296 – An Invitation to Hold the Sacred Stories of Church Girls with Bible Teacher and Psychotherapist Dr. Sarita Lyons

Narrator
Be the bridge. You bethebridge. You are listening to the bethebridge podcast with Latasha Morrison today. It’s exciting each week, bethebridge podcast tackles subjects related to race and culture with the goal of bringing understanding. But I’m gonna do it in the spirit of love. We believe understanding can move us toward racial healing, racial equity and racial unity. Latasha Morrison is the founder of bethebridge, which is an organization responding to racial brokenness and systemic injustice in our world. This podcast is an extension of our vision to make sure people are no longer conditioned by a racialized society, but grounded in truth. If you have not hit the subscribe button, please do so now, without further ado, let’s begin today’s podcast. Oh, and stick around for some important information at the

Latasha Morrison
end. Okay, be the bridge community. Natasha Morrison here and I am so excited, like we’re back. I’m excited to be back. I’m excited about the guests we’re having since we’re back. This is someone that I’ve wanted to have on the podcast for a while. Some of you may know her, some of you may not, but I have Dr Serena Lyons here, affectionately known as Dr Serena. She is, let me just tell you a little bit about her. Okay, she is a wife, mother, speaker, a Bible teacher and a psychotherapist. Yes, a psychotherapist, much needed. She is on staff at Anthony Fellowship Church in Philadelphia, home of the Eagles. I had to throw that in to make everyone mad as the direct director of discipleship and women’s ministry, prior to full time ministry, Doctor Lyons was in private practice for eight years where she provided counseling for individuals, families, couples and groups for a variety of psychological needs. Some of her treatment specialties are in recovery from trauma, depression, anxiety, marriage and family therapy. She also specializes in Counseling and Consultation for the church leadership and their families, for personal and ministry related needs. She speaks rights and advocates for the intersections of faith, mental health and justice, as well as women’s issues in and outside the church. Now I just read that bio. Y’all know she is needed. Let me tell you, Honey, this is like when we think about the brokenness of the world, and then also some of the brokenness that’s in the church. What you do is so needed. And this book, I think I told you this when I first read it, I sent you a message. I was like, this is the book that’s needed. Like, this is such a great book, especially because of your expertise and to really to get under, underneath things. And what stood out to me is a lot of your testimony at the beginning. We’re going to go there. We’re going to go there. But I I want to hear from you, our community that may know you, they may not know you, before we get into your book that you wrote church girl, you also mentioned that black women are hidden figures in the church tell our community a little bit about what you mean, and give me an example of that, sure. Well, thank

Speaker 1
you so much for having me on Hello. Be the bridge community, so glad to be here. So you know that may be kind of a curious associate, an assumption or assertion that people may think of black women as Hidden Figures, especially just given research that shows, particularly in black churches, we are the majority, but many times, what I mean by Hidden Figures is that you can be present physically, but still be invisible in many ways. So a hidden figure is someone who’s there, right? They’re doing work. They they have things to offer, but different things, whether, in this case, sexism, racism, you know, different forms of misogyny, even not really thinking from a biblical view lens about women and how and seeing women the way God sees them, we can kind of fade to the background. And the other thing is, even if you’re seeing them, sometimes black women are missing, so they’re being seen, but missing or they’re not being valued. So it is the it’s not really about physical sight as much as it is, do you see them the way God sees them? Do you even know them? Do you know their life? Do you know their history? Do you know their needs? Do you know their value and worth and gifts? And based on the knowledge? Because see how you see something impacts how you use something, how you. Think of something, how you engage something or someone. And so in that way, I think historically and even today, an argument can be made that black women, though present in the church, are the Hidden Figures often,

Latasha Morrison
yeah, yeah, I know I was, I’m reading, we have the anniversary of MLK as I Have a Dream speech coming up. And, you know, even in that movement there, you know, there were so many women in the background that we don’t hear about, where they’re hidden figures, they’re just not seen. But the work, their work, was documented, but they just weren’t the front of the of the movement. So, yeah, I totally get that. I understand that. In your book, you, you kind of start off with the story. First of all that I wish I if you have it, if you have the book with you, I do want you to read a little bit of it. I’m going to jack everything up. I plan to do because there’s, I think Jackie Hill Perry did your forward, yes. And when I read it was such a great forward and, and I there’s a, there’s a part in there that I want you to read like, like, I think it’s like the first, the first paragraph. I don’t have it with me. I just heard forward, yes, of her forward, yeah. And I think it was just just poignant, just that part. And I want you to just read a little bit of the of the forward. You can

