When Women Speak: Breaking Silence and Challenging Patriarchal Interpretations with Laurie Beth Jones

What happens when we put down the stories that have limited us and pick up a pen to write our own? In this illuminating conversation with renowned author Laurie Beth Jones, we journey through the liberating practice of questioning inherited narratives and crafting something more authentic.

Laurie Beth challenges us to recognize Jesus as the ultimate "plot twist" in spirituality—not a conquering king but a baby born to poverty who consistently broke social barriers. She invites us to examine biblical texts with fresh eyes, questioning interpretations that have marginalized women for centuries. "Just because it's written down in scripture doesn't mean it's accurate," she reminds us, opening doorways to more expansive understanding.

The conversation weaves through powerful examples of women who refused to accept limiting narratives, like Joan of Arc who, against all odds, became history's most successful military general. Despite facing death threats from her own family, Joan told "a better story" about herself and her calling—a powerful template for modern women seeking to break free from constrictive expectations.

Perhaps most compelling is the invitation to see ourselves differently. As one workshop participant realized, "I'm not the broken seashell in the jar—I'm the unsinkable cork." This shift in perspective represents the heart of telling a better story: recognizing our inherent worth and refusing to be defined by others' limitations.

Whether you're questioning religious teachings, seeking to understand your purpose, or simply wanting to view your life through a more empowering lens, this conversation offers practical guidance for crafting narratives that heal rather than harm. Join us in exploring how, when we change our stories, we change our world.

Visit us at expansionisttheology.com for more content and to join our online community.

Transcript

Welcome to The Expansionist Podcast

Heather Drake 0:02

Welcome to the Expansionist Podcast with Shelley Shepard and Heather Drake. In each episode, we dive deep into conversations that challenge conventional thinking, amplify diverse voices and foster a community grounded in wisdom, spirit and love. Hello, shelley Shepard, it's so good to be with you today. Hey, heather, it's great to see you. Also with you is Lori Beth Jones. What an honor it is to be having such an incredible person on our podcast. We've read books from Lori Beth for years and years and years, and she has continued to expand my personal ability to see Jesus and to see spirit in ways that are bigger and greater and still growing and still expanding, and so I am thrilled to be in this space with Lori Beth and with you, and for us to talk about a better story.

Jesus as the Plot Twist

Shelly Shepherd 0:55

Yes, yes, thank you. Thank you,Laurie, for being here and for, I think, coming at just the right time to talk to us about this topic today, which is to tell a better story. I think your work over the last several decades has taught us how to look through a lens in a particular way and see a pattern, to recognize a pattern that maybe people missed. I think your writing teaches us to look differently through a lens and tell a better story. So welcome to the Expansionist Podcast. We're so excited to have you here today and to help us talk about this big topic of how we tell a better story. Welcome, thank you.

Laurie Beth Jones 1:40

That's a very huge topic and as I was thinking about telling a better story, the New Testament, as we teach it, jesus, is the giant plot twist. Good books have a lot of drama, which the Old Testament, which we call the Old Testament, has a lot of drama, but the plot twist was whoa a baby comes not a king and is born to a poor young girl in a podunk town from a podunk town. Whoa. Plot twist no, marching triumph through the gates of Jerusalem was this story. So I think that as we each contemplate our own stories, we think maybe we're a little plot twist that the Lord, I'm going to go with the Lord, that's my comfort zone. We're a plot twist of the Lord's story, a better story for this time.

Laurie Beth Jones 2:40

And what do you mean? I think so many of us feel unworthy, joan of Arc and so many people. When you look at Isaiah, you look at so many of the prophets, everybody felt unworthy. It's the people that feel worthy that you've got to worry about. And I'm also thinking that with the Bible, when you read it, there's different filters that you can read that story with, and also the way it's been taught. And as we talk about patriarchy and how hard it is to deconstruct for women when all these stories are written by men. And this may be a very painful example, but it's kind of like the coroner who declared a woman who was found stabbed 10 times. He declared it a suicide and that was the final report that was filed and it was like how do you stab yourself to death 10 times? You know there's a part. When you're reading some of this stuff you've got to say what. This isn't common sense. Just because the report was filed doesn't mean it's accurate.

Shelly Shepherd 3:51

Can we hang out there for a minute? Yes, yeah, yeah, I want to hang out right there for a second about. Just because it's written down in scripture doesn't mean it's accurate.

