What does it look like when you are set free in your life by God? Kim Walker-Smith of Jesus Culture joins Julie Lyles Carr on episode #141 of the allmomdoes Podcast. They talk about her journey, the pain and anger she had to overcome in her life, what it was like to allow Jesus to set her free, and what it is like to be led into a career she never expected.
Listen to “#141 – Being Set Free by God with Kim Walker-Smith of Jesus Culture” on Spreaker.
On the episode:
- A special, exciting announcement! We are so excited to have the allmomdoes Podcast with Julie Lyles Carr joining the Christian Parenting Network Family! in partnership with Christian Parenting we can join other parents and podcast hosts in getting these much-needed resources out to the world! More ears listening, more changed hearts, more kids being raised in the hope of the Gospel! We would love for you to subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to our email list on ChristianParenting.org/VisionaryFamilies so you don’t miss any episodes! Oh, and sharing is caring, don’t forget to share this with your fellow parent friends!
- Kim Walker-Smith
- Follow Kim on Facebook or Instagram
- Check out Kim’s new album “Wild Heart“
- Jesus Culture
- Follow Jesus Culture on Facebook or Instagram
- “There’s always something you can do to be faithful with what is in front of you.” – Kim Walker-Smith
- Subscribe to the allmomdoes Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts!
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:00:00] You are listening to the allmomdoes podcast from allmomdoes. And part of the Christian Parenting Podcast Network family, I’m Julie Lyles, Carr, your host. I am a mom of eight, and bestselling author. I have been married to my husband, Michael for quite a while now. And I am so glad that you are here. The allmomdoes podcast is just for you.
It is to speak directly into your life, where you are raising those kids. You know, we try to foster that great romantic relationship building up that career and the faith journey you’re on. This is a place where you’re going to find inspiration, information, resources, and community here at the allmomdoes Podcast.
I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr and I have someone I’m really excited to talk to. Kim Walker-Smith of Jesus Culture, the voice of a generation when it is come to praise and worship music over the last few years. And she’s a mom to three and she’s been navigating all the stuff you’ve been navigating being at home, all the changes in work, all the kids with you all the time.
Kim, thanks so much for being with us today.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:01:08] Yeah, thanks for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:01:10] So for my listeners who may not be as familiar with you, give us that little elevator pitch who is
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:01:18] Oh, well, uh, who am I first? I am a wife and a mother, as you said. Um, my kids are six, five and three. And I would say after that, then I, I just love serving the church and I do that through music and some other ways, but mainly through the music and I have been with Jesus Culture for 20 years.
I’m a little older than I look, but I’m good with that.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:01:43] Hey, that’s a great thing, right? Yeah. Sign me up for that designation. Yeah.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:01:49] Yeah. And that’s, um, I mean, I guess that’s a short version of, of who I am. I’m also a farmer. I have a little farm, so that’s like another kind of little weird piece of me.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:01:58] Oh, we’re going to have to talk about that.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:02:00] Yeah. Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:02:02] Let’s just start there. Talk to me about this little farm. So what does that mean to you? My grandmother in Mississippi was this phenomenal. She would just say she was a gardener that cam for all intents and purposes, the woman was. Farmer. I mean, she had an acre that she just grew everything on fed the neighborhood.
So I’m curious to hear what your definition of farm is in your world.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:02:24] Well, um, we live in a tiny little community called rescue it’s just outside of Sacramento, California. We have five acres, which is a good lot, but for a farm, I would say that smaller. We have chickens and goats, one sheep named donut. He is a black sheep and he is the troublemaker on our little farm.
I do grow a lot of food and I love doing that. And, um, my kids run around the property and, uh, Are usually filthy dirty and wild as you would expect little fun be
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:02:59] yes, totally on brand. Totally on brand. I had a garden I grew for a little bit, never had the kind of success that my grandmother did apparently was just not something genetically that.
Came through for whatever reason. I mean, houseplants beg for mercy. When I try to bring them home, they’re like, please, please leave me at the home depots and let some other soul who’s going to remember to water me, bring me up. But I did have one year that I did have a bumper crop of radishes, and one of my kids loved to lay the dirt and eat those dirty radishes.
