Religious decision making can feel overwhelming when you're caught between equally important values or facing an uncertain future. In this episode, Dr. Angela Williams-Gorrell shares her practical framework for faithful discernment that emerged from her own difficult choices, including leaving a tenured academic position and navigating divorce. As both a practical theologian and someone who has walked through complex decisions, Angela offers a process that honors both human wisdom and divine guidance, moving beyond quick fixes to help listeners engage in meaningful religious decision making.

Angela's approach to religious decision making includes five key phases: recognizing the "stirring" that signals change, actively surrendering to God's guidance, working constructively with emotions, sifting through competing values and convictions, and finding "sated joy" in faithful choices. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes that emotions are "incredibly helpful teachers" in the discernment process and challenges the false binary between rational and emotional decision-making. Whether you're a pastor facing ministry challenges, a leader navigating organizational change, or someone at a personal crossroads, this episode provides both theological depth and practical tools for making decisions that align with your faith and values.

So emotions are incredibly helpful teachers if we allow them to be. ⁓ And so it's not a matter of can I be rational or can I be emotional? These two things are integrated in our minds. actually, emotions are critical for moral decision making. Making a difficult decision doesn't require you to sideline your emotions and be like, okay, I need to get clear headed here.

It requires you to constructively work through your emotions and to say, is being signaled to me here? What can I learn from what I'm feeling?

Hello everyone, welcome to the Pivot Podcast, where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile

and I'm Terri Elton. On the Pivot Podcast, we discuss what we believe are four key pivots that God is calling many churches to make in the 21st century. They are a pivot in posture, from primarily fixing institutional problems to listening and discerning where God is leading. A pivot in focus, from membership to discipleship. A pivot in structure,

from one-size-fits-all models of ministry to a mixed ecology of an inherited and new forms together. And then a pivot in leadership from predominantly clergy-led, lay-supported ministry to lay-led, clergy-supported ministry.

Today we're delighted to welcome to pivot Dr. Angela Williams-Gorell. Angela's work as a theologian, an educator, and author speaks directly to the heart of what we mean by pivoting from a fixing posture to one of listening and discernment. Too often when faced with difficult decisions, whether in ministry, leadership, or personal life, our instinct can be to quickly find solutions or fixes.

But Angela's research and personal experience and her new book reveal that the most faithful path forward often requires us to slow down, listen deeply to God and our communities, and embrace a process of discernment that honors both human agency and God's guidance. Her approach offers a framework that helps us cultivate the spiritual practices of listening, surrendering, and discerning that are essential for faithful leadership in uncertain times. So as churches face

complex decisions about their future. This conversation and Angela's new book, Braving Difficult Decisions, What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do, couldn't be more timely. So welcome Angela to the Pivot Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. It's awesome to see you all. I see you as both colleagues and friends, and I'm just delighted to dive into conversation with you.

So Angela, you write that this new book emerged out of your own experience with some difficult decisions, including a divorce and leaving a tenured academic position. So what led you to approach these personal struggles as a research project? And say just a little bit more about what you mean about this book emerged out of your own story.

Yeah, I was up for tenure, so I didn't get tenure because I decided to leave right before getting tenure. Definitely a hard decision for anyone listening that's unfamiliar with higher ed. When you get tenure, it's a big promotion. So it's like, we want to change your title and we want to give you more money and we want to give you more stability. And I was like, nah. ⁓

No. And so it was a really difficult decision because at the time I felt like I was choosing between two sets of values that were equally important to me. And I think that happens a lot to us as individuals. It happens in communities and organizations and it happens in society where sometimes when we're making a law, for example, that we're like choosing between two sets of values that might be really important. ⁓

like to everybody in the community like has a vision like we need to be about these sets of values and these other people like we need to be about this and yet and so they're both good and you have to figure out which one you're going to lean into for the moment that you're living in. so this was part of my journey was making some really difficult decisions and then as I thought about it I realized that as an educator I

basically almost every question that students would come to me about had some sort of version of like, what do I do? And ⁓ I'm dealing with this, ⁓ Angela, like what do I do? And then it happened a lot as a spiritual guide in a church to write as a clergy person, where people were consistently coming and saying, how do I hear from God on this thing? And what do I do while I'm waiting on God to reveal what I should do? And so there's so many great books that have been written.

that are incredibly good books about the practice of discernment. But many of them I felt like weren't really practical. was like, these are some things, like, was like, these are some things to think about. It wasn't really a journey, like do this and then think about this and then, you know, and then a lot of books that were pretty practical, like the five questions you should ask when you're making a difficult decision, felt like they weren't nuanced enough for the complexity of.

big decisions. And so I wanted to marry those two things. And then I also, felt like there were so many good books that were that told the stories of people who had made brave bold choices. And I thought, what if I, you know, I want to be, I want to, and I tried in my own discernment journey for these difficult decisions that you named to marry this stuff together in my own life. And then I thought, oh, wow, what if I wrote a book that married all of this for other people?

