Show Notes
What happens when the confident, inherited faith you’ve relied on suddenly fractures? Many believers eventually hit a wall where doubt, suffering, or church hurt make everything they thought they knew feel like it’s dissolving.
Navigating this disillusionment isn’t a sign of failure. It is often a deeply normal, expected part of the spiritual lifecycle that is rarely talked about openly.
In this episode of Nuance, host Case Thorp sits down with Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague, co-authors of the book Mid-Faith Crisis. Catherine and Jason unpack the difference between toxic spiritual environments and normal human failing, the danger of bringing consumer-culture expectations into our theology, and how to survive the inevitable valleys of faith. Drawing on their pastoral and personal experiences, they provide a roadmap for believers who feel stuck, showing that the path to true spiritual maturity often requires moving past easy answers and learning to sit in the sanctuary of God’s presence.
From releasing unrealistic expectations to understanding the spiritual rhythms of consolation and desolation, Catherine and Jason help modern believers see how pressing through the darkness eventually leads to a more resilient, flourishing faith.
📚 Episode Resources:
Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path Through Doubt, Disillusionment, and Dead Ends by Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague: https://www.ivpress.com/mid-faith-crisis
Catherine McNiel’s website: https://www.catherinemcniel.com/
Jason Hague’s website: jasonhague.com
InterVarsity Press: https://www.ivpress.com/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Faith is not always a straight line. Many of us begin with a confident, inherited faith. It fits, answers many of our questions. It feels reliable. And then somewhere along the way of life, something happens. Things get complex. Maybe it’s a pastor that just preached on something that infuriated you, or maybe someone at church said something pretty ugly and it hurt you. Or perhaps it’s prayers that go unanswered, a time of suffering that goes unnoticed. Certainty can fracture.
Well, here at Nuance, we usually explore the intersection of faith and work and how that shapes our vocation to lead in public life. Well today, we’re going to lean a little decisively on the faith side of that equation, because before faith informs our work, it must first survive reality. Don’t I know it?
Well, my guests today are Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague, co-authors of a new book from InterVarsity Press called Mid-Faith Crisis. It’s a book that gives language to an experience many Christians carry quietly and often alone. Well, Catherine, Jason, welcome to the show.
Catherine McNiel
Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here.
Jason Hague
Thank you so much.
Case Thorp
Well, I really appreciate you taking your time for this. So we are recording this in February where it, in Orlando here, is a balmy 65, 70 degrees and sunny skies. So I hesitate, Catherine, what’s it like in Chicagoland?
Catherine McNiel
You know, I wish that you had invited us to record in person. I would have come.
Case Thorp
Well, give us some more donors and expense accounts and we’ll make that happen.
Catherine McNiel
There you go. Actually, we’re doing very well today. It’s in the 30s and it feels amazing because about 10 days ago it was at least 40 degrees colder than this.
Case Thorp
That’s an improvement.
God bless America. That’ll give me a mid-faith crisis. And Jason is coming to us from Eugene, Oregon, where, I don’t know, how much snow do you get in Eugene?
Jason Hague
We don’t get much at all. No, if we want snow, we usually drive up to the Cascades and in an hour drive and you can get some snow. It’s chilly, but it’s not cold. It’s not like Chicago.
Case Thorp
Well, there you go. Well, friends, listeners and viewers, let me remind you to please like, comment, share these episodes on your social media. You just don’t know how that helps us to reach further and to bless folks with these conversations. So we hope. Well, Catherine McNiel is a writer and a retreat leader whose work centers on spiritual formation and the interior life. Jason Hague, a pastor and a writer himself, who spent many years accompanying people through seasons of doubt, loss, and reconstruction. So now, friends, I can imagine, I mean, a book like this doesn’t get written from distance. I mean, this book clearly has emerged from your real ministry and pastoral work in real people’s lives. So tell me, how do you know each other, and then what sparked the writing of this book?