I still think is why it really helped her immune system. So what a fun way to be bringing up your kids in this time and, and to let them have that outdoor life. Now I want to back up because you have quite a history. You know, I think for some of us who may have grown up in the church, that’s all we’ve ever known.
We sometimes can get this heading where we forget that people can have some really varied stories and how they come to God and how their gifts are revealed. So you were born and raised more in the Pacific Northwest, and then things went a little bit sideways when you were pretty young with your parents’ marriage.
Is that right?
Yeah. My parents divorced when I was four years old and I had three stepfathers after that. And, um, the marriages came pretty quick together. Um, and it wasn’t until I was almost 12 years old that my mom, she married my third stepfather, who was a Christian and very different than the other men.
Um, I had gone through a lot of abuse. Um, from my stepfather’s before him. And, um, he was a really. George was his name. He’s really incredible solid Christian who really changed our lives honestly, and got us going to church on a real consistent basis. But also that’s when we got involved in church, when it was more or less, like I’m a part of life, not just like something that you did randomly on a Sunday or a holiday, but it was really part of life and community and going to people’s houses and the potlucks and the, you know, the youth group and all those different things. But because of what I had walked through as a child and the abuse yeah. And the trauma, um, I had a lot a pain and mainly a lot of anger and had a really hard time accepting my, my new life and my new stepfather.
And it wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that, um, I had attempted suicide. And right after that, I gave my life to Jesus. I finally surrendered, but I said to Jesus, I will give you my life and I will follow you, but you’ve got to set me free because I can’t live with this pain anymore. I can’t live with this anger and this I’m just, I was just very, just in a lot of bondage from everything that I’d walked through and I didn’t realize in that moment, but that really set me on a journey. God answered that prayer of, of setting me free. And I went through quite a few years after that, just walking through inner healing and counseling, working with different people too, honestly. Get free, but kind of rewire and relearn things, honestly like, you know, how do, how do healthy people handle conflict?
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:06:05] How do healthy people handle disappointment? Things like that, that I just hadn’t learned, um, because I kind of had just had a lens of trauma and pain and anger. And so I kind of had to get new eyes a little bit to be able to, um, walk into life and into adulthood, uh, in a healthy way and in a, in a, a good way and in a free way.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:06:26] I think it’s beautiful that you bring up that yes, you prayed this prayer for freedom, but then there was a process and a participation that you had to be part of. And sometimes I encounter people who, for all the right reasons, want to show up within a faith community and have this bondage broken off of them, which is.
A beautiful and wonderful thing to be asking for that kind of transformation. But I think sometimes we forget to put the disclaimer at the end. Like it is sometimes when you see an ad on TV for, you know, a drug company or for something, and there’s all this disclaimer at the end may cause we forget to say, look okay being in that place where you want to be free, you want to be free of bondage. Sure. It can happen instantaneously, but sometimes a lot of time it feels like in my experience, God’s going to take you on a journey for that. So how did you reconcile and these early stages of being a Christian, praying that prayer praying such a sacrificial prayer.
Being willing to walk through the process instead of having what would have maybe felt more preferable, an instantaneous transformation.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:07:32] Yeah. Well, first of all, I didn’t have an expectation of God suddenly. Snapping his fingers and making everything good. Um, something that I’ve come to recognize, even with my husband, my husband had a very different upbringing.
His parents are still married. They really love each other. Um, he was brought up in a Christian home where church was part of life, even at home, not just something on Sunday, I’m a very safe upbringing, just a very happy upbringing. And it wasn’t until adulthood and even marriage that he started to actually face.
Challenges and, and things being hard or difficult or things that we were walking through as a family or as a couple. And it wasn’t until that time that he had to learn how to really honestly walk through the hard things with Jesus. And I think that sometimes that is a false perception that if you. I have a life with Jesus that he’s just going to make everything good and easy, but he never promised us that things were going to be perfect or easy, but he did promise us that he would never leave us or forsake us in the journey.
