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"Mid Season Recap & Life Updates" with Chris & Eddie · The Weight

• 0:00
  Chris McAlilly: [INTRO] The truth is, the world is growing more angry, more bitter, and more cynical. People don't trust one another, and we feel disconnected.
• 0:16
  Eddie Rester: The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing, and hope.
• 0:28
  Chris McAlilly: So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health. And we want you to be a part of it.
• 0:44
  Eddie Rester: Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO] I'm Eddie Rester.
• 0:52
  Chris McAlilly: I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
• 0:55
  Eddie Rester: Today we are doing our spring wrap up. We've never done one of these.
• 0:58
  Chris McAlilly: But we're doing it today.
• 0:59
  Eddie Rester: But we're doing it today.
• 1:00
  Chris McAlilly: It's gonna be great.
• 1:01
  Eddie Rester: It's gonna be great. We want to give you some life updates.
• 1:03
  Chris McAlilly: Life updates. My life looks a lot similar since last time we gave life updates.
• 1:06
  Chris McAlilly: Eddie's has changed.
• 1:08
  Eddie Rester: Mine's a little different. So we'll get to that.
• 1:10
  Eddie Rester: We want to talk about some of our favorite episodes, maybe point you to some episodes that you missed along the way. And then we're going to talk about summertime, Chris.
• 1:17
  Chris McAlilly: Summertime!
• 1:18
  Eddie Rester: Are you doing anything fun this summer?
• 1:20
  Chris McAlilly: I'm going to put my toes in the sand.
• 1:22
  Eddie Rester: Toes. Which...
• 1:23
  Chris McAlilly: And then I'm going to go to the mountains as well. I'm doing a little bit of both.
• 1:27
  Eddie Rester: Oh, you're doing both Wow. Aren't you...
• 1:29
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah.
• 1:29
  Eddie Rester: Aren't you just kind of special?
• 1:31
  Chris McAlilly: I'm not that special. I'm not as special as you. You travel now all over the country because the life update.
• 1:36
  Chris McAlilly: But we'll get to that.
• 1:37
  Eddie Rester: I travel. We'll get to that in just a minute.
• 1:38
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna kind of work through the spring and talk through some of the great episodes and maybe you want to listen to a little bit of this, it won't be very long, and go back and revisit some of the episodes that have been some of our favorites this spring.
• 1:55
  Chris McAlilly: What for you, Eddie, I wonder what your favorite episode was this spring?
• 2:02
  Eddie Rester: I've got several of them. Dana Trent's just one of my favorite people. Back during the episode, we mentioned that she's a fan of the pod.
• 2:10
  Chris McAlilly: Now she's blowing up. It's like watching your favorite indie band blow up.
• 2:12
  Eddie Rester: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Her book is doing well.
• 2:17
  Chris McAlilly: "Between Two Trailers."
• 2:18
  Eddie Rester: "Between Two Trailers," which is her life story. It really deals with trauma, childhood trauma. And one of the things we talked about was that everybody has some version of childhood trauma. Nobody escapes it. But how we heal from that, and how we process that as adults becomes important for the people we become, and how we shape the lives of other people.
• 2:38
  Chris McAlilly: Is this the episode where you give folks a sense of your childhood stuff?
• 2:42
  Eddie Rester: I think I did.
• 2:42
  Eddie Rester: It's hard to remember sometimes what we talk about so in depth.
• 2:46
  Eddie Rester: So but yes, it's a little bit of my background was in that episode.
• 2:53
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah. So and that reminds me of another episode that was kind of in a similar vein, but it was talking about preaching. And it was with Kim Wagner.
• 3:01
  Eddie Rester: I knew you were goin to say.
• 3:02
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, preaching at Princeton, and the book was called "Fractured Ground," and the episode has the same title.
• 3:09
  Chris McAlilly: And I think Dana and Kim need to meet. I think they need to work together. Because there are a lot of parallels. One is in a memoir format. And one is in a conversation about how we process trauma theologically and in the context of church and in preaching. And Kim's idea is that trauma fractures our story.
• 3:33
  Eddie Rester: Right.
• 3:33
  Chris McAlilly: And then the question is not just how the pieces get put back together, but how you gather those pieces up, honor them, and then find your way into a new narrative.
• 3:43
  Chris McAlilly: And she does a remarkable job of bringing her research to bear and she's just a delightful person.
• 3:50
  Eddie Rester: Yeah. And what I really liked was her perspective wasn't just always on individual trauma, but communal trauma.
