Episode 7: Kintsugi – Finding Beauty Through Healing

Tom

My guest today is Chris Wasman. He is the co-founder of Istoria Ministry Group, along with his wife Lorri.

Before his life in counseling and in the ministry, Chris spent many years serving in high-impact roles for several of the fastest growing churches in the nation, along with serving as a VP of Sales and Marketing in online travel, and a veteran: serving as a United States Marine in Desert Storm earning multiple service awards during that time. If you’ve met Chris in person, he has multiple tattoos as well from that period, which I love!

Chris earned a BS in psychology from the University of Central Florida, and an MA degree in pastoral counseling from Liberty University.  He is currently acquiring dual certifications as a Christian life coach, and professional life coach as well. 

And we’re going to use all of these experiences from the Marines as a veteran to your ministry, and your counseling, as we begin exploring the role of spirit in the healing process.

Chris

I love getting to know you and seeing the story, and watching what’s going on with Growth through Grief. It’s really exciting to play a part, even a little one in it. So thank you for inviting me.

Tom

Thank you so much for participating. So many of us who’ve experienced a loss of our partner, unfortunately, we view our lives as broken in some ways. 

However, one of the things that you pointed out when we first met was, there’s a great parallel between these breaks and the healing process and the art of Golden Joinery, which is from Japan, talk about Golden Joinery and how it relates to the grief journey.

Chris

So I love this example. It’s something that we used in the church welcoming process, as we got to know people and talk about what their story looks like?  What sorts of things have they been through? What did they overcome to get to this place?

There’s common themes, and that is that everybody’s got this brokenness, to some degree or another. And so the idea is, how can we use that brokenness to grow the kingdom of God or to be more effective in life. 

The concept is really cool. It comes from a Japanese culture, unlike our culture in America as being quick to dispose of things, they’re all about recycling, and they respect the elderly, and legacy a lot more. We often put the elderly out to pasture, in a  home or something when they’re no longer useful to society. But in Japanese culture, it’s very different. 

And so it started with a Samurai who broke his favorite tea bowl, and he sourced several people to try to repair it, and the repairs did not go so well. 

And so he was really upset, but he sourced one more potter to try to fix it. This guy, instead of making the lines disappear or trying to hide the brokenness he actually decided to highlight that part of it by taking some resin filled with 14 karat gold, and highlighting those cracks.

So the end result of this is a piece of pottery that was clearly broken, but now put back together  it’s actually more valuable because of the gold that’s in it. And it’s more beautiful with all these lines highlighted in gold, and it tells a story. 

We use that analogy in the church and some of the counseling stuff that I’ve done, just to show people that there’s value in the brokenness, that it’s not going to go away, but that we can take those breaks and honor them, build on it and use that as part of your story to connect with other people and just be real/

Tom

Chris, I think the analogy is a great one and I’ve written about it inspired by you for introducing it to me. https://growththroughgrief.org/golden-joinery/

There’s beauty in the breaks, and rather than trying to super glue it back together to create the same pot that you had before or the same person there was before. It’ll never be the same. 

And I think that’s the first thing to realize in Kintsugi is that, “look, it’s broken, it’ll never be the same”. And now we have to create something new out of it. And how do we do that? 

Well, we want to put things back together. We want to make sure that that pot can still hold the tea, it can still function. But it doesn’t have to be the same. And we shouldn’t be trying to hide those imperfections, hide those breaks. We should instead embrace them. 

And that’s what I love about Golden Joinery, it emphasizes the breaks, 

Chris

What we found is that week after week, we’d go to church and connect with people and many times it would look the same. We we’re high fiving each other at the door, saying: “Hey, man, good to see you. How’s everything going? I’m doing great, everything’s great, Let’s get the kids together…”.

You know, all those interactions are very surface level. And the culture today is telling us that it has to look that way And that’s just not the way it is. It’s a so much easier route. 