Jason Hague
We know each other because we first published through the same publisher and we met through our editor. So we started texting, we realized we had a lot of similar tastes in literature and things. So we became friends years ago and we just started talking about our own lives and ways that we were seeing the world, things that were happening, and realized, hey, this is a topic that’s touching our lives in very personal ways and touching people that are coming to us talking about it. So we decided to write this book together.
Case Thorp
So did the editor see a personality or a vocational overlap, or did they come to you with this topic and say, we think y’all have something to say?
Catherine McNiel
It was a personality overlap that it was actually not the editor of this book who introduced us. It was an editor at a different publishing house of a different book. Both Jason and I had written on themes of loss and suffering and perseverance and disorientation in the past. And we’d even found some pages that almost seemed identical to what the other had written, even though we didn’t know each other at the time, hadn’t read each other’s work. So I think our editor was wise to introduce us. And then we found we just had so much in common, both in the ministry posture that we have, as well as the ways that we wrestle with things like this.
Case Thorp
Well, I’m really excited about this conversation because so much of my story actually comes from brokenness in the church and brokenness in faith. So I had grown up in the United Methodist Church and we had four pastors in a row who, God bless them, just were not gifted, skilled, and did a lot of damage. And we begged and begged our youth director, who mentored myself and my sister, discipled us, my mother’s best friend, we begged her to leave. And finally, through some precipitous events she did, went to the Presbyterian Church. I’ve stayed ever since. And I was actually very hesitant when I was feeling the call to ministry because I had seen so many poor examples of pastors. And yet it was at that Presbyterian Church that that pastor just redeemed for me what that could look like.
Tell us what is a mid-faith crisis? What do you mean by that?
Catherine McNiel
What Jason and I have discovered through our own life of faith, as well as our own ministry of journeys with other people over the course of years and decades, as well as the research that we’ve done for this book, is that it is very common in a life cycle of faith that after you have something all figured out, after you are deeply committed, all in, in it to win it, there comes a time when it seems like everything has fallen apart or is dissolving or is disorienting. You hit a wall, you hit a ditch. You know, there’s endless metaphors I could use, but the point is…
Case Thorp
And specific to faith, not just your work life or your relationships.
Jason Hague
Right.
Catherine McNiel
Exactly, exactly. And you know, there is a pun in our title, mid-faith crisis. We are definitely hoping people will notice that there’s a parallel to a mid-life crisis. But we are looking specifically at the life cycle of faith. And it’s not just in our own lives and in the lives of those we’ve ministered with or journeyed with. It’s also in the research. People have found that if you are going to have a full life cycle of faith, it is almost inevitable that you are going to have a time period of season where it seems that you’ve hit a wall and there’s just not a path forward. I think we all know folks that have been there or are there, even if we ourselves don’t resonate with that today. And I think often the options that are available in our imaginations and in our conversations are, well, just ignore that, push that under the rug, don’t talk about it, that sounds scary. Or you know what, just throw it in, like leave faith, walk away. And those are options, but we wanted to look for another option. We wanted to find a path through the very real experience of doubt, disillusionment, and dead ends.
Case Thorp
Jason, tell me how you come to understand this phrase.
Jason Hague
Yeah, I mean for me, it crossed over really well, the idea of mid-life crisis and mid-faith crisis because I had a lot of stuff in my 40s that I just didn’t expect, even as a pastor. So there really are lot of parallels there. There’s a lot of disappointment, there’s a lot of disillusionment that you can have in your life in general, in your career, in your family.
Case Thorp
Even as a pastor. Yeah.
Jason Hague
In that it hits you- this wasn’t supposed to be this way. This is not how I planned it. This is not how I envisioned it. That can happen and that can happen in your family life and it can happen to being a Christian too, like I thought kids weren’t gonna struggle like the other kids struggle. I thought that I wasn’t gonna struggle my prayer life the way that I see some of my parishioners struggle in their prayer life. I thought that I was gonna maintain this confidence in the way that I’ve seen scripture and all of a sudden I find myself as shaky as some of the people that I’m ministering to and and wow, it’s that the fact that that hits you by surprise– that’s the jolt– it’s like wow, I didn’t expect this, it wasn’t supposed to be this way and so it it definitely feels like a crisis. It’s not just I’m asking questions, it’s this is a crisis, I feel shaken because this timeline did not match up with what I thought.
