Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I am Adam Young and I have my guest today is Rebecca Wheeler-Wolston, who is from Williamsburg, Virginia, currently, where I went to college.

So I got to see her this summer when I was back at my alma mater. Rebecca, it's good to have you on the podcast.

Thanks, Adam. Good to see you again.

Say a little bit about what you spend your time doing, a bit about who you are.

So I am first, probably a wife and a mother of two teenagers. So that is always good space, eventful space, and sometimes stressful space.

I live in Williamsburg with my husband of 21 years and to this day he is one of my favorite people on the planet.

My marriage is definitely a place of rest and grace and peace. And so, yeah, I prefer to spend my time with him above just about anybody else.

I am a trained attorney by choice and I run a practice in Williamsburg that specializes in faith-based law and also have a master's in counseling and spend some time working with the Elder Center doing some trauma work.

So let's talk a little bit about story for you.

How did you get interested in this work of engaging story?

In undergrad, I had, if someone gave me a copy of Dan Allen's book, The Wounded Heart.

It's the only piece of literature that I knew about him. It's the only time that really heard his name. And that book was instrumental probably in my emotional and mental health through undergrad and really in a lot of ways my spiritual formation even in undergrad.

And so, use the book. You return to it often gave away multiple copies. Use it really as a blueprint for kind of engaging my own story.

Trauma is not a new thing for me in terms of where I come from, but learning how to engage it well and release it to God.

It is a difficult thing and something that I've worked to discover multiple times over the years. And so fast forward, you know, 30 years later and in my work as an attorney, I had an opportunity to come across Dan Allen or at an event and walk up to him and to express my gratitude for the book, The Wounded Heart and what it meant to me.

And I met a number of people from the Andersen Center who were at the event and that was my first sort of injury into looking at trauma as a landscape, our lens or frame through which we can understand ourselves and understand the God we serve and in many ways, the calling that we might have on our lives.

After you read the Wounded Heart, like how did that book affect you in college? I come out of a background that has multiple kinds and layers of abuse in it.

And remember in college running across the Oprah Winfrey show where she was discussing her own trauma and talking about how when you encounter trauma that that severe the possibility of healthy adult relationships with men.

And at the time I was a young Christian and remember thinking literally, oh God, I hope that isn't true.

Like my wish, my prayer in this moment was, please let there be another alternative for a child of God other than an adult life that is that is tethered to this inability to make healthy intentional, generous connections to people.

And actually like rest in and revel in what that that would look like or feel like.

And so the book, the Wounded Heart really just gave me like the opportunity to test out that hypothesis, like to put that sort of dare to God himself and see if he was who he says he was.

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