1KHO 747: How to Carry a Heavy Life | Shannan Martin, Counterweights

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And you so graciously came on to talk about it. And then you have anybody coming out, so it worked out. Well, I get a second day, spend time with me.

This is a fantastic book about, well, the subtitle is an essential practice for holding

hope in a heavy world, and it's about the balancing of the heart and the good. And the book is called, counterweight. It's beautiful. I'm eyeballing them. Actually, I have like a binder version that got printed out, and they put like a,

what is this even called? The spiral binder. Like a little spiral, yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's that for an advance. But this book is out now, and you can go pick up a copy.

I love this whole concept. I mean, I didn't really know what it was going to be, but I knew that I'd love start with hello. So I was excited to read it. And you're talking, Mr. and a lot about your dad.

Like, what an interesting dad. He's like, he's into gardening, and he builds things. And he just passes on Mr. Wisdom. And this is sort of leading into the concept of the book, the title counterweight. Yeah. So if you wouldn't mind, I love if you tell us about your dad, Dwight.

I would love to. Dwight. Yes. I just saw him yesterday. So I live in Indiana.

I grew up in my parents are still in Southwestern, Ohio. But I was just there yesterday with him. So yes, I owe the premise of this book to my dad. And I've, I've sort of merged him with the poet, Rilka, who talks about, you know,

“the beauty and the terror that life is built of beauty and terror.”

My dad's part of this. And let me pause and say, my dad is far from a poet. OK. He is like as practical Midwestern, blue collar, construction worker, you know, like brawny and outdoorsy.

That's who my dad was all throughout my growing up years. Did not go to college. I mean, brilliant man. But just in a different lane. Like so brilliant of a mind and just amazed me all the time.

But when I was a young child, I'm a middle child. So my siblings and I have a very clear memory of walking across the barnyard to get to the big barn with my dad. And he told me, if you're struggling to carry something heavy, which I must have been. I mean, I was young.

So it's like a hazy fever dream of a memory. But he said, if you're struggling to carry something heavy, the easiest way to do that is to carry something equally heavy in the other hand. And at the time, he was carrying a bucket. He was probably carrying two buckets of maybe grain for the cows.

I don't know what was in those buckets. And so I remember thinking at the time, in my young brain, like this does not make sense. Like how are you telling me carrying more heavy things will make it easier? But he sort of demonstrated, you know, if you're carrying one heavy thing, you're lurking to the side, you're kind of dragging, you might tip over, but as soon as you put

something equally heavy, another bucket in that other hand, it pulls you back to center.

“And it allows you to have that momentum you need to carry on and move forward.”

And so my dad was not trying to give me a philosophical lesson on anything. He was just trying to help me carry heavy things. As I got older, and you know, I became a writer and I am not a poet. But I think I maybe have the brain of a poet at times.

I'm always searching for a metaphors and they come to me maybe more easily than for some

people. And years and years ago, I mean, 10 years or more, I started to think of this idea of having two buckets. So in one bucket, we have the heavy things that hurt, the things that we wish we could

And yet we are, they are part of our life, we cannot control them, we have to carry them.

But we have this other bucket in our other hand that we can choose to fill with heavy goodness and heavy beauty and heavy joy and heavy rest and all of the things that it requires for us to come back to center, to keep our heads above water and to keep moving forward. And so over time, that idea of these two buckets, I started to envision it almost like a scale, you know, we've got these two ends of the scale and this idea of counterweights.

It's something more than counting our blessings, which just, you know, there's nothing wrong with counting our blessings or making a gratitude list. A lot of people do that. Counterweights is a bit different because it requires to, it requires us to acknowledge both buckets.

It requires us, it demands us really to give attention to the heavy things and to the things that help lift us up a little bit. And so it's outside of that idea of just focusing on the positive. It's saying, this is your life, this is what is being thrown at you.

“You have to figure out how to carry it all.”

And with this idea of counterweights, that gives us a framework and a really simple practice that we can do all the time to help us continue to move forward. Shannon, I love it. I love it. What a mental picture.

As a new go through all of these different examples in the book of your own life. You're like, when your legs starts to swell, you know, but still swollen, Jenny, like, as we speak, like, that's a part of my life now. And it's the weirdest health situation I remember thinking, you know, there are people dying of cancer.

There are people suffering these horrible things. I have the stupid leg that stays swollen all the time, but it doesn't hurt. I'm not dying, maybe that's not enough for me to care about to write about whatever.

And the reality is, we know suffering is not a contest.

The reality is, that is something I am asked to carry right now. I don't know why I hate it.

“I think about it constantly, but when I wrote counterweights, I wanted to write super”

honestly to the point of maybe being kind of weird and quirky sometimes. These are my weights. These are my counterweights because that is what this practice is. Yeah. And I think what it causes you to consider is because you brought up, you know, like, oh,

have a gratitude journal, list three things at the end of the day that you're grateful for. But if you are going through a time period where the grief bucket, you know, the hardship bucket is incredibly heavy, then you're three things that night might not be enough. Right.

