In this profound episode of the Fresh Start Family Show, Wendy interviews Lauren Pinkston for an eye-opening discussion about embracing justice buttons in ourselves and our kids.
The conversation delves into Lauren’s life journey, the motivations behind her work, and the impact of her mission on both global communities and individual family dynamics.
Lauren recounts her transition from feeling compelled to live modestly as an emblem of Christian faith, to recognizing the freedom in wholeheartedly embracing her God-given identity and strength.
The conversation flows into Lauren’s work abroad, her role as a mother of four, and her thoughts on faith reconstruction.
She shares valuable insights into responsible parenting, questioning established norms, and the significant role of curiosity and humility in effecting change. As they talk, the duo casts light on the challenges, triumphs, and the balance between activism and peaceful existence.
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Episode Highlights:
- The importance of aligning one’s work and faith journey with personal identity and convictions.
- Embracing the justice-oriented traits in oneself can aid in powerful advocacy for change across various societal issues.
- Parenting and educating children through a lens of compassion, curiosity, and recognition of individual needs, particularly for neurodiverse children.
- The discussion on how questioning and reconstructing one’s faith can lead to a more inclusive and accepting Christian practice.
- The role of businesses in contributing towards ethical practices and supporting the fight against human trafficking.
Resources Mentioned:
Follow Lauren on Instagram
Not able to listen or want to read along with us?
Here is the episode transcript!
0:00:02 – (Wendy): Well, hello there, families, and welcome to a new episode of the Fresh Start Family show. I am so thrilled to be here today with Miss Lauren Pinkston. And we’re going to be talking about how to embrace justice buttons in ourselves and our kids. Welcome to the show, Lauren.
0:00:21 – (Lauren): Thank you. I love anything that we can talk about around this idea of embracing justice rather than being afraid of it and running from it.
0:00:32 – (Wendy): Heck, yes. Yeah. I have been so excited for this interview, Lauren. I do feel like my team and I kind of stalked you, but that’s what we do with people we love. We’re like, scheduling sometimes is crazy, and then one of us will get sick or something will happen. Right. And so with you, I remember we had to reschedule a few times, and we were just like, okay, let’s get you back on the schedule. Let’s make this happen.
0:00:57 – (Lauren): Thank you. And that is my love language. When people don’t read into my, I don’t know, my lack of response. There’s a lot of moving pieces in my life, and I’m raising four kids, so it’s kind of madness over here. So thanks for allowing this to happen.
0:01:15 – (Wendy): You’re welcome. For stalking. Are just so. I am so in love with your work, Lauren. And it is just seriously an honor to sit here with you. Am just. It’s like one of the perks of this job, right? You just get to be with people you admire. And I have a goal to fill you up and make sure you know how cherished you are and how valued your work is, because I know you are busting your buns out there in the world, having tough conversations, holding space for just the intensity that the world is today. And we just appreciate you so much. So thank you for being here this morning with us.
0:01:54 – (Wendy): And I got to tell you, I found you. This last year has been so interesting for me as I really started to kind of honestly become a little scared about what was happening in the christian world. And I started to become more and more entrenched in diversity, equity, and inclusion work through the organization that my brothers and sisters in my life coaching group that I call my sister group. It’s like a company from another mother, I always say. But we’ve just been really knee deep in that work in the last few years. And as I grew in that work and really understood more and more things, I started to just see things more clearly from a faith perspective and just started to become more and more scared. And it was like such a blessing from God because I found you at the same time I found Carlos Whitaker, who’s been on our show.
0:02:52 – (Wendy): Are you friends with Carlos? You guys are in the same state? Do you guys know each.
0:02:55 – (Lauren): We’ve. We’re only like an hour away from each other. We text online, and then we both fall into our wild schedules. And so we are hoping to get to meet in person soon. We’ve got some things that maybe cook, I don’t know, maybe cooking up. Carlos, if you hear not, I’m not letting you see.
0:03:16 – (Wendy): Yeah, we all got our people that were right. Okay. Amazing. Well, I’m glad you guys are at least in talks because, yeah, I found you. I found Carlos, who was just, again, such an honor to have on the show. I found Kayla Craig along the same, had just interviewed her on the show. I found Sarah Bessie, who was just such a blessing to this season of my faith and still to this.
0:03:39 – (Lauren): Shepherding me all the way through college in my early adulthood. I knew that I’d found my person in her when she said she was too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals, and I was. Is that I like you?
0:03:55 – (Wendy): Yes, exactly. I love that. Yes. We’re like our black sheep in our own everywhere. Right?
0:04:02 – (Lauren): Right.
0:04:03 – (Wendy): And then I also found Sharon McMahon around the same time.
0:04:07 – (Lauren): Are you friends with Sharon? Oh, yeah. The queen among us. We don’t deserve her. I was going to tell her the other, like, if I was going to clone anyone, which I don’t really ethically believe in, but I think that I could excuse all of my cloning values to just make more of her in the world.
0:04:24 – (Wendy): Oh, my gosh, I adore her. And it’s crazy because she went to high school with my good friend Amy, who’s now a poly-sci professor at Point Loma Nazarene and who reminds me of you so much. She does so much of similar work. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, in a perfect world, I would get all these people together, but I can just see if you are ever in San Diego, please reach out, because you, me and Amy could go for a walk. And I would just love to see you guys riff on all this amazing things that you are doing in the world.
0:04:57 – (Wendy): But it was just like this. Yeah. It was just this amazing time where I met so many of you all, and I just instantly fell in love with your voice and the messaging that you were giving. And it just comforted me and helped me just be rooted that everything’s going to be okay, that I get to be whatever kind of Christian that I want to be, that there wasn’t was everything was going to be okay. And so I’m just so thankful that I found your work.
0:05:28 – (Wendy): And really, it’s like I saw in you, Lauren, this very tender hearted, huge justice, button oriented person. And I know you say kind of like, you talk about how you’re a bleeding enneagram eight, and I want to hear more about that. So my daughter, who’s now 16, is my very strong willed, amazing. She cannot fairness and equity and equality and justice, and if there is something that is not fair, she just cannot relax. Right?
