Ep. 403 Shannan Martin - Counterweights: Holding Hope in a Heavy World

In this episode, I’m joined by Shannon Martin to talk about her new book Counterweights and how we keep moving forward when life feels overwhelmingly heavy. We explore grief, collective trauma, and why quick fixes and toxic positivity fall short, alongside the small, ordinary practices that help us stay grounded and human. This conversation moves through faith, paradox, community, and the kingdom of God, not as something we wait for, but something we practice together here and now. If you’re carrying more than you know what to do with and looking for a way to remain present, honest, and hopeful, this conversation is for you.

Shannan Martin is the bestselling author of several books, including Start with Hello, The Ministry of Ordinary Places, and the popular Substack The Soup. Shannan is a wannabe gardener, a news geek, a fighter for justice, and a thrift store stalker. She and her family live as grateful neighbors in Goshen, Indiana, where Shannan is on staff at the local community kitchen. Find her on Instagram @shannanwrites.

Shannan's Book:

Counterweights

Shannan's Recommendations:

Shrinking

Where Do We Go From Here

Cherished Belonging

Love Walked In

All About Love

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Transcript

Shannan Martin: 0:46

The abundant life does not just mean that we ignore the bad stuff and we focus on the the joy or the good stuff. It means we get it all, and our job is to figure out how to carry it you

Joshua Johnson: 1:06

Josh. Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, how do we keep moving forward when everything feels heavy, not metaphorically heavy, actually heavy. Grief, violence, dehumanization, a sense that the world is off kilter, like something sacred has been flipped upside down. What do you do when the weight doesn't cancel out, when there's no neat balance, when Joy feels too small to compete with the grief you're carrying? That's the question behind this conversation. Today I'm talking with Shannon Martin about her new book, counterweights. At first, the idea sounds almost too simple. When life is heavy, you need something that helps pull you back to center. But what happens when the bucket of heaviness is overflowing? What happens when the pain is collective, when it's not just personal sorrow, but shared trauma played out in real time, in public, on our screens and in our communities. We talk about grief and paradox, about why toxic positivity doesn't work, about why small, ordinary practices, like cooking, resting, paying attention, choosing care, might matter more than we think. We talk about faith, not as a private escape, but as something rooted in community, about the Kingdom of God not being something we wait for after death, but something we're invited to practice here and now, and about what it looks like to hold both sorrow and joy without pretending one cancels out the other. This conversation is about learning how to carry what we must carry without becoming numb, about finding counterweights that don't erase the pain but help us stay human inside of it. If you're feeling worn down, overwhelmed or unsure of how to keep going, this conversation is for you. So join us. Here is my conversation with Shannon. Martin. Shannon, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on it's great to be here. We're gonna be talking about counterweights today. Your new book. But the concepts of counterweights is really important, I think, for us to be able to keep moving forward in this crazy, hard, difficult, strange world that we live in today. Let's just open it up to start out like, what are counterweights and why are they helpful?

Shannan Martin: 3:34

Yeah, sure, I'd love to. So I always have to give at least for the time being, I'm giving my dad credit for the initial concept of counterweights. The longer I talk about it, I have a feeling I'll veer away from from that. But for now, my dad, Dwight, from Pleasant Hill, Ohio, gets, gets the credit for this, and here's why. I grew up not on a functional farm, but I grew up as sort of a farm kid on, you know, out kind of in the country, with barns and some livestock in the whole nine. And I remember my dad telling me from a very young age, myself and my siblings, when you need to carry something heavy, which you know, on a property like that, there are a lot of heavy things that apparently need to be carried when you have something heavy to carry, what makes it easier, counterintuitively, is to carry something equally heavy in the other hand. And I remember him telling us this when we were young, and it just, it really didn't make a lot of sense to me, but he would demonstrate, you know, carrying cement blocks or heavy suitcases or buckets of grain when you carry, when you're carrying something very heavy in one hand, the tendency is to kind of lurch over to the side, and you're kind of struggling forward at the point that you level out that load and carry something equally heavy in the other hand, it pulls you back to center. And so at that point, upright and ready, you're more easily able to move forward. And so he, you know, my dad is a blue collar man to this day. He meant that in the most practical and literal sense possible. But because I am a writer, you know, I go to metaphor. And I found myself years ago thinking about this idea of two buckets with, you know, sort of the picture of a scale with us and our lives, our ordinary, imperfect, beloved lives, as the fulcrum of that scale. And so we have all of these hard and heavy things on one side. This bucket is filled with things that we cannot change, things that we never asked for, things that we wish we did not have to carry. And yet here we are being asked to carry them. So. If we set out in our lives to be more intentional about filling the other bucket with things that are good, with things that bring us peace, with things that bring us delight or joy, or you know, sometimes it's even just the ability to honestly grieve things. If we can keep that other bucket full, it pulls us back to center. It allows us to keep breathing through the chaos. It just keeps our heads above water. And I don't believe that the goal is this mythical sense of perfect balance. I don't really think that even exists, and that's not what this is about. But when we find ourselves kind of tipping into despair, if we can be on the lookout for the good things happening around us to keep filling that other bucket as we go, it might lift us a little further off the ground. And right now, that is a win. You know, right now, I we're all living different lives in different places, but I think a lot of us are finding that life feels kind of heavy. The world around us feels heavy and unmanageable. We're not quite sure how to keep going, how to survive, how to carry everything. And so the idea of counterweighting the heavy things that is is sort of my and my dad's prescription for moving forward.