Speaker 1
just, yeah, sure. Jackie Hill Perry says there’s a diversity of bullets for which the black church girl is obligated to duck. There are no hands behind the trigger, but worldly belief systems are being shot at us daily. The finger is a metaphor for the world views reflective of a society that is godless, the shooter is still flesh, the framework shot our way, are fundamentally theological in the way they claim to tell us who God is. If God is the Creator of all things, then the woman is his idea, and she is good. She is a good one at that. But look around for a moment at a movie, a social media clip, or the quips of a fool with a podcast like and you think the female body belonged to everyone else, and that is a good only insofar as it is useful to be a woman at All is to be a resource and a reflection. The black woman is made in God’s image. So she is helpful, resourceful, administrative, productive, etc, but she is also more than what she gives. She is worthy to be given to. Yes, this woman is an image, a testimony, a witness to the Creator God. And because of this, we are obligated to give her her flowers.

Latasha Morrison
Yes. Thank you so much for reading that. I heard that, and I was like, That is so good. It just it. It is. Let me tell you, I was like, first of all, she is definitely a word. Smith, yeah, it is beautiful. And it just resonated. And I know people hearing that now is resonated. And some of you, you’re listening, you’re like, Well, this is for black women, you know. How does this, you know, relate to me? Because predominantly our audience is predominantly white audience, and I want you to just tell them why this is also important for white women to understand and to listen. Yeah.

Speaker 1
Thank you so much for that question. Because, well, first I want to say that I am very thankful for the number of women that are not black women, white women, Hispanic women, other even other women of color, Asian women, but particularly white women who have reached out to me or talked on social media about how they’re excited to read the book. And of course, I’ve also heard that people you know, you look at the book, you see the subtitle a gospel vision to encourage and challenge black Christian women and people might quickly run to the assumption that the book is meant to be divisive, right? Yeah, and I think this is an important conversation to have on your podcast. In particular, the book is not meant to be divisive, but I do think we have to own the fact that in this country and even in christiandom, black women have been at the metaphorical bottom of the totem pole in many ways, which has kind of created an erasure. Of their life and their lived experiences from the story of the gospel and the Christian experience. And so I’ve told people when I talk about a gospel vision for black women, it’s not a different gospel vision, right for black women compared to any other racial or cultural group. But what I am attempting to do is keep in mind that for many black women, when we look at slavery, when we look at the oppression that black women have faced in this country, when we look at the ways black women are uniquely injured in the church, all people can say they have had an experience of church hurt that we all can relate to, but black women often have some unique ways that we experience church hurt. I’m trying to also, as an apologetic, reach a group of black women who question the faith and have been resistant to God because of the injuries they’ve experienced at the hands of people, and now that injury has been projected on God. So because some Christians haven’t been good, that doesn’t mean God is not good. Because some Christians have not valued black women, that doesn’t mean God doesn’t value black women. And so it is important to think about ministry evangelism from a contextualized place, and it is only because of the history of racism and people being so nervous and uptight to talk about race that we view a literary work with a specific target audience as potentially problematic. But we do not say that when books have been written to women, we don’t say mindable, where the where’s my book. We do not say that when books are written to singles or married like, why are they talking to the married people? Why are they talking to the single we don’t say that there have been books written to Native American cultures and Asian cultures, because the faith needs to be contextualized and and in Scripture, we see God being a god of contextualization. Everyone didn’t go to the same place. He sent some to Samaria, some to some to Judea. He sent Jews to some Jewish places. He sent some Gentiles to some gentile places. Because our unique experiences, the way we have lived in the world, and the bodies that God put us in have been a a useful resource in the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so I want to just say, for people who are afraid to talk about color, that we should not be and that and when we when we’re trying to undo the effects and impact of racism by saying I am colorblind, that actually is very disrespectful to God, who is Elohim, who is a fantastic artist, who is a masterful creator, and who put people in bodies that look different. So to say we don’t see differences means that we’re rejecting something very unique and specific that God created. And so I just want to say, and I also want to encourage other people who are not black women to read the book. Because when we do life with one another, to be able to like, pull up a chair, kind of like when you read the book and see the experiences of your sisters that don’t look like you, helps us love one another better, helps us have empathy for one another in a very different and deep way, and helps us own the stories of other people as significant and meaningful, hold space for them and even protect, have a voice for and show up in their lives, in the church and in the world, more empowered with information that you would not have, maybe If you didn’t read a book like this, right,