And so I think for me, because of everything I’d already walked through, I had zero expectation of, of everything just being easy. I had already, I already felt like. I knew life is hard. And, um, now I just thought, but now I have someone to walk, walk through this with me. The other thing that that changed for me was that I recognized that the pain and the anger was only something coming between me and Jesus.
And that the only way that I was truly going to get free is if I chose him above the offense above the question. So I kind of had this like, Demand at first, like why, where were you? And I was just a child child, and I, I didn’t deserve these things that happened to me. And these were tough questions that people didn’t talk about in church a lot.
And they didn’t really have those conversations. And, and because of that, I kind of held Jesus at a distance at first, but I suddenly recognized. The only way I’m actually going to get free of the pain and the offense and the things I’m carrying is if I actually, they lay those down and choose him above that.
And I got to the place where I just said to Jesus, I want you more than I want the answers more than I want that demand of anything else. I just. I want you and I, I acknowledge and recognize that this is actually the only way to freedom and it’s a painful process because it requires you to live with a vulnerable heart and an open heart to him.
And, and that’s hard because a vulnerable heart means that you might feel pain. You might feel you might feel things. And it’s easy when you’re in a lot of pain, too. Make yourself numb and just to shut down and just to live, uh, anger is an incredible coping mechanism in that time to help you feel numb, to not feel the pain.
But I learned that if I was really going to be free, I had to surrender those things. I had to bring my heart to him. I had to live with a soft heart and a vulnerable heart. And, um, that’s what I fought to do. And it wasn’t, uh, a one time decision. It wasn’t a, I just did it. It was, uh, Everyday process every day, every day coming and bringing my heart,
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:10:40] right. Just a discipline, you know, and that strange way that we take that, which can feel very esoteric, very spiritual, but we put legs to it. And in that way, it does become this discipline that just has to be lived out. Now, you’ve talked about the experience of moving around a lot. So you did have these very traumatic experiences of several marriages of having different stepfathers through of childhood abuse, but you’ve also talked about that moving around was really a challenge. And then the Lord leads you into a career that in many ways, because you’re on different stages across the world, in any given month, how do you think that all that moving around either prepared you or did it make you more of a home body? Did it change what you wanted to do for your kids?
Because I’m a kid who moved around a lot and I found it to be traumatic too, even though I didn’t experience some of the things that you did in your childhood, but moving it was tough. Moving was tough. So how did that play forward in your adult life and in the call that God’s put on your life?
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:11:35] Well, it was an interesting process.
Actually. It was very traumatic to always be the new kid and feel like you could never really like make friends or really settle down. Um, and then when I got into high school and my mom was married to this incredible man, uh, everything changed. I was school one school for all four years. The first time I had some consistency and it kind of created in me that like home body, like I know, I don’t know, go out and go anywhere. Yeah.
When I actually did leave home for college and everything, um, I just wanted to stay in my little town and just have my life and that’s it. I just, I had zero desire to travel or to go anywhere. And actually just the thought of traveling gave me severe anxiety. Like I can’t breathe anxiety. Like I don’t, I don’t want to go anywhere. And, um, as life began to unfold and I’m getting healing and I’m really changing from the inside out. And, uh, slowly God leads me into my career and what I’m called to do, which I never expected. Um, and the, the thing start opening up for travel and for going around the world, it was really hard at first because the homebody in me was very uncomfortable and wanted to be home.
I didn’t like being in foreign countries where it’s like foreign food and I’m not used to the customs or things like that. I got a stressed being in an airplane for so long, you know, all the. Horrible thoughts are going through my head. And I try not to think about those or whatever it is and it, and it took me a long time to really get comfortable with that.
And it was kind of like right when I got comfortable with it and I’m like settled in like, okay, I’m doing good. I’m handling this. Well, I’m not having the same anxieties I’ve settled into this is my life. Now. I feel like God is giving me some tools to get through that. And I get married. And then when my husband and I got married, I was 27 when we got married and actually neither of us wanting to have kids. And because I just thought, I don’t want to bring kids into this. This is a crazy life. This is, I feel like this will not be good. I don’t want to do to them. What happened to me where they’re just constantly moving around. Like no things. I’m not putting any child through that. And four years later, God really had changed my heart in regards to that. And my husband as well changed him as well. We both decided, okay, we’re going to, we’re going to go for this. And I remember when I was pregnant, I was so afraid. Just I’m going do, I’m going to ruin this child. I should just finish my be done with my career and just take care of my kid.