However, when you can highlight the brokenness, and say: “Man, this is what I’ve had to overcome. But let me tell you, what it’s done for me. Let me tell you, the people that it’s connected me to, because of it. Let me tell you the ways that I’ve grown from it in my faith and in these different areas of life. Let me tell you how much closer I am to my kids because of this pain”.  

I think when you can take the focus to brokenness and highlight the good from it. It’s just countercultural.

Tom

I think the healed breaks are what makes us beautiful. But like you’re saying, we live in a social media culture where, #LlvingMyBestLife is what it’s all about, right? 

And it’s not about highlighting the breaks, it’s about highlighting, everything that’s perfect, all those very special moments that most times are rare and fleeting.

And what we don’t do, whether it be a church, or in social media, or even with a lot of our friend groups, is share some of these deep wounds and deep pains that we have. The things that might not be healed, where we need some help from our friends and our church brethren too, to maybe help join with gold. 

When we do have a break, we’re reluctant to talk about it, because we want to come off as being perfect, we want to have that perfect mask on, that perfect look for the world. And we don’t share what’s really beautiful in the union. 

Chris

You know, a lot of people are uncomfortable when they’re around somebody that’s been through something difficult. You’ve probably faced that with friends, where friends kind of pulled back from you in that season where you went through your loss. 

I didn’t experience that loss. but I did experience another hurt where I saw people just kind of push away a little bit because they don’t know what to say. 

And so culture has really set us up poorly for this. It should be okay to talk out loud about it with the idea that hey,there’s good that can come from this, there’s always good. 

We serve a good and powerful God who’s working through this process. And so there’s freedom, there’s a huge freedom in being able to just be real with people. As opposed to having that front on with them where the front has to stay up the whole way through. It’s exhausting. 

And relationships that are only surface level… I think if people see the real in you, one thing that I’ve noticed that happens is that it’s almost infectious. That they will start to share things with you that are that they’ve been dealing with for a long time.  

For them, it’s been difficult and they need to move through a similar process of healing, no matter what it is, but they’ve had a hard time opening up about that or they’ve never had the opportunity to do so. It’s something that our society doesn’t set us up well for, but I think if you can navigate your healing with this mindset, sharing the bad and trying to show people there’s a lot of good that can come from it.

Tom

Yeah, and a lot of it is just sharing.Sharing the hurts. Sharing the healing that you’ve gone through. And that can be hard to do as a man. 

There aren’t very many places where we seem to trust the person to share with. I know that you’ve had some personal pain and you’ve become pretty good at sharing it. I think that’s part of your healing process actually.And this sharing, inspired me to do a lot of the same, because I wasn’t sharing as much as I needed to. 

And one of the things I did experience was something that you spoke about, an incongruence, between who we are portraying to the world and who we are. I was exhausted, Chris, I was literally worn out all of the time until I started that sharing process. 

How did you begin doing that? Because we have both been through some very painful experiences, how did you kind of get to the point where you could share some of the most painful moments of your life,

Chris

I think it took a process on my side, of getting real with my faith. And so it wasn’t until God put me on an island and kind of removed a lot of the distractions, and allowed me to get to a place where I found everything I needed in that faith. It was then that I could start to see some of the victory over those things.

And so it’s part of what we try to work through in our ministry efforts with people, guiding them down a path of seeing. First of all, let’s identify the hurts, and they’re there for everybody. Sometimes we don’t realize just how much they’re there until we take stock of them, and look back and go, “Wow, when I take inventory, I really have been through a lot”. And those hurts are leaving a mark along the way. 

A lot of times, we’re not dealing with them well at the time. And so they just kind of get stuffed away, like getting pushed in a suitcase. And so at some point the zippers are not going to be able to hold everything in. 

So we guide people through a process of looking at the lies that stem from these hursts, where we tell ourselves that we’re insignificant, or that I didn’t do a good enough job on whatever that was. There’s guilt and shame and all kinds of things that come along with this: either we’ve been let down by people, we’ve been let down by circumstance, or we’ve been let down by ourselves quite honestly – maybe not responding to something well.

