re talking about, you’re looking back, but what if they’re in the middle right now? What could they do?
[LYNDSEY]
The first thing that feels obvious and also has taken me a really long time, probably an ongoing process to get the most out of it, I guess, is to commit to a practice of rest and pay attention to how you feel when you’re actually doing the thing. When I am really tired and I take a nap or watch a movie in the middle of the day, I can still recognize sometimes be a pretty intense experience of self judgment, fear that I won’t get everything done, as if that would like be the end of the world or fear that someone else is going to walk in and judge me and declare me not an adult. So that paying attention in that, like willingness to be uncomfortable, I do think we all, a lot of us have different ways that we experience rest well or struggle with it. So whatever that is for you is really helpful information for thinking about how you view yourself and how you experience God’s expectations or lack thereof. So like what’s in the way of being able to simply enjoy that?
[DAWN]
So looking at your like thought process of how you’re judging yourself and maybe that can come from internal things that you’ve grown up with, or it could be like cultural things in the world around you, but really noticing what thought pattern you have around rest. Then more also jumping into finding a rhythm of rest. I talk about that a lot with soul care is what I call it, of learning, like what really brings me true refreshment regardless of what anyone else is saying, where do I connect with God and my true rest?
[LYNDSEY]
Absolutely. And the corollary maybe to that practice is, we often think we have to be almost literally at the end of our rope in order to quit something or even adjust our expectations for something. That is not true. That is, I think that’s why I wanted to bring in the alternate perspective that no one is actually, our attention is actually expecting us to run an empty all the time. And those who do are, do not have our best interests at heart. So there does come a point when we’re talking about limitations, like there are hard limitations on what we are able to do in a week or a month on our emotional capacity sometimes, or when we are working through a serious spiritual or emotional journey, I guess that is actually going to take our real time and energy away from other real things.

So you don’t have to have an excuse such as my whole entire body has collapsed to quit a volunteer position or a job or anything that is draining you. I think if you are already burned out or on the edge of burnout, the first thing to do is to like, stop the leak where things are taking from you. That’s really hard. Again, I don’t say that lightly, but I feel like almost as someone who with a chronic autoimmune disease, I almost have a license to be like, no, you have to do this.
[DAWN]
But you’re saying that other people don’t need that. You should be able to stop and say no and get out of a commitment because it’s draining the life from you, without a chronic illness, is what you’re saying?
[LYNDSEY]
Yes. I mean, on the flip side of that sort of should, I mean, I think we owe it to each other to begin creating a world where we don’t ask each other to have some dire crisis before we are allowed to set limits and set boundaries and be honest about what our capacity is and is not without —
[DAWN]
I agree. I love that. Looking at the community, we have to yes, we have to commit to each other that this is not okay anymore. We can’t live like that.
[LYNDSEY]
I’ve found in the last couple years since I’ve really sort of more embraced my own life being this way, whenever I’m in a meeting for an organization, I am also, I’m often the only person in my head, or if I’m brave out loud asking, like, is this thing where putting so much effort into discussing doing, is it actually necessary at all? Is this central to our mission? Is this supporting each other or whoever we’re trying to support in this organization? Or are we just so used to sort of making up things for ourselves to do, things for ourselves to do? I think that might sound flippant, but it’s really very striking to me coming into organizations with people who are more abled and more used to this culture of, well, what can we do next? What’s the more that we are trying to reach after, how can we be more and more and more? My question is often, like if we were doing less, would we be doing it better actually and would we be in better relationship with each other?
[DAWN]
Yes, I totally agree. Yes, it’s like, even when you look at Jesus’s life of servant leadership, you’ve probably heard that term before, but it really is like the slowing down. I mean, I forget who I was listening to, but they were talking about Jesus walked everywhere. There’s something about walking. It takes forever to get somewhere. I know that was the time, but just the rhythm of how Jesus did His life after a big miracle, He would usually go away and rest and not just go, not go to the next miracle and then keep going, going, going. There was a rhythm of rest and how much we ignore that. I mean, I’m actually thinking, I’ve been studying this for the last year, but I’ve been, the book, have you read the restless or The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer?
[LYNDSEY]
No, I think I’ve heard of it.
[DAWN]
I think you would like it.
[LYNDSEY]
I read a [crosstalk]
[DAWN]
Yes, I think just that. Then there’s another book I was reading called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by the Nagoski sisters. They talk amazing about that too, about how it affects our bodies. One of the sisters was in the hospital learning about her burnout effects. So yes, just, I feel like we have to, especially over the last few years, two years, we need to look at this burnout, how it affects our body and changing our internal world and our internal narrative. That’s going to help the community too. I love that you brought that up.
[LYNDSEY]
Yes, for me, it’s been really interesting too, because I see a lot of people looking around after the two year anniversary of the pandemic is coming up and I see a lot of people looking around and saying, the US in particular really chose to sacrifice a lot of vulnerable people on the alter of expanding our economy. And feeling a lot of despair about that cultural, like insistence that we have to be able to ignore when things are wrong and pretend that they’re normal. Who are we as a country, if our economy isn’t constantly growing, that seems to me to be the story that we’ve lived through politically.