It doesn't counter the weight. It doesn't. We can only counter what we are willing to weigh. And so I am saying, whether you do it, I do it all throughout the day, it's just a part of my life now, it's kind of blood and even to my, to my in real life friendships,

people around me are casually mentioning to me, their counterweights, which I love. It's just a really, it's a sticky word that we can envision and it's, it makes it once we name it, once we've given it that name, it's so much easier to reach for it. And so that is happening. What I'm saying is, sure, go ahead and write your gratitude, your blessings, your counterweights, but also jot down the things that are weighing you

down because there's power in naming those things too and giving them all our sacred attention and acknowledging these are the things that make up my life right now today. This is what I've been given. So make a list of both. Yeah, okay, so going with the leg example, which was, you know, a story, what's interesting

“about the story, there's a lot of things that are interesting about the story, but I think”

it makes you think about the things in life when you're just going along with your daily business and something happens that's really unexpected. So you say, you're, you're a cook at a community kitchen, the window, one of your happiest places. You say, when my life changed forever, something fell in my foot, I'm like, oh, no big deal. But still, this has caused this mysterious condition. And you say, I exist on two separate planes in one,

everything is normal as long as I wear long pants. And on the other, something is obviously wrong. And you wrote, I was fracturing and almost no one knew. So you're talking in this one, and maybe you could explain it in the framework of counterweights. But you're talking in this one about how everyone that you talked to, these experts are like, well, what's

causing this? It's mysterious. We can't figure it out. And finally, someone says, well,

just try and get your swelling down. Yes. I mean, can you, can you believe it? I can, just hearing you retell that story to me is taking me back to that time. Yeah, this random thing happened. I kept working. I mean, it's like, it hurt. It hurts when we drop something on our

I did the business of the day. I noticed that my foot was bruised, which made sense. It started

“as well, which made sense. But then it just kept swelling. Like, the bruised one way and the”

swelling was getting worse. And I almost, I was like, weirdly reluctant to really acknowledge what was happening. I was trying to ignore my way back to a normal that did not exist for me any more. And so I just kept telling myself, like, it doesn't hurt. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. You know, like I said, just where long pants, because at a certain point, that summer, it was summertime. People started to notice. And I remember one night I went to

dinner with a group of friends that I don't see super often. And I had on, you know, like, cropped jeans and sandals. And at the end of dinner, we're walking back to the corner. It was a woman and a man. And the the man, like, stops and just stares up my foot. Like, the thing I didn't want anybody to do. And he's like, what is happening? Like, this is not normal. Because we had gone

“through the whole dinner, I hadn't mentioned anything. I mean, that's what I was doing. I was just”

like, if I ignore this, everybody will ignore this. But at certain points, we cannot, we cannot ignore our way out of the pain. And so, yes, various doctors, various experts, like, that became

my life for a while. And finally, one person, it wasn't even a doctor that I was actually seeing.

It was just like a friend's husband who is a physician said, I cannot believe nobody is trying to reduce your swelling. And when he said that, I was like, oh, my gosh, nobody has ever even mentioned that. The, the experts were so fixated on figuring out what caused this mysterious thing that nobody was trying to actually help me feel better in the short term. And so that led me to the path of understanding. It's a complicated medical thing. It's because of a lot of different reasons that

converged and sort of what we would call a perfect slash terrible storm. This is part of my life now, but my only symptom really is the swelling. And so, that's kind of the epicenter of the thing for me.

You know, it's always going to be a little swollen, but it's way better than it was before people

trying to actually help me control that swelling. And so, that became the whole, the whole journey was like acceptance. This is part of my life. Now, this is something I've been asked to carry. But also, there, there can be some relief in this, right? And the journey of acceptance brought me into in a lot of ways. And then a lot of other stories throughout the book, but for it to keep it to this leg story, I had to grieve it. And through that process of acceptance and grieving,

I came to see that the counterweight to loss is grief. So we think of grief as like this horrible thing that happens to us. The grief is not the horrible thing. The grief is our healthy way of responding to the thing, to the loss. And our grief is what helps us to move through it so that we can carry on. Wow. And then you talked about the German carol who helped you. And then you have the beautiful, there's all these beautiful, I don't know what they call them, call out. They're like little extra

sections in the book. And you have a baker's dozen blessing for carol. I read this book recently called "Hold on to Your Kids" by a man named Dr. Gordon Newfeld. And then this other woman like who trained with him named Deborah McNamara, which he has a book called "Rest Play Grow"

about raising toddlers basically. Anyway, they both use this phrase called "tears of futility."

