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Amy Julia (00:07)
I’m Amy Julia Becker and this is Take the Next Step, a podcast for families experiencing disability. We’ve teamed up with our friends at Hope Heals to bring you weekly conversations with fellow parents, with therapists, disability advocates, all about practical ways to cultivate a thriving future for the whole family. Here at Take the Next Step, we see your family as a gift to our society and to your local community. Your family matters.
Your child matters. We need you among us. In this first episode, I am talking with Katherine Wolf, author, podcaster, stroke survivor, and co-founder of Hope Heals. After Katherine survived a near fatal brainstem stroke at the age of 26 years old, her family’s journey through disability became a public witness that good and hard can coexist in the same story.
Through caregiving, storytelling, and lived theology, Katherine is inviting others into a vision of hope, interdependence, and embodied resilience. She and her husband Jay live in Atlanta with their two sons. And today, Catherine is here to talk with me about what it looks like to live with delight, connect to community, and continue taking steps towards a good future.
As one final note before this interview begins, I do want to mention this is a new podcast. And the way new podcasts find new listeners is through people like you. Today is the day we need you. We need you to share this episode. We need you to subscribe to this podcast. We actually need you even to take a moment to rate and review it on your favorite podcast app. When you do…
any or all of those things, more families will begin to be able to join this community and take the next step towards their good future. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for helping us spread the word. And thank you for listening.
Well, hello, Katherine. I always love getting to talk to you and I’m especially excited for you to be here with me on the inaugural episode of the Take the Next Step podcast. Welcome.
Katherine (02:28)
⁓ am so glad to be here Amy Joya. There is not much I would not be a part of if you were at the helm. ⁓ I don’t think I would do illegal things. But short of that, I would be in to be a part of anything that you are dreaming up and executing. ⁓ and honestly, those things are making the world more of a place.
Beauty and goodness. So I’m it you are putting up outposts of beauty and goodness in the world and I am here for
Amy Julia (03:07)
Well, I am so glad you’re here for it because you have been so much of the inspiration behind what I hope will be the beauty and goodness of this podcast. ⁓ As you know, we’ve talked about things related to what we’re going to talk about here today. I’ll get to that in a minute for many years. And that has helped me to develop this idea of reimagining disability and doing that by taking delight in our families for those of us who have families affected by disability.
learning how to connect to community and just take the one next step towards a good future. And when I look back at your story, which I’ve heard many times, and I’ll ask you to tell a little bit of that in just a minute, I just thought you embody those things. You embody a reframing or a reimagining of disability, taking delight even amidst hard circumstances, connecting to community and continuing to take one step at a time towards a good future and believing that that is possible.
That’s why I really wanted to have you on here, especially for this first episode today. And I thought maybe I could just ask you for listeners who don’t know who you are or how you came to be deeply involved in the disability community. Will you just give us like the cliff notes of your story?
Katherine (04:18)
Sure, as a typically able-bodied 26-year-old with no health problems, no medical history, no family history, no indication there was anything wrong, ⁓ as a new mother and somewhat newly-red, I suffered a massive brain stem stroke from a birth defect.
called an AVM arterial venous malformation that I had under my brain stem. And when the mass ruptured, it caused the massive stroke that nearly took my life. I had a very, very near fatal massive stroke and subsequently became severely disabled as I largely
remain today even though as you know it is not holding me back to have some limitations.
Amy Julia (05:19)
⁓
Yeah, so will you fast forward us just a little bit? So give us a sense of I know you had a long kind of initial recovery and now have a very full life that would not be marked by thinking about being in the hospital and recovering all the time. So you just give us a little bit more of what’s now been over a decade, a long time.
