Jess - He Lifts the Weight of Those Collective Burdens

When Jess moved from Melbourne to Bendigo she didn’t realise it would be the beginning of such an isolating period of her life. Becoming a mum at the same time as she had moved away from community and a job, not knowing anyone in her new home. For two years she felt hugely isolated, and lonely. But all it took was an invitation from a stranger at a playgroup to change things. While it took six months for Jess to accept that invitation, it eventually led to her going to church and attending an Alpha course. Through these years Jess was brought to the difficult realisation that her will power and strength of character were not enough to absorb all the hits she kept taking. On her own she was inadequate to handle the chaos waters that had come. How was she to carry it all? And how could Christianity possibly help her?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

G'day there. Welcome to The Spirit, where we share stories of faith from the heart of the country. We've just put the kettle on and they're scones with jam and cream. Pull up a chair, settle in, and join us for a chat. I'm Darcy and I'm here on the lands of the Cha Chawarung, who I acknowledge and offer my respect. And I'm in a little place called Kennington and I'm speaking to Jess. Gday Jess.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hello, Darcy, how are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I'm well, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

That's my pleasure. Thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Jess, did you start life around here or did you grow up somewhere else?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Ah, that's an interesting question.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Oh, not straightforward?

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Well, no, not really. I moved around so much as a kid. Right. Originally I grew up in regional Victoria, but in northeastern Victoria. And we moved quite frequently for my father's work. And I think I counted the number of times I started as a new student at secondary school, and there were 13 new starts. So the idea of shifting around a bit is something that uh became a bit of a theme in my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

True. Yeah, so did you get a little bit of a wandering soul?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Very much so. Yeah. Very much so. And being somewhere for six months or twenty four months became very much routine.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Was church or faith part of your early life, Jess?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Uh yes and no, not really. Whenever Nan and Pa came to stay, then we go to church. Yes. Basically, like Easter, Christmas, maybe. Okay. Um, but yeah, not really. Yeah. So I I did my first holy communion. Yeah. Um, but that was it. And by the time we moved away from that area and we didn't see Nan and Pa as often, it drifted.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

I remember being really stressed in like primary school for a test that was coming up that week, and my Nana gave me a prayer as she was saying goodbye. I still remember where we were. I was in the car reversing out of the driveway. I was in the back seat, and Nana was there, and she she said, When I'm feeling worried about something, Jess, I always pray, Lord, help me remember that nothing will happen to me today that you and I can't handle together. And so even though I had no faith, at different points in my life I prayed that prayer.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah. It's such an encouragement, I think, because there are a lot of older people in our churches who have grandkids and they feel like their grandkids are so far from Christian faith, but it's a testimony to how even those little um offerings and gifts of things like prayers um travel with those grandkids. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Absolutely. And long before I found any kind of faith that I would hold as my own, I would pray to my nana after she died. Yeah. And I didn't I don't know why, I don't know how, but sometimes, you know, in the dark of night when fears were great, yeah, I would think of her and express my wishes or w like whatever it was, but it was her that I pictured.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah. Wow, that's so interesting. It is, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. She must have been a comforting presence.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

She was a marvel, that woman. Yeah. She was wonderful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

I wonder then, growing up, were your attitudes to Christianity and the church anything in mind as you kind of entered adulthood?

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Uh yes, but it wasn't particularly complimentary, I'm afraid, Darcy. I remember my uh year ten science teacher talking about faith and science and the creation of the world.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

And um pointing out the contradictions in evolution and uh a seven-day creation narrative. And I remember being horrified, having never turned my mind to that, and asking my mum when we got home, and she was just she didn't have an answer for me, which I now understand why, because it's not something that you can, it's not a simple question.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Um but that really chipped away at what could have potentially grown sooner. My idea of Christians and Christianity is that they were beige.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

So beige. They sat around singing kumbaya, believing in something akin to Santa Claus, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, more money than any other institution in the world, having raped and pillaged the globe for centuries. I had nothing but contempt for a world of hypocrites who would say one thing and do something else.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah. Jess, what did you end up doing for work? How what kind of career did you end up in?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

I ended up uh in the law. I studied a couple of times at university. I studied an arts degree at Melbourne Uni the first time round and then travelled overseas, and I worked all sorts of different jobs from nannying to teaching English to working in cocktail bars all around the globe. And at some point I was like, hmm, I wonder what I'm gonna do. I'm definitely not gonna be a teacher, and I'm certainly not gonna be a nanny. I guess I need to do something else. Got into law, so then I did a graduate entry law degree. And then I went from there into some of the top-tier firms and ended up spending about 10 years in that environment, which was cutthroat to say the least. Darcy. Yeah. Take a group of A-type personalities and smoosh them into a highly competitive environment and then shake really hard.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah. What does it do to your soul working in those types of environments?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

That is a great question. And I can't speak for anyone else.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