Latasha Morrison
right? And we see that, you know, even in Scripture, like you said, the Bible is written, you know, from a contextualized lens. You know, we read through the Gospels. You know, it’s like you have certain audiences that each of those books were written for, and when you understand that, you can read it from that perspective. So it it just helps your it illuminates what God is saying to us when we understand that. And I think you know especially, we are supposed to be able to sit in the pain of others, to empathize, to have compassion, and we won’t do that if we don’t understand. You know what I’m saying, and so you’re giving us a view into understanding. Because even as a black woman, it may not necessarily be my story, but I need to understand it, you know. And that’s the same thing when you’re talking about. Uh, you know, our indigenous community, just because it’s a book written I want to read it because I need to understand. I want to know. I want to be a better neighbor, and so that’s why it’s important to know. There’s a lot of books you know that are with written by white female authors that I mean this like a total disconnect from my lived experience, but sometimes I read those books because I there’s something I can learn, and there’s also something that I learned about the person that’s writing it, or the audience that they’re writing to. And so I think that is so good for us to understand you also you start this out, and I was just talking to my my Goddaughters, they’re, they’re out of college, but they’re young adults. They’re under 25 and I have a lot of my friends, their kids are in college. And, I mean, they’re, you know, some of them go to HBCU, some of them go to pwis. And I don’t have children myself, but it’s like that extension is also extension of me. So I like to know so that I can help equip and I know some of the things that they’re dealing with in there. And you talk about your experience as a young college girl that grew up in the church, but you were like, biblically illiterate, you know, went to church, but were biblically, and that’s something like that we’re seeing. We wouldn’t be here as a society if

Unknown Speaker
we had a

Latasha Morrison
healthy biblical literacy. You know what I’m saying when we you know. And so we’re seeing that, especially even in our community. What would you say? You know that some churches need to do to help. What are some things that you know youth groups could do to help make sure that people not just read the Bible, but know the Bible, understand the Bible, but more importantly, understand the God of the Bible,

Speaker 1
Amen, wonderful question. Yeah, and that gets to the practicality of how we equip the body, right? Ephesians talks about equipping the saints for ministry. So equipping, for me, starts with knowledge, right? First, because you cannot do what you do not know. So I do think that we have to, for young people, even older people, we have to make the practice the spiritual discipline of learning the Bible, engaging God’s love letter to his people, a real thing that we do. And so I think that we have to teach biblical study methods, number one. And so so much of the Christian faith is about consuming what someone else has prepared a meal someone else has prepared for you. And that’s legitimate, because the Bible says, you know, how shall they hear if there’s not a preacher? So we need teachers. We need preachers to carefully, wisely, authoritatively and and respectfully teach the unadulterated Word of God, right? But we also need to equip people, even young people, to know how to study the word for themselves. We need to teach them basic Bible study methods, coupled with things that I learned in like VBS and stuff like scripture memorization. But I don’t think I ever until much older in life, thought about sitting down and studying the Bible like you. Read a little bit here, read a little bit there, and how the Bible is its own best commentary, and how the Bible speaks to all the messy issues of life, right? And I love the fact that we have a God that didn’t sanitize the Bible. He didn’t try to make the Bible seem like his people were perfect, which really reminds us that’s why we needed a Savior. But I would also say the next step in equipping after learning is teaching people how to then apply that word to their life. Because I do think sometimes we know a lot of Scripture, but we don’t necessarily think through. What does it look like for me to live this out. How does this apply to me in a dating situation? How does this apply to me in my friendships? How does this apply to me when I’m dealing with emotional distress like anxiety and depression? So really learn the Bible, but then equip people to live the Bible. And I think one of the deficits that I had when I got to college is I didn’t know as much Bible as I thought I did, and I certainly didn’t know how to live it. I didn’t know how to apply the Bible to my life when I’m being tempted, when I’m feeling weak, when someone and I definitely also didn’t know how to defend it. It, because you also cannot defend what you don’t know. And so you know, like Christian cliches, Jesus died on the cross to save you from your sin, like when I am dealing with someone who does not believe in Jesus, and they know more Bible than me, and they know about their their approaching me about the history of the Bible and the formation of the Bible, and I don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re telling me that all this is just copies of Coptic or comedic images. And I’m like, what you and then they literally show me a picture of what I come to understand as an image of Christianity next to an ancient African image. I was like, Oh, my poor parents. They had good intentions, but they didn’t know nothing. We ain’t got the right thing, you know? And then I think for black people in particular, which is why I’m contextualizing the book, for black women, they have a history of pain that that has taught us like we have a lot to overcome in order to push away the lie, which it is a lie, that Christianity is the white man’s religion, it’s a lot for us to hear from non Christians that you would never be Christian. Your ancestors, your forefathers in slavery, would have never been Christian unless the Bible was beaten into them. They were forced into Christianity. So if you do not understand that Christianity was in Africa long before the transatlantic slavery, if no one ever taught you that some of the major forefathers of the faith were North African scholars and leaders, you know, like if you read confessions by Augustine, and on the book, he was painted white, you know, like all of that complicates your ability as an African American person to see that no God called me. God made me. Christianity is for all of us. And the pain of slavery, the pain of racism is a work of the devil. It is demonic, and it has been a direct attack on the black community to get us to not trust in a God who died for all, who died for all, died for all, died for all, died for all, died for all,