Katherine (05:42)
It
has been, it’s been 17 and a half years. So I always like to lead with the reality that this has been a slow burn. This isn’t like I woke up out of bed after a and was like, I want to do all these really cool things with my life now. And I’m completely stepping into the disability community with both feet. No, it was initially.
five years of really ⁓ trying to come up for air and recognize how I could live a life turned upside down. I could no longer drive a car. And I’d been typically able before. I could no longer see. My eyes do not track to this day. I’m deaf in one ear. Obviously, as you can see, maybe our listeners can’t. My face is paralyzed on one side.
have a hand that no longer has fine motor coordination. I have to use a walker to walk. I mean, there’s just a lot that remained in the story. And yet, ⁓ after those first initial just five or so years and continually processing and marinating, my husband and I have gone on
to launch a ministry called Hope Heals, where we just get to share our hope with our world and create sacred spaces of belonging for others. And we do that through a glorious camp where you have been both a teacher and a camper, and it’s glorious. And my husband and I opened our ministry, opened a coffee shop called Mend Coffee and Goods.
in Atlanta that employs half our staff with disabilities on the outside of their bodies. And we’ve written three books and I do a lot of speaking and above all, I get to create the sacred space of encouragement at the coffee date and the phone call and get to show up and I believe do the next right thing, which is be present.
show up with my whole heart, even when it’s hard and love deeply, even when it feels entirely unsafe. So that’s, that’s a bit, guess, of who I am Amy Julia. Feel free to fill in anything you want.
Amy Julia (08:16)
Well, there is so much I could say, which includes the fact that I have, ⁓ yes, loved being at camp, loved coming to men, loved seeing and reading the different books that you have written, both with your husband, Jay, and with your sister-in-law, Alex, and just for anyone here who’s not subscribed to the Hope Note, which also contains some of those thoughts there. It’s just a wonderful email that I receive every couple of weeks and I’m so grateful for.
Throughout all of that, you speak and write about essentially reframing or reimagining your both present and future realities. And I’m just wondering, like, for people who are listening to this, maybe they’re like you and are experiencing disability personally. Maybe they’re like me and have a family member who is experiencing disability. But either way, ⁓ we get messages from our culture that disability is a burden and a tragedy and just a bad thing that happens.
And that is not the way that you talk about your life or your experience, although you also don’t go down the toxic positivity route. So I’m just curious, what has helped you to reimagine disability and really just to reimagine your life? What are some things that might help others and have helped you?
Katherine (09:27)
Yeah, good question. ⁓ Well, probably the most basic thing that I have done that I would implore all of your listeners to do is to go outside of yourself. I think there can be such ⁓ intense focus on ourselves when we’re hurting and there’s hardship of any kind.
that we look inward and are really navel gazing. And I think one of my great strengths, which I don’t take credit for this at all, I think God really did a move in my heart to say, go out with this pain, see a world that needs what you got. You need to share and minister to a hurting world. So I think that’s been
Actually a big part. I hope that’s not completely random to tear that but it’s just the truth. I I can’t imagine not Almost harnessing what’s been happening in my story with the hurting stories of others As as you know, Amy Julia I’m all about just building a bigger table and saying come sit with me and I think that that’s been a
whole part of my story.
Amy Julia (10:55)
Well, one of the things you also say often is if you have a pulse, you have a purpose. And I think what you just spoke to, I think one thing that happens within families affected by disability is the idea that our family, we don’t know what our purpose is, our family doesn’t matter, or like we’re just kind of drawing down on other people’s resources rather than contributing. And I love the vision you just gave of getting outside yourself, not only to have a perspective,
but also to be able to give to others and to know that you have a purpose within that. I think one of the things there is I’m moving on a little bit to this idea of like starting with delight instead of starting with all of the deficits that come and can come in a very real physical or mental emotional ways with disability.
We know that there’s hardship and there is suffering that can come as a part of a disability story, but we also know that joy and belovedness and purpose can kind of wrap around the pain of that story. And I know one of your, again, things that I’ve heard you say a lot is don’t wait to celebrate. So I just would love to ask you to speak about what does it look like to live out that sense of delight, that sense of celebration? How do you do that?
Katherine (11:57)
Yeah.