Case Thorp
Well, I’ve experienced many who have had a powerful religious experience or conversion, and they want to stay on the mountaintop, as we all do. And it’s just not reality, and that’s okay. I’ve learned in ministry to try to speak of plateaus, that this retreat or this study or this mission trip takes me to a new plateau rather than the sharp up and down. You’ve heard that in your conversations.
Catherine McNiel
Yeah.
Jason Hague
I absolutely think that, you know, in different circles it’s worse. My experience has been mostly in the charismatic stream of the church, which I love; we have some beautiful things in there, but there definitely is that expectation. There’s the mountaintop, you’re supposed to live up there. You know, the more you look at scripture, like why do we think that should be a thing? The people of God who have never stayed on mountaintops, they’ve had these experiences, but they go down into the valley. And so one of the main things we try to do in this book is to normalize that experience. It’s okay. You don’t have to stay up there. It’s okay that doubt is hitting you. It’s okay that grief is hitting you in this really deep and tender spot. You’re not extra broken. You’re human and you’re wrestling with this very real life that’s beautiful and so, so painful.
Case Thorp
Yeah, to expect it.
Catherine McNiel
And you know, it helps to look at scripture and see this there because you know, scripture is full of heroes that ebb and flow, but we can look into our own bodies. We can look out the window. We know that we can’t stay awake, you know, functioning consistently. We have to wind down. We have to sleep. We have to wake up again. It cycles in, you know, this is less so true for you in Orlando, but one of the benefits of living in a place that gets so cold is that everything looks dead now and it looks dead for months. But new life is coming and that’s true about our spirits as well, and we write about, these are big words, but consolation and desolation. Like we do go back and forth between the two and the fact that we are in one or the other right now doesn’t mean that the other one’s not coming. It is, and we can learn to kind of go with the rhythms and build up some strength and some muscle as we go.
Case Thorp
Sure. Well, at The Collaborative, we’re real and intentional about spiritual formation. And while we do a lot of heady stuff, I still advocate the heart is the focus in a lot of this. 51% heart work, 49% head work. All that to say, consolation and desolation are big themes for us. So explain what those words mean. Love those words.
Catherine McNiel
We write about consolation and desolation using a lot of writers and thought that has gone before us, specifically in the realm of spiritual formation. It does, I think, go back to that earthy lifecycle metaphor of sometimes we are moving towards something expanding and sometimes we are contracting. And it is absolutely necessary that we have the dawn as well as the dusk and the dark as well as the light. When our spirits are in desolation, we may be contracting or going into a season of dimness or dusk. But if we can keep going, persevering, the dawn will come. A season of consolation is around the corner and Jason and I are really honest that it doesn’t feel that way. We know firsthand how long the night can be, but we still find so much value in encouraging each other to persevere, to look for those moments of consolation, those areas of quickening and enlivening and light. I’m sure Jason has wonderful things to say on top of that, but that’s a little bit of how I see it.
Jason Hague
Yeah, I see it as…life in the Spirit is, you know, it’s breath. The breathing in and breathing out. And the moving toward and then the feeling like you’re having distance. And I think in both of those times, the desire is to look toward God, look toward the Spirit, look toward community. Because there’s times where you’re gonna feel that distance, but to always be trying to move toward. Even in feeling that separation, to make to stay in that posture of trust is even in the midst of desolation I think is a beautiful and such a helpful thing.
Case Thorp
Jason, why do you think we assume or live our lives thinking it’s always gonna be roses?
Jason Hague
I think, you know, I can’t speak for other cultures in this, but I think it’s because we have too many TV commercials.
Case Thorp
It spills over in our faith.