Until you’re you’re in a place where you could really reconcile your faith with God and what He says about those things. There, I don’t know of another way to get on the other side of this.

Tom

I completely agree with that, I think you really have to be reflective of what your hurts are. And dig deep. 

I think as I went through the exercise with you, we happen to be on a retreat together. And we went through the “hurt exercise” of identifying those pains, identify the hurts.

I think one of the key things for me was making sure it wasn’t just about the immediate hurt, perhaps in the loss of my wife, or whatever the immediate hurt is that you may be dealing with. It was going back, and then going back some more, and going back even that much further. 

And in therapy, those of us who’ve been through therapy, you’ll know that they tried to take you back a long way. And a lot of times, some of the hurt and how the hurt is manifesting itself around the loss of your spouse, the immediate hurt that we’re all dealing with, is compounded by issues that are unresolved in past hurts, whether that be acceptance issues, or love issues or forgiveness issues. The current hurt is just compounding on top of those. 

If you don’t address those issues, or at least identify the hurts that go way, way back. I think sometimes you could focus so much on the hurt today, and then wonder why you’re not getting over the loss maybe as soon as you thought you should. And granted, there’s no timeline for it. But we all know that sometimes we’ve been disappointed in how long we’ve been holding on to things, 

In my personal journey, until I went to therapy, and started to think about those real past foundational hurts from 6,7,8 years old. It wasn’t clarifying my loss and hurt today.

Chris

And I love using this. Just the word compound. They build up over time. And it’s so it’s easy for me to look back and say my Dad was really tough on me as a kid. But that’s no big deal. I overcame it. With the Marines that toughened me up, and it was good for me too. 

But I never really acknowledged the lies that came from that, that I started to tell myself or not really ever deal with the unforgiveness in my heart over certain circumstances. So you’re absolutely right. It’s a compounding effect. 

And then you wonder why we find ourselves in a cycle, right? We say, “Well, I’m doing fine for a while, and then something happens”. And especially with the loss of a spouse, I can’t imagine. That would be the perfect platform for outpouring of all of the hurt from the past, all of those life experiences to come together and really make you question yourself. 

And I know, there were dark seasons in the worst of my hurts. There were dark seasons where I legitimately questioned my sanity, saying, Am I crazy? I’m thinking these things, but I don’t know, maybe I’m missing it. And so I ask a few people around me what’s going on and why I’m not processing this well. But you’re right, it’s a culmination of those things. And until you have the opportunity to really sit down, reflect on them, and come to some sort of resolution and button those things up from the past. It’s a tough, tough battle to carry that stuff along, and then deal with something as tremendous as the loss of a spouse.

Tom

One of the ways Chris to help overcome some of those past hurts, and the pains is, as you said, it manifests as “the lies we tell ourselves”. It’s identifying those lies, give us an example of how you can begin to overcome, transcend those lies, those negative thoughts that kind of portray the story that we’ve told ourselves.

Chris

When we work people through the ministry program that we have, we try to focus on two things: the mind and the heart. Because those tend to be the places where these hurts get caught up.  The hurst and the lies we tell ourselves get caught up in the mind and in our mental process, down at a subconscious level. There’s these deep feelings of unresolved hurt inside of there. 

And if not dealt with, these unresolved hurts and lies are going to turn into resentment. And eventually destruction is what it’s going to turn into. 

And those are the things that cause you to respond in ways that you don’t even want to respond in. So you get angry in the car when someone cuts you off. All of this stuff is a byproduct of this unresolved hurt and anger that’s going on in there.

So the lies for example, you know, I’ve mentioned before that lies like “I’m inadequate, because I couldn’t take care of my spouse’s disease”, or that marriage failed, or a business failed, or my Dad was tough on me and didn’t love me as a result., or I was let go from a job, whatever it is, they create these little doubts, that kind of camp out in the back of our mind”. And there’s scripture that speaks directly to every one of the doubts and says who we are in God. And what we think about God says everything about us. It also says everything about what we think about ourselves, because God says something about us and we either have to come in alignment with that or, or wrestle with it. 

