Today we're joined by Colette Lafia, a spiritual director, poet, and author whose newest book Leaving the Shore: Experiencing Poetry as Prayer invites us into a different way of meeting the divine than we might be used to.

Much of our faith language often centers on effort—perseverance, pressing forward, fighting the good fight. Colette offers a somewhat gentler direction: the idea that relationship with God can look much more like surrender than striving.

One of the most vivid parts of the conversation is Colette's take on delight. She traces it back to relationship: the moment she stopped approaching God as someone to plead with, and started experiencing the connection as something to simply enjoy. Her point isn't that discipline or commitment don't matter—she still believes in practices that cultivate a spiritual life—but that delight can carry us there without so much of the striving we're used to.

We felt like this conversation is an invitation to loosen our grips on outcomes, on certainty, even on the idea that connection with God has to be earned, and to notice what opens up when we let delight and creativity lead instead.

Join us September 24-26 at Restore:Connect and don't let finances stop you from joining us - email info@faithmatters.org for a scholarship if you or someone you know could use one.

Today we're joined by John White, a theologian and ethicist who is currently Research Fellow at BYU's Maxwell Institute — and who has a fascinating and unexpected story that led him to convert to the Church just under a year ago.

For over a decade, John was a tenured professor of practical theology and ethics at Baylor's Truett Theological Seminary, where he directed the graduate chaplaincy program. His work has been at the intersection of theology, ethics, and everyday embodied life—character formation, moral agency, and the ways our institutions and practices shape who we become. Then a few years ago, an unexplainable experience at an academic conference set him on a path he never saw coming, one that eventually led him to baptism.

What made this conversation so fascinating for us, is that John brings the full weight of that background to the questions many of us have lived with our whole lives. Together we explore the theology of the body—what it means to embrace the body, not just tolerate it, and how our theology supports that idea. We wrestled a bit with the phrase “the Church is true,” and how a Christ-centered lens might free us from treating every question as a row of dominoes. And we spent some real time on the problem of agency—where our freedom actually lives, and how it might expand as we act in concert with the divine.

Again and again, John helped us see things we'd almost stopped noticing, and hear language we take for granted with fresh ears. We’re excited to share this one.

Join us September 24-26 at Restore:Connect and don't let finances stop you from joining us - email info@faithmatters.org for a scholarship if you or someone you know could use one.

Today we’re bringing you a session we loved from last year’s Restore with Thomas McConkie.

There’s a particular overwhelm I know that often comes with learning something new—a low-grade worry that I’m already missing something, forgetting the important pieces, not going to be able to hang onto it all. When it comes to personal development or spiritual truth, that worry can feel especially high stakes.

In this session, Thomas offers what has felt to me like an antidote to all of that striving. The deepest truths, he says, aren’t hiding somewhere just out of reach — they’re woven into our actual lived experience, so close we can’t help but bump into them again and again. As Thomas puts it, “Sacred reality is so good you can’t miss it.”

There’s something incredibly freeing to me about trusting that what is most true and most sacred will keep finding us. I’ve thought about this session and his message often since last year, and I’m excited to finally share it with you.

Thomas will be back with us at Restore:Connect this September, so you’ll be able to hear more from him there. You can get your tickets now at faithmatters.org/restore!

And be sure to check out Thomas’ podcast One Heart One Mind, produced by Faith Matters, as well as his book At-One-Ment.

Available on Bookshop.org

Available on Amazon

Join us September 24-26 at Restore:Connect and don't let finances stop you from joining us - email info@faithmatters.org for a scholarship if you or someone you know could use one.