Legalism: Law without Love

In this episode, Carly and Raleigh explore the difference between fear-based faith and love-rooted obedience — and why so many sincere believers struggle to tell the difference.

God’s Promise from Micah 6:8 “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Carly shares a story from her past about a conversation with an ex-boyfriend regarding Mass attendance: If we’re practicing our faith primarily out of fear, are we missing the point of the Gospel?

From there, we define two common spiritual struggles:

• Legalism- The belief that God’s love must be earned through perfect performance — following traditions, rules, or a “rule of life” strictly out of duty rather than love or intention.
• Scrupulosity- A disordered fear of sin that distorts God’s mercy, often leading to anxiety, self-punishment, and despair rather than freedom.

Many saints — and many people earnestly trying to follow Christ — fall into legalism and scrupulosity because they want to please God.

God can appear harsh in Scripture when misunderstood.  The world is often harsh and demanding.  Authority figures in our lives can sometimes model severity instead of mercy.  All of this can make it difficult to trust God — who is authority itself — as gentle, patient, and kind.

Saint Spotlight: St. Jane de Chantal a powerful example of how God heals perfectionism through gentleness.

Born in France in 1572.  Lost her mother early in life.  Later widowed after having six children, two of whom also died.

Overwhelmed by grief, she became extremely strict with herself and her household. Turned to intense penances, rigid prayer schedules, and self-punishment in an attempt to regain control.

Through the guidance of St. Francis de Sales, her spiritual director, she learned three life-changing truths:

1. God desires gentleness

2. Holiness grows through patience with weakness

3. Love must be free

Together, they founded the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, created especially for women who were widowed or physically unable to sustain demanding religious life.

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as true strength.” - St. Jane de Chantal is the patron saint of those who struggle with perfectionism.

Key Faith Takeaways

1. A well-formed conscience helps us live God’s commandments in love, not anxiety.

2. Jesus consistently challenged rigid interpretations of the law in the Gospels.

3. The Pharisees remind us what happens when rules are prioritized over mercy, justice, and faith.

4. The Book of Micah calls us back to a God who desires freedom, humility, and relationship — not fear-based obedience.

5. God does not ask us to earn His love or our salvation.

Practical Recommendations for Healing

1. Go to Confession regularly

2. Speak honestly with a priest or spiritual director

3. Practice conversational prayer

4. Read gentle, trustworthy spiritual works

5. Find an accountability partner who reminds you of God’s goodness when fear creeps in

Reflection Question: When you think about your spiritual life, are you filled with anxiety and a sense of loss? Do you believe you are beloved by a gentle, loving God?

Scripture Passages References

“Therefore, I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12:10 

Recommended Resources

The Heart of Perfection — Colleen Carroll Campbell

Introduction to the Devout Life — St. Francis de Sales

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to The Glory and the Grind, the podcast where we explore the beauties and the struggles of living out our Catholic faith.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

I'm your host, Carly Flynn. And I'm also here, Raleigh Poche. We're just two friends finding grace and the grind of motherhood and ministry while literally just being a girl. We take your questions from life and the grind and look for the glory woven into your story. So let's dive into some moments where holiness and hot messes meet. I love this icebreaker question today. So I thought about one icebreaker and then this one popped in my head. So you're getting my second best. And truthfully, I feel like it might be my first best. So pretend like you're going on a job interview, Carly, and you can't bring your resume, you can't talk about any of your previous work experience. All you get to present to the hiring committee is a dish that you have made. It can be something you baked, you cooked, you grilled, you smoked, you boiled, whatever. But you can't buy it from the store. It can be someone else's recipe, but it is something that you have made. What are you bringing?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Last night I made pokey bowls, and all you have to do to make a pokey bowl is boil shrimp for two minutes and then put a bunch of other raw ingredients into a bowl with a sauce, and they can kind of make that takes some type of talent. But what I like about it is that my husband really likes it because he can make it his own. He can put his own sriracha, he can put his own ratio of all the different ingredients, he can make it just right, and then he always tells me that it's delicious, and all I did was boil shrimp for two minutes. So I'm gonna say I will bring- Wait, so what are the raw ingredients? Go in. I put some matched it carrots, I put some edamame that I did put in the microwave. Okay, it was frozen edamame, and then I had to shell those and I did have to peel the shrimp before I boiled it. I had to cook the rice. So like it's not zero effort, but I can I can present a tray with like rice and boiled shrimp and different raw ingredients and different sauce options and say something to the effect of like, I can help make it exactly what you need it to be.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

