Navigating Holiday Emotions—An Honest, Heartfelt Conversation About Guilt, Nostalgia, and Exhaustion with Author & Spiritual Director Anjuli Paschall
Episode Notes
Do the holidays bring a mix of joy and complicated emotions for you?
We're "supposed" to feel grateful, and parts of us do. But other parts of us feel nostalgic, driven by guilt, exhausted, or even angry. In this honest, vulnerable conversation, author and spiritual director Anjuli Paschall joins me to explore the emotions that surface during the holiday season. We talk about how to navigate these feelings with grace for ourselves, and how these emotions can be gifts in disguise. We cover. . .
Here’s what we cover:
* How to distinguish between true guilt and false guilt
* The surprising connection between anger and exhaustion
* Why nostalgia can be both comforting and bittersweet
* Practical ways to honor all your feelings during this emotionally complex season
* Anjuli’s practice of praying through complicated emotions and finding God’s presence in them
Resources:
- Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion by Anjuli Paschall
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
- Lovealways.anjuli on Instagram
- anjulipaschall.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 30: Protecting What’s Good Without Denying What’s Hard at the Holidays
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
- Whether you're exploring distant lands or enjoying a staycation at home, Cozy Earth has your back. Visit cozyearth.com and unlock an exclusive 35% off with code BESTOFYOU.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey, everyone, and welcome to this very special Thanksgiving episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you on this special day and the days that follow Thanksgiving for this well-timed episode.
I recorded this conversation a while back and realized it was the perfect episode to share with you today. This is a day when we often feel like we should feel all the things, like gratitude, joy, peace, and serenity. But the truth is, other emotions often show up on the holidays.
It's so normal to feel a variety of different emotions on a day like Thanksgiving, or the day after Thanksgiving, or days when your kids are not at school, or days when you're spending lots of time with family members that you love, but also bring up complicated feelings inside of you.
In honor of all the emotions you might be feeling this Thanksgiving, I'm thrilled to invite you into this conversation I had with Anjuli Paschall. She's a spiritual director and she's written a beautiful book called Feel: A Collection of Liturgies Offering Hope for Every Complicated Emotion.
What I love about this resource is she goes through 75 different emotions, offering a way to name them and also a way to bring those different emotions into your conversation with God. If you've read my book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, I talk about the importance of naming tools.
We need ways to name the different things that we feel. Sometimes it's so elusive. We don't even really recognize the uncomfortable feeling or sensation that's tugging at the corner of our soul. We don't even realize we're feeling it until after we've had a meltdown or after we've lashed out at someone or after the day is over, oh my gosh, I was agitated all day long.
In this book, she's offering you a way into your different emotions so that you can take charge of your emotions, not the other way around.
I found this conversation with Anjuli to be so therapeutic for my own soul. We dive into three emotions in particular that tend to surface unbidden at the holidays. We talk about guilt, including true guilt versus false guilt.
We talk about nostalgia, which is such an interesting emotion. I loved what Anjuli and I stumbled upon as we talked about the role of nostalgia in our lives. we also talk about anger, which often shows up unexpectedly spoiler alert.
It's closely linked to exhaustion. it's so important to recognize the tug of anger on our soul before it takes us over.
This is a beautiful conversation. That's real. It's raw. also deeply prayerful. I love the language through which Anjuli honors these emotions, even as she's constantly bringing them into conversation with God.
I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Anjuli Pascal.
***
Alison Cook: Anjuli, I am so thrilled that you are here today. I'm so thrilled to have this conversation with you. You've written this beautiful book, all about feelings. I'm so curious to dive into a little bit of your own relationship with feelings. You talk about how we want to avoid, run away from, and control them. You also talk about wanting to indulge certain feelings.
Tell me a little bit about your younger self, whether it was your early twenties, before you had kids, or as an early young mom. What has your relationship with your emotions been like in the past?