Latasha Morrison
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Speaker 1
Yeah. So you, you described it perfectly, about the blending of different, um, incompatible faith, or religious practices. And so I think that’s the thing. You can do it. But the question is, as a Christian, does God want you to do it? Is it actually compatible? And I would say so much of what we’re doing is not compatible. Some of it comes from ignorance, which is why we just need to talk about it, right? We’re not trying to beat people up, but we’re trying to empower and inform people that the culture is telling you Christ plus something else, right? And that was a lot of what even Paul was dealing with when he wrote to the church in Colossae, right in the book of and so, you know, for me personally, when I first started getting introduced to kind of African spiritualism, and if a practices from the Yoruba culture in Nigeria, I was not necessarily trying to throw away Jesus at the time. In fact, the very first altar, I had an altar in my room that I created had all of these things that I was told help me connect to my ancestors, connect to my culture, but I also had a Bible on the altar. So I was trying to blend. I hadn’t said I don’t want to be a Christian, but I was really in search of an identity that was something unique and important to me as a black Christian woman, as a black woman, I felt like, you know, I say in the book, so many black people are disoriented in the West. Yes, you know, we’re not able to pinpoint, many of us, the country that we come from. We talk about Africa like a country, because we just don’t have we don’t know where where we were taken from. And so I think a lot of African Americans long for that connection. And I believe that as a Christian, there is a way to celebrate who you are culturally in ways that are compatible to Christianity, but some of them are not. And so some of the things really, really come from like I wanted to just read for you out of Deuteronomy. Chapter 18, this, this is even just a word that God had for abominable practices. Verse nine, when you come into the land that your the Lord, your God, is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, who practices divination or or tells fortunes. So we go to the fortune teller and the psychic or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium, someone talking to the dead, right? And so a lot of times we we we have grief in our life, and someone tells us, I can put you in contact with the person that you desperately miss. But it says, No, you know necromancer or one who inquires of the dead. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. The LORD is driving them out before you. And so right there in Deuteronomy, very, very specifically, God is telling us, as you know, my pastor talks about doctor Eric Mason, we are not to be trying to access the spirit world or the unseen realm by illegitimate means. And that Jesus Christ is now our mediator. If you want to talk to an ancestor, talk to Jesus, he’s the only ancestor actually alive. And so I think that is those are some ways, tarot cards, or in African practices, reading curry shows and those sorts of things or thinking that we need to use other spiritual means of dealing with life, apart from Jesus, Christ. So burning, safe, God created sage is beautiful. Ain’t nothing wrong with saying so we’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, right? And I’m not saying that aren’t actual medicinal principles in some of this, right? But if you’re burning sage because you believe the lie that it will get rid of evil spirits, that is incompatible with Christianity, because the Bible doesn’t tell us we need to burn sage to deal with evil, right? We cast down strongholds, we rebuke evil, we confess the name of Jesus Christ. You know, we understand that Satan’s power is limited, and that really, we can rely on God to protect us from the evil one, right? We don’t need God and saved crystals to help us have protection like we don’t need protection from something God made. We we we get protection from God Himself, yes, is our helper and our protector and our defender. And so all of these things are practices that really is a work of the enemy that we’ve been told in the culture, hey, you can do this. And for a lot of people, and I’m writing particular. Black women who have been so disempowered in the world, it is a source of empowerment. It’s a sort of identity. It’s a source of empowerment. It’s also a quick fix. It’s like if I’m praying to Jesus and he coming through, I don’t have my husband, I don’t have my ways, I don’t have my kids. I’ll have the five year plan I wrote about in my journal. Oh, so let me just start wearing some crystal and attracting the law of attracting, attracting some things to me, so it is when we don’t want to wait on God. We don’t want to trust God in the culture tells us Jesus is not enough.

