Some stories don't fit neatly into a testimony card. Ro Elliott's story is one of them. In this episode, Ro sits down with me to walk through a life marked by unexpected loss, hard-won faith, and the kind of redemption that only makes sense in hindsight.

Ro grew up in a tightly-knit Italian Catholic family outside New York City before her father's job transfer landed them in the deeply unfamiliar terrain of East Tennessee where she encountered Protestants, Baptist churches on every corner, and eventually, Jesus. What followed wasn't a neat conversion story. It was a slow unraveling and rebuilding that touched every part of her life,

and yet… Ro kept her grip on the God those communities had distorted, asked him hard questions, and found her way back, not just to church, but to genuine healing and community.

This conversation is honest, unhurried, and full of the kind of hope that has actually been tested. If you're in the middle of your own hard story, this one's for you.

Ro’s Website: https://www.roelliottconsulting.com/

Ro on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roelliott/

In the South, you can drive down the same road and see both of them… Spanish moss and kudzu… sometimes on the same stretch of trees. Both draped. Both familiar. Both so much a part of the landscape that most people don't look twice.

But up close, everything is different. One takes nothing. One eventually collapses what it climbs. One rests and receives. One covers until you can no longer see the shape of what was there.

This final episode in the Dormancy Is Not Death series holds both plants in the same hand. And the question I keep coming back to, the one I'm asking myself and asking you, is simple: which one am I tending right now?

Because the honest middle most of us are actually living in is that we have some of both. There are places in our lives where we've genuinely learned to rest and receive. And there are places where something has been growing longer than we intended and covering more than we realized.

I also want to tell you about the bald cypress, the tree that drops every needle in winter and looks completely, entirely dead, and why it might be the most important image in this whole series for anyone who's standing in their own stripped-bare season right now.

This episode ends with three questions. They're not homework. They're an honest invitation to look at your own landscape and tell yourself the truth about what you see.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

If you've driven through the South, you know the image… entire treelines swallowed whole, every individual form buried under a mass of relentless green. That's kudzu. And I think most of us have some version of it growing in the interior landscape of our lives.

Here's the part that I couldn't shake when I started researching this: kudzu wasn't snuck in. It was invited. Celebrated, actually. The U.S. government paid farmers to plant it in the 1930s because it looked like a solution to a real problem. By the 1950s it was classified as a weed. By the 1970s, a federal pest. What was subsidized and welcomed became what devoured the landscape.

That's the episode. Because the things that do the most damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious rebellion, they're the things we welcomed in because they looked like solutions. The coping mechanism that made total sense in the season we adopted it. The way of thinking about ourselves that started as protection and became a prison.

And here's the harder truth I had to say out loud first. You can deal with the vine all day long. Cut it, name it, make a commitment. But if you don't deal with the root, it simply waits and resends. The kudzu root goes seven feet deep and weighs four hundred pounds. The vine is just evidence. The root is the conversation.

This one's a little uncomfortable. But I think it's the kind of uncomfortable that's actually really good for us.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/