And you know what that tells me? You are good at delegating. You are very good at delegating. You can create a strong foundation and provide all the tools necessary, but you are you've your management material.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Management material. I was about to say you read my mind.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Okay, do you have an answer to that question, Raleigh? What do you make it? I'm making manicati. I am making an Italian dish. It's called Manicati. Pretty much everyone in my family on my mother's side knows how to make it. You kind of have your own little recipe. Everyone makes it a little different, but my kids love it. My husband will eat it. It's like it's something that I'm very confident in. I can make a good manicati.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

So we used to have manicotti. This is slightly off topic, but whenever I was in college, if it was someone's birthday, someone, one of the other roommates would make manicotti. And I never made the manicotti. I always put myself in charge of like buying the cake or trying to bake a cake. And I was like, y'all make it all figured out.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

You know your skills. I think that's also important. Very good management material right there.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Well, thank you, Raleigh. I feel like I have a vote of confidence on your end. So that's wonderful. We are gonna jump in today with one of God's promises, which is always meant to give us a little bit of hope as we go through the grind of not being able to cook and trying your best. So today's God's promise is from the book of Micah, chapter six, verse eight. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

To follow that, let's dig into the main question that we're digging into for today's episode. How can we tell the difference between faithful obedience and legalism in our spiritual lives?

SPEAKER_00 3:54

And a quick disclaimer, y'all, we encourage you to take our words and hold them up to the church's teachings and hold them up to sacred tradition and scripture, especially if something doesn't sit well with you while we're sharing. It could be the Holy Spirit's prompting for you to dig deeper on a certain topic because we are indeed quite fallible, but we are doing our best to give you some good answers.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yes. And I think this topic leaves a lot of room for personal interpretation, but right, but we know that the church has given us tools to interpret scripture and interpret its laws within love for the Lord and going back to the sole purpose of our lives, our missions to seek God, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. So I'm excited to see where this goes. So now that we've got all that legalism stuff, that legal stuff on the legalism out of the way, we're gonna dive into today's topic of legalism. And I'm gonna pass things off to Carly to tell us a little bit about what she knows on the topic. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Thank you, Raleigh. So, whenever I was preparing for our episode today, I had a memory pop into my head that I thought I would share. When I was in high school, I was dating a guy for several years, and I really, of course, cared about him very much, wanted a good relationship with him, and I knew, even as a very young girl, that having a good faith partner, having someone that I can talk about prayer and church and all of these things that we're talking about on this podcast with would be really important as a foundation of a relationship. But I was in high school, so I didn't really know how to go about. Wasn't mature enough to like talk to another person about their faith life. I could barely talk about my own. But what I did do was bother him incessantly about coming to mass with me and my family to the point where it was annoying. And we had been together for over a year, never been to church together, didn't really talk about it. We really only saw each other on the weekends. So it wasn't something that we really had a whole lot of day in and day out experience talking to one another about. But I did ask him one day and I kind of put my foot down and I was like, why won't you come to church with me? What's what's what's that about? And he said, What's the big deal of going or not going? Like, I don't understand why that's so important to you. And in my little 16-year-old brain, I thought this was gonna be the answer. I thought this was gonna like get him to come with me. Like, you can't argue with this. I said, Aren't you afraid of going to hell? And he said, He said, if you're going because you're afraid, that's kind of not the point. And I had no response to him. I thought I was about to like shut him down, and he totally shut me down because I didn't have an answer to that. So then I stopped bothering him about going to church, and I realized as a 16-year-old, like maybe there's more to this than even I'm considering. Like, why do I want him to go to church? Why do I go to church? Why any of it? And I realized over some time, and even after that relationship ended and all of that, that I did a lot as a young person out of a sense of obligation, out of a sense of high achievement, out of an expectation, or trying to meet an expectation that I felt had been placed upon me. Rather than doing it, because I really wanted to, and I had my own good reasons for praying, going to church, considering myself Catholic, participating in the sacraments, whatever, place activity here. And that really gets to the heart of what is legalism. You know, you can think of that term in a lot of ways. It's a big word, but what it comes down to, and what I think sat the best, the definition that sat the best in my heart, is that it is the feeling that God's love must be earned by perfection or by performance. Um, and it has a lot to do with adhering to traditions, adhering to the quote rules out of a sense of duty rather than out of a sense of love or participation in the spirit of the tradition or the rule. And it leans, in my experience, very easily into another kind of big topic, which is scrupulosity, where you start to have this disordered fear or this anxiety surrounding your ability to perform or your ability to overcome your imperfections. Uh, and it becomes something that can distort you from understanding who God is. And honestly, that has been an experience in my life where maybe it was when I was younger and dating this guy, or even when I was a little bit older, this fear of going to hell, this fear of sinning and not realizing that I was sinning, this fear of being judged, this fear of being less than what God called me to be. Uh, and there's a lot that goes into a spirit of fear and what causes a spirit of fear. I mean, there's all sorts of ministries for people who are experiencing fear and anxiety, right? But that is where I think legalism starts to come in. This idea that you're doing it out of a sense that you have to or else. And I'm curious, Raleigh, where that sits with you. Is that a working definition we can agree on? Do you want to add to that at all?