And so as a practical theologian, it just made a lot of sense to me to try ⁓ to write a book that would really address this pressing concern in people's lives of what do I do when I don't know what to do?

So your book has, you each chapter is like a phase of the discernment process and each begins with an S word. And so you began this with stirring those feelings of kind of being conflicted or treading water. Say more about that.

Yeah, I think that oftentimes when we enter into a decision-making process, when we have a big question that we want to answer, it begins with this sense of, need to do something about this. ⁓ sometimes it looks like being at a crossroads in our life. We're at a particular stage of our life. Maybe we're entering into retirement or like we're in that phase of our life and we go, is it time to retire? Like we feel that stirring within us. maybe I need

Maybe it is, and then if I do, what would I do with my time? Or maybe we sense that a relationship in our life has become, you know, conflicted. Like that maybe that relationship, that something needs to shift in it. Whether it's a family relationship, a working relationship, a friend relationship. And we just know, we feel that nudge in our spirit of something needs to be addressed here. ⁓ Or maybe we ⁓ enter into a particular life stage like, ⁓

and where we realize biologically ⁓ that we cannot, so maybe it's like, do I have children or not? You know, I'm entering this period of time where I'm kind of running out of time if I want to have children biologically or even if I want to adopt children or have a surrogate or something like that. it's time, like I need to act. Or another thing that happens where we get this sort of stirring too ⁓ is that maybe we go through a crucible experience of some kind.

where we were refined by fire, so to speak, where something happens that really surprises us in life. Perhaps it's something that breaks our heart, like someone saying that this relationship is over, or you're fired, or then maybe a positive crucible experience. I mean, maybe in the end, it's positive. Maybe you go through a cancer, and then you're declared cancer-free.

Like that's the good part of it, right? But then you have this new way of seeing the world and you think, I have to do something with this new way of seeing the world. I just don't know quite what to do with these new glasses that I'm wearing. And so there's so many, and so many other examples that I could give, but there are different moments in our life that I think we start to feel this inward thing within us that said this nudge that says, I need.

to think more about this. I need to do something about this. I need to respond in some way. I need to deal with this. people who are listening who are disciples of Jesus, who are already Christians, maybe you're sitting there going, oh, that sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit. And I would say, too, yes, the Spirit of God can give us that voice of God. can hear it in dreams, in the language of other people, the words that they use.

We might hear it in a movie or a book that we read. I think God speaks to us in so many different ways and we think, ⁓ yes, I'm dealing with that in my life. I need to do something about this.

So the second S is surrendering. And I think often we think of surrendering as humans as very passive. And you actually put it in a real active framework about actively opening ourselves to God. Help us think through or understand what that kind of surrender looks like, ⁓ especially as we think about this pivot from doing to listening, right, from actively fixing.

after that stirring, we want to do stuff, right? And we want to take responsibility. And you're kind of challenging that a little bit.

Yeah, I think of surrender like similar to peace building. It's not, peace building is not doing nothing. And a lot of people think about peace, but it's like, ⁓ I'm just allowing whatever to happen to happen. No, peace building is not passive. It's an active nonviolent resistance. And similarly, surrendering is not passive. It's an active ⁓ thing that we do where we're declaring our faith and our trust in God.

where we're saying, God, I've come to the end of my human knowledge and ability here. ⁓ Or also, maybe I have more capacity here, but I need you, God. And I am living open to you showing me my next step. I'm living open. I am powerless in this situation, maybe. Or I feel powerless. Or I feel fragile. I feel vulnerable in this situation. And God, I'm going to rely on your strength.

I'm going to rely on your guidance. I'm going to trust that you are good and that you're leading me. And so I think that surrender is not something to do just when we're making a complex choice. I feel like all the chapters of this book, really, I think my hope would be that they would be seen as practices of discernment that we take up in our life, practices of developing wisdom. Like if I want to be a wise person, I would say I want to be a person who lives surrender.

who lives as a person that is leaning on God and leaning on community, that recognizes I can't do life alone, that lives open, that lives faithful, you know, like with, that embodies faith and hope. And so for me, surrender is all of those things. And I'm, I was really inspired by the life of Ignatius. Ignatius, you know, he, he has this vision for his life that's really clear. I'm going to be a military general.