I see a lot of other people feeling a great amount of despair over that. But to me, we get so wrapped up and of course there’s our phones and the news and the hysteria are not helping us with this, but we get so wrapped up in that big picture story that we forget that we have the opportunity to live a different story in our own lives and to actually begin to make change in our family or in ourself first. That’s actually really helpful to me.
[DAWN]
Yes, like taking back the power of this is how I want to live and I can change the narrative. I love that. Well Lindsey, thank you so much for spending the time with us today. If people want to get ahold of you and your book, can you tell us your website? I think you also have a free PDF for us. You are going to talk about a simple lent practice and a feminist lent practice. Can you tell us yes how to get ahold of you and more about the freebie you’re giving away?
[LYNDSEY]
Well, I just realized, is this coming out before lent or during the lent?
[DAWN]
Yes, it’s going to come out in March, actually.
[LYNDSEY]
Okay, great. Well, I’m Lindsey Medford, L-Y-N-D-S-E-Y M-E-D-F-O-R-D, and I am at Lindsey Medford everywhere that I am, which is mostly Instagram right now. You can also head to, or through my Instagram or at my website, lindseymedford.com. I have a couple of lent devotionals there for free. So those will be a PDF you can download for the whole six weeks right there. Those have some scripture reflections, some journaling questions and some practices to try the every day. So they’re designed for a five to 10 minute sort of reflection time and a practice to try throughout your day, every day of lent. One of them is simple lent and one of them is feminist lent, actually.
[DAWN]
I love that. Thank you. That’ll be, I will totally look that up and download for myself.
[LYNDSEY]
Cool. Yes.
[DAWN]
Tell us the name of you book again and when it’s going to come out.
[LYNDSEY]
The book is called My Body and Other Crumbling Empires, learning to heal in a world that is sick. I think that’s the subtitle we landed on. It’s really going to come out on the first week of March of 2023.
[DAWN]
Ooh, love it. I can’t wait to hear to get that book and read more about your story. Thank you so much for coming on today. I think I actually have a dear friend going through some major chronic illness and I’m watching her go through some of the emotional struggle right now of what can I let go of? I just can’t do this. So it’s been really personal just hearing, yes, hearing you today. It just, I want to let go call her right after this. “You to have to listen to this.”
[LYNDSEY]
I’m sure she’d appreciate. I appreciate when people are thinking of me or learn about my illness or whatever. So text them.
[DAWN]
Yes. Thank you so much. I will totally let her know about your book too. So thank you. To my listeners go check out Lindsey’s website and get her PDF and thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening today to the Faith Fringes podcast. For those of you wanting to take a deeper dive into your own faith journey, you can grab my free email course, Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. If you’re a therapist and would want to work with me, I offer sacred space holding for you through my consulting, as well as my soul care retreats. To find out more, go to my website or email me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

I love hearing from all my listeners. Drop me an email to tell me what’s on your mind. You can also connect with me on social media. I’m on Facebook and Instagram at Faith Fringes. As always, if you’re enjoying this podcast, I would love it if you could show it by your reviews. Go to Apple Podcasts and leave your review so that others can find this podcast and get curious about their own spiritual journey. Thanks again for listening.

Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.