Tom

For me, the grief went often back to other things that are amplifying it all the time. So I completely agree with that. 

When it comes to forgiveness, I think that can be an incredible tool for overcoming the hurts through the grieving process. You know, many of us widowers are carrying a lot of hurts. Where we’ve been tough on ourselves, maybe we feel like we could have done something differently in the treatment process. Or perhaps we were harboring resentment during the sickness process towards our spouse, and we knew it wasn’t their fault, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t resent certain things, your lot in life that you’ve been given through your partner. Perhaps there were things that were said, or left unsaid that you’re beating yourself up over. And then there are all those past hurts. 

For all of these, there is forgiveness that needs to be given. Forgiveness can be an incredible tool. In this healing process. But It can be scary.

Chris

Forgiveness. People tend to be a little bit tentative about that. And I think some of it comes from just a misunderstanding about what it is and what it’s not. 

So forgiveness isn’t reconciliation. It doesn’t mean putting yourself back in a bad situation. It is taking the responsibility of the issue and handing it off to the Lord. where it belongs. He’s the one that they’re accountable to. 

And so, you know, you’ve probably heard people talk about how you keep yourself in jail with this un-forgiveness. It will erode away from the inside out if you hang on to this stuff. 

And so we walk people through a process of what that looks like, we have some theory on even self forgiveness, and what that looks like and how to go about it that we take people through on these retreats. 

And so I would say that is probably the most powerful part of what we do is helping people just offload some things that don’t belong to them, that they’ve been carrying around for way too long.

Tom

So you identify the hurts and the pain. There’s usually something associated with that, that often requires forgiveness. And that could be forgiveness of yourself, for maybe something that you did and you regret. Or something that someone else did to you, whether on purpose or not doesn’t matter. 

Like you said, this isn’t a matter of acquiescing, or approving what they did, or somehow making it all right, right.  It’s about realizing: “Look, I’m human, they’re human. And if I hold on to this, either against myself and the things I’m not forgiving myself for, or the things that people might have done me wrong, I need to forgive me for my self-hurts and others for their transgressions, because it gets me out of jail. 

And so for every hurt, there’s usually some kind of forgiveness that you can align with that. And one of the things that was so great in what you took us through on the retreat, was making sure you’re saying “the ask for forgiveness” out loud. 

I did this verbal exercise  in a walk in the woods, ( https://growththroughgrief.org/a-walk-in-the-woods/ ) which is the culmination of a multi day retreat that we went on with the Istoria Ministry Group. It was powerful, because we had identified each hurt, and some of these were a surprise: “Oh, yeah. Wow, I didn’t realize”. 

So I started to build a list of all the hurts. And then started togo through all of the things that I did wrong that I really needed forgiveness for, and that list just kept growing and growing and it just kept getting longer. And then, there were those hurts from others that I needed to let go of.

Chris

There can be substantial hurts that can be just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it’s a hurting event in your life that you’ve been hanging on to for a long time.  You’d be surprised how many people need to hand some things off to God. But their perception is “How could you let this happen to me”, and it’s a natural perception. But there’s some forgiveness, there’s some offloading that needs to happen there, and some recognition that this didn’t come from you. 

We live in a fallen and broken world, you made it perfect. And so I’ve been holding this fist up to you. And now I’m realizing that’s not the God that you are. And so you’d be surprised how people need to go through a forgiveness process with God. It sounds weird, but

I think that’s really appropriate. 

Tom

There’s a lot of widowers who would say, “You know what, for me, I gained faith through this process”. There’s a lot that I’ve talked to who have lost faith, where they’re like, “God, if you’re a loving God, how could you let this happen to my wife who was there for everybody. You know, you left me and you took her, you know, that’s unforgivable”. 

And so you’re harboring that and a lot of people have lost faith as a result. So I do think that’s, that’s something to consider as well. It’s forgive others, forgive yourself. And then also, you know, come to a reconciliation on how you may be doubting God, because you’re maybe harboring some resentment.