Heather Drake 4:03

Well, and then that reminds me of the Old Testament story that actually invites us into the question whose report will you believe? Like, it is up to us. We do have the power to choose how we will respond to what is being reported.

Heather Drake 4:18

And I think, particularly as women not only as women, but particularly as women or any marginalized group we should take back our power to choose who we will listen to, who we will pay attention to, what voice we will lean into, and I think that what I feel like you're inviting me to do is to question the story. Is there another way to see this? Is it perhaps another person that actually should be paid attention to and in the story.

Heather Drake 4:50

Yes, yeah, and maybe it's not a literal invitation, but it is in fact something that we could maybe turn on its head and receive a better story for ourselves.

Laurie Beth Jones 5:01

Yes, and I'm thinking and sometimes you can do that with humor and just a different take on the story. For example, I'm thinking of the story of a prophet who and Heather, you'll know the exact name of the prophet but he just wrote and wrote about how this woman that he loved and she was always leaving him and then he ended up calling her a whore and that, you know, she became the symbol of Babylon and all this other stuff. And I'm reading that story with a different lens. Now I have a whole different lens as I read these stories and I'm just thinking, dude, she just wasn't into you.

Heather Drake 5:38

I think that is that should be the subtitle of the book of Hosea. Hosea, she just wasn't into you, let her alone.

Questioning Patriarchal Biblical Stories

Laurie Beth Jones 5:47

And he turns her into this harlot. And so you know, one of the themes that you see in the patriarchal interpretation of the Bible is that women are always, you know, either saints or whores. And even you know the story of Mary when she has said you will be celebrated above all and a sword will pierce your soul. And I thought dang it, not even the purest woman in history. They've got to stab her, they've got to make her hurt. So there's this pattern in many of the stories of the Bible that women must suffer for some made-up thing that they did. So when you read stories you just think you know, really. Another one I'm thinking of is Abraham. And you know, maybe it was Lot and the two daughters who supposedly seduced him, right? Is that the right story?

Heather Drake 6:39

Heather, yes, yes.

Laurie Beth Jones 6:40

Yes, and he was also the one who offered those two girls to be brutally raped by the crowd, exactly. And then the story is that God got angry and destroyed the whole village because men were going to sodomize the angel and nobody this man offers his preteen daughters to be raped. There was no criminality in that. God wasn't upset about that. God was upset, supposedly, about the sodomy that was going to take place. And so I'm thinking and then it goes on and it says in another story that Lot, they got him drunk and they seduced him so that they could have babies. And I'm thinking, wait a minute.

Heather Drake 7:26

That doesn't make sense.

Laurie Beth Jones 7:28

This man got these girls pregnant, probably they were sexually abused all of their life and they get blamed so that the children of that, the fruit of them, can be purified or whatever. So the fruit of the tribe can be. You know, it's just. You start reading these stories and you're thinking what. This doesn't make sense. Can I, yes, go, no, no, it's very good.

Heather Drake 7:54

It's very good, because when you say that, I also get excited and I remind you that it's absolutely essential. When we're talking about reading what we call like the Christian Bible, which the first half of it is a Jewish text, and then we kind of come right in after Matthew, after Jesus's thing, and we kind of hook our texts there, we have to remember who actually is writing this. There are parts of the of the first Testament that are actually written by the enemies of someone, and so if you really want to defame a people, if you really want to make them small, you start writing stories that are horrible, that you would be offended by, and so we really need to be mindful that this is not what we would consider, maybe even sometimes an accurate account of what happened. But this is for us an invitation, because all of us have something in our life or we believe something in our life that we found out later to be untrue. And how do we kind of wrestle with the fact that? I think a part of true spiritual maturity is asking questions. What does this mean? How is this? Something that I should maybe avoid or follow after, but ask the questions, not to read anything just as it is, but to engage our spirituality. In fact, jesus said one of the ways that we love God is through intelligence, and so to be able to offer the intelligence to say that doesn't sit well with me. I don't believe for one minute that that is the way that God wanted the story to tell, and I think that that's again. You started with such a beautiful point.

Heather Drake 9:27

Jesus is this master storyteller and he comes to retell the story of God, all the things that we had got about God wrong. Jesus shows us when part of the scripture written was don't touch a woman. And Jesus is just saying, yeah, let them come and let them touch me and I'll touch them. And everybody's allowed to touch anybody. And Jesus is just saying, yeah, let them come and let them touch me and I'll touch them, and everybody's allowed to touch anybody. And it horrified people because we were sure God wanted no part of that. And Jesus not only tells us stories with his words, but with his life and with the actions. And then I believe the invitation is to expand it, that the invitation is not just to read it and then go. That was a great story, that was a great invitation, but what are? What am I to do with the story of my life? What am I to do with?

