Wilderness Wonder

God's word stand's alone. 

Guides can teach you and bring you safely to the edge or through the forest, but they cannot make the jump for you. The journey is yours, and yours alone, but taking the journey with pathfinders who are willing to come alongside you can always help us remember who God is.

Ultimately, Jesus is the guide we are all seeking. After all, it was he who said,

“Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28-30

Wilderness Wonder is going to be moving to a different release day every week. Wilderness Wonder will be releasing on Monday mornings now, instead of Wednesdays. Next week, October 18, we’ll begin this shift, and we will be back in full force with our next episode about emotions.

This season we’ve been developing the idea of our Sacred Garden, our one-acre plot of land in our soul. The space where God and you reside together.

Today, we’re going to sit by the river, and we’re going to build a safety net for our soul.

We will, together, destroy and overthrow kingdoms in our hearts that were built by expectations, traditions, and society; and not built by God. Instead, we will build up and plant new ideas, ideas in line with God’s grace.

Emotions are signals trying to give you information about survival.  Information about things you should or should not respond to. Why did  God give us these feelings? And who is God in regard to them? What I’d like you to learn is that your emotions are God-given responses to the stimulus around you, part of our image-bearing capacity for the creator of the world, and that is exactly why we need to learn to stop suppressing our hard feelings.

Imagine your most open and unafraid self. What does she need to emerge?

Your becoming is happening right now. To know who God is asking you to  become, you must work on your skillset of observing, allowing, and  grounding yourself. You must also begin to set boundaries, to protect your most precious and wild self, your soul.

God wants your soul to emerge. He is inviting you into your own becoming.

Lean in. 

Content Warning: In this episode I reference the disappearance and death of Gabby Petito, and speak of domestic and emotional abuse. This content may not be suitable for young listeners. 

Our soul voice is the inner-most important relationship that we must  learn to shape in order to come into deeper connection with God. When we  are learning the sound of our own soul voice, we must challenge the  narratives that we've written about ourselves that are not friendly, and  sometimes aren't even healthy.

In this episode, I'll share a story of  when I looked back on a season  and realized that I had abandoned myself and the way I was able to find  grace.

I have an important question today.

What do you want?

Coming home to our own desire is sticky work. It leaves us open and vulnerable to the most fleshy parts of our inner world. Much easier to keep that buried. But, what if I told you that God doesn't mean for our longings to stay buried?

Jesus said, “Are you tired? Worn out? . . . Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew  11:28-30

I believe that in order to "learn the unforced rhythms of grace" from Jesus we must first unlearn all of the things that keep our inner world quiet and yearning. What if I told you, we can start rebuilding right now?

We’re going to talk about beginning a rebuilding year, but before we jump in, I would like to give you a disclaimer: You do not have to move across the country, or across town, or change the shape of your family,  or anything drastic at all to decide to have a rebuilding year. In fact,  quite the opposite. I think we should have rebuilding years anytime the  angst comes.Your body and your emotions and your inner wisdom know, and I’m giving you permission right now (even though you don’t need it, I’m giving it anyway) to listen.

The one thing that I am most passionate about is spending time creating space to know God's voice in your life, and today I am talking with  Rachael Groll about learning how to listen to God. Rachael just published her book She Hears: Learning to Listen to Jesus in June, and today we are sharing a conversation about her experience leaning into God's invitations through rest. community and surrender. 

Do you ever come to a point when you are feeling that everything you are doing is not sustainable? That you haven't made any space for the true you to come to the surface? I know I have. Whenever I find myself in this rut, I come back to this mantra gifted to me by a friend: Protect Your Space. There are four ways that this practiced has helped me become a more grounded, loving, centered version of myself. I am sharing those ways with you today after a months-long journey of learning how to protect the things that are precious to me. Things that make me come alive, and things that make my world make more sense, or just the things that can make my week go by smoothly.

All of these things need to be protected. It is an act of self-care.

Learning how to protect my space has shown me that covering these things that help me take care of myself in a little protective dome, helps me pour from a full cup. Some of the things I need to protect for my own sanity-sake are: Mondays, my dining room table, the quiet early morning, and my War Room. These are the spaces of my life when I can get grubby and get focused. Sometimes it is butt-in-chair writing time. Other times it is hair pulled back, scrubbing toilets time. Often, it is prayerful time.