Anjuli: Yeah, that is a great question. I grew up in a pretty typical evangelical church and home. My parents were very connected to ministry and so I grew up really with this idea that there are good feelings and bad feelings. The good feelings are happiness, creativity, joy, and then bad feelings like anger and fear, even disgust.
I spent a lot of my life focusing on how to get to the good feelings. Because I even grew up thinking that anger and fear and disgust were sinful too. In my childhood, I was so happy. It was this optimism, happiness, and focus on good things. If anything bad comes up inside of me, get rid of it, or something's wrong with me, or it's sin.
It took a lot of time to start unpacking, realizing that feelings are not bad or good, they're true. They're not always right, but they're true.
Alison Cook: Say a little bit more about that. What do you mean by that? I could hear some folks going, what do you mean by true? Let's say I'm feeling really mad at a friend or really resentful of someone. How can that be true?
Anjuli: That feeling is a true feeling. I recently went through an experience where there was a lot of misunderstanding in a relationship. The feeling of being misunderstood is very uncomfortable. It is a true feeling. But it's not necessarily right. There could be different causes or different reasons, or I don't know the whole story. I can interpret the feeling incorrectly. But the feeling itself is true.
Alison Cook: I think you're saying something so wise. The feeling is something to be honored. There's something true, and we can misinterpret the feeling. I might feel misunderstood because my friend in fact misunderstood me. I might feel misunderstood and she in fact did understand me and I didn't understand her reply to me.
Anjuli: I think it has taken a lot of work to untangle the family dynamics that I grew up in, but also untangle some of the messages that I heard from the pulpit or from church, well-intended or not. I came to believe if it's good, present it, speak it, perform it. If it's bad, stuff it, ignore it, pretend it isn't there.
That really got me in a world of trouble. It works when you're young, you can get away with pretending and performing, but eventually it catches up with you. I think probably in my mid-twenties, it really caught up with me. Turns out you can't really outrun anger. Turns out you can't really stuff fear.
It'll catch up with you eventually. My mid-twenties when I was actually in seminary, and I had to confront these feelings that had been stuffed for so long. It really felt like a serious breakdown. You can only keep that ball underwater for so long until it then becomes like a bomb. That's what it felt like, this bomb going off inside of me.
Until I was really doing some internal deep dive work and letting some of those feelings that had been ignored or suppressed come up, was I able to actually find integration in a healthy way.
Alison Cook: That makes so much sense. You hit that rock bottom of the overwhelm of the feeling, and there's no way out but through. I love that you're saying that you began to untangle the knots of your emotions. Then you go into becoming a mom. You're also a spiritual director.
In both of those roles, similar to me as a therapist, our job in many ways is to keep our feelings on the back burner, as we are present to the feelings of others, whether it's our kids, whether it's someone you're mentoring, a spiritual directee, someone you're sitting with for me as a therapist.
It's my job to keep my feelings a little bit in the back as I am helping others navigate their way through feelings. I think that's a really interesting role where you're learning to honor your own feelings, but not necessarily have them be front and center in some of those roles. How do you navigate that inside of yourself as you try to stay healthy emotionally, internally?
Anjuli: That's a really great question. I would say it looked a lot like stumbling. It looked a lot like confusion. It looked a lot like the question, what's wrong with me? I think especially becoming a mom, I had already done so much previous training in soul care. I thought, I know what I'm doing. I have all these tools now.
Becoming a mom really was a shift for me. It took some time to integrate real life with heart knowledge. I think what really became the outlet for me is honesty. Because you know about all the shoulds. And, becoming a mom, I should be happy. I should love every minute of this. I should be grateful. I should not want another life.
I bumped up against all these “shoulds” when I had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 kids. Especially when I had one or two kids, I noticed how lonely I was, but I shouldn't be lonely. Because this is my dream. This is what I've always wanted. But I'd go to parks and just, I remember being weepy.
It seems like everybody else is having the best time pushing their kid on the swing while I'm over here being like, this is slow, boring work. I don't really know how to play. I don't know how to do this motherhood thing.
