Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Link. And I am Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we’re gonna do the Q&A that we said that we didn’t know if we wanted to do. That’s right. The “Lost Years” series, all along the way, we prompted you guys to use #EarBiscuits and let us know how you were processing and if particular questions arose, let us know. And I don’t think we said if concerns arose, let us know, but I guess that happened too. Yeah. Well, what we talked about last week was how we’re processing this whole thing and how we have a tendency, I think, maybe me more than Link, I have a tendency to, once I start looking at questions and thinking about what people are saying and asking, I start wanting to defend myself and to justify myself especially if I see that I’m kind of being misunderstood or misrepresented. But I am becoming a healthier person as I get older and I am learning more ways, just me and my ego and so we decided to instead of getting into answering questions last week, to kind of just get into our process, but also what we talked about was we don’t want this podcast to become a place where we’re just gonna spout off our opinions when it comes to things that we’re ultimately not qualified to talk about. And so, because you can very quickly get into this place where two guys who basically have been making a living on YouTube for over a decade, are sitting around and trying to tell you their particular apologetic, prospective– Giving persuasive arguments for what beliefs you should adopt is not something that we’re gonna do. Because there’s a lot of people out there who have dedicated their lives to studying some of the things that we talked about and they’re experts in their field and there are so many books that have been written, articles that have been written about all the things that we talked about. So it is up to you to go and do your own research, come to your own conclusions. But I do think that there were a lot of questions that were asked just from a very curious place like we told long stories about our stories and our faith journeys and we condensed them down into less than two hours. We left a lot of details out, we left a lot of people wondering about different parts of the process, wondering about how we think about particular things now and I’ve seen a lot of questions kind of grouped together. So, I thought and also I think these questions have also been coming from the Christians that we stay in contact with in our own lives, which is one question that we got. You guys, are you guys still friends with Christ? Yes, we’re still friends with lots of Christians and we’ve got really close lifelong friends who are still presidents of seminaries and Old Testament professors and pastors. And so, we’ve got a lot of people who can challenge a lot of the things that we said and we’re in conversation. But I think a lot of those questions come from a curious place and so we want to honor your questions, honor your curiosity and just kind of give our personal perspective. This isn’t designed to be like this is what you should think. This isn’t prescriptive. This is just to kind of fill in the gap of your curiosity if you have it. Yeah, so you’ve grouped together some questions which you’re gonna tee up. I know some of these but not all of them but yeah, for me, our stories are so different that they engendered a different flavor of response and when your story talks so much about the issues that it did, it invites people to engage on this apologetics level, on this reasons for believing certain things level, whereas I’m not getting as much as that. So, I think I’m grateful because I didn’t want that, well I decidedly– You shouldn’t feel bad. You seem like you almost felt bad about not getting I told my story in the way that I told it, piggybacking off of your story because it would drive me nuts to have the responses that are directly addressed to your story. Well, It would just it would that was not a healthy environment and so I’m glad that the way that I told my story even though a lot of what you experienced, again I was there for it and we discussed it and I was the sounding board and I didn’t shut any of that down. Yeah, well I stand by what I said when you told your story which is I think that your story is ultimately more relatable to more people than mine is but people who think– Maybe we’ll come back to what the difference is in response and the magnitude of responses, what that means. All right. All I’ll say right now is that people who think like me also behave like me which is, they talk more about this particular type thing. They make YouTube channels about it. They make make podcasts and YouTube channels about it. They set up events where they debate about it. Right, and so– That ain’t me. Yeah. And that’s how I am Yeah. If I was still in the faith, I would be right there alongside them. If I was like that, we’d have a totally different podcast and a totally different online persona, I guess at this point. But so I will say before you get into those questions that the main thing that people responded to my story was like the stories that I told, and particularly the story about you leaving me on the side of the road. So, if you’re more interested in the story aspect of things, once we get through some of these other questions, we’ll come back to that because people are interested in your point of view– Because I didn’t say anything On that particular day, right. And I will say, I mean now we’re six and a half minutes in but if you happen to be someone who’s just checking out Ear Biscuits for the first time and you got to this point, and you’re not overly confused I think