And then he gets injured in war by a cannonball. he, over the course of the next couple of years, he realizes that he's been injured so badly that doctors can't help him. And he needs to rethink the life that he's going to live. And it's really difficult for him. But while he's laying there fragile, in many ways what he felt, I think, as powerless, he begins to be given a different vision for his life. And it's in his fragility. It's in his surrender and openness.

to God and to others, to reading books about people like ⁓ St. Francis of Assisi, that he begins to get a sense, a vision of going on a pilgrimage that totally changes his life. And so I was really inspired by this. wow, what if all of us lived with that kind of posture in our life? Maybe God would give us the vision that we're hoping for.

So I think a lot of leaders can struggle with the role of emotions in decision making. Against a kind of false binary of emotional versus rational. So how do feelings contribute to faithful discernment?

Thank

Yeah, when I look at the life of Jesus, I mean, I'll just start there with someone, you know, ⁓ that if you're a Christian, like you think like this person embodied the life worth living, this person lived as meaningfully as possible. And when I look at the life of Jesus, I look at someone who experienced a variety of emotions and he not only like experienced them, but he experienced them very fully.

whether it's like in the Garden of Gethsemane and just being totally brokenhearted and feeling abandoned, or looking at the city of Jerusalem and weeping about it, or sitting with Mary and weeping with her about her brother's death, or getting really angry when people were misusing the space of the temple and going against God, like God's holiness and goodness to people in the temple.

So he got angry and he got sad and he ⁓ did this in a way that ⁓ he was still living what God would have him to do. And so emotions are incredibly helpful teachers if we allow them to be. ⁓ And so it's not a matter of can I be rational or can I be emotional? These two things are integrated in our minds. ⁓

Emotions are critical for moral decision making. ⁓ We don't hit someone that we respect and love because we don't want to feel shame about it. So as we're training up children in the way that they should go, so to speak, we teach them what to do partially in conjunction with their emotions. so like a journey like this, making a difficult decision doesn't require you to sideline your emotions.

and be like, okay, I need to get clear headed here. It requires you to constructively work through your emotions and to say, what is being signaled to me here? What can I learn from what I'm feeling? And how do I work through this in a way with God's help where I can allow the difficult feelings that I'm experiencing to contribute to the clarity that I need to move forward?

Yeah, that's beautiful. I can imagine ⁓ the integration of that is part of the hard work, right? It's not either or. It's putting those things together.

Absolutely, yeah.

So you have a chapter summoning that focuses on identity. Who am I? Say a little bit about why you think this is so crucial, this question when facing difficult decisions. And I want to add, and what does it mean for those of us that maybe struggle with saying, and who am I as a beloved child of God and really believing it? Like, how does our Christian understanding

weave into that or not? Like, how do those things come together?

I think another emotion that really can paralyze us in the midst of making complex choices is fear. ⁓ I think a fear of the future sometimes, like, it's a way to kind of calm the fear in us, is to have, is to allow our ⁓ vision of the future to be informed by the stories that we've lived and by the stories that have made us. And as Christians, like part of that story is God loves you.

You are a child of God. You are God's beloved. And there's no one thing that you can do that would change that. And so you can walk in that truth. You can go or stroll in that truth. You can go confidently forward in that truth, allow it to hold you. And then part of that story too is because you're God's beloved child, you have dignity and worth, God sees you, God is hearing you, God is leading you, God is trustworthy.

And then along with the stories of our spiritual life, we can rely on the stories of our family, of our community that lift us up, that tell us who we are, that help us to move forward, not just without fear, I think, but also that us clarity about where we need to be going in our future. in that, I think we get a lot of courage as well. And so I think I wrote about Dolores Huerta, who's still living. ⁓

in this chapter. And a lot of people look at, man, her life was incredible. Her life has been incredible. She's an activist for people in marginalized communities, particularly farm workers in California, and has just spent her blood, sweat, and tears, and words, ⁓ spent her entire life advocating for people that she feels like have been pushed down, marginalized, neglected, disregarded.

and yet do some of the most important work for this country in relationship to like making sure we all eat. You know what I mean? And so ⁓ she spends her life doing this and somebody might look at her and go, how could she spend her life doing this? Especially when she had, I think seven children. ⁓ And we look at her life and then you learn about her mother. Her mother had this hotel and growing up she watched her mother.

allow people to stay at this hotel that couldn't pay or to stay at the hotel for like one or two dollars. So she had this person who exemplified moral courage and then she was able to take that on. And I think for some of us, if we excavate the roots of our lives, we go, yeah, I learned this from this person. I can be this kind of person in this moment that I need to be. Or as a community, maybe we excavate the past a little bit and we...

we go, okay, what does it mean to return to our roots? Like who are some of the people who created this place, who structured this organization and how do we lean into their vision for the moment that we're living in now? Yeah.