• 3:55
  Eddie Rester: Churches, communities, schools, go through significant trauma and how we deal with that as communities matters.
• 4:05
  Chris McAlilly: And I'll tell you one way that we deal with it, and I am making a transition. We do it through food.
• 4:10
  Eddie Rester: We do it through food. So we've got a couple of food episodes this this season.
• 4:12
  Eddie Rester: We've got John T. Edge who writes about food in the South.
• 4:17
  Eddie Rester: He was actually the one that started us off this spring. And that's got... We don't get to do a lot of live interviews, live podcasts. Everybody's on zoom.
• 4:27
  Chris McAlilly: We've got to get back to that. We're gonna have to. If someone's out there and wants to give us a large donation to fly people into Mississippi, we would happily receive it.
• 4:34
  Eddie Rester: Exactly. I think some of them would probably want to fly privately. But...
• 4:38
  Chris McAlilly: And we will also.
• 4:39
  Eddie Rester: We could go.
• 4:40
  Chris McAlilly: Also, we can go to where they are.
• 4:41
  Eddie Rester: We can go.
• 4:42
  Chris McAlilly: That would be fine.
• 4:42
  Eddie Rester: I go to a lot of plane rides. We'll get to that in just a minute. But the other one was Hunter Evans, who owns Elvie's in Jackson. I'm eating there soon. Excited going to brunch there.
• 4:54
  Chris McAlilly: What are you going to eat?
• 4:54
  Eddie Rester: I usually get this this duck hash brown thing, a few eggs.
• 4:59
  Chris McAlilly: I didn't know you were a duck hash brown guy.
• 5:00
  Eddie Rester: I like it. It's very good. It's very good. But Hunter talks about his love for Jackson. He's honest about the challenges of Jackson, Mississippi. But he is committed to a vision of not just work, but a vocation, living out who he's called to be there in Jackson, Mississippi.
• 5:18
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, I think culture is upstream of a lot of the problems that we see in politics and otherwise. And I think some of the most creative people move to places and see possibilities that others of us don't see. And if there's going to be a broader kind of social or cultural, a social or political renewal, I think in some ways, it will start by folks investing in cultural renewal. And I think that Hunter is one of those people. And I was very inspired by that conversation. Those were the food episodes. And now I'm forgetting what else we talked about, because now I'm hungry.
• 5:58
  Eddie Rester: One of the people that was fantastic. I didn't know anything about her. Kayla Craig, "Every Season Sacred," back in February. She's written a book that really helps parents talk about faith with our kids, but not in a pressure, oh, if your kids can't recite the entire Bible by the time they're four, you failed as a parent.
• 6:16
  Eddie Rester: Very much freeing parents to here's how you raise your kids in the faith in the midst of lives that are busy and crazy and overwhelming. And it's a resource I wish I had had, when I was raising my kids and things were busy, crazy, and overwhelming.
• 6:33
  Chris McAlilly: She gives the language and sometimes one of the hardest things to know what to do is to talk to kids about faith in a language they can understand. And she gives language for prayers and liturgies, for the simple and ordinary parts of life.
• 6:50
  Eddie Rester: Right.
• 6:50
  Chris McAlilly: Not just the really difficult or the really joyful times. And the goal of it, I think, is that you adopt, as a family, a certain kind of rhythm and your kids begin to take on board this idea that life is sacred. And she is herself a mother and does a great job of offering some of the wisdom that she's learned along the way.
• 7:15
  Chris McAlilly: You know, I'm thinking about, you know, the power of story. I know that one of your favorite episodes this season was Neil White.
• 7:27
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 7:28
  Chris McAlilly: Tell folks who Neil White is.
• 7:29
  Eddie Rester: So Neil White is a New York Times bestselling author. He wrote "In the Sanctuary of Outcasts." But now he helps other people tell their stories. He runs a publishing company. He helps people figure out how to do the writing.
• 7:42
  Eddie Rester: Sometimes he ghost writes with other people, helps people write their stories. But I ran into him actually, in a store here in Oxford just yesterday, and he was so delighted. People have been finding him, talking to him about the podcast.
• 7:58
  Chris McAlilly: So many people listen to the podcast that they just find...
• 8:01
  Eddie Rester: He didn't say, really, how many. Probably three. I don't know. But he said people have talked to him about the podcast.
• 8:07
  Chris McAlilly: Hundreds.