And I was like, oh, this is kind of my new favorite phrase. Basically what they're saying is at standpoint, and they're talking about it for toddlers. But I was like, oh, I really relate that there's

“so many things in life that you don't have control over. And so you have to learn how to”

cry tears of futility. It's not going to hurt you. I love that. I loved it. It's like surrender. Yeah. Like a toddler. Like they can't control everything. You know, things are constantly happening that they don't want to happen. They wish they could do more. They wish they were taller. You know, they wish they had, you know, they could eat the cookies. Whatever the thing was, it was so, there was actually so many instances where they, and it was a, you have to guide your

child through learning that there are parts of life that you can't change. And so you cry tears of futility. Yes. And that's kind of the end. You, you, you, you. Yeah. So I love carry on. Yeah. Grief is not the crisis. It is our response to the crisis. We cannot heal what we won't grieve. So that's one of the examples of counterweights that's in the book. March is when home school families start looking ahead. You can almost see the finished line.

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“in Michigan, I would love you to talk about your 25th one hour anniversary trip. What was that?”

It was your 25th year, but Corey, two of Michigan and it was like a couple hours. I mean, you know, I opened up that chapter. The chapters are all really short, which is that's the kind of book I prefer to read, so that's the book I wrote. But I'm talking about, I see, I have this sense and I think a lot of us have this sense that like, everybody else is doing everything better than I am, including celebrating their

anniversaries. Like, we just are kind of haphazard. We love each other very much, but we are not, like, we are not cute like that. And so you know, I'm talking about one of my dearest friends, upgraded

her, her wedding ring and it's gorgeous. Like, my own very practical parents who never went anywhere

went to Hawaii for their 25th anniversary. It's like the only place they ever went that I can remember. Corey and I had like a handful of hours and we drove up to New Buffalo, Michigan, and it was like time-bound. We are on a schedule. We had to get back to town to take our 16-year-old to do as drivers to us. Like, this is just life. And so yes, we, we fled an hour north and we sat on the

beach umbrella, like we weren't, you know, it was too chilly to swim. It's just we went there as like

our version of we're going to mark this moment. We're going to do something outside of our routine. It is not fancy. It's not expensive. It's attainable to us right now. And this is going to have to cut it. And it did. It did. Oh, and I loved it. And you said, so you're looking for Seeklass. You found like this is a place where you can find it. And you wrote Seeklass without time and grit is just someone's old beer. They say it takes anywhere from 20 to 200 years for a broken bottle to achieve Seeklass status.

And so then you had this whole list of, it was a beautiful list of things that improved with time. I loved all of those little extra sections. Yeah. Oh, I'm so good. Is that to mean that you kind of knew from the beginning you were going to do or did? Okay. I kind of knew. I mean, I knew, you know, this is a, this is a, a paperback book. This is not like a fancy hardback book with photos and

bubble, bubble, blah, blah, blah. I think books like that are amazing. But that's not the book that I was

writing. But I started to feel like, well, but what if we did do like some different kinds of things in this more traditional paperback book and my publisher agreed? So I knew what I knew was going in. I didn't know how many chapters it was going to end up being. I didn't know how many, you know, weights and counterweights I would end up writing about. But I wanted after every chapter. I wanted

“there to be a counterweight. And so that's what those little, like, because I write about some heavy”

things, there are some heavy things happening in my life and around me. And I write pretty honestly about them. So I wanted, and I, I also wrote about a lot of really lighthearted things. But I wanted after each chapter to have this moment of a couple things. It was showing the work, part of the work of counterweights is knowing ourselves. And a lot of us don't. We don't know what we like. We don't feel like we really are allowed to want things or to long for things or to have

favorite things like we get real stuck in that. And so I wanted to offer these little glimpses of like things that I love books that I've read, movies that I like. You know, these, these ideas of like, as we do the work of understanding ourselves, then we are more able to find to locate our counterweights within our everyday life and world. But I also wanted it to be for the reader, like just a chance to like take a breath and have some fun. And, you know, I don't

“explicitly say in the book, make these lists yourself. But I think that's something that readers”

can certainly do is kind of take my example of, you know, I listed things that get better with time. Like, what do you think are things that get better with time? It's really fun work to do. Yeah, yeah, what are my favorite novels? What are my favorite movies that I've seen recently? And then I love this part about you collect, you collect the little bits of nature. Can you talk about your jars, your time capsules for the season? I can. You'll see behind me right there

is my shadow box. So that's a, yeah, it's kind of, you can't see what's in it right now. But there's stuff in it. I am a magpie forevermore. I don't, I think I was probably this way, even as a kid. I mean, I love your work, Jenny, and like helping us understand the value of letting childhood exist outdoors to be extent that we are able to. And, you know, I am almost 50 years old. The internet obviously was not a thing when I was a kid. But I grew up on this little piece of country land.