And I just kept feeling the Lord saying, um, I’m going to give you. I’m gonna give you the right kids for your life. They’re going to be equipped for the life that I’ve given you. I’m not going to force you to make a choice. I’m going to, this is going to blend together and, and, um, I couldn’t see how that would happen, but now being where I am, I totally see that my kids, they just have the, the personalities.
Like they, they ask COVID this pandemic we’re in right, right now has been so hard for them. They’ve been asking. When are we going to the hotel? Let’s go on the bus. We’ve been home for too long. I want to leave. And at one point they’re in the car saying, we want to worship for like, you’re so done with this, you know, I’m there.
And I realized like, God really did just equip them for that. They’re, they’re really comfortable with, um, new faces. They don’t, they don’t get shy really with people. Um, they just fit into our life and are happy and they hit their moments every now and then when they are just like, we’re done, we want to be home.
And I pay attention to that. And I clear out my schedule and I go home and we’re home for the time that they need to be. And all of a sudden they’re going, Hey, when are we going back out again
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:15:29] on the road,
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:15:31] get back out there.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:15:33] I love that. And, and you bring up that you guys have been home. I mean, for your kids who are so used to being on the road, you’re in this extended play season.
I look back and I think it’s so cute. I remember when all this started, I thought, Oh, it’ll be a handful of weeks. And. Here we are. I mean, we are rolling into the fall, like nobody’s business. And for any of us in the speaking, writing, you know, music, ministry, areas of life, right now, this has been such a shift from everything that we have known.
It has been such a, I wouldn’t, I don’t want to even say it’s a stall out because when I talk with people, I’ve seen them come into these new areas of creativity in ways that are really beautiful, both in the things they’re known for. So there may be. Books or music or whatever that’s coming out of this season for them.
But then so seeing people explore new things that maybe they haven’t had time explore and they find God showing up in this really creative way. Have you had an experience like that during all of this where you’ve just had a creativity, not just for the farm and not just for donut the sheep, but for things that you’ve had some time to pause and, and play around in.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:16:36] Well, I guess there’s two things with that one. So I homeschooled my kids and I was doing that before all this started. So like, like you said, and like a lot of people, when everything first shut down, I was kind of thinking, Oh, it’s a few weeks. It’s, it’s fine. And nothing really changed for me. I’m still at home, still homeschooling my kids, like nothing’s changed.
Um, but then as time went on further and, um, all of my events got shut down and it’s not just. Um, this is what I love to do and my, my career and my life, but this is also, this is my income. This is my finances. Like it’s, it’s affecting everything. It’s and even the like, um, I felt so sad, not being able to be in a room of worshipers, just, um, the beauty of when the church comes together in worship and how incredible that is.
Like, this is just touched on so many areas. And so, um, it’s taken me a while to kind of shift my perspective and kind of find those moments of new things and all of this and good things. Um, and one thing. Good that has come is I feel like I’ve really thrown myself into motherhood even more. I feel like I’ve had a journey with, with motherhood, which has been, I’m always kind of doubting if I can do it well enough or do I have what it takes to do this?
Am I, I don’t want to mess up my kids. Am I messing them up? Am I, you know, just all these, um, the mom guilt, like a lot of moms. Have, and sometimes even feeling just ill-equipped to a mother, you know, and I feel like I’ve settled into that a lot more in this season. Um, just honestly, just having nothing else, but here I am at home with my kids day in and day out.
And I, there’s nothing else to look at or to do or to put my energy into. So I’m just putting my energy into motherhood in a new way I haven’t done before. Um, so. That’s been actually really fun for me and really good. And I think it’s actually brought even a deeper level of healing into my heart in regards to, um, my own relationship with my mother there and kind of pain from the past or, you know, things like that.
