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Hi, welcome back to Crumbling Empires. I’m Lyndsey Medford, and this is a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I’m here today with Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, and I’m so honored and so excited about this. Dr. Chanequa’s book is coming out in August, and I think this podcast will also be coming out in August.
It’s called Sacred Self-Care, and it’s a devotional space, a reflective space, and so full of information and theology about self-care. Thank you so much for being here—Dr. Chanequa just invited me to call her Chanequa, and I don’t think I can do it—Let me practice. Chanequa, welcome and thank you for being here.
Chanequa: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Lyndsey: I was so excited about this book. When we met, which was a few years ago, you were teaching a writing workshop that I was blessed and privileged to attend. And we had a lot of conversations about the medical system and about self care in that context. And so you’ve been a mentor to me from here and far in that space for a long time. And so I’m really excited that this book is spreading your wisdom and knowledge.
I wanted to give this book some context within all your other work. You’re a researcher, you have like 12 degrees in psychology and in theology. And so you have researched where the myth of the StrongBlackWoman comes from. Your book before this was about racial reconciliation and I go around recommending that book all the time.
And you are a two-time breast cancer survivor. And that’s important, I think, for my listeners, because so many of us have chronic illnesses, and the rest of us, of course, love someone with a chronic illness. I would just love to hear you set up for our listeners who are new to you and your work, who you are and how this whole story has informed coming to the place of writing this book.
Chanequa: Yeah, yeah, thanks. Um, and this book, I think at its face, it seems very different from the work I’ve done before. But, um, as you know, from our conversations and people who’ve been in conversations with me know that in addition to my work around racial and gender justice issues, there’s always been this thread of self care and they’re very much connected.
My own entry into ministry begin with a health crisis. It began when I, you know, right at my 30th birthday, dealing with chronic unexplained pain, high blood pressure, all sorts of stress-related problems, and beginning to say, I gotta do something different, right? And that actually was the start of my self-care journey, but it was also when I learned about the StrongBlackWoman because I was trying to figure out why I was doing what I was doing. Why was I just pushing myself beyond my limits, really to serve the needs of other people. And in my readings, I stumbled across this thing called the Strong Black Woman. And I was like, oh, this is me, right?
And so I started really focusing on my own care, and I experienced this drastic turnaround in my physical and mental wellbeing. Well, mental more than anything. A lot of the health problems were still there, right? But they were, they were manageable, right? But mentally.
And so I began to say, Oh, I should do this with other women, right? If this was helpful to me, this could help other people. And that was actually when I first heard my call, the beginning of my call to ministry. So I ended up working with the women at my church around self care, and at the same time, continuing to think about the StrongBlackWoman.
Um, so really I say I have this now 20 plus years self care journey. I was talking about it a lot in activist spaces. Um, you know, so I get in these activist spaces. I’m trying to find my place because, um, I’m not the person who’s going to go march a lot, right? Like I’m like, I don’t know about crowds. Like how far do I have to walk? Can my body maintain? Like, can I do it?
Lyndsey: Yes. Very familiar.
Chanequa: Am I going to be in too much pain? I don’t know if I can do this, right? At the same time, like lots of friends in the Christian community development world, right? And they’re moving into these impoverished neighborhoods doing this fascinating, incredibly important ministry. And I’m alongside them saying, where’s my place in this field, right? Because like I need to be near certain types of medical centers and grocery stores, and there’s certain types of food that are and are not good for my body. Where do I fit?
And one of the things I found over time is that no matter where I was, I was encouraging people to take care of themselves. And I began to find, oh, this is my place in this movement. I’m the encourager. I’m the one who sees the activist, the pastor, whoever, and says, hey, you’re doing great work.
And so over time, I started weaving this into my classes. I’m a seminary professor and I just kept doing it more and more. I taught a spiritual formation class, our intro spiritual formation class. I decided to upend the model for how we taught about it. And I wasn’t just gonna talk about spirituality. I was gonna talk about self care in a very holistic way, right? So that my class was not about just taking care of your spiritual self. It was, I want you to develop a plan for how you’re gonna sustain yourself in seminary, right? And then in ministry, right? And so this book, it begins to put all of this together. So that’s sort of the long story.
