Get Ready With God

I’m pressing pause on the podcast for now, and I want to be honest about why. I’m in a season where my faith feels hard and I’m choosing it even when I don’t feel it. I’m taking some time to go inward, rebuild my own relationship with God, and trust that the right path forward will come.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to control how people perceive me, and I’ve learned how exhausting—and limiting—that can be. In this episode, I’m talking about the freedom that comes from living in alignment with my integrity and letting other people misunderstand me when I can’t control their story.    

I’m getting a little salty about the obsession with what “counts.” Whether it’s scripture study, work, or personal goals, I think we’re missing the point when we focus more on checking the box than on whether our effort is actually moving us toward the outcome we want.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to control the outcome, but losing my son taught me something I couldn’t ignore: sometimes you can do everything in your power to change what’s coming and still have to let it happen. Inspired by The Odyssey, I’m thinking about the balance between fighting like hell, taking action, trusting God, and eventually getting on the raft and letting yourself be carried home.

I talk a lot about looking for divinity in every day, but I’ve been thinking about what that actually means. I don’t experience big miracles or obvious communication from God very often, and for a long time, that made me wonder if God was even there. In this episode, I talk about why I think miracles can be rare while divinity is everywhere—and why we shouldn’t count ourselves out of God’s story just because our experiences don’t look like the faith-promoting stories we hear from other people.    

In this episode, I share my perspective on one of the most divisive topics in religion: modesty. I talk about why I'll never teach girls they're responsible for boys' choices, why I think how we present ourselves still matters, and how I've come to think about modesty through the lens of respect, responsibility, and maturity instead of shame. This isn't really an episode about hemlines—it's about how we choose to show up in the world.

What do you do when someone you love starts questioning the faith that means so much to you? In this episode, Julie reflects on parenting adult children with humility, trust, and compassion. Instead of focusing on controlling outcomes, she explores what it looks like to trust God, validate honest questions, protect the relationship, and choose love over agenda.

Does following God invite more opposition—or prepare you to face the challenges that were already coming? In this episode, Julie questions the narrative that the more good you do, the more you're attacked, and shares why she'd rather focus on God's power than fear the darkness. A conversation about courage, willingness, and choosing hope over fear.

What if following God doesn't protect us from hardship—it prepares us for it? Today we're talking about letting go of a transactional view of faith and discovering the kind of peace that doesn't depend on our circumstances.

I realized something while painting my office this weekend: I don't actually struggle with perfectionism. I struggle with high expectations. And those are not the same thing. Today we're talking about the difference between perfection and growth, why failure is actually required to meet high expectations, and why I don't think God ever expected us to be perfect in the first place.

Today I'm sharing one of the most sacred parts of my grief story. We talk about loneliness, the presence of someone you love, and why some experiences feel like evidence that there's something more than what we can see. If you've ever wondered where God is in heartbreak, this episode is for you.

Were we sent to earth to learn how to suffer, or to discover a deeper kind of joy? In this episode, I share a reframe that's been changing the way I think about pain, faith, and the purpose of our lives. Maybe suffering isn't the lesson after all. Maybe it's the path that teaches us to recognize a joy that's deeper, steadier, and less dependent on our circumstances.    

Sometimes the people we love can see something in us that we can't see in ourselves. Inspired by Kacey Musgraves' song "Rainbow," this episode explores how loving others gives us a glimpse into the way God might love us. What if, even in your hardest moments, there's still a rainbow over your head? What if God sees your potential long before you can see it yourself?

In a world built for convenience, what happens when we outsource too much of our own lives? Today I'm reflecting on why physically caring for people, making food, tending plants, cleaning a home, and creating with our hands can become deeply grounding spiritual practices. Maybe the goal isn't to do everything yourself. Maybe it's to stay connected to the parts of life that keep you rooted in each other, in the earth, and in God.    

Why are we so determined to prove we're right? Whether it's faith, parenting, politics, or the food we eat, we spend so much energy defending our choices and comparing ourselves to everyone else. Today we're talking about the freedom that comes when you stop trying to win every argument, stop needing everyone's approval, and let your relationship with God become deeply personal instead of performative.