Um, and then the other thing is. Just looking to God, like you said, for new, new creativity. And, um, I have got like some new ideas kind of brewing and kind of throwing myself into to things that I before may have gone. Ah, no, thanks. Not for me, but I’m like, okay, well maybe let’s give it a try.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:19:07] Yeah. See what happens.
See what happens. You bring something up that is really. A fascinating component for anyone who is doing something on the ministry side and in 2018, because I, for a long time was on a church staff and I was, I was pastoring women. And then I was speaking and writing and all the things. And in 2018, God really laid something on my heart that I wrote down.
And I kept writing down in these last two years since then, which is God is not the job. God is not the job. And this season where so many of us have discovered that we’re home and all the things we had planned canceled, and we’re not on the road doing whatever. Or if we’ve been serving at our church, either in a volunteer position or as staff and all of a sudden people can’t be in the building or they’re in the building and very limited numbers, I think that exposes it even more where at least for me, where God had become the job and I needed to get.
Clarity again on the difference. How do you work on that in yourself? Because you do have a career in music, you are on the road, this is your livelihood. And yet it feels like there’s sort of has to be this distinction between making that, which is your livelihood, not your ultimate devotion to God. How do you work that out?
Because it is, it is some confusing, confusing lanes.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:20:26] Yeah. I think, um, for me, it’s staying really connected to people and staying in community, um, if you’re on the road all the time and in ministry all the time, or like for me, music on a stage, back in green rooms all the time, whatever it is, it’s very easy.
Like you said, to kind of make it the job and really forget about the people that you are ministering too. And the things that they’re walking through and facing, and sometimes what people need more than, um, a good song is they need a friend to walk through something with them. And so, um, I just fight really hard, honestly, to stay really connected to my people and to do life with them and community with them, my closest friends.
Um, do not have ministry careers. My closest friends are not people that anyone would know. They’re um, just moms like me that have walked through some really hard things, some really challenging things. And, um, it’s been. Like one of my friends, she had something really traumatic happened to her and I was on the road during a tour and she called me in the middle of it.
I’m crying and weeping. And I just sat and wept with her and cried with her. And it meant a lot to her that I would take the time out on my tour to. Talk with her and be with her, but it meant so much to me that she knew that she could call me right. That I wasn’t too busy for her, that she knew that I love her and care about her enough, that I wanted need to talk with her and be with her in that moment.
And, um, I think that one of the greatest ways that you can get out of that mindset of it being a job. Really staying connected to the people and remembering that we’re all, we’re all just people and we’re all just living life. And we all have hardships that we’re facing and challenges. And I’m just remembering what got me into this to begin with.
I did not ever dreamed that I would be in this. Career or this life, this isn’t actually what I tried to do. It’s not what I do. I was pursuing early on in my life. I just kind of stumbled into this in my pursuit of Jesus. And it’s my love of people and my love of him that led me into it. This, and I, I try to just, uh, remember that this is why I do what I do.
This is why I write songs. This is why I travel. This is why I, I do music and ministry because. Of my heart, number one for Jesus and my heart, number two for people. Sure. But to stay connected to that, I’ve got to stay connected right. To people. So I really make it a priority even when I’m on the road, even when I’m busy too.
Like if I’m home and I have two weeks at home, I am calling up my friends. I am at church on Sunday. I am getting in, in the lives of my people and my community and staying connected to them even while I’m out.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:23:26] Right, right. So important to stay connected in those ways, even if it has to be virtually right now, but still to make those efforts connected.
You mentioned that this was not initially what you set out to do to have this music career, to be on the road, to be known for all this beautiful music and your incredible voice. What were you pursuing first and what. Have you learned because in terms of, so often I hear from women saying, I’m trying to figure out what my purpose is.
I’m trying to figure out what my call is. I really, I think I’m supposed to be doing XYZ, but nothing seems to be working that way. And that seems like it should be this thing that God would want for me, because it would be serving him. And I would be doing this, that to me, it can be really confusing trying to figure out.