Latasha Morrison
That’s so good, so good. You know, we can talk all day. But I do want you to get into a little bit, because I, I was just talking to another friend, and we was just talking about the deficit of love that, you know, some of the things that we’re seeing and the outcomes that we see in our in our culture and our society, is definitely like people do not have a Real theological view of love. And you talk about limitation and lens and one of your chapters. And you also talk about love and just share a little bit, you know, just about just the capacity and and you know, God is love and the need for that. You know, in our society today, in our churches, today, in our leadership today, there is like we are bankrupt of love. So just speak to that a little bit Sure.

Speaker 1
So in the book, I basically am saying, in order to have a gospel vision for your life, in order to see it, you need three things. You need light, which is salvation, because the truth of the matter is there are just some truths about yourself and God you will never fully be able to comprehend. Apart from the Holy Ghost, you need to have a transformed life. And even when we are saved, we see through a glass deadly right? The second thing I said is you need the right lens, and the lens is the lens of the Bible scripture, in order to have this gospel vision. But then the third thing I mentioned to your point is you need the tent, right, or the filter of God’s love, in order to see a gospel vision for your life. Because there are, truthfully, some very hard things in Scripture that, if you don’t understand descriptive passages, meaning God is just telling you what happened, versus prescriptive passages, he’s telling you what to do. You can read some stories women about rape and just things that like went left in the Bible and think that God is condoning it, right, right? Or, if God says things like, you know, why submit to your husband? If you don’t understand that God perfectly loves us, submission can feel like a four letter word, and so knowing that God loves us when we read the Bible, it presupposes His goodness from John. So even if I don’t understand everything that I am reading, it’s not because there’s something wrong with what he said. It’s something wrong with me, like I don’t have a full understanding. But if I come and approach the text with the tent or the filter of God’s love, that even if it don’t feel right, even if it don’t feel like I want to do it, I don’t understand what he’s saying. I believe, from gate, from the gate, that God loves me, so that everything that he said in that book is perfect and good, and He can be trusted, because God is love. He never fails, and he does everything motivated by his love for God. So loved the world, he sent his only begotten Son. So we we do have to see God fully as a God who loves us, is for us, cares about us and wants relationship with us. And I do think that one, one of the main ways that the devil gets at us and causes confusion in our ability to live well as Christians, is two things. One, he doesn’t want us to see God as holy. So he wants us to think if he’s not holy, we can do whatever we want to do. But he also doesn’t want us to see God as a God who loves us, because if we don’t see that he fully loves us, then we feel rejected, we don’t feel good enough, and we’re kind of forced into a works based relationship with him. But when you really understand how much God loves you, and that the best expression of that is that he sent Jesus to literally pay your sin debt, it revolutionizes everything about you. And then when we when we think about now the body of Christ, or relationships with leaders and brothers and sisters in the body of Jesus Christ, we’re now supposed to say not not only is God love, but He commands us to love one another in the way that he loves us. And I do think that you know, aside from you know, where you fall on the gradient or the scale of your. With knowledge and what you’ve been through in your life. So much can be corrected. So many hearts can be healed. So many people can be drawn to the faith or drawn back to the faith, if we just embodied the love of God with all the people that we encounter. Um, which, but it’s hard, because God’s love is agape. God’s love is sacrificial. It’s not self serving and but that is the way. That is the call of the Christian. I believe more people will come to faith if we get out of the way with our anti love interactions with them. I believe it is people who profess the name of Jesus Christ that, unfortunately, too often, are his worst marketers, his worst PR representatives, because an invisible God has sent us out into the world to be ambassadors, to make. He wants to make his appeal to the world through us, but when we’re constipated with hatred, when we’re constipated with bigotry, when we’re constipated with racism and nationalism, when we’re constipated with sexism, people can’t see God, the beauty and the love of God, because they got to fight to see the truth of him through all our mess, but it is a commitment to Christian love. It is a commitment to Christ like love that begins to pull away the impurities of the human heart so that people have a chance of having a corrective experience in a clear sight into the Holy of Holies and into the truth of who God is.

