Kate Bowler: This is. Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler. So I get the same question a lot. It has to do with faith. People often wonder how, in the midst of everything that happens, present continuous, do you hold on to a faith that holds you back? You know what I mean? Like, you can feel it actually carry you in any kind of way, through the ups and downs and in-betweens. Who would that God be? I think so often we’re absorbed in an understanding of faith that requires life to work out. This is one of the reasons I love talking to people who’ve gone through something or have really hit middle-age, and they, they have some life experience to test their beliefs against. Because many of the beliefs that we had, perhaps as children or as people young in a set of, you know, in a theological or spiritual framework, we had all kinds of certainties. And whether we admit it or not, we may have assumed that with enough trust or belief or right action or prayer, that we could guarantee ourselves into a kind of life. A life without trouble or without pain or without suffering. And then we look around us and we may see only trouble, pain, suffering in our lives, in the lives of people we love around the world. So how do you have a kind of faith that can hold all of that reality? That is a kind of wisdom. And today’s conversation is with someone who has really been thinking about this question, especially given that her job is reporting the news every morning, it is being aware of everything and everyone all the time. How do you hold on to hope in the face of so much to despair? Now, before I introduce her, we’re going to take a uick break to tell you about some of the sponsors of today’s show, but we’ll be right back.
Kate: My guest is a combo platter of kindness and quick wit and an ability to get up at 2 a.m.. You will recognize Savannah Guthrie from co-anchoring NBC’s Today show every morning, and because she is friends with so many of my friends, I have been pretending that we are close for years. I accept our new solidified and notarized best friendship. She’s written a gorgeous book of spiritual reflections called Mostly What God Does. Savannah, thank you so much for doing this.
Savannah Guthrie: Kate, I’m so happy we’re together. I’m glad that you I I’m glad it’s mutual because you are also a best friend in my mind. And we have a whole friend group. You know?
Kate: We do, yes!
Savannah: We all know who’s in it, too.
Kate: We really do!
Savannah: They didn’t know I’m in it, but I’m in.
Kate: Absolutely And I guess that’s why it feels so special for me. Because you’re the person I feel like I can kind of let my hair down with and be like, “Oh my gosh, some of these topics are sort of awkward to talk about,” being the kind of people we are. So I thought it was so lovely that you’re like, I just want to talk about faith for a while, even in this very cosmopolitan world where we would rather be self-reliant and kind of make the world predictable. But I just wondered then, like, why did it feel important to you to just do a book of reflections about who God is?
Savannah: It’s so funny because I’m the last person who should write a book about faith. I’m definitely, certainly no theologian, and I’m certainly no life to emulate or model and no example of moral rectitude. So that’s my like disclaimer disclaimer. So what business do I have writing about faith? None. Except for that I love God, I love Jesus, and turns out he loves me, too. And I love to talk about this God that I know. And mostly what I like to say is that he really, really loves people. And you in particular person who is reading this book.
Kate: Yeah. It is weird, too, how vulnerable it does feel. Like, I was going through something really difficult. That was maybe the first time it started to feel almost embarrassing to talk about God, because what I felt felt very like the kind of love that I felt felt difficult to explain, like it was easier for me to give like a lecture or kind of like lead with an expertise or, but it was in the middle of. My cancer diagnosis and that very strange experience after in the hospital, where, I mean, the more common question I got was like, well, isn’t that the time where your faith unraveled? Like, God is not fair, this world is not fair and nothing’s really coming together. And like the thing I felt almost too embarrassed to say was like, live. If for some reason in the middle of this I felt so absurdly loved and like loved by other people and loved by God, and somehow this thing that sometimes faith that sometimes, like, I don’t know, crystallized in the worst times ends up being this like beautiful golden thread that runs through the rest of how I guess I know how to think about being loved.
