Lisa-Jo Baker

May 6

11 min read ⭑

“For the last few years, this has been a reminder of how God is constantly giving us what we don’t deserve. ... Whether it’s our neighbors literally next door or globally or the kids in our own household, there’s something about being willing to receive that free gift that really does grow one’s ability to pass it on.”

Lisa-Jo Baker looks around at the world and sees stories. Stories of ordinary lives that mean something special, something Jesus saw as worth dying for. This view of the world influences her entire life—from how she spends her free time to the work she’s done as a former lawyer, leader of the (in)courage community, acquisitions editor at W Publishing, bestselling author, and co-host of the Out of the Ordinary podcast. Today, we’re catching up with Lisa-Jo to talk about her memories of South Africa, her journey toward healing and wholeness, and the top movies, books, and music that stir her soul.

The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

I am South African. My whole family and extended family lived there. I came to the States for college because I was 20 and I thought it would be cool to do that. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with the cute boy with green eyes from Michigan. So we ended up transplanting to the States. I live on the East Coast now, but I am constantly homesick for South Africa and the food and family we enjoy there.

My favorite restaurant in the entire world is located in South Africa. It’s a chain, so they have them in any city you go to, and it’s called Ocean Basket. It’s seafood on a giant platter, served at tables that have newspaper-style tablecloths, family dining, and the most beautiful, incredible seafood. I’ve never found something in the States that replicates what they serve at Ocean Basket. I ate there throughout my childhood and pregnancies—even though you’re not supposed to do a ton of seafood when you’re pregnant—and now, I eat it with my children whenever we go home to South Africa.

It’s like a pilgrimage going to this restaurant because it has all the flavors of home. Many generations gather around the huge tables, all eating until they can’t move, having long conversations, catching up, and then documenting it all with photographs. We actually have this expression in Afrikaans. If you translate it, it means “to eat for the hunger that lies ahead.” So when we’re at the table at Ocean Basket, we eat the food to fill up our bellies for the hunger and the homesickness that lies ahead. But we are also filling up on the company of the people and all of the stories we’ve missed while we sit at the table. So I always feel like it’s a place to stuff myself with as much food, as much memory, and as many of the people I’m related to as possible in these small pockets of time when we go back home to South Africa.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

Going to the movies. My mom was a drama and theater major. My brothers grew up to make movies for a living. I am a writer. I see the gospel through story-colored lenses. My mom actually used to take me out of school to go and see important movies. Once upon a time, she drew timelines to explain the Back to the Future movies to me. I don’t know anything better than the vehicle of story to bring you into the heart of the gospel. Jesus is my favorite storyteller. He knew that to get people’s attention, you need a great story with a plot, a protagonist, lots of drama, and then a twist ending you’re not expecting.

So in our family, movies are sacred. They are sacred territory to find our way back to Christ through characters whose footsteps we get to walk in. They remind us that the world is made up of all kinds of people and stories—and we can find Jesus in all of them.

I was really moved by the movie Wind River with Jeremy Renner. It tells the story of the disappearance of Native American women on the reservation and how little attention has been paid to those statistics. It’s really beautiful. Another one of my favorites, which we just introduced our children to, is Moulin Rouge!, a musical by Baz Luhrmann that stars Nicole Kidman and tells the story of loss and love. The movie’s arc introduces you to the grand themes we want our children to pay attention to in the world.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

I love this question because I have a 19-year-old teenage son who’s obsessed with Batman—the darkest of the superheroes. When my son wants to get to know people, he will ask them, “So what’s your origin story?” We all have one.

For me, my kryptonite is coming out of a family story and a family bloodline where our plotlines were really dictated by what I would describe as the language of violence, rage, and anger. I grew up in South Africa under apartheid with a father who had grown up on a remote sheep farm in the South African outback, and his temper came down through the generations. I inherited it. I was in the middle of a temper tantrum, screaming at one of my children, when I realized something had to change. We have to rewrite this part of our family history somehow. That’s been a big part of our parenting journey—rewriting that story so we don’t pass it on to our children.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

I just spent five years writing a book called It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories, and it’s doing what I just talked about. It’s taking my origin story and looking backward in order to go forward. It tells the story of South Africa, my father, and me and invites the reader to find themselves in those places we all live in. It shows the intersection of our past, present, and future, where sometimes we’re just caught up in a hamster wheel, thinking, This is just how it is. This is how our family operates. Part of what parenting invites us to pause and say, Wait, is it? Can I write a different story for my kids?

So I literally wrote a different story. I sat down and unpacked all of my origin story and my dad’s origin story. So the book is a memoir. It moves back and forth in time between my dad’s childhood and mine. My dad grew up in South Africa when it was developing almost a police state when it came to race, racism, and apartheid. I was born in the heart of Zululand, where my dad was working as a missionary doctor. The book describes my journey under his roof and in his footsteps from South Africa to the States (he came here to study as well). It really asks the question: Can we change the stories we’ve inherited? My hope is it gives the reader a reminder that it’s just never too late, no matter how old you are, to write new stories for the next generation.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

The word “grace” in the Zulu language is umusa. It’s an interesting word because it holds a double meaning. It means both grace and humanity. It’s a great reminder that our humanity is connected through grace, the grace we extend to one another and the grace Christ extends to us.

For the last few years, this has been a reminder of how God is constantly giving us what we don’t deserve. The act of receiving his grace is then incumbent upon us to pass it on to others. Whether it’s our neighbors literally next door or globally or the kids in our own household, there’s something about being willing to receive that free gift that really does grow one’s ability to pass it on.