The most sacred moments of our lives are often the most painful. Today, I'm reflecting on grief, the thin space between heaven and earth, and why trauma and divinity sometimes seem to exist in the very same moment.

A new mom asked me, "When do you start feeling normal again?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe we're asking the wrong question. Today we're talking about the grief of becoming someone new, why life isn't meant to leave us unchanged, and how God often works through transformation instead of restoration.

My 15-year-old said something after work that I haven't stopped thinking about: "Good stories are great, but they suck to live." Today we're talking about the difference between wanting an outcome and wanting the life that produces it, why meaningful lives are often built through uncomfortable days, and how to tell if a dream is actually yours by looking at what it requires of you.

We were told to build a personal brand. But what if turning yourself into a product comes at the cost of your identity? Today I'm talking about the pressure to monetize ourselves, why chasing culture can leave us disconnected from who we're meant to become, and why I believe our calling should shape our lives more than our personal brand ever could.

What if freedom comes from giving yourself fewer choices? Today I'm sharing a simple system that has helped me navigate everything from body dysmorphia to faith deconstruction to OCD tendencies. Sometimes healing isn't finding the answer. Sometimes it's recognizing that a particular thought spiral has lost the privilege of your attention.

The world is designed to keep you wanting more. More success. More money. More influence. More of everything. Today I'm talking about why that constant pursuit can leave us feeling restless, and why staying grounded in a divine source is the only way I've found to know what's actually worth chasing.

What if the fastest way to grow is simply admitting you made the wrong choice? Today I'm sharing why I've stopped trying to convince myself every decision was the right one, what a recent trip taught me about my priorities, and how my relationship with God helps me learn without spiraling into shame.

What if reality is already enough? Today I'm talking about emotional regulation, our tendency to dramatize difficult situations, and why our response often shapes our experience more than the circumstances themselves. From a lost phone at an amusement park to the stories we tell ourselves, this episode is about finding peace by letting reality be exactly what it is, without making it worse.

Complaining isn't the problem. Staying there might be. Today I'm talking about the difference between criticizing and contributing, and why the biggest changes in my marriage, work, faith, and community have come when I stopped waiting for someone else to fix things and started asking what I could do to help.

Why do some people seem more "blessed" than others? Today I'm sharing why I've stopped thinking of blessings as rewards for righteousness and started seeing them as something much deeper. For me, the greatest blessing of faith isn't wealth, health, or easy circumstances. It's finding peace and being okay, even when life isn't.

Is the world really worse than it's ever been? Today I'm sharing why I've changed my thinking about that narrative, why I believe it's rooted in privilege more often than we realize, and why focusing on doom doesn't actually make the world better. This is a conversation about perspective, responsibility, and choosing hope without ignoring suffering.

We aren't returning, we are rebuilding. 

I went to the Vatican, watched strangers cry in a building that wasn't mine to cry in, and came home with a theory I've never said out loud until now.

Gwen Stefani said something at The Sphere that I wrote into my talk the next night. I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

We talk a lot about generational trauma. I want to talk about generational love and what it actually costs to build it.

Two years ago God saved me by asking me to do more. Today I got to find out if it worked.

I took away my own existential crisis privileges, and honestly it's going pretty well.

My ambition came back recently, and instead of feeling relieved, I felt guilty. Turns out there's a stage of grief nobody really talks about.

My official submission for a new faith campaign. 

A handwritten letter from one of the most faith-filled people I know reminded me that the person making you feel like you belong rarely knows they're doing it.

Turns out Jesus didn't follow consistent patterns, and what that means for how I'm learning to live my own life.

A churro, a daughter, and a reminder that the thing you're most self-conscious about might be exactly what someone else needs from you.