But I saw a friend of mine recently, a phenomenal woman and a phenomenal lawyer, and she reminded me that we were sitting in our offices and we had a conversation, being like, Is this it? We have worked so hard to get where we are. And you get through getting into law school and getting grades that are good enough and doing all of the extracurricular activities and then getting into the law firm and then getting a place and then getting a job. And she and I were like, Is this it? And I find that I I often look back to that because looking around, there were so many people who had a hollowness inside, and we all tried to fill it differently.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Some people chose cocaine, others chose alcohol, some people chose status symbols like fancy cars or clothes, or there are so many different ways in which we try to fill that gap in our lives. I chose to step away from it momentarily. I I met my partner, and I he and I together decided that we needed to do something a bit different.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

And so he and I took 12 months. We travelled Australia, we spent like six months in Europe, like friends' wedding, all these kinds of things. And then we came back, we were married, and I was pregnant, and we needed to work out where we were gonna go.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

And we knew we couldn't afford to live in Melbourne on a single income if I was home with a child. If we needed to find work in Victoria, we would need to go to either Geelong, Ballarat, or Bendigo, because other there are no other regional towns that would actually have sufficient work to employ us. And I had this affinity with this town, and this is where we ended up coming to.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

And having moved here, and our eldest was born within like six weeks, and I moved into a very isolating period of any woman's life if she's lucky enough to have children, but that was compounded by moving away from a role, not having worked, having no job to go back to, moving into like the culture shock of going from like inner city suburbs, team conferences in Brussels, like to living in a house that had been a rental property for like 20 years, everything was yellow and arid and burnt and dry. And if you had told me then that I would still be here 10 years later, I would laugh in your face. Yeah. I was like two years max.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

And here we are. For two years at least, I felt hugely isolated. Yeah. It was it was a really lonely time. I'd go to this coffee morning on a Friday, and sometimes people would talk to me, but not often. No one ever remembered me, and if they had better people to talk to, they'd just chat to them instead. Except this one lady, and I still remember where we were standing when she first spoke to me. She knew everybody, and she could have talked to anyone there, but she she chose me. And she invited me to playgroup, which was at a church, but it wasn't like a churchy playgroup, it was just a playgroup that happened to be at a church. So there was no need to like go to church, it was just a playgroup. It took me over six months to get to playgroup. Right. For a number of reasons, it just didn't happen for a really long time. But on the day I got to that Tuesday morning playgroup, she recognized me. And I could see from the way her eyes lit up that she remembered me and she welcomed me with a warmth that I had not experienced in this town.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

It was really profound.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I now know that she prayed for me for over seven years for me to become a Christian.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Really?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yep. She never gave up on me.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

She prayed for you before she met you?

SPEAKER_00 10:20

No. It took seven years from me going to playgroup for me to become a Christian. Oh, I see. And that whole time our friendship deepened. And one of the reasons I think our friendship became so strong is because she had no expectation on me. Her friendship was not conditional on me going to church. It was not conditional on me becoming a Christian. She always invited me to anything going on, including her like small groups. And I always respectfully declined. Yeah. Not because I wasn't curious to see what they talked about there, but because I was afraid that if I went and I walked away, I'd lose her friendship. And that's that's how much of it meant to me.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Do you know what else was really interesting? She wasn't beige.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Like at all.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Like ever. And also, through that playgroup, I made new friends because everybody had lived somewhere else. Everybody had come, either come back or had come to Bendigo in like a certain period of time. And none of the women I met there were beige. If they were Christian, they they laughed. They told jokes. They were vibrant, passionate people who had done interesting things and they loved dancing to James Brown or drinking a cheeky little glass of bubbles. There was nothing boring or kumbayar-ish.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

And it it didn't sit with me. Because all of a sudden it didn't fit with my confirmation bias that all Christians, well like the ones that I had met before. Through these friendships, they every now and then just dropped a little something, a little breadcrumb. And also in the background, like the chaos waters were rising. I guess for all of my life I have believed that I am strong enough to carry it all on my own. And with this phenomenal gift that I have, a combination of sheer stubbornness and perhaps a little bit of stupidity, I there is nothing I could not achieve through just sheer work. And we all live in like a meritocracy. Like the harder you work, the better it is. And if you do your best, then you'll get what you deserve. Like this concept that we are able to just through being good enough, it will all be okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

And that's not what's happened in my life over the last however many years. Because even though my love has grown with each addition to my family, so that this encompassing love just goes further, my willpower and my strength of character to just absorb all of the hits that we all kept taking. It was just grossly inadequate for the chaos that just came. And I felt like I was just bouncing and ricocheting from one disaster to the next. But I had a dream two and a half years ago, and Jesus was in my dream. It only ever happened once, and it happened, and it was he was wearing white, and he was me, and then he was there, and he spoke to me, and he said two words. And I uh I I didn't know what to make of that.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, you'd become a person with a weird Jesus story.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Which is why I haven't told anyone until now. She says, leaning into the microphone, I'm like, oh, this is not good. What was interesting is that um so I kind of tried to go to church once or twice.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Still not feeling comfortable.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