they’ve gathered that they missed something. Yeah, we did a whole series. First of all, this podcast is just two buddies who’ve known each other forever just trying to figure out life together, being friends and talking about the process and things that we’re interested in. And one of the things that we decided to do over a month ago is to kind of tell our full stories of our evangelical Christian backgrounds, how that got us to where we’re at in our careers. It played an integral role and what we call “The Lost Years” We call them “The Lost Years” because they were literally never talked about until we talked about them on the podcast. I find it hard to believe this is the first episode anyone’s listened to. But somebody might be. And you know what? Those were long episodes, just skip them. No, I would love you to listen to them. So we told our individual deconstruction stories and we asked you to participate in asking some questions and now we’re gonna finally. Well, we did another podcast where we talked about how we didn’t feel, how we didn’t know what we were gonna do by answering questions. But now we’re gonna answer some questions. Okay. One of the things, again I’m not gonna credit anybody. Maybe it will come at some of these later questions, but again, this is me this was a group. So these are all from Link Okay, yeah. These are from multiple people so you asked yourself “What if I’m wrong?” I said that during my story. There was a point in which when I was a Christian and I had experienced a bunch of doubts, I said “What if I’m wrong?” Do you ask yourself that question now? What if you’re wrong now? That’s that question. Yeah, because it seems like our belief on the inside, it was like a hedging your bets Occam’s razor kind of what if you’re wrong. It’s like worst case you know, worst case on the outside, you’re risking eternal punishment, separation from God, right? I think you’re talking about Pascal’s Wager. Pascal’s Wager. Occam’s razor. Occam razor. I can’t even say it now, it’s the simplest solution solution. The simple solution. The Pascal’s Wager is essentially right, we’re gonna place Pascal, famous mathematician and thinker from a long time ago who was a Christian basically said what do I have to lose by living a Christian life you know because I get to. You have a lot to gain. You have a lot to gain. You have a lot to lose by going to the dark side. Which I wanna talk a little bit about Hell in a second related to Pascal’s Wager and why I don’t find it compelling. But yeah, but the question, what if you’re wrong? What about Occam’s razor, though, are you gonna talk about that? Occam’s razor, I shave with it every day. I shave underneath my beard with Occam’s razor. Well, what’s your response? Yes, I asked myself if I’m wrong. I hope I never stop doing it. Like I said at the end of the podcast, the moment I told my story it’s like, if anything, I have demonstrated a willingness to change my mind right, to sort of extricate myself from something that is still very much a part of the way I think and the way that I behave was my entire worldview in my entire orienting principle in life and I moved away from it in spite of wanting to not want to… I didn’t want to stop believing it. And so yeah, I continue to ask myself that question. I hope I hope I never stop asking myself the question, “What if I’m wrong?” I will say that though, the flavor of the question has changed a little bit because I no longer have real definitive ideas about things that I find hard to be definitive about. Like I don’t know what I think about the afterlife. I have some guesses but I don’t have any convictions about the afterlife. I don’t have any convictions about the supernatural reality of the world and so therefore, when I had certainty about those things, and I knew that I was gonna go to heaven and that people who ultimately disagreed with me were gonna go to hell, “What if I’m wrong?” felt different. Absolutely. I feel now like I don’t have to be right. I felt like I had to be right before and you know, if I didn’t feel confident about a certain aspect of my rightness, I had to bolster that. I had to reload a little something about it. You know I think that if you had a doubt about the resurrection of Jesus, then you would google evidence for the resurrection. And it will come in droves. And it took a long time for me to get to a point where I’m like, I’m actually gonna Google evidence against the resurrection, just to check it out. But I guess, since the shoe’s on the other foot, I should ask us, well now are we Googling things like evidence for the resurrection? And I think that’s a later question you have so we can go back to it. Yeah, yeah. We’ll come back to it, keep going, this is almost fun. A related question that kind of comes on the heels of what if you’re wrong is what about Hell? Do you not live in fear that what like if you if you were right, in the first you know three quarters of your life, you were right, then this version of you who is wrong is going to hell. And not only are you going to hell but you’re leading your family, your best friend and anyone who’s listening to your podcast, potentially you’re leading– Your fans. You’re leading them to hell. What about the impressionable fans? Okay, so the first part of the question– The personal, are you scared of Hell? Okay, okay. Are you’re scared of Hell? My answer to this is that when I was a Christian, I was not scared of all the other potential outcomes as presented by all the other religions. Right? So according to some conservative flavors of Islam, I would have been considered an infidel and probably would have gotten into paradise. The Muslim concept of hell’s a little bit