Episode 33: Taryn Hayes

Immigration guilt, homeschooling, a difficult diagnosis, writing a novel - these are some of the things that Taryn Hayes shares with Tori Walker, host of The Lydia Project: Conversations with Christian Women. Join Tori as she welcomes Taryn to her dining room table to chat about living in the light of the gospel. Keep listening to hear the easter egg at the end!

EPISODE NOTES:

Taryn and her family moved to Brisbane, Australia from Cape Town, South Africa in 2017, due to her husband's job transfer. Taryn's day job consists of homeschooling their four kids and ferrying them to sports and activities, however she also makes time for small group church ministry, writing, reading, and connecting with people in various ways.

In 2019, Tori asked Taryn to join the The Lydia Project: Conversations with Christian Women podcast team. Eager to exercise her creative muscles, Taryn agreed to be involved in the background, but was soon roped into doing some interview work too. Reluctant at first, given her lack of interviewing experience or confidence, Taryn has come to love this part of the job for how it allows her to connect with others and hear, first hand, their stories of how they came to trust Jesus and how He is working in their lives. 

In her spare time, Taryn enjoys creating memorable moments for her family, writing for various online platforms including The Gospel Coalition, Australia and spending time with friends and family. She hopes to get to bigger writing projects in the future and continues to pray for opportunities to grow in her love and understanding of God's Word. 

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Home Church in Cape Town: St James Church, Kenilworth (Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church in South Africa)
• Home Church in Brisbane:  Mitchelton Presbyterian
• Taryn is the author of the gospel-highlighting novel, Seekers of the Lost Boy (Naledi, 2013) set in Apartheid South Africa

SHOW SNIPPETS:

"From that point onwards, I understood assurance in a growing sense."

"Here I am at 42, still so often on my knees saying,  “Oh,Lord, I am so glad that I don’t have to work out my salvation, and that you have saved me because I’m really bad at this obedience thing!”"

"We fell head over heels in love with each other, and everything that comes with, just you know, teenage romance: not thinking carefully about physical boundaries and getting embedded in that very deep, very intense relationship to the exclusion of many other relationships. So, a lot of lack of wisdom. But, God, in His incredible grace kept us, and six years after we met, we got married and we’ve been married for 20 years."

"Initially I thought homeschoolers were nuts! I thought they were crazy and felt so sorry for poor children who are homeschooled because I imagined that they would be stuck inside all day; they wouldn’t get to socialise; they would be socially awkward; they would grow up to be people who would have a very limited understanding of the world. Basically every stereotype many think people think about homeschoolers, I thought, with enormous amounts of judgement."

"My advice to new homeschoolers always is answer (critical questions) with oodles amounts of grace and admit that before we started homeschooling that these were my concerns too, but this is how we’ve solved it."

"It (homeschooling) does mean putting a lot of my passions on hold. I love to write. I have discovered, through having written my own book, that to do that requires enormous amounts of time because once I'm in the zone, that's all I want to do. I want to live, breathe, eat, sleep the book. I don't want to be a mum. I don't want to be a wife. I want to just write. And I know I can't repeat that until my kids are grown."

"The marketing is soul-sapping … you as an author have to self-promote. It’s putting yourself in a space that is not comfortable at all. I’m fearful, if I’m honest, to wade back into that world."

"I will never forget the look on Murray, my brother-in-law’s face when he came out to tell me… he looked ashen. I just knew that something was wrong."

"For a whole week we didn’t know and there was a possibility that it was cancer. Everyone was skirting around that without saying the C word. There was a lot of uncertainty and concern."

"It was a very very traumatic time. But it was a time where we sensed enormous amounts of peace as well. That sense of people’s prayers carrying us was felt, very supernaturally … although we did have fear and we did cry, sob, worry, undergirding that was a sense of the most enormous amounts of peace."

"ldquo;She on her own, as an 11-year-old, came to the conclusion, “why not me?"

"It’s one thing entertaining an idea, it’s another thing when it becomes something you have to make a decision about."

"Along with our move (to Australia) has been a lot of immigration guilt."

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