Savannah: Isn’t it astonishing? Only God could pull that off. It’s so divine. There’s no other word for it. How is it that your moment of despair and question, how is it that you could possibly feel the most loved? Only God. Of course it’s divine. And I so relate to that. I lost my father when I was 16 years old, and I remember friends. You know, we were teenagers, friends saying like, well, what about your faith? Now, I bet you have a lot of doubts. And I remember saying, no, this is when I need him the most. This is the last moment I should be abandoning my faith. This is when I actually really need it. I can’t say there haven’t been other times and other moments where of course I questioned or of course I doubted. I never felt like I doubted that God existed. I feel grateful that that’s not my particular challenge, but I have often doubted what God’s intentions toward me were—whether he loved me, whether he really was kind and compassionate, or whether he was a, you know, brutal taskmaster above, meting out difficult and humiliating, painful life lessons in service of some great spiritual growth that I certainly couldn’t attain. You know?
Kate: Oh my gosh. This sounds exactly like me when you describe that. You’re like, there is a long stretch where I wondered if I was being judged and failing horribly all the time.
Savannah: Yeah, and that’s what, I mean, that’s the whole thing about the book. It’s called, Mostly What God Does. Spoiler alert the rest of the sentence is, “mostly what God does is love you.” While we’re imagining this, this brutal overlord sitting in terrifying judgment, mostly what he is doing is loving us. That does not mean that he does not see or judge our flaws, but because in our faith tradition, because of the great love and sacrifice of Christ, God doesn’t see that. He doesn’t—he, he sees past those flaws. And you know, that gets into like a big theological discussion. But that was my, that’s my big “a ha” of faith. When you were talking about being in the hospital and the worst happening to you, and that being the moment of your deepest connection, again, I see that as God’s calling card and his hallmark. You know, I write that I spent so many years afraid. Afraid that I was going to get my comeuppance. And calamity was right around the corner. And God’s, again, painful, humiliating lesson was just right around the corner. And I surely deserved it and couldn’t withstand it. And then some bad things did happen. And what I learned was my fear of the bad thing was worse than the actual bad thing, because my fear of the bad thing always left out the crucial element, which was the saving presence of God himself. But when you actually go through a thing that’s hard, you actually face your crucible, what you find out is that God is right there with that sweet and unmistakable presence. And it’s not that you would choose the hard thing, but boy, you wouldn’t trade that experience of, of knowing God and experiencing him that way.
Kate: I said something really awkward, exactly like that, where I remember I was. I was like right in the middle of treatment. And I was talking to an Old Testament professor who I really love, and she’s just someone I felt so comfortable having those like, I think I’m on the edge of a spiritual thought, I don’t exactly know how to say it. And I kept saying, I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back. And I definitely didn’t mean I don’t want to go back to being a person that doesn’t have stage IV cancer and, and, and like—I would trade that in a heartbeat. I would go back and unlearn those lessons. I mean, three, two take me back. Put me put me in a movie with time travel, return me to being 34. And like, but I, but there, but the truth of what I was like, just trying to like figure out how to land on was that there was like this terrible, beautiful discovery that you can only have when you’ve genuinely come to the end of yourself and then to see like, oh wait, God was in, was also in front of me, and like also behind me, and also around, and still somehow I feel, like still somehow I feel loved. I, I found that, because I guess I just never wanted to sort of like land on that, I think, absurd and incomplete thought, that like, you know, it’s the end of every celebrity interview? “And it made me who I am today.” Right? You never want to say that. And yet, like, there are precious truths we learned that we don’t want to forget.
Savannah: It’s true. And I mean, of course, we’re so shaped by, yes, the positive experiences, but also the adversity that we encounter. And I think, you know, and I’ve said this occasionally to friends who’re going through a trial of their own, and I, I hope it’s okay to say it, I hope I convey it the right way. But I often say, you know, here you are in this moment that is so difficult and everything is coming so sharply into focus that you have a superpower. You know what matters in this moment, and you have a sixth sense now for blessing. You have a sixth sense for what matters. You’re in a different, you’re on a different plane now than the rest of us bozos just going around on a Tuesday, mad that the barista got our name wrong. Like you’re in a different level. And that’s not to say that you wouldn’t—you’d rather be Tuesday, you know? Kate would like to be pre-34, healthy as a horse and never have the knowledge that you had to have. Of course we all would. But since you are there anyway, we just recognize that you have a powerful moment and a powerful access to wisdom and truth and a powerful sixth sense for goodness, love, and blessing. I don’t know why it is that way, but it is.