• 8:08
  Eddie Rester: Probably thousands.
• 8:09
  Chris McAlilly: Thousands.
• 8:10
  Eddie Rester: Millions. That's probably...
• 8:11
  Chris McAlilly: Probably not millions.
• 8:12
  Eddie Rester: Probably not millions.
• 8:12
  Chris McAlilly: There're not that many millions that live in the state of Mississippi.
• 8:14
  Eddie Rester: That's right. So but he really was thankful, because people understood that, really telling your story. And he really encouraged people.
• 8:21
  Eddie Rester: Write your story down. Not to get published, not to ever turn it into a book. But just to be faithful. Writing your story is something that we can all do.
• 8:31
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, I'm looking back through some of
• 8:31
  Eddie Rester: Couple episodes about the church, I want to these episodes, and "Stories Save Lives," that was the Dana highlight those if that, if you're wondering, how do we do Trent episode. But that is a theme of the spring is just the power of stories. Danjuma Gibson talks about the power of story of some of the folks that we think of as saints, particularly this? How are we, in this moment, this strange moment, saints that were working through the Civil Rights Movement, folks like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr, and looking through their eyes, looking through their story for the wisdom of how we might navigate our stories. That episode was really powerful.
• 9:21
  Eddie Rester: culturally that we're in, what does it mean to be the church?
• 9:24
  Eddie Rester: Angela Patterson, who is studied psychology, studied media, and does deep dives into the lives of really Gen Z, people ages 13 through 25, and what does faith look like for them? What is purpose mean to that age group?
• 9:39
  Eddie Rester: What can the church offer them?
• 9:44
  Eddie Rester: And the hopeful thing for me in that episode was that Angela says that there's a lot, actually, that the church can help people frame faith, that the church can help people understand where they see the sacred in the world. She says this younger generation sees and understands sacred but sometimes they don't have language and they don't have a lens for that.
• 10:04
  Eddie Rester: The other one is Andrew Root, who wrote a book called "When the Church Stops Working." And it's kind of a play on words, but a lot there about looking for our watchwords. How do we find the things in our church, that's really embedded into the DNA of our churches and live out of that?
• 10:25
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah. So the idea would be that God works in the future, in light of how God has worked in the past.
• 10:31
  Eddie Rester: Right.
• 10:31
  Chris McAlilly: And thus far, the Lord has helped us. Here I raise my Ebenezer, those kinds of phrases. Nothing shall separate us from the love of God. Those are things that we can remember, and it can shape our attention and our hope for the future.
• 10:46
  Chris McAlilly: Another person who offered that perspective was David Watson, in an episode called "The Faith that Shapes Us." He said, we don't have to reinvent the faith in every generation, we inherit the faith. And in inheriting the faith, we inherit all of these memories, all of these words of who God has been in the past, and how God will be at work in the future. I was preparing for the summer sermon series here at the church. And I was reminded the story of Hagar and Ishmael.
• 11:10
  Chris McAlilly: And one of the things that that story is the first time that the word "wilderness" was used in the Bible. It's first time somebody went into the wilderness. And at the backside of the story, Hagar says, and that she named God, "the One who sees me." You know, and I've been thinking about that all day, this powerful idea that we don't have to make stuff up. We can go back and receive the riches of the tradition. And that can be offered to the next generation in a way that can give them better health outcomes, more hope, like all kinds of wonderful things, and lead to flourishing lives. It's been a great...
• 11:59
  Eddie Rester: It really has been a great season.
• 12:00
  Chris McAlilly: Great spring season. We've now just talked about almost every episode. And so you should just go back and listen.
• 12:04
  Eddie Rester: Just go back. The whole thing. You've got to summer to do it. This summer, we will be releasing episodes from the backlog some from this season. We've got...
• 12:12
  Chris McAlilly: So many good espisodes.
• 12:13
  Eddie Rester: Four previous seasons. And so...
• 12:16
  Chris McAlilly: As we mentioned before, The Weight's just a huge deal. It's just blowing up around the country. We don't want you to miss.
• 12:21
  Eddie Rester: Don't miss out.
• 12:21
  Eddie Rester: But so maybe if you're new to the podcast, watch for those episodes to pop up on Thursdays, listen to them, and they may lead you to some other episodes from previous seasons. I'm thankful for the work we've been able to do. I look forward to the restart in the fall. It just introduced us to so many amazing people around the country.
• 12:46
  Chris McAlilly: No doubt, and we...
