What Happens After Transformation?
I’m someone who spent a good number of years keeping my life compartmentalized for various reasons — my writing and coaching life didn’t overlap with my day job, and my ministry life didn’t really overlap into my writing life. Until it did.
The lines have started getting blurred, or life just had me coloring outside the lines. When it comes to our spiritual formation through a word of the year, any transformation we experience in one compartment of our life will undoubtedly spill over into the other areas. It’s beautiful, meaningful, and feels frustratingly inefficient as we struggle with slow growth.
In the rest of my conversation with Joanna, we don’t go there specifically but it’s in our subtext, so let me sketch out the picture for you.
Joanna is the traditionally published fantasy author now pursuing peacebuilding through her master’s thesis on storytelling and the peacemaker’s inner transformation. It’s in this setting where her word of the year flowed from patience to transformation, and that’s where we left off last time. It’s fascinating standing back to watch the dots connect in people’s lives.
The values, beliefs, and character that emerge from those experiences, plus the talents and skills we’ve honed—all of these converge into something new and precious and beautiful.
And the process is often messy.
It’s not until we step back that we start seeing the picture form, probably one God has been seeing and anticipating all along and recognize the next focus word that will both anchor and guide the next season.
I’m Emily Grabatin, and this Welcoming Slow Growth Podcast is a space for God led writers, entrepreneurs, and creatives called to bring hope and healing through your work. This season, we’re exploring stories of like-hearted people who chose one word to guide who they’re becoming…and what happened in the process.
Take a deep breath and let’s settle in together.
Subscribe to The Heart’s Calling publication, including the Welcoming Slow Growth podcast, to know when the next episode is released—and join the conversation.
Three and a Half Months to Return
It took Joanna three and a half months to land on her most recent word of the year.
“I kept journaling, I kept thinking, I listened to music, I prayed. I had different words coming to mind, nothing was really sticking until all at once, the word that came to mind for me was RETURN. It came to me while I was actually reading someone else’s words, which really fills me up and helps me find direction.
I was reading a translation of The Voyages of Saint Brendan, an Irish saint. I knew a bit of the story, but I had never read the whole thing. Reading through this translation I realized there’s a point in his story—he’s sort of known as an adventurer—when he goes out to sea in a boat, and that image had always stuck with me.
I wanted to be the adventurer. I wanted to go out on the sea. And I feel like God did take me there. Beginning in 2022, it felt like going out into the deep, into this place that I had never been before spiritually. All I could do was trust God and watch as my understandings of Him and the world and the eternal deepened and widened and became something so much more rich.
But it’s also really terrifying to be out there.
Reading about Saint Brendan, there was a point after he reached the distant shores he was searching for when an angel or someone comes to him and essentially gives him a word saying, “Well, now you’re going to go back to Ireland, and that’s going to be your future.”
It hit me as I was reading that, that in so many ways in the last few months, I am returning to shore after three years, four years of being out to sea. Now I’m coming back to where it is that God would have me go with, all of this new trust and inner resilience, spiritually. That’s what it feels like.
Does it mean I’m not going to break tomorrow? I might, and that’s okay. But I’ve certainly learned much more than I knew before this journey—how to be rooted in God and withstand a lot of the hardships even, even with tears on my face.”
Returning to a Place I Thought I’d Never Go Back To
Joanna recounted how hard her first transition was back in 2022 when she left the United States after living there for almost 13 years. As excited as she had been to be home with her family in Canada again, she’d been sad to leave the community she had come to love.
Now that she’s been home for over three years, she senses God might be calling her back to the United States, a place she figured she’d never go back to live.
“I thought, if I go somewhere, it’ll be somewhere new. Maybe, England… and have a nice little C.S. Lewis home here I’m just reading books and strolling the countryside. Now the horizon has shifted, and I’m not upset about it.
I’m actually very excited and happy, and it feels very right, but it’s not what I would have expected… I’m not returning as the same person.”
What Return Means to Me
RETURN isn’t a word I’ve thought of or used much until the past year in contemplative conversations. So I was curious to hear Joanna’s perspective and what she’s anticipating with this word.
“To quote from The Voyages of Saint Brendan the messenger that speaks to him says that when he goes back to Ireland, that land is going to become
‘the school of truth, the college of saints, the student’s bower, the hermit’s calm retreat, the stranger’s home, the hospitable hearth, and the shrine to which shall wander pilgrim’s feet from all neighboring nations of the earth.’