Gosh, I very much love the notion that we have to celebrate in the process. We can’t wait to celebrate until the outcome, because the reality of course, as human beings, we must learn that outcomes don’t always come on earth. So we might as well get busy celebrating what we do have. So I think I’ve really
tried to train my brain to experience delight that is not the end. That is not an outcome related delight. That delight is in the process. And I guess delight and celebration can be some interchangeable words here. That truly delighting in and celebrating what is in the story. Which I think speaks so much to
taking the next step to re-imagining the good life is very much recognizing what is in the story. There’s a lot that’s not available for sure in disability context. However, there are significant things in our stories that can be a part of our future.
Amy Julia (13:35)
So tell me, what, I’m curious if you have any examples of what it looks like for you to delight in the process and not the outcome or to celebrate in the here and now rather than the only if this thing happens.
Katherine (13:50)
Well, of course, what is top of mind, which is how you know this so well, is our precious Luke 14 banquet, which is not practical to just me, but to our camp. So I should tear it first and then I can move on. But at the banquet, we eat dessert first, which is so powerful because we are celebrating.
Right now we are not waiting to celebrate. So we eat our dessert first and in a very beautiful, beautiful picture of delighting all our campers, all our volunteers have a dinner together and celebrate being together and belonging together. We have this fabulous dance party afterwards.
and just get to spend an evening delighting in each other and the image that we all bear together. So that’s a way to camp, but you probably want to know me personally, I’m guessing.
Amy Julia (14:54)
I’m curious about that too, yes.
Katherine (14:56)
Yes, and your specific question is, where is there delight?
Amy Julia (15:01)
Just practices of delight or of gratitude, know, things that are just kind of anchors in a daily way that someone could take from and be like, I could do that. That would take one minute or three minutes, you know. ⁓
Katherine (15:16)
I have tons. So one super easy, low hanging fruit, nothing is required at all. It’s simply when the lights are out, when your head hits the pillow, spend the moment before you fall asleep, recognizing through the landscape of the whole day, what is there gratitude for in this day? This day that has been, that is about to end, what happened to me? Wake and I think,
When we start to pay attention to what we are paying attention to, it changes how we think. That’s a Kurt Thompson, not Catherine Wolf thought. ⁓ truly, I’m going to choose what to remember from this day, what stands out, and let it be the right stuff. Lord, let me look in my life at the landscape of this day and pick out these special moments I’m not going to forget or pass by.
Also, in those moments, the gratitude can be minuscule. Sometimes my gratitude is my sheets are so comfortable on my bed. I love the sheets on my bed right now. They feel so soft. I feel so good. I love this moment. In fact, I really tried to go next level and start kind of giving myself a little hug in bed.
and saying like, I love my life. I love my life. I love this story. And I think it’s doing something powerful to my brain. It’s kind of a practice in recent years is I really want to deeply, truly love the story God is writing. And it would be tempting when my head hits the pillow and when I wake up in the morning to think about a lot of issues in my life.
In case your listeners think my life is perfect, it’s not. It has a lot of challenges connected to the disability and stroke and a whole lot of challenges not at all connected to that. I got just a whole game of big issues happening. So there’s a lot that could consume me both morning and night if I let it in the door.
Amy Julia (17:41)
Yeah, I love that idea of especially, ⁓ you know, knowing that sleep is where we often make our long term memories, like that’s how our brain does that. And so to feed our brain with true memories from the day or experiences even in the moment of lying in your sheets and to put bank those in that long term place of sure amidst a lot of hardship and pain. Guess what else is here and what I’m what I’m choosing to remember. I think that’s really beautiful.
I also wanted to ask you about ⁓ the idea of like supportive community, because I know that one of the really prompts for founding Hope Heals for you and Jay was the amount of community that really did support you both right after and for years after your stroke. And so I was thinking about, again, just if you could speak a little bit to that experience personally, but then I would also love to talk about how people who are feeling really isolated.
Again, if there are any practices or like quick little things they can do to connect to community. So the first is just your story, but the second is like, what do we do when we don’t have a whole church family that rallies around us and we are feeling really alone?
Katherine (18:54)
Yeah. Oh goodness. Totally. Very much. And in a completely unrelatable way that is just for me personally, since you asked, we had a lot of community that rallied and stayed and kind of went crazy. Like poured it out to us. We had people bringing meals to the hospital for my family to eat. Cause I couldn’t even eat food yet for months.