And then more immediately, 2021, Lent is coming up, right? Um, we’ve been in lockdown for a full year and my family and I really went into lockdown for the first, probably, I think until all of us were vaccinated, we did not leave the house. We just didn’t leave the house except to go to the grocery store. And only my husband did that. My son and I stayed at home. Um, and so we were talking about, I was thinking about, what does it mean to give up in a year where collectively we’ve given up everything?
And I thought, you know, I don’t think I want to give up. I think I want to take on, right? I went into quarantine knowing that caring for ourselves was going to be really important because of the stress we were all under, that we got to like double, triple down on our self care. And so I decided to do this Lenten challenge online where I said, let me invite people for my practice. I’m going to deepen my self care. Let me invite other people in.
I started writing these daily prompts and having these discussions with people. And about midway through, one of my friends, oh, it was her birthday yesterday actually, she reached out to me and said, “You know this is a book, right?” And I was like,”yeah, I think it is.” And so yeah, finally, and for years, I kept saying, everybody knows what I say about self care. I don’t need to do anything with this. And it was really that process that was like—Oh wait, there’s a way I think about this that is different than how most of these conversations are happening. And so that’s what I tried to put in the book.
Lyndsey: Yeah, what, I mean, for you, what is that way that’s different?
Chanequa: Well, the one thing is thinking about self-care that in this way that is not capitalistic, right? And so that’s a big thing that once the language of self-care went mainstream, you have all these corporations that have kind of jumped into it.
And when I talk to people about self-care, what I will often hear from women is: “Self-care is selfish. I’m concerned.” From Christian women especially—”I’m concerned about this being selfish,” right? And so having to help people understand why.
But also the other thing people would say, well, I take a vacation or I go get a massage or yeah, I don’t really have the money for a pedicure. And I would say, you don’t need money, right? Like that, it’s none of those things. Like money might help, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something much more basic than that. I’m not talking about the occasional treats we give to ourselves, right? The day spa, the vacation, those are treats. That’s not self-care, right? It can be part of self-care, but it’s really not the fundamental.
And so part of the way that I’m thinking about it is thinking about self-care, is getting back to the heart of what’s ourself, right? And for me, is rooted in this idea of the Imago Dei, that we are created in the image of God by a loving God. And I’ve always thought, if this is it, right, this body is God’s greatest gift to me. Like this is it. That’s the thing. Every one of us at our birthday, we got our best gift ever, right? When we were born, it was like, God gave us us. And thinking about that, like we have a responsibility to care for ourselves because we’ve been given this great gift of existence. And so how do we take care of the gift that God has given us?
So it’s really about getting in touch with our embodiment and trying to figure out, wait, who am I? What do I need? And then how do I make sure that my needs are being fulfilled?
Lyndsey: Yeah, I, well, I don’t want to say that a lack of self care makes me suspicious of people because it’s so ingrained in us to – we don’t learn these skills, we don’t hear these encouragements and these arguments and even the scientific and psychological research that tells us why we need to be doing this. I don’t want to say suspicious exactly, but I think when you talk about the gift of ourselves. And then you when you’re in a space where people, I’m thinking of activist spaces in particular, or in possibly church spaces, where there’s just no sense of what it means to care for ourselves or to have boundaries or to leave margin for people’s for each other’s bodies and needs—I start to I start to wonder about the bigger picture, right?
Cause like if we’re not taking care of the gift of ourselves, I’m starting to wonder. We all know what we’re against here, or we all know what is like driving us towards urgency here or whatever it is, but do we know what we are for? Like do we know what we are cultivating together? If we can’t do that in our individual lives, as far as finding the space to be our full selves or to have pleasure or to be present with our bodies and present in relationship, then are we going to be able to find that space together on a larger scale either?
