I missed last week. Here's why. We lost one of our cats, and grief doesn't keep a production schedule. But there's more. After two years of this work, I find myself worn out, and I've been sitting with that honestly.

So today I'm giving you a word: Shabbat. Not as a self-care buzzword but as a theological practice, commanded, ancient, and countercultural. And its companion, nuakh, the Hebrew word for dwelling, settling, being present. Together, they're my invitation for this season.

I'll be back with Theology Unleashed, a new series of short Greek and Hebrew word studies starting with tzedakah. And despite what the men of the SBC would prefer, I may not be as quiet this summer as I planned. This is not the time for women with voices to go silent.

69 episodes in the archive. Start at Season 1 if you're new. Jesus. Justice. No apologies.

Want to see what's coming this fall?

Check out www.kristenabrock.com/theology-unleashed

Episode mentioned: Pulpit Fiction: The Women They Renamed, Silenced, and Forgot

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start?
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

Justice Coaching options!

"Find your justice mindset" quiz!

Pentecost and social justice belong in the same sentence, and this Season 3 finale makes the case that they always have.

This episode goes back to the room before the wind came. The locked room. Full of frightened, grieving, failing people. And that is exactly where Jesus starts.

Two Pentecost accounts belong together. Acts 2 is the outer Pentecost: loud, public, multilingual. But Joel's prophecy is a social inversion, sons and daughters, old and young, servants and free. The crowd in the street is itself a justice statement: colonized people hearing the gospel in their own languages, not Rome's. And the multilingual miracle is the reversal of Babel, not uniformity, but the many held together without erasing each other.

John 20 is the inner Pentecost: intimate, quiet, a locked room. Jesus walks through the locked door, shows his wounds, and breathes on them. The Greek emphysaō appears only once elsewhere, in Genesis 2, when God breathes life into the first human. New creation, in the dark, with people who ran.

Romans 8 tells us the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us and intercedes with groans when we can't find words. That resurrection power is available now.

Spirit-fueled faith is not a feeling. It is a direction. This is the Season 3 send-off.

Scripture References:

· John 20:19–23

· Acts 2:1–21

· Acts 4:32–35

· Joel 2:28–29

· Genesis 2:7

· Genesis 11:1–9

· Ezekiel 37:1–5

· Romans 8:26–27

· Philippians 2:6–8

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start?
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

Justice Coaching options!

"Find your justice mindset" quiz!

Mental health in the church is one of the most underprepared gaps in the Christian community, and for families in crisis, that gap has real consequences.

This episode is personal. Kristen reads a piece of writing kept private for years, a story about her son, suicidal ideation, and a 5150. After reading it aloud, she pauses to name what her body still carries: not just memory, but PTSD. The hypervigilance doesn't turn off when the crisis passes.

From there: a direct theological reckoning with what the church typically offers families in mental health crisis, and why it causes harm even when it means well. The anti-medication strain in evangelical culture has cost people their lives. The brain is an organ. Bipolar disorder is not a faith failure.

The church's silence around suicide compounds the harm, isolating families, layering shame on the unbearable, leaving the bereaved without a community equipped to hold their grief.

Scripture offers more. Psalm 88 closes in darkness without turning toward hope, and that's canon. Jesus was on his way to perform his first resurrection miracle when he stopped for the woman with the issue of blood. Turned. Made her visible. Called her daughter. The resurrection could wait. She could not.

Mental health in the church is also a justice issue; kids from trauma backgrounds, BIPOC families, and lower-income communities bear the highest cost of the church's unpreparedness.

The close lands in Ezekiel 37. God doesn't ask the dry bones to reassemble before entering the valley. God enters first.

Mental Health Awareness Month is not a secular intrusion into sacred space. It is an invitation to recover something the church was always supposed to be.

Content note: This episode discusses suicide and mental health crises. The 988 Lifeline is available by call or text, anytime.

RELATED EPISODES

• Season 1 Episode 14, Beyond the System: A Journey of Love, Loss, Healing and Faith (ACEs and childhood trauma)
• Season 1 Episode 16, Bearing Witness: Navigating Mental Health and Miracles (original telling of this story)
• Season 3 Episode 5, The Cost of Staying Awake: How Long, O Lord? (lament theology and Psalm 88)
• Season 3 Episode 14 Everyday Prophets: You Can't Heal What You Won't Name with Conscious Coore(trauma-informed spiritual care)
• Season 3 Episode 8, Starting in the Rubble: Reconciliation That Holds (repair before reconciliation)

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

If this episode was meaningful for you, the best way to help others find the show is to:

• Text this episode to a friend who might need it
• Leave a 5-star rating and review
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes
• Wrestling with faith and justice and not sure where to start?
• Grab my free theological reading list, Beyond Faith as Usual, HERE!

Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com

Holy Disruption: Reclaiming a Justice-Rooted Faith course info and interest list

Justice Coaching options!

"Find your justice mindset" quiz!