Kate: I do not hate any of that. If I, if I heard that pep talk, I would love it because it gets us to like, like, what do we get when we’re trying to become wiser? And so much of it is the, is the beauty and the terror of a different kind of awareness. And I guess that’s one of the things I found, so, really like, remarkable about you is you have to live with a very intense awareness all the time. And then balance that with the other truths that you know. Like you wake up every morning with this horrible list. If you wouldn’t mind telling me about the overnight notes that you receive.
Savannah: Oh yeah. And I’m going to start forwarding it to you just to ruin your day. No, I wrote this little essay. It’s called, “The Overnight Note” because we have an email that goes out every night, unimaginatively, it is called the Overnight Note, because we work on a morning show and the producers, the senior producers, and the anchors, we sleep at night, but there’s a whole staff of people that are up all night, different time zones collecting news, but they also keep track of everything that’s happened essentially in a 24 hour period. And they put it all in this document with headlines and links. That’s all it is, headlines and links. It’s pages and pages long. And it’s like everything horrible and terrible everywhere all at once. And that is my wake-up. You know how they’re like, don’t put your phone next to your bed or don’t read news right before? It’s like, this is it’s my job to wake up and read this note. And it is astonishing. It is like waking up and falling down a hole and then trying to climb emotionally back out. And you don’t want to become so numb to it, or anesthetized. And then you add a whole other set of problems, but you can’t be so beset and overcome. So it’s trying to strike that balance. And that I think about it all the time, how you hold onto hope in a world that globally and watching the news invites despair, but also personally and locally, in your own life, with your own setbacks, your own disappointments also can invite despair. And what are we supposed to do with that? I don’t know, is the answer.
Kate: Yeah, well, I think it sounds like you’re really good at figuring out how to adjust the dials because, like I hear you saying, you can hear, you can, you have like, a wide bandwidth for awareness and then you’re just like adjusting the dial on fear, adjusting the dial on hope, and then like, and also just it sounds like there’s a dial in the middle too, which is like, hey, I’m a person and stuff’s actually going on in my life. And then like allowing your own friends and relationships and whatever help you figure out, like what your capacity then could be.
Savannah: Yeah. And I think it’s also, you know, this is a job. It’s this is, I’m supposed to be a professional, you know, I’m not supposed to read the news and then dissolve into my own personal reaction after every script that I read. I’m supposed to read it I’m supposed to understand it, I’m supposed to connect with it, yes, emotionally, but only to convey the, the importance of the matter, the significance of it. So I’m supposed to be connected emotionally, but I’m not supposed to be a mess. I’m not supposed to be a wreck. And I think knowing and feeling that it’s a profession helps me keep a lot of this at bay. But there is a price to be paid over time, when you’re continually trying to overcome and rise above and not have a feeling that you should feel when you read a headline about a mother who killed her toddlers. You know, like you don’t want to be the person who reads a headline like that, and it doesn’t even have an impact, and I don’t want to become that person. So I’m trying to just have that balance. And I think some of it is really just nothing more than in the morning, you know, I got a job to do. I’m going to do that. And when it’s over, I don’t need to have cable news on all day long. I don’t need to read every single website. I know what time I need to wake up and what I need to read to brief myself. And I try to set some boundaries that way.
Kate: That’s lovely. Especially when… Okay, so one thing I really relate to about your description of being in the world is, is like sensitivity and awareness and kind of being able…like a, a vigilance, which makes you amazing at your job. Like you’re so good at connecting with people, you’re so intuitive and like you can feel the compassion in all of it. And then, but aware people are aware people, and awareness is the worst. Like, like we can hear criticism faster. Like, I mean that just any possible thing I might have said or done, it’s really difficult to kind of like have, I don’t know, like a framework of love. God’s love. Our love. When like, awareness is the gift and the curse.