Chris

Your view of God determines everything: who He is, and where He fits into all of this. It determines everything as to how you’re gonna come out on the other side of this process. 

And so, part of the process is reconciliation of what I really believe. Have I made some assumptions along the way that aren’t accurate? It might be that I was just attending church for all of those years to kind of check a box and go through the process. But I wasn’t really getting relational with God, I didn’t really understand that I needed a savior that Jesus is who he says he was, that that fixes everything for me. And I have every reason to have hope, even in the midst of the worst type of thing like losing a spouse, right? 

So the process that we work through is meant to do just that, to create a moment between the people that come on the retreat and their Creator, it’s not our program, it’s not me, they don’t need me, they need a Savior. And so hopefully, we set them up well, for that conversation that walk in the woods, like you took on Sunday, to just meet with their maker and say,” Hey, I’ve had a chance to kind of take stock of what I thought about you, and how all these things that have happened to me and kind of hurts that have built up along the way. And I think I understand what you’re calling me to now”.

Tom

Identifying the pain, going through forgiveness. I think one of the next steps that was so important was transcending, talk about what that is, and why that’s so important to

Transcend.

Chris

Transcend. It can be a word that throws a lot of people off. Make you think of persay an Eastern religion, and things of that nature. 

But the Bible speaks in Philippians 4:6-7 about a “peace that transcends all understanding”, The verse starts off telling us, “Do not be anxious about anything”, which is kind of laughable when you first read it. Do not be anxious about anything, when we live in an anxious culture. It’s almost been made cool to be as busy as you can and schedule yourself so thin and have all this busyness and anxiety in your life. 

And so that phrase, in and of itself is really difficult to swallow. But it says “Do not be anxious about anything. but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus”.

And so this is a the theme verse for how we get to this place of peace when it doesn’t make sense otherwise on how to get there. And there’s nothing about losing a spouse that makes sense. You could easily drive yourself crazy asking the “why” question. 

I think that that could be said about most of the hurts. I’ve been on the other side of the table with quite a few people. And I’ve heard some things that are just terrible things that have happened to people that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. And so it’s really heart wrenching, and there’s never ever a good “why” to hand back to them. But that’s the thing that they want most. It’s the thing that I wanted most for my hurts, “Why is this happening? Why? What glory could you possibly get from what’s going on in my life right now. This does not make sense. How are my kids going to benefit from what’s happening?”. 

I know as a widower, you have to be asking the same questions. There is no good “why”. 

But what there is, is hope that that goes beyond that, that allows you to not look at that is meaningless. But look at that, in the scale of God’s glory, and what he is doing and the eternal vision, if you will. And so that’s kind of where we come from on that. It’s a peace that can’t be given by our program, by this podcast. It’s only going to come one-on-one in a relationship with Jesus. 

Once you’ve acknowledged that, and come to that place of brokenness where you say “uncle, I give”, and this is the most difficult thing for most people. I was in the Marines, and surrender is not what we did. 

Our faith however is about surrendering to God and saying, “Okay, I can’t do this alone. I nee that Savior. I needed Jesus to come help me out”.  

And that idea of surrender. That’s a bad word in the Marines. We don’t surrender, we fix it. Right. And so it’s counterintuitive to everything that we know, especially as men. The idea is once you decide that I don’t have to fix this, control this, figure this out on my own and process thi. I don’t have to do all this work. In order to get there, I literally just have to hand it over to God and say, this is yours, I can’t handle it. It’s too heavy for me to carry. I need you to carry it for me. And I need you to carry me forward. 

And He’ll do it. It’s unbelievable, the release that happens at that point. That peace in your heart and the peace in your mind that is transcendence. And so that’s my little pitch on transcending peace.

Tom

And, Chris, I think it’s really important for those who are working through this journey, as I did, 

I worked on my mind and I worked on my body first. I worked through forgiveness even. But until I really surrendered, I don’t think I achieved that ultimate peace. 

