Sara Billups Explores 'Nervous Systems' and How to Build a Non-Anxious Life
Good Faith
Good Faith
5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can We Move From Fear to a Holy Indifference That Teaches Peace and Presence?
Seattle-based writer Sara Billups joins host Curtis Chang to explore how faith, mental health, and spiritual practices can help calm anxiety in our bodies, families, churches, and politics. Drawing from her book Nervous Systems (available November 4, 2025), Sara shares practical ways to find peace, emotional balance, and spiritual resilience amid today's chaos. Together, Curtis and Sara discuss how understanding our stories and grounding in faith can help us live with calm and clarity in an anxious culture.
(02:23) - Navigating Anxiety in Uncertain Times
(04:35) - Understanding Anxiety Across Generations
(18:58) - Navigating Anxiety With Holy Indifference
(26:00) - Anxiety in Churches, Politics, and Systems
(28:15) - Churches Cultivating Non-Anxious Presence
(33:43) - Finding a Spiritual Home in Crisis
(41:20) - Sara's Message a Generation of Anxious Young Adults
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Sara Billups' Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics
- What is Epigenetics? (Cleveland Clinic)
- Curt Thompson discusses generational trauma and epigenetics (episode of Curt's podcast)
- Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises
- St. Teresa of Lisieux's Divine Office
- The story behind the hymn It Is Well With My Soul
- Frederick Buechner describes his daughter's anorexia and praying Psalm 131 (video)
- Frederick Buechner's Telling Secrets
- Matthew 26:36-46 (ESV) Jesus prays in Gethsemane
- Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
- Edwin Friedman's Six Measures of Effective Leadership (Jack Shitima's Non-Anxious Leader blog)
- Mark Sayers's A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders
- The ignatian concept of Indifference
- Thomas McKenzie's The Anglican Way: A Guidebook
- Tim Keller's The Church in the City (Series of audio messages)
- Christianity Today's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill (podcast) 22
- Explore Grace Church Seattle
- Good Faith episode featuring Paco Amador of Little Village in Chicago
More from Sara Billups:
- Sara Billups' Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home
- Sara Billups' Bitter Scroll (substack)
- Sara Billups' That's the Spirit podcast (with Morgan Page)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If God is real, if God is good, if God is in control, we can calm down. |
| 0:05.0 | But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. |
| 0:07.0 | We live in a time where things are difficult and may well get worse. |
| 0:11.0 | We don't know if it's going to get better, but we know that there are things that we can do with our lives |
| 0:17.0 | to make different choices, to model the way of Jesus. |
| 0:20.0 | I want to say something positive, |
| 0:22.4 | but I think it might just be hard and get harder. And maybe there's something beautiful in that |
| 0:27.3 | unknowing, even if it leads to suffering, because I think we all know that that's where |
| 0:31.3 | character is formed and how we grow. Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang, and the Good Faith podcast is where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. |
| 0:58.7 | The podcast is a production of Redeeming Babel, a 501C3 nonpartisan organization. |
| 1:06.0 | It's a pretty obvious statement to say we live in a world filled with anxiety. There's anxiety about |
| 1:13.4 | what's happening in our politics, in our climate, in AI technology, and more. What's less |
| 1:20.2 | obvious is the question of how we're supposed to respond to this multifaceted anxiety. As an anxious person myself, I've tried to reflect on this question |
| 1:30.3 | in my book, The Anxiety Opportunity, but I know I do not have all the answers on this multifaceted topic. |
| 1:38.6 | We need more voices to speak into our anxious age. And this is why I'm so glad to bring back our friend Sarah Billups. |
| 1:47.5 | Sarah is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and other places. |
| 1:57.1 | Her most recent book is on this topic of anxiety called Nervous Systems, Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics. |
| 2:09.3 | Sarah has joined us at Good Faith to co-lead some of our prayer meetings and was part of last year's Advent series. |
| 2:17.0 | Sarah, welcome back to the Good Faith Podcast. |
| 2:19.3 | Thanks, Curtis. It's really good to be here. |
| 2:22.3 | Okay, I'm going to begin by asking a question I ask almost every author that comes on here, |
| 2:28.3 | which is, why did you write this book? Why make the effort to get this in the world? |
... |
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