Savannah: That’s why we need God. I mean, that’s why we need someone outside this brain matter. And I’m so glad that you’re here with me on the agita and anxiety train when I. It’s funny because when I, you know, I’m writing this book and I would send it to the editor and all of a sudden I’d be like, do I sound like a complete neurotic basket case? Like, I sound insane? Like it’s like because I’m like, oh, I worry about this. I worry about that. I, you know, I have this guilt, I have this shame, I have all that. It’s like the that radio station is always on in perfect clarity with no static in my brain. And, you know, it’s, it’s, a, I need perspective. I need something outside myself. You know, I read this quote I can’t remember now if it was, it’s either Oswald Chambers or C.S. Lewis, maybe Eugene Peterson. Unclear. We can, we’ll Google it. But basically it says, something like God is the only accurate way to understand ourselves. It’s like, I cannot really, I’m not a reliable judge of my character. I will either be way too lenient. Or more likely, in my particular psyche, way too harsh.
Kate: If I listened mostly to my own inner voice, whenever people are like, “Look inside,” I’m like, inside is actually a bit of a problem.
Savannah: Yeah. You’d run screaming for your life. Don’t come into my inner dialog. You’re not running.
Kate: Or it’s like a grab bag of, you know, ways that I’ve been formed from, like, growing up. And, you know, the reason why I am a very hypervigilant and sensitive person in the first place, like all the things that went into that wiring is pretty difficult to, I guess, manage without some kind of, I guess I’m describing an intervention. But like…
Savannah: Therapy? I was about to say without therapy or medication?
Kate: Exactly.
Savannah: I’m positive on both!
Kate: Yeah, exactly. We’ll be right back.
Kate: One of the things that struck me about your thinking is that, you’re… You’re in a place of, like, you know when you kind of tell when you get into a season of life where you kind of, you, like, feel accumulated wisdom? Like you kind of got somewhere? Like there are others—it’s almost like if you went around the same circle of some same theological questions, you found that you were actually just like, deepening when you thought maybe you just been taking a break. And I really enjoyed listening to you describe like the feeling then of being loved for like in for this long. Like for the in the stage of your life. Like that in the mostly what God does is love us is, is a life that is in the process of being transformed. And I work at a Methodist seminary, so we talk a lot about like what people get confused in self-help and wellness world as just progress. But like what we’re really hoping for, right, is sanctification. Like, we’re we’re hoping that we might be transformed by all this love. So I guess it kind of made me wonder what are some things about who you are now that feel like they’ve been deepened by love. And where do you hope it will go?
Savannah: That is a really good question. I mean, the part of myself that is the taskmaster, and you see a lot of this, I think, in the book, although hopefully with a nice velvet glove approach, it’s me telling myself, “And now if you have been so loved, you have to get out there and share it.” And not because you have to. It’s not really taskmaster, you’ll do it because you just can’t help it. How could you hold it within, like if you really saw it, if you let yourself glimpse it? How would you possibly be able to contain it? You know, I always joke, it’s like if you found a stain remover that got red wine stains off of your white couch, and it worked really great, like you would be calling all of your girlfriends and being like, you got to get the Chateau Spill. It works. I don’t know how, but it does, right? So I kind of feel that way about God’s love. So that’s the first thing I feel, I’ve sort of been let in on this secret that I’m supposed to share it, you know, that’s my purpose is to share and purpose is just to tell people, but hopefully in aa way that doesn’t feel like a throwaway or super shallow. But I also think, you know, they always say, that the preacher preaches the sermon that he or she needs to hear. So I wrote the book that I need to have and read and continue to read. And this idea of mostly what God does is love you. Mostly what God does, has been doing, is loving you like while you were flitting off and making mistakes, or when you were super devout and you were overconfident. Either way, he was mostly just loving you. You know, I write about it in the very beginning of the book, my growing up in a really churchy background and then having and, you know, a lot of part of the guilt. And now the Lord was convicting me about this and oh my gosh, failing all the things, you know. I drank and