different in how you qualify for it. But whatever, there are some people who believe a certain thing in that faith who would have said that I was going to hell. There are some people who believe in reincarnation and might believe that, based on my actions I was gonna come back a grasshopper, whatever the particular and now I’m not trying to make light of that, I’m just saying that that could be somebody’s idea. I didn’t lose any sleep about those potential outcomes when I was a Christian because as a Christian I had a very long list of people’s beliefs about the afterlife that I was that I didn’t believe. I wasn’t scared of their hell because I didn’t believe in it. There’s a very long list if you really tried to make it. Right. So the only thing I’ve done is I’ve added the Christian hell to that list of things that I don’t believe in and so it becomes you know, it’s not as easy as a mental exercise as I just made it seem because when you believe in it for so long and that’s what you thought when you were in your formative years, your adolescent years, it’s a little bit more difficult to disregard. But I would say that sort of the short answer is I don’t lose any sleep about it for the same reason that you as a Christian don’t lose sleep about going to someone else’s hell. And I didn’t lose sleep about Hell when I believed I had escaped it. And I think it was just something that I did not like to think about, like I mean you might think that with all the experience that I described and like the guilt and the pressure that I placed on myself within that belief system, you might think that there was a direct connection to Hell like there’s a lot of people who with a similar makeup as me would then take the next step to like well God, am I really saved? I gotta make sure I’m saved every day. I gotta pray that sinner’s prayer. Well, Jessie was told, my wife Jessie who went to a very conservative Christian private school, was told when she was a kid and of course she struggles with scrupulosity, the scrupulous a version of OCD. So this is especially troublesome for her they say. Which is a religiously applied version of OCD. Yeah. If you’re 99% sure that you’re saved, you’re a 100% lost. You’re telling children that they had to be assured of their salvation. Wait, wait, so I wasn’t told that and you were there all along, so we weren’t told that. No, no, I wasn’t. You know I never interacted with hell that way, it wasn’t something I was constantly faced with. It wasn’t like it was constantly talked about. What we’re actually talking about it a lot and it might give the false impression that it was shoved down our throats constantly. Well, it’s not a pleasant thing to think about. Yes, so but instead, we just didn’t think about it and then because it’s not pleasant. And the more you think about it, I think it gets less pleasant if not for you, for the people on the outside. Yeah. And so, it’s a place I never wanted to go. I have wanted to go to one of those. I never went to one of these Where they scale the hell out of you? Like a Christian haunted house, yeah. Just like a Hell House. Never did that at Halloween. You would have loved it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t You would have come out giddy. a part of a denomination that did that kind of thing. You would have come out satanic. We just did a Fall Festival because we didn’t believe in Halloween. But we didn’t do Hell houses and I feel like it was a missed opportunity. But this is also the reason why I don’t find Pascal’s Wager the same. I apply the same logic to my response to Pascal’s Wager as I do to this and that is, you can take Pascal’s Wager and you can use that to argue for any faith. You know what I’m saying? It’s not like– Because it you they present it as such a value prop any faith it presents a value proposition. That ain’t a consequence for not following it. So then if you don’t, you can’t forget about that value that’s like well if I don’t, I have so much to gain here. It’s not just what you have to lose. Well, what I’m saying is that, from a Muslim perspective you could also have Pascal’s Wager and you could argue that against a Christian. You can take and you can start with particular religious perspective and say this is what you have to gain and this is what you have to lose and then you can argue from that standpoint so it doesn’t actually it’s just not… It’s only compelling to someone who’s trying to hold on to Christian belief but it’s not very compelling to someone who doesn’t have Christian belief. Does that make sense? Yes. Isn’t there also a factor in that that’s like you’re not just mentally assenting to certain beliefs but you have to have like a heart connection to it that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. What kind of a relationship with God is that that it’s just based on a fear of Hell or but well maybe I’m gonna stick around just in case you guys are right. That doesn’t feel like a vibrant relationship with God. It just kind of feels like a mental exercise. The second half of this question or questions that you’ve grouped together when you talk about Hell is what about speaking out? What if speaking out has led other people into eternal punishment but if you’re wrong about this? Right? Wasn’t that in the second half of the question? You added that. But I have seen that. Like what about the fans and the friends? Isn’t that the question? You have an answer? I’ve seen that one, I felt like we answered it towards the end of last week. I mean when I read the exchange between two mythical beasts and it was hey, we’re presenting our perspective but everyone has to make their own decision. I just feel like our audience can understand