0:06:04 – (Wendy): And I look at her and I’m like, I know you’re not supposed to assign your kids, but I’m like, I have a feeling she is an enneagram eight. And so when I saw you say that, I was like, oh, that’s so interesting. And I just love how you seem to encompass or really just radiate, like, this huge amount of compassion, but yet you’re so firm and dedicated and passionate about causes and what you believe in. So whether you’re advocating for, I’ve seen you riff on compassionate discipline for kids or helping marginalized populations or antitracking efforts, which I want to hear your story and hear so much more about that, or ethical missions, which has been so much of your work, or support for orphans, or common freaking sense gun law reform, or unity amongst human souls despite political differences, the list goes on and on.
0:07:01 – (Wendy): And you just have this way of calling us into action that seems so in line with the way of Christ and is connecting versus dividing, which I just see so much in the world these days. And I just really wanted to elevate your voice and make it louder. So I just really feel called to do that because there is so much loudness on the other side and christian nationalism that is just scaring the crap out of me. And so we need to elevate voices like yours. And so just thank you again for being here.
0:07:37 – (Lauren): That’s so generous. And I can tell you that it took a lot of breaking and a lot of the Lord attacking my pride through things that he invited me into in a very kind and gentle way. If we can talk about gentle parenting. The Lord has been very gentle but firm with me as well. And I would not be where I am today without the Holy Spirit’s help in just allowing myself to be broken and reformed. And that is still obviously something I will always be in the process of. But that is why I hang out in the.
0:08:14 – (Lauren): I mean, I’m an academic. I got my phd from Clemson University, but even there at State university, they were so great to let me focus my research on faith based works, because I feel like within christian circles, we kind of become entrenched in one way of thinking. And I hate to use the word incestuous, but we only promote things from within our circle and our network. And I think it’s important that we engage the best thinking that exists in the world and wonder how, like, if the Lord created those people, how are they reflecting his image?
0:08:55 – (Lauren): How are they reflecting his creative heart and his creative mind? And how can we, as a faith community, also engage best practices in the ways that we think about the world? So I’m really passionate about that, and that’s why I’ve kind of stayed close with a christian community, because my faith is so pivotal to who I am and the way that I live. And also, I think that there’s so many ways that we need to look inward and kind of like those whitewashed tombs, call out what’s dead inside and be honest about the ways that we engage.
0:09:31 – (Wendy): I love that. And I love how you highlight that you feel like that God’s called out your pride. Because I think I’m like a two wing three. And I know that the pride part of it is like, I’m a helper. I live to help. I live to serve. But then there’s that pride part of us that is like, so when you say, look within, I think the power of humility is so monumental in the ability to peacefully solve conflicts and come together and be able to discuss and hold space and solve big problems. Right. And come together to create forward momentum, whether it’s with our kids or in politics or in our communities or in our church. And so much of it takes that humility piece.
0:10:21 – (Wendy): And so I love that you’re constantly kind of talking about that and looking at that because it should be important for all of us. Right?
0:10:29 – (Lauren): Yeah.
0:10:30 – (Wendy): Well, take us back. Give us a little flyby, because, holy smokes, have you done so much in your career? And you’re still so young, and you’re, like you said, a mom of four, right?
0:10:42 – (Lauren): Right.
0:10:43 – (Wendy): Don’t you have, like, a baby baby?
0:10:45 – (Lauren): I do. I have a one year old, and I have a 13 year old. So we are doing all of the entire span of emotions in our home at all times.
0:10:54 – (Wendy): That’s incredible. I mean, incredible. So you’re doing so much. You’re the founder of Kindred exchange. You host the upwardly dependent podcast. You advocate for so many amazing things, start all these wonderful conversations, but give us the flyby of what your journey has looked like and how you got to where you are today and how you became so passionate about what you do and who you are and being called. So I know that’s going to be a lot, but just take your time. Tell us. I want to hear your story.
0:11:30 – (Lauren): So, it’s funny, my mom tells me that she prayed that I would have a child that was like me so that I would know what I put her through while she was raising. And we, my bio kids are a lot like my husband, but I have an adopted daughter as well. And so we’ve laughed about how I had to go all the way to Uganda to meet my match. But she and I are so close and we’re so much alike. And so that’s been a funny side comment, I will tell you.
0:12:00 – (Lauren): I think it was my third birthday. My grandmother said she talks entirely too much, and that would be true of most of my. There have always been a plethora of words in my mind and coming out of my mouth. And then my aunt at my fifth birthday told my mom, Lauren is either going to be a missionary or she is going to be dancing on tabletops naked one day. I don’t know which one’s going to happen, but good.
0:12:31 – (Lauren): You know, over the course of my life, seeing an intense desire to see justice done, because I never felt like it was right that I was given so many things and others out of no thing that they could control, had less or were experiencing such scarcity or such trauma. To me, that felt so wrong. And I didn’t understand why everything that I touched seemed to succeed or everything that I was a part of was ridden with privilege. And that made me feel like it was almost wrong that was happening for me. So truthfully, I had to go through a ton of therapy and redefining my own thoughts around theology because know, over and over in scripture, in the Old Testament, God would say, and in the New Testament, Jesus would know, the poor are blessed and they are sacred.
0:13:28 – (Lauren): And I would think that I had to be very poor in order to be close to the heart of God. And so I went to college and I studied education. I thought, I mean, I’ll just be a poor teacher. That’ll be good. If I’m going to get a college degree, let me get the lowest paying one. So I got a degree in education in Tennessee. I was not planning to make a lot of money here. And then I married a man in medical school and I was like, great.
0:13:52 – (Lauren): Well, I’m going to marry a doctor, but we’re going to move overseas so we won’t have any money. It’s not like we’re going to live this lavish doctor lifestyle. And then we had a church that said we would like to fully support you guys to move over. So we never raised a dime of support. We always had everything that we needed. And finally, I was like, lord, what are you doing? Like, I am trying so hard to humble myself.