And if ever, I start to take back control, and go back to the old “control enthusiast Tom”, all of a sudden that peace acquiesces, and I have to get back to that complete surrender. 

I think it’s an important element. And you can work on a lot of things. You can go to therapy, and you can do a lot of other works to get yourself in a better spot. You can workout at the gym, and go to group exercise, practice yoga, meditation, work on having a growth mindset, all of those things are positive. 

But transcendence is something that can only occur through this spiritual surrendering to God and to Christ. I think that’s something that some get it right away. I’ve had several widowers in our group who had faith going into it. Faith through the disease process. Faith through the passing. Faith through their healing. And it has helped tremendously. 

For me, it was the opposite. And I think more people come at it from that angle, in this journey. I did not experience that peace until I went through forgiveness, and I went through the thanks, and then I ultimately surrendered. And that is when the peace in the Holy Spirit was there for me.

Chris

You’re so right, you can try to run it out, right? Or work it out at the gym. And that’s not a bad thing. As you said, there’s healing in that it’s scientifically shown that there’s healing in those things. 

There’s also science, though, that shows the power of Faith. Scripture speaks about the renewal of our mind, and it’s possible to rewire how we think about things. And scientifically, they’re starting to prove these very things that we can literally rewire the way we think and we can literally rewire the way that we’re feeling about things using faith. And this burden that we’re taking off. 

Whole health is kind of where you were moving towards just a moment ago, when you talked about us being spiritual beings. We’re spiritual beings that happen to live in a physical body, and we have a mind and a will, which is what makes us different the animals. We can think through things and have logic and all of that. 

So a lot of people are okay with taking care of the physical part, where if I hurt myself, I go to the doctor.  There’s usually not a question of how you handle the physical part.

The mental health part, albeit young, started maybe 100 years ago. And unfortunately, it was funded by the government. And it was aimed at taking care of war veterans. And so mental health automatically got kind of a negative connotation, instead of being a positive thing. But we’re getting to a point where it’s okay to talk about mental health openly now. And they’re starting to talk about how there are things that overlap. 

So if I have things that I’m struggling with mentally, it has an impact on me physically, and vice versa. If I have physical ailments, it’s weighing on me mentally.

Now we need to move to a place where we’re comfortable talking about spiritually. What does this mean for us? 

We are three part beings. That’s the way it spells it out in the Bible. That’s the way we were created with this spirit that God breathed into us. We need to nurture that part of our being and it can’t be nurtured in an hour on a Sunday by checking the box by going to Church. It’s gotta be a process where you say okay, I have needs as a spiritual being, and I need to try to meet those needs e. And the only way to meet them is through this relationship with God. So I’m gonna start, I’m going to start taking care of that part of myself.

Tom

Chris, you’re spot on with that. And I want to emphasize this because it’s something that took me a while to get to. 

A dear friend pointed out in stark terms to me how much time I was spending in the gym, every day probably three to four hours. How much time I’m spending, reading and digesting growth podcasts to nurture my mind, another hour or two every day, sometimes a little more. 

And then how much time I was spending on Spirit every day. And it was pitiful when I did the math. It turned out that it was, on average, in the minutes a day. And then I was wondering why I hadn’t achieved peace yet. It’s like a three legged stool,  that’s just completely unbalanced. 

And so I really made an effort to try to balance it out with bible study twice a week ,and more devotional time. Yeah, it’s still not all the way there, in complete balance. But every day, you have to dedicate yourself to all three elements on this journey. 

If you want to heal, if you want to become functional, if you want to become more beautiful bowl, you know, you’ve got to take care of the breaks, but not just take care of them, you’ve got to work on them. 

So they’re joined in a golden way, in a more special way. And that does take effort. But my goodness, glory how beautiful it will be afterwards, when it’s joined in that way. And those breaks. you’re able to emphasize them because you’ve done the work in mind, body and spirit to join them in an incredible way. It’s possible.

Chris

The culture today is telling us to do the very opposite of what you and I are talking about Tom. 