So you referenced this idea of kind of competing values or you use the word sifting in this next section to talk about how we have contending convictions that we need to ⁓ kind of parse through and figure out as we are making these decisions. Say more about that balancing kind of convictions with openness and how do we discern those things?

Absolutely. So I think on the one hand, we can learn from our past. You know, that's what I'm just saying. I was just saying, on the other hand, I want to say that we can give ourselves permission to grow. You can change your mind. can take, if you've been living with a particular belief for many years and then you come up, you you realize there's another belief that's in conflict with that, you can let the first one go.

and say, I no longer need to believe that, I realize now that this is true instead. And the best example of this that I could think of and that I put in my book was the Apostle Paul. ⁓ The Apostle Paul in the New Testament spent his life believing that Christians needed to be persecuted and needed to be killed because they were not living the right way. ⁓ that's literally, I there was a deep, you I think a lot of times when I hear people talk about the Apostle Paul, like,

in his previous life, it's like he just didn't get it. He didn't get it. It's sort of like even maybe softening his former, like, oh, poor Paul. He missed it. It's like, no, he lived with a very particular set of convictions, and he was living that out. And then all of a sudden, he had this experience on the road to Damascus where the literal scales from his eyes were like, right, yeah, he had blindness.

he gets this new vision and realizes, I have had bad convictions. My beliefs were wrong about Christians. I need to become one instead. Their beliefs are right. And so there are sometimes in our lives as a community and as individuals and in our society together where we need to acknowledge, I was wrong about that belief. We reject it now and we embrace something different. That's not someone who is

I think sometimes we think of people as like being, it's like that's not someone who failed miserably. That's someone who knows how to live with integrity and humility. And then there's other ways to deal with beliefs that can feel conflicting as well. like sometimes we come up against a belief in our life and we realize this feels partially right. But in our experiences, we realize I need to expand this belief. I need to add to it in a way.

that helps me to live with more integrity or this community to do so. And then other times we run up against in life, especially in midlife and beyond, and Richard Rohr, the author and spiritual guide, talks about this all the time, and that's paradox. Sometimes we need to learn in our lives to live with paradox, where we realize that two things that feel like initially can't both be true actually need to be held together, because they're both true. ⁓

And Paradox, know, Rohr has argued it to be like sort of the pinnacle of spiritual maturity. And I think that would be interesting. That's a whole nother podcast, perhaps, but.

Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think paradox is a great example. You know, in the Christian life, we think life comes through death. Like, okay, if that isn't a paradox, right? Right. But I think many of us maybe were raised in churches that didn't know how to put those things together very well, or we have the Sunday school answers, right, that don't hold paradox very much. And I think in the challenges we face today, there's a lot of...

If we were a little more open, right, to not only hearing where we started with and to surrender to God, hearing people's stories, ⁓ there might be a little bit more ⁓ shifting of what we believe or being open, right, to adapting our beliefs.

Yeah, I felt like the thing where I saw this the most, like there was someone I interviewed. I interviewed multiple people for this book too, and seven of their stories appear in the book. And there was a woman I interviewed who felt really, really called ⁓ to the job that she had. And then she started to feel that stirring within her to leave the position. And she was like initially thinking, my gosh, but I was called to this job.

how could I leave when I felt so called to it? And then she eventually embraced paradox and she realized she could say I was called to it and I'm going, I need to leave this job now. And the and really helped her with that.

So when you're talking about selecting between different values, you encourage people to do a values inventory. I wonder if you could say more about the importance of that. And then also, might that apply to congregations or communities that are doing face with difficult decisions as they're looking to their future? Can you say a little bit about both of those?

When I think about just like living our lives period, not just difficult decisions, that ⁓ I would place values in like, there's like, everything that we do every day has something related to belief, and then practice, and then desire. You know, and they're all embedded together. And I would say that desire is really closely related to values.