SPEAKER_01 9:17

No, I think that some things that you talked on that I want to also kind of expand, the priorities in our faith and a relationship with the Lord have to be put in right order, right? Like, I think that this kind of goes off of also what we talked about in the last episode about the different movements within the church. One movement really emphasized strict adherence to the rules, and the other one was a little bit more about the personal conversion. And I think that there's something to be said about a good balance of both of them. Because, like, as teachers, as people who've worked in ministry, it's pretty easy for us to teach the what of our faith. It's difficult to teach someone the why of our faith unless they have had some personal experience or some personal conversion that has prompted their heart to love the Lord more deeply. Because I can know the catechism front and back, know the rules, follow the rules. But if I don't, like it says, if you don't have love, you're just a resounding gong making a bunch of noise, but not really fulfilling your potential, right? So it's important to know what the rule is. But when it comes to a relationship and a mission serving alongside the Lord, you can do it with a joyful heart if you know the why. And I think that we think back to um the Israelites, right? At the the end of, I think it was around like after Joseph was gone and Pharaoh had taken over everything, right? It said that everyone did what was right in their own heart, right? Because they they knew what it felt like to now, you know, have peace and have the comforts that they needed, but they lacked that structure and those rules and a guidance. And when we kind of just go based off of what is right for us, that may not be what is best for the whole, for the church. That's why we do have rules. We do have guidance um and and canon law and things that we do have to follow, not because God loves to make rules, but because he knows that we need the guidance of those rules.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

The same thing is true, and we learn this as parents, right? It's not that you want to give your kids a thousand and one rules they have to follow. That's not what brings you joy. But you know that they can't touch the stove and they can't drive the golf cart and they can't run with scissors and all the things. So you tell them that, and you say, You also should speak to people a certain way, or you should eat vegetables, whatever that looks like. It's because you know it is right and good and will serve them. And so to think of all of the laws and all of the traditions and all of the scriptures as God's way of helping us to grow and learn and be healthy and be full, then you can see it in a light of love rather than in a light of chastisement or like unruly authority, you know?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah, there's a lot of freedom when it comes to Catholicism and it comes to the teachings of the church. And I know that that might sound kind of contradictory because there's so many things that you can and can't do. But when I was explaining this to, you know, my students or even just, you know, someone that I was talking to about the faith, they're like, I just can't wrap my mind around, you know, not having sex before marriage. I can't wrap my mind around, you know, not having an eye for an eye being an acceptable form of, you know, revenge and things like that. There were like little niche things that really, really were a hang-up for people, which I totally understand. But the way that I was kind of able to get my point across was that, like, okay, well, you just started high school. Unless you're, you know, a prodigy, you're gonna take algebra one. You're not gonna go straight into calculus because you are still in a certain spot where your mind has not yet been formed. It's hard for us to accept these big truths from God because we have not yet been formed to accept that kind of obedience. Like we said, my kids don't know they can't touch the stove. They have to be taught that. And sometimes they have to be taught by, you know, natural consequence that can hurt, but God can bring healing, or it can just come from knowing that that's not something you're supposed to do and trusting the person who's given you that law, given you that command.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