0:14:19 – (Lauren): And he’s like, that’s not what I’m asking you to do. That is still you trying to control your salvation. That is still you trying to earn your way into my love and my presence. And that is not what I have for you. So if you can just see the resources that I am pouring on your head, and if you can just multiply those for the good of other people, that’s what I’m waiting on you to do. And it was when I remember specifically the know and laying face down on my tile floor in southeast Asia. I’m just asking God, like, what can I do to be useful, to know? I’m trying so hard. And he’s like, I need you to stop trying.
0:14:58 – (Lauren): And I need you to just be. I need you to allow me to do the work. I need you to be a vessel, and I need you to just open your eyes who’s around you and who is looking for a word of mercy. And that really was such a relief when I finally saw that it was not on my own shoulders to manufacture something or to build something or to even make myself nothing, right. That God wasn’t asking me to be completely depleted in order to be submissive to him, but that he was allowing me to be my full self. He was allowing me to step into the things that made me tick, the things that made me angry, the things that made me feel alive.
0:15:43 – (Lauren): And that he was able to use those things not as. Because he didn’t see those as a threat to the church. And I will tell you, as a woman, as an enneagram eight who grew up in the southeastern United States and then turned into a missionary, nobody really knew what to do with me. And so that was not a welcome space for an opinionated woman who wanted to blaze trails. That was not. Wow.
0:16:08 – (Wendy): Yeah.
0:16:08 – (Lauren): How to be that. So, anyways, that was the beginning of my undoing and truly allowed me to be more comfortable in my own skin because for most of my life, I was not comfortable being who I was made to be.
0:16:26 – (Wendy): I can so relate to that. I feel like I’m in a season right now where God is kind of just, like, shaking me stop striving, stop relax. Like, 2024 is the year, right? But the way you describe for me that I’m proclaiming this relaxing into my work, and it’s wild when you do work like you do or like I do, because it’s so intense, but there is this beautiful relaxation into it when you do that word submission, I think, for so many of us, carries such, like, ick, right? Because it’s been weaponized, it’s been used, and such. But there is such beauty when you realize that you can do that and that you are safe and that that is really where your work is going to flourish.
0:17:16 – (Lauren): Totally. I love. That’s the irony of scripture. That’s the irony of God pursuing us, is that he sets us free from the things that are so counterintuitive to us. And I’ve never felt more free than when I finally submitted and just said, okay, I’m not in control here. And it’s ironic to use these words, because I research human trafficking and global issues around slavery for much of my work. But I do see that there is some type of freedom that comes with just identifying as a slave and to say, it’s not my job to control this. It’s not my job, I don’t know, to be in control.
0:18:02 – (Lauren): It’s my job to show up and be used. And so I found a lot of freedom in my faith when I was able to cross that threshold.
0:18:10 – (Wendy): I love it. So your undergrads in education, so, as you went on, tell us how you decided to pursue, because your phd is in community psychology, which is just so fascinating to me. And then talk us through how you went on to found kindred exchange. Talk us through that part.
0:18:29 – (Lauren): Yeah. So I always hesitated to call myself a missionary. I never used that label. And I feel very strongly that we have elevated people who do that type of work and made them more than God in some ways. We joked a lot that it’s always the most spiritual person in the room that gets asked to pray at, like, the family reunions or the gatherings. And so it’s like, do we have a preacher? Okay, well, let’s ask him to pray. And anytime we were in the room, like, missionaries Trump preachers. So my husband always asked to pray.
0:19:06 – (Lauren): Then we came back and he’s just a doctor. He never gets asked to pray. Right? Makes me laugh. So I never really identified as that. Also, because I had seen so much harm done through missions. I had seen so much colonialism, imperialism, racism, things that we had as westerners, as people from the church. In the global north, going into other countries that we had never been asked to enter, and assuming that we had something that was better for these people than what they already had going on and ignoring what they brought to the table and the way that they contextualize who God is and what he embodies for their society.
0:19:50 – (Lauren): Just incredibly using that word arrogant again, like incredibly arrogant. And so I already saw that before I moved overseas, but I still like cross cultural work has always been where I thrive and what I love. And so moving abroad and doing that, I wanted to make sure I was super, super careful to not recreate what I had seen. And some of the places that the United States church goes most often, like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, East Africa, some places that we have really claimed and made it sexy to do work there. I think the statistic is that there is one missionary every 15 dominican republicans like people in the Dr. So there are certain places that obviously have been impacted more by this, but I just wanted to make sure that I was not a part of that harm. I knew that I would make a splash and do things that were stupid and harmful wherever I went, but that’s what led me to pursuing a higher ed degree in international development and community psychology.
0:20:53 – (Lauren): I did my master’s research in missionary mental health and looked at the outcomes of medical professionals specifically working around the world and then shifted over to the anti trafficking field that I’d always been curious about and wrote my dissertation, which I think like three people have read on the lived experiences of practitioners, christian practitioners, protestant practitioners in Thailand who were leading trafficking works.
0:21:25 – (Lauren): Yeah, that was kind of the trajectory. I did a lot of that work before I moved overseas and then finished it online while I was there having kids, learning another language. That was a wild time. And now I’m just starting work next year. So in January, we’re starting a new research project on what does success look like in the space of employment as defined by survivors of exploitation. So what do survivors of human trafficking say successful employment looks like?
0:21:55 – (Lauren): Because we can say all day long what we think it means, but I think it’s critical that it’s informed by survivors. So I’m excited to start that project in January.
0:22:05 – (Wendy): Wow. Oh my goodness. That’s amazing. And so you were in. Where were you overseas living? You mentioned Uganda.
0:22:15 – (Lauren): We were there for a short time, but I lived in Southeast Asia for five years. And so it’s a small country there with one of the top 25 most persecuted countries for christians. And so we kind of were under the radar, had to code all of our emails, and be real careful about what we said, what we were doing. We were able to do vocational work there. And so I was working in a coffee shop that was a foreign investment business, and I was helping. It was a social enterprise, but it was also connected to an underground trafficking rehabilitation program specifically for youth women. So I built out their vocational training center and program, opened a couple of businesses that are still owned and operated. And it was the believers there that really saved my faith, truthfully. Like, watching how they interacted with their neighbors, watching how peacefully they honored their government even after such intense persecution, it was really remarkable to watch them, and I owe so much of who I am to them.