And so every once in while we need to look, if we're trying to figure out what practices, like how do we, like we realize that we need to do a shift in our practices, that in order to make that shift, we have to address belief and we have to address desire or values. And so ⁓ I think it's, the inventory that I'm encouraging in the book is to do an inventory of both of like your spiritual values. And this is where you get your spiritual values from.

from the tradition that you're a part of, from your sacred text, the Bible specifically for Christians, right? ⁓ And then the community that you're a part of ⁓ also contributes to those values, like your community as, like with the history that you have together. But then also ⁓ you have individual values yourself that maybe, like, so even if you're making a communal decision,

different individuals in the community will have things that they lean toward. And so if you're trying to make a decision together, part of the process that can be really helpful is just naming the one or two values that you feel like are really pressing as it relates to this particular question you're trying to answer together or the decision that you're trying to make. Realizing that values often undergird where we think that we should go. And maybe sometimes just specifically naming like, I'm really leaning into this value.

And then someone else saying, well, I've been really leaning into this value of our community, our tradition, ⁓ the Bible. Then you can see right there, wow, those are both good values, but they do take us in different directions. And so then you have to decide together which one of these are we going to really lean into? But maybe a better question, which one is God really leaning and asking us to lean into in this time? So for example, the fruit of the Spirit is a pretty diverse list.

They're all good things, but are we being guided right now by patience? Are we being guided right now by joy? ⁓ These are different things. so it doesn't mean you're not embodying other things, but whatever you make primary, both in your individual choices and communal choices, can give you a sense of where you should go next.

So your final step in this process of discernment is sated joy, which is I think a beautiful phrase, ⁓ even in difficult decisions, right? On the other side of that. And one of your previous books was the gravity of joy. So this whole theme around how do you find joy amidst loss and suffering ⁓ is something you've thought a lot about. So say more about that piece. ⁓

What does joy look like even in difficult decisions?

Yeah, I love the phrase, Sated Joy. I was inspired by the author of When Breath Becomes Air, and I quote him ⁓ in that chapter. I was inspired, like the moment I read Sated Joy in his work, I thought, ⁓ that's a form of joy that I want to think more about. Yeah, the gravity of joy is all about the attempt to live open to joy in a hurting world. And my deep belief.

that joy and sorrow can live in really close proximity together and oftentimes intermingled in our own hearts. ⁓ so that's, was like my second book was really that journey of like, what does it take to live open to joy? And also trying to grapple with the question, ⁓ can I be experiencing profound loss and pain? Can I live in a suffering world and life still be good? And my answer was a resounding yes. ⁓

And in the midst of difficult decisions, I think sometimes we can feel like I just did this really hard thing. I did this thing that broke my heart or it broke the hearts of other people or maybe everybody's a lot of hearts, you know, or I felt like I did this really hard thing. And even though it was right and maybe like the language of broken hearts doesn't really apply, but wow, it was really hard.

Can life be joyful in the midst of that? I wanna say again, a resounding yes, that say to joy is close to contentment. It's close to the ability to live at peace, if even just for a few moments with the fact that you feel like you heard from God to the best of your ability. And with great humility and fear and trembling, you decided to move forward. And in this moment in time, you decide to look at the story that you're living into.

and be and welcome the sated joy of God. ⁓ And as you move into that new story, and I just was really, as I looked at all these people throughout history who had made bold choices, I really, I felt in their autobiographies and in their biographies, this sense of sated joy, ⁓ where, I mean, it was sobering, quiet, transformative joy oftentimes, but there was a sense that like, I am living

the life that I was meant to live as I do this thing. I am doing what God wants me to do or what I believe to the best of my ability that God wants me to do in this moment, and I can live with joy in that.

I've been known to be a person that likes the word and. And you also like and. ⁓ That embracing the and when a lot of the world, and maybe even we've been conditioned to think but, this or that, right? And I think paradox that you've talked about, I think the kind of exercise around values, even.

like in a church or even I was thinking with our spouse or our children or our families, right, where values are being wrestled with, right, together. Help us think through how an and mindset might actually help us in those difficult moments in making a decision, whether it's, you know, a relationship thing or a church or whatever, because I think there's something powerful about the and.

in a world that wants to think but.

