On a FaceTime call with Ryan's parents, Ryan mentioned a USC game. His dad said, "Oh, I didn't know you were a fan." Ryan has been a USC fan since he was eight. It was a throwaway line, and his dad didn't mean anything by it. But Ryan felt his smile dim, and he noticed it as it was happening.

That small sting is where this conversation begins. Change always costs something, and a lot of what it costs is relational. Over the past several years, both of us have moved a long way from the faith we were raised in. For Ryan, it was a shift from searching for the one true story to asking how to live well when no one really knows. For Jennie, it came through years of being told no, wait, or move over, until she finally said, "I can't do church anymore." She was in her last semester of seminary, writing a capstone paper arguing that community was the missing element in spiritual formation, while we were walking away from ours.

We didn't only leave a church. We moved into a different world from many of the people we love. Distance like that is rarely announced. It shows up in a forgotten detail, or in a question like "Who's the common denominator?"

Not changing would have cost us something too. We would have kept our heads down, ignored the pain, and kept living within limits on who we were allowed to become. And change has opened things up. Jennie describes it as walking out of a slot canyon onto open plains. We see people and their stories differently now, with curiosity instead of an agenda.

What we're still learning is how to stay close to people who are still where we used to be. We don't think the two worlds can be fully bridged. What we can do is notice when something hurts, ask why, and keep showing up as the people we want to be. Maybe that's what grief asks of us: not to forget what we've lost, but to make room for it in the life we're living now.

Moments

• 0:00 — A dimmed smile on a FaceTime call
• 3:48 — "I don't think anyone knows, so now what?"
• 9:53 — Writing about community while walking away from ours
• 18:18 — The difference between a pastor and a prophet
• 21:33 — "What should I do?" and what no one can promise us
• 28:33 — Out of the slot canyon, onto the open plains
• 31:18 — Staying close to people still inside the system
• 35:50 — Grief as integration, not forgetting

Questions to Sit With

• What has a change in your life cost you, and what did it make possible?
• What would it have cost you not to change?
• Where do you feel distance from someone you love, and what might that distance be asking of you?
• How has someone else's change landed on you?

Mentioned in This Episode

Todd
A mentor who once told Ryan there's a big difference between a pastor and a prophet.

Pink Floyd, "Is There Anybody Out There?"
Stuck in our heads by the end.

Keep Reading

• Why are Questions so Threatening? — Episode 2, which this conversation keeps circling back to.
• Lose the Script — Jennie on her dissertation defense, the UNFOLD Model, and the ordination question.
• Whatever Purity Meant