When I say honesty, Alison, I’m talking about those feelings of loneliness and sadness and grief and even some helplessness and connecting to my feelings. Being honest with them and actually feeling them, giving myself permission to feel them and then to speak them, be it online or with my friend or at my MOPS group table, it actually became the means for intimacy and connection with other people.
I guess I wouldn't look at it like I'm attending to others as one thing and I attend to myself as another thing, but as I attend to myself and my heart and honor that, I'm actually able to attend to others and my kids and make space for them in a much better way.
Alison Cook: Attuning to your own emotions, you are actually more able to attend to theirs. When you started being more honest, what were some of the reactions you got, both negative and positive?
Anjuli: I'll give you a personal one. When I shared about my early mid 20s, when I started to notice, what is this feeling? What is this fear and anxiety? Oh my goodness, anxiety. I remember sitting in a parking lot with my best friend and sharing that with her, how actually really scared I was. I was sweating. I was like, dripping sweating fear.
She looks at me and says, yeah, of course you feel scared. And I was so empowered then. Oh, I'm not gonna be rejected in my fear, but also I'm gonna find friendship. I can also find more words for it, which led to so much more community.
With motherhood, that's where I started writing online. I was talking about this honest place of motherhood for me. People came out of the woodworks, like me too. Oh my gosh. I'd get these messages from moms weeping and feeling the depth of their own shame and guilt. It actually became such a bridge for relationships.
Alison Cook: You have an amazing presence, both in person and online, and you really do have a ministry. You're so authentic. You show up so honestly, so vulnerably, in a way that invites others to feel seen. It's a very beautiful gift that I hear from what you're saying came out of your own experience of, I have to be honest about this. I have to be honest.
Anjuli: And I'm scared to death. It's the scariest thing ever to step into vulnerability, but it's also true.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's true. The truth sets us free.
Anjuli: Turns out.
Alison Cook: Yeah. So, your book highlights 75 different emotions. First of all, I want to know, how did you come up with your list? Second of all, I'm curious, which ones were the hardest for you to write about and pray through as you led us through them?
Anjuli: I broke the book down into the six core emotions, which are surprise, fear, anger, happiness, disgust, and sadness. You can find variations of the core emotions, but those are the ones I really stuck to. Under each core emotion are subcategories of feelings. Each one was challenging for me, but probably the hardest was, it sounds so funny now that I say it, but playful was a really hard one to write.
Another hard one was anxiety. However you feel, you can open up to that chapter and the first section is language for your feeling. Because oftentimes, we don't even know how or why we feel what we feel.
I did my best to take from my own journals, my own diaries, if you will, of how I experienced that feeling, to help the reader connect to their own feeling of agitation or worry or guilt. The next section is a liturgy of that feeling, opening the heart to God. Anxiety was tricky, because anxiety itself is really the fear of not feeling other feelings.
It was hard to name and write because not everybody, but a lot of people feel anxiety, and they feel it very differently. I didn't want to miss somebody and neglect or dismiss their feeling. But I also didn't want to overshoot it either. So I rewrote anxiety like 18 times.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I could see that, because anxiety is very familiar, but it also surfaces in so many different ways. I thought it was beautiful. I'd love to even hear maybe a snippet of one to think through, man, I'm feeling this and now I can go use this tool to walk myself through it.
Anjuli: Yeah, if you are feeling anxiety, you would open up to the chapter on “Anxious”, and it gives a general definition: it's the feeling of avoiding other important emotions. In the language for feeling anxious, this is how I begin.
“I can't even recall when this feeling began. My body can't settle down. Everything itches. A slow growing panic pulsing through me makes it difficult to breathe. I am anxious. I can manage many things, but not this.
Fear races through me, and I can't rationalize, organize, or talk myself out of my escalated state of anxiety. It has a mind of its own. It is the boss. Trying to regain right thinking, a right posture, a right plan, is exhausting. There is a war within me.”