that and I think even if, I know that a lot of people were shaken up but again, I don’t think it troubles me that I just feel like… I get nervous when I make generalizations about the church but I do feel like it’s a little, they err on the side of like okay, let’s not fully engage in our doubts. Let’s not have it’s you know, it just didn’t feel like something that you could talk about freely. It was like I gotta have a special meeting with my pastor and I don’t know how I’m gonna bring this up and I don’t know how he’s gonna respond. It’s because it feels like there’s so much at stake, there’s not this open dialogue where it’s like you really can. It’s gonna be normal to have doubts and to engage in that. I just don’t feel like that was the environment. But I feel like that’s the environment that I try to create with my kids. It’s like listen, don’t think that your daddy knows everything. Yeah. And like you said before, it’s more about they learn so much more from our actions and they do from what we say that I think that they know that I don’t know everything but at least I try to be sorry. That just as one example. I try to seek forgiveness from them for things like that. So what’s my point? I think if I’m gonna open up my kids to that level of honest dialogue with wherever they’re at, I’m comfortable doing that with our audience and them being able to make decisions, responsible decisions for themselves and not just take what we believe, hook, line and sinker for themselves. Yeah. So I just cannot put that burden on my back and I’m not gonna do it. Okay. Okay, I don’t disagree with anything you just said but playing devil’s advocate, if I were still a Christian who believed that Christianity holds the ultimate truth to man’s salvation. Yeah. Then I would believe that distorting that truth or misleading people would be a horrible thing to do and true, everyone needs to make their own decision but you also have a huge platform and you’ve got impressionable kids listening to you and you’re shaking up their situation. What if you’re wrong? So I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. They need to make their own decision but you have influence when you speak. Again, but then my issue with this particular question– Well, I hope that was my influence was that it opened questions. I get that, you’re not wrong. But I’m saying, the reason that even just what I said, playing devil’s advocate ,is not compelling to me is the same reason that Pascal’s Wager is not compelling to me or the same reason that I don’t fear hell. And that is because the hell that you’re saying that I might be sending people to, I don’t believe in that hell. You believe in that hell. And so, I don’t think that that’s what I’m doing. Of course, if I thought that that’s what I was doing or if I thought that there was a reasonable chance that that’s what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it. Right. But I don’t believe that. So I actually think that by getting people to ask those questions and to kind of explore the foundations of their faith, I think that ultimately just as a species questioning that and getting closer to the truth is gonna ultimately serve everyone’s best interest. ‘Cause I’m not suggesting something that you should replace your faith with. I’m figuring all that out in my own life but I’m just saying that hey, if this isn’t gonna take us to the next phase in our human evolution, then we got to figure out what is and we don’t need to try to bring along some, we don’t need to try to bring along something that’s actually not gonna service our species. We’ve got more questions. We got some more questions but we are gonna take a short break and what are we trying to get people interested in right now? mythical.com has interest galore, Rhett. Don’t undersell it. Just because I’m not wearing something, doesn’t mean that mythical.com is not a burgeoning center. Well, it was all just a setup for you, Link because of– Of mythicality. What I wanted to say Free activity curiosity and tomfoolery on your body, in your hands When you look at this white T-shirt that I’m wearing and you say to yourself man, think of all the things that that white T-shirt could be. This is like a canvas that I’m planting this thought in your head of this white T-shirt that could be anything you could say, mythical on it. Yeah. It could have a nice picture of I don’t know. Look at my shirt, We are selling so I don’t know what to commit to at this point. Look at my shirt. I’ve had this shirt. We don’t sell anything like that. I’ve had this shirt for probably 15 years. How to kill a mustache, I was wearing this shirt. Yeah. That was a long freaking time ago. Yeah, it’s like a cowboy style, I still like it. At a certain point, you might realize that you’ve been wearing the same clothes for a long time. mythical.com. can help you with that. Wrap your boys. Let’s get back into some questions. Hit it. Okay. Now again, you haven’t suffered from this as much as I have and I’m using the term suffered loosely. But because my story was very much my intellectual journey and I questioned some foundational things about the Christian faith, of course, people who know and care about these things have suggested many, many, many, many resources for me to check out. And I wanna talk about, I wanna hear a book report. Listen, how do I want to get into this because people have suggested websites, articles, YouTube videos, books and all by people who are probably, definitely many of them but probably most of them are smarter than me. Definitely most of them are more well studied than me. They haven’t been making YouTube videos almost exclusively for a decade. They’ve been studying