Cynthia and Susan are joined by guest Jeralee Henderson Renshaw to discuss the idea that God isn’t impatient with us, we are impatient with ourselves. “Becoming” is a lifelong process—the fact that we’re never quite finished is simply part of the plan.

Episode Summary:

  • Life has a way of placing unexpected things in our path. There are things placed in our lives that we can’t get over, under or around. You have to just go through it. That can be very difficult, but gives us opportunities to grow.
  • What do you know?
    Jeralee:  “I am far from what I once was, and not yet what I am going to be.” The older she gets, the less she knows. We have to keep our minds open to learning new things or looking at things in a new way. Taking a step away from certainty holds space for a lot of possibilities.
  • God is not in a hurry, but we struggle being patient in our lives. We can know this intellectually, but it is hard to put it into practice.
  • God uses raindrops to make canyons. Nothing on the earth is perfect, it is all in a continual process. What does perfect even look like? 
  • Cynthia’s life motto: It’s good enough!
  • As women, we put a lot on ourselves to achieve perfection. It could be about our own lives or our lives as parents. We have to accept and honor the agency of our children. Our family isn’t always going to look a certain ‘perfect’ way.
  • “It all fits.” —Richard Rohr 
  • Our children’s choices are a part of the story. We can always love and support them regardless of what they choose.
  • A lot of us have anxieties in wanting to know the outcome of choices and life in general. We have to be patient and let go of control. We have to learn to love and appreciate the process. In regards to our children, it is their process, their choices. We will always care as parents, but we have to to honor the process.
  • Slow does not equal less desirable.
    • “Slow doesn’t have to be timid or lazy or less than smart. Slow isn’t a marker for fear and procrastination. Nor apathy and indecision. Slow isn’t dull and boring but contemplative and considered. Slow is the yin in a very yang world.”  —Jeralee Renshaw
  • People want to just know if it is true. Then they will believe. But we should sit with the questions and be careful to not rush through and make a decision too quickly. How much of life’s richness do we miss if we try to move too quickly through life? Get comfortable with the discomfort in our lives.
  • Our church’s symbol is the beehive: worker bees, industry, hard-work. It doesn’t give us the ability to sit back and embrace the process and do the work. There is a lot of emphasis in church on the finish line and on doing. There are a lot of things that need to get done and people to help. But maybe in our internal growth and progression, we need to slow down and be mindful and enjoy the process. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate those two parts of our lives.
  • Susan had two elderly visiting teachers at one point in her life, when she had young children. They kept telling her to appreciate those days with little children because those days were fleeting. It was never helpful! Those days are hard! But if she were to go back now and live that life, things would be different because of what she has learned since then.
  • We have a long-view but that often negates our mortal life. We often don’t allow ourselves to fully immerse ourselves in the experience that we are having here in this life with our families, ourselves, the aging process, etc. We have more control of what happens in this life right now, instead of the anxieties of what could happen in the eternities. We need to focus on our relationships and families today and the eternities will work themselves out. There really is no other way.
  • Deep time—the earth has a multi-billion year history and could last for billions of years to come.
    • “In deep time, everybody matters and has his or her influence and is even somehow present and not just past. Deep times erases the barriers of the years erect between us. Once a person moves to deep time he or she is utterly one with the whole communion of saints and sinners, past and present.”  —Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
  • Deep time could be those “a-ha moments” when everything comes together or makes sense. It could sum up the past years of your life and you can start connecting the dots.
  • “To pray is to learn how to trust deep time. To learn how to rest there and not be wrapped up in chronological time.” —Richard Rohr
  • Deep time is similar to Mormon eternity. Maybe the problem isn’t that we are trying to fast forward through this mortal time, but somehow we need to encompass more of the ideas of Mormon eternity in our lives now. 
  • Fear holds us back so often, but hindsight shows us that things tend to just work out. In the moment, we don’t see or know how things will work out. Susan made an art piece that said, “Things will happen you can’t begin to imagine now.” Susan learned through her cancer experience that she would give back the anxiety felt in the experience but would not give back the lessons she learned through it.
  • “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue, do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live among some distant day into the answers.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
  • The wisdom will come to us, in time.