So do you woke up the next morning, that's really vivid, and you kind of I knew it was real. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

There was something, there was, and I and still now, and I guess that's why I don't talk about it, because who knows, like, who has a real dream where someone comes? Like, but it was. It was like it was not a dream. There was it was tangible. Like I knew who that was in a way that that never happens in dreams. Like characters shift and fade, and this was the Christ, and he spoke to me, and he told me to have faith.

unknown 15:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Which went against every fibre of my being.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Because I was not going to sacrifice my intelligence and what, leave it at the door to go into church and start believing all of this hyperbole.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

On the basis of a dream.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Exactly right. This is no no no no no.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Lawyers don't act on dreams.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

But on one of these occasions that I went to church, Darcy, they said something about alpha. Right. As much as I was curious and I wanted to go, I did not think. Well, actually, I just knew that I couldn't. I knew it was very difficult, nigh impossible for me to actually leave the house.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

With the demands of the household, for me to leave the house once a week for like 10, 12 weeks. Like that's just physically, it can't be done.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

My mate messaged again and again. She's like, Can you come? Can you come? Can you come? And I was like, I wish I could, but I know that I can't. And then this extraordinary woman who had given every Tuesday morning from 7:30 a.m. to 8 30 a.m. to help my son learn to read for free in my living room, said to me as she was leaving, Hey, do you want to do alpha with me? I'll pick you up just before it starts. And I just said yes. I knew I couldn't do it, so I'd given it up.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

But then all of these things just fell into place to make it happen.

unknown 17:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

And thank God it did, because when I got there, I tell you what, if she hadn't driven me, I would have turned around and walked out.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

You didn't have your car keys.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

No, I didn't. So I had to stay. And I was like, what an eclectic.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Eclectic, nice word.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Ecentric.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Misfits. Like it was.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

You didn't belong there.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Oh, nobody belonged there. It was such a strange group. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

And I say that knowing that I've said this to their face. Yeah. And you know what? That first session was pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Like it was really philosophical. Why are we here? And the guy who was like running the show, running the program, the guy who developed it in London.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Was a barrister from a family of barristers.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

And the whole reason he became a Christian is because one of his mates at uni had become a Christian. He was like, right, I'll have to prove to him that it's wrong.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

So he sat down and read the Bible. Came out for air four days later. Oh God, it's true. I was like, huh. Interesting. Week number two was where it was tricky, Darcy, because that's when they started with the evidence.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

I was ready for it, the Christian propaganda machine.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

So when they started talking about the evidence, I was like, here we go. Luckily for me, my mates know me better than I knew myself. And they had so many books for me to read. Right. And so any questions I had, they would answer. And in fact, made time to sit with me weekly. Often the day after the alpha session. So that whenever I was frightened, which was most weeks, especially later on. Later on when they started talking about, you know, people speaking in tongues. I was like, I'm sorry, what? I actually hid in the bathroom and tried to figure out if I could escape through the window. True. True story without anybody noticing.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

When C.S. Lewis says he's the most reluctant convert to Christianity, I feel like I'd give him a run for his money.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if he ever tried to clam out the bathroom window.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

To be fair, I didn't actually try, I just I just thought about it. I was like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Yeah, would I fit? Yeah.

unknown 19:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

What was extraordinary about that Alpha course in the end, though, is that it didn't convert me to Christianity. But by the time it had finished, I had to acknowledge to myself that I wanted to spend time with people who are Christians. I don't know why. I couldn't articulate why necessarily, but I didn't want Alpha to finish. And I didn't want that eclectic group of cray crays to stop meeting every week because there was something about coming together. And I don't know what we did together that was so powerful, but I didn't want it to finish. And it hasn't. We still meet every Thursday night. Really? Two years later. Yep. We had dinner together last Thursday.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Wow, that's so special.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

That's so special. There's something really special about this group.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

When the word church is used in the Bible, it's actually looking to the people. And when you have to or more gathering in Jesus' name, that's when the church connects. And for me, that has become my lifeblood because it is only through this body of Christ that I feel that I am still standing today. Because the chaos waters have just risen and risen and risen, and there have been times when it just overwhelmed me. And it is that church that someone will message or call or turn up with the dinner or pick me up or just hold me. And there's a sense of Christ being in with that moment, and then when we pray to him, it's like he lifts the weight of those collective burdens and he literally carries that load.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you so much, Jess. Thank you for speaking with me. Thank you so much for being so open and generous with your time. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

My pleasure, Tarcy.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

The Spirit is brought to you by the Anglican Diocese of Bendigo. To hear more stories like this, please subscribe to this podcast. You can help us share these stories by leaving a review. And you can find photos, videos, and more storytelling from the heart of the country at thespiritstories.com.au or on Facebook and Instagram at thespirit.stories.