smoke as a young girl like I did all that, you know, so like being sort of devout one day and then terrible the next, you know, all that stuff. And then I once I got older, it was less about those kinds of things and more about like, hey, this is the season I’m reading, getting up every morning, and I’m reading my Bible and I’m doing my Bible study and I’m memorizing verses. I’m in this season of great connection and devotion to God, and then falling out of it and not barely doing a thing for years and years and feeling guilty and kind of ashamed and like, oh, am I out on a limb here? And is God going to, like, have to come crack down on me? Hard to, like, pull me back into the fold and all this stuff? And what I realized when I looked at the when I looked at my whole life and the whole seasons of devotions, seasons of despair and distance, that either way. Mostly what God does was loving me the whole time. Mostly God was just there loving me. He wasn’t saying, wow, Savannah, you’re really coasting on fumes, aren’t you? You haven’t learned anything new in a long, long time, or, you know, he’s just like, We ask ourselves, Does God want this for me? Is this the right path? Is this, it’s like, I don’t know. All I know is God wants to be closer to us. That’s the trajectory. So you can ask yourself and figure out for yourself whether or not this path or that path brings you closer or farther from God. But that’s the trajectory. The trajectory is closeness and love. Like, are you headed in that general direction? Then you’re probably going the right way. Is it about, you know, this job or that job? It’s, I think God cares, and sometimes I just feel like he can work with anything. You can work with our screw-ups. You know what? You should have taken the job at Peet’s Coffee, not at Starbucks. Either way, Pete’s, Starbucks he’s God. He can work it out. You know, it’s like the question is really, is, am I going in, in the direction of closeness and intimacy. That’s always where he’s at. It’s always where he wants.
Kate: Do you remember those old choose-your-own-adventures? Where I like, I always end up being like you’ve been, page 42, you’ve been eaten by a bear.
Savannah: You’re like, ugh, if only on page seven I had the strawberry milkshake. Sliding Doors.
Kate: It does, it feels like in this version of choose your own adventure, you just like, every page is like, oh, you were in a tar pit. You’re also loved. It’ll be fine. Like, oh.
Savannah: I feel in the end, and maybe that’s, I don’t know, I mean, again, like, I’m, I’m 52 years old and I know a little, couple things, but I’m more aware of what I don’t know. So maybe this is just going to end up being like, ha! That was crazy. But the way I feel right now is God is just like, yeah, let’s just be together. You know? Let’s just, I’m interested in you. You can, you will be blessed by more of me in your life, let’s do that together. We’ll worry about the rest and the circumstances and all that. Like, the goal is to get close so you can feel loved. Because I, when you feel that love, you, really, you won’t be the same and everything around you will be different. And in that way, when God shares his love and deputizes us with his love. Well, now he has all of us headed out into the world, we’re different people.
Kate: It kind of reminds me of something, Beth Moore said to me one time when I was describing a really difficult thing where I was like, I don’t know, Beth. Like, I don’t like doing this really hard thing. I don’t even think it’s going to get better. Honestly, like this particular thing, I actually just don’t think it’s going to get better. And I it is actually unbearable. And she was, ah, she just said it was so much love, she was like like, you are going to keep, you are going to keep operating in love. You’re going to keep working really hard for what you know, that you have to do. And by the time you have to make a different decision, if you have to make one, you will be changed. And like I loved that as like the, the like a promise of love is like, if you just keep being immersed in it, even if it’s in the horrible time, like by the time you get to, you know, turn to page, whatever. Like you will have been transformed by love. So maybe, maybe then, even then, the thing I’m scared about, or the things in my life that are the boulders that won’t move, I just felt like if love’s there like I’ll, I’ll be changed enough, deepened enough maybe.
Savannah: But like, and believing that is faith. Because it’s not—you’re not sure. And when you’re in that moment you’re like, well, that sounds good. And I sure hope that happens. But that’s faith. You know, you’re not given a video like, hey, this is your future. See? You’re changed. It worked. You have, you have to believe that while it’s not changed, while you couldn’t imagine change.