Joshua Johnson: 7:04

You know, when I woke up this morning, I was thinking about this interview. I was thinking about our conversation, thinking about counterweights. And it's the second anniversary of my mother in law's death. Today. She she passed away about 20 feet away from where I am right now. And you know, I woke up. I was then talking to my wife about counterweights. She's holding the grief of her mother, the loss of her mother, she's she's holding some crises that she's dealing with that are really heavy in her job. She's also we, you know, we spent a lot of time working with refugees, and we spent a lot of time with them in their living rooms and just drinking tea. And so seeing the dehumanization that is happening in our country at the moment is very, very heavy, yeah, and it feels like the the heavy bucket is overflowing, like it's like unmanageable at the moment. And thinking about a counterweight, sometimes I think that, Oh, I'm going to look for little pockets of beauty and joy and have some gratitude, and it feels very slight. It doesn't feel like it's going to counter the weight of the big bucket that's overflowing. Right? How do counterweights work? And how does it help us to walk forward when they don't seem to be, you know, optimized and equal.

Shannan Martin: 8:32

Yeah, they're not equal. They're absolutely not equal. And that's something i i write quite a bit about in the book, because that is my lived experience, too. And not just my lived experience, but the lives of people around me, which are even more difficult and challenging and painful than my own personal life. You know, we get to bear witness even the story you just shared about your wife. You know that is, that is heavier than the load I am personally carrying today. And so you're right, there is no there is no little pocket of joy big enough to cancel that out. And so the reality is we can't. The reality is everything that we face on a day to day basis, a large portion of it, we do not have a say in it, and it cannot be canceled out. My goal in counterweights, and just my personal practice in counterweights, is, if you know, if you're picturing life as a scale, if I can put something, even something very small, something that seems sort of insignificant, into that other bucket, if it lifts me up just a little bit further off of the ground that allows me to keep moving forward. And if we can be looking for those counterweights throughout our days, throughout our lives, you know, from the raw materials of whatever we have been given, it doesn't equalize. I wish I had a formula for that. This is not a science it. There is not an equation that works for this. But it gives us, it increases our capacity just a little bit to to bear and to carry what we must bear, and we must carry. And so, yeah, I think we have to get away from the idea. The thing I'm certainly not doing here is talking about some sort of toxic positivity, where, if we just focus on I remember years ago. I mean, our country was in a state of turmoil, similar to what we are in now, and I remember somebody near me, I mean, I was just, I was feeling the heaviness so profoundly, and somebody close to me said, I'm just choosing to focus on joy. And it was, it was so offensive to me, to be quite honest, and a conversation was had. I just don't think that is what we're trying. To do here, to turn a blind eye to the things that are that are grieving us, and to just focus on joy. That's never going to work. The reality is, if we believe that our lives are sacred and that everything within our lives have something to teach us, that they are, that we're just asked to carry them for whatever reason. Sometimes we can't even make sense of these things. If we can honestly look at both things, if we can honestly look at the things that are hard and heavy and allow ourselves to feel what our bodies are feeling, and to experience doubt, sometimes to experience anger, you know, whatever, whatever difficult emotions we're going through to be really honest and to treat that as sort of a sacrament, even you know that we're going to be brutally honest about the things that are hard and heavy, but we owe it to ourselves and to this one life we've been given to also get a little more intentional about being really honest about the things around us that somehow, in spite of it, all continue to bring just little kind of shimmers of goodness and beauty and joy and peace and comfort. I think that taken together, that is the abundant life that we have been promised, the abundant life, does not just mean that we ignore the bad stuff and we focus on the the joy or the good stuff. It means we get it all, and our job is to figure out how to carry it.

Joshua Johnson: 12:21

It is both hands. It's not like either or it's not that's great. Life is a paradox. It's not like all good or all bad and but we see things through. In this country at the moment, it feels like we're seeing things through. And, you know, an either or proposition, yes, like it's either this or it's that. Yeah, but there is a both and that we can hold. How do we hold paradox as we're living in in a place, you're living in a community, you're living amongst immigrants, yeah, your husband is is a chaplain in a jail or cook in a community kitchen. There's places where you're seeing goodness and beauty, yeah, but there's places you're seeing ugliness, that's right, dehumanization of of of your neighbors, of people that you know you're living proximate to. How do we hold the paradox of our life?