Chanequa: Yeah, right. It’s part of, I think for me, self-care, it does help us to figure out just that what we’re for, right? Not just, okay, we don’t want this world. But then what do we want? And how do we begin to experience that now? As opposed to a lot of activism is oriented towards, we’ll just lay it all on the line because we’re striving for this great world. And then maybe once we get to this great world, everybody gets to care for themselves.
Increasingly, I don’t think we’re gonna get to that great world. I think a lot of what we have to learn to do is how to survive and thrive in the midst of crumbling empires, right? We have to learn, how do we experience joy? So what does it mean to be in the context of just messiness and to say, “and yet,” right, “and yet I still want health to the extent that I can. I still want joy to the extent that I can,” right? I want that for myself. I want that for other people. Yeah, I think it’s important for us to begin to figure out what it is that, what flourishing looks like. Like how can we strive for a society where flourishing is happening if we don’t have a taste of flourishing, if we haven’t experienced that, and we’re not experiencing that in our own lives?
Lyndsey: Yeah. And a lot of my listeners are like, just really tired of the word “self-care” because it is obviously, we can be, get an A plus at self-care and still it’s insufficient. Like we need more. And particularly, when people are chronically ill or disabled, or in any of these sort of justicy spaces and fights, there’s so much need. It’s not always fair to put that on individuals. And I know you acknowledge that in this book. And I want to acknowledge that in this conversation. So I can be the person saying, self-care is not enough. I’m tired of it.
I also remember being the person in my early 20s, particularly as a young Christian woman that had this thought that everyone should take care of everyone else, and then we would never have to take care of ourselves because we would do it for each other, and that would just be better for some reason.
I, and so I’ve gone, I’ve gone from these, I’ve been on these two different pendulum swings and I’m still trying to pull them back together. Where does self care and community care intersect and intertwine?
Chanequa: Yeah. And they definitely intertwine. I think for me, I always come back to self care because I think ultimately we are responsible for our own lives. Right. Um, ultimately I feel like if there’s going to be an account, right. Um, for how we spent our life at the end of our life, that that’s on us. And so I come back to it for that reason.
The other thing though, is I think when self care is, is, is put in the right perspective and what I’m hoping I’m doing here is that it becomes tied to our relationships, right? So I talk about relationships as part of self-care because I think we are not meant to live in isolation. We’re meant to live in community with other people. So part of our care is connecting with other people, loving other people, caring for other people, being loved by other people. That’s part of that. So self-care is always this tension between self-differentiation, right? And being part of community.
But one of the reasons I think they’re not necessarily disconnected, it actually came up experientially. When I first, 30 years old, started practicing self-care and really focusing on myself, I would start in with, I’m putting myself first, right? What are my needs? What do I need to do? I need to exercise, I need to meditate, I need to pray, I need to read my Bible. And I kept doing these things. I need to do this for myself and then I’ll go to work and then I’ll do these other things.
What I found was the more I intentionally focused on my own care, the more I reached out and connected to and cared about other people. It, I mean, and initially it was really strange to me because I’m an introvert. I only like this much, right? Like I like people in like small doses, like, okay, this is my people time. And now this is my me time. And suddenly I found myself like walking the halls of my department and stopping by my colleagues and being like, “Hey, how you doing?” And they would look at me like, “and what do you need?” And I’m like, “Oh, I don’t need anything. I just came to see how you’re doing.” Right? It was so foreign in our workspace for that to happen.
I found that I started reaching out to friends more, right? And part of what I’ve realized, and it makes complete sense when we think about stress, when we’re under stress, which is usually what is happening when we’re not practicing self-care, our stress response system is activated. When your stress response system is activated, you’re not thinking about loving other people as much. You’re in survival mode. And so it becomes, “Oh my God, I need this, I need this, I’m so tired,” right?
It’s a different type of self-focus than if we start with this sort of expansiveness of, oh wait, I can care for myself, I’m worthy of my own care, I’m worthy of my own time. We end up then sort of filling ourselves up and we do have this overflow. and that space and it’s like, “Oh wow, look at this. I have all this energy now, right?” Oh wow, I have this abundance of compassion because I’ve been directing it inward and it starts to grow. And so now I’ve got extra compassion. Let me start spreading this, right? And so I found out that when we really start thinking about self care the right way, it actually deepens our connections with other people.