0:23:29 – (Wendy): Wow. Oh, my goodness. That’s incredible. Yeah. I can just imagine how invigorating that is to see just a total different set of believers in such a different set of circumstances to what we have here in America. Amazing. So you have four kiddos now. And when did you move back to the States?
0:23:52 – (Lauren): We moved back to the States in 2019. I had three kids then, so this is going to make me sound like a pathological liar, but we had a nine month old bio kid when we moved to Asia. Then a couple years later, we had been in the adoption process for a very long time. Finally got matched with a court date in Uganda, and I had a lot of hesitation about adopting internationally. Uganda was not a Hague accredited country, and there was a lot of unethical practices, I’ll say, going on within the adoption space there at the time. So we flew to Uganda, met our daughter. I fully expected to get back on a plane a few days later with red flags that I just said, I’m not going to go forward with this. But her case was incredibly clean, and it was clear that we were in the right place. So we moved back to the States for a little bit to finalize her immigration and her us citizenship.
0:24:52 – (Lauren): So she’s a dual citizen. And then I got pregnant with number three. So we moved back to our country in Southeast Asia, showed the kids the house we were know, showed our adopted daughter, like, these are all the toys we’ve been saving for you, and these are the clothes that we couldn’t pack in a suitcase to take to Yakanda. Also, we’ve got to go to Thailand and have this baby. So we lived in four countries together. The first year, she was attaching to our family, which I don’t know where my accountability partners were, but that was not the smartest thing ever.
0:25:21 – (Lauren): So my third son was born in Bangkok on a Friday night in rush hour. First time Coldplay came to the city, it was so wild. I almost gave birth to him in the Land Cruiser. And then we moved back here in 2019, and my fourth kid was born in 22 at the point where I have to really write down their birthdays and information.
0:25:53 – (Wendy): Amazing.
0:25:54 – (Lauren): That’s who we are. And it is always an adventure here.
0:26:01 – (Wendy): It really is. Oh, my gosh, I love it. And then now talk to us about how kindred exchange was born and tell us a little bit about your work through that and why you’re so passionate about that.
0:26:15 – (Lauren): Yeah, so I am really passionate about business. I feel like business is the most authentic and dignified way of addressing poverty and addressing rehabilitative strategies, especially for survivors of exploitation. It’s usually businesses that exploited that work. 86% of labor trafficking victims are trafficked within the private enterprise system. So we know that business is a huge perpetrator of exploitation. But I also believe that it’s the thing that can heal the most as well.
0:26:48 – (Lauren): So I really was passionate about business. I had a business for three years with my sister called weary, and we sold fair trade and ethically sourced wearable goods, and retail just was a little life sucking for me. So we were going to start a different type of business of sorts that would maybe move more into wholesale and connecting with artisans that I had met around the world. And at the end of the day, we just saw that it was the way that people in North America were handling themselves and interacting with the world outside that needed to be changed. And I wanted others to have the opportunity to have their lives impacted, like mine had been by the church in Uganda, by the church in Southeast Asia, by the refugees, the know refugees on the border of Myanmar and Thailand, by the way, that christians in Peru who know moved away from Catholicism but were still bringing that worldview into their faith had formed me.
0:27:52 – (Lauren): And like I told you those, it was these folks that saved my faith when I was deconstructing and trying to figure out who I was. And I believe that they have a lot to share with the church in North America. And we want to facilitate those exchanges. And so we are, at conjured exchange, are developing vocational cohorts so that people who are educators here can be connected with educators that are syrian, maybe living in Greece, and people who are pastors here can be connected with pastors in North Africa, and people who are medical can be connected with medical professionals in other under resourced countries. And I just feel like that that’s the way of healing our world, by bringing humanity one to one in social connection.
0:28:41 – (Lauren): And alongside of that, we do our podcasting and our writing as well, to just offer free resources for churches and people who are engaging cross culturally to better the ways that they engage. So that’s been a really fun thing to be a part of for the last few years.
0:28:58 – (Wendy): Wow, I didn’t even realize. So you have two podcasts.
0:29:01 – (Lauren): Well, kindred exchange. They sponsor my podcast. So we have a network, actually. So they sponsor the upwardly dependent podcast, and we do the editing and the work through that organization. We have another podcast called Missio Pop. And it’s two of the guys that work with us who talk about popular mythiology, but the contextualization of the gospel. They’re about to start another season on mutuality and missions and how mutuality is key to better understanding the gospel. And then we are also about to produce a podcast, kind of like a mini podcast on ethical narratives. And so how do we talk about places when we share stories about the places that we visited?
0:29:48 – (Wendy): Amazing. That is something that listeners can go support on a monthly basis, right? When it comes to kindred exchange, if they’re like, feel drawn?
0:29:58 – (Lauren): Yeah, that would be awesome because like every other nonprofit, we’re struggling to close our books for the year. But, yeah, absolutely. If this is something that you care about and something that you want to see changed, we would love to engage with you. We’d love to see how you’re making waves in your church and in your community and would love to. I mean, $25 a month, it’s like helium. It just pushes us up and we’re like, okay, somebody cares. Somebody wants to see this done differently.
0:30:30 – (Wendy): I love it. Lauren. Oh, my goodness. And I love how you phrase it with, when you say your faith reconstruction, right? So it sounds like over the last five, seven years, maybe. I don’t know how long it’s been.
0:30:43 – (Lauren): For you, but I’m going to go with 20. Yeah, I was 20. No, seriously. I was raised in a christian home. We were at church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and made jokes about going to be missionaries in southern California. Sorry. In Malibu, Pepperdine was a part of our network, so that was my background. But around 1415, I had a thriving dating ministry. There was really nothing to do in my town, so I just dated a lot.
0:31:19 – (Lauren): I joke, but it’s actually real. Like, I would get guys to church and they would come with me and people would be like, well, who’s Lauren got with her this week? And then I was like, I got the second generation evangelism. We’re multiplying here because my ex boyfriend brought his new girlfriend and she was baptized. So look at the work I am doing. The Lord’s work.