Shannan Martin: 13:13

My family moved into this community maybe 15 years ago, and I think I am wired to be a person who thinks about things in binaries. And maybe that's just a human thing. Maybe that's a Shannon thing, I don't know, but I am the type of person that, you know, when something was hard. For example, our kids are mostly grown now, but when we had, you know, a bunch of little kids, and that was a challenging stage for me. If one of them was going through something difficult, you know, a challenging phase, I was inclined to feel like it was going to be this way forever. You know, I tend toward that sort of things are either good or they're terrible. My day is either fantastic or it's a real bummer. It was moving into this community and into the context that you sort of just laid out. And you know, belonging in a place is a gradual thing. And so to the extent that I felt belonging in year one, I feel differently now in year 15. But at some point, my writing started to shift a little bit. The things I was saying online started to shift a little bit. And I remember a friend of mine saying, Man Shannon, you just seem like you're really sad all the time. Now, I was writing about harder things because I was bearing witness to harder things, to things I have not experienced personally. And that really struck me, because I think what was actually happening was I was finally being, I was finally seeing without sort of, you know, a veil in front of me, and I was finally feeling some permission to be honest about the state of the world. I was seeing it more clearly. I was speaking it more clearly. But what struck me about her comment was, and I sort of took a step back, and I said to her, every single day I'm sad, and that's true, and every single day, I feel joy and peace at some point. And that is also true. And so it is the it is the community that surrounds me that taught me a little bit more. I don't think I have the answer to, you know, how do we navigate paradox? How do we think about it. How do we live it? But watching people who struggle in different ways than I have struggled, and who struggle deeply and and survive and thrive despite it all, they have been my pastors and my teachers and my guides about what it can look like to. To to bear it all, to figure out how to carry it all, to do that imperfectly, but to do that in community. I just think any opportunity we have to to be immersed with people who are struggling in different ways, and to get a little more intentional about sort of sitting in that with each other that is our that is our path through.

Joshua Johnson: 17:10

As we're walking through that path, I think one of the things that struck me is the conviction that your husband said is that no one should have to experience death, yeah, to experience the kingdom of God, yeah? And, I mean, that's a that's very powerful to say that we could experience some of that today, here and now, as about what is happening here, and not just about what's going to happen when we die, right? How did that shift and change your outlook, on your community, on your life, on your faith?

Shannan Martin: 17:44

I mean, initially, probably the first time I heard him say that, I sort of felt like, Uh oh. I've had a lot of those moments in my life. You know, I grew up in in pretty my husband, I both grew up in conservative white working class, mostly communities and and deeply embedded in more conservative evangelicalism. I know for sure that what caused Corey to make that statement was was the answer I gave you previously. This community has changed our outlook on the world, on God, on theology, on politics, like we have rewired so much of our lives because of this, this context that we're in. And still, there are all these things along the way, and I write some of these things in the counterweights book, but there are these moments where I'm like, oh, you know, like, Am I in trouble? Here? Am I? Am I being called into God's principal office, Principal's office over this. I'm sure that was one of them, because it was just so fundamentally different than what I had been taught my entire life, which was, all of this is temporary and it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that you pray this particular prayer quietly in your bedroom or at church up front at the altar. You pray that prayer, and then you bide your time, and then you go to heaven one day, and everything is perfect there. That is a difficult concept for a child to grasp, and it might be even a more difficult concept for a fully grown, almost 50 year old woman to grasp, because I still don't get it. I find such freedom and liberation, collective liberation, and this idea of like, Wait, it seems to matter to God an awful lot for us to love each other, like to really with our with our bodies and our bones and our tears and our sweat, to really, really love each other. So maybe this time on Earth is not just this random, you know, necessity that we have to, we have to sort of struggle through it to get to the big prize at the end, heaven, whatever that really is, up in the clouds, wherever it is, you know, what would it look like to commit to creating imperfectly and incompletely, to be working towards the kingdom of of God right here on Earth, just like, just like Jesus tells us in the Lord's Prayer, you know on earth as it is in heaven, what does it look like to build that and create that and curate that together at the point that we started to kind of reshape that part, that sort of fundamental part of our theology life becomes this wild and unpredictable and sometimes devastating and often exhilarating opportunity to really be in it together and to create the better world that we are still able to imagine, even when things feel pretty

Joshua Johnson: 20:57

weak and we're holding things and we're trying to move forward and actually seeing that there is a place where we can actually be with God In the middle of our community, you wrote Jesus's parable in mark where it says that a farmer scatters a seed. Kingdom of God is like a farmer scattering his seeds and he goes, goes to sleep, and that, you know, the plant grows and grows without him actually even paying attention to it. It's just going to grow. You actually write through your process of that parable and understanding it from a me centric, individualized, like it's about me, or I'm the farmer. It's about me doing all of the work to it's about us. It's about community. What shifts when we see things in a communal perspective, when we see. That we are in this together, that we are all the garden that is growing,