I go on for another paragraph, “I want to manage it and control it, or I want to suppress it, or I fall prey and let it take over sometimes, and I don't have a way out.”
Then the next section is a liturgy for when I feel anxious. I want people to pay attention to feelings in their body. I think that's really important. But ultimately, for people to open their heart to God with how they feel.
“God, when have I felt this in my story before? God, please do your deep healing work in my life. Help me, God, to be curious about my pain and the wounds that remain in me. Help me be kind to myself as I enter and feel all that remains unfelt in my soul. Gift me words for my heart. God, this anxiety takes me on a journey that is rather painful, mysterious, and unknown.
But God, you are here with compassion and care and understanding. With you is an ocean of compassion. With you is a dwelling place for comfort. With you, I am made clean.”
It goes on to share more about opening your heart in prayer and then every chapter ends with a simple verse about prayer and meeting with God and your feeling.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. Is there an audiobook version and do you read it?
Anjuli: It's coming! Alison, it’s coming! Unfortunately, I don't get to read it this time. I've had a lot of vocal cord issues, but I got a good reader and she's awesome and I'm entrusting the Lord to that.
Alison Cook: Yeah, because it's beautiful to hear it. I actually wonder, we're going into the holiday season, which is a time when a lot of emotions get stirred up. What's a section of the book that might speak to the listener, who is feeling maybe some sadness, maybe some frustration, even some anger, and feels like they shouldn't feel that way going into the holiday season?
Anjuli: The two that come up for me are nostalgic–I feel really nostalgic during the holidays–or definitely as moms, guilty. Like we can never do enough.
Alison Cook: We need to have a live poll here. I'm very curious about nostalgia, but I think guilt is so baseline around the holidays.
Anjuli: Always. That's why I'm telling you, we go into debt every December, because oh, one more thing, one more gift, one more party, one more stocking stuffer. Yeah, guilt is very related to fear. Fearing that punishment awaits you for a crime or wrongdoing you have committed.
I think it's so important to pay attention to true guilt versus false guilt. False guilt comes with a lot of shoulds. Have you actually done something wrong?
Alison Cook: Exactly.
Anjuli: I'll read an excerpt from that. I want to invite people to pay attention instead of reacting. Especially with guilt. Like I said, we can go into a lot of unnecessary debt because of guilt. When we stop and pay attention to ooh, what is that thing I feel? I'm afraid of losing relationships with a spouse or a kid or a parent or a sibling. We react by doing something. Pay attention: am I actually doing something wrong?
When that guilt comes up, pay attention to even your temptations in it. Do I power through it by buying more gifts and doing more things and always saying yes, so that hopefully the guilt monster will go away? That's one temptation: we power through.
Do I suppress it? Do I push it down and ignore it, stay busy, avoid it, don't look at it? Don't pay any attention to it. Just stay busy. That's another temptation. Then the other temptation is, we fall prey to it. We let it consume us and we lose all of our agency.
Instead of powering through, suppressing, or falling prey to the feeling, I want to invite people to name it. Oh, there's that guilt again. There it is. I see you. I see you there. The second thing I want to invite people to do is actually feel it. Feel it. Where do I feel it in my body, in my chest, my neck, my back, my throat?
Give yourself permission, for a moment, to feel what you feel. Then lastly, I want to invite people to give your feeling a sound. If it's a sigh, if it's an exhale, if it's tears, and if you're even able to give it some words–hopefully, this book will be a resource that gives you some words for your guilt.
Here, I'll read a little part.
“God, I feel guilty. Search my heart, oh God. Help me listen. Right now, all I can hear is my guilt and it plagues me. I'm afraid of being found out. I'm afraid of punishment or condemnation. Help me know if this guilt is from you or from another source. I want to know if I'm feeling false guilt. Am I trying to keep laws and rules that you didn't ask me to obey?
If I haven't, if I have not actually broken a command of yours, this guilt is not from you, but from a false god in my life. God, if I did something that is truly wrong, I seek forgiveness. Help me accept forgiveness. God, forgive me for my wrong. Yet even as I speak these words, conflict is provoked within me.