I mean, just right away with a relationship. I love this person, but this person is hurting me. ⁓ And the and there helps us to realize that you can both recognize that someone's hurting you and still love them. You don't have to choose between this realization and your love for them. Or I love this person and I need to leave this person. ⁓

They can both be true. Or perhaps you're thinking about, you're like, want to start a new business, but I'm a new mom. They can both be true. I want to start a new business and I'm a new mom. So what does that mean for how I navigate this? Or maybe for a church. We are an older congregation with important values that we don't want to lose. But we need to make changes to get new members to join us.

Well, that's a false binary. It gives you the sense that you need to choose between your values and welcoming new people into your community. So the word and there would look like we are an older congregation with important values that we don't want to lose. And we need to make some changes to get new members to join us. So that word and I think helps us to ⁓ really broaden our perspective on what's possible.

So as we bring this conversation to a close, one last question for you, which is, what would be your advice to congregational leaders who might be listening or watching ⁓ as they are trying to build their community's capacity to faithfully discern God's leading? What couple of things you would give them as counsel?

I think that what immediately comes to mind is an and sort of thing. ⁓ It's important to give your community enough time together that allows for as many people as possible to be heard. ⁓ And you need a timeline. If you're trying to discern something together, like how are we going to welcome more people into our community? Like what changes do we need to make?

⁓ That could be a conversation you have for the next 50 years. But you don't want to have just that conversation for the next 50 years. And you don't because people stop participating when there's no timeline. They're so exhausted and so busy from their everyday lives that they just think, can't participate in that. And so I would really encourage you to have an and mindset where you're like, what kind of process can we set up where we hear from as many people as possible and where we do change with people and not to them?

⁓ But also what kind of timeline can we put into place that really gives some good boundaries to this discussion where it can meet like where we can actually make a decision together and then also I encourage you to be really clear about who gets to make the decision and how it's gonna be made I think also tie like in churches ⁓ and all other types of organizations people get invited into the process and they start to believe right away like ⁓ I matter I matter

And then all of sudden the decision's made behind closed doors and it just happens to them and they're like, wait, I thought we were all participating in this. But if from the get go, you're really clear about what you want from everybody and then who gets, mean, maybe it is everybody gets to make the decision. Well, you have to be clear then too, like what does consensus look like? Or is there a boat of some, you know? And so you remind people of the rules of your organization, the boundaries of this kind of process. ⁓

Just clear communication is so essential in a discernment process. ⁓ I would say something else that is just that a humility part, like I would use that word a few times in this conversation. When I look at the wisdom literature in the Old Testament, what I see again and again and again is that wisdom is always in close relationship with humility. Wise people know that they're not always right.

Wise people know that they don't even have the capacity to know when they're wrong. That I don't know what I don't know. Wise people realize that, they embody that, and they live that every day. so ⁓ whenever you're making choices as a community, be people who are consistently saying from the front stuff like that.

I often in my classroom with students, I would say like, I welcome half-baked ideas. Like most of what we're gonna talk about is half-baked, okay? Like we don't always have it all, like you don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to raise your hand and talk only when you feel super confident about every single little thing that you wanna say. Like say, you know, this is in process and recognize that most of our ideas are in process, that God is always revealing new things to us. And sometimes we'll get it wrong and that's okay.

And we might go through this whole process and decide something. And then in a year, we're going to review it and reflect on it, because that's what we do as a community. We're constantly, we all know, right, on this call, like action and reflection. We're going to do something, and then we're to reflect on how it went. And then we're to do something a little bit differently, because we're going to learn. And that's what we do in this community. We learn and we reflect together. And so in a year, we're going to learn what we did that probably could have, like how we could have done it better, and maybe new information that's going to shift what we do.

And so as leaders, think that clear communication about all these things is super helpful in discernment processes.

Well, Angela, thank you. This has been great. And you've helped us understand a little bit more about how faithful discernment can not only be for us personally and in our relationships, but also as we think of leading in these uncertain times. And I think a lot of what you open up in this book is helping us get at things that are often guiding us, but invisible or deep down in us. And you bring them up, right? You get us to call forth or spend time

kind of reflecting on that. If our listeners want to find out more about where they can find more about your work or your other writings, where can they do that?

Yeah, thank you so much. I love to connect with people. And so please, if you're listening, I would love to hear from you, like an email through my website. There's just like a contact me box on every page basically of my website that if you contact me there, it would go straight to me. I love it and I will respond to you. Or you can message me, like DM me on Instagram or Facebook. I'd love to hear from you. That's also my website is where you can learn more about my different books and I speak for a living. So of course, if you want me to.

Partner with you in some way related like with a retreat or a workshop or something like that, you know, let me know it'd be great

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