Shannan Martin: 21:54

yeah, I mean, I think to say it really simply and maybe annoyingly, everything shifts. Everything changes. It changes everything. I mean, it just it that, in a nutshell, has changed who I am and how I move through this world, how I see life unfolding around me, how I see God engaging with us moment by moment. I think it's such a disservice. It was, it was such a disservice to me and to any of us who were given this very individualistic faith that was, it was completely personal. And of course, you know, I believe in a personal relationship with Jesus. I might, I might sort of experience it in different ways now, but I believe that it's true. I just I also believe that our faith was never meant to be private. I think there's a difference between, you know, having a personal relationship and having a private relationship that that your faith stays contained over here, and everything is you know, between you and God and and how you interact over here, how you interact on the other the other seven days of a week, or whatever the case may be, that these two planes do not intersect when we can really sort of reshape our faith into the garden of God where we're all we're growing and we're dying And we are taking root and we're thriving, and we're drinking the same rain, and we're, you know, growing under the same sun, and we're struggling against the same wind, and God is is our caretaker through all of this, and showing us how to tend to each other, to lean into each other, to let our roots get tangled. That is a faith that compels me much differently than this idea of this very static, private, quiet faith that simultaneously, you know, there's this element of of this, this private, individualistic story happening here, but also you're supposed to be evangelizing everybody else around you so that they can go to heaven one day like it just stopped making sense to me. And the thing that that really forced that that break was seeing myself within community, was watching the way my community, which, as you said, My community is at my neighborhood, is mostly immigrant people, our friend base, our our lived community, is heavily people who have been or are currently incarcerated, people who have lived their whole lives below the poverty line. I mean, all of these, these things that have not been my personal struggle, but when we root into the garden together, what we find is that you know, the things that influence or impact the flourishing of one impacts the flourishing of all

Joshua Johnson: 25:03

this may just be for you and me, because I don't have permission from my wife to read this, but she just wrote a poem. It's called a cry for help for America, January 2026, where we are. And so I just want to read this. It's not very long, so I'll read it, and then we'll talk. She writes, capsized Shalom. Dresses both sides in a white hood, capsized Shalom modeled by our modern day Rome. Tree of Life is swapped for poison wood as we justify evil towards good with capsized shalom, rupturing our reflections, once crafted as Imago day rupturing reflections designed for love and connection. I can almost hear foes brazen Bray as our Quintessence is drained by rupturing reflections. Commander, step in, lash us to the mast. Stop our urges. Commander, step in, this violence we're up to our necks in will rip us apart and submerge us as our mutual hatred converges. Commander, step in, as she's lamenting the violence, the upside down, shalom. She she writes in Jeremiah 811 it says, And they treat the wounds of my beloved people as though they were scratches. Don't worry. They say peace, everything is well. When there is no peace and nothing is well, yeah,

Shannan Martin: 26:33

that's powerful. Capsized shalom, yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 26:38

capsized Shalom. That's

Shannan Martin: 26:40

what we're living. That's what we're seeing all around us. And I think there's, there's some, there's an extra layer. Are, and I think about this a lot, we are drowning in toxicity. It's not just that toxicity and violence and harm and hatred and capsize Shalom is happening all around us, and we sort of know it, and we sort of don't that's not our situation. Our situation is we are seeing, we are watching in in full color video every day, sometimes every hour, we are watching people be murdered, harmed, abducted, ripped from their places of belonging. I mean, it's a trauma, it's a collective trauma, and I think that is really the root of of where my counterweights practice became an emergency. Because I just, I don't think I would go so far as to say I don't think any of us get the luxury of opting out of this? I think it's, you know, being part of the garden of God means we owe each other something, and sometimes the thing I can offer is simply that I will bear witness, that I will be honest about what I'm seeing, and that I will call a thing by its government name, you know, like, I'm going to call things out, and I'm going to I'm going to risk being seen as a little dramatic sometimes by saying, This is what I see, and this is what we've seen across history, and this is what this feels like, and this is what this means for people. And so at the point that we that we really feel committed to honesty about the heaviness, we just have to find ways to fill that bucket. I mean, I'm just going to keep coming back to the this, this visual picture of this, this hard reality is, is our reality. It's what we have right now. The danger is that we become numb. The danger is that we completely burn out. We find ourselves exhausted. We find ourselves sinking into depression, despair, we just check out. I don't think I know for sure that that is not the answer. And so, what can we do? What can we do day to day, hour to hour, to just offload a little bit of the stress and onboard a little bit of that true shalom, like what what the love of God really means and what it really looks like, and, you know, perpetuating the flourishing for the people who are struggling the most. What does that look like right now? Maybe our little counterweights, which, in my experience, and I wrote through a lot of them through the book, and some of them are a little more grandiose, and some of them are very personal and weird. Because I want people to understand, this is a this is it's contextual, right? I mean, we're all we've got to we've got to be able to listen to ourselves, to our bodies, which, by the way, is another thing I was taught was like Danger, danger. As I've learned to just listen to my body and trust that my body is letting me know what it needs, and as I'm learning who I am at the age of almost 50, what do I actually like? What do I long for? All of these flow into this practice of counterweights, because if we don't know, if we don't really know ourselves, it's going to be a little more challenging to figure out what the things are that might lift us a little bit up off the ground. And so if choosing the mug that I drink my tea out of each morning, if I can get just like a slight little rhythm build a little rhythm of joy at micro level into my mornings, and that's something that personally brings me happiness each morning, I nerd out over my mugs from the thrift store. But to be able to say like, Oh, this one is calling my name today. I'm gonna enjoy my tea with her today, that's something that that helps me move through this catastrophe. Then let's do it.