Jason Hague
I mean, it absolutely does. We live in such a consumer society where everything we see, I mean, I use commercials as an example, obviously, but everything we see is like, this is the good life. Do this, wear this sweater, this is the good life. These shoes, you know, whatever it is. So we expect that we take something and this is going to make everything work. So I think that ends up crossing over into our faith of read this book or do this, pray this way. You know, it wasn’t so very long ago that there was a massive best-selling little gift book that says pray this specific prayer and everything in your life is going to fall into place. And that was a massive, massive bestseller. And I think that speaks to where the church in the United States has in large part been. We thought that if we can do this, here’s the magic bullet to the good life in Jesus, and it’s just not realistic.
Case Thorp
That’s right.
Well, and the iPhone or other phones lead us to think it’s simple and it’s achievable. And in some ways, yes, Jesus is so simple, but there’s the long walk of obedience that really makes a difference. That’s really good. So what are some of the things you found that really upset people’s walk of faith most?
Catherine McNiel
Well, we have a bunch of them. Jason and I have joked we could definitely write a sequel because we wrote about what we could and there’s many other topics that we could have included. We found that suffering, we were just touching on that, but suffering is a big one. A lot of times I think we do believe that everything is going to be great and if it’s not there’s someone to blame and there’s something that can fix it. So when suffering comes and nothing seems to fix it we’re wondering are we to blame or is God to blame? And I think that it can be an extremely difficult road for a lot of people. Another one that we found is disillusionment. Following a teacher and then finding that he or she was leading you in very much the wrong direction, involved either in abuse or toxic behavior or any number of things, becoming disillusioned by the person who is leading you to Jesus or the church, the organization, political beliefs, social standings, all kinds of things that we have associated with the path that we’re on going to Jesus only to find out that it’s not. Actually, that it’s quite a different path. We found so many people who are just absolutely turned around and confused by that kind of thing.
Case Thorp
Mm-hmm. You write on page 75, “What about the people and institutions that were supposed to hold these leaders accountable? All too often, when questions arose and red flags were raised, governing bodies such as boards and denominational leadership look the other way.”
And one thing I’ve observed, especially from a staff perspective, is so many people come on staff thinking it’s going to be like the church retreat all the time. And then all of a sudden they bump into, we’re real people and we have real agendas and we have real sin and we hurt one another. Now I’m grateful we have the tools, maybe unlike some other workplaces where there’s confession and grace and mercy, hopefully. But I see people when they finally get to a point in their faith they realize you know that the church isn’t perfect. It needs to be healthy and not toxic. But that’s different than this perspective of it’s always going to be perfect and nothing can be bad. And if it is, then I can’t handle it.
Catherine McNiel
Yeah, yeah. We also write in the book about how there is a level of sinfulness that is damaging and harmful, and we need to be very upfront about that and seek healing and repentance. But there’s also a level that is non-toxic and is just human, and that’s where we need to use forgiveness and compassion and mercy. And I think it can be very difficult to know, especially if you’re someone who has been traumatized in the past or harmed or abused in the past. You don’t want to come back into a community if there’s a danger that the community is going to hurt you. But the fact of the matter is all human relationships are going to include missteps and misunderstandings and pain. And I think it can be hard to say my prior experience was deeply harmful and abusive, and I can now differentiate this experience as painful at times, but overall loving, and that’s a journey that takes a long time.
Case Thorp
And it takes time sometimes not to blame God, but to realize this wasn’t God. This was that crabby person or that poorly managed issue within an organization.
Catherine McNiel
Yeah, and the lack of accountability for it, as you mentioned.
Case Thorp
I know someone who was very much in their faith, walking with the Lord, had been in environments with weak discipleship, not great discipleship, and then somebody in the choir just popped off one night at choir practice. I mean, really, really hurt this person, and they’ve never been back to a faith community, a church community. And it just makes me so sad. It’s real, and it makes me sad for both of them. But the more I feel like I try to vocalize such things that it helps, like you say, like what your book’s trying to do, to recognize there’s the warp and the wolf, the consolation and the desolation, and some perspective resetting perhaps on…Well, what is this arrangement, this thing called Christian community? That even the body of Christ can act this way.