What your purpose and your call is. So what did you start out in? And then when did you begin to realize, okay, he’s going to do something completely different that you couldn’t really manufacture or market yourself into that
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:24:19] position. Well, my dream, my whole life and growing up was to be the first woman president.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:24:28] There’s still time.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:24:30] There’s still time
I can do it. Um, so my, my plan was to get my degree in history and then go onto law school and just kind of worked my way through. But. Um, all of that changed when I realized how bad I was at college, my grades were not good. And I was like, I am not cut out for this.
And, um, eventually through various jobs, I always had a job. I was always working and it was just kind of like, I was just going into a lot of different things, but I got a job at a bank and. Uh, through my stepfather, actually, he was vice president for a bank and, um, he helped kind of get me a job, just an entry level teller, but I worked my way up to where I became a banker and I was processing loans and I found that I really have a knack for business, and I really have a knack for numbers and I really loved it.
And I was thriving and I was doing really well with sales. Of course, it’s sales with loans. And, um, I just, I loved it so much. And we were probably like three albums in and I would take vacation days to go and do conferences or do ministry events and things like that. And it wasn’t until our pastor and the one who started Jesus culture was saying, Kim, when are you going to realize God is calling you into ministry?
And I think it. Well, I realized was I was kind of looking at it like, Oh, that’s never going to pay the bills. Like I gotta be diligent and, and I gotta, you know, be responsible. And it just felt like this huge leap of faith to, to leave the safety of a job and to jump out there and trust that God, God is my provider.
Not the job is my provider. And that was really big lesson for me to learn. Um, and so I did it. I just jumped out there and it’s funny because I remember one day. Um, I was in a Q and a, and someone asked that question, like, how do I, um, I feel like God is called me to do like what you’re doing. So how do I do it?
And yeah, it made me just kind of stop and kind of go, Oh, I am living in my calling and kind of look around and go, how did I get here? I don’t know how I’m not here. I did like, and um, I realize I really made him my focus, not the dream and not the, the goal. So what I try to encourage people with is don’t put so much focus on whatever it is you’re trying to do, but put your focus on him.
It says in Proverbs, that man makes his plans, but the Lord aligns his steps. And I really believe that if you have your eyes. Fixed on Jesus and you’re moving towards him, always pursuing him that he will lead your steps and guide you exactly where you’re supposed to be. And he’s faithful to open the doors when they’re supposed to be open.
His timing is perfect, but the other thing I think that’s so important. It’s just being faithful. If you feel like God has called you, let’s say to, um, uh, a career as a preacher, but you don’t have a platform right now, or you don’t have a church to preach in. Well, you could start right now. Doing, you’re doing the work of creating sermons, studying the Bible, um, putting in the time to practice your speeches and take a speech class, like so many things that you can be doing to actually prepare yourself so that when the door opens, when God opens that door, you’re ready to hit the ground running.
So I think that there’s, there’s an element of don’t despise where you’re at, but actually faithful to what is in front of you, whatever that is, whatever that that looks like. And so I think sometimes feel like also just like sitting and waiting, thinking that something’s just going to like fall in their lap.
The dreams is going to fall in their lap. When I think that there’s, there’s always something you can do, um, to be faithful with what is in front of you. I, I say it’s like, if someone gives you a whole bunch of ingredients and says, show me all the things that you can make with this. Well, my personality is.
I’m going to push that to the extreme. I’m going to make as many things as I can. And I think sometimes we will make one thing and go, okay, I did it right. What’s next. Right, right. Without kind of being creative and going no, like really being faithful, like show me everything that you can do in this time, in this season to prepare for what’s ahead.
So yeah, I would just encourage people with that. Just being faithful and being our eyes fixed on him.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:28:43] The thing I keep. Circling back to in my own life is discovering that little jobs I had here and there, or experiences I had or things that I was practicing back in the day, Kim, it just amazes me how those things come back around and God will use it to me.
I often say nothing’s ever wasted in God’s economy. He just comes back around and things that you didn’t think would be germane to anything you would be doing in 2020. All of a sudden you discover that you were being prepared for something so that you could put so into someone else’s life or so that when a door opened, you were ready.