That I think is the thing is the trust to come to the father who you know will judge you. Like we all will all be judged, but to have an idea that you can trust the one who is judging you, that he knows your heart, that he knows your circumstances, and that doesn't quote get you off the hook, like you don't get to not follow his instructions because he knows your heart and your circumstances. But he understands what obstacles are in your way. He understands your weakness, he understands who you are and why you feel needy and incapable. But he also wants to give you what you need to overcome those obstacles. He wants to partner with you, he wants to support you, he wants to offer you grace, he wants to sit next to you in your weakness. And you know, today, for those of you who are listening, we're recording this in Advent. And today we meditated on the incarnation and how God made himself into the weakest, smallest, tiniest little thing, which is a newborn baby, in order to meet us where we were. He entered into weakness, he entered into smallness, he entered into neediness, he is not made uncomfortable by our weakness. So, what we then have to do, as we hear in God's promise today, is walk humbly with our God and say, I am weak, I am small, I don't know how to do this, I don't understand everything, but I know that you're good and I trust you so I can take the next step or do the next thing and and sort of submit to the process. And that is scary for a lot of people because you have to develop trust in a relationship. And if you, like you were saying, Raleigh, if you're just coming into the faith and you're kind of handed the catechism and you're like, this is a lot to figure out. This doesn't feel like me. You know, I didn't come up with these rules for my life. So to submit to the process or submit to the rule to use that word, because that's what kind of lead legalism leads us into this rule following mindset. To submit to the rule ultimately means that you submit to the person who wrote the rule. You submit to the person who created you and who created the church, and you say, I don't really get it yet, but I can walk humbly with my God until it does make sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

So do you want to hear a story of a saint who I think really illustrates this for us? Well, of course I do. Absolutely, I do. Do you know um about Saint Jane Dechantal?

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Is she Italian? No, is she Australian? Is she French?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