these things and so the people are pointing to me, pointing me to all these different resources. Now, I’m not then taking all the resources and staying up every night and just going through all the information and sort of reading everything that everyone is sending to me deeply. And I have a few reasons for that. The first is that, with a few exceptions, the general arguments that people are kind of pointing me to and the resources, whether I’ve looked at those things specifically before or things very much like them, I kind of just want to and this is a little bit of a defense of my process which I said I didn’t want to do but I just feel like I have to say it. I didn’t come to any of my conclusions lightly, right? As I said earlier, I wasn’t trying to get myself out of the faith. Leaving the faith, was the scariest possible proposition for me. Right? There was so much there for me and it was a very slow process over like 10 to 15, about 15 years and it was based on looking at a lot of these types of resources on both sides. I know I kind of listed out some resources when I did my story and people had a lot to say about what that indicated. Those weren’t. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t the only thing I looked at. That was just a small sampling of some things that I found compelling but I don’t remember everything that I looked at. But I didn’t come to any of those conclusions lightly so it isn’t like, “Oh have you been to this website “because they’ve got all the answers “that you’re looking for?” It’s like, I probably have seen those answers and processed those answers and in the end, after a layman’s investigation over the course of 15 years, came to the conclusion that I just didn’t find those things compelling, right. So that I’m not super like chomping at the bit to get into ’em. But I wanna talk a little more personally about why I have a kind of an issue with the whole enterprise of like apologetics and these kinds of resources. It seems to me that one of the things that people are doing is they’re saying, “Hey Rhett, “here’s a really smart person “who knows a whole lot more about this than you do “and they’ve got a really compelling book about it. “Check it out.” So there’s a tendency, as I talked about in my story, to find a smart person, right. Find a smart person who believes what you believe and use that as justification that it’s cool and reasonable to believe what you believe. And so you kind of get into this, appealing to smart people game. And I don’t know how to say this. I’m trying to be as charitable as possible but I don’t think that this is a really fruitful game for certain kinds of Christians to play because when you get, depending on the subject, once you get into the, hey here’s a smart person who believes what I believe game, you’re gonna find pretty quickly that you’re gonna get outnumbered by the smart people on the other side of that issue that you’re trying to get people to see. Take evolution as an example, right. The vast majority of biologists, the vast majority of people who have given their lives to studying, you know biology believe in common ancestry. So when you find a really smart scientist who doesn’t believe in it and be like hey, it’s like well I can find a hundred smart scientists who disagree with him. So playing that game kind of defeats itself after a while. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. But I see it done so often and I also did it but I think that there’s very few issues that I talked about in my journey, whether you’re talking about archeology or whether you’re talking about New Testament scholarship where that wouldn’t be the case. Now interestingly, the closer and closer you get to Jesus you know when you get into like New Testament scholarship, a lot of people who have devoted their lives to the study of the New Testament, there’s a lot, you have to be a certain kind of person to get to that point in the first place so the proportion of people who disagree about that is a little bit different than say evolutionary biology. Does that make sense? Definitely. But you do have plenty of people who got into it and dug into it very deeply, who came out on the other side and said, oh I got into this because of my love for an interest in Jesus and then when I started seeing the realities, I actually was very troubled and moved away. A lot of people say go to seminary, there’s one of two options. Either you’re gonna become a deeper believer, you’re gonna you know your faith is gonna deepen or you’re gonna leave it. It’s not gonna stay the same. But when you talk about Christian apologetics in general, something I thought about recently because I have been watching a lot of these podcasts and going, I still I love, I’m kind of genuinely interested in this stuff so out of my own interest, I still read these articles and look at these things to some degree. But one of the things that has kind of struck me about just the enterprise of Christian apologetics is that the whole idea is that you can use basically logic and reason to make a defense of the Christian faith, to make it seem reasonable and logical. But it feels like, and take the issue of the resurrection which is kind of the linchpin of the whole thing right. So there’s plenty of people who have written books and I’ve read them some of them about why the basically the best explanation of the events around Jesus’ resurrection is that he actually bodily raised from the dead explains the empty tomb and explains the start of the early church, yada yada yada right. heard the arguments. But I find it interesting that the best defense of the Resurrection which is a miraculous, unbelievable, unreasonable, illogical