Catherine McNiel
Yeah.
Jason Hague
I think it would be easier with some of that if in general the body of Christ was better at calling out the things that were needing to be called out. And I think sometimes it just feels like there’s this endless barrage of scandal and cover up the past decade and you know, there’s been more of it even the past couple of weeks that have been very high-profile regarding cover-up and I think when people see that and they see it not properly addressed, it can make them extra tender in places that aren’t necessarily abusive but could be still unhealthy. It’s gonna make them extra tender and not trust the community. So I think, I’m hoping that that’s beginning to change from a higher level.
Case Thorp
I was a part of a church staff where sexual inappropriateness occurred, nothing that broke law, but there was certainly a range of opinion as to how serious or not serious this was. And disciplinary action occurred; the individual lost their job. And there were quite a few people upset about this. They argued the infraction did not match the discipline. And I found in that conversation, it was helpful to say to these individuals, I understand your perspective here, but also recognize there are women across our staff who are watching. And while from the legal perspective, this incident may not have broken any laws, there’s the health of our organization that matters and the way in which we manage this, not just the two people involved. And I saw a lot of light bulbs come on and realizing, okay, so this is more than just those two.
So but you’re right, not all organizations can manage these things in a healthy manner. I feel like maybe churches, because of the scandals in the last, my goodness, well, there’s always been church scandal, but churches are trying to do better, or at least it’s much more on the conversations, much more in the conversations of how do we handle these things well and right when hurt happens. Are you seeing an upward trend in that direction?
Jason Hague
I think how easy it is to get your story out there has certainly helped in this. And of course there’s some real downsides to that too. But when people can come and say, hey this happened and something needs to be done and then that gets picked up, it certainly does strike the fear of God a little bit in some of these organizations as it should.
Case Thorp
Sure. For leaders to know what can happen if you don’t manage this right.
Jason Hague
Absolutely, yeah, you need to see that. And I’ve even seen just recently there’s a significant church scandal where the senior leadership hadn’t been doing anything and it was the secondary leadership, the younger pastoral staff had stood up and said, we need to do something. It’s because they were a little bit more in tune to what the stories actually were. So to me, I’m encouraged in that way because more light only makes people…It’s a good thing, more light is a good thing and it can end up helping people do the right thing even if that’s not their first inclination.
Case Thorp
Yeah. So we’ve talked about some of the organizational ways someone’s faith can be negatively impacted. Catherine, you actually led off with suffering and life experiences where one’s expectations of their faith don’t necessarily follow through. I want to focus there a bit more because I’m thinking about the individual who comes off that mountaintop and they go to work and they don’t see the kingdom of God breaking around them. They go to their family Thanksgiving. My goodness, talk about a pressure-filled environment. And so take us through some of the stories or situations of where God’s not meeting their expectation or maybe, like I’ll say often when I teach, we haven’t developed yet those muscles, those spiritual muscles to see the kingdom of God.
Catherine McNiel
Yeah, you know it’s interesting how all the topics that we’re talking about here, as well as the topics that we wrote about, there’s so much overlap, you know the the toxic institutions or individuals cause suffering and suffering causes doubt and doubt causes unanswered…leads to unanswered prayer which leads to you know, it’s not like any of these exist alone, but we do write a lot about different aspects of suffering, just doubt, wrestling with doubt, wrestling with unanswered prayer, not knowing what to do about the fact that we seem to be pouring ourselves out to God with a just cause and a clean heart. And it doesn’t seem like anything is changing. And how long is this going to go on? I think a lot of it does come back to kind of the marketing that Jason was talking about earlier in which some of us, you know, actually we start off the book with bringing up this concept of a meme called “how it started, how it’s going.” And I don’t know if you or the listeners are familiar, but it’s kind of a cartoonish meme that you’ll find online where you’ll see something starting and then an update on how it’s going. You might see like a… So there’s some beautiful things depicted here like a wedding or an engagement, and then the 50 year anniversary photo or a baby and then the graduate, how it started, how it’s going. But there’s a lot of broken-hearted things depicted that way too. Things that we started hopeful and excited and enthusiastic that are just so worn down. I think there’s so many stories that we’ve lived through, that we’ve walked through, that we tell in these books about people who were told that if they were walking with God, then their suffering would at least be lessened. That doubt was gone now. You’re sure now. You’re certain now. You have this confidence in the Spirit inside of you that we could approach the Father with our prayers in confidence that this feeling would never end. And I just actually summarized four different chapters because the fact of the matter is again, our prayers often seem unanswered. Our body feels assailed with doubts and lack of certainty. We suffer, we lose all sense of emotional high or even of resilience. But what we are pleading with our fellow Christians is to be honest in our marketing and then in our discipleship that we are choosing a path of following Jesus because we believe it is the path to life. But it’s going to go through the valley of the shadow of death and it’s going to have difficult, difficult components as we go through the world. And that doesn’t take away from the value of a discipleship journey, but it does not take place on the mountain. It is a long obedience.