This practice of protecting my space has become a small form of worship, the kind that I didn’t know I needed until I did it. When I show up for myself on the Monday, or in the morning, I come prepared to give God my offerings for the rest of the week, or the rest of the day. Like David said, in the end of 2 Samuel, “I refuse to offer something to my God that cost me nothing.”

When I spend time looking into my core, I always find how reading is something that makes me feel like myself. So, I am sharing with you seven books that have shaped my faith and my understanding of myself.  These books will all live on in my personal library until the end of my days. Each of them has given me a gift and I am sharing what each has taught me.

Hear what books helped me see where I was playing small in my life.

Discover the books that met me after a dark season.

Discern what book is next on your to-read list.

When we go through difficult seasons a resilient spirit in us comes forward. Leeana Tankersley shares her story of finding resilient “hard-won hope” with us. Leeana and I are exploring in this conversation the ways that God is always reaching towards us. 

Welcome to Season Two! While I’ve been on summer rest, I’ve been reading "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott, where she wrote, “Every single one of us, at birth, is given an emotional acre all our own.” This quote has helped me shape this new season. Today we are beginning that new season by welcoming wonder and unpacking our emotional acre.

Our own garden of Eden.

Our garden is born when we begin to seek the wonder that God gifts us with. I believe, at core, we are made in the image of God before anything else entered the picture. And because of this belief I also believe that anything that has broken, wounded or separated us from God, is not at our core. Because the true essence of God is that he wants to be in relationship with us.

Together we will unpack our acre, tend to our garden, and seek the essence of God at our core.

I am announcing a summer break this week, and sharing my most important prayer right now.

If you'd like to stay in touch during this short break, please visit AmberRedmond.com to join my email list, where you will receive a copy of my Core Values Journal and you will sign up to receive my weekly email "Searching for the Pause".

I'll be back with new episodes of Wilderness Wonder beginning the first week in August. Until then, keep searching for God's voice in your life. 

Every week on this podcast, I tell you how I hope this space is a stopping point, where you can come home to yourself. But, friend, what if coming home to yourself isn’t exactly the home you want to come to every day?

Today we’re going to lift the veil of the inner critic to welcome ourselves home, to begin the tender work of tearing down how we talk to ourselves and lining it back up for inspection.

Who speaks God into your life? 

Are you speaking God into anyone else’s life?

We are talking with my life-group leader and lead pastor, Rick Ruble. Through our friendship I have found what a gift it is to have people in your life in different seasons who can help you see small and large picture the ways that God has been working upstream in your life.

Through Rick’s story I’ve been able to see God’s faithfulness and work.

“It's helpful. I think, to have people in your life all the time that you can pour into and that pour into you. Disciple-making relationships really go both ways. There are always people who are farther ahead of you and people hopefully that you're reaching out to and helping move towards Jesus as well.” Rick Ruble

Today we’re diving into what that looks like.

I don't know how it feels entering this next season for you, but I know looking back on the last year, on the last few months, I can say, I  have witnessed the power of God. I have also found myself needing God's  nourishment, the wilderness and the wonder live in a cycle. God knows that, and he meets us with grace.

Knowing our values helps us remember who we are at our core.  The values  and practices I’ll share today are so pivotal to this podcast because  they opened the door to asking God who we are becoming. When we open  that door, we will find a whole host of answers that always comes down  to the truest answer: We are becoming love, in the midst of God's kingdom.

This is a conversation on infertility with my friend, Anna Kettle. Anna is the author of “Sand Between Your Toes,” a daily devotional with 100 devotions to help you find God's rest in your everyday life. 

I can attest, her devotional is doing exactly that for me, and every page is beautiful.

Anna and I are talking about what people believe about miscarriage versus actually experiencing miscarriage. Our conversation may be difficult for some listeners however, these are conversations that need to be brought to the light and this is a space I am curating as a safe haven to talk about difficult topics. Because – when you go through the trauma of miscarriage, you need voices to remind you: You Are Not Alone.

Are you tired of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps?

The significant problem with pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, is that we are assuming those bootstraps are sound and reliable. But, friends, I don’t think bootstraps are the strength we want to be living on anymore.

What if we invite God into the situations that are making us feel so tired? How could we ask him to come with us as we bring our shadowy places to the light?

Today I’ll talk about some of the ways we can live more integrated, in connection with God and with our truest selves.