Heather Drake 10:08

the story of my family. What am I to? Do with the story of the world that I live in as a woman, and then I think it's an invitation to co-create, to write, to write a better story.

Laurie Beth Jones 10:18

Yes.

Shelly Shepherd 10:28

Well and this is this is what Laurie and I were talking about in the pre-show before we started recording but this idea that there's so much conversation and books and podcasts and so many things being written about patriarchy and how the information that we're using to tell a better story are these stories that we're just referring to right now in either First or Second Testament, and I feel like, Laurie, one of the things that your work has done and you can talk about this for a few minutes has done, and you can talk about this for a few minutes, but we have to have a way to turn the lens and see something different. In the workshop this weekend, you talked about the diamond. Right, the facets of the diamond. When you hold it to the light and you shift it just a little bit, just a little bit, it changes the entire you know spectrum of light that's coming through, and so your work started that, I believe, to look at Jesus as a CEO.

Jesus as Liberator, Not Law-Maker

Shelly Shepherd 11:40

No Christian publisher wanted to touch that. They thought you were a heretic. They thought you were. You know, name the list. And here you brought us a picture of Christ that no one had really thought about before. Like, you were the first person to see this. And so if we are going to bounce over or away from I'm not suggesting that we just forget all of history, you know, and just kind of toss it out but if we're going to, if we are going to write a better story as women and not use the patriarchal stories, how do we do this? How do we write a better story as women?

Laurie Beth Jones 12:27

Well, I think the always I go back to Jesus in terms of he said it has been written. But I say to you, you know acknowledging the past and then saying, hey, what about this? It has been said. And then he said I came to fulfill the law. And so, you know, so many religions want it to be law, law, law, law, law. And what he was saying, it's spirit. It is the spirit. It's the words that come out of your mouth that are full of hatred. You know, calling us to look within, heather, to your point.

Laurie Beth Jones 13:07

What is our story? What is the story we're telling us? And are we believing the story that other people have laid down and said this is the law, this is. It's like the emperor's clothes. You know, the little girl was the one who said he's naked, you know, and everybody else was oh is so?

Laurie Beth Jones 13:27

I think to uh, to deconstruct is to realize that jesus never said it was a box and he never jammed anybody back into a box. He set people free, right, free to do what, to think and walk alongside him as companions. You know to we've talked about this to be companions, not servants and slaves or people going and killing other people because they don't believe the same way. It just wasn't in his nature to do that at all. So the better story, I think, is to always go back and look at the essence of who he was, which is from the stories that we've been told. So we don't even know. You know, jesus didn't even write anything down which is an impact workshop. Write it down so that others may have a tool, instead of just letting the coroner file report and saying this is the way it was question heather we've lived with that.

Shelly Shepherd 14:27

We've lived with that right, absolutely, absolutely.

Laurie Beth Jones 14:29

We've lived with it and even in the new testament, when they were talking about women and jesus, you know, and you all know, with Magdalene the first apostle, really was the one that he spoke to the most and after his death they said a woman should not be allowed to speak and she will only be saved through childbirth. This is in the New Testament and it was like what, what? Where did that come from? They have totally erased it and this is after people who have, you know, supposedly been saved and enlightened and all this other stuff.

Laurie Beth Jones 15:09

They went back to the thing of putting women in a box, and actually not even the whole box, but half a box, which is her lower half, and we want you to be silent, that's the upper half of the box, and one of the most most requested magic tricks is where the man the magician saws a woman in half and spins her around and then she crawls back out all whole and he gets all the glory and everybody claps. And we know the magician's name. We don't know her name, but in many of the scriptures in the new testament, if that box got spun around, they don't want the part of the woman that talks, they want the part of the woman that only has the sex organs that can please them and give birth, and that's a very harsh thing to think about. So the and the magician you, you know he could, and so here's the question why do women climb into that box in the first place? Why do we do that? Why do we climb into these boxes?

Joan of Arc: A Woman's Powerful Story

Heather Drake 16:09

Yeah, and sometimes it's our mothers, sometimes it's teachers, sometimes it's culture that tells us that that's what we should do, and so one of the things that we do to liberate each other is tell a better story.