I want to atone for my own guilt, be it pride or vanity or greed or self-righteousness. Deep within my will, it is incredibly hard to accept that I can't save myself. I want to prove myself, restore myself, and I hate that I can't. God, you invite me to feel my fear. Guilt at its core is about fear. This is painful.
When fear emerges, help me greet this feeling with gentleness instead of hiding. Let fear be what leads me to you instead of lying, covering, and pretending. Lord, no fear can separate me from your love. Your love lives at the core of my existence. May I be with you even here as you are with me.”
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. That's so good. These are naming tools. These are tools to help give us language for what we're feeling. You're helping us get in there. What is it? What's connected to it? It's through a conversation with God, where it's totally safe to tease out the threads of the knot of emotion.
I'm curious to hear a little bit, whether you want to read or share, tell me a little bit about nostalgia. I think that's such an interesting feeling that is sometimes hard to pinpoint. I think sometimes nostalgia, especially around the holidays, can be tinged with grief, but sometimes it can also be life-giving. I can find myself sometimes wanting to bathe in nostalgia, kind of wanting to let it linger over me.
I'm like, is that healthy? Is that not healthy? So let's talk a little bit about nostalgia. I think that's a really powerful name.
Anjuli: Yeah. It's interesting because it's such a nuanced feeling. Sadness is sadness. There's a purity to it. Anger is anger. It's all the way through. There is frustration and rage in there. But nostalgia–imagine a skier, a downhill skier, the slalom skier. It goes back and forth. It goes between sadness, it goes into fear, and then it goes back into happiness.
Alison Cook: To gratitude.
Anjuli: Yes! Yes!
Alison Cook: There are a lot of ways nostalgia can go.
Anjuli: As I was doing the research for this book, it really, at the core, was happiness. Even though it can feel many different things. So I kept it in that category. But really, nostalgia is the longing for home. And that's what the holidays do to us, doesn't it?
If it's your childhood home, those young memories of youthfulness, where there was safety, where everything was as it should be. I think the word “bathing in nostalgia” is actually pretty accurate, because there's a soothingness, even though there's sorrow. There's comfort in it.
Alison Cook: I love this naming because I actually will seek it out sometimes to soothe. I'll go seek it out, if I've been working too hard or if I'm a little burnt out or if I can't get out of my head. Because that's part of my bent–it's hard for me to sink into my emotions.
I'll go drive past an old memory. I talk about this in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. I went back and found an old apartment and those memories flooded over me. It takes me to a different time. There's something very soothing about that. I sometimes have to chase it. I have to pursue it.
It's so interesting to hear you name that, because I've not put that name on it. It's a tug at my heart, and it's exactly what you said, for something elusive, some memory that brings me to a different place that is soothing.
That's a great word for it. It's soothing. I think happiness is the right category for it, because even though there's a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of, oh, what was is no longer, it doesn't take me down. It does something inside my body that feels soothing. I think that's an interesting naming. I love that.
Anjuli: It's comfort. Especially the holidays, when we have that cocoa that we had when we were little kids, or we sit in front of the Christmas tree and remember what it was like to be a little kid and looking up at a tree instead of at the tree, and these songs that just take us to the core of our being.
I think with nostalgia there's still those temptations. We can power through it. We are going to feel this, we're going to have this amazing memory-making experience and you're gonna go down memory lane with me.
Or we ignore it because there is a sorrow to it. Just keep the ball under the water. Don't look at it.
Alison Cook: It feels like too much maybe, so we want to avoid it.
Anjuli: Yeah, especially if there's been a lot of trauma since that experience. If you've lost a loved one, that can be painful. Then there's indulging in it. I tend to do that with nostalgia. I hear what you're saying. I drive past all my old houses all the time. My kids, I drive them crazy. They're like, mom, can we go home?