Kate: That is spectacular. Savannah. You are, fundamentally loving. And that quality is obvious to everyone who watches you. And what a privilege then, to know you. Thanks so much for doing this with me today.
Savannah: Thank you Kate, I loved it.
Kate: Mostly what God does is love us. That is the animating truth in Savannah’s life. And you know, we know that it can be so hard to believe that when our lives come undone. And if we may have gotten stuck in a framework that imagines that our lives were supposed to work out, and then that would be the evidence of God’s love. But that is not what’s promised. Instead, we have these beautiful, terrible days and the promise of God’s presence in the middle of it. And that is the strange mystery of it. If I thought about, like, who I was before and who I am now, I’d have to say that I have so much less certainty. But I do truly believe that God promises to be near to the brokenhearted. Like I don’t understand it. I can’t predict when or how it shows up. But. I have known a kind of presence and love. Especially in other people. Where I look around and find that I am horrified and surprised to realize that other people have carried me. You know, actually, that’s one of the things that maybe feels more precious to me now than ever before is being able to notice earlier the people who carried me. The book I wrote, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day, The preface is dedicated to one of those people in my life, Roger, who, when I met him, I couldn’t have known, Like he was the librarian at Duke Divinity School. The person who sat near me in historical division meetings. And I never would have known that he would be one of the people that I picture so clearly in my mind when I think, “God was there.” It’s wild. So if you’re having one of those seasons where maybe you’re wrestling with a faith you had or wanting to experience some kind of feeling of presence, I thought maybe we could read a meditation from my new book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! And it’s a blessing for honest faith. Here we go.
Kate: God, I am disappointed and embarrassed at what people get up to in the name of religion. My heart is thirsty for a faith I can trust. and I mean that. I don’t trust the cultural scripts that turn religion into any game where somebody wins and somebody loses, and there is the strong scent of the entrepreneur. Somebody is selling something. And from the recesses of my mind from some very early encounter, I think I must have met the real you. That somehow I met goodness so pure it settled my heart to understand trustworthiness of a majesty and stature that afterwards I could accept no counterfeits. God. Come and show yourself again. Show me faith that can’t be faked. Let me see you in the loveliness of others living out their faith so genuinely, so honestly, that you shine through. And if I can’t get all the theology right, let me not worry too long. I suspect you’d rather I live honestly, by the light of what I know to do that looks most like you. And keep quiet about the rest.
Kate: Well, my dears, this is the time in the show where I get to catch you up on all the things that’s happening behind the scenes here in the hallowed halls of Everything Happens. And one of the big things is that Lent is happening right now. Didn’t you know it? We’re in the middle of that 40 days. That leads up to Easter. And if you’ve never heard of Lent or it sounds overly religious and stressful, don’t worry. But do you consider yourself completely invited. So what we’re doing is these tiny daily reflections in the morning as a way to practice honesty together, to tell the truth about our days that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrible. It’s totally free and you’re not too late. Just join us at KateBowler.com/lent. And none of this—she gestures around wildly toward the podcast mic—would be possible without our generous partners who make everything possible. Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You love theological education and media projects like this and I’m so grateful. This podcast is a team effort of people I deeply love. So thank you especially to my great love, Jessica Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Jeb Burt, Sammi Filippi, and Katherine Smith. I adore you. Thank you. And we do it all because we really love doing this. For you, my favorite listeners. Yes. You doing the dishes or running late again. You are our absolute favorite and we are so grateful to get to make useful things for you. Please let us know who you want to hear from this season, or, if you have a second, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You have perhaps no idea how much that matters. It’s so wild, but it really, really helps. Or call us and leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. Okay. Next week, what am I doing? Guys? I’m going to take you with me to London where I got to spend time with the incredibly talented actor, Richard E Grant. He is witty and honest, and he is tender about the death of his wife, and he has got these incredibly wonderful observations, then, about how to live. You’re going to love him, and I promise he will make you laugh out loud. Until then, this is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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