Now it might strain some connections because there’s some folks that we realize, you know what? I don’t think this relationship is good for me. I think I might need to put a boundary here, right? And we get some clarity on, there are people, for me, the people who are most in my corner were often the folks that I put the least amount of effort into. I was ignoring those folks, family and friends. I was ignoring them. Yeah, I’ll get to call you eventually cause I’m focusing on all this work stuff. But then I was like, “Wait. Now those are the folks who show up for me. Those are the folks who love me and care for me.” Relational self-care means I gotta put some time and investment into nurturing those relationships.
So self-care is not at all in tension with, I mean it’s a little bit of tension, but it’s not necessarily contradictory to community care.
Lyndsey: I think it only feels that way because self-care has been co-opted so much by this super individualistic lens. I do wonder, I really want to highlight that you are a researcher in psychology and in theology because I’m starting to see a lot more people really worrying about how, um, certain different trendy therapy buzzwords get sort of gobbled up or leaking into spiritual spaces in ways that are like murky and muddy.
Um, and then I, as we’re speaking, there was recently this, um, this kerfuffle about Jonah Hill using sort of therapy speak to try and control other people—highlighting how easy it is for people to walk out of their therapist’s office with perhaps a tool, like if their therapist is a good therapist, trying to offer a tool for thinking about something and then they take it and they just like wield it as a weapon, like totally out of context.
So I think, just that hyper-individualistic idea of what a self is and how we care for ourselves and how we maybe, how we contribute to the world or live a good life can really twist that relationship. But if we’re taking the whole of what you’re saying here and what you’re drawing from both science and the Bible and the Christian story, where they’re not, like you’re saying, they’re not in tension.
Chanequa: Yeah. And I should say, you know, my background as a psychologist is even more unique because I was a family psychologist. And so I was trained in family systems theory. And so there are a lot of therapists who do have a very individualistic focus, but system therapists, even if we’re working with one individual, we’re often thinking about their embedded relationships, right?
And so for me, even when I worked with, you know, it’d be a mom in therapy and I would tell them, you know, kind of what is your desire for your life? Do you want to be like, fulfill all your wildest dreams? I can do that for you, but you might end up by yourself, right? Yeah. Or if you want to maintain your relationships, if you want to raise kids that are healthy, I’m going to work with you a different way, right? So that then we might put some constraints on some of the things that you are part of your dreams, maybe you don’t get to do right now, or maybe you don’t get to do ever because there’s a trade-off on some things because being in these relationships is also giving to you, right? So having, yeah. And, I’m thinking about your kid who’s looking at you as an example of how to be in the world. So I think there’s a way in which that infuses my work too.
I’m often, even with my students, I’m often telling them, you know, when they talk to me about what they wanna register for, and I’m like, wait, don’t you have a partner? Don’t you have kids? Yeah, this plan, is it good? You might get out of school faster, but you might also be divorced, right? Right, so let’s think about what our overall goals are.
So I think there are ways in which we can, if we start grounded with this idea that we are created to be in relationships. And that doesn’t necessarily mean romantic partnership, right, that’s friendships, that’s family relationships, but we are, that’s part of who we are. And if we start with that, then self-care takes on a whole different idea, right? It’s not just about getting my needs met to the exclusion of other people or at the expense of other people, it becomes, yeah, I wanna get my needs met, but part of my need is for my friend to be happy. Part of my need is for my kids to be fulfilled, right? Part of my need is to have a good relationship with my partner so that self-care actually encompasses all of that as well.
Lyndsey: Oh, that’s brilliant. I’m just gonna confess to you. I really want your next book to pull out more of this because I’m thinking, as you’re speaking, so much of your previous book whose title I cannot currently recall—I Bring the Voices of my People—because so much of what you’re saying just sounds like, it sounds right in like a Hallmark movie sort of way. “And then they remembered that family was more important.” But in our day-to-day lives, it’s also not obvious to us. It is not the assumption we bring to our class registration form because of white supremacy, basically.