0:31:37 – (Wendy): Look at me. Go, boys.
0:31:38 – (Lauren): Pay for my dinner.
0:31:41 – (Wendy): Oh, my gosh.
0:31:44 – (Lauren): At some point, I was so gung ho. I was so passionate about teaching and about what I’d been taught that it was my responsibility to save everybody and teach them the right things. And I was quickly learning that all of these verses that I had been taught and highlighted and color coded in my Bible, people were not responding to them like I was doing everything that I had been told in terms of teaching people the right way.
0:32:10 – (Lauren): And literally nobody cared. And people were even offended by it. And people would say, well, if you’re offending people, you’re doing the right thing. And I just thought, I don’t know that that’s always true. Sometimes maybe, but not always true. So I started asking a lot of questions when I was a teenager. I would say, when I got to college, I went to a Christian, a small christian university. And when I got there, I kept asking questions. And that was really not welcomed with my Bible faculty.
0:32:41 – (Lauren): And it was clear that I wasn’t just going to step in line and copy what everybody told me to believe. And there was just too much wonder, too much wonder about God, too much wonder about how unique people are that I thought, I can’t fit what I know about the world into this box anymore. So either I’m going to have to close the box and walk away from it because it’s irrelevant, or I’m going to have to let the box get a lot bigger.
0:33:11 – (Wendy): I love that so much. Obviously, you were in this environment where questioning was shut down and you weren’t like. And so you’ve gone on to really create the environment that you want, right? Like where questioning is actually a normal, healthy part of Christianity. And I saw a post. I’m going to read it because it was so beautiful. About the Bible, you said, today I have 4 hours of alone time. It is some of the first quiet time I’ve had in a month, and I’m at the end of what I can pour out before being filled up. The human parts of this book aren’t perfect. Referring to the Bible. Men wrote it, they translated it. They designed pretty copies of it for profit.
0:33:54 – (Wendy): But the God parts here, they are true, inspired, confusing, challenging. Absolutely life changing. When I can hold both of these things together, I open myself to new strength and new purpose. I accept the curious mystery of an allpowerful creator who, for reasons I am still exploring revealed the world through man, through selfish, carnal, finite beings who reflect the image of God back onto one another. I love the confusion this book creates. I love the cognitive tugs it forces onto my self made thoughts. I love the responsibility of defending it. I love the responsibility of questioning it.
0:34:32 – (Wendy): For faith as tattered as this book spine, which I love that your Bible is so just tattered. Nothing is wasted in the brokenness and grief of your doubt. Don’t hesitate to scotch tape your soul. Genesis one taught me this morning that God called creation good, not perfect. I mean, it just makes me want to sob. Lauren, you need a book. And for whatever reason, that brought me great comfort in God’s willingness to mix all of us and our messes into the world created so long ago. He settled on good.
0:35:07 – (Wendy): And I like that. Good is good enough. That’s just one of your beautiful posts that over the years has made me fall in love with you. You really do need a book. Like if there is, I’m working on. Okay, good, because that kind of writing is. I just want more of that. I want questioning to be normalized. I want it to be okay for christians to have different opinions about what this scripture or that scripture means. And you and all those people I highlighted at the beginning are just people who are creating environments where we can actually have conversations and be together and unified in Christ and be willing to look at this book and honor it with different ways and live our life as christians in united yet different ways. And so I just love that. And I love that you call it faith reconstruction because there’s so much so many of us are doing and we have so many listeners who were raised in the church and really harmed by so many of the teachings. I mean, obviously, as a parenting organization, the blatant forefront is just the amount of harm, humiliation and hurt as presented as punishment. Godly discipline is just something that so many of our parents in our programs across the world are undoing and unlearning. And I love this idea of reconstructing what do we want?
0:36:54 – (Wendy): What do we want our legacy to be, what do we want our Christianity and our homes to be? And it just doesn’t have to be what was done to us and what was from the past. We get to question, we get to wrestle, we get to be together. And that makes us strong and unified as christians, not broken and like liberal. I don’t know. The labels that are put on anybody who does this kind of stuff is crazy.
0:37:24 – (Lauren): I have a list a mile long, names that I’ve been called for sure.
0:37:27 – (Wendy): Oh, yeah. It’s crazy. But I always say everybody, most people who are in our programs are in our world or listening, that come from a christian background or living a christian life. I’d say many of them, the compassionate discipline thing alone is causing them. And that’s why I love you. And I wanted to talk and just highlight your justice button, is because so many of our parents that we work with, once they learn that, there’s a different way, and there’s really. I hate to use the word better, but I’m just going to say better way than what families were taught that you needed to hurt, harm, and humiliate, and that’s what God wants you to do if you’re going to be a godly parent.
0:38:09 – (Wendy): But once they learn that, and once they hear that, they cannot unsee it and they cannot go on with their life. They will not keep hitting their children, they will not keep harming and humiliating the oppressed, and they just can’t do it. Their justice button gets triggered and it’s present and it’s honored, and then they learn to honor that justice button in their children, too. Because so many of the times, our children are just direct mirrors of us, right? Like, whether they are our bio children or they’re not, so much of the time, I think God blesses us with these children that become mirrors, so then we can learn to love ourselves more and love others. But the justice button is just.
0:38:51 – (Wendy): The parents we work with, they cannot just keep going in life. They have to make a difference. And so that’s why so many of our students become committed, because they’re just like, no, we will change our family legacy, and we will help others do the same.
0:39:09 – (Lauren): Yeah, I was that kid. Know, I remember specifically saying to me with a fly swatter, and it’s totally normal in rural Tennessee at the don’t. This is not. Yeah, we’re. We’re very close. I don’t consider myself harmed by her, but I was that kid that looked at her and said, that didn’t hurt.
0:39:29 – (Wendy): Yes.
