“Is God Even Listening?” An Honest Easter Conversation - Reverend Kyle Norman

 

Airdate: April 16, 2025

Julie Rose: It's something nearly every person of faith has experienced, but we don't talk about it.

Kyle Norman: And I started asking myself a whole lot of questions that I never thought I would ask ever, like, "Is God judging my family? If we were better Christians, would this not have happened?"

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And I know you're probably wondering, "Why would anyone choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can stay open and curious about it. And that is what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.

I'm joined today by Reverend Kyle Norman. He serves as Rector and Dean of St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral in Kamloops, British Columbia in Canada, and he's recently released a book titled, Alive, Loved, and Free: Finding Jesus When Faith is Hard. Reverend Norman, what a treat to have you. Thanks for your time today.

Kyle Norman: Well, thank you. You for the invitation to join you. Julie, it's my pleasure to be here.

Julie Rose: So, When Faith is Hard, that subtitle points to this thing that we don't like to talk about as people of faith. You call it "spiritual discouragement." What is it?

Kyle Norman: Spiritual discouragement as, as I define it in the book, is this inward feeling that somehow we're doing it wrong. That somehow our faith life, if we come from a faith tradition, or just our spirituality, that somehow that's not being lived out as it quote, "should be," and however we term that. So, it is this feeling of dis-ease, it's this feeling of frustration, and it can come from a whole lot of other places, a whole lot of different places, but fundamentally what happens is we, we feel this dis-ease, we feel like we're doing something wrong, and so we heap upon ourselves a whole lot of shame and a whole lot of guilt and a whole lot of judgment thinking that somehow the problem is us.

Julie Rose: Maybe you could share an example, 'cause I know that was part of what, uh, inspired this book. What, what, what has spiritual discouragement felt like to you?

Kyle Norman: Spiritual discouragement, uh, for me, and, and we'll talk a little bit about my story, it's uh, it's all surrounded my wife's cancer journey and so my entrance into spiritual discouragement was being the caregiver for her and, all of a sudden, finding that the spirituality that I had been living in as an ordained priest for 15 years at that point, completely turned around, and I felt like I couldn't pray. I felt like I was alone in the midst of my life and my ministry and the church. I felt like God was absent. And I started asking myself a whole lot of questions that I never thought I would ask ever, like, "Is God judging my family? If we were better Christians, would this not have happened?" So, all of that came crushing in on me very, very quickly, and I had to stop and think about, "What's going on here?" And that really helped me understand that so often in the pews and in people's lives, people of faith traditions who are faithful people carry around these things when they meet those Uncomfy places in their life and find themselves wondering, "Is this because God's rejecting me? Is this because I'm not praying enough? Is this because I'm not a perfect whatever?"

Julie Rose: Yeah. I've experienced spiritual discouragement and I went through a big bout of it when I hit about 30 and, you know, was like, "My life has not turned out the way I thought." I was sort of told that it probably would if I did all the things, right? Like, you know, still single, childless at that age and feeling like, "Okay. I, I, huh? Like, hmm. Where, where are the blessings that I kind of thought I would get out of this, this deal," right? And struggling to understand why it didn't seem, feel like my, my prayers were being answered. Um, talk to me a little more about how you responded, especially as a, as a priest. To not be feeling the presence of God must have been really unsettling.

Kyle Norman: It was, it was hard. It was hard, and this all happened around Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. This is when my wife was diagnosed. And so, like, there was a whole lot of stuff going on in me in terms of journeying with that celebration of Jesus going to the cross and, and all of this stuff. But, you know, I couldn't pray. I ended up going to see a spiritual director, this, this lovely winsome person that, you know, I was talking with over the time and just saying, "You know, I can't pray. I, I sit in my chair, and I try to do the liturgy that I do every single morning, and the words don't come," and, and I was heaping upon, like, you know, "This means that I'm a sham of a priest. You know, if, if faith, if prayer can't sustain a priest in this time, what am I doing before the congregation?" And it was interesting, what he said to me was, "You know, a child in distress doesn't need to say anything. It's enough just to be in the presence of their parent, and so if all you can do is just sit there, that's enough." And for me, that's what sustained me, being able to just sit in my chair and even just for five minutes, daring to believe that that was enough for my relationship with God. For my wife, all she could do was run her hand over prayer beads, you know, because chemo was affecting her thoughts and she wasn't able to think her way through her prayers, so all she could do was rub some beads and just daring to believe that that's enough. It doesn't all of a sudden make it, "Oh, this is great. Now my prayer seems so fail—" it doesn't. It's still uncomfortable and it still feels kind of empty, and yet in the midst of that uncomfortableness, in the midst of that discouragement, I found a deeper reality of God's presence than I ever would've thought before.