And I remember I have clear memories of when the trees would bud out and spring. I would pick the little flowers and make popry or like dump water and random things from the bathroom and try to

make perfume. I was always kind of into that sort of tactile, enjoying nature thing from a very

young age. And then I got away from it as we often do. We let, we let life grow us up too much, grow us out of the, the callings of our inner child that are so desperately trying to show us what we love and how we interact with the world. And so at some point, probably since I've lived here in this home, which was a really pivotal moment for our family moving here. But 15 years ago I started to, you know, here we're in the city. For the first time I was not living out in the country,

life looks different here, beauty in some ways looks different here. And so I found myself just starting to, you know, when we would go and walk, I would see a cool rock or I would see a pretty leaf or whatever the case would be. And I was just trying to like, it's almost like I was doing it

“without really understanding it. And as I've picked it apart as a writer does, I think I'm trying”

to just hold on to a moment. Like a moment of rest, of beauty, of delight, of peace and bring part of

kids who, which my kids did this to, kids who have desk drawers full of rocks and dirt and twigs. And

“that's kind of what I was doing as a, as the mom. And my kids were starting to be like, why is”

this stick here? Is this trash? Are you keeping this? So I ended up finding a little shadow box from a thrift store. And I started to place my little treasures into that box and then at the end of every season, I pack them into a glass jar and I put a picture of one of those jars in the book. Yep. So you can see like what my little time capsule of that season looks like. And it's become, I mean, I just kind of fell into doing this, but it's my favorite thing now. It's just, it's like a

little visual time capsule of my life and in my life through the seasons. Oh, I love it. Yeah, fall 20, 24. Look at that. Oh, you know, isn't it interesting? I talked to the German, her name's Aaron Lynam and she has a podcast called Nat Theo. It's about like the theology of nature, it's for kittens. And my daughter loves it. My nine-year-old daughter loves it. Like what about the hummingbird? And you know, I mean, she goes y'all like all sorts of different animals. And she talked

about, and I've never considered this year. And about how God made all these sensory experiences

imparted out, trigger our memories. Long before people had an iPhone where you could video tape everything, or Google Glass, you know, where you can just whatever record. Yeah. Long before that. And so you have these little beautiful bits of nature that serve as memory triggers. I want to read what you wrote. It's so beautiful. I never feel more loved than when my family enables my endless pursuit of living as a magpie in 10-ton collecting earths gifts. They've come to expect my trailing a few

paces behind, bending down, or reaching out for nature's runoff. And you say, "Some might call it clutter.

“I call it evidence. I was here. I am here." And I love that gives a permission. I think all of it”

gives permission. You're talking about the list and then someone would think, "Oh, why could do that?" And we often think that there's a collecting, like you said, for children. There's racks in their pockets. You know, there's racks in their desk drawer, but for adults to do as well. So, a lot about

nature in here. Always, you know, the Midwestern summers, the skies, the fig trees, a lot in here.

You say, "My body instinctively led me outside where values take root. Talk about spring, spring comes late to go, but it plays for keeps just a lot there about nature." And a lot in this one about church. Yeah. So, the good, the good, the bad and the ugly. In my case, we got kicked out of church. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I know. It's such a common story. Yeah. I mean, it's more relatable than I wish it would be. And to be very honest, I foolishly never imagined that it would happen

“to us. You know, I saw it happening around. And I empathized and I believed it and I felt it.”

And I just felt, I didn't even think about it. I just, I sort of felt like, "Well, you know, that's awful." And it's terrible that the church has become so harmful and painful to so many people.

But I never imagined it happening to us. And our church that had been our home for, you know,

13 years. It was a huge part of our life. There was so much good that had come out of it. And it shaped me. And really, it shaped me, my kids, my family. And really, meaningful ways that we, we hold on to even now. But yeah, that experience was extremely painful. That's one of the hardest seasons of our life. And in our marriage, even. I mean, it just took a toll. It was devastating. It was devastating. Yeah. I related to a lot of it, the fall out, the ramifications.

And the sort of, I guess I do the point of the swollen leg. Like, there's way worse things. People die. You know, people are in horrible, you know, just horrible situations. So you tend to sort of gloss over. But I mean, we had our kids the other day. They, um, okay, I learned about this thing. It's called the Fast Friends Questions. Have you heard of it? It's like, no, 36 questions. Someone did a study on how quickly can you build a relationship? And so they came up with these

36 open-ended questions. And that strangers come together for 45 minutes and banter back and forth with these open-ended questions. One of them is like, do you have any premonitions on how you, how you will die? I mean, that's a more toward the end of the list. Yeah. You know, what are the qualities you like in a friend? And anyway, it was like, it was so powerful that the people who didn't know each other's names, or they knew each other's names, but like, didn't have each other's contact

information. They just came in the strangers, saw each other out, like a huge portion of the people saw each other out based on the details that they learned in that 45 minutes. And two of the people actually got married. Well, anyway, it's pretty cool. It's called the Fast Friends questions or

we just did last week, which was trying to give your life story in four minutes or less. And the kids are, there's still kids, but for every single one of them, this was the central thing. Being kicked out of church, being ostracized, heartbreaking, losing community, no one checks on you. And in our kids, there was a pedophile as the youth pastor. And we had sent in letters of concern.

“And that's why we got kicked out. And they said we were gossips. And they said we were stretching”

the fabric of their community was so nasty. They kicked us out through certified letter in the mail.

And then when it finally came to light that the guy was a pedophile, because like the same year,

six months later, six or seven months, we went in to see how they would announce it to the church. We tried to watch the online service, but they didn't put it in there. And they had us escorted out by the giraff. I am zero percent surprised. I am so, so sorry. And so much of what you just said, almost completely mirrors our situation with our church. It is just all too common of a story. And I remember, I remember telling Corey, you know, this happened a couple of years ago for us.

