Catherine is joined again by Maria Garvey who is navigating life with ongoing physical fragility and chronic pain. She reflects on surrender, vulnerability, and the slow undoing of an identity built on strength, resilience, and responsibility. What emerges is not a neat lesson, but a lived experience of being “broken open” — and discovering love not as something earned or managed, but something received.

Together they explore curated vulnerability, aging, self-compassion, and the courage it takes to stop “bouncing back.” Maria shares stories of toll booth chocolate bars and “microdoses of love” — inviting us to notice the small, sacred encounters that hold us together. What does it mean to rest into love, especially when life brings us somewhere we’d rather not go?

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Catherine Cowell chats with Andrea Clarke about surrender, rest, and rediscovering who we really are beneath all the roles and expectations. Andrea reflects on a sailing trip that became a powerful spiritual reset, where she sensed an invitation to join Jesus’ “crack surrender squad” — not about doing more, but about letting go. Through stories, poetry, and deep honesty, they explore surrender as returning to our “factory settings”: being loved, enough, and free to live authentically. It’s a gentle, thoughtful conversation about releasing over-responsibility, resisting pressure (especially in faith spaces), and learning to live and serve from a place of love rather than exhaustion.

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This episode is a deep, honest conversation with Addison Torrance and Caidyn Bearfield about their experiences in the foster care and youth institutional system in Ohio, and how those experiences led them into advocacy. They both share painful stories of being placed in congregate care and residential treatment facilities, where trauma, over-medication, lack of education, and loss of trust were common. Despite that, they talk about finding healing through community—especially with other former foster youth—and turning their experiences into purpose. Much of the episode focuses on challenging systems that profit from institutionalizing young people, advocating for safer, more humane alternatives, and pushing for systemic change (like the creation of a Youth Ombudsman). It’s heavy, but also hopeful, showing how shared experience, learning, and courage can turn harm into meaningful action. If you would like a transcript, you can find one here

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