So for me, the Holy Spirit has been there throughout the writing. I think of him as this very unique storyteller who offers us his perspective on our lives, including when we sit down to write books. That’s sort of the amazing advantage of being a writer. We are forced to pay attention to our stories, and in so doing, we get to see firsthand where grace was at work all along.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it: which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?

It’s an ancient one that I’ve never done before. I’m in a season of a book launch and then a child launch. I have a senior graduating high school this year and going to college for the first time, our first one leaving home. I also have a full-time job.

In this full season, I’ve often felt I’m too busy to do what the Desert Fathers and the ancients have practiced, which is to pause and pray the Daily Office. It’s where you pause and reflect in the morning, the noon, and the evenings. I’ve never done this before, but I had become so overwhelmed when someone passed a book to me by Peter Scazzero called Daily Office. It has great readings, excerpts, and periods of quiet, reflection, and doing, which have been a wonderful way to rightsize my sense of importance.

It’s just a good reminder that what I do is passing away. It’s not as significant as we may believe sometimes. And so pausing to pray the hours has been really helpful to me in reorienting throughout the day.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are some resources that have impacted you?

I am impacted by other storytellers. There are two books in particular that have shaped my thinking over the last few years. The first one is All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way by Patrice Gopo. It’s meaningful to me because Patrice writes about race and identity. She has Jamaican immigrant parents, but she was born in Alaska and is married to a man who’s from South Africa. So that has been meaningful to me as she interprets the questions and reflections when it comes to race and how we have conversations about who we are in the world. The book is stunning.

Then there is another memoir by Sean Dietrich, Sean of the South, called Will the Circle Be Unbroken? It’s a memoir of a boy from a very southern family. In that sense, it’s very different than mine, culturally speaking. But it is the most beautiful interpretation of a very traumatic, violent father. Sean is a man of faith, and his story of finding God through a lot of the questions of his painful childhood was deeply resonant for me.

Then I’ll add music. There’s a South African group named Ladysmith Black Mambazo. They were on Paul Simon’s Graceland album, probably where they’re the most well-known, but they have tons of music of their own. Their music and how they sing about pain and country and place and journey and identity and folklore—everything about their music is phenomenal. It has been the soundtrack of the last two decades of my life.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times—times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

This is going to be out there, but for me, it’s really this family unit that I’m part of. This is our last year with everyone living under the same roof. As somebody who is a transplant to America, I’ve never had immediate family here. I’ve always been the outsider, the kid who has to hope someone invites them home for Thanksgiving. I’ve built my own family unit. I’ve built my own homeland here in the middle of America.

We’re in the sweet season of older kids who can drive and who are bringing their stories and their movies and their books and their interpretations and their Scripture moments to us. The sweetness of the five of us who are my zip code right now, my zip code of DNA and home, is so grounding and powerful. It helps me understand that my story is now becoming the smaller story, and their story is becoming the bigger story. It requires me to keep asking, What am I passing on to them? Who are they becoming? What resources am I giving them? Am I being present?

Just the delight of who they are as human beings. Getting to watch their much healthier stories walk out from under my roof compared to how I ran away as fast and as far as I could to another country when I was 18. To watch my 18-year-old leave home as a whole human who doesn’t have huge parts of his soul broken in half. Deeply, deeply edifying.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

A message that’s been in the quiet dark of my own heart for the last five years is now coming into the light and into other people’s hands. I’m a week away from the book being out in the world and readers being in it with me—the initial stirrings of how it sits with other people. For me, it was an act of obedience to write. It felt like God wanted to have a conversation about some really hard things, and in order to do that, he asked me to publicly tell a story so that he could have conversations with other people who didn’t want to tell the hard parts of their story.

I feel like I’m just starting to see the first few flickers of how it’s resonating with early readers. They’re responding in ways that make all the really hard, painful work meaningful. It sounds like the story is landing in ways that others can relate to. So this book is finally coming into the world. It’s been in process for so long, and I’m so excited about it. It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping is really the most meaningful new thing that’s coming out into the world for me.

There’s a quote that’s long been attributed to Martin Luther: “I have so much to do I shall spend the first three hours of the day in prayer.”

The idea behind these words is simple: The busier we are, the more we desperately need prayer. Of course, we always need prayer—not just when we’re busy. Still, there’s a lot of truth to Luther’s sentiment. When our lives are full to the brim with rushing, accomplishing, and doing, our minds can become consumed with what’s next instead of the grace Jesus offers us for the present moment.

“Be still, and know that I am God,” wrote the psalmist in Psalm 46:10 (ESV). “I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth!”

Ask yourself: Where do I struggle with prayer? In what ways do I view prayer as a to-do instead of as daily nourishment I can’t live without

Lisa-Jo Baker is a lapsed lawyer, current acquisitions editor for W Publishing (an imprint of HarperCollins), co-host of the Out of the Ordinary podcast, and the bestselling author of Never Unfriended along with The Middle Matters and Surprised by Motherhood. Lisa-Jo worked in the human rights field before leading (in)courage. Lisa-Jo sees life through story-colored lenses and loves people, movies, books, and helping other authors decode their stories. Originally from South Africa, Lisa-Jo now lives just outside Washington, D.C., where she met her husband. Their story together spans decades, languages, countries, books, three very opinionated children, and one dog.

Justin Camp