Now, that’s a beautiful picture of what Ireland did become and still is to this day. It’s such a, such a mysterious, hidden place to go to spiritually and I highly recommend it to anyone listening. But I have this very strong sense of the different elements of my life –my writing and my creativity, alongside my schooling and my work in peace building—that these two things are converging in this return as I seek to make a new home again.
However this time, it feels as if I’m being funneled into this by circumstance, but on the other hand, I have way more choice and freedom and in the building of this next home. It’s not just the currents of life sort of bouncing me around as it has been in the past. Rather this feels very intentional.”
Joanna shared how overjoyed she is to anticipate sharing this new return with another person as they build a home together and seeing both their creative calling and their visionary calling come together.
“We have the same heart. We have the same alignment of vision as, creatives and as Christians, as peacemakers. I have this sense of wanting to create that ‘hospitable hearth’ and that place to which wandering feet can come and maybe experience peaceful presence for a moment and be heard and be encouraged in their own creativity if they happen to be artists or whatever the work God has for them.
I don’t think anyone has to have the label of Christian at this moment to be stirred by God and to be on a journey. For me it’s very much about welcoming everyone, listening, and seeing what is God saying to them? What is stirring in their heart? And trying to be that encouraging word to say, “Keep going. Keep on your own pilgrimage. Keep walking. You don’t know what’s over the next hill, around the next corner.”
A Deepening Capacity for Generosity
Going through an adventure of faith and getting to know God in a new way, like Joanna had the past several years, changes a person. I noticed Joanna had mentioned several times how much her trust in God had deepened.
“How do you feel this has shaped you—looking back at who you were before and who you are now to step into this return?” I asked
Jo was quiet for a couple minutes, sifting through her flood of thoughts. Finally, she said, “This season of trust, and all that’s come, has certainly shaped in me a greater capacity to be generous.”
She admits she’s not entirely self-sacrificial. The daily struggle between what generosity could look like and protecting her own needs and desires is real, and she shared a Bible verse that’s been shaping her perspective:
“Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will sow generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver, and God is able to bless you abundantly.”
2 Corinthians 9:6
“I think growing up, I tended to interpret that more as financial, the necessary, you know, willingness to give to a local church or to a community—certainly to give to those who are in need, which seems to be an important part of the verse.
I think we sort of miss the next bit, which says,
“They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor.”
But reading that again now, I certainly don’t read it as only a financial transaction or something where we give in this very tangible way. I realize that in my life I have developed a greater capacity, which comes out of trust in God, to be able to give of my time, of my energy, of my presence, my listening ear.
And I need to make this very clear -- I was not always great at that. This is not something that’s of me. I’m an introverted writer. I could spend hours by myself just focusing on my own stories and my own words and have a very insular life, and probably be very happy.
But I do love people. I do love connecting. I love talking. And now I don’t rush. I don’t feel restless nearly as much if someone is in need of my time, I don’t worry that I’m not going get a book done or that I’m not going to be productive in some other way.
There is much more to be gained and much greater beauty to be summoned in God’s kingdom by being generous with our presence and sowing that generously.”
Having spent many hours getting to know Jo over the past few years, I can recognize that transformation she was noticing about herself.
We sipped many cups of coffee and tea conversing about what God is up to in our lives, when it feels uncertain, confusing or vividly unfolding. And in between those conversations, it’s hard to miss the relaxed, intentional way that she invests and scatters her presence. She can spend weeks immersed in writing or editing one of her novels, head down under the pressure to meet a looming deadline. But the next week she could be out of town visiting family, caring for a sick friend or cat-sitting.
It’s no coincidence that her quiet attentiveness to her creative calling, her trust in God and the kind of generosity he’s been shaping in her are preparing her for the next season of her calling as a peacebuilder, whatever that may look like.
Our Worthy Invitation
When I asked Joanna what closing insight she wanted to leave for the Welcoming Slow Growth listeners, she had one more quote to share – a quote from a newer favorite of hers, Frederick Buechner.
“We have it in us to be Christs to each other, and maybe, in some unimaginable way, to God, too. That’s what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing, as well as to have them worked upon us.
We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him, and once in a while, maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another’s pain, and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another’s joy, almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God’s mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all. And though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for Him, any more than we have ever managed to live for Him very well either, His story will come true in us at last.
And in the meantime, this side of paradise, it is our business, not like so many peddlers of God’s word, but as men and women of sincerity, to speak with our hearts, which is what sincerity means, and to bear witness to and live out of and live toward and live by the true word of His holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.”
—Frederick Buechner, originally published in A Room Called Remember
I had to absorb that for a moment, then asked Joanna to sum it up in her own words.