event is to use logic and reason to try to make it seem like it actually happened. To me, the resurrection is the ultimate test of faith. It is saying I’m gonna believe something that is unbelievable. Isn’t that what makes it a beautiful thing to believe from the standpoint of faith? But if it really happened, everything around, you could have logical, historical, philosophical, cultural convert analysis of it. Right, but I feel like all the historical, logical analysis of it, from the standpoint of someone who’s trying to argue the resurrection, I think they’re very much overstating their case because I think that it’s like again, I told you I knew somebody who wrote a term paper explaining why the resurrection happened and I feel like they definitely there’s some logical leaps in there and they’re justifying something that is okay, it could have happened. The best you can get to is it could have happened. If you believe that resurrection is possible, it is possible that Jesus resurrected. But what I’m saying is that, to me it feels like you take the magic and the beauty out of something. And I’m just using the resurrection as an example but what I’m saying is that post-enlightenment, all this very super reductionist thinking that people are applying to the faith, to God in his action in the world and people’s relationship with him, to me the reductionism takes the faith and the supernatural. We’re not talking about reasonable things. We’re talking about God, this external personal force moving into the physical world and doing things that defy all logic and reason. So when you start trying to put your logic and put God into the reasonable and logical box, you’re kind of taking away some of his attributes in my mind, which leads me to, I personally think the most intellectually defensible Christian position is something called biblical presuppositionilism right, which is basically you just start with the presupposition that the Bible is true and that everything flows from that. Now, do I find that compelling? No. Do I subscribe to that? No. But it I can understand it and I find that the people who kind of start with this presuppositionalist viewpoint have a lot less trouble getting into this tit-for-tat logic and reason argument back and forth because it’s just like I don’t have to deal with your arguments because it’s I just accepted as true. I just feel like the enterprise of Christian apologetics for a lot of people, if you go into it with an open mind and an open heart and you kind of say, I’m gonna follow where that wherever the truth leads. I think one of the reasons that so many people like me when they take on that particular, they go down that path they end up where I’m at is because exactly what I said it’s because you’re taking and you’re applying logic to it and if you’re gonna do that, you’re going to end up in a logical and reasonable place which I don’t believe is a place of faith. Does that make sense? Yeah. I’m not gonna add anything to it. Okay. Okay, well, I didn’t wanna spend too much time talk. Again, I don’t I like talking about that stuff but I don’t want it to be our podcast. So let’s talk about some more personal things. Let’s go back to as personal as we possibly can. And to make this even more personal, I’m gonna say that this question came from just say the name, a man named Daniel, a man named Daniel. I almost said Damniel, my character’s named Daniel. He likes to have fun. What are your takes on miracles such as healing and unexpected blessings? And another question, I don’t know if this is I think I just grabbed this from somewhere else. Have you ever had a supernatural experience and if so, how would such an experience fit into your worldview, tell? Okay. Have we ever had a– Lots of people ask this question Supernatural experience. How do you, because a lot of people said God moved in my life in an undeniable supernatural way and therefore, regardless of what you’re gonna say about the foundation of the faith it’s so real and so personal and I’ve seen with my own eyes or I’ve experienced something that is undeniably supernatural and God’s movement in my life and therefore I’ll never depart from him. How do you relate to that? Oh you were asking me? I thought you were restating the question in general. Well, I didn’t really hear your restating a question. ’cause I was thinking of if if I’ve ever experienced something miraculous, I don’t remember ever experiencing anything miraculous. I think in our particular church it was like, we weren’t taught to expect miracles. It wasn’t a part of the, there weren’t healings associated with our church services. That wasn’t the denomination we came from. Yeah, we pursue it to something you might call dispensationalism which is the idea that miraculous activity by the Holy Spirit coincides with the dispensation right. So a dispensation it like so when obviously, there’s all kinds of miracles in the Bible because A, Jesus is doing them, so you’ve got God in the flesh, they’re doing miracles. And then you’ve got all these early church miracles when the Holy Spirit is basically coming on people at Pentecost and then a few years after. But God doesn’t do that anymore. But God doesn’t do that anymore because he doesn’t need to. That’s kind of, but that doesn’t mean that occasionally, God’s gonna answer a prayer but it’ll be one of those things it’s like did this person get better from cancer because the church prayed or was it just, it just happened or was it the medical team? But it wasn’t like somebody’s gonna come in and like grow hair of a different color or their legs are gonna get longer, they’re gonna stand up from being you know disabled from for 10 years. Like