Case Thorp
Or in a straight line. I had a friend, a pastor, and he would tell couples that wanted him to do their wedding, he would say, I don’t do premarital counseling, but I require you to come see me once a month for the first year. You know, let’s get some conversation going when marriage gets real and events of life unfold. Well, I’d like to take a pause here actually and read some scripture.
I can imagine someone listening or viewing this as I am experiencing, just a lot of emotions might be stirred up from hurt in the journey of faith. So I’m going to read two verses from Psalm 73. So this is Psalm 73, verses 16 and 17, not as an answer per se, but just a companion as we’re talking about this.
“When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply until I entered the sanctuary of God. Then I understood their final destiny.”
This psalm is written by someone whose faith was unsettled. And what changes here, I think, is not that everything suddenly makes sense, but that psalmist remains present long enough in the presence of God to be touched. And that touching is not always explainable or formulaic, but it’s an experience.
Talk to me about hope. Talk to me about the turn from hitting the crisis then to rich, flourishing faith again.
Jason Hague
I think if the problem was our expectations, which many times that’s the problem, is we come in with these things that aren’t real. The turnaround isn’t always, well, let’s just get better expectations. Sometimes the turnaround is the release of expectations. The, you know, I don’t have to have visions of how this is all gonna work out. For me, as we continue our journey, as people who do struggle, oftentimes we struggle with all the same stuff. As far as grief, as far as lack of certainty, all of these things, like we’re still walking and holding all of these things. What do we do? To me, one of the best things we could do is come in with an attitude of curiosity to say, I’m not gonna pretend I know how this is all gonna work out. I’m not gonna pretend I know what restoration for this relationship looks like or what healing for my kid looks like or whatever it is. I can’t pretend that I understand what’s going to happen. And so what I need to do is just continue to put one foot in front of the other and be curious. I wonder how this will turn out. I wonder how God might intervene. I wonder how I might be surprised. So to become open to surprise.
And open to you know, I like what you’re saying. You’re staying in the sanctuary, right? Like you’re staying close to the presence of God knowing that’s where restoration can really come. So if we are continuing in our faith, we are continuing with our community of faith, continuing on that road. And certainly that is our desire for this book, obviously, is that people don’t step off the path. Some of them might need to, and I get that. Our desire is for people to keep walking with Jesus. And I think we need to stop filling in the blanks and be willing to be surprised and really to truly let Jesus surprise us.
Case Thorp
You say be willing to step off the path. I wonder if sometimes folks struggle so deeply it’s because they afraid they’re gonna lose their salvation. Now I’m obviously from a reformed, Presbyterian perspective and we confess that that’s not possible. Once saved, always saved. Don’t know where y’all may be on that, but that folks, when they don’t have the closeness and the joy, that they worry they may have either walked away from God unintentionally or God walked away from them and their eternal salvation could be at risk. And you’re asking for a bit of that reorientation, relooking at that.