0:39:30 – (Lauren): And so that thing inside of me, that, as an enneagram 8, I didn’t know as a kid, but that was me wanting to prove my dominance and my own power and that I wasn’t going to let anyone else think that they had overpowered me. And what I didn’t know growing up is that that was going to allow me to purposefully put myself in the line of fire when there was someone who didn’t have that inside of them to stand up for themselves, that I would naturally want to inject myself in between the perpetrator and the person being harmed.
0:40:04 – (Lauren): And I am still doing that as a natural space for me to sit in. It’s something that does not scare me. The grace in that is that now I realize not everybody is wired that way, so not everyone needs to be like me. But if I had known as a kid that that was something that was good, not something that was going to harm, I would have honed in that skill so much younger. And now looking at my kids and seeing how differently they’re made, inviting them into that self discovery of connecting their heart and their mind and their body and their spirit, to say, what motivated that behavior in you?
0:40:47 – (Lauren): Why do you feel like that was a good response? Help me understand what’s going on in your heart and in your mind. And modeling my own processing for them. Even this morning, on the way to drop off my kids at school. My kids are at four different schools during the day, so I get a lot of time with them.
0:41:04 – (Wendy): Wow.
0:41:05 – (Lauren): And I actually was running out of the house late, so I handed z bar to my six year old in the backseat to give to my. To the one year old, and I said, hand it to him just like this, because I know how he likes to hold it when he eats it. Well, of course, the six year old takes it out of the wrapper and then hides it behind the seat to get on his nerves and provoke a cry. Yeah, of course. And because I had a busy day coming up, there’s other things going on inside of me because of other things that I’m holding.
0:41:35 – (Lauren): And I just kind of raised my voice, and I was like, why would you do that? And as soon as it came out, I was like, okay, Lauren, you are not okay. You are not in control. And you just tried to use fear and threatening and shame to get your child to do what you. You know, Wendy, shame is a powerful tool, but it is not a sustainable tool. Forming our kids hearts. And so I took a few deep breaths, and I centered myself, and I said, you know what, Quinn?
0:42:10 – (Lauren): I should not have raised my voice at you. That was not fair to you, and I did not mean to make you feel bad about yourself. I think that this is an opportunity for us to learn from each other. I am a mom of four kids, and all day long, all I am thinking about is how much I love you guys, what you need. And I am using my brain for four different bodies while I’m using it for myself and for your dad.
0:42:34 – (Lauren): And that just makes me feel stressed sometimes. And so I wonder, instead of me yelling at you when you didn’t respond like I wanted, I wonder what it would look like if you knew that that made me feel like you didn’t care about me and all the things that I’m holding, even though that wasn’t your intention. And I wonder what it would look like if we all treated each other in his family. Like, how can we all help each other be our best selves?
0:43:03 – (Lauren): Like, watching face. Watching his face change from. He was curled up in the backseat. He was kind of, like, chin down, feeling really ashamed. It’s not apologizing to a six year old when you know that what he did was wrong, but that was just another affirmation for me today to say, stepping in with our kids and modeling regulated breathing, first of all. But also just saying, hey, let’s talk about this in a different way. Let’s reflect on what just happened. How can you see my humanity? How can I see yours? And how can I help you be your best self?
0:43:40 – (Wendy): Heck, yes. And that is so uniting. And, I mean, gosh, we could riff about shame all day long, but, yeah, the honor of just being able to do it differently with our kids, to influence, to help them redirect. Right? Correct. Whatever it may be. But to know that we can do that without shame is just so powerful. And I love that story of your little guy. I’m guessing he’s probably not one of your strong.
0:44:09 – (Wendy): Is one of yours like, would you say. You said your older daughter is the one that’s more strong willed, right?
0:44:14 – (Lauren): Oh, yeah. I know. Like we said, you’re not supposed to type your kids, so I have not told her. I said she’s like an eight wing, eight, double eight. She may not be, but she’s very strong willed. And all kids, they’re always looking for safety. Kids are always looking to see who is safe, what is safe, and will respond physiologically when they don’t feel safe. And so maybe sometimes I wonder if that’s what we’re witnessing in our kids that seem strong willed. It’s that they are sensing a lack of safety around them, and so they are behaving in a way that is going to express dominance or be defensive or look to us like disobedience, but really, they’re just seeking safety.
0:45:05 – (Wendy): Aren’t we all, right? Aren’t we all? I love that so much. And, yeah, just knowing that there is this ability to get underneath the misbehavior, and if you can look underneath of it, there’s often, because at the beginning of that story you were telling, you were talking about, what was your intention to help me understand what makes you tick, what caused you to make that decision, whatever it may be?
0:45:30 – (Wendy): And it sounded like from the story that that’s probably not your strong willed one, because going inward and the caving in is very typical for just the more mellow kids where we freak out on them, and it’s like they just kind of are like, oh, but then the strong willed ones, when we yell and we try to exert dominance, they actually puff up and they become even more resistant.
0:45:51 – (Lauren): Right? Absolutely. And it’s easier to apologize to a kid that kind of sinks into themselves. That will break your heart. But the ones who are strong willed, and, I mean, we have mastered teeth sucking in this house. Like, neck rolls in the teeth sucking. Okay, well, and when you are a strong willed person, as a parent and your kiddo is strong willed and you’re like, oh, you will not be dominant over me because I am the adult or I am the parent.
0:46:21 – (Lauren): And again, that just takes a lot of embodiment to assess what’s going on, to see that that is not a direct offense to you. We could just pull ourselves down in this one to one battle that will just continue to spiral instead of pausing, being the adult in the room, acknowledging what’s going on in the body of your kiddo, and using yourself as a co regulating place for that child to be safe in your presence. Anytime you puff up in the face of a kid that’s puffed up, you’re just going to be poking each other.
0:46:54 – (Wendy): Yeah. And to be able to see those ones specifically that are so like you. I feel like God uses them if we allow him to. To help us learn to love ourselves more, because that pushback that so naturally comes from them, or the challenging of the status quo or the refusing to accept a punishment model or being like, it’s the same thing we have in us. And I love how you say, lauren, that I thrive in rooms where the stakes are high and the narratives are complex.