Julie Rose: What do you mean?

Kyle Norman: For me, and again, this is part of the journey of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and, and Easter in the Christian tradition that, that God meets us in the uncomfortable places. Sometimes we think, or sometimes we have been taught to believe that faith makes everything beautiful, everything perfect. Life is just rainbows and roses once you become a person of faith, and so when you hit those uncomfortable moments, well, it's because you're doing something wrong, right? This is discouragement that comes in there, but that's not the biblical understanding of faith. That's not what faith is. You know, that wasn't, if you just think about the Bible, that wasn't Israel's story. That wasn't the disciples' story. That wasn't Jesus' story, so why would we think that that's our story? But the story that we are told is that, and this is the whole point of, of Gethsemane, this is the whole point of the cross, that no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how dark, no matter how crazy things are, no matter how discouraged we can be, God meets us. God comes to us in those places and doesn't take it away, but wraps us in God's presence and journeys with us, and that's kind of how I, that's what I felt going through this time.

Julie Rose: Your book is structured around the Holy Week, as you've mentioned, um, I imagine partly because this happened for you right around Easter, and here we are again, um, at Easter time. So, expand for me just a little more on what the, what the last week of Jesus Christ's life on Earth tells you about spiritual discouragement and its role in a life of faith.

Kyle Norman: So, if you just look at that last week of Jesus, which is the culmination of, like, everything was building up to that. And so, this is the culmination of his mission and his ministry and, and so what is involved in that? Well, it is betrayal, it is rejection, it is throwing himself down in the garden of Gethsemane praying, "God, please take this cup away from me," and going to his friends and finding that his friends were asleep. He just wanted to have people around him and they're just sleeping. And then he gets arrested and everybody flees from him. He gets tortured and beaten and crucified, and on the cross, what is his prayer? "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And sometimes we can wrap this around some semblance of, of, of victory. "Oh, well, you know, 'cause he was Jesus, he knew God was with him." But again, if we do that, what we are doing is we are divorcing Jesus' experience of darkness and hurt and rejection and in some sense an unrealized prayer and agony, and, like, we're divorcing that from our lives. And so, we need to be able to recognize that because Jesus went through that viscerally that means that Jesus understands and dwells with us when we feel it viscerally as well.

Julie Rose: So, that's a point of comfort then I guess, to be able to recognize that even in this separation, moment of discouragement that, that too, Jesus can succor us in.

Kyle Norman: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Just think about the beloved Psalm, Psalm 23. You know, "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures." You know, there's this verse that says, "He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake, though I walk through the deepest valley," but then it says, "I will not fear for you are with me." That articulation of the darkest valley? That actually sits in the center of the Psalm. That's what it's about, not about this just miraculous removal of all hurts, all harms, all discouragements, but the indwelling of, of God in the midst of that.

Julie Rose: Kyle, what was helpful for you, and what was not helpful for you, in this period of spiritual discouragement that you, that you went through, and I guess helpful in terms of, uh, your own behaviors as well as the response of others?

Kyle Norman: Yeah, so I'll, I'll start with what was not helpful. What was not helpful was the Band-Aid slogans that sometimes we as people of faith put upon another person's situation, not to make them feel better, but to make us feel better because we don't know what to say. So, statements like, uh, people would say this to me, you know, speaking of my wife's cancer, "Kyle, God is not picking on her. He's handpicking her to bestow his glory." Like, come on, ugh. Like, that's not helpful. Or, "Kyle, we just need to pray the pain away." What? Like, that means nothing, and what it does, it just completely dismisses your experience, right? And it's not made to help them, it's made to let us feel off the hook because we don't wanna sit with the uncomfortable reality. So, that wasn't something that was helpful.

One of the things that was most helpful was, you know, the people who would really want to help, not in, not in a soundbite kind of way, but in a journeying with kind of way. So, I tell a story where somebody came to me and said, you know, "Kyle, what can we do?" And I had to trust that they actually wanted to help, and so I turned to them, and it was a hard moment for me 'cause as the priest, you know, I kind of thought, "I need to have all the answers. I need to be okay." But I turned to them and I said, "Can you mow my lawn? Because in the midst of everything, I'm not mowing my lawn." And so, that Saturday, he came with his lawnmower, it took maybe all of 10 minutes, and he mowed my lawn. He didn't come into the house, he didn't say anything. He just arrived, mowed my lawn and left. But that, what really helped was the times when the friends and family and the community of faith gathered around me to journey with me and to journey with my wife in the midst of it, not a, not offer answers or solutions, but to journey with us.