that didn’t happen in our church, but I do understand that it happens in many people’s traditions. But based on that teaching, I never really looked for it. I never expected it. I’ve been thinking like a corollary question people have asked it’s like what about answered prayers? You know, if you wanna put that like in a near miracle or like in the miracle category, I guess they’re like miracle light. That sounds like a beer. Well, it sounds like a spread. Miracle Whip. But I when I was thinking back, my memory’s fuzzy but my prayer life was not that vibrant and I don’t recall ever asking God for something that I didn’t think he could give me. You didn’t wanna be unreasonable. I didn’t wanna ask for too much. That’s but when you’re taught how to pray, it’s like you got adoration, you got confession, you got Thanksgiving and then if you haven’t fallen asleep by that point, you got supplication, ACTS. Supplication, ACTS. And I never got, I just I had this feeling that I just never had, I didn’t wanna call God on the carpet. I don’t know. It’s like I didn’t want to be proven wrong. Maybe that was part of it deep down subconsciously. I had a lot of again I don’t want to go back to the guilt thing but like I knew that I didn’t really have a great prayer life and I put that on me. But I don’t remember ever expecting miracles or really expecting healing you know. I especially like after college in the church that I was involved in there it was a different strain of Christianity and it you know they started, in that church we believe that like the people who were gonna be saved had been chosen ahead of time which means that others were chosen actively for damnation ahead of time and there’s biblical passages that seem to say that. A lot more people believe that than you would think. But it was very and you know we we joked and called ourselves “the frozen chosen” because it wasn’t a dynamic experimental expectation. It was pretty heady. That God was… It was pretty heady. God wasn’t gonna show up and do something crazy because he didn’t need to. He had already he’d been there and done that. You either believe it or don’t. Right. But don’t don’t demand it. Who are you to demand that God do something? So this was the environment that I operated in and I don’t really recall experiencing a miracle. One of my mom’s friends who was like, she was she was one of those what I felt like more the spiritual like in touch with things that she that are ineffable and she was also a Christian. She said I had this premonition. It was kind of like a dream but it was more of a vision that your son, she was talking to my mom. Link was in front of this huge crowd in a stadium and it was like he was Billy Graham and he was like preaching the gospel. And I was in high school when she told me this. My mom relayed it and I was like okay, thanks for that pressure. I don’t know maybe she saw us performing in a venue and she didn’t realize that we were just singing a dumb song. Oh, so I was there? You were not there. Okay, well it sounds like a solo act to me. Yeah. To be honest with you. That hasn’t happened. I mean that that’s a vision, a miracle but… Well, I have what I would have called my miracles. I’m gonna tell my stories. Okay. Right now. All right. And then I’m gonna tell you my perspective on them. First miracle, 1998, I’m in New York City working with Campus Crusade for Christ “Summer in the City” is what we called it where me and I don’t know, 30 40 other college students worked with the churches in the inner city to do basically you were with a different church every single week and doing whatever outreach and stuff they were organizing. And interestingly, one of the things that I was struggling with at the time, this is one of my first sort of I don’t remember exactly where I learned it but when I started learning more about how the New Testament came together, specifically you know the way the way the Canon was decided and the counsels of these church fathers getting together quite some time after the the writing of the Bible to then kind of determine what the books of the Bible would be. Yeah, let’s not worry about the book of Thomas. Exclude some of those books. And this was troublesome, right. For someone who had never really thought about this and was just like oh, the Bible is God’s Word, so you kind of just imagined that it was– It was. Somebody just you know like I know I think the the tradition of the Quran is that God basically filled Muhammad and then he wrote it. I’m ignorant about that. But I think it has a little bit in like the tradition of the Book of Mormon I think is that God filled the Holy Spirit kind of came upon Joseph Smith and got him to write it. Like that kind of feels like a good thing to kind of fall back on like it feels a little tighter you know from a scripture standpoint versus like well… Some people wrote some books. We don’t know exactly what their intentions were and then– Let’s get to the miracle, man. So you were doubting? Right. So I started thinking about this and had some doubts about it and I specifically was arguing with a Muslim student on some college campus in New York, I can’t remember which one it was. Not arguing but we’re having a friendly discussion where he started to attack the New Testament in this way, basically saying what I was just talking to you from a Muslim perspective and basically saying how the Quran is more superior because of this and I didn’t have any answers for him because I hadn’t really looked into it. So and of course, I’m in New York, it’s 1998, I don’t really have access to the internet because we didn’t have cellphones and there was no computer anybody had. So I didn’t really have any way to