And so my kids at that point, you know, we had one in college, two in high school. I mean, they were older. But I just remember thinking like panicking, like we're getting to the end of our time with them

“here at our home. And this is what they're going to remember. They're going to remember. They're,”

yeah, they're dad and their mom just being stressed to the max, crying, fighting with people,

you know, beating back false accusations, being called names. Like you said, being ostracized, like I just, I so desperately wanted to just put that bucket down and carry on with my life. And yet I couldn't. I mean, I was just, it was a bucket. I was forced to carry. And so we had to do our very best to find ways to stay whole and human and connect it to each other, connected to God, to help our kids process whatever they were processing. We were just forced into it.

And like you said, I mean, are there worse things that happened? Yes. I mean, you know, people suffer all kinds of horrible things. Relationships and divorce happens. Like all these things that we just we wouldn't have picked. But for us, it was catastrophic. And we survived it. And we continue to heal. We continue to move forward and hope. And it's also still painful. Yeah. Yeah, you talked about the part of the counterweight here was Taylor Swift. It's true. And I know, like, you know,

I know we're not all Swifties. I mean, I don't find your thing. But for us, it was so shocking, Jenny, because I had been like a very low level. I wouldn't have even called myself a Swiftie. But like, I liked some of her music. And I was liking it increasingly. You know, I was learning it a little bit more. But when my husband, like, my burly bearded jail chaplain husband started to really

“key into Taylor Swift music, I was kind of like, what is happening? This is so unexpected. And I believe”

in my, in my true heart, this was God's gift to us, because it gave us, it, it's so weird to say, it gave us like this united, this united project where we were like, okay, we're just going to go all in on Taylor Swift. We're going to listen to all from music. We're going to listen to podcasts about her music. We're going to pick it apart and figure it out. And so it was this big, you know, this big, like fake academic endeavor, pop culture. But it took a lot of time and intention. And when we

were doing our Taylor Swift homework, it was giving our brains a break from from the terror, right, of this church stuff. It was giving Cory and I something new to talk about, because we were just in that position where it overtook our lives, it overtook our conversation. It just gave us a beat to catch our

breath, to have some fun, to connect in a way that we had never connected before. And in so many ways,

during that particular season, it saved our lives as random as that might sound. I love it. I love it, because it's so heavy. You write things like this. Maybe the next time we spoke from the heart, we would be heard. Maybe if we try a different angle, our words would fall into place. Maybe if we stayed calm enough persistent enough, they would understand. You say, "Understand my survivors of abuse often avoid seeking accountability, intent, institutional or otherwise. In the end,

it's your throat. That's left raw and aching. Your nervous system. That's abandoned on high alert. You talked about which exile did you prefer?" And you guys, quote from Emily Freeman, that said, "We were leaving, but we felt left." You know, you're like this is the 13 years. And you can't remake it when you talk about the buckets that you carry. You cannot 13 years,

for this person to kid. And that's the meaning that we've been learning with our own kids, it's like, we're not ever going to have that exact same community again. And I don't, I mean,

“I believe in God's redemption and actually we've made some other really beautiful friends that,”

you know, then you're like, "Oh, I wouldn't know this person otherwise." But, you know, so the point with the Taylor Swift, it's like, "I mean, this is so heavy." And yet, then you bring in this other part that's really light. And I interviewed this man, his name's Adam Lane Smith, he talks about attachment, family counseling. Anyway, I learned about

this chemical that I never heard of, she had in called vasopressin. And it's a chemical that's

released when you are on mission together, like on a mission. And how I was like, "Oh, that's kind of interesting." Like, sometimes something seems so awful. Like you said, "This was really hard. This is your 25th year of marriage." You know, it's supposed to be like when everyone goes to Hawaii and gets their new jewelry and you're spending two hours getting sea glass in Buffalo, in New Buffalo. And you're also like, "This is a really hard year of marriage because we're

mired in the fallout from losing our church." Has been goes back to therapy. You, there was something else you had that I thought was so deep. You say, "Let me find it."

Oh, I really want to find it. It was about quarry. And you said, "As our spiritual home

went up in flames, I watched parts of my husband incinerate. The battle overtook our lives." And so the counterweight, it's a great picture because you're like, "Who would have thought Taylor Swift?" But it does go to show you that you come together and you folk you pick up a different bucket and you hold it at the same time. And it can help you to get through. Yeah. And then you had this beautiful list of other people's counterweights. Holy Alliance, counterweights.

“Can you talk about that? I'll read a couple of them. Can you talk about that?”

Yeah, so Hawaii Alliance is, I've mentioned my husband quarry is a chaplain at the Elkert County

jail. The second largest jail in Indiana. It's a massive place, unfortunately. That it's not a

point of pride to have an enormous jail. But that is his full-time work. And so in the aftermath of losing our church, we sort of, in some ways, fell into, we were already like jail ministry and incarcerated people are just interwoven into the fabric of our life and have been for a long long time. So just a really important and meaningful part of our community, the community that we have learned so much from, and we consider them in so many ways, like our pastors and our guides.