Heather Drake 16:20

One of the accounts in the First Testament that really was profoundly impactful to me, even from a very early age, is the story where the children of Israel are being on an exodus journey, they're being released from slavery and things get really hard and they say we better go back to Egypt because at least we had onions and garlic there. And that, to me, is profound about the way we tell stories about our past, the way we tell stories about our past collectively, that instead of going, we cannot go back to Egypt because they were throwing our babies in a river, they were killing our sons. We are slaves, we cannot go back there. Instead, we started telling a different story to make it better.

Shelly Shepherd 17:08

Not a truthful story.

Heather Drake 17:10

But to ease whatever discomfort we were in, we said at least we had onions and garlic.

Laurie Beth Jones 17:15

Beautifully said and I think.

Heather Drake 17:16

Very often that happens in families where we say, well, they did the best that they could, or even in our churches where we're like you know what, let's loose each other and set each other free and go, absolutely not. We're not going back there. This is hard, unequivocally. This is hard what we're going through, but we're not going to whitewash a story and tell someone. They need to live in Egypt because thankfully you have onions and garlic. You know like let's go all the way to the promised land.

Laurie Beth Jones 17:44

Beautifully yeah.

Heather Drake 17:45

We want to pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend, and if you found the conversation intriguing and want to know more about what we're learning or how you can join our online community, visit our website at expansionistheologycom.

Laurie Beth Jones 18:07

In the workshop I talked about the creative tension zone, how, what is, or what the past is and what could be.

Laurie Beth Jones 18:15

And when you hold those two together the past and an ideal future which could be our own stories, there's a tension. There's really a quantum tension between those two, because the brain can only see one picture. So the brain is saying give me one thing to look at, give me even in a binocular, it brings it into one focus. So what we choose to focus on is what the brain will begin replicating in attracting magnetically and spiritually those things to us. So if we focus on the past and we see ourselves as victims and we see ourselves as and we blame, you know, the blamer's lodge is no place to be, and yet a lot of religions just live there. It's the poser's palace and the blamer's lodge. And so the new story is what is the new story of women, of Christian women loving Jesus, not climbing into a box and being told they can only do certain things, you know, but being these freed spiritual beings that have all the powers of God within them within us through a patriarchal system.

Shelly Shepherd 19:25

You know platforms, agents, publishers, all these steps that you've taken to find yourself maybe the only woman speaker on a platform, maybe the only female Christian author on a platform Like, how did you navigate, having Jesus as your source, even through all of those patriarchal turns and, 14 books later, still able to write? You know some of the best stories that you could tell the world, like I think that's the place. One of the places that I'm struggling with a little bit right now with the church is that we keep using the same information and we keep calling everybody Christians or disciples, or you know, heather's not she's calling everybody beloved now. So there's that. We love that. That piece is beautiful, and yet it's like how do we make the shift? Are we making the shift right now, even in this conversation, where we are expanding something beyond what we've always been told? Is that how we tell the better story? How did you keep Jesus the central figure?

Laurie Beth Jones 21:01

It comes down to for me, I believe that I came to have people look at Jesus in a new way, that I was the messenger. I was the pizza delivery person. I never wanted to be the story, and if what I had was good enough, people were going to be eager to open the door. And by writing about Jesus in different ways, using modern language and real life stories and contemporary examples, they wanted it. People are hungry for love. People are hungry for practical wisdom. People are hungry for connecting to a higher power. Every religion wants to connect to that, and so if we focus on what is the higher power, what is the higher story, and not make ourself the story because that's when you get self-conscious that was one of the first signs of the divine connection break in the story of the Garden of Eden, they were self-conscious, and before that were self-conscious, and before that they were not. And so part of going forward is not to see ourselves as the labels other people put on us, but as an essence of the divine and um, it's gonna. It's really important in these days not to slap labels on ourselves or on other people and just say I want to be the light, I want to bring the light. And so you do have to.

How to Tell Your Own Better Story

Laurie Beth Jones 22:27

In the Joan of Arc story, when she felt these voices saying save France, she had to get off the farm and her father was. He told her sons I mean her brothers, if you see her leaving, because she was talking about what she was hearing he said kill her Not, I mean, her father was a very cruel man. We have to know that, because who threatens to kill a daughter for wanting to follow a dream? Well, he did, and the boys were going to do it. So there's an honor killing for you, right, and it took her. She just told one person a better story. She said I'm the one I've been told to save France. One person believed her, who was her uncle, and they figured out a way. And he said we got to get you off the farm alive. And he said well, I'll tell her that. And his wife was pregnant. The uncle's wife was pregnant, she needs help. So the father well, a woman helping a baby, a woman having another baby, that makes sense.

