Storytelling, Podcasting and the Work of Belonging

Juana Jordan

“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” — Gwendolyn Brooks

Not long after my mother unexpectedly died in July 2024, something I could not have expected began to happen: I started meeting students who were also living through devastating loss. Some were part of our campus ministry community; others had been sent to me. They were grieving parents, grandparents, and, in some cases, friends who had only recently graduated.

The encounters felt disorienting because I was still trying to understand the loss of my own mother. I had spent years guiding others through grief. As a pastor, I had preached funerals, buried church members and family friends, and sat with grieving families in the aftermath of death. But this loss was different. It was mine. And for all my experience, I felt strangely ill-equipped to help my students.

I began to wonder whether words could really do anything for a pain this deep, or whether silence was the only honest response. That inner struggle left me exposed, wrestling with grief in a way I had never known before.

What became clear very quickly was that I could not carry this in isolation. I needed help learning how to live inside this new reality.

There is something deeply human about walking through grief, trauma, lament, and change in community. We see it in scripture: the mourners outside Jairus’s house in Mark 5 and the call for the wailing women in Jeremiah 9. We see it in cultural traditions that make room for collective lament. We even see it now on social media, where people share hospital photos, raspy voices, and heart monitor beeps with the world. What once puzzled me began to make sense. In moments of crisis, we want to know there is a community somewhere that can hold space for us. Even if we remain on the edges of it, it matters to know that such a space exists and that we are still within reach of its care.

This is how I was raised to understand grief: mourning is communal. It is a shared experience in which the community becomes part of the support that helps carry us.

This is also perhaps why poet Gwendolyn Brooks words have become both a reminder and charge: “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Because community building and gathering are not optional. It is how we survive. It is how we carry one another and ensure no one has to grieve, remember or become alone.

When I joined the Phygital Fellows cohort, I initially wondered whether I had entered the wrong room. I am not a technologist in the conventional sense. I do not code, build apps, or speak fluently in Java or Python. I am still learning the language of artificial intelligence and digital innovation. But over time, I came to understand that I do belong in this space.

I belong because I am a storyteller. And storytelling is a form of technology—one of our oldest and most powerful tools.

Storytelling preserves culture, sparks change, reshapes perspective, nurtures empathy, and transforms how we see ourselves and the world around us. A compelling story does more than transport us to another place or time; it invites us to feel, to recognize ourselves in someone else’s experience, and to imagine lives beyond our own.

Narrative allows us to share wisdom, build community, and make room for hope. It creates belonging. In that sense, storytelling is an ancient technology that continues to evolve, helping us heal, connect, and envision new possibilities for the future.

My podcast, In the Processor” was born out of this realization. I wanted to gather stories of Black grief, listen for wisdom about how we navigate loss and trauma, and change in our lives and create a space where authenticity, vulnerability, and community might help us find our way forward together.

This was not the only podcast I could have made. But it is the one this season of my life has asked me to create.

I have been out of pulpit ministry for several years now. For the last three, I have served in campus ministry. In that time, students have taught me something essential: campus ministry can no longer be defined only by Bible study, food, or as a clergy colleague reminded me, by efforts to secure professions of faith and funnel students toward pastoral ministry.

It must become something more expansive and more attentive to the realities students are actually living.

When we asked students what they needed, their answer was clear: campus ministry must help tend to their emotional and mental well-being too. In other words, they were asking whether ministry could be a place of spiritual care broad enough to hold the full weight of their lives.

Their question sounded deeply Thurman-esque to me. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman asks what Christianity has to offer those whose lives are lived with their backs against the wall. What Thurman shared stays with me still: until we can respond to what is most pressing in people’s lives, our proclamation will ring hollow. If our hearts do not break for what breaks God’s heart, we cannot faithfully embody the Jesus we preach.

Isn’t that what so many of us are looking for—points of connection, understanding, a way to be seen and known, and have some kind of compass for when the path ahead is unclear?