She paused to form her words, and then said,
“We are participants in this. God is looking for coworkers, co-creators, people who can help make His kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven. And that is the most holy thing that we have to do, and we all have our own unique, beautiful, creative ways to do it.
And I think as soon as we realize that, recognize that, wonder at that, the journey becomes so much more rich and meaningful and hopeful. Even when we’re a little bit in the dark or a little bit lost, we are heading towards God’s vision. We just need to keep walking in that direction.”
Three Kinds of Return for a Writer or Creative
Have you ever had that sense that you are being called to revisit someplace—whether physically, emotionally or spiritually? A place you were resolved not ever to go back to?
Both as a book coach and in ministry, I’ve seen people experience this return in a few ways, and I wonder if you can relate to one of them?
1. Writing Your Memories
The first is when, as a creative or writer with a calling, you feel that tug to write that book on your heart.
Once you accept the mission, find your writing flow and focus, you realize, “Oh man, I’ve gotta tell that part of my story.” ‘Cause that’s the experience that shaped your values, beliefs, and entire life today. And for your reader to fully understand the importance of the story, your message that you need to say, you need to authentically share that scene that you don’t want to go back to.
For me, it was when I was writing Dare to Decide, and I realized I needed to write the scene in my 20s when I came home on my lunch break to my first husband’s announcement that he was done with our marriage. So, there I was in a coffee shop at 6:00 AM one Saturday morning, writing that scene with a cup of Earl Gray tea steeping beside me and tears wetting my face because I went back there in my mind.
But after that writing session, while I felt drained, I was okay. Fulfilled even, because I wasn’t that 20-something anymore. I wasn’t the same person returning, and I knew that sharing the story was an important part of bringing hope and healing that I felt called to bring.
2. Returning to Your Youth’s Delight
The second type of return that I’ve seen among creatives recently is kind of like going back to your first love.
Like when you loved writing or creating, crafting or painting, when you were young, and now maybe in a new season of life after hardship or adulting, you feel drawn to come back to yourself. This writing wasn’t just something you enjoyed doing. You’re realizing it’s a part of who you are in a way you can’t quite explain. It’s a way of tending to a part of yourself that others often don’t get to see.
It’s a way of slowing down, of being present with yourself. Maybe it even becomes a way of dwelling in God’s presence. This is a beautiful kind of return.
3. Returning to Memories to Heal
The third type of return I’ve often seen is through the emotional healing or healing discipleship group I’ve led at my church. These men and women come feeling stuck or blocked, maybe in their relationships or choices, self-image, or their calling.
And part of the healing process involves going back to memories they never wanted to face again.
It’s painful. It’s dark, heavy.
And after they press through, limping at times, they often see the light and feel the peace they trusted was on the other side of their return.
But often it doesn’t end there.
A year or two later, some of them come back. They return to facilitate the same experience for others. They aren’t the same person in this return, though. Sure, their personality is the same, but their story, the memories they go back to, and how they experience the content of the program, it’s not the same experience as it was the first time.
Often, I see they are more relaxed in who they are, more compassionate, more free to be themselves, more at peace in their relationship with God. And often they sense more spaciousness for next steps in their own calling.
It’s another beautiful return and one that keeps giving.
What Are You Being Called to Return To?
In the previous episode and today Jo expressed some ways that she’s not the same person she used to be now that she’s anticipating this return. She’s more generous, hospitable, compassionate. These are qualities essential for exploring what the next season of her calling of peace building and interreligious hospitality looks like.
So what about you?
Is there something you’re being called to return to?
What are you noticing about this beckoning or assignment?
What gifts and new perspectives are you bringing into this return?
How have you changed?
And what difference could that make in your fresh adventure?
Let’s wrap up by revisiting Joanna’s lovely thought-provoking words:
“God is looking for coworkers, co-creators who can help make his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And that is the most holy thing that we have to do, and we have all our own unique, beautiful, creative ways to do it.”
— Joanna Mumford
What a marvelous invitation we have.
More about guest Joanna Mumford
If you’d like to follow Joanna Mumford her peace-building journey unfolds, read more about the quotes, theologians and muse that shapes her faith and perspecitve, she’s started a new Substack.
We’d love to hear what you’re percolating!
What kind of return are you recognizing in your life? How are you the same or different going into this return?
Which quote resonated with you the most from this episode?
If today’s Welcoming Slow Growth conversation encouraged you, would you share this episode with a friend or colleague who needs to hear it or leave a thought in our Substack community?
Click here to listen in your favourite app.
Connect with Emily Grabatin:
Substack | Podcast | Author Tips | Coaching | Book