Laurie Beth Jones 23:21

So she got off the farm and then it was just one thing after another and, as I shared in the workshop, by the time she reached the point where she had been given by the village a white horse and her sword, and she wanted her armor and she had a flag and she knew the power of hopeful visualizations. Right, this is where we have to go instead of. You know, so many crime shows start with a dead woman somewhere. It's the fodder, it's the basis of stories. Right, we're not going to start with that. We're going to have, like, the Joan of Arc image of the woman with the sword and the white horse and calling people to confess their sins, and this is how she got the army back in shape. And then, as I shared, you know, she is actually historically the most successful general in history in terms of winning of battles, percentage of battles won. There's nobody to compare to Joan of Arc. And even in the workshop full of women, people were naming Napoleon and George Washington Nope, nothing like it.

Laurie Beth Jones 24:25

And she won battle after battle and by the time she got into, maybe after the first city, the cities would surrender to her without a fight, because the power, the radiance and her reputation was so powerful they thought this is going to be a lost cause. We are not going to withstand this much power. She felt the anointing. She used the visuals to bring it about. And she went there, not about herself, but about righting a wrong, writing a wrong, and even when the king was finally on the throne, the little sneak, the Dauphine, who betrayed her ultimately. But he said what do you want me to do for you? So there is. We see that in scripture with Esther what do you want me to do? There's a point where women just overpower the men where they say I'm going to give you everything you know, tell me what you want.

Laurie Beth Jones 25:17

And she, she said, I want you not to tax the people in my village for the next hundred years. What a heart, what a heart. And they didn't, they didn't. And then after that he sold her out to the, to the English, and you know, they set her on fire and all those things. But, um, and the legend is, and maybe this goes back to that, after they went to the ashes to collect everything, her heart had not burned. And I think that's when we go into the flame of tribulation, trial attacks, vilification, abuse, all those other things, if we keep our heart on Jesus, in Jesus, our heart, may it be said that after the fire, our hearts refused to burn.

Heather Drake 26:18

And our hearts refused to burn.

Laurie Beth Jones 26:19

So I think that's you know. For me, I had to get off the farm, out of my own farm and, as I shared in the workshop, once I got through this, and then my first book was accepted and then it kept selling out and selling out. People surrendered without, and then the Christian publishers came back and they all wanted me right. Why? Because I was selling. You know, I was selling books like crazy. So I think that's the story is don't make yourself the story. Make what's right the story, make what's beautiful the story, and dedicate yourself to it and tell somebody else and they're going to help you. You're going to find help. That's the beautiful part about this. Once you get clear about your story, people are going to help you.

Heather Drake 27:06

I think one of the gifts that we have as women is we have influence in relationship and we are storytellers, whether we know it or not, and whether we just rehearse someone else's story or read their script, we forget sometimes that we have the power to change the world by changing the stories that are being told and change our own world, to change the world of the people that we have relationship, and we may not all have an enormous platform where other people that don't know us listen, but we as women are communal. We have people in our lives that we touch and we tell the story, even by our showing up in a certain light and with a certain power, and so I just want to remind us that it is up to us to learn how to tell a better story.

Breaking the Silence of Women

Heather Drake 27:57

If you don't know how, there are people like Lori Beth Jones who can help you see Jesus in blue jeans or can help you. You know there's many books that are available. If we'll seek them out. They may not be mainstream but that can help us look at things and examine things and then find our own lens and be able to say if it brings us to more love and if it brings us on the same path that Jesus had as far as enlightenment, bringing us to love more, to include more, to be gentle. Those are the stories that change the world, those are the stories that are healing stories, and we should be listening to them and listening, I think, reading particularly outside of the scope that we normally do, read something from someone else and particularly listen to the voices of brown women who are telling a story of.

Heather Drake 28:50

American Indian women who have incredible stories to teach us, and then to practice telling your own story, but tell it with a slant, tell it bigger, tell it from the inside, tell it in a way that maybe no one's ever heard it before. I think it's particularly important for us to tell young people the story, to train young girls how to tell the stories, but to also allow young men to hear us, as older women, tell the stories a different way.