Loyalty is powerful and it matters enormously where we place it. I learned this the hard way when loyalty to a person kept me stuck somewhere I shouldn't have been. Then a friend told me something that changed me: you don't have to be loyal to your suffering. This episode is a quick inventory. When we're more devoted to an influencer, a pastor, or even a skincare routine than to our actual divine source, we're one bad decision away from a crisis. People fail. God doesn't. The goal of this podcast has always been to point you back to your own relationship with God, not to me. I'm just a girl sitting in front of a microphone. (Diet Coke gets a pass.)

A woman at church yesterday put words to something I've been feeling but couldn't quite name: the pressure to be negative. Not just cultural pressure to be negative, but the sense that despair and outrage have become the moral high ground. That if you're a good person paying attention, you're angry and hopeless and posting about it. I share a personal story about a time I got called out for not posting about an immigration situation while I was quietly helping families in my own neighborhood, and I make the case for a different way to fight. Hope is not naivety. Positivity is not opting out. And I think normalizing both of those things right now is actually the harder, more important work.

I've been noticing the same theme showing up everywhere in my life lately, so I'm putting it on record. I believe God is inviting us to graduate from black and white, checklist-style living into something harder and better: holding complexity, living in the gray, and letting that be the standard. I get a little niche with my Mormon faith to make the point, but it applies everywhere. When we stop box-checking, performative action loses its power, judgment gets harder to justify, and we finally get free enough from ourselves to actually love other people well.            

I share a newly articulated belief that's reshaping how I follow God: everything He asks of me is for my own good. Not because He needs something from me, but because He doesn't need anything at all. I unpack my past season of atheism, what I used to get wrong about jealousy and commandments, and why choosing this as a baseline assumption makes trust a whole lot easier.

I used to believe that following God meant things would eventually go the way I wanted. Then the worst years of my life happened while I was trying the hardest. This is what I learned about prayer, entitlement, and what it actually means to trust God when He does not give you the miracle you asked for.

I have seen this pattern wreck people in their careers. I have seen it wreck people in their faith. And I have done both. This episode is about the moment you stop demanding that God, or your religion, or your marriage, or your motherhood owe you something and start realizing the power you actually have to choose your own way.

This episode might not be for you. If you're already self-sacrificing to the point of destruction, skip this one. But I have to be honest about what has actually saved me, because I can't tell you anything different. Every time I've hit a breaking point and prayed to be rescued, the answer has been more. More service, more sacrifice. And it has worked every single time.

I spoke on unchangeable worth at a conference while privately struggling to feel my own. Then flew across the country to speak on grief with strangers and felt more at home than I did in my own city. It was a good reminder. The path God actually calls us to walk is not always the one people approve of. That's not evidence it's wrong. But there is a cost. And the only way through it is going back to the source.

There was a time when dissonance felt like a reason to opt out. I did it with faith for years. But we're past that. Dissonance is in every relationship, every job, every person. You can't opt out of everything. So we might as well learn to hold it, because when we do, things get deeper, not harder. That's been true in my faith, my marriage, and honestly, my feelings about AI.            

I spent months waiting for God to tell me what to quit. Nothing came. So I just started quitting things, one by one, and the guidance showed up in the action. Not before it. Waiting on God can quietly become non-action, and black and white thinking about right and wrong can paralyze us completely. God trusts you. The question is whether you trust yourself.

Noah Kahn can articulate something without knowing how to fix it. So can I. Being able to name a feeling is not the same as having the answer, and I think we've been wrong about what counts as valuable. God rarely hands me a solution. He hands me creativity, relationships, experiences. We're not only here to solve for x. We're here to build the equation.

We need to stop giving Satan so much credit. Resistance is normal. Hard things are normal. And framing other people's agency as darkness working against you is a wild way to live. Maybe Suzanne from down the street just disagrees with you. That's not a spiritual attack. My calendar is full. Satan is not on the agenda.

The whole point of working on your insecurities is not self-love for its own sake. It's so you can be trusted. It's so you can show up for other people without being threatened by them. When I can get to that place of genuinely rooting for someone, seeing their gifts clearly, no jealousy, no agenda, that's the closest I've felt to seeing someone the way God sees them. And if I can believe it for them, I can start to believe it for myself.