Chanequa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that yeah, everything that I do the choices I make, because we’re taught in the US in particular, that our work life and our home life are separate, right? And we keep them boundaried. Our school life is separate.
And so we do school, I increasingly think about the ways we educate people away from their families and communities, right? So people go off to school. And then suddenly you can’t actually talk to, you know, I get seminarians who talked about, they can’t go back home, right? Now that I’m in seminary and I’m learning this and I’m thinking, I can’t go back home. I don’t fit anymore, right? And I think, I don’t think that should be what we’re doing. Right? We want people to be able to go back to their communities and bring them along the journey.
So for me, beginning to think about, and I think again, it comes from me having been educated, all of my education was in predominantly white institutions. Most of my professional life has been in predominantly white institutions. And at some point I realized how much culturally that I’d lost or given up in an attempt to kind of fit in to achieve all the rungs of success.
And I realized that—but those people, those relationships, those cultural practices, that was my grounding. And okay, how do I get that back? And that for me also meant, okay, so then how do we, how do we help people to understand that that’s also part of who they are, right? And that caring for yourself might mean some ways finding out how to be in connection with the communities that raised you, right? Even if, even if you have tension with them, right? A lot of us who are more progressive Christians, we live in this tension where, like for me growing up and realizing the church that nurtured my faith didn’t mean all the things that I thought they meant.
Lyndsey: Yeah.
Chanequa: Like, I’m like, oh. Yes. Oh, you didn’t mean all God’s children? Oh. [But] that tradition is still an important part of my coming into being, right? And so how do I take that and say, let me hold on to parts of this, even though I know I don’t fit there anymore, but I don’t have to jettison all of it. And so I think part of this idea of self for me is really so much more contextual, right? Yeah, it is our people. We are our people. Good, bad, ugly, that’s part of who we are as well as our individual journeys.
Lyndsey: Yes. I have been really slowly reading After Whiteness by Willie James Jennings and now I want to go hang out with you in a few minutes and run back to that book because it’s been such a wellspring. It’s one of those books where you’re like, “This is so good. I have to put it down.” Yeah, it’s taking me so long.
Chanequa: It’s funny though that you mentioned him because he was, yeah, he was my professor at Duke and it was in his class. I had already been a faculty member because I did my psychology graduate work before I went to seminary. And I remember sitting in the classroom and watching him and saying he’s, he’s just completely himself. Like he would tell jokes that nobody else got and he would just crack up at his own jokes, right? And it didn’t matter if the whole classroom was just looking at him like, what are you saying? And he’d just be laughing. And I’m like, he is having a grand old time because he is being himself.
And so it transformed me in terms of how I started operating in both in my teaching, but also my other work, right? Like, oh, this really is about coming to ourselves. That’s the work that we’re trying to do. I think that ought to be the work of Christian discipleship, right?
Who did God create you to be? What are your needs? Like, what needs do you have as a person God created you to be, your particular history? What are your needs, your desires, your wants, your joys? And how do we help you to live more into that? Because we think that if you’re doing that, that actually makes all of us better. To me, I think that sort of needs to be the heart of Christian discipleship as opposed to, here are the rules, this is what we think everybody should be and do regardless of your own unique expressions of yourself. Yeah.
Lyndsey: Well, that was actually my next question was the questions you were asking. You say in this book that we can’t steward ourselves well if we don’t know ourselves well. So, I mean, maybe this is—This is probably also contextual, right? But how do we start to know, as you say, our bodymindspirit, it was all one word, how do we start to know ourselves? How do we start to know what our needs are? Especially if we are overwhelmed and this all just feels very foreign.
Chanequa: Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of action and reflection. Like there’s doing things and then thinking about its impact. Trying something new and then seeing how it felt in our body, right? And it starts with something small. When I started with self care, I think I had, if I think, remember correctly, there were like five daily practices. Drink enough water. Like that was, like just drink enough water.
Lyndsey: That’s very small.