Julie Rose: How do you counsel then, um, members of your congregation when they come to you in spiritual discouragement? Like, what has to happen? I guess this is a two part question because the other thought that I have is that in those moments of deep discouragement, a perfectly natural reaction would be like, "Well, I guess, I guess I'm out. Like, if, if, you know, if God's not there for me, or if this isn't, like, maybe," so what has to happen for discouragement like this to bring us closer into our faith rather than away from it, and, and how do you counsel the folks who come to you in this pain?

Kyle Norman: You know, one of the reasons why it's hard, and we need to recognize that everybody's discouragement is completely different. Like, so, I use the language of discouragement, but it's not necessarily one thing. It can be, you know, whether somebody is struggling with forgiveness or somebody is struggling with a disease or struggling to feel God's love, it can be so many different things. You know, one of the things that I try to say if people come and say, "Well, I think I'm out. I just feel that, I just feel God's not there with me and all this kind of stuff, I just, I just have to leave." One of the things that I try to say to them is, you know, "What would it look like for you to continue journeying with, with the community of faith? It's okay if you are struggling, it's okay if you doubt, it's okay if, even if you think that this isn't for me." But so often, I've been ordained at this point for 22 years, and I've seen a lot of people, you know, say that. It's, "I'm feeling discouraged, I feel something's going on, so I need to leave, and when I figure it out, then I'll be back." And unfortunately, what happens is I usually never see them again, so I kind of just pose to them, "So, what would it be like if, if you find God again in the midst of everything isn't you stepping away from things but is willing to journey with it, with the community of faith?" And that might take some time. I sometimes point to them to, uh, the story of Doubting Thomas, right? Doubting Thomas who wasn't available in the room when Jesus showed up, and, and Thomas says, "Well, I don't, I don't believe it. Unless I see the nails, unless I see Him, I'm not gonna believe any of this stuff." And then there's this little line that says, "After eight days, Jesus appears again, and Thomas was with them." So, I tell people, "Be like Thomas." Thomas didn't believe. He had a whole lot of questions, but for eight days, he decided to journey with the community as they talked about experiences that he didn't have and as they prayed and as they shared and as they sang their songs that he didn't really know what to think about, but he journeyed with them, and somewhere along the way, he met the presence of God in a very personal way. And so, if we are willing, I loved your intro about sitting with the Uncomfy. If we're willing to do that, then it might not be eight days, it could be a little while, but if we're just willing to tarry there, then that actually might be the thing that opens up another reality of our understanding of the God who embraces us in the midst of our mess and actually journeys with us in the midst of it.

Julie Rose: Yeah, that's beautiful. It seems to me as though in your book as well as on your Instagram and the messages that you share about spiritual discouragement that you're trying to, in some ways, just normalize the fact that this is a part of a faithful life, that these moments will come.

Kyle Norman: Absolutely, and that's why I wanted to write the book. My discouragement around my wife's cancer really helped me open, open my eyes to the reality of what people struggle with and sometimes carry with them. The reality is, in every single parish that I've been in, and I've been in rural churches and urban churches, and now the rector of a cathedral. I've met men and women who carry around a secret shame with them and a secret feeling that somehow they're doing everything wrong. And these are faithful people, these are people who maybe have sat in the same pew for 30 years, and sometimes it's because of what they've been taught in the church, or it's been because they've read a book that, you know, presents this Pollyanna type of faith kind of, but they carry around them this really deep sense of condemnation and frustration. And so, what I wanted to do was articulate the normalcy of wrestling in the life of faith, and just because we wrestle, just because we have questions, just because we are discouraged, it doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong. It actually might mean that we are actually being an authentic person of faith.

Julie Rose: Reverend Kyle Norman is Rector and Dean of St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral in Kamloops, British Columbia, and his new book about spiritual discouragement is called Alive, Loved, and Free: Finding Jesus When Faith is Hard. You can check out more of his work at revkylenorman.ca. Kyle, thanks again. Thanks so much for your time today.

Kyle Norman: Thank you for having me.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. Have you had a moment recently when you chose to embrace discomfort instead of shying away from it? Maybe you had a tough conversation, or you took a bold step toward a goal or challenged a long-held belief. Whatever it was, I would love to hear your story, so email me at uncomfy@byu.edu or connect with us on social media to join the conversation.

And in the meantime, if you love diving into thought-provoking discussions, check out my other podcast, Top of Mind with Julie Rose. Each episode tackles tough topics in a way that pushes us to grow and think deeper and feel more empathy. Just search for Top of Mind with Julie Rose on your favorite podcast app.

Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Jake Hasleton, James Hoopes, Isabella Sosa, and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.