Right? So the community itself was not new that group of people. But we sort of fell into leading a Sunday morning gathering. We do not call it a church. Some people kind of do. We don't.

“But it's a Sunday morning gathering of people from work early. So at this point, we're up to like”

100 people from work early, which is right in our neighborhood, which is like an incarceration facility for people who can go to work and church and some things like that. And so we meet early Sunday mornings for an hour. We call ourselves the holy alliance because, you know, we are set apart. And we are for each other and with each other. We are an alliance, a family together. And we just so desperately, we ourselves want and need that belonging. We believe we all want and need that

belonging. And so that became this like this little shoot of new green growth on the grave of something devastating. You know, and it happened, it happened around that time and has become so redemptive and healing and such a source of light and life for us. I guess it's kind of similar, right? It's like it's not the same. These aren't people that were with your kids when they grew up and that you saw your kids right in the church

performance, you know, and all those years. But it is something new. Our middle daughter is a singer and she, she's in middle school, but she, um, saying, she got to sing the star-spangled banner at this like homecoming basketball game. And it was packed and she really like nailed it. She's pretty good. No one else in our family can sing everyone so jealous. Anyway, so she nailed it and she had to render and she just, I mean, she broke down

sobbing and she said later, she said mom, she said a year ago, I had no friends. But you know, then in some ways, you're like, well, she did experience with God's redemption, you know, and that's right. She learned something through that. Yeah. So I want to read a clip. I'll go ahead. You go. Well, no, I was just going to say before

our daughter Ruby, who's 19, she's our only daughter. She's getting ready to move far away, like 600 miles away, the end of this week. And so because all of these folks are incarcerated,

they're always people leaving, getting out of work release. It's like a positive thing.

But we're always sad to lose them. They go back to their lives wherever they are. Some of them are able to stick around. And they're always new people coming in. So it's a community of people that's always turning, like influx. So we, we designate a few minutes every Sunday to read a blessing over whoever is graduating or moving on. And so this past Sunday, Ruby agreed. She's very shy. But she said she did want to come forward for the blessing. And when Corey, you know, there were

a couple other folks who were getting out of work release that came up. And then he said, my daughter Ruby is getting ready to move away and watching, especially the women get up. Because it's like,

“if you want to come up and like put your arms around, people, you know, while we pray for them,”

so many of these adult women who don't really know Ruby super well, right? But they've been in Holy Alliance with her for however long they've been there. And this is what a community does for each other. And so just watching my daughter, my young daughter, who's been shaped in ways, she probably can't quite identify yet. But I know that this is shaping all of us in different ways and to watch these women who so much of society would judge or, you know, denigrate or, you know,

try to keep their children from. People who are incarcerated watching them put their arms around my daughter was just beyond. Wow. And you're in this community of people who are going out

and doing something new, you know, like you said, it's always going back maybe to what they were

doing, but this community of people who are used to being influx and so then they know how to pray for her and how to come around her, how to support her in that time. Yeah. Wow.

“Well, these are her things. One of our kids really struggles with trust. She's like, I mean,”

I saw these people are my friends. And I'm like, where all of a sudden we're not at church anymore and no one reaches out and says, oh, are you? Where have you been? Yeah. We got asked for it out by the police and these people that get to have been in our home that we've coached their kid's sports. No one's like, how are you? What's happening? What's going on? It's just, it's hard. It's kind of horrible. Yeah. It really is. It's the wolves that eat the sheep. I read a lot of books

about it now at this point. Right. I read that book too. Yeah. Yeah. But you say, what does it really mean for a church to be safe, safe for whom? So if you're going through that situation like that, or something that's just really heavy, then you know, it might be Taylor Swift. Right. I might, my hope is that when people were reading that chapter in particular, it's one of the heavier chapters that I wrote, but I imagine most people did not see Taylor Swift coming and that's just the way

it happened. Right. I was just writing down what happened, but I got a little like a little kick out of knowing that people were going to be like, wait, what? How did you go from this to Taylor Swift on one page? So yeah. I love, I love that you pointed it out. What it does is it makes you realize like, okay, this is really heavy. Whatever the thing is, you're listening in whatever the thing is right now that you're holding in your left arm, that's so heavy. And you think, oh, gosh, I have to find

something equally as big that's going to counter this out. And it's just whatever you can find that brings you joy. So you had examples from the Holy Alliance, their counterweight, and I just wanted

“to read two of them. Cardio mixed with worship music and peppermint essential oils from Adam.”