French way to go. I actually think if you don't know very much about her, I think you're gonna like her a lot. We can look to a lot of saints actually to learn more about legalism and scrupulosity. That's like a really common story in a lot of saints' stories. But her story, I think, is particularly good for us and our audience because Saint Jane was a wife and a mother, and she was experiencing maybe a lot of what you and I are experiencing, or what a lot of women who are not in the convent maybe are experiencing when it comes to navigating the spiritual life. Um, so she was born in 1572, and I'm not gonna give you her whole biography, but just to illustrate, she lost her mom when she was really little, and then she got married when she was 20. She lost her husband when she was 28, and she had had six children in those eight years. So it was all of a sudden a widow without a mother with all these little children, and hard, right? Hard, harsh world. So she had this personality of responding in harshness because she had experienced all this grief and all this loss after her husband's death. There's all these stories of people who were in her community. Uh, and then her later spiritual director would talk about how she was so strict and harsh with herself and with her kids of just like, we have to wake up and we have to pray, we have to like submit to these penances, we have to be really perfect. And there was just this grief that sort of overtook her, and she could not believe in joy. She could not believe in a version of spirituality that was beyond suffering. So she thought the more I let myself suffer, the holier I'm being. And the more I submit to my own. Like, I need to be mortifying myself in such a way that like everyone knows that I care more about God and more about my spirituality than about like comforting myself. And it became this whole mission in her life to just be like the most pious and the most maybe legalistic in that way that she was just like, I'm gonna do everything perfectly and I'm gonna let go of every other desire that I've ever had and be very obvious about it, right? So she was really intense. Enter another saint, Saint Francis de Sales, becomes her spiritual director, fellow French saint. Yes. So wouldn't you just love for some saint to come rolling into your life and be like, hey, boo, you don't need to do all that. Girl, you're brain broke. You just need to redirect. And so Saint Francis comes into her life and he basically tells her, You gotta go to sleep. You gotta stop waking up before the dawn to say your prayers. You gotta start just being patient with the children and patient with yourself. Because the very first thing you're gonna learn is gentleness and weakness. We're just gonna start there. And she's like, No, we have to wear hair shirts. He's like, No, we need to love our children and love ourselves and love God. That's what we need to do, right? So, like you said before, there's of course a balance. Of course, we're going to church and we're saying our daily prayers, and we are not ignoring God in any way, but we are inviting God into this weakness, this humility, this sort of submission to the fact that I am needy and I can't do it all by myself. And so Saint Francis, who later wrote Intro to the Devout Life, if you guys want a book to read, you can learn exactly what St. Jane learned from her spiritual director by reading that book. He taught her that God desires gentleness and that you become holy through patience and that love must be free. So if you are submitting to all of this legalism and this scrupulosity and feeling like if you don't do it, then you are damned. Then that is not free. You're not choosing it. You're doing it out of fear. Like I said, I was doing when I was younger, right? I was going to church every Sunday because I didn't want to go to hell, not because I loved God. So love has to be free. You have to choose it. You have to be in a state where you are making free choices and not doing it out of anxiety, not doing it out of compulsion, um, and not doing it out of fear and despair. So together, after a series of times where Jane kind of came to this realization and could live out this way, they did end up finding or founding a religious order for women who were widowed or who were just sort of weak, like physically weak and couldn't support themselves anymore. Um, it was called the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, which if you remember is the story of Mary going to visit Elizabeth, right? So, like going to see an older woman who was kind of like in her home. So they became a religious order in France, very, very popular, very, very successful. Um, and one of her most popular quotes, I guess you could say, is that nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as true strength. And in that, she became the she became the patron saint of people who struggle with perfectionism. And so when I first heard her story, I was reading another book called The Heart of Perfection by Colleen Carroll Campbell. So if you need something to uh peruse through, if this is something you're dealing with is legalism and scrupulosity and things like that, I found that book really instructive because it is the story of several saints who dealt with these inclinations towards like self reliance, but also the story of the author herself as she was working through it as a working mother, as a wife, all those things. So, what I learned from this whole story was that I didn't have to. All the answers. I didn't have to make it make sense. I didn't have to be the one earning God's love and forgiveness. I could submit to the mercy and goodness that was already being offered to me. And then, like you were saying before, Raleigh, I actually met God and fell in love with him because I was like, oh my gosh, you're not just like waiting to smite me. You're not waiting with a lightning bolt to like tell me he's not a gotcha God. He's not. He's not waiting to tell me all the things that are wrong with me. He knows all the things that are wrong with me. And he knows that I'm not going to get it right the first time. And he wants to sit next to me and help me do it better next time. Uh so that was a totally different perspective. And that's today's question is how do you discern that? How do you know, you know, like when am I leaning a little bit more towards, like you said before, I'm doing what's right in my own eyes, versus when am I going too far and going into like, I'm just doing everything because, because, and because you're supposed to. So where's that discernment? What does that look like in your mind, Raleigh?

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Think it, if I think about the seasons of my life when I was in high school and college, I thought if I make a poor decision now about direction in my spirituality or direction in my life, that's it. Like I cannot come back from it. I am stuck with one way altogether, and it gave me a lot of anxiety. That's when my faith was more for myself in a sense of kind of like the the Pharisees. Like, I want everyone to see my faith, but my faith was not really rooted and grounded in forming my conscience on the Lord. And when my faith was me centered, it was like I got so much anxiety about choosing the wrong thing or making poor choices, or just like if I don't go to confession within like the next couple hours, that's it. As I got a little bit older, got a little bit more education about my faith and education about spirituality, I saw my weakness more as space for him to work. It was more I was aware of my brokenness and places where I was not strong. You know, it's like St. Paul says, when I'm weak, he's strong because it gives him more space to work. It gives him more growth to bring about in me. So when I'm thinking about anxiety and a sense of loss when it comes to sin and seeing a gentle God, it's been a slow and gradual progression towards peace and knowing that I have a loving and forgiving God. But that has not always been the case. There has, I didn't see faith as something of freedom. I saw it more as a cage. And I think that that might be something that might, you know, be relatable to a lot of people listening, especially those, you know, in high school and college that see people of authority figures might be kind of like gotcha, like just waiting to see you mess up so I can say gotcha and give you this detention or demerit or, you know, whatever, or trying to catch you in a lie, and like that's just not who our Lord is.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah. And I feel like there is a culture in Catholicism where some don't want there to be an emphasis on the mercy of God because there needs to be an adherence to the tradition and to the law, and that's really important. And we want the traditions and the teachings of the church to be respected absolutely, right? But like you said before, legalism means if you are only following the rule of the church or the laws of the church because of fear and because of pressure and because of like social expectation, then you're missing all those opportunities that you just shared about for the growth and the relationship. It has to be married. You have to submit to the rule out of trust of the Lord who you are getting to know and like talking to regularly. You can't do one or the other. It can't be all relationship and I just do what I think God is telling me to do, or all law and all rule. And then there's no space for um, you know, personal interpretation, like you said before, because sometimes the Lord is gonna place something on your heart that's not from the catechism, right? There has to be a balance of both what the church and the tradition is giving you and why it is so beautiful, and what the Lord Himself is giving you in personal revelation through prayer that you are experiencing with him. You need both of those things to have a full experience. And so we have to have that dual emphasis, but it's not quick. Like you were saying, it's slow. It's about like a daily surrender to this rule, to this instruction, to this new type of prayer, to this time in silence. Like it's just a daily, gradual thing because it's a relationship.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

