We are interviewing all of our regular contributors for you to get to know them better. Today’s guest is M, who was a GP and cross-cultural worker in the Middle East, but currently living in Argentina with her Latino husband. She is also one of our regular writers at Stories.

We explore M’s lifelong interest in connecting with and finding common ground with the stranger, people whom on the face of it seem quite different to her, and how this has played out in her work history and friendships. We also discuss grief in relation to the cancer diagnoses of two of her brothers and learning to trust a God who is good, strong and kind.

Why Do The Sads Feel So Sad? is a deep dive into grief with a Mental Health Social Worker, a woman in ministry, and a Clinical Psych Registrar. Britt, Maddy and Bec explore our experiences of grief including bereavement but also discuss loss through transitions, aging, and the loss of dreams and potential.

Can grief be a gift? How do we learn to live with it when our bodies shut down? How do we grieve in community? How do we grieve as Christians? As always, we have questions. Join us around the dinner table as we flesh this one out. 

We are interviewing all our regular contributors in Season 1 for you to get to know them better. Khaiah Thomson is a social worker and the author of the Blackwood series.

In today’s episode, we explore:

• Turning your creative hobby into your job and finding ways to get unstuck

• Growing up as a pastor’s kid in the country. Khaiah believed she was a Christian, but when she moved to Perth as a teenager she wrestled with feeling alone and unlovable. God said to her, “You don’t know me.”

• In a time when people want to outsource discipleship of their kids, the value of growing up in a big family where she felt like it was a safe place to wrestle with all her big questions about faith and life. 

• Working as a hospital social worker on the renal transplant team whilst also diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease. We discuss coming to terms with eventually needing a kidney transplant when she wanted to ignore it and learning to rest in the fact that God is in control.