Alison Cook: I'm a little bit of a nostalgia junkie.
Anjuli: I love that. We need a shirt.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's very comforting, but I understand what you're saying. It can also evoke sadness. I get why. The thing for me is sometimes other folks like in my family aren't as much and I get it. It's because some of those memories also have a lot of pain. It's not that mine don't, but for whatever reason, the way I'm wired, tapping on it doesn't evoke the pain. It evokes comfort.
What are some other ones that surprised you or that you noticed yourself particularly drawn to? Maybe even ones you were like, I don't want to go there. I don't like that one.
Anjuli: You may have noticed we have not even talked about anger because man, anger. I could live in sadness. I could swim in sadness. I find consolation in sadness. It's like my long lost friend, but anger is terrifying. Anger is very vulnerable. Growing up in the church and in my family, anger was dangerous.
If someone was angry, something was being thrown, something was being slammed, someone was driving away. In the church, it was like, don't let the sun go down in your anger. So I was like, okay I guess I'll suppress it and pretend it's not there because the sun is setting. Anger was so hard for me to write because that's probably the one I've resisted experiencing in my life the most, because it was bad or sinful or scary.
Alison Cook: In writing it, you have to tap into it.
Anjuli: Yeah. Anger can be as small as laziness. That surprised me. I know that turned my head. Laziness is anger turned under; it is anger suppressed. You push your anger way down. it actually numbs you out and you become lazy.
Anger goes from such a range, from laziness to furious anger. That is a range of feeling. Alison, actually, vulnerability was why my vocal cords are so damaged. It was because I went through a pretty traumatic experience a couple months ago.
For me, screaming was absolutely necessary for me to find healing. It was this experience for over a week. It was like a discipline. I had to force myself to get my anger out. So I'd go for drives and scream and it was scary and hard, but you know what? It was freedom, getting it out of me. It was one of the greatest gifts God has given me, my anger.
Alison Cook: It's mobilizing, it's empowering, it's hard. Like you said, it's so scary. I can only imagine putting myself with you in that car. There's something about a car. I've noticed for me, I'm the opposite. I don't love anger, but I have a hard time with sadness and I've noticed when I really need to cry it out.
This is a thing I've since learned. I will get in my car because there's a container. There's something about a car that's contained, or the shower is another one people talk about. There's like a time limit. You can't be there forever. But you can get it all out. I can sob it out and then I'm going to get out of my car and close the door.
I could see for anger, getting in your car and screaming it out. I could feel it in my body. There's a containment for it. There's going to be an end when you're going to get out of the car. That's really powerful. But you are allowing that emotion to flow through you versus stifling it or indulging it, letting it live with you all the time.
Anjuli: And it’s so painful to do that. Then it leaks on all the people you love the most.
Alison Cook: How did you feel afterward?
Anjuli: Gosh, aren't feelings in so many ways quite mysterious. Most of the time after I would scream, I would start crying. It's weird. I think for other people it's the other way around. Sometimes they cry and it leads to screaming. But it's certainly a journey of the body and the heart of processing and moving through true pain.
Ultimately brought an immense amount of freedom. It was like breaking out of jail. It felt free. My hands were tied and then I was free.
Alison Cook: That's powerful. My sister used to always say to me, when I would go through seasons. She has a higher tolerance for the big emotions, which I'm super grateful for. She becomes one of those people that can help me when I need to feel something, but I don't want to.
She used to say to me, anger is going to kick in the butt on the way out. That's what you're saying. You got to get it out, and then often on the other side is oh, now I'm hurt. You also need to feel that. As we close down today, I would love to hear some of your words that you speak to God through anger.
Anjuli: Let me find some.
Alison Cook: I love this. I could do this all day.
Anjuli: I could do resentful, furious, exhausted–exhausted as anger, isn't that interesting?
Alison Cook: Tell me more about that.
Anjuli: Exhausted is beyond tired and it's like you are exhausted to the point of anger. It's a tight, deep tiredness that aggravates your bones.