• 12:47
  Eddie Rester: Around the world.
• 12:47
  Chris McAlilly: We're excited about the fall. And we're beginning to make plans. And part of those plans involve thinking through what are the conversations that we need to have, personally and professionally, that help us answer some questions. And I feel like this might be a good point for us to transition and maybe talk about life updates.
• 13:08
  Chris McAlilly: I'll give you my life update.
• 13:09
  Eddie Rester: Give us your life update.
• 13:10
  Chris McAlilly: What I did yesterday, and what I did today are the same. And my kids are a little older. But I'm basically doing the same stuff.
• 13:17
  Eddie Rester: Same thing.
• 13:17
  Chris McAlilly: What's your life update?
• 13:18
  Eddie Rester: My life update is that after leaving Oxford two years ago, Audra and I moved back to Oxford, Mississippi, in March. My role at the church in Jackson ended at the end of the year, actually a little bit before that. And so I spent a season of just prayerful discernment. Where's God leading me? What is God calling me to do? I spent the end of the year, first part of the year having conversations with great people all over the place and ended up in a conversation with a guy named Derek Baker who leads a group called Dickerson Baker.
• 13:55
  Eddie Rester: They're a consulting firm. They do a lot of nonprofit consulting. And for several years now, they've wanted to launch a division to do church consulting. And so they've been looking for somebody to do that.
• 14:05
  Eddie Rester: We had an incredible conversation, set of conversations really, with different staff people.
• 14:12
  Eddie Rester: And in March, I went to work for them, launching this church division. There's a group years ago, that was, lots of people know, called Cargill Associates that, back in 2022, Dickerson Baker kind of absorbed that group. And my directive is to build a group that can help advance the church. And so I get to use all of my experience and conversations and just kind of bring to life a group that helps with leadership development, resourcing, helps with coaching of pastors, staff searches, a lot of different things that we'll be doing in the years ahead. We're just in the early stages of putting the wheels on it, and we'll see. We'll see where it takes us. But I'm very excited. I do travel a lot. I got stuck in Dallas for two days recently, and that was... It was... It was not fun.
• 15:06
  Chris McAlilly: A lot of people travel in and out of Dallas these days. I want to ask you about your work. But before I do that, I want to ask you about the season kind of between things.
• 15:17
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 15:18
  Chris McAlilly: If you'd be willing to talk a little bit about that. I think that there are a lot of people that get--this is my observation. And folks in their 20s are just trying to figure it out. "Can I do the thing?" And then some people get to a place in their 30s, where they are able to do the thing and are successful at the thing and get to whatever the height or the pinnacle of their thing is. And then I observed something happens from like, 40 to 45, where you do the same thing over and over. And the question is, "Can I do this forever?" And then you get to a certain point around 50, where it's like, "I don't know if I can do this forever." I saw a little bit of that in you.
• 15:56
  Eddie Rester: Yeah.
• 15:56
  Chris McAlilly: You know, and I wonder as you have imagined something new, kind of what you learned in that season of being a little bit wandering in the wilderness and coming out the other side?
• 16:06
  Eddie Rester: Yeah. You know, it was wandering the wilderness. I have joked before, I was semi retired. And then my girls, just they remind me, I was unemployed, basically. And so it was the season of, you got up in the morning... and you didn't have anything on the calendar.
• 16:23
  Eddie Rester: Maybe I had a meal with somebody or phone call set up. But you know, so it was this weird, awkward moment.
• 16:32
  Eddie Rester: A couple of things that came out of it. One was I wrote a lot.
• 16:35
  Eddie Rester: And that was a godsend for me.
• 16:35
  Eddie Rester: I'd wanted to write a lot through the years and that really anchored me. I'd get up in the morning, and that's the first thing I would do is write.
• 16:45
  Eddie Rester: The other thing was, and this was something that just God whispered to me going back into last summer, that all would be well. And what's funny is that a week after my last Sunday at the church, I went to a silent retreat at a monastery in Coleman, Alabama. Who knew that they have multiple monasteries in Coleman, Alabama?
• 17:08
  Chris McAlilly: Alabama is a weird place.
• 17:10
  Eddie Rester: It's fantastic.
• 17:10
  Eddie Rester: But the mug that I picked up to drink my coffee in late November, said, it was the quote from um... from her. Mmhmm. "All will be well, and all manner things will be well."
• 17:26
  Chris McAlilly: Is that Julian?
• 17:27
  Eddie Rester: Julian, yeah.