It's a relationship with the church, it's a relationship with God Himself, and all of that takes time. Yeah, it's like you said, it's not a submission to the rule, it's a submission to the rule giver, right? It's a submission to the Lord. So I think that that's where our emphasis needs to go. That's where our our why needs to go.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Yes. And so where do where do we maybe, Raleigh, go to form our conscious well so we can discern well?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

I think there's a lot of resources out there, more than there was when we were coming up in the faith or our parents were coming up in the faith. There's so many like podcasts and apps and episodes and easily attainable things that we can grow in our faith outside of attending mass and hearing homilies. I think that you learn about what you love. And if your love for the Lord is something that you want to grow in and you want to understand more, I think you need to pick up a catechism, but find a companion in that. Like, you know, Father Mike Schmitz has the catechism in the year where he reads the catechism and explains it. I think that you need to find different sources and outlets that are trusted. And even like there's there's, you know, like St. Paul's Institute has their this big Bible study that they have out right now, like access to a lot of different things, even within your own church parish. If you are not unsure of where to start, talk to your priest on Sunday. Talk to the youth minister at your at your at your church. There are resources out there, some free, some you probably got to pay for, but there are ways to grow in the understanding of the church that is outside of a YouTube rabbit hole. Right. Right. Because you can hear someone speak with the utmost confidence on things and them have zero credibility. Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

And I do think that if we're talking about legalism and scrupulosity, if that's something that you're dealing with and it makes you just feel like afraid to even admit that you have a doubt or a question because you just feel like you're supposed to know or you're not supposed to ask a question. I promise you, your pastor or your friend or whoever it is is going to be more excited about the fact that you are trying to go deeper and understand the truth than they are going to judge that you didn't have the answer or that you had a doubt. I I've personally never met anyone who chastised me for asking a question. Maybe they challenged me with the response. Maybe they said, hey, if you don't really get that, then like I'm gonna need you to commit to learning about it. I'm gonna need you to commit to saying, you know, practice some conviction there. But I didn't feel judged. I didn't feel, especially in confession, I've never felt judged by another Catholic who I sought out for advice. And that's not to say I never felt judged by another Catholic, but not someone that I sort of went to in an honest sense of like, I want to become more aware. Can you help me with that? So I do have a reflection question for our listeners. If you maybe are feeling a little triggered by some of this, I would invite you just to think when you think about your spiritual life, does that maybe make you feel anxious? Like Raleigh and I said when we were younger, maybe we felt anxious thinking about our spiritual life and talking to God and thinking about sin and things like that. Or do you already maybe feel like you are beloved by a gentle, loving God? And there's a wide spectrum in between those two things. But just think about where you are on that spectrum because that's gonna inform your next step of your growth.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Amen. Something to pray on, a little bit of homework for you all.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and pray that the spirit has guided your reflection. And in the next episode, we're discussing practical ways to prioritize prayer.

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We'll see you all in the next episode through the grind and the grace. We're praying for you. Pray for us too. See ya. Bye.