Welcome to the Strong Women podcast, where we explore the beautifully diverse ways God invites and equips women to participate in his story.

We're here to encourage one another as we step out of the shallow definitions of what it means to be a woman

and into the flourishing life that comes when we walk out our design. I'm your host Sarah Stone Street.

I'm so glad you're here. Welcome back, listeners. I'm so glad you've joined us. Today I have with me

Kina Aragon. Kina is an author and speaker,

and the thing that caught my attention about Kina is that she's a spoken word poet. And so you're

going to get a little bit of a taste of her poetry later in this conversation, but you can also

look her up and she has these wonderful videos where it's artistic and

she's performing her poetry and it's just lovely.

So you'll have to look her up later.

But she's also the author of a book called Love Has a Story.

And it's part memoir, part poetry, part theology.

And we're going to also talk about that too. So, Kina, thank you so much

for coming on with me today. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. I'd love to hear

a little bit more about you. Like, what fills your days these days? Well, let's see, since 2020-ish,

my life has been marked by chronic pain and chronic illness and about five surgeries

and lots of trauma therapy, lots of reckoning with the effect of trauma on my body now in my 30s.

I'm like in my mid-30s. So yeah, really the last five years has been an epic slowing down and if my capacity was this big it's

like this tiny now in terms of what I'm able to fill my day with and so as you can imagine

especially in our society and in our culture let alone my own personal story. That has been a hard thing to embrace

for me to have to say no so many times to so many opportunities, to, you know, make less

money because of that, to feel embarrassed or, you know, about just not being able to hang anymore as much, you know, not being able to

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