And so you know, the popular thing is you do whatever makes you happy. Everybody is so confused about who they are. They’re missing the very, very core of it. 

And I think, where you spent your time, when a friend asked you about that? It’s so true, right? I was that guy where I could say “I’m Christian and this is what I believe in”. But if you looked at my checkbook, and my calendar, you would question that. 

And so now I’d like to believe that my family is making this shift. And hopefully, what’s happening here in the Wasman family is going to be something that changes generations. And that will be able to have an impact on other people, by just sharing what God has done through us. 

And I think that’s the beauty of the Kintsugi. By taking these things that we’ve learned along the way, highlighting them and saying, “Look, I’ve found myself there, there’s something healing”. 

That’s why your group is so strong together, there’s something really healing about looking across the table at somebody and saying, “I get it, I know, I know the  pain that you’re feeling in the loss of a loved one, I’m in the same place and automatically, their shoulders come down and they think, wow, this guy knows exactly what I’m talking about”. 

And so I think that’s what we’re called to in life is to do exactly that, to find people and connect to them, and find this common thread of brokenness, and talk about the ways to use those things for growth.

Tom

You’ve got to spend time in the gym, you’ve got to spend time in the books and the podcasts, and you’ve got to spend time in the Word. 

And balancing them out, I think is an important aspect to kind of getting that complete healing. 

As you said, when you’re sitting across from a brother, who’s lost his wife as well. You’re one of the people that can see the beauty of what can come from that. If you’re doing the work and you’ve gone through the journey, like you’ve been golden joined, maybe not complete yet. But holding water, and you can start to share that with them to say, look, this doesn’t have to be as ugly as it is right now with all these breaks, see, it can be beautiful again, and your life can have meaning and purpose again, in a new way. 

And as you said, with the Wasman family, hopefully with the Pisello family as well. It can be generational, this gift, right? So Chris, what’s the one piece of advice you’d like to leave our widowers our growth was with I think

Chris

What you’re doing is tremendous, by creating a community. I think that’s what we need. We are not at our best when we’re off on our own, when we go into a silo which is where the enemy wants us. There’s a real enemy out there, and he wants us to be distracted. Isolated and alone, our thoughts can get the better of us in that place. Our habits can go down the tube when we’re not in community, there’s just so much bad that can come from it. 

And so I think surrounding yourself with a group of people that are moving in the direction that you want to move in. For me, that’s people that are dialed in on their faith. People that are trying to be not just believers, but knowers. People that say, I know that God is real. I know Jesus is who He says He is. And I’m trying to do what He’s calling me to do. I’m going to make an effort every day to do it. Am I gonna get it right? Probably not. But I’m gonna make an effort. And I want to be around a group of people that will do the same thing and lift me up when I’m not getting it done.

Tom

Chris, how can people find and reach you online, learn a little bit about your ministry.

The greatest way to stay connected to us is through our website, for a list of the upcoming events, retreats, local worship nights. So if any of your audiences are local to the Orlando area, once a month, we host a thing actually at our home where we bring people in and for an hour, just turn on worship music and let the Lord do the ministering. And it’s a really cool time to connect. 

And so those types of things are on the website. If the program sounds interesting to them. There’s a little explanation about the Transcend program that we walk people through. 

We welcome opportunities to minister to new people. God has opened so many doors along the way since we decided to devote to him. And so I trusted that if somebody’s listening right now this may very well be the sign that they were looking forward to start to engage on their faith walk. And so I hope that we get to play a part in that

Tom

The website can be found at https://www.istoriaministrygroup.org/

Chris, your worship nights is where many of the poems that are included in the articles that are on the site have been written. Many of them are inspired during those worship nights. I’ll sit there while the music is playing, while people are exercising their faith. I journal along with one of your daughters, and I just absolutely love the inspiration 

Chris

Thank you, as you are a mentor and a partner in life. And so thank you for all that you’ve poured into me, into my family and into our ministry. Tom, we appreciate you and I love what you’re doing with this platform.