Latasha Morrison
Period, period right there. Oh, man, that was excellent. I’m telling y’all. Get this book. Buy this book for someone in your family. Follow Doctor Sarita, if you’re follow her, let me tell you I’m sitting up here. I was like, I just, you know, just, I’m not like out. I didn’t grow up in the church, but I’m familiar, and went to church with my grandparents, and so I still understand, because sometimes I say that, people say, Well, you didn’t grow up in the church. How do you know, listen, I went to black church. When I went to church, it was black church. And I just wanted to put an organ up under there, right, right, right, you know. And as we close, I want we were you had a post a little while ago that captured life is complicated. Just remember, God is present. You said it’s okay to have heartache in a season of flourishing. It is okay to have joy when a lot of pain is evident. The beauty of God being omnipresent is that he is on the mountain and in the Valley at the same time, whatever spaces your heart, heart occupies. God is there? Whoo, that thing spoke to me. Let me tell you, because that is so true. Like, I just came from, I just come from a funeral, and people are saying, like, how is it? Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I said it’s, it’s always a tension, you know, there’s, like, there’s this grief, but also this joy, you know, the joy of and they can exist at the same time. And it’s hard to explain that and but understanding that even when things are not going the way we planned, or when there’s difficulties in life, that God is with you on the mountain, not to forget that, but also in the valley, in the sickness, in the grief, and all of those things, so Many people right now are dealing with those tensions and those words are so encouraging. What helps you navigate these times and remind yourself of that truth?

Speaker 1
Yeah, wow. So you know, a lot of what I share on social media is something that might that I might be actually dealing with, and that quote, that post that I made, is because I am that person I am right now, someone who is has the CO mingling of both joy and grief. And particularly, you know, as I, you know, launch church girl into the world. There’s so much joy and excitement about this. I’m so happy. This is my first book. I feel like I heard from God and I did what he told me to do, and I’m excited for the number of people it’s going to bless, but I am heartbroken. You. Because my own mother died in January, yeah, and my mother was an English teacher. She was an Advent reader. My mother is the one that told me about Jesus. She’s the one that encouraged me. And my mom has been suffering from cancer for a very long time, and I kind of sense that I might not have that much time with her, and I did the best that I could to finish this book before she died, that I didn’t make it. And so I want my mom to be able to hold it and she can. I want my mom to be able to be proud and read it, and I know my mom was proud of me, but what I do in these moments is I preach the gospel to my soul. I preach the gospel to my soul. I remember that I serve a God who died for me so that this present grief that I feel is not the end of the story, and I have hope, not only to see my mother again, but I have hope to see Christ, and that I get to live in the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth, where the Bible says that there will be no more crying, no more dying. The streets are paved with gold, that the leaves on the trees are good for the healing of the nation, and that we will be in the presence of God, the same God who the Bible says, if we were to look on his face, we would die. But now, because I get a glorified body, my mom will have a glorified body. There’ll be no more cancer in her body. There’ll be no more diabetes. There’ll be no more hearted there’s no more depression there. There’s no more anxiety there. I preach the gospel to myself that Jesus, though fully God and fully man perfect, took on our sin debt so that we could live again. Yeah. And I also invite Jesus into the present. He is a present help in the time of trouble. Yes, I have my eschatology type. I know what’s coming, but I got help right now. He said, I send the Paraclete. I send the helper right now. And so I reach out to the Lord. I counsel myself with scripture. I cry when I need to cry, and I praise my way through. I don’t isolate myself. I get in community. I get honest. I tell people when I’m struggling, I tell people when I’m not having a good day, and I remind myself David said I would have fainted. He really saying I would have died, but I would have lost my life. I would have fainted lest I believe. What do you believe? Yeah, that I would see the joy of the Lord, not in heaven. I believed I would see the joy of the Lord in the land of the living. Yeah, the very land where that is wet with my tears, the very land that is full of hospitals with sick people with diagnoses that the doctors are shaking their head. And I believed I would see the joy of the Lord in the land where racism and sexism abound. I believed I would see the joy of the Lord in a land where there is brokenness and the murder rate is climbing, and where children are being abused and families are being destroyed and husbands are leaving their wives, I believe that we see the joy of the Lord and this land, yeah, the land of the living. And so it is the message of the gospel. It is the hope of the gospel, and it is the presence of the helper who brings comfort, who brings clarity and perspective, and helps lift the heaviness, because he carries it. He’s a burden bearer. He don’t just stand there watching me bear my burdens. He says, roll them on to me. Cast your cares to the Lord, yeah. Imma get up under you. You take my yoke. My yoke is easy. My burden is like, that’s how that’s how I make it. That’s how I cry the day my book is released, and also bless God, because he’s still good. And my mama is healed, and hold in heaven. And so it is the truth. It is true. It is the truth that sets you free, yes,

