How does God move in your life? It’s a deceptively simple question.
For Episode 14, we went live to have the kind of honest exchanges that sparked Avenue M in the first place, the conversations we were meant to host. We choose to share this not least because we’ve learned that when we share our struggles, that gives more folks permission to do the same. When we ourselves struggled, hearing where others were (and weren’t) gave us the comfort and courage to continue on.
Because we can’t move forward if we don’t know where we’ve gone wrong. We can’t move forward until we see our failures aren’t just failures. Closed doors can be redirections. The Divine might pull us away from what we want because it might not be what we need. With enough years behind us, we’ve started asking not just where we’re going, but what the arc of our whole lives has been trying to tell us.
Lent Us An Ear
You can watch the full episode above. You can also watch this episode, and all our episodes, on our Avenue M YouTube channel.
Of course, you can listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Break Fast for Dinner: Just the Podcast, Hold the Menu
We recorded this entirely unscripted fourteenth episode during the overlapping observances of Ramadan and Lent. Joey reflects on the practice of return — breaking the expectation that the only valuable spiritual life is one without misstep. Haroon, meanwhile, is aiming to fast at least some of Ramadan, for the first time in many years, keen to find God in the quiet hours of the night.
We found the shared concerns and convictions to be more than just meaningful.
They suggest the direction Avenue M will go in, with more live-streamed, unscripted deep dives into the hard and joyful stuff of life. That’s also why there’s no show notes here, though we’ll take a minute to point you to Christopher Beha’s Substack — Beha is the author of a new book, Why I Am Not An Atheist, which Haroon references (and which will get further treatment over at his dedicated Substack, Sunday Schooled).
Happy Lent and Ramadan Mubarak to all who are seeking, trying, rising, returning, but never double parking.
This episode is sponsored by The Brueggeman Center for Dialogue at Cincinnati’s Xavier University. Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.
