Chip Lunch

In Part 1, Nicola left us on a cliffhanger — hanging in the dark inside a Himalayan crevasse. Part 2 picks up exactly there. And then goes further back, to find out how a girl from Madang ended up on the side of a mountain in the first place. After her first engagement ended, Nicola went rock climbing. Then Nepal. Then, after completing her nursing degree, she moved to Nepal for a year to live with a Kiwi expedition company owner she'd met there. All she did for twelve months was climb. She summited Shishapangma, one of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks. She says it now causes her health problems. She says the view from the top was worth it. But the episode title doesn't come from mountaineering. It comes from a marriage. Nicola was in her first marriage — to a man she'd met adventuring, an atheist, the son of atheists — when she found herself sitting in a joyless house, not yet a Christian, and thought: if there is a God, surely there's more than this. There was. It just took a while longer to find it. This episode covers the rest of the road: a year of solo travel through Europe (and a reunion with her parents at a 5-star hotel in Venice, arriving filthy off an overnight train). Deciding, at 31, to do nursing. The new grads program at Sydney Children's Hospital, then the PICU and NICU. Meeting Scott — through helicopter transport training, both going through separations. Coming to Soul Revival expecting hymn books and robes and finding a warehouse in Kirrawee. Then doing Christianity Explored with Jai. The question that kept nagging: if there's a God, why do babies still die? And the day on the drive home, after a terrible shift, when she found herself mid-conversation with Jesus and burst into tears. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything.

Nicola grew up in Papua New Guinea, fourth-generation PNG-born Chinese, raised in Madang on the northeast coast. At twelve she boarded a plane to Sydney and started high school at PLC Pymble, thousands of kilometres from her family. It was boarding school she loved, she says — the lifelong friendships, the freedom within structure, the PNG girls who all stuck together. But it left her, perhaps, without the anchoring her parents would have provided. She'd find that out in her twenties. Those years were turbulent by her own admission. Failed economics at Sydney Uni. A stint at secretarial college. Honours in textile technology, then four rough years in the fashion industry; screaming bosses, impossible margins, Sunday dread. An engagement that ended. Through it all, something she describes simply as not knowing what she wanted. She was wild. She was searching. She just didn't have a name for what she was looking for. Eventually she landed in nursing, neonatal and paediatric intensive care, and never looked back. She now believes God led her there. The stress is real, she says, but the purpose makes it different. You're working towards something. A baby going home. A family staying whole. Enter Scott. A Christian. Early in their relationship, he asked about her values, her upbringing, what she believed; and quietly, consistently, brought every conversation back to God. She started going to church. Two years passed. Things started to shift. The turning point came in two moments. The first was a Good Friday sermon where Tim asked whether the congregation believed Jesus had died and been resurrected. Sitting in the pew, Nicola thought: yes, I actually do believe that. The second came weeks later on a bad day at work, driving home, she found herself mid-conversation with Jesus before she even realised she was praying. "It dawned on me then," she says. "I am a Christian. And then I burst out crying." But the episode title doesn't just point to faith. In her twenties, Nicola went high-altitude mountaineering. She fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas — hanging in darkness for 45 minutes before her team hauled her out. She got blown off a summit in New Zealand by 150km/h winds and slid down the mountain with two others, three ice screws popping before the last one held. She probably should have died, she says. She didn't. She thinks she knows why. Recently confirmed at Soul Revival, Nicola joins Joel and Tim to trace the long road God walked with her — from Madang to Pymble to a crevasse to a car on the highway. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything.

Rob is the first to tell you he's a hypocrite. He'll get annoyed at his kids for leaving the toilet seat up, and then realise it was him. He'll lose his cool working from home and snap at whoever walks through the door, and then feel the conviction of it. He tells his kids constantly: I'm a hypocrite. Not as an excuse to stay that way, but because he thinks modelling the ongoing, messy, unfinished nature of faith is important. In Part 2 of his Chip Lunch conversation, Rob picks up with the story of how he and Kate got together — through shared church community, scripture mornings, a lot of time at the Pad, and a brief break during which Rob discovered it was definitely Kate he was in love with, and not just love itself. They married at Parramatta, had two kids, and eventually made the decision Rob had carried for years: to move overseas and be used wherever the need was. The need turned out to be Qatar. Rob talks about what four years in the Middle East actually looked like; the family unit it built, the cultural lessons it taught his kids, and their youngest being born there. He also reflects honestly on coming home, re-engaging with church and community, and the way fatherhood keeps exposing things in him that God is still working on. Through all of it, the through-line is grace — not the polished, sorted, has-it-together version of Christianity, but the kind that acknowledges the log in your own eye, says sorry properly, and trusts that God has a reason for the stuff-ups too. When asked what he'd tell his younger Christian self, Rob says: nothing. God had a reason for all of it.

Rob was not the kind of kid who accepted things at face value. He asked questions. He pushed back. He wanted to understand why, whether it was in the classroom, at home, or eventually, at church. So when Christianity came into his orbit, he didn't just slide into it. He interrogated it. Joel and Brayden sit down for part 1 with Rob: engineer, husband, dad, and more, for a conversation that covers a sceptical upbringing, an intellectual path to faith, the doubts that have stayed with him, and why he keeps choosing to believe anyway. Rob talks about growing up in a household where questions were encouraged and certainty was earned, the moment faith stopped being something inherited and started being something he had to decide about for himself. He also talks about marriage, fatherhood, an engineering career. There's honesty here about the moments faith has felt hard, not just intellectually, but personally. And he keeps coming back to the same conclusion: this is true, and it's worth building a life on.

After years of serving at C3 church: running microphones, doing admin, helping with kids, Lenore found herself at a crossroads. The community she had built her adult life around was changing, the distance from home was starting to wear, and a friend kept mentioning a church in the Shire. She came to Soul Revival not knowing what to expect and found something she hadn't quite experienced before: a community where the teaching was deep, the people were genuine, and she felt, almost immediately, like she belonged. She reflects on thirty-plus years of serving in church and what sustained service actually looks like. Not the highlight moments, but the ordinary weeks of showing up, doing the thing, and trusting that it matters. Because it does. When asked what she'd tell her younger Christian self, Lenore's answer is characteristically honest: trust the process. The long obedience in the same direction. The life built quietly, faithfully, one ordinary week at a time. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything