The Salt and Light Express with Lee Ann Walling | Created In The Image of God 234

What happens when the life you built around love, faith, and routine suddenly falls apart—and the country outside your front door feels just as fractured? In The Salt and Light Express, Lee Ann Walling follows an older woman who sets out alone in a small RV after the death of her long‑time partner. The journey takes her through the physical landscape of a divided America and the inner terrain of grief, anger, and spiritual disorientation. Along the way, she revisits Episcopal congregations from her past, lands in the hill country of Texas with an evangelical family unsure she should even be a Christian, and finds herself unexpectedly in conversation with a Baptist preacher whose kindness doesn’t fit her assumptions.In this episode, Lee Ann shares how the novel emerged during her MFA program at Drexel—nothing like the book she first imagined, yet deeply rooted in her own path through Methodism, Baptism, atheism, and an eventual home in the Episcopal Church. She describes her protagonist’s sharp, sometimes elitist judgments softening as she encounters ordinary people who complicate the culture‑war caricatures: a pastor willing to risk his position by preaching from Matthew 22 about loving God and neighbor in a hostile climate, relatives who wound and yet reveal their own fears, and strangers whose small acts of grace reopen the possibility of faith. Threaded through is a quiet attempt to strip religion back to “the teachings of Jesus” and ask what a simple, lived‑out faith might look like for someone who has lost trust in institutions but still longs for God.More than a theological treatise, The Salt and Light Express is a road story, a love story, and a meditation on aging, loneliness, and belonging. For readers and listeners—older women, spiritual seekers, LGBTQ believers, or anyone who has gone “to look for America” and found more division than unity—this conversation offers a tender, honest look at how stories can help us keep traveling toward meaning, reconciliation, and a faith that is both humble and real. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe Get full access to Created in the Image of God at wadefransson.substack.com/subscribe