Chanequa: It’s very small. Drink enough water. Take a lunch break during the day because I was used to working through lunch. So stop and pause and take an actual lunch break, get enough sleep, meditate and pray and exercise. Like that was it. And it wasn’t necessarily that I was trying to do all those things every day, but I picked five behaviors. It was just like, I am going to focus on these five and just see if I can do that. And some days, if it’s really hectic, it’s, you know what? I’m actually only gonna, drinking enough water is all I can manage today.
And so it became, let me do this and then see how it feels. And I would try all manner of things. I learned that some of the things that people say are good for you are not good for me. Right, like even like some nutrition stuff, right? And it took me a while because I kept saying, “I’m trying to be vegetarian. I really want to be vegetarian.” Well, I have these GI issues and they kind of don’t like beans and nuts. Like in a whole, like it’s kind of hard to get protein if you’re not doing that. And so finally I was talking to my therapist who does gut-based mental health. And she was like, so why are you eating that? And I was like, well, cause they say you’re supposed to. She was like, but isn’t your body telling you something different?
And so sometimes it’s really, this can be so hard, especially for women, right? Because we are so used to, and you were both southerners, so there’s this idea of the good Christian girl in the South and how you do, you follow the rules. That’s what a good Christian girl, you follow the rules. And so for me, it’s still a struggle for me to interrogate sometimes the rule if what happens by following that rule actually doesn’t feel right for me.
And so learning to say, let me try, I’ll try it on. I’ll try doing this type of exercise. You know what? No, that’s not good for me. That doesn’t work for me. Right. But, oh, if I keep playing around, maybe I find something that this lands well. Or I can exercise, but I can’t give you the 30 minutes you want because my body does things to me at like that 20 minute mark. My body starts doing things, right? It starts hurting and I know I’m going to trigger a flare. And so then, okay, so what can my body do? Right?
And so I think a lot of it really is, it’s trial and error. And so part of what I do in the book is I ask people to try on these practices, right? Just try it. If it doesn’t fit, toss it out the window, right? But then if it does say, okay, now this is part of my own toolkit.
And knowing that that is going to look different for every one of us. And for us to be okay with that, like it’s okay that if my body needs something different than your body, great. Right? We know that. So now let’s try to make sure we can each give our body what it needs.
Lyndsey: Yeah. You talk about a lot of how a lot of these, and you’ve been talking in this conversation about how so many of these sort of attitudes and skills start with ourselves and spread out to the relationships and communities around us. And this is one I’ve been thinking about a lot. I think because I’m starting, like anticipating entering into parenthood, I’m realizing that for whatever reason, there’s this whole skill set of paying attention to things and caring to notice what results from an experiment, and being curious about why that is and then moving forward with that information, that we are not always taught and doesn’t come easily.
And I think even people want to try things, but then even the process of trying itself is unfamiliar, right? And how to actually gather information from that. And I’m realizing that is a skill my disease has taught me that is like infinitely transferable. And so, you know, everyone doesn’t have to be grateful for their illness. I am grateful for that, that change in my life as a result of illness. And I really appreciate you like, explicating the steps of that process.
Chanequa: Yeah. It’s such a gift to, I think, to teach children, right? We tend to do the exact opposite with kids. We tell them how they’re feeling. Yes. We tell them what they’re gonna like and what they’re not. “You’ll like it, just try it.” Um. Like we tell, as opposed to teaching them to check in with themselves. And I think the more that I do this for myself, the more I’m able to say then for my son, “how does it feel when you do that? Oh, you didn’t like that, you really didn’t like that. Okay, then honor that. What symptoms are you feeling right now? What are you feeling?” As opposed to me telling you, think about what you’re feeling, what you’re able to do. Do you think you can manage?