Joshua Johnson: 31:00

And so there's always paradox in my mug choice. So I have a mug wall. We have about 120 mugs on the wall. They're from where. Well, they're from wherever, all the places we've been. And so, like I picked this morning, I have this, I have my Belfast mug. And so as I was thinking about counterweights, I was thinking about Belfast I was thinking about this is a place where there was so much violence towards one another, it's an us versus them mentality, but then, as a counter, people have been working for peace in such a way where it's actually rippled across the world. To see some what is resolution, restitution, reconciliation? And and peace look like. And there's been so much like beauty and poetry and things coming out of the ashes of Belfast. And to me, this is what counterweights to me felt like. And so I chose the Belfast mug this morning. Yeah. But I think those, those those things of like, like choosing, yeah, I think for us as we are in a collective trauma period. How do we start to choose our counterweights collectively? What does it look like to pay attention and choose and saying, This is what I'm going to need to move forward.

Shannan Martin: 32:26

Let me ask a slight follow up. Are you saying, like, what does what does it look like for me to find my counterweights? Or what does it look like for us to find

Joshua Johnson: 32:35

right now, let's go with, I want to go with a communal because this is what we were talking about, communal trauma, and we're talking about community, and then we'll talk through our personal counterweights.

Shannan Martin: 32:45

Yeah, that's an interesting question, and something I will now be thinking about for hours and days to come, the the idea of communal counterweights. I think we we can trust that our communal counterweights are rooted in the goodness of God, and that if there's something that we're working towards that doesn't bring about the flourishing of the people who are struggling the most. It's off the list. You know, like I just I find myself driven time and time again, back to think of the person in your life who you love, who has the least amount of power, who faces the most oppression, who feels the the least safe right now. What does it look like to build a world that is safer for that person right now? If we can orient ourselves towards that, I think that that leads us to, you know, the prophet Jeremiah, who says, work for the peace and prosperity of your places. Period next sentence, pray to the Lord for it for its welfare, will determine your welfare. People grumble at me whenever I point out that I find it very interesting that first we are told to work for peace and then we are told to pray for peace. I find the order of those two things very interesting, and I believe intentional, because it doesn't allow us to just get waylaid on, you know, this idea of praying for a better world. If we want to get to the place of praying for the better world, we have to first be doing the work of creating the better world together. And so I'm into that, you know, I'm into this idea of of linking arms with each other, not for the sake of the most powerful and the wealthiest and the people who are making lives a living hell right now, but for the people who are fearing for their lives and weeping for their children, and, you know, flooding the streets in Minneapolis right now. I mean, the list goes on and on and on and so constantly reorienting ourselves into that direction, I think that's where we will find our collective counterweights. Another example I'll give you. We are part of our church situation right now. We don't really call it a church. Some people tell me I'm kidding myself by refusing to call it a church, but we are, my husband and I are part of a Sunday morning gathering called holy Alliance. It is made up of about 100 people. About 80 of those people are currently incarcerated at the neighborhood work release center, and so we meet together. We think of it a little bit more as like a Bible study or a Sunday School hour, because most of those folks then go on to a different church for for actual church time. But we, over the past couple of years, have created this community where each Sunday Corey will say, who wants to because, because of the nature of incarceration, there are always new people coming in, and there are always people leaving right people are cycling in and out. And so we we tend to go over the basics quite a bit for that reason. And so Corey will say, you know, can somebody come up and explain, why do we call ourselves holy Alliance? Somebody always volunteers, and they come up and they say, we're a holy Alliance because we're with each other. We're for each other. When one of us is down, we're all down. When one of us is succeeding, we're all succeeding. That's a pretty basic summary of what a lot of our community would describe us as. We have chosen to come together to say these are the ways the world is up against us, some more than others, and this is what we're going. To do, to be a force of love in this world, to take God at His word that God is love, and to take Paul's description, his real, clear description of what love looks like, and to carry that into the world. Those are our collective counterweights right now, to be joy, to be peace, to be patience, to be goodness, to be gentleness, to do it imperfectly. We recite together every Sunday that we say it as sort of our mantra. This is what we're working towards. We are not always patient, and yet together every Sunday we say we are patient, we are kind. Because there's this belief that maybe if we can be in this together and remind each other of our real purpose, maybe we can continue to move ourselves collectively towards this perfect love that God is.

