The driveway up to our home is long, steep, and winding. In good weather, it’s picturesque. In a snowstorm, it’s a test of faith—however you define that word.
On one particular day, a foot of snow had fallen. Our small tractor with the plow attachment wouldn’t start. I’d managed to jump it the night before and get it into position, but by morning it was dead again. Meanwhile, my 4Runner was parked at the top of this icy incline, and the snow kept coming.
So I did what seemed reasonable: I backed the 4Runner out to try to reposition things and get access to the tractor. Only gravity had a different plan.
As I shifted and tried to ease back up the hill, the wheels lost traction, and the 4Runner began to slide—slowly at first, then decisively—backwards down the driveway. Steering was now more of a suggestion than a control mechanism. I slid off the plowed track, over one of the young cherry trees we’d planted three years earlier, and down to the bottom of our very large “front yard” - perilously close to a much larger tree.
There is a Swedish phrase my father used to say: nu sitter du ute i skogen—“now you’re sitting out in the woods.” It’s what you say when someone has really made a mess of things.
Sitting in a car stranded in the snow at the bottom of a hill, with the driveway still unplowed, and the tractor still dead, that phrase came back to me. The labels I usually wear—planner, provider, problem-solver—weren’t worth much at that moment.
And that, oddly enough, is where my recent conversation with a Catholic songwriter and a Pentecostal-raised entrepreneur comes in.
The Limits of Labels When Gravity Wins
In that moment on the hill, none of my usual identifiers mattered.
- “Homeowner” didn’t stop the slide.
- “Former minister” didn’t miraculously part the snow.
- “Author,” “executive,” “podcast host”—none of these labels had any bearing on the simple fact that gravity had cast its vote.
The situation would eventually resolve. Later that day, I managed to use my daughter’s car to jump-start the tractor, plow the driveway, and get the 4Runner safely back up to the garage. But what stayed with me was not the logistics; it was the realization that our labels, as real as they are, don’t hold when life tilts.
I’ve seen this more dramatically, too.
As a child, I was caught in the middle of a traumatic tug-of-war: my parents divorced when I was eight, and not long after, my father secretly took my sisters and me out of the country to Sweden. Courts, custody battles, and shifting identities followed. Later in life, after years in full-time ministry, I built my adult identity around one conviction: I would never divorce. Then my wife divorced me.
When the ground gives way like that, the labels we’ve been clinging to—husband, minister, “the one who does it right”—suddenly feel thin. If those fall away, what’s left?
That question—what remains when roles and categories fail us—is at the heart of what I try to explore on my show, Created in the Image of God. It’s also what drew me so strongly to my recent guests, Erica and Lorraine, and to their own show, Beloved.
A Catholic, a Pentecostal, and an Unexpected Friendship
On paper, Erica and Lorraine don’t obviously “match.”
Lorraine is a lifelong New Orleanian, a Catholic singer-songwriter who has spent over 40 years in music ministry. She’s released seven albums, studied Scripture and liturgy in graduate school, and travels the world sharing the gospel through music.
Erica grew up in a strict Pentecostal holiness environment—the kind she cheerfully describes as “the hammer of religion.” For her, God was originally presented as harsh, strict, always watching, always ready to judge. It wasn’t until a brutal divorce shattered the life she thought she had, that she began to ask, “Who is God to me, really?” That journey led her into a more intimate understanding of God’s presence: “I and my Father are one.” Today, she’s an author, speaker, and financial coach helping women find independence, often so they can leave situations they’d otherwise remain in out of fear.
Add to this:
- They are from different regions: Louisiana and Atlanta.
- They are of different races.
- Lorraine has four sons; Erica has three daughters and a nine-year-old grandson.
- Lorraine freely admits she likes structure and planning; Erica is the quintessential “go with the flow” person.
The sort of differences that, in today’s climate, are often used as reasons to divide them into separate camps.
But then a mutual contact—Holly, a booking agent—had an idea. She told each of them separately, “I’m working with someone I think you need to meet. You’re so different, but you’re so alike. I think you should do a podcast together.”
