Reading · The Heart's Calling

I’m Emily Grabatin, and this Welcoming Slow Growth Podcast is a space for God led writers, entrepreneurs, and creatives called to bring hope and healing through your work. This season, we’re exploring stories of like-hearted people who chose one word to guide who they’re becoming…and what happened in the process.

Take a deep breath and let’s settle in together.

A conversation with Jodi Grubbs, author of Live Slowly

There’s a story behind how Jodi ended up on this podcast. It starts with a young woman in my writers’ group.

She had just come home from a vacation to the Caribbean island where she grew up. When it was her turn to share about what she was stuck on, she said:

“Oh, if only I could find my island at home. How do I create my own island? Because I am so inspired there. The words just flowed, the creativity — and now I’m in Canadian winter, cold and a busy work schedule, and I just moved and got married into a new place, and I don’t have my island.”

A little while later I came across Jodi’s book, Live Slowly. The whole premise is finding your island in the city and I immediately thought of my writer friend.

So I invited Jodi to the podcast.

Jodi grew up on Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean near Aruba. She left when she was sixteen.

“The book was probably, for me, a book of remembrance. I’ve just always, in the US, felt this busyness — the hustle culture.

And my body just couldn’t keep up. I would get sick. I would get burnt out, tired.

So I started remembering not just the faithfulness of God, but what did that look like tangibly? For me, it was going back to the island and pulling different things out — memories of quiet, solitude, peace, beauty.”

More and more women she talked to needed that same reprieve.

“I’m like, we all can have our island in the city. We can all have this soul care sanctuary. Sometimes we create it in our mind.”

One of my listeners had asked me this question: Why do we get caught up in hustle culture so much, especially in North America? Why do we keep running toward the very thing we say we want to leave?

So I asked Jodi for her perspective on that. She named two things, based on many conversations with women over the years.

The first: people pleasing.

“As a woman in the United States in this busy life, we feel like we can’t say no — like we owe it to others to be our best. We don’t know how to choose ourselves if our capacity just isn’t big enough. We all have a different level of capacity, and we need to honor that. God made us that way.”

The second one rang true as well.

“The big thing I think is something I was running from, and I’m finding a lot of people have been running from — and that is grief. When we are busy, we don’t have to stop and think and live through some of the hard things. It’s just easier to keep busy.”

I’ve learned that myself.

In my late twenties, when my first marriage ended — within three days, he was gone — I made a choice to actually go to the dark place and feel everything I was feeling. I was starting to recognize patterns of people pleasing, insecurity, rescuing. And I thought, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life repeating the same mistakes.

Jodi nodded when I shared that.

“The really rough lesson I learned was that if we don’t slow down, slowing down will be chosen for us.”

She learned it twice. First when her husband was seriously injured and she quit work to care for him through nine months in and out of the hospital. He passed away. And again, years later, when her own body started refusing to keep up.

One vivid image keeps coming to my mind from the book and this conversation.

A young Jodi, stretched out on a big yellow raft, anchored just off the shore of her island backyard. Sun on her face. Water lapping around her. A giant blue sky and shore stretching beyond her.

Jodi recounted what it was so significant to her: “I felt close to God. So I’ll remember that yellow raft – I call it reef lounging.

And at other times, we have to physically go find our little rocking chair somewhere near a rose bush and sit with our cup of coffee on the way to work. Sometimes you can only take two minutes — just pause in solitude with yourself and God.”

She calls it soul sanctuary now. Whether it’s a physical space or one you hold in your mind, it’s a place where you stop performing and simply receive. It’s where all five senses slow down enough to notice what’s actually present.

As Jodi has leaned into this over the years, two words keep circling back: solitude and presence.

“I don’t even pray as much. I’m just quiet with God. Just having Him accompany me and sit with me — like in the empty chair. Just listening and having quiet time in nature, being in God’s presence. And so that has changed a lot for me.”

Solitude, she says, can sound scary — but it’s really just being alone without being lonely.

And presence — being fully where you are, not mentally living two steps ahead.

“I have a tendency to say, ‘Oh, I’m doing this so that I can do this in a year or two.’ And God was like, ‘No, live your life right now where you are, just right where you are.’”

These two practices became the quiet foundation of her creativity as she wrote her book. Because, as she put it:

“We can’t ever be busy and creative at the same time. More comes out the quieter I am.”

Jodi didn’t write her book on a strict schedule. She paced herself through the day, and when it was the best time for her mind and body, she’d stop and let the thoughts come.

“Opening the door for creativity to flourish is important, but we have to make the time and the steps to allow that to emerge.”

She also talked about immersing yourself in beauty as a kind of creative jumpstart — a walk through a rose garden, rain on a window, a patch of light. On an island, beauty surrounds you without effort. Elsewhere, you have to slow down enough to notice it.

She almost didn’t finish the book. And one day, during COVID, when she was feeling discouraged, wondering if the book was worth continuing, something profound happened. She was walking her dog near a train track, and a train passed by with beautiful turquoise graffiti — S L O W L I F E.

“It was like, what? I felt like that was a message just for me from God. I’ve never seen it again. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone to quick take a picture.”

That encounter was a special gift that was just for her. As she shared the story, I sensed a sweet awe in her.

It took Jodi six years to write Live Slowly. And when I said, “Well done,” she smiled.

“That fits. The live slowly sometimes, the writing of it. You have to marinate in it for a while. And live it out — check, do I really believe this? Am I living this out authentically?”

Near the end of our conversation, Jodi talked about another simple ‘live slowly’ practice: open hands. It’s a posture she returns to constantly, even now, texting the emoji to her best friend.

“We have to get to a point where we just let go of expectations, whether it’s in the industry we’re in, in the creative circles, and just let God use us in His timing.

God knows the timing of our culture, of society, of our own hearts, and when we’re ready to use our creative gifts at the time that He wants in history. And so we just have to trust that He knows.”

She realized her book might not have resonated with as many readers had been released before or after the pandemic. Her publishing house may not have been ready for it, either. Little did she know people were ready for exactly what she’d written at the time it was released.

“So the God knows the timing of our culture,” she commented.

Find Your Raft

In her book, Jodi shares many simple practices for how to live slowly in a busy culture. Soul sanctuary is one of them — and it doesn’t require a Caribbean island.

Finding your soul sanctuary revisits what she learned from reef lounging on that big yellow raft, anchored just off the shore, sun on her face, water lapping around her, that giant blue sky stretching beyond her. She wasn’t trying to pray. She wasn’t trying to create. She was just there — and without even knowing it, she was with God.

I’m guessing you don’t have a big yellow raft to go reef lounging. So where’s that space (real or imagined) where you can stop feeling like you have to perform or measure up, and you can simple be present and receive?

What do you notice in that place, when five senses can slow down enough to notice what is present?

For me, sometimes it’s my rocking chair beside my tiered plant stand with grow lights. With the patio door open, I hear the little pond waterfall and the traffic. For you, it might be a chair, a window, your own backyard, a patch of morning quiet before anyone else is awake.

The invitation is simply this: find your raft.

How can you be still and present with God and yourself — just a little longer than feels comfortable?

Jodi mentioned that busyness is often our distraction from unprocessed grief or people pleasing. I wonder if having a quiet space means we have to be okay sitting with some uncomfortable thoughts and feelings first — until they feel released — and then we can truly make space for our creativity to flow.

So what’s in that space when you slow down? Where do your thoughts go? What comes up for you?

Think about that. And let me know about the next quiet space you find.

Slow growth is still growth.

13 Live Slowly, Find Your Soul Sanctuary with Jodi Grubbs

Comments