Latasha Morrison
yes, I love it. I love it. Well, I’m telling you, and I know that that tension of joy and grief, you know, and you know it evermore when you lose a parent, you know. And I know some people listening, they may have lost a child like that, that pain is so difficult, but I love how you are very vulnerable about that. And you know, because that does help other people like you. I think you posted taking pictures of your books and like Mommy, I wish you were here, you know, and your dedication to. To your book. When I wrote my first book, I dedicated that to my mom and to my dad, and that was in 2019 I had no idea at that time that my dad would leave this earth in January of 2021 from covid, you know, and so he got to see everything about that first book. And even making that dedication, I had no idea that he wouldn’t see the second book, you know, and so I totally am with you in that, but like, I think that’s the perfect sentence. Like, you have to preach the gospel to yourself. And you know, keep moving. You feel it. You know, you know, I told my little cousin, who just lost her father, she’s only 31 years old. I said, there’s going to be some good days ahead and some really hard days ahead. I said, we’re going to take it one day at a time, you know. But your family’s here. God is with you, you know. And just but understanding that. So I was going to the last thing, I was going to ask, what is giving you hope? But you just spoke hope, right there. You just, you just sealed it. You just sealed it. And so I’m grateful to you. To your words, I know your mommy is proud of you because she saw the potential in you before you saw the potential in yourself. Yes, you know she knew that. She knew who she at birth. And so you’re walking out and continuing to walk out her legacy. And by allowing your your faith, to shape the world you know, not just others, but the world you know, that book is going to go to the world, to the masses, you know. And one thing I said when after I wrote my first book, I was like, Lord, it’s written down, like, it’s not going to die with me. It’s not going to die with me. No, it’s written down, it’s going to it’s going to be here after I’m not here, yes, and

Speaker 1
it’s about that, yes,

Latasha Morrison
yes, yes,

Unknown Speaker
yes. So

Latasha Morrison
well done. Well done. Good.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much.

Latasha Morrison
And you keep doing all that you do and just speaking the words of truth and discipleship that is so key, you know, to what we need and what we’re lacking in our society and spiritual formation like it’s a necessity, you know, because, like you said, we wouldn’t be dealing with half of the isms that we’re dealing with now if we really got that concept. So thank you so much for joining us on the be the bridge podcast, Dr Serena Lyons, and the book is church girl, so we’ll make sure that you guys know how to follow her. There’ll be links in how to get the book, because the book is out now. So when you hear this, it’s not about pre order, it’s about order. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Narrator
Thanks for listening to the be the bridge podcast to find out more about the bethebridge organization and or to become a bridge builder in your community, go to bethebridge com. Again, that’s bethebridge com. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, remember to rate and review it on this platform and share it with as many people as you possibly can. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Today’s show was edited, recorded and produced by Trayvon Potts at integrated entertainment studios in metro Atlanta, Georgia. The host and executive producer is Latasha Morrison, Sarah connatser is the Senior Producer. Please join us next time this has been a bethebridge.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai