Christmas is about the love of God given to us in Christ. Love compels us forward through darkness and light—enabling us to grow and change, connect and relate, forgive and let go, and make a difference and seek justice.

This December, we’re celebrating Advent with you by offering four guided meditations by Dr. Pam King—considering how to cultivate the Advent virtues of hope, peace, joy, and love into our lives this year.

We’d be grateful if you considered the Thrive Center in your year-end giving. To make a year-end tax-deductible gift, visit thethrivecenter.org/contribute.

Don't forget that Season 2 of With & For launches with all new episodes on January 6, 2025!

Show Notes

• Jesus said, "As I have loved you, you must love one another.”
• “Love compels us forward through darkness and light, with its power to connect and heal.”
• Love for God, love for others, and love for yourself
• You are beloved.
• Breathing practice
• Attuning to sensations of love in your body
• What are these feelings of love saying about you, your values, your beliefs?
• What does love say about your deepest beliefs about what matters most in life?
• Who needs love from you today?
• How do you live out love in the world?
• What is one thing you can do to lean into love or to live out love?

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Joy is more than a feeling. It’s a virtue. And it’s something we can cultivate. We live into joy when we encounter who or what matters most to us. It’s associated with our life's deepest yearnings and connection.

This December, we’re celebrating Advent with you by offering four guided meditations by Dr. Pam King—considering how to cultivate the Advent virtues of hope, peace, joy, and love into our lives this year.

We’d be grateful if you considered the Thrive Center in your year-end giving. To make a year-end tax-deductible gift, visit thethrivecenter.org/contribute.

Don't forget that Season 2 of With & For launches with all new episodes on January 6, 2025!

Show Notes

• The Shepherd’s Candle—symbolizing joy
• Joy is more than a feeling. It’s a virtue.
• Cultivating joy through encountering who and what matters most to us
• Breathing practice
• Loving and joyful presence of God
• How are you experiencing joy in your body?
• Joy’s insight into our values, opening us up to creativity and connection
• Does pursuing joy require you to step out of your normal routine?
• What can you do to bring joy to another?

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Peace can be elusive, but if set an intention to be instruments of peace—both in offering it and experiencing it—it has the power to transform us. Peace is often an indication that life is in balance and going well, either in the immediate or the eternal sense.

This December, we’re celebrating Advent with you by offering four guided meditations by Dr. Pam King—considering how to cultivate the Advent virtues of hope, peace, joy, and love into our lives this year.

We’d be grateful if you considered the Thrive Center in your year-end giving. To make a year-end tax-deductible gift, visit thethrivecenter.org/contribute.

Don't forget that Season 2 of With & For launches with all new episodes on January 6, 2025!

Show Notes

• “Peace can be elusive.”
• Peace is more than a feeling—it’s an indication that “all is well.”
• Consider the Prince of Peace, who comes to dwell with us this Christmas
• Breathing practice
• What brings you peace?
• Where do you feel peace in your body?
• What has been preventing peace for you?
• “Peace is often an indication that life is in balance, and that life is going well, either in the immediate or the eternal sense.”
• Setting an intention to pursue peace
• “Peace I give you.”
• “May the peace of God be with you and pervade your life this week as you anticipate the coming of the Prince of Peace this Christmas.”

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Hope is powerful. It’s more than a feeling. It’s a foundation for getting us through even the darkest of times. The season of Advent provides the opportunity to attune to hope, become aware of our deepest hopes and desires, and then align our lives to hope.

This December, we’re celebrating Advent with you by offering four guided meditations by Dr. Pam King—considering how to cultivate the Advent virtues of hope, peace, joy, and love into our lives this year.

We’d be grateful if you considered the Thrive Center in your year-end giving. To make a year-end tax-deductible gift, visit thethrivecenter.org/contribute.

Don't forget that Season 2 of With & For launches with all new episodes on January 6, 2025!

Show Notes

• “Hope has the power to transform and involves our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.”
• Take hold of hope with simple steps of attunement, awareness, alignment, and activation
• Breath work
• Attune, in order to feel sensations of hope in your body.
• How are you experiencing or feeling hope in your body?
• Notice, don’t judge.
• What do the feelings of hope say about your deepest desires?
• Where does your hope come from?
• How can you align your day with your hope?
• How can you align with hope to reflect God's desires for you?
• What is one thing you can do today to lean forward into hope?

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

SEASON 2 is launching January 6, 2025! Subscribe to With & For today!

How can we reconnect, repair, and rebuild our fractured world?

We need grounded scientific insight that we connect us with what is good, true, and beautiful. We need wider perspective that guides us toward purpose, community, wisdom, and spiritual health.

Developmental psychologist, ordained minister, and professor, Dr. Pam King introduces Season 2 of With & For, which launches on January 6, 2025. Inviting guests with expertise in psychology, spirituality, and leadership, this new season will tackle practical questions with courage, openness, and hope—focusing on insights, stories, and exercises for how to reconnect, repair, and rebuild our fractured world. How to find psychological, emotional, and spiritual health, and how to find one another in love.

This season, episode topics include:

The power of positive emotions like awe, wonder, curiosity, and transcendence, along with other research backed practices that encourage them.

The dangers of spiritual and religious abuse, the psychological impact of childhood relational trauma, and how to heal from the wounds of the past.

The neuroscience behind our emotional health, its impact on how we develop, learn, grow, and make meaning.

The science behind core human relationships, the emotional vulnerability and power dynamics of intimate romantic relationships, as well as the challenge of parenting and being parented.

Why and how our moral lives and cultivating virtues are fundamental to joy and thriving.

The legacies of racial justice and consider the spiritual and moral underpinnings of nonviolent resistance. The healing properties of art, creativity, and beauty, and how they offer comfort and strength beyond words.

And much more.

Subscribe to With & For wherever you listen to podcasts and visit us online at thethrivecenter.org/podcast.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

If we want to bear good fruit in our lives, we must have strong roots. Good fruit must lead to love. As the Rev. Dr. Pam King offers in this episode, “Root into love so that you can live out love.”

Speaking on Jesus’s parable of the Tree and Its Fruits in Luke 6, she draws on theological and psychological resources to reflect on the role of active and intentional love in a thriving life.

Luke 6:43-45: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes bramble bush. The good person, out of the good treasure of the heart, produces good. And the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”

Show Notes

• Luke 6:43-45: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes bramble bush. The good person, out of the good treasure of the heart, produces good. And the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”
• “I believe this scripture … redefines reality and redefines fruit.”
• True love in *The Princess Bride — “Wuv. Twoo Wuv.”
• “True love is the greatest thing in the world.”
• “Root into love so that you can live out love.”
• What is thriving? What New Testament parables of Jesus express thriving?
• Redefining “Good”
• What is good?
• “Good” is a four-letter word
• There’s always a right answer in Sunday School: “Jesus”
• Defining the Relationship? Or Define the Reality?
• A reordering of values
• “… a radical reordering of values and a re sanctification of sanctioned behaviors. He describes the kind of conduct that is appropriate for this kingdom that he will be leading. It is love your enemies, do good out of love. Give generously out of love. Lend without expectation. Love your neighbor.”
• Fruit is a symbol of love
• Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, “The Home of God”—what is to come is coming now. “Inbreaking”
• Flux in congregational or community life
• The Reciprocating Self
• Conformity is not synonymous with uniformity
• “We are each invited to bear fruit out of our own giftedness.”
• “Bear fruit as yourself.”
• “Pam, you’re a good Pam.”
• “We bear fruit by living out God's love. in this world as ourselves.”
• Tree imagery in the Bible
• “A tree firmly planted, or some versions rooted, by streams of water, that does not get blown when the winds come by.”
• What kind of tree are you?
• How do you root into God’s love?
• Eli Finkel and third-person perspective taking
• “When people take a benevolent third person view in the Christian worldview, God's perspective, and they actually write those things about a person, the conflict is still there, but they're able to interact and care for that person more effectively and see that person more wholly.”
• “80 percent of Americans young people are lonely. We are in a cultural mode of despair in many ways. We are losing our relational capacity.”

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.