I love your perspective on that. What has surprised you most about motherhood? Because I tell you my husband, Mike, you know, I’ve got, we’ve got eight kids and there are ours they’re together. You know, all the things it’s this family that, that God has built. Mike was one of those guys who did not want kids.
I thought maybe I’d get one out of him and maybe a cat. I was trying to figure out the bargaining on what was going to happen. So what has surprised you most in mothering since it wasn’t something initially that you thought, Oh, this is something I really want to chase. This is going to be really central to who I am.
What, what is it? Is it that you kind of go, Whoa, who knew.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:29:48] Yeah. Um, okay. So one is definitely the kind of, um, mom’s intuition. Yeah. They just, yeah, it shows up when you become a mom. It’s weird. I remember my mom always saying to me things like, well, I got eyes in the back of my head and I believed her as a kid, like.
So, how did she know the things that she knew? Like, I couldn’t get away with stuff, you know? And I recognize with my kids, like I’ve had times like weird things. Like I remember on a flight to Norway one time. Um, my, my oldest son, he was just about a year and a half and sitting next to me in his seat, he was sound asleep on the plane.
And I sat up, I came out of it, just a dead sleep, and I suddenly had this feeling, something was wrong with him. And I turned really fast and and I looked at him. He’s just. Sound asleep. Totally peaceful. Like just. Nothing is obviously wrong with him looking at him. And I was like, that was weird. Maybe I had a bad dream.
And just as I’m about to lay back down, all of a sudden he sits up and just starts vomiting everywhere. And I was like, okay. I was already kind of, they’re like ready. Like you didn’t just. Two nights ago, I had one of those moments again, I just wake up out of a dead sleep and I feel like something’s wrong with my daughter.
I go out to the house towards her room and just, as I step into her room, she sits up screaming. She was having a nightmare and she’s just reaching out for me, wanting me to hold her. And she was shaking. She was so scared and I was already right there in her room. And I was like, yeah, How did I know that it was just weird stuff like that?
This mom intuition. The other thing that’s really surprised me is, um, and this might make me, it makes me feel emotional every time you think about it, but like their resiliency and their forgiveness. Oh yeah. They’re so quick to forgive, and I fail when I mess up there, they just, um, It’s just so incredible to me that I can have like these really hard days where I just feel like I’m failing as a mom.
Like I was short tempered, I was impatient. I was, you know, whatever. And at the end of the day, they just want to cuddle. They tell me how much they love me. And I, I think, man, they just, they are so quick to forgive. And they’re just so resilient and they just still love me and need me and want me, despite my flaws.
And that is, um, That’s been really surprising and incredible and wonderful actually to experience.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:32:16] I love that. I love that. Well Kim Walker-Smith? The new album is Wild Heart. I want my listeners to go find it. We’ll make sure that we put links in the show notes so they can go check that out. And that’s a solo album, right?
That’s the first one you’ve done in a while.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:32:29] First one, I’ve done it about almost four years. So it’s been a little while. Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:32:34] Super exciting. Wild Heart is the album. Kim Walker Smith is my guest. Thanks so much for being with us today. I have just loved hearing your thoughts on all things, motherhood and creativity and the all the things.
Thanks so much.
Kim Walker-Smith: [00:32:45] Thank you.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:32:47] Check out our show notes, where you can connect with our guests and find out more. Do me a favor and subscribe and share the podcast wherever you get your podcasts from and leave a five star rating and review it helps get the word out about the podcast. And thank you so much. Connect with me particularly over on Instagram. I love me the grams. I’m Julie Lyles Carr. There. I’m so thankful to interact with listeners each week. I just love it. So head on over and say hi. Thank you. Thank you to Rebecca, our content coordinator and Donna, our producer, the dynamic duo who make this podcast possible go to alllmomdoes.com For an awesome resource and community for women walking through many of the same things you do with kids and spouses and work and faith.
It’s such a great place for you to connect and refresh. I’ll see you next week with another fantastic episode of the allmomdoes Podcast.