0:47:26 – (Wendy): Conflict is connection to me. So I wish to share the gift of stewarding a place for your questions and pushback. And, man, if every strong wheeled child on the planet could just have an environment like that, right where it’s like, conflict is not the end of the world, we are capable of being able to hold space for one another. And especially as parents, we are capable of expanding our toolkit so we can learn to create a safe place for these kids, especially the strong willed kids one.
0:48:00 – (Wendy): And when their questions and pushback comes our way, instead of moving to the amygdala and the threat and the danger and the like, oh, my gosh, we have to squash this. And all those years of being taught that this is disobedience and you’ve got to end it or else you’re not a godly parent. But instead, we are safe. And your questions and your pushback are welcome here. And, yes, I will be a firm, kind parent, and, yes, we will follow through on boundaries and rules, but you are safe here. And I can just tell that’s what you’re doing in your home.
0:48:31 – (Wendy): And it’s just so beautiful. So, man, Lauren, I could talk to you all day long, but I’m going to end with this one question, because, I mean, there’s just so much more on my list here, just that I wish we could just go on and on because I just would love to hear you speak about so many things. But let me ask you this. So many people who are we. We have this justice buttons, right? Again, I think most of us who are practicing this way of parenting, firm and kind, connected parenting, who are really turning the ship around, changing the family legacy, refusing to pass down generational traumas and painful generation like cycles, we have these strong justice buttons. We believe strongly in things.
0:49:18 – (Wendy): We have opinions. Many of us are black sheep in our families and communities and churches. I will say, because it is being preached from the pulpit again, that you need to get control of your children. And godly discipline is hurting and harming, and that’s just what you do. So there are so many black sheep present who want to feel confident using their voice and being different at the Christmas table and not laughing at the jokes about whooping their kids or being courageous, finding the courage to speak up about responsible gun reform in their state, right.
0:49:58 – (Wendy): And go against maybe their party lines, like, all that kind of stuff. And it is so intense. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So leave us with, how do we do this and still stay lifted up and peace filled with the Holy Spirit? Because you just seem to embody this. You just radiate peace to me and compassion. And I just want to be someone like that. And I think I just. I think all of us, like, I always say I want to be a conduit of Jesus light, but holy crap, do I get pissed off sometimes.
0:50:47 – (Wendy): And I don’t want to hear one more freaking person tell me that gentle parenting is some cult. It’s like, no, it’s not, dude. It’s like your nervous system can get so riled up. Whether it’s like any of these big ticket items on the ballot when we’re voting, or how could our religion be going down this christian nationalist route, or how much punishment is in the christian world, all of it can just get you. So how do we do this and just honor our justice buttons, which will then in turn teach our children to honor their justice buttons and stand tall for what is right while doing it in a peace filled way.
0:51:35 – (Wendy): That’s my ending question for you, Lauren.
0:51:37 – (Lauren): I love that question. The first thing I’m going to say is I’m going to read this sticker that I’m looking at on my laptop from the happy givers. It says, stop trying to sit at the tables Jesus flipped. And we have to know where our spaces are and where we can have influence and where we can’t. And so we are going to burn out. And we will be so angry if we spend our time trying to move mountains that are immovable.
0:52:08 – (Lauren): If we are spending our time trying to have influence in spaces where hearts are not soft, that will exhaust us and that will leave us without hope. And so the first thing I would say is spend your energy in the right places. Right? Where is an open crack or shifting thought? Where is openness in your community, in your neighborhood, in your family, around your table. For there to be a way for everyone to be opened up to thinking about things differently.
0:52:40 – (Lauren): Which leads me to the second part. Curiosity and asking questions, I think invites self discovery so much more than telling people how they think and why they think. You may be observing someone’s behaviors. You may be observing the way that they vote, the way that they think, the way that they communicate online. But at the end of the day, they are a person that wants to be loved and accepted. And they have a load of insecurities.
0:53:08 – (Lauren): All of us have so many insecurities. And so the more that we can tap into people’s insecurities and their thought processes, the more that we’re going to be welcomed as a safe person that is not telling them what to think, but is using story and life experience to say, well, would you ever consider, could I share a story with you about what changed my mind about that? Or when they come at you with gentle parenting is woke or is going to ruin –
0:53:45 – (Lauren): This is the way that our school board here, this is a perfect example. Our school board in my county last year, they made it so that you had to put down your political party in order when you ran for school board, which is supposed to be a nonpartisan position. So our party in power here pushed that through in our county. It turned into a very ugly school board race that unseated some people who ran as independent because they didn’t think that it was right. And then within the first month of the new school board being in power, they said, social and emotional learning is the Trojan horse that’s going to bring in woke education and make white kids feel bad about who they are.
0:54:35 – (Lauren): That fired me up. I was angry. And I would say to anyone who feels angry, like, anger is not a bad emotion, so don’t run anger. Don’t feel bad about that. Get out what you need to get out to the people who are safe to you. My husband gets my rage, or my friends get. Sometimes I throw things and burn things and then find my centered place. Right. So then that was followed up with an email to my school board to where I said, thank you. For those of you who supported the children and their social and emotional learning capacities, I wanted to just share a little bit as a parent about what we’re going through as a family. And I was very vulnerable to say, we’re spending $2,000 a month out of pocket for therapy services that one of our kiddos who’s neurodiverse needs, and that has led us to having to remove her from the public school system because it could not meet her needs.
0:55:33 – (Lauren): We are people of privilege that have the income to be able to do that. But that is not true for a lot of kids who are marginalized in our community. And I would just love for you to consider what those families might need as we think through what might be good moving forward. I hope that in sharing my story and in sharing the things that are true for us, that opens the door for conversation. Now, when you’re sitting around a table, sorry, I know we need to wrap up, but when you’re sitting around a.
0:56:11 – (Wendy): Is you wrap up when you wrap. I am here for all of it, Lauren. So you keep going as much as you.
0:56:17 – (Lauren): We’re. When we have a history with someone and we are sitting around the table and their words cut us because they are deciding whether or not they love and accept us because of what we believe, that gets a lot more personal when you are deconstructing faith and people are considering you to have left. I mean, people have told me that I’ve left my first love. People have told me that I am a heathen and a heretic and a yada, yada, yada.
