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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

Lenore grew up in Bankstown, rode the East Hills Baptist Church bus to Sunday school as a kid, got bullied at school, and found her safe place in an organisation some have never heard of: Girls Brigade. It became a constant through surgeries, hard seasons and big life changes. Sixty-nine years after Girls Brigade started at East Hills Baptist, Lenore is still there. In Part 1 of her Chip Lunch conversation, Joel and Brayden hear about a childhood shaped by life on the Georges River, a faith that was always present but took time to become truly hers, two surgeries in year 12, and a university degree that started in teaching, pivoted to business, and was interrupted by a week in Ghana at an international Girls Brigade gathering where she attended a four-hour church service, tried cow's feet, and had cold bucket showers. Lenore talks honestly about the gap between going to camp as a teenager and giving your life to Christ, and then going back to school and not really living it out, and the moment in her early twenties when she sat down with a pastor over several weeks and was asked the hard questions. That was when the faith she'd grown up with became genuinely her own. When Joel asks what made her think Christianity was the right one, given she'd been exposed to many other religions and worldviews at school and university, her answer is simple: it never felt like there was another option. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

When Alhana was last on Chip Lunch five years ago, she had just started full-time at JB Hi-Fi and was finding her feet. A lot has happened since then. In those five years: she stepped into a management role too early and burnt out, spent eighteen months largely absent from the Saturday night community she loved, got diagnosed with PMOS, PMDD and chronic nerve pain from shingles at twenty-five (the old person's disease) changed degrees multiple times, and eventually, on something close to a whim, applied for a Bachelor of Social Work at Wollongong. Got an offer four days later. Started studying. Six months in and it was the first time she wasn't sick of it Through all of it, God kept showing up in ways Alhana is only now able to see clearly. A management conversation that became the catalyst to step back. A month of Monday-to-Friday shifts that got her back to church on Saturday nights. A new person sitting alone at a table who needed someone to make her feel welcome, which turned out to be exactly what Alhana needed too. Alhana talks about the stubbornness that kept her away from community longer than she should have been, the pride woven through her work ethic that she's still untangling, the gift of finally being vulnerable, with people and with God, and why going through the fire, while awful, has made her better at everything she actually cares about. She's still a little bit on fire, she says. But she's coming through.

Dave Jensen grew up as the Archbishop of Sydney's son in Newtown, surrounded by Greeks and Vietnamese and punk music and heroin. He knew what genuine Christianity looked like because everyone around him had it. He just didn't have it himself. He got a girl pregnant, married young, joined the army, had two kids, got divorced at 22, and spent the rest of his twenties in Townsville and Darwin; drinking, fighting, lying and womanising in a way that would be extraordinary if it weren't, as he puts it, just par for the course in the infantry. He called himself a Christian the whole time and would have been terrified to say otherwise. Then one hungover morning in Darwin, he opened his twin sister's laptop and a John Piper sermon clip started playing. He watched it. Then another. Then spent hours watching sermons and called his army chaplain mate Tim, who told him plainly — Dave, your name is a byword for scumbag. And then took him to Romans 5. That was it. He fell asleep in tears praying and woke up a Christian. The first thing that changed was that he loved Jesus Christ. He didn't care before. Now he did. Recorded at Soul Revival's annual Week Away camp at Waterslea, Joel and Brayden sit with Dave, now the evangelism director at ENC for a wide-ranging, funny, honest and deeply encouraging conversation. They cover his Newtown childhood, army life, what it actually costs to preach well, how he met his wife Sam, raising four boys on the Central Coast, and what he'd tell his younger Christian self. His answer: be kind to yourself. The pathway forward isn't self-loathing. It's repentance and faith, over and over, grounded in the love of Christ. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

Katie was last on Chip Lunch almost five years ago, on episode 13. She's back married to Ethan, a lot wiser, and with a story she couldn't have told back then. Three months after the wedding, she contracted glandular fever. It triggered what she was told was an autoimmune disease. She spent two years on eight medications a day. Then a new specialist told her she'd been misdiagnosed the whole time, and she came off everything and felt immediately better. Then Ethan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Then a specialist told her she shouldn't have children. Then another specialist told her that wasn't true either. Through all of it, Katie has been a perfectionist and a planner trying to learn what it means to give up control. She has OCD, which makes that harder. She spent years grieving a version of herself that could do ministry at full volume: kids, youth, late night, Chip Lunch, all of it at once, and had to figure out what worship looks like when you can barely get out of bed. This is one of the most honest conversations Chip Lunch has ever had. Katie talks about anger at God, the fear that feeling angry meant she wasn't trusting enough, what Habakkuk gave her permission to do, what "going full Anderson" means in their household, and why she thinks God has been preparing her for ministry in ways she couldn't have designed herself. She went to Late Night recently. First time in four years. Her and Ethan ran the night together. For such a time as this. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

Every year Soul Revival packs up and heads to Waterslea Youthworks Conference Centre for five days of Week Away. Joel, Gemma, Brayden and Ethan hit the road to cover petrol station rankings, packing tips for girls' cabins and newborns alike, the best Week Away weather, what to expect from speaker Dave Jensen's series on Life on Purpose, why trivia is getting a shake-up, and a very important high-five attempt directed at a roadside traffic controller outside Campbelltown. There's also a genuine conversation about whether people, particularly young people, are hungrier for Jesus than they used to be, what makes a Jesus-shaped community different from a good soccer club, and why the after-dinner golden hour at Week Away might be the greatest thing the church does all year. Hit play at President Avenue and Acacia Road and sync up for the journey.