Alison Cook: I’m thinking of the holidays. This is another thing we hear. I'm exhausted. It's so interesting, even tying together what we've been talking about. I call it guilt-driven love. I've been guilty. So I'm doing. Then I'm exhausted and angry.
Anjuli: This is how it comes out and I will do this with my husband. I buy all the presents. I'm the buyer. I purchase them, I pick them, I get them, I store them, I hide them, then I have to wrap them, which is the thing I hate more than anything in the world. Wrapping a bazillion presents.
They're all under the tree. Then I'm so exhausted. Now I'm not exhausted. I'm angry at my husband as though it's somehow his fault, that I took it all on myself, but that's where it turns to him. It's anger.
Alison Cook: Even at your kids for their existence, and it's nobody else's fault. That's a really powerful naming again. That level of exhaustion can be a form of anger. This is so interesting. The three emotions we picked, guilt, nostalgia and anger. There's that anger guilt thing at the holidays. I'm feeling it. I'm seeing the pattern in my own life.
Anjuli: Happy holidays. Gear up.
Alison Cook: I had a conversation with Alli Worthington on the podcast about her new book about parenting. She talked about the bitterness of family holidays, and she didn't want to bring that into her own holidays. It's what we're talking about–sacrificing everything for you and then I'm mad at you.
Anjuli: Totally. Yes, I'm making you this amazing dinner, which no one asked me to make. Spending all this money on the food, making the table as beautiful as ever, having the right music on, and then the kids don't eat it, and then I'm mad at them. That's exhaustion. Deep tiredness that fuels anger. Maybe I'll close with that.
Alison Cook: I think that's good.
Anjuli: “God, help me believe in the good of the journey I am on. The good is for others in my care. The good is for the spreading of the gospel. The good is for the healing of my own pain. God, help me endure because I can't do it on my own anymore. I can't carry this cross alone. It's harder than I imagined. It is hard to not harbor anger.
It is hard to forgive. It is hard to let go. It is hard to relax. It is hard to surrender. It is hard to believe that you care about my life more than I do. You understand exhaustion. You took space to be with your Father when your soul and body were weary. May I learn from you how to rest in God's love.
If it would be your will, please deliver me from this pain because it is hard to bear. If my circumstances do not change, may your grace be enough to sustain me. I pray it would be one moment at a time. What you have entrusted to me, I entrust back to you. I give you my life. Even as weary as I am, may my life be an offering to you, Lord. Hear my prayer.”
Alison Cook: Beautiful. I could listen to you read those prayers all day long. What a beautiful gift to give to people, to tease out the nuances of each feeling in conversation with God. I'm so grateful for you for sharing it with us today. You cover so many different emotions and I love what you're saying. You could pick it up to the one that stands out to you, maybe it's a surprise, maybe you're not sure.
So you flip through the pages and see which one leaps out at you and go into it. I think it's going to help a lot of people and I'm really grateful that you are here with us today.
Anjuli: Thank you for endorsing it and your friendship and always championing other people. Such a gift.
Alison Cook: Before we close, two questions I like to ask, sometimes I forget, but I like to ask 90 percent of my guests–
Anjuli: That's good. 90 percent is good.
Alison Cook: What would you say to that younger you back when the bottom was falling out from suppressed emotions? What would you want to say to her now?
Anjuli: I would probably say, and even in light of this conversation, anger is a gift. Because it leads you to hope and the love of God.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. What is bringing out the best of you right now?
Anjuli: Backyard fire pit conversations. We go out there and sometimes a kid joins us and sometimes they don't. But I feel like when it's dark and there's the glow, the warmth of the fire, it brings out the best in me. Great question.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you? Where can they find your work?
Anjuli: Yeah. I'm on Instagram a lot, so it's lovealways.anjuli or my website where I have a few courses that I offer, anjulipaschall.com.
Alison Cook: Check it out. Thank you so much again.
Anjuli: Yay. Thanks, Alison.