0:56:46 – (Wendy): Me too.
0:56:47 – (Lauren): And those are people that I thought were in my corner. And it became very clear that they only accepted me because I conformed to the same things that they believed. Strong kids are never going to conform. Yeah. Because they believe that the world can be better, and they believe that there’s more to discover. And I think that’s what improves us all, is those who are willing to ask those questions to say, can’t this be done in a different way?
0:57:20 – (Lauren): And if so, why aren’t we thinking about it? The challenge then, is to be able to sit in a room and to not bring your strength and to not bring your power, but to bring your curiosity and to bring your questions and invite people into your steady strength that says, this is a safe place to ask those questions. And I’m not going to judge you, and I am going to let you know that I don’t have it all figured out. And I also don’t think you have it all figured out. And I think that if we bring both of our views together, we may be able to learn something from each other.
0:57:59 – (Lauren): And to me, that’s been able to move the needle not out of manipulation, but out of a true curiosity. Like, what makes you think. Tell me more. What makes you think this? What do I not understand about the way that you see gun laws? What do I not understand about your desire to protect the second amendment? What do I not understand about the way that you think this? And would you be open to me sharing some things that I’m wrestling with? Maybe you can shed some light on it.
0:58:28 – (Lauren): And that has just opened the door for some really rich conversations that challenge me in return. And I think just help settle me into a better humanity with the people that I’m around. Oh, my gosh.
0:58:43 – (Wendy): And it is exactly the same for is just. That’s why it’s like you and Carlos are so, like, this is like, how to human. How do you get super. You’re going to get super angry, but you don’t. Like, you wait till you’re able to process that, and then you handle business. And whatever you do, just don’t be quiet. Just keep going. Right. I love that. Invite people into your study. People respond to humility and connection and unity. They do not respond to pride and ego and judgment and condemnation and disgust. That’s one of the biggest things I see right now, is when the tone of disgust is brought in, you just lose people.
0:59:32 – (Wendy): And it’s like, disgust is a tone that is rooted in know, and it’s like, we got to clean that up. So, Lauren, I just love you so much. And again, I cannot wait till your book comes out. So if there is an agent that I need to tell them how important your work is and how they need to sign you, you let me know. I will write a letter because I will be preaching that book and sharing that book from the mountaintops.
0:59:58 – (Wendy): But I want you to help us leave listeners with where can they come find you? Tell us about all the social handles. Where can we support kindred exchange with a monthly collective support? And also maybe just one call to action, too, just about mental health support. As a mom who has a kid who really, you’re experiencing it firsthand, what is maybe like a call to action that every listener could do to maybe move the needle a little bit to advocate for a change in mental health support in all states in our nation. That’s kind of my ending question for you.
1:00:40 – (Lauren): So I wish that we had the power to do this. We have got to create language around developmental trauma. And so people can go back to my podcast, the upwardly dependent podcast, and listen to my interview with Dr. Patty van A. But she defines developmental trauma and what happens to kids between ages zero to three and why that is so critical to their development, their ability to regulate their emotions, their ability to make healthy neuro sequential connections in their minds.
1:01:12 – (Lauren): That early childhood age is so pivotal. And so anything that our politicians can be doing to support families when those kids are zero to three is the most important in my mind. So that is still a diagnosis. Developmental trauma is a diagnosis that’s not even listed in the DSM yet. But working on so that I think understanding that, understanding the neuro sequential model that Dr. Bruce Perry has put in place, and he’s the one who just came out with that book, with Oprah, what happened to you? So I would say read that book.
1:01:44 – (Lauren): And really, there’s just, gosh, there’s so much. Every state handles child development and mental health services differently. But the thing that I am hearing over and over again in my interviews with folks as we handle this season on reforming orphan care is get in with families. Notice the mom on your street that is working and raising kids on her own. Ask if you can keep the kids once or twice a week in the afternoon so that she doesn’t feel stretched in childcare coverage. Ask the person whose grass is growing unusually high.
1:02:16 – (Lauren): If there’s something going on, walk up to people’s front door and introduce yourself and be a present neighbor in the places where you live, because everyone needs someone who notices them, who sees them. I think that that’s the most powerful thing we can do. I am at upwardly dependent on Instagram. Hit or miss. I don’t handle the algorithm well. I am in the depths of motherhood, so I’m there. My website, upwardlydependent.com, has some more information.
1:02:45 – (Lauren): But we are looking for a legacy team of ten families or so that really want to see this movement around the church and the church changing the way that it engages with the world. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, in joining us to help back 80% of the work that we’re doing, we have a tiny budget, and I would love to just get to know families that are passionate about seeing this language around faith and community change.
1:03:12 – (Lauren): And so, yeah, reach out. Sorry, my email is on our website. So, [email protected]. And our website is there as.
1:03:23 – (Wendy): Oh, I love that. So you guys go find Lauren’s organizations, podcast organizations. But what a wonderful idea to support financially. I think a lot of people are starting to just reexamine financial support, like where they want to give it to advanced Christ work. Right? And so just a reminder, listeners, that there’s all these different options and that giving to your church, if you’re really backing your church and what they’re doing and feeling really good about that, and if you’re in a season where you’re just like, man, I’m not sure if I’m fully supportive of what my church is doing. I’m starting to ask questions. I’m starting to back up a little bit. Then an organization like Lauren’s is a wonderful one to support and share in your giving, right?
1:04:19 – (Wendy): Because we know that’s just such a wonderful way to worship the Lord, is to give and be part of beautiful movements like this. So go check out her work, listeners. Make sure you follow all the things and buy her book when it comes out, because it will come out. I’m advocating for that. Lauren, thank you for being here today. We love you so much. Keep doing your work. Don’t worry about being present on Instagram.
1:04:41 – (Wendy): You have designed a beautiful portfolio over there. And don’t let the enemy convince you for a second that you are not present enough. You are doing wonderful work. Be present today in what you are doing because you are so loved, admired, and seen.
1:04:55 – (Lauren): Thank you so much, Wendy. Thank you for this podcast and thanks for having me on.