You know, we do it. That's a simple thing, but it really can, and to your point, these are people who are, you know, have had, I would imagine, just the hardest of the hard pasts, you know, that's true. You can't even probably even imagine. And then the situation that they're in now where they're really trying to come out of it and change their life. And they're going to say,

Cardio mixed with worship music and peppermint essential oil. And then there was this one from

Micah. I am a door duster. And I look for it to the interactions with the customers, retailers, and other people I meet in the restaurants and stores. Many just need one encouraging word or smile to help them out a little. I enjoy this. That one, that one, cry when I first read. I mean, what I wanted, it's not that I wanted. It's that I know deep in my bones that counterweights are accessible to everyone. This is not about being bougie or having privilege or wealth.

I mean, some of the things I wrote about, yeah, I mean, some of them, like, I wrote about traveling. And that requires some amount of privilege and money and all of those things. But at its core, counterweights are available and accessible to everyone. And so when I, when I brought this concept to Holy Alliance, and I explained it in probably two minutes. And they, like, instantly, they got it.

you know, write it down here, sign your name so I can print it. And the stuff that they instantly,

“it's like, these are really small things. Several people mentioned a cold pop. We're here in the”

Midwest. We call so-to-pop. And several people are like a cold pop as a counterweight. It's like something easy that I can reach for. Yeah. And it fills that good bucket just a little bit.

It lifts me up just a little bit off the ground. Because this was never about achieving balance.

It was never about, like, can a tailor swift song counterbalance this devastation for losing our church? Of course not. That's not how this works. It's not about, like, you know, this can't cancel out this. And whatever, it's not how life works. But it's about finding these little things that can lift us a little further off the ground so that we can carry on. And they instantly got it. And their answers just blew me away. Yeah. Yes. And I love the variety. Some of them are about

relationships. Like, my kids, my grandkids. Some of them are about a lot of them are about music, movement. And then a lot of them are about work. So this, I mean, this guy's saying, I'm a

door dasher. And I learned about door dash probably 18 months ago. And I was like, this is an incredible

adventure. What? You know, we were at a hotel. And I was there with, like, some of my kids, my husband and my son were else. We didn't have a car. My colleague's supposed to get food. And so I downloaded that door dash app. And I was like, this is a miracle. It is a game changer. Yes, you can get anything. Yeah. And I'm so I do feel like often probably when the door dash person shows up, you're dealing with a person who was like, so thankful. Right. Like, I am filled with gratitude.

Because otherwise, you wouldn't have eaten in my children. You know, so I loved it. It was such a beautiful mix of these, of these counterweights. And in such simple things, sunshine on my face, everything from that to music. And the idea is just remind you that art or feeding people good food, or someone wrote Mexican food, that these small things really can make a difference. When you're in the hardest of the hardest situations, I love the book, Shannon. I love it. I love it. It's so

honoring. It's, um, you use the word soul-merishing. And I was like, I can't remember what it was

“related to. But the phrase soul-merishing came up when I was, that's, that's how I feel about this book.”

It's soul-merishing. I love the, I love the picture of the tree that you talked about. And you said, writing the book was soul-merishing. And I felt like reading the book was soul-merishing. Oh, I'm so, that means so much. I loved it. All right, let's wrap it up. So this is out now if you want to grab a copy. It is called counterweights in the central practice for holding hope in a heavy world. That's it. One more topic. Hotness Patelity. You're the first person to ask me about

hotness Patelity. I'm so glad. Well, you say it's one of your greatest counterweights. You're in perfect tone. Yeah, it is. I mean, tone for me. I'm a person who I am an introvert. I, I love to be cozy. Wow. I love to, I know. Interesting to me because you do so much with people. I do. And, and that's maybe even all the more reason why I just love my home. My husband Corey, we've kind of switched roles and it's very interesting to me. He used to be, like, we were both

introverted. But he was almost like 100% introverted. And I was a little more middle. I'm becoming more introverted. Although, you know, I have public, I do public work and I do people we work and I love both. Yeah. Corey's becoming more extroverted. And so when he gets a free evening, he's like,

“let's walk into town. You know, let's see who we see. And let's, and I'm like, are you kidding me?”

Like, all I want to do is just be here in my home and be cozy and watch my show or read my book or put her around the kitchen or whatever. We're, we're just all different. But yes, I, I have learned in large part thanks to my neighbors who have invited me into their, into their homes, into their spaces, into their, you know, I wrote about, and maybe I don't know if it was ministry of ordinary places or start with hello. But I've been invited into, have tea with a person who did not have a

table. Like, so many of the people around us are just their lives are different. They are struggling in different ways. And yet I have received the truest hospitality from some of them. And that in and of itself has allowed me to really reconsider what hospitality looks like and what I want my home to be. You know, we're so long for so long. It was like, you know, I get into decorating and I love to cook and, you know, all these kinds of things. But if we're not careful, we can find

ourselves in situations where like, nobody's allowed in our home unless everything is perfect,

which is for me, never. So if I understand the value of inviting people into my space, which is,

I learn more and more like, even if it's not my first instinct to be like, yeah, come on,

and come on over on short notice, I'm always going to be so glad I did. And so it just it brought

“that bar, that expectation that I put on myself down. And I think that, like, when we can get to,”

like, low bar hospitality, which I call hotness fatality, like, that's where that's where the good stuff is because then it, whoever is in our imperfect space suddenly realizes, like, oh, wait, we're doing this. Like, we're just, we're just being together as we are, as our homes are, like, I can do that. And that is where I want to, that's where I want to, kind of, make my home. Oh, I loved the ideas. Come on Christmas Day, there will be snacks and a puzzle.

