A Remix of Episode 1 of My Podcast

Hi! I'm Mandi, the Queer Christian Disabled host of Beyond Beautiful: Disability, Liberation, Love. Beyond Beautiful is my space to share stories, truths, and tools that help us reimagine and build a world where disability, justice and love are at the center.

People who have followed my journey for some time may remember when I first started podcasting, I created a podcast called Find Your Beautiful: Life through the Eyes of a Christian Disabled Woman. At the time, that title captured exactly where I was in my journey.

I wanted to challenge the narrow ways our world defines beauty by sharing my lived experience as a disabled woman grounded in my faith. That podcast gave me the courage to tell my story out loud. It helped me connect with people who felt unseen, and it became a space where I could share both the hard truths and the joy that disability brings to my life.

But over time, I began to realize something. I'm not the same person I was when I started Find Your Beautiful. I've grown and I've healed. I've moved more fully into my truth, not just as a disabled woman of faith, but also as a queer woman who believes that justice and love belong at the center of our work and our relationships.

So let me share a little bit of my growth story with you.

In 2018, someone asked me a question that completely shifted my faith journey. Would you be a Christian if you were born in another country? At first, this question shook me. That one question opened the door to what I now know as deconstruction. This is a process of examining not just what I believe, but why I hold those beliefs. This process forced me to look at Christianity not only as a faith, but as a system. When I began to see it as a system, I also had to face how religion, like so many other systems, has been used to oppress, to exclude, and to center power in the hands of the few while pushing those furthest from power even further to the margins.

This wasn't just theoretical for me. I have been directly affected by these systems as a disabled woman, as a queer woman, as someone navigating spaces that weren't built with me in mind. And yet, through that struggle, I discovered a few other things, a few gifts - the gift of my voice, the gift of relationship building, the gift of being able to use my story not just for myself, but to fight back against ableism, against exclusion, and against fear.

This is why I started Beyond Beautiful. It's about taking these personal experiences and weaving them together with the bigger questions and questions about faith, justice, love and liberation. It's about recognizing how systems harm, but also about dreaming new ways of being that heal.

We need to rebuild. We need to reimagine.

We need to do the work of creating communities where love is louder than fear and where liberation isn't just an idea, but a practice. For me, it's not just about finding beauty anymore. It's about going deeper, beyond what society tells us is valuable, beyond stereotypes of what disability, queerness, or faith are supposed to look like, beyond access as a checklist, and into real justice and liberation.

Beyond Beautiful is about moving into justice, liberation and love.