Like today he had swim practice, even though he wasn’t quite feeling well, but I asked him, “Do you think you really want to do this?” As opposed to me making the decision, no, I don’t think you should do that because of this. I might have some wisdom, and there are times where I might have to put a boundary, but there are also times where I can say, let’s let him try it for himself. If he says, I feel like crap, but I think I still want to go to practice, then let him do it. And then say, and how did that feel to do it? Do you still think that was the right decision? And then he gets to have that information for himself, like, no, next time maybe I shouldn’t do that, or actually, yeah, so I know that if I feel like this, I can still get through practice, right? I’m not at my limit yet. But I think it’s important for them to help them figure out their own limits, right? When they say, I wanna do something, you know, when we’re trying to rush through, right? And we’re like, okay, let them try to figure it out, right? They’re trying to figure out the limits of their abilities as well.
It can be a really great gift. I’m trying increasingly to help my now-15-year-old check in with himself. Because it’s important to me for decision making, right? Check in with yourself. What do you feel like? Do you feel nervous right now? Because then, okay, pay attention to that. Don’t override it because I’m telling you, you shouldn’t be nervous because if he’s out with friends and they start doing something and in the pit of his stomach, he’s feeling that thing that feels like, “I don’t think we should be doing this.” I want him to know what that means. Right? Yeah. And I want him to honor that. So again, know yourself. Yeah, this says no. This says, okay, I’m backing off because I want you to be able to do that for your life.
Lyndsey: Yeah. And that’s what you were saying about discipleship too. And I think there’s a real temptation that we don’t talk about in the ministry and nonprofit worlds also, to tell people what to do or to take responsibility for how other people are feeling or what their moral obligations are or all these other things. When actually maybe the job is to do some of that equipping as well.
Chanequa: Yeah.
Lyndsey: So we have to start wrapping up here slowly. Um, my, uh, last question is usually, uh, how do you define hope and where are you finding it right now in the midst of a world that’s probably never gonna, you know, easily facilitate our self-care and our flourishing, as you said earlier. What does hope mean to you?
Chanequa: I think hope is about an expectation that goodness is still at work in the world. And for me, I look for glimpses of hope. Like I think there are times depending on where you look, it seems very hopeless, the world that we’re living in. Like if you just get on, I can’t remember what I was doing on social media earlier. And yeah, and you just like, “Oh my God, like how is the world falling apart today?”
But one of the things I try to do, and I think this is part of my self-care, is I train myself to look for glimpses of hope and to see signs of the world that I hope would exist, right? And that to me is like, okay, all right, like, okay, maybe 95% of it seems bad, but look at that 5%, right? Like that, so it’s whether it is sort of the rose in concrete, it is the glimpse of sun in the midst of a cloudy sky, right? Like knowing, like the sun’s still back there, even if the rain clouds are there, the sun is still there. I think that hope is that knowing. It’s that knowing that even if I can’t see it, the sun is still there. And so I just wanna, can I catch a glimpse? And that is enough for me.
Cause I, but I think part of it is I’m an optimistic person. So all it takes is a little bit. Oh, there we go. Right? Racial justice is possible because of that little thing!
Yeah, so I think for me, those are the things that keep me going. Babies give me hope. The idea that life, like God is still in the business of new things. And so every new birth is a confirmation that God is still doing new things. Like that there’s always this possibility. And so, puppy videos and baby videos are often when I feel like I need my spirit lifted, it is time to go to YouTube and watch a montage of babies doing adorable things. So yeah, that’s kind of where I find hope.
Lyndsey: Awesome. I love that. It doesn’t cost money.
I did want to ask you also to read one of the benedictions. So Sacred Self-Care is a devotional set up for seven weeks of reflection and action and experimenting and journaling. Each week there’s a benediction that you’ve included and these are so sweet and meaningful. I wanted to let our readers go with one of these from you. You have that?
Chanequa: Yeah, so let’s see. Let me pull it up.
All right.
May the Spirit of the Living Christ fall fresh on you, inviting you into a new way of life, one in which you abound in care and love for yourself, for humanity, and for all of creation. Go forth with the assurance that God’s love for you is for you. Dwell in that love as you seek to love your neighbor and to love God. Be revived, be renewed. Be resurrected. Amen.
Lyndsey: Amen. Thank you so much, Dr. Chanequa.
Chanequa: Thank you.
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