Yeah, it's not super excited, but I love and I'm like, puzzles. You know, we consider

around trying to find the pieces, vasopresson, you know, you have a common mission, a threat,

talk about things, come for Easter lunch. There will be store-bought pie served on paper plates. You say, if we hope to live a good life of contentment, we have to exit the trap of comparing ourselves only to those who have more than we do and learn from those who have less uncomfortable as that might be. My imperfect home is among my greatest counterweights. Bring what you have is always an adventure and a feast. What a book. What a book. We didn't cover a lot. There's, I know,

there's a lot in there. There's a lot in here. Talk about three to one. You talk about when you are rude to the Kruger lady. Yeah, you say the way we treat those in our peripheral vision matters. That's a beautiful story. I love reading about that. And you, I mean, there's so much in here, is a wonderful, wonderful book. Huge congrats to you. Thank you so much. This is book four.

“So can you tell people about the other books as well as your subject and your free counterweights?”

Counterweights, am I even talking? Counterweights, I mean, it's a mouthful. It's a mouthful. Yes,

I would love to. My first book is titled Falling Free, rescued from the life I always wanted.

And that tells the story that I hinted at somewhere in this conversation about when my husband and I and our young kids at the time move from that picture perfect storybook country living into this neighborhood. Next came the Ministry of Ordinary Places. And that book tells the story of like, oh, wow. We're in a very different place. And it's going to change everything about our lives. And so it's sort of about like looking around us in our ordinary lives and letting the people around us

kind of change us, letting ourselves be changed by that. That all of my books are faith-based, start with hello came next. And that book is not like overtly faith-based because we wanted that to be like,

“this is about how to live as neighbors together. And that's for everybody. In a perfect world,”

that means people who believe very differently are living together in coexisting together and supporting each other, loving each other as neighbors. And so that's a little outside of my typical writing lane. I'm a storyteller by heart. And by nature, I guess I should say, and that still has a lot of storytelling in it. But that book start with hello is the little more, it's not a how too because you just, it doesn't work that way. But it's a little more instructional, I guess I would say like

very practical ways to to learn to live as neighbors. And then counterweights is number four. And counterweights is sort of in the vein of Ministry of Ordinary Places, which, you know, it's these really short chapters. It's storytelling out of my, my personal, unique, wonderful, challenging life. But this one is unique too because like you said, it's got photos, it's got lists, it's got like fun little counterweights sprinkled throughout it. Yeah. And then okay, you said sub-stack. I do have

a sub-stack. You can find, it's called the soup, but you can find it by just Googling Shannon Martin sub-stack. It's a weekly sub-stack where I write about a lot of these similar things. It's a best-selling sub-stack. So a lot of people are really enjoying it. And then I started in November is separate thing called counterweights weekly. And that is free for anyone who wants it's not on sub-stack, but you can subscribe to all these things on my website. Counterweights weekly is

a short little weekly. Email it goes out midweek, Wednesdays. And in it, I write a couple short little paragraphs about a political weight that I have noticed or that has weighed me down over the past week. And then a couple paragraphs about a counterweight that has helped to lift me back up. Ah, you offer so much. So much. I love sourthallow. I just like pulled up my own notes. I'm, I, what am I notes say? And, you know, I have, I wrote down, I loved your writing.

Like when you say, we've been together for 13 years faded by birth dates in zip codes.

if you grow up together. And then you talk about when you become an adult, you say forging new

friendships and adulthood is a high-stakes business. No one teaches us that community has to be built with our hands and our tender hearts and our precious time. No one breaks it down. And no one

really talks about how what to do when it's shattered. I'm sorry. You know, the books go hand in hand.

“I think the counterweight they do. They do. They work really well together. And yeah, I mean,”

they're just, they're so much of, for me, it's kind of, it's fun to go back and see, like, you know, my kids, so my kids all came into our family through adoption. That's something a little bit unique about our family. But I write about, like, I can go back and read my books and watch, my kids grow, watch our family grow and change our minds about some things and shift into new ways. I mean,

“this is what life is doing. If we are, if we are not changing, we are not growing. And so I,”

I love thinking of them kind of in sequence and how they just tell our story.

Yeah, yes. Huge congrats. Counterweights and essential practice for holding hope in a heavy

world. It's available wherever you buy your books. Jen and thanks for being here again. I, it's my pleasure. I loved it.

“But what I wanted to do is not to get a lot of the students. The master by tag,”

laptop, the soft hand, the internet, so master is really great. I say, you can say, you can say that to Rekouen. You have a story about it, right? But you don't believe it. egal. It's a happy story. It's a story with how so much. And when you then work, it's a shame. That's right. Save. How so much? Hold it, thank you, Rekouen.