They’d never met. They didn’t have a concept. They didn’t have a title. They just had a nudge to trust the connection.
Lorraine flew to Atlanta for barely 24 hours. From the airport to the hotel, they were already talking like old friends—interrupting each other, laughing, resonating. By the time they sat down in the hotel lobby, they knew two things: they wanted to do this together, and the show would be called Beloved.
On paper, their labels could have kept them apart. In reality, something deeper drew them together.
Beloved Beyond Labels
Beloved is a podcast about faith, but not in the way we often expect.
Erica was clear when they first envisioned it: “I don’t want it to be another religious conversation where we’re just preaching the Bible.” She wanted it to feel like the kind of conversation friends have when life is complicated—when you’re wrestling with depression, aging parents, money issues, or your kids’ relationship with social media—and you need honesty more than you need a sermon.
So in Season 1, they took the fruits of the Spirit—love, patience, gentleness, and so on—and devoted an episode to each. Not as abstract virtues, but as very human struggles:
- Times they were not patient.
- Moments they failed at gentleness.
- Situations where “love” was costly and confusing, not soft and sentimental.
In Season 2, they brought guests into the mix and widened the field:
- Menopause.
- Forgiveness, including a priest who forgave the man who murdered his parents.
- Aging parents and dementia.
- Spiritual warfare and the strange things that start happening when you confront hard topics.
- Grief, loneliness, and the holidays—when everyone else seems joyful, and you’re not.
They approach all of this from a clearly Christian perspective. They quote Scripture; they talk about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. But they don’t start with the labels—Catholic, Pentecostal, Black, white, conservative, progressive. They start with the shared, messy reality of being human.
Their guiding intention? Lorraine put it beautifully: “When people finish listening to a show, we want them to feel like they’ve been wrapped in a warm blanket and that they know they’re loved by God.”
That word—beloved—sits at the center of their work. And it’s here that their story touches something universal.
You don’t have to use the word “God” the way they do to recognize the human need underneath it. Call it God, call it the Source, call it Love, call it the sense that your existence is wanted rather than accidental. Whatever language you choose, we all live with the question: am I, at my core, loved?
If the answer is no—or if we suspect it might be no—then our labels become our only protection and our primary identity.
If the answer is yes—if we are, before anything else, beloved—then labels become what they were meant to be: descriptive, not definitive.
Unity Without Erasing Difference
There is a kind of “unity” that’s really just uniformity in disguise: everyone believes the same thing, votes the same way, sings the same songs, and uses the same language. Step outside that, and you’re out.
That’s not what I see in Erica and Lorraine.
They don’t pretend their backgrounds are the same. They don’t flatten their differences for the sake of a shallow harmony. They simply refuse to make those differences the main story.
Instead, they model a different kind of unity:
- Unity of purpose: to remind people they are loved, especially when life is hard.
- Unity of posture: curiosity, vulnerability, and the willingness to say, “Here’s where I struggled too.”
- Unity of practice: starting with the person in front of them, not with the label attached to that person.
In many ways, this is what I also aim for with Created in the Image of God. The subtitle of the show is “Building Vibrant Communities.” That doesn’t mean building communities where everyone looks and thinks alike. It means bringing together a wide diversity of people and stories, and weaving them into something life-giving.
Every Sunday morning, for example, my wife and I go to a local nursing home. My wife is a physical therapist and had a colleague who met a resident there—a woman from the Bahamas—hungry to study the Bible. She wanted, in her words, “a spiritual community in this place.”
Two years later, we have exactly that: a small but vibrant gathering around coffee, Scripture, conversation, and occasionally music. The residents come with walkers, wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and long life stories. No one is asking who’s Catholic, who’s Protestant, who’s something else entirely. The labels haven’t disappeared; they just aren’t the organizing principle.
They come because something in them knows: I need connection, meaning, and hope. In other words, I need to know I am not alone, and that my life still has worth.
Belovedness comes first. Labels, if they matter at all, come second.
When Life Slides Sideways
Back to that snowy day.