• 17:28
  Chris McAlilly: Julian of Norwich.
• 17:29
  Eddie Rester: Julian of Norwich.
• 17:29
  Eddie Rester: Thank you. And so. So that was just comfort for me. All would be well. So as I entered into this season of being in between, carrying with that. I had a lot of friends, Chris, you are among them, who occasionally had to remind me, Eddie, all will be well. And you know, what was glorious was every conversation led to another conversation led to another conversation. You know, I got to talk with random people, that people would say,"Call this person," or "Call that person," and you know, just every conversation was encouraging.
• 18:05
  Eddie Rester: And I think part of me wanted to hole up and to just go under a rock for a while. But my friends wouldn't let me do that, old and young, wouldn't let us do that.
• 18:17
  Eddie Rester: And looking back now, I'm thankful for that. And if, I would encourage you, if you are in an in-between place, one of those spots right now. There are friends around you who want to cheer you on, who want to pull you out from under the rock. Let'em.
• 18:37
  Chris McAlilly: I think that's a good word. And I wonder what did you, you know, beyond kind of...
• 18:40
  Chris McAlilly: I think that's helpful. It kind of provides a map. What did you learn about yourself? And what did you learn about God in that season?
• 18:51
  Eddie Rester: I think we'll start with the second question.
• 18:55
  Eddie Rester: I think just God's faithfulness, just in little places. You know, I can't remember who said this either. You probably, since you knew Julian of Norwich, you may know this one too. You know, there's nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred. I felt like I learned, every moment in life has potential to be sacred, every meal, conversations. God just kept showing up in the strangest places. I showed up at Oxford University United Methodist Church, first Sunday of Advent. And just everything in that service spoke to where I was, from the music... Y'all, the church started Advent a Sunday early. Chris, you broke the rules there.
• 19:43
  Chris McAlilly: I did. I did it for good reasons. If you want to learn those reasons, you can come and talk to me.
• 19:48
  Eddie Rester: So, I think that.
• 19:48
  Eddie Rester: And then I think for me, what I learned was just keep, keep leaning in. Keep leaning in to the God who's going to show up.
• 19:55
  Eddie Rester: Keep leaning in to the God who doesn't abandon, the guy who sees, that all will be well. I mean, there was one time I texted some friends I said, really I'm in a place where you just need start texting me every few days, "It's gonna be okay." You know, since I was in elementary school, I had a job.
• 20:16
  Eddie Rester: I had work. And I didn't, and that was different. But God was faithful, and God was present, and God wasn't different. God was consistent. And that's what matters. That's what I learned mattered.
• 20:31
  Chris McAlilly: So what about for you? What did you learn about yourself?
• 20:35
  Eddie Rester: I think my proclivity to productivity is a danger to my soul. I remember, one Saturday or Sunday morning, laying on the sofa early in the morning, I was like, "We've got to figure out what we've got to do today, Audra." And Audra was like, "You can stop. It's okay for you to stop." And I had, it had been so long since I had been given permission to stop, that, one, I learned that my wife is very wise. And two, I just need those moments just to stop.
• 21:20
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, that's wisdom. And I appreciate your sharing it. And I am grateful that you're in a new place. And I'm grateful that you made it through. But I'm also grateful for the lessons that you learned during that season. Because I think that there are people that need to hear it. And so thank you. And
• 21:37
  Eddie Rester: And let me offer this. If you're in that season, come find me. Reach out through the podcast. Find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.
• 21:45
  Eddie Rester: Don't do the Twitter's anymore.
• 21:51
  Eddie Rester: It's too dark. Find me. I'd love... We'll set up a zoom or if you're around Oxford, let's go have coffee. I'll buy you lunch.
• 22:02
  Chris McAlilly: That sounds good. Thank you. Thank you, Eddie. And thank all of you for being with us for a little bit over 20 minutes. We won't keep you all day today. But we're grateful.
• 22:13
  Eddie Rester: Becasue we want you to go listen to another episode.
• 22:14
  Chris McAlilly: Go listen to another. Yeah, we just want you to be on just a steady diet on repeat of The Weight podcast.
• 22:21
  Chris McAlilly: Just let it soothe your soul.
• 22:23
  Eddie Rester: Thank you for listening.
• 22:24
  Chris McAlilly: Thanks for being with us today. And we'll see you next week.
• 22:31
  Eddie Rester: [OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
• 22:37
  Chris McAlilly: If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]