Jason Hague
Yeah. Well, I think there’s the fear. People have the fear of losing Jesus. And whether or not they’re thinking about that in eternal perspectives of salvation or heaven or however they’re seeing that, whether or not that’s even in the equation, they have the fear, like I did when I went through my crisis, of just losing Jesus.
And that’s a very deep and personal kind of thing of like, my goodness, I’ve given my life here, is He gonna walk away? Was I wrong about Him? I think that’s a terrifying conundrum if you’ve walked with Jesus for a long time.
Case Thorp
Well, like losing a parent. You know, is my mother or father going to walk away from me? That’s tough. I love that at the end of each chapter, you offer practical, concrete ways to go about leaning into the topic or changing things in renewal. So page 141, you write, “May we invite you to take a deep breath and learn bit by bit, step by step.”
And so you give some of those, like you say on page 143, consider listening to Psalm 131. Consider listening to I Don’t Know Anything by John Mark Pantana or Things to Read from, oh look, here’s one from Catherine McNiel. Why did you include those practical steps?
Catherine McNiel
I… that’s something that’s very important to me. We wanted to… this book is full of stories, really vulnerable stories at times, sometimes stories from the Bible or from other people that we know, but we try to tell stories and we are hoping to connect with the heart. Hearts that are breaking, hearts that are scared, hearts that don’t know where to go, as well as with the mind. But I wanted our readers to have additional steps to take. I love that moment of intellectually or emotionally connecting and saying, yes, this makes sense of what I’m experiencing. This is the framework that I need to understand what I’m going through. And so I wanted that, but then what? I wanted folks to know that there were other things available. And some of them are practices. Sometimes we’re asking people to look at artwork or listen to a song, but sometimes we’re pointing them to another book they might read or another institution or organization that they might want to look up online that has a slightly different perspective on a topic that maybe they need to totally reevaluate. I wanted what I really want, actually in all of my books is for people to know that they’re not alone.
And I initially want to do that by telling stories, true stories, that I think can help people say, first of all, I’m not the only one experiencing this, and second of all, this helps me make sense of what I’ve been going through. But then also to point them in another place where they can find other people who are in a similar situation.
Case Thorp
And I just want to point out, built into your words there and your practices in the book is that not just assumption but truth. God’s there waiting. He hasn’t walked away. I’ll push my reformed Presbyterian perspective that, you know, we teach once saved always saved because that which God has claimed for himself, he will not relinquish even if our unfaithfulness or suffering, as we’ve discussed, gets in the way. And so He’s going to be there. It’s just learning new ways to find Him, engage Him, sit in His sanctuary.
So good. Well friends, we’re going to continue this conversation next week, and I’m going to ask Catherine and Jason to go a little bit more deeply into their own lives, their own journey of faith, those mid-faith crises, but also where the Lord met them. So before we close, Catherine and Jason, tell us where we can learn more about your work, your writing, and more.
Catherine McNiel
Well, you can find our book, Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path Through Doubt, Disillusionment, and Dead End anywhere books are sold. You can find more of my work at CatherineMcNiel.com as long as you can spell my name right. Yes, yep.
Case Thorp
There you go. InterVarsity Press.
Okay. With a C, right? And it’s McNeil with I-E-L, not E-I-L.
Catherine McNiel
Yes, there’s so many potential disasters in my name. I should have…
Case Thorp
Right. You should have bought all of those websites. Well, we’re going to have the right website in our show notes. So don’t worry about that. Jason, for you?
Jason Hague
Yeah, you can find me at my website, jasonhague.com, that’s H-A-G-U-E, and on Facebook on Jason Hague Writer.
Case Thorp
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, friends, stick around or come back next week and join us for the second part of this conversation. If this resonated with you or maybe you know a friend who has gone through such a journey, perhaps share this with them and help them to grow in their own walk with the Lord. Leave us a review, a comment. It helps us expand the conversation. If you go to our website, wecolabor.com, give us your email. We’ll send you Zeitgeist, our journal on faith, work, and culture. Many thanks to the Canaparo family for supporting today’s episode. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
