Marian grew up the daughter of a research chemist and a stay-at-home mom in 1950s Michigan, sharp, driven, and set on a path in math and physics. She married a football coach, had five kids, and said yes to Christ young; but life didn't unfold the way she expected.

Her husband's zeal curdled into deception, a self-declared prophet, a cult of three families, a farm in the Ozarks, complete with hiding places for an end that never came. Twenty-two years of marriage, isolation, and spiritual abuse followed, along with a night in the woods when she nearly ended it all.

She's still working out why Christ never let her go, through a decades-long separation, the loss of her daughter and grandson, and a faith walk she describes not as one dramatic rescue but as daily, sometimes hourly, surrender.

This episode goes to places most conversions don't. Marian doesn't offer a tidy resolution, she offers the truth that some people are saved not once, but over and over, every single day.

Content note: This episode includes discussion of spiritual and emotional abuse, suicide, and the loss of a child. Listener discretion advised.

Rich Sullivan was raised Catholic on Chicago's west side, taught to kneel, be quiet and discouraged from opening a Bible. He walked away from church for years - turned off, as he puts it, by hypocrisy he couldn't square with what he was being told to believe.

But God wasn't finished with him. Following a miscarriage scare that brought him to his knees, he found his way back to church. What followed wasn't a clean turnaround but a slow, deliberate work: a mentor named Kent Adams, a well-worn copy of "Mere Christianity," and a heart God kept softening year after year until the hypocrisy that once drove Rich away no longer had power over him.

After nearly five decades in the same church, working through the type of pain that sends most people looking for the exit, Rich now watches his grandkids sing worship songs from the same stage his kids grew up on. He's got some blunt, hard-won advice for the next generation about marriage, forgiveness, and what it actually costs to stay somewhere for the long haul.

Three generations deep in one church, and still not done serving.

At 90 years old, Bob Dryden has walked with the Lord longer than most of us have been alive - and he's not finished yet. In this episode, we sit down with a man who's been a fixture at Sawyer Highlands Church for generations: a mentor to pastors, a spiritual grandfather to the congregation, and someone whose steady faith has quietly shaped the people around him.

Bob talks candidly about aging, watching his body break down, and choosing gratitude over complaint. He reflects on 38 years in one job (in a world where a little over three years is now the average), the weight of raising a family in faith, and the moments he wishes he'd done differently. He shares hard-won wisdom on staying rooted in Scripture, what makes a pastor worth listening to, and how he wants to be remembered.

It's an honest, unhurried conversation about a life fully lived - humbling, funny at times, and a good reminder that faith isn't about having it all figured out. It's about staying faithful to the end.

Episode Summary

Some people walk away from faith because it was never tested. Laurie walked away because it was tested too early, and too hard.

In this first episode of UNDONE, Laurie takes us into the parts of her story most people keep locked away - childhood abuse that planted a deep, understandable distrust of God, and years lost to drugs and alcohol as she tried to outrun questions she couldn't answer and pain she couldn't name. She had every reason to stay cynical. Plenty of people would have.

Instead, through the patience of friends who stayed close and the counsel of people who spoke into her life at the right moments, Laurie found her way to something she never expected: a surrendered life, and a faith that isn't naive about suffering but has somehow made peace with it.

This isn't a tidy redemption story. It's a real one. Wherever you land on the spectrum of belief - devout, doubtful, done with religion altogether - Laurie's story is a case against giving up on the possibility that things can still turn.

In This Episode

• How childhood trauma shapes (and distorts) our earliest ideas of God
• The long, winding road through addiction — and what it was really running from
• What it looked like when the right people showed up at the right time
• The difference between "getting fixed" and actually surrendering

Learn more about Undone

To learn more about Undone, support our work, or share your story, visit us at undonepod.com.

Every podcast has an origin story. Here's ours...

Pastors carry deeply guarded stories of the people they serve; stories that are shared in confidence - in hospital rooms and kitchen tables and parking lot conversations that stretch past midnight. Stories of people at the end of themselves, finding something they didn't expect. Stories of faith found late, doubt carried long, and grace arriving in the last place anyone thought to look.

For years, Mike Bettig - co-host of Undone - walked away from those conversations renewed. Filled. Reminded of why any of his work matters.

And then one day, a question formed that he couldn't shake: What if people could be a fly on the wall for this?

Not a sermon. Not a testimony service. Just the real conversation - the one that happens when someone finally feels safe enough to tell the truth about their life. The before and the after. The struggle and the surrender. The doubt that still creeps in and the faith that gets chosen again anyway.

That question is the seed that has become this podcast.

In this trailer episode, hosts Mike and Brendon sit down to explain everything. Where this idea came from and why it wouldn't let go. Who they are - a pastor renewed by these stories for years, and a reluctant seeker encountering them for the first time. What each episode will look like. And why they named it what they named it.

If you've ever wished you could sit in the room for the kind of conversation that changes people - you're about to get that chance.