Laurie Beth Jones 29:18

I just thought of something in the impact writing workshop where I had a jar of seashells that I brought that my little my sister's granddaughter had collected, and there was a cork in it and there was a glass unicorn hanging on it, and so I had people write and study and just describe it. That's all they needed to do was describe the seashells and then, as it pertained to grief, many of the people were saying you know, scattered, coming, the seashells are broken and scattered and brought in from the deep and you never know. You know I'm ad-libbing where you're going to step on one. Or. And then this one woman who was full of the perhaps the most grief, remember, she looked at it and she said you know what? I'm not the seashell in that thing, I'm the cork. It was like what. And she said I'm the cork in that bottle and everybody.

Laurie Beth Jones 30:13

It was just a profound moment. She, she got a better story for herself, because corks float. I mean, you cannot sink a cork, and so a lot of that is the metaphor Jesus, I'm the gate, the good shepherd. What are those visuals we have about ourselves? You know, are we the broken seashells being crunched on by patriarchy, all those things? Or, hey, are we the cork? You know the unsinkable Molly Brown, that kind of story.

Shelly Shepherd 30:42

So, shelley, you know that was a beautiful. Thank you, heather, for the piece that you shared about how a better story is birthed and born, you know, by telling it, and I think in some of the circles that I'm involved in, and certainly on Substack over and over, what I am reading and understanding is how hard it is, how very difficult it is for women to share their story, particularly to put it in writing, and I'm not really sure all the you know pieces of that. Some of it I do understand, even my own story, like I'm not really sure I want to tell my own story. I need to write it but I don't know if I want to tell it. I'm finding that what you're saying, lori and Heather, is that are we encouraging people enough to come to a place, to a table, to a podcast like this, where they are encouraged to learn to tell their story and maybe the better story is part of that but just to tell their story? Are we offering enough places and spaces?

Shelly Shepherd 32:03

I was with a group last night and we just had the freedom just to throw it down on the table. Whatever we thought, whatever we felt, whether we agreed with Psalms 138 or not, we could just say that was rubbish and disgusting. Or the next person might say you know, that just healed me tonight. And so I'm wondering if part of the better story is that we encourage people to share it and to write it. And so maybe this writing impact workshop, lori, is the beginning of you, beginning of expanding the path, your work around. Why am I here, what does this life mean and what is my purpose? Like to tell a better story. You've written a better story, in fact. You wrote Contessa Chronicles, which was really antithetical to Jesus, ceo. In very many ways, it was a very different story for you to write, and now, here you are encouraging us to sit down and write our stories. So I'm just grateful for you and your work, thank you.

Laurie Beth Jones 33:18

Thank you, if I may add one thing to it. And part of the reason that women are afraid to tell their stories is because we have been taught to keep silent. Keep silent we weren't allowed to vote. Keep silent in the church, in the city square, in the home, you know, obey your husband, all things. So it's enculturated in us in many religions to be silent.

Laurie Beth Jones 33:45

And what's beautiful about you know, I'm thinking about miriam, you know, confronting moses when he was messing up, and she gets leprosy, and aaron, the, gets promoted, and they both say the same thing. And then I'm thinking about Lot's wife. You know she looks back on the story that they were leaving. She gets turned into salt Like nope, you're not going to look back. So there's this silencing.

Laurie Beth Jones 34:12

Certainly in the extreme Middle Eastern, some of the Taliban, they don't even want women to gather. They don't want women to gather to tell their stories because there's power in it. So here's the beautiful thing In the New Testament, when God goes directly to the woman to tell the story doesn't go through a man, doesn't go through a prophet. They were the last to know the story. They were the last to know. And in fact, when one of the men challenged the name that Elizabeth was given to name John John. God strikes him silent. The man is struck silent and the women name the baby and the women carry on the story and the men are the supporting act. So this is a new way of looking at things that you know in Song of Solomon. Let me hear your voice. Let me hear your voice and I believe Jesus hung out with women all the time, every chance he got. Why he wanted to hear the story from the woman at the well.

Laurie Beth Jones 35:16

Inspiring as always, lord Beth Jones, thank you, ladies, thank you so much for the woman at the well Inspiring as always, lori Beth Jones.

Heather Drake 35:22

Thank you, ladies, thank you so much for the work you are doing. Yes, yes, yes. This woman, anyway, so grateful. Thank you for your time and we look forward to all of us telling a better story.

Laurie Beth Jones 35:33

Absolutely Amen, and I want to hear it we want to hear it.

Heather Drake 35:37

It was our joy to have you listen to our conversation today. If you would like further information or for more content, visit us at expansionisttheologycom.