A guy on a building site said it about Nico after knowing him for four weeks: he really lives it. Not as a compliment you'd fish for. Just something a 16-year-old apprentice said out loud because it was obvious. Part 2 of Nico's Chip Lunch conversation picks up where Part 1 left off: with a Dutch migrant couple who arrived in Sydney in 1982 with no car, no connections, and a faith that had never really been tested because it had never really been doubted. What followed was forty-plus years of God's hand showing up in the details. There's the house in Gymea that they bought from the estate of a fellow Dutchman, with a Ritmeister cigar tin on the table and a shelf in the corner that read "Jesus lives" in Dutch. The title deed that came back forty years later stamped with a Netherlands bank. The factory job that came through a man from church. The church that came through a teacher at the local school. None of it planned. All of it connected. Nico also talks about what it actually looks like to share faith without making it a performance: the McDonald's arches he drew on a piece of timber to explain the two crosses at Calvary, the truck driver in a Dutch TV show who asked a reporter why he wasn't driving a truck, and why he'd rather do it than talk any day of the week. He and Frederika ran kids holiday club at Miranda Community Church for years. They've been at MCC for over thirty years. And when asked what he'd tell his younger Christian self, he genuinely can't think of anything. Because he never doubted it. Not once. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

Nico has been in Australia for 44 years. He got married in August, skipped the honeymoon, packed everything into boxes, and landed in Sydney on the 15 October 1982. He's never looked back, and he'll tell you it was God's hand the whole way. Joel and Braden sit down with Nico for a wide-ranging conversation that's part history lesson, part immigration story, part quiet testimony. He takes takes them through growing up in the Netherlands, where faith was woven into school, street, and daily life in ways that are almost unimaginable now. He explains the difference between patat and friet, why Dutch chips come with mayonnaise as the default, what Petit Oorlog, actually are, and how the whole thing traces back to Belgian and French debates that nobody has fully resolved. He talks about growing up in a village of 15,000 people with chickens and rabbits in the backyard, cycling 150 kilometres across a flat country to visit his uncle, and doing his civil engineering exams in fog so thick you couldn't see the telegraph pole across the road. He also talks about faith, not as a dramatic turning point, but as something that was simply always there. A Bible reading to start the school day. A Protestant church at one end of the village, a Catholic one at the other. The quiet sense of knowing that certain things weren't for him, without always being able to say exactly why. And then, at 26, a tea towel from Australia on top of a secondhand spin dryer — and a decision that would change everything. This is Part 1 of Nico's story.

Joel and Brayden pull producer Hudson out from behind the desk and onto the couch for a catch-up episode that goes deeper than anyone planned. What starts with fast food chip rankings and AI in marketing gradually becomes one of the most honest conversations the show has had about the everyday struggle of the Christian walk. Joel shares what it's like to coach an under-12s football team and realise mid-season that his pre-game anxiety has nothing to do with the boys and everything to do with his own identity and idols. Hudson opens up about noticing his temper for the first time, not just on the sporting field but in quieter corners of life too, and what it's meant to let God reveal something he didn't know he needed to work on. They all reflect on the pull toward self-reliance and the resistance that shows up right before prayer, even when you know that praying is exactly what you need. Woven through all of it is a thread from Habakkuk, the prophet who brings his biggest frustrations not to other people but directly to God, and waits there. The guys wrestle with what it means to wait actively rather than passively, to take your laments to the one person who can actually do something about them, and to keep showing up to church even when the week has been ordinary or hard. This is the kind of episode that reminds you you're not the only one still figuring it out.

Kezia grew up as a pastor's kid in a church full of elderly people, then she went to KYCK in Year & and thought: there are people my age who believe this. Kezia joins Joel and Ethan for a conversation that's funny, fresh, and surprisingly wise for someone still figuring out what comes next. She talks about growing up in a congregation where she was surrounded by grandparent-aged friends, learning to love reading despite her dyslexia, and the Instagram reel that made her cry after a breakup and feel, for the first time, like God was speaking directly to her. She also shares one of the most creative frameworks for understanding the fruit of the spirit ever heard on this podcast — each fruit assigned to a different fruit, each year of life shaped by a different virtue — and the journey of slowly realising that ADHD, dysgraphia and anxiety don't define her. God does. From a Fiji mission trip that overwhelmed and reshaped her, to church streaming during COVID, to interior design at TAFE and a job at Betty's Burgers at the airport, Kezia has learnt that God doesn't let anything go to waste. Not the hard seasons, not the uncertain ones, not even the ones where she had no idea what she was doing.

Erin doesn't have all the answers. She's not a deep diver, not an academic, not someone who can study her way through the hard questions. What she has instead is a childlike trust in a God who she knows is real, who she knows is there, and who she knows has it — even when she doesn't understand. Part 2 of Erin's Chip Lunch conversation picks up where Part 1 left off. After years of drifting in and out of church, Erin and her husband Chris found their way to Soul Revival: first to Kirrawee with her brother Pete, then to the small and eclectic Cronulla gathering. They stayed because Chris said something that stuck: maybe God put them there because the church needed them as much as they needed the church. Erin talks about what it's actually like to commit to a small church — the challenges, the deep relationships it creates, and the unexpected gift of raising two boys in a community where the adults treat them like real people in an intergenerational community. She talks about her brother Pete's longtime friendship with Matt Redmond, an old 1860s church building her family spent years restoring in the country, a husband who grounds her, and a dog named after Frank Sinatra. And when we ask what she'd tell her younger Christian self: just trust. Be open with God. You don't have to have all the answers. It's not a cop out, that's faith.