Joshua Johnson: 37:41

I think when people see the like what you described as, I want the flourishing for the the person who's the the most oppressed that is is struggling the most. And like, what are we going to do that's going to be good for them? I think one of the problems in this world is that we see that as if we do good for them, that means that it's doing bad for me. Like, yeah, that that's, I think, what people are sensing, and that's why we're fighting for the goodness of ourselves and not for others, because we think that if we fight for the goodness of others, the goodness for us is just going to go away and we won't have any of it. It's gone. How do we hold that tension of knowing that if I work for the goodness of others, the goodness for me is not going away, it's still there, and we can all flourish.

Shannan Martin: 38:36

Yeah, I think the we have been collectively shaped and by we I think I'm I'm specifically talking to people who grew up as I did in white conservative spaces. I was formed in the way of of trickle down economics, and I think that's sort of at the root. You know, my husband and I both used to work in federal politics and conservative federal politics in a different lifetime. I think there's a real strong tie between, between the idea of, you know, we're just gonna, we're gonna make sure everything's real good way up here at the top, and then that that goodness will surely drip down on everybody else, if we, if we are shaped into that lens on the world. And I was, and my husband was, you can see how it starts to feel like, well, wait a minute, if we're, if we're thinking first of the people who we see as maybe down here, what about us? You know, in your wife's poem about capsized shalom, I like that visual of, like, capsizing something up ending it. Jesus upended these paradigms. Jesus flipped the grid on all of this. And so I sort of like to think about the, you know, the trickle up economy of Jesus, where you know, when we read the Beatitudes, Blessed are you not? You know, maybe one day in heaven, you'll get your reward, which I think is, is often how I sort of saw that but, but blessed are you right now, who struggle, who fight for your own dignity and survival? This is Jesus's stump speech, his famous you know, this is this is what Jesus ran on. This is what matters to the heart of God, that we are really prioritizing the people who are struggling the most, and if we can begin to reroute our own dumb brains around this and understand that if you know I'm thinking of a I encourage anyone listening, think of a particular person you know right now who's deeply struggling. Imagine what it would look like to live in a world where they did not have to struggle in that way. When I imagine that world, which I think is a really important exercise for us to just continue to be imaginative about what the world could look like, it's so easy to get really bogged down in the way it looks right now, but to imagine that, I mean, I'm not a billionaire, so I can't answer for how that would feel to a billionaire. But when I, when I think of a better world for my friends who are hurting man, the world looks pretty good to me too, like I but I just think it's it requires us to dig a little deeper, to ask better questions, to get under the thing, you know, to dig under the thing. And. And to begin to understand that these things that we feel like we have to conserve, these these paradigms of scarcity, where, you know, there's only just a little bit, and we've got to spread it, you know, we've got to divide it in certain ways, or we're going to be left without we were promised the abundant life, and the abundant life means we get it all, and the abundant life means there's enough for everybody. And so we're talking, maybe accidentally, a little bit about things that are political. I personally think almost everything is political. But yeah, I mean, if we can get back to, and I don't know if back to is even the right way to say it. If we can get to allowing the words in the life and the way of Jesus to inform our politics, it will capsize it. It will capsize it in the way that that I was taught to see it, and it did. And so rather than, you know, forging forward and believing our politics can exist over here, and our theology, our faith, can exist over here. These things are merged, and they're muddy and they're complicated and they're tangled. And if we can make some peace with that, and really truly work to allow our our faith, to inform the ways we see the world, and particularly the ways we see the poor. It will change things.

Joshua Johnson: 43:11

Two days ago is Martin Luther King, day one of the quotes that I love here is, from where do we go from here? Which I think this is the question we're asking, Where do we go from here? What is next? And he says, I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems, and I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. And I think that's one of the things that is now part of what I want to do is, yeah, of is love really is the answer, and the love of God is the answer. And I want to talk about love wherever I go, that I want to see that love happen. These counterweights, I think, are really important. So as we move into you specifically and your own little counterweights, yeah, many of the counterweights you offer are lists, are recipes, playlists, yeah, they're they're naps, their gardens, they seem small and ordinary to a lot of people. Why do these small practices matter as counterweights?

Shannan Martin: 44:13

I think small things are really the only things, and I felt that way for, I don't know, 10 years or so now. I think moving into this community forced me to get sort of to live down at street level a little bit, to get my head out of this like invisible future that awaited me, and to become very present and realistic. And I think that's how we see Jesus live. Jesus was very committed to his reality. And so I think we're invited to do the same, where we really believe that it's all sacred. And I remember, you know, before I started to kind of shift. I mean, you know, I think we're always shifting. I think a growing faith is a changing faith, and we all have permission. And I say that not because I'm the person who gives permission, but because I'm someone who, for a long time needed somebody to give me permission. You know, God does not change, and so we must. We must be changing if we hope to be moving closer into the movement and the love of God. And so when people used to say things like, everything is sacred. I was just like, What in the world does that even mean? I think what it means, I don't this is a final answer. But I think what it means is that our our lives are are calling to us, and God is calling to us through the the ordinary movements and moments of our lives. And so yes, I wrote one of the one of my goals in setting out to write counterweights was, my kids are getting older, and it's a struggle for me. It is like, I mean, on a daily basis, I'm like, What is my life going to be like? I'm just going through that, like I'm heading towards an empty nest, and I don't know how I'm going to handle it, I wanted to write a book that was the truest version of their mom possible, that my kids could hold this book in their hand one day when I'm not here anymore, and say at least in you Know, 2025 2026 this was my mom, page to page, I also wanted to write very honestly about my counterweights practice, so that it gives a really clear picture for other people of what their practice might look like. And so I did write a chapter or an you know, the chapter. Are all very short. I wrote a chapter about traveling, like you said with your mug from Belfast, I traveling is like a big counterweight that does cost some money and requires a certain amount of privilege and all those things, and I wrestled with all of that, trust me, but it's also something that has been a gift in my life and a value in my life. And so I wrote about it, but taking a nap out on the porch is another important counterweight to me, and so I wanted to write about that too. And like you said, I wanted to include these little it got a little meta, because I wrote about a lot of things that are heavy and hard, things that maybe the average reader of my books will not have experienced from the close seats as as I did, I wrote about a lot of light hearted things, but I wanted to. I wanted to build counterweights into the book of counterweights. I wanted to give lists of things that I like and things that I enjoy and songs that I love and books that I've read, because that required me to do the work of understanding who I am, and to I just, I think that's such an important part. If we want to identify our counterweights, we have to get to know ourselves a little bit better. And so I'm not the type of person to write a book with. Like now, now fill out these questions or like. That's just not the type of writer I am, but what I did give is a living, written example of my life over about a year or two, some really difficult things that I encountered, and the little ordinary, everyday things that kind of rose to the surface that I could hold on to, that allowed me to keep going, that allowed me to keep breathing, that allowed my capacity to increase a little bit. And I hope everybody who reads this book will find themselves through that example, looking around them all the time. You know, there's one of my favorite authors is Sarah miles, and she writes, God is always happening. And I love that. And I think, you know, every good thing comes from God. God is always happening. This means our counterweights are always, always happening, if we can get, you know, once we've given them that name, I think this is work that a lot of us are doing, whether we consciously realize it or not. We're looking for things to help us keep going once you give it a name, man, that's like, now you've got to practice. Now you've got something that you can talk to your friends about, talk to your family about, talk to yourself about, what are my counterweights today, I ask myself that question out loud most days, especially when I'm really struggling, like what I look around me in the room, I look outside, up at the sky. Where does my help come from? And there is always something waiting for me.

Joshua Johnson: 49:33

So what's your counterweight today?

Shannan Martin: 49:36

My counterweight today is that my child, this is a weight and a counterweight, because this is the life that we live my you know, I have already shared my struggle with letting go of younger children. My youngest is now 17. He's a junior in high school, and he drives himself to school and all the things, and he texted me this morning and said, Mom, I think I'm getting a cold, and that's a weight, right? That's I don't wish that on him. I don't wish it on anyone, but any opportunity I still get to care for my kids is a gift to me. And so, you know, he goes to a like a technical school in the morning, and then he goes to his regular high school in the afternoon. And so in between, I said, stop by the house and I will have some medicine for you, like just setting out these little things to help care for him, and then he's he's on his way again. I think caring for each other in small, ordinary, everyday ways is a massive counterweight for me often. I also think watching myself care for myself is important. That's often a counterweight. And so, you know, the example for today is me caring for somebody else. But at some point today, I'm gonna, you know, maybe towards the end of the day, I don't know, I'm gonna ask myself, like, what do you need? And maybe I'm gonna need to light a candle and bundle up in my favorite blanket from Ireland, by the way and watch a show you know, like, this is just life, and it's not. This isn't fancy stuff. This is asking ourselves, How can I ease your burden a little bit today? And a lot of the time, that's us caring for ourselves.

Joshua Johnson: 51:22

Yeah, I think both of those things is really helpful for people who are now holding really heavy buckets. They're really, really in it right now today, you can hear this and you can say, hey, I'm going to find my counterweight. They are all around us. Yeah, they're there. You say, What do I need? And step into it. Shannon, your book is, is wonderful. It's great now, as I was reading your book, and, like, right before this interview, I was like, Did I read the book? Or was Shannon speaking to me like it was, I felt like your voice was in my head before we started talking. And that's just a brilliant, brilliant writer on the page giving us your voice, and that's really, really good. And I think a lot of people will. I was like, Oh, I have a lot of people. I was like, I want to give this to them, and give this to them, because it's something that I think we all need right now as counterweights. It's a it's a brilliant thing for us to be able to help us move forward, and especially in this time of collective trauma that we're in today. So thank you for your writing. How can people connect with you and what you're doing? Where would you like to point people to? Is there anywhere specifically you'd like to point people to get the book as well?