I mean, truly, we were the leaders of a very large Sunday school class at our church, my husband’s dad is a pastor of a large church in Montgomery, Alabama. ⁓ My family in my hometown of Athens, Georgia, it’s very tight knit, large community vibes in the small town which happens. So there was just support across the board, like a whole lot of it. However, that
could just stop with me. Like, yeah, cold story, Catherine, that’s great. But I’m not about that. Like, that’s cool. And I love that that happened. But that’s not most people’s stories. They’ve a ton of built in community when the bottom falls out. So what I would say to that, and to like our precious camp community, I say it every summer, everybody wants to live out Hope Hills camp all year long. So I get to say,
You get to be the one to create the community of your dreams. it going to be exactly like Hope Hills Camp or exactly like this other cool thing you heard about? No, but it’s going to be something. And when you go look for the person who does not have the people either, then you become a group. And it’s fascinating.
I love the passage of scripture from Luke 14, the passage the banquet is based on, that the rich man goes out and finds the misfits, brings them to the table. The people who can’t pay him back, the people who aren’t the cool, beautiful rich people, but no, the people having a hard time. And he says, come sit at my table. And he’s found his people. And I think that’s what we all must do.
Amy Julia (21:18)
I love that. And I love having been at those tables. ⁓ The Luke 14 banquet at camp, but also in just life with our daughter with Down syndrome has invited me into tables that I might not have sat at otherwise ⁓ and been able to experience community and support that I might not have otherwise. And so I love that sense, again, of a purpose that is outside of ourselves, where this experience of whether it’s being a person with a disability or ⁓ a family member
affected by someone in your family having disability, that sense of having a purpose which involves, yes, caring for ourselves, but also bringing other people together and ⁓ using these experiences that can seem really hard to actually become something really good and beautiful.
Katherine (22:05)
Totally. listened to a podcast a couple of days ago where the podcast was unpacking that David Brooks deep dived a research study on 142 countries where happiness, may have read about this as well. And when the world’s down to it, the happiest countries and going up are the
Amy Julia (22:23)
Yes, yes, yes, but tell it, yeah, go.
Katherine (22:33)
opposite of where the quality of life is going up or getting better better. So it kind of makes no sense except it’s about purpose. It’s consumption versus contribution. That when there’s contribution being made when there’s purpose, you are happier than when you are purely just consuming. And I think that could translate so beautifully and importantly to our population that
The contributing is where delight can be found.
Amy Julia (23:04)
So
I think like the so many people, if you take our culture’s understanding of disability as your frame, part of what’s problematic is the idea that if you’re disabled, you can’t contribute, which is totally false. And part of why we’re here is to say we don’t believe that we’re giving each other a high five. Yeah, but I think that’s part of what we want to do is actually be able to.
Katherine (23:22)
I’m you’re not
Amy Julia (23:28)
empower families to know that they have something to contribute and it really matters. It really matters in our world. like the last thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea of taking one next step towards a good future because it can be so overwhelming to have medical and logistical demands, to have family problems, just to need to respond to email. I mean, there’s so much that just feels
Katherine (23:36)
Absolutely.
Amy Julia (23:57)
totally overwhelming and you layer disability onto that and it can just be like, it’s too much for me. And so I’m curious what you do to kind of keep going. You’ve talked about like having gratitude for the present moment. I’m now thinking about how do we kind of hold on to hope in a manageable way in a day to day, I can actually believe there’s a good future for me and for my family. How do you do that?
