You Don't Have to Lose Yourself to Find God: Kristi Garcia on Inner Authority, Wholeness, and Feminine Discipleship

Kristi Garcia is a poet, a lifelong learner currently in nursing school, medical interpreter, public speaker, and someone I met through the Elevated Mother Collective. Her debut poetry collection Women Who Knew gives voice to the women of scripture from their own perspective, in their own words, and it is one of the most unexpectedly moving poetry books I have ever read.

✨Listen to the full episode or read for the breakdown.

What Women Who Knew Actually Is

The book started with a spark. Kristi heard the Christmas song Mary, Did You Know? and found herself asking the obvious follow-up question.

What would Mary say back?

That question became a poem. That poem became a collection of nearly 50 first-person poems, each one written from the perspective of a woman in the Bible, each one imagining what she might say if she had the chance to tell her own story. Kristi wrote the entire book lying in bed next to her toddler after getting her to sleep, phone in hand, asking herself who had a message to share. She says it poured out of her in about three or four months and that the process felt sacred in a way she did not fully expect.

She became friends with these women in the process.

She even woke up in a cold sweat after submitting the final manuscript to her publisher, realizing she had forgotten Noah's wife. That poem has since been written and will appear in her monthly poetry subscription.

The Theme She Did Not Plan For

One of the most striking threads running through the book is infertility. Sarah, Hannah, Elisabeth, Rachel. So many of the women whose stories are told in scripture are defined, at least in part, by their struggle to conceive. Kristi did not set out to write a book about infertility, but she could not ignore the pattern. She experienced her own fertility journey, welcoming her daughter via surrogacy after miscarriages, and found that the women of scripture were speaking directly to something she knew personally.

Her broader insight was this. Women meet God differently than men.

The hero's journey sends men outside themselves, up the mountain, into the wilderness, to prove and conquer and return. The heroine's journey is internal. It is a coming home to the self. And the pattern in scripture reflects this. God does not typically tell women to go somewhere. He comes to them. At the well. In the kitchen. In the middle of ordinary life. Kristi believes this is not incidental.

It is by design.

Women have more sensory nerve endings. Our physical senses are heightened. What if the way we experience God in our bodies is not too much or too emotional? What if it is exactly how we were built to receive Him?

"You don't have to lose yourself to find God. You don't have to disconnect from your body and say it's lesser in order to be a faithful disciple."

Inner Authority and the Lighthouse

"God's authority and my authority as a divine being, a daughter of God, are the same power in two different channels. It is about alignment, not hierarchy."

Kristi talked about the difference between inner authority and higher authority, and how for a long time she thought of them as a hierarchy, with God's voice at the top and her own intuition as a secondary confirmation at best.

What she has come to believe is different.

They are the same power in two different channels.

She used the image of a lighthouse with an upper and a lower light. The upper light guides the ship toward home. But without the lower light, without alignment, the ship still wrecks on the rocks. Both lights are necessary. Neither is lesser. For Kristi, discipleship is not about silencing the inner voice in favor of authority. It is about bringing the two into alignment.

She will die on that hill, and honestly so will I.

The Book She Is Writing Now

Kristi's next book is called Feminine Discipleship and it picks up exactly where Women Who Knew left off. It explores what it actually feels like to follow Christ in a female body, how women have historically been asked to make themselves smaller within organized religion, and how to reclaim a wholeness that Kristi believes God never intended us to lose.

She is clear that this is not a book about women being better than men or a call to dismantle structure entirely. It is a guide for women who want to ask the question she started asking herself.

What does it look like to be a female disciple of God?

And then to actually answer it, on their own terms, in alignment with both their inner knowing and their faith.

"I became friends with these women in the process. I was calling my friends. Have I called up Martha? Have I called up Priscilla?"

What Stayed With Me

There was a moment near the end of our conversation where Kristi said something simple that landed hard. She said the question guiding all of her research is whether she truly believes God is a God of love. And whether the things that feel like fear and control in religion are from God or from men who used His name to gain power.

For her, starting from a place of love changes everything. It changes how she reads scripture, how she navigates doubt, and how she holds space for the questions that do not have easy answers.

That is the middle ground I keep coming back to.

I am so glad this book exists and I cannot wait for the next one.

You're awesome

🌈Brynne

Kristi’s References:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kristigarcia.speaks/

Join her poem of the month club, newsletter and buy her book “Women Who Knew,” via her link on Instagram.

📕Women Who Knew - https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Knew-faithful-fearless/dp/B0FLLHC2CB

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Hi, I’m Brynne. I share my journey of becoming through stories and reflection - guided by a higher power as I explore identity, faith, and everyday life, inviting you to grow alongside me.

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