Shannan Martin: 52:41

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for your kind words about the book. I'm still at the phase where not a lot of people have read this book. I've read it so many times, but it's really, it's really special and meaningful to hear your feedback. So I just really thank you. That is a counterweight for me. It's something I'm going to tell my husband about later. So thank you for that. Yeah, the book comes out the end of March, and so anywhere you find your your books, the book will be available. Can go to my website, Shannon martin.com, and there's all the different places that you can order the book directly from there. If you catch this before the book comes out, you'll still have a chance to pre order it. And when you pre order, you get the audio book for free, which means you actually can hear me. Well, I will play the book, and you'll be able to actually hear me. I recorded the audio two weeks ago. I will read it to you. And so that's a pretty cool perk, if you catch it, you know, before or during the the week of the release. But yeah, you can. You can find out where you get your books. You can find me at Shannon martin.com, on Instagram, on threads, I'm in both of those places. Most days I still enjoy social media. It's like very uncool to admit that, but I do. I write a weekly free newsletter called counterweights weekly. So you can sign up for that on my Instagram or website. And you know, that's just me, sort of living out my practice and sending it. I focus more on political counterweights for counterweights weekly. I also have a thriving substack called the soup. And you can just Google Shannon Martin substack, and it'll take you over there with that. And so you can find me all different kinds of places.

Joshua Johnson: 54:27

Excellent Shannon, there's two really quick questions I would like to ask at the end here. One, if you go back your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Shannan Martin: 54:36

Oh, my goodness, my 21 year old self, I would give myself the advice. I'm gonna say two things that just bring to mind. Number one, start paying closer attention to the sky, because it brings me a lot of peace, a lot of comfort, a lot of joy. It is a revolving source of beauty and a daily counterweight for me. And it took me decades, like I still think back, like I lived so long without really caring about the sky. How is this possible? It is the greatest living art installation ever, and so I wish I would have cued into that a little sooner. And then I would also give myself the advice to give myself permission to change my mind. There is a lot, I mean, thinking of my 21 year old self and loving her very, very much. There is a whole lot about her that is different now. And I think she struggled for a really long time to break away from some of that and to feel alone and isolated in some of that. And that's that's just part and parcel of the work we are doing. And yet, on the other side, you know, half a lifetime later, my life is beautiful, and I love it, and I'm connected with with people who love me back. And so whatever fear she feels about, about reclaiming some things that she should go ahead and step into, that

Joshua Johnson: 56:01

that's wonderful. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend,

Shannan Martin: 56:05

oh yes, we're watching shrinking right now. We're big TV people. I heard on an interview that, like, people in Italy think Americans are so, like, I don't know, I don't know the word they would use, but like, we're so something for all the TV we watch. But I get it, it makes me feel kind of weird, and yet it brings me a lot of joy and rest and connection with my husband. We are finally watching shrinking and enjoying that I am reading, where do we go from here? For Martin Luther King, Jr, right now, I'm in the middle of that, and I'm also in the middle of reading Father Greg Boyle's newest book,

Joshua Johnson: 56:44

cherished belonging. Cherished belonging. Saying, Yeah, that's a great one.

Shannan Martin: 56:49

And then I'm also rereading, I don't reread fiction ever, really, but my, my very favorite novel, probably from around the time I was in my early 20s, is a book called Love walked in by Marissa de los Santos. And I'm rereading that because we're heading into, you know, I appreciated that you said all that you did about, like, choosing love and walking in love. And as cheesy as it may be, we're heading into the season of love, February, Valentine's Day, I'm picking up also Bell Hooks is all about love. Like I'm one of my counterweights is to like, be really niche, to like, curate little seasons within my life. And so I'm I'm heading into the season of love. I'm going to bring out my Valentine's Day mugs and read books about love. Wonderful.

Joshua Johnson: 57:39

I love it. Shannon, thank you for this conversation. It was fantastic. And I just pray that we can actually find our counterweights. We could hold those together. That's, as you said at the beginning, that we could learn how to hold the whole cosmos, and we could walk forward and feel the grief and the lament and the loss and the pain and the struggle and the hardship and everything as we feel it, and be honest about it and brutally honest about it. Yeah, we could also find the places of beauty and hope and joy, and we could find our counterweights so that we can move forward. We could see the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven. And we could see communities all over the world flourishing because we are all in the same garden growing together. So thank you. Shannon, it was

Shannan Martin: 58:23

fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. You.