At one point, standing in the yard with the 4Runner stuck, the tractor dead, and the driveway impassable, I remembered a short prayer we sometimes use in our family—the “Remover of Difficulties” prayer:
Is there any remover of difficulties save God?
Say: Praised be God!
He is God.
All are His servants, and all abide by His bidding.
I prayed it then. But I also remembered something else: I had thought about praying that before all this began—and I didn’t. I got distracted, went ahead with my plan, and found myself, as my father would say, “out in the woods.”
It’s easy to treat prayer—or any kind of spiritual centering—as an emergency tool. “Break glass in case of crisis.” But there’s a deeper lesson here, one that connects back to Erica and Lorraine.
Being beloved doesn’t mean:
- The car never slides.
- The marriage never ends.
- The 18-wheeler never barrels through the red light.
- The spiritual warfare episode goes off without technical glitches.
Erica told a story about that 4 a.m. prayer meeting. She was on her way home, sitting at a traffic light. Normally, she’s the kind of driver who moves the moment the light turns green. But for some reason, when it changed, she stayed put. Long enough to think, “Why am I still sitting here?” Then, an 18-wheeler flew through the intersection, running the red at full speed.
In that split second, she realized: had she been “herself”—fast, decisive, in control—her three daughters might have woken up without a mother in the house.
That experience didn’t erase her labels (single mom, divorced, businesswoman), but it did reframe them. Underneath all of it, she began to see herself differently: not as abandoned, not as judged, but as held.
Lorraine, for her part, talks about the way she begins each morning: with a gratitude journal, listing three things she’s thankful for from the day before. On some days, that’s easy. On other days, it’s a stretch. She reaches for the most basic things: a roof, a meal, a heartbeat.
Gratitude, for her, isn’t denial of the mess. It’s a daily act of remembering: I am more than the mess. I am more than my failures and fears. I am, in a word, beloved.
From Labels to Names
We live in a time where labels are everywhere and often weaponized. Political, theological, racial, ideological, generational—we sort and are sorted at high speed.
Labels can clarify some things. They can give us a shorthand for parts of our story. I’ve had many in my own life: minister, ex-minister, husband, divorced, Swede, American, executive, author.
But labels become dangerous when we start treating them as our deepest identity. They’re not. At best, they’re chapter titles. They are not the book.
What Erica and Lorraine are modeling, through Beloved, is something simpler and more profound:
- Start with the assumption that the person in front of you is beloved.
- Let that shape how you speak, listen, and tell the truth.
- Let your differences be real—but not ultimate.
And when your own life slides off the driveway—into grief, confusion, conflict, or just the quiet despair of things not going as planned—remember that there is a “you” beyond the label “failure,” beyond “divorced,” beyond “too much” or “not enough.”
However you describe it, there is a deeper name spoken over you.
You may call that source of love God, as Erica and Lorraine do. You may still be searching for the right language. Either way, the invitation is the same.
The next time you find yourself “out in the woods,” take a moment before you reach for your labels. Ask instead:
- What if I started from the assumption that I am beloved, here, in this?
- What if I extended that same assumption to the person who looks or believes nothing like me?
That, I’m convinced, is where real unity begins—not in uniformity of label, but in a shared recognition of a worth and dignity that no storm, no slide, and no category can erase.
You are created in the image of God. Even if you don’t yet use that phrase, your life carries a value that is deeper than any label you wear. Our task, together, is to learn to see that in ourselves—and in each other.
Sneak Peek at Next Week’s Show
Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be joined by Wanda Thibodeaux—writer, musician, podcaster, and author of a new daily devotional series. Wanda grew up in a small rural community in Michigan, but her journey through psychology, music, and deep personal reflection has given her a powerful way of talking about joy, suffering, and the lies we believe about our worth.
If you’ve ever wondered how to experience God through joy in the middle of hardship—or how “fighting for your joy” can feel like backhanding the devil—you won’t want to miss this conversation. We’ve already recorded it, and I can say this much: it’s rich, practical, and deeply encouraging.
Tune in next Sunday at 7 a.m. Central.