Katherine (24:24)
for me, what has been so important is to recognize that life is not supposed to be easy and not going to be easy. And that switch has unlocked something amazing in me that I kind of live with the reality that all is not okay. All is not well at all.
but I can still very deeply somewhere inside know that all is not lost. And so I’m kind of choosing to live in that tension every day. And I think it changes how I feel about my life. I know too much to think everything’s okay. It’s not. It’s, mean, you’ve been to camp. We’re burying campers left and right after camp. It’s very, very sad.
on the one hand, absolutely. That is true. But two things can be true. It can be incredibly sad. And there can be incredible hope and joy in the very same story. So I think that’s probably not practical at all. Sorry, Amy, you’re wanting something practical. What can I tell you that’s related to all this one next step in my story? You know, I guess
Book writing is always something everybody wants to know. How do you write a book? That’s so overwhelming You do it this way guys. You open your laptop You say I’ve got ten minutes and I’m not doing anything else I refuse to get distracted My fingers are going to move on the keys of the type board for ten minutes that we’re gonna see what comes out. Yeah, and
That’s it! That’s how you start to write a book. That’s the most absolutely unsexy way ever and that’s the truth. You just do the thing. And that’s probably part of the next right thing is do the thing.
Amy Julia (26:33)
Totally. just literally with for me, I get when I get overwhelmed, whether it is with something like writing a book or, you know, I don’t know, Penny turning 18 and thinking about Social Security. And it’s like, OK, can I come up instead of with, my gosh, over the next year, I have to do 1700 things to help make this happen. But it’s like, but is there one thing and is there one thing I could do today? And then I kind of start.
just moving, as you said, it’s like you start taking one step at a time. You start writing one word at a time that you start talking to one person at a time. And even if the next step is literally to say, my next step, I’ve had this before. My next step is to talk to someone else and say, I don’t know what to do. So now I’ve got something to do, which is tell someone else I don’t know what to do, because maybe they can help. And almost always they actually can. So I think that’s actually a great encouragement and visual, the idea of writing a book for so many people.
whatever it is that is feeling overwhelming and like I just am crushed by the weight of all the things. Okay, but is there one thing even if it’s simply saying this is crushing me right now, what am I going to do? You know, the one thing you can do that helps you move forward and to trust that there is a good future in store.
Katherine (27:50)
a huge advocate for some talk therapy, talk it out. So I love that. That one next step is tell somebody you’re overwhelmed and not doing okay. Talk to somebody about what’s going on and see how it helps to begin to sort out what’s happening up here. That’s a great one.
Amy Julia (28:11)
Well, Catherine, thank you so much. know we could talk for like 17 more hours right now, but we are going to knowing that we’ve got busy people with sometimes overwhelming lives listening to this podcast. We’re just going to say that there are so many more resources available through the Ministry of Hope heals and through Catherine’s writing and speaking. We will link to all of that and we will just say thank you for giving us just these like.
really actionable ideas, whether that’s lying in bed and being grateful for our sheets or taking that one next step by saying I’m overwhelmed or looking for the people who can come to our tables. Thank you so much for all of that today.
Katherine (28:49)
What a blessing, what a profound impact this work has. Families feel trapped, hopeless. For you to just be at the helm of helping them navigate the darkness is just so important. I’m just so proud to be your friend.
Amy Julia (29:09)
Well, I am so grateful to be your friend and to be a friend of Hope Heal’s, so thank you so much.
This show is produced in partnership with our friends at Hope Heals. Hope Heals is a nonprofit that creates sacred spaces of belonging and belovedness for families affected by disabilities to experience sustaining hope in the context of inter-ability communities. And I am gonna say it again, this podcast is just getting started and you can help it grow. When you subscribe, share, rate, review,
That pushes the podcast out to more people who need encouragement. If you tell a friend about it, if you begin a ripple effect, we would be so, so grateful for that. Thank you for being here right at the start. We are so excited for what is ahead because we already have recorded some beautiful conversations and we’re looking forward to more. Next week, we’ll be back with therapist Cissy Goff to talk about the importance of delighting in our children.
We also are going to get to talk later on this season with people like Jordan Arigetti from Support Now, Eric Carter from Baylor University talking about belonging. We’ve got authors and podcasters like Heather Avis and Jillian Benfield and Sho Baraka and more. We would love to hear from you. You can send questions or suggestions to amyjuliabeckerwriter at gmail.com. And as we conclude, I do want to thank Jake Hansen for editing this podcast.
certainly thank Amber Beery, my assistant, for doing everything to make sure it happens. And I want to thank you for being here. I hope you leave this time with encouragement to start with delight, connect a community, and take the next small step toward a good future for your family.