research or anything. So it just kind of ate at me as I continued to do ministry throughout the summer. And then one day, we went square-dancing because of course square dancing was what every college student who knew which way was up was doing in the late ’90s especially in Christian groups. Well, we squared-danced like rabbits. Amen. I just mixed metaphors there because we couldn’t have sex, we were square dancing yes. That’s kind of what I was getting at with the rabbits thing. Well, you couldn’t grind, so you squared? Right. And so, we went to the Lincoln Center or something, I can’t remember we were to square dance and then we had to come back and of course we’re using the subway system and there’s no cell phone or anything so you’re like using your map that you’ve got and we realized that the subway station that we need to get on the subway we need to get on to get to a story which is where we were living had closed because it was so late but there was a stop across Central Park that we could get on but it was only gonna be open for like 10 more minutes. So we all start running across Central Park, not the long way, the short way. It’s not that hard to do. We’ve got just a little bit of time to get to the subway station. We get there, we go down, we move through the turnstile and then we get on to the subway and I go to my seat and right at the seat, that I’m about to sit down at, is a sheet of paper. Okay. I pick up the sheet of paper and it’s just like a portion of a paper like a term paper like so just text. Just typed text. Typed and put out Not a professional publication. And it basically begins to explain why the New Testament is necessary, how you couldn’t just stop with the book of Malachi but that the Old Testament was calling for the fulfillment in the New Testament. And I took that sheet of paper and I said thank you God for proving yourself to me. I’m not gonna doubt about this anymore and put it in my journal. You stole somebody’s paper. Big Time miracle, right. What is my perspective on that now? I told you the story the way that I’ve told it many times, the way I told it to groups of people when I was a Christian. you know I’m gonna tell you the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say. Because the way I told the story, Paul Harvey wrote most of the New Testament. He did. The Apostle Paul Harvey. The way that I would tell that story. What’d you leave out? Is I told it in a kind of a sensational way. Right, I kind of set you up with what I was doubting and then I went to this particular seat that was in the particular place that I went to and there’s a sheet of paper and it addressed this thing directly. Yeah. The reality of the way that it happened Sounds like Ear Biscuits. Well, it made a better story that way but the reality of the way, that that’s also the way that I told myself by the way, when I would go back to that miracle time after time. But the way that it actually happened, everything leading up to getting on the subway’s true and I was doubting this stuff. But we got on the subway. There was flyers like all over the multiple seats like it wasn’t just the seat that I was going to, it was everywhere. Okay. When I got to it and read it, it was someone who is mentally unstable had written a bunch of sort of religiously informed gibberish. Oh, like a manifesto. And in this and it wasn’t just a sheet of paper it was a few sheets of paper and as I read it, nothing really made sense and it was like this person seems a little bit off but oh but there is a line in here that says something about and just like the book of Malachi is calling out for the book of Matthew blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. So I found a sentence. I was dealing with something in my heart and it was sort of tearing me apart in a lot of ways. And then I found something that was was quite a coincidence, was quite serendipitous and was quite unusual and I was able to make that connection. So and and it really put my doubts at ease at the time. Now looking back on that, do I think that that was orchestrated by God? Well, if I did then I probably wouldn’t be where I am right now. No, I don’t I think it was a coincidence that I’d then incorporated into my framework and bolstered my belief with it. My second story, much easier than that. It was actually that same, was that the same summer? I was a camp counselor at a camp at the tri-state area near New York, yeah and I had a bunch of inner-city kids who were coming out to the wilderness to be in this camp and these kids come from broken homes and they were just wild and very difficult to contain and control. Okay. And I was in charge of them. And one night, they were just going absolutely ballistic in this cowled are they What ages are you talking about? 13. Okay. Probably like seven or eight of them they’re going absolutely nuts and being completely disrespectful but also like almost fighting each other and I’m like sitting there like, I don’t know what to do. So I go outside and they’re like super loud and like fighting. I go outside and I place my hand on the cabin and pray for peace. And then immediately, they get quiet. Wow, did you feel power leave your hand? No. Now that’s the way I used to tell the story. Now I’m going to tell you the real version of the story. Paul Harvey. The rest of the story is– I never heard that one by the way. I have heard the other one. You only told me the first part which tells me like the fact that you would even just by the way, that subway story, you only told me the first version. You didn’t even tell me like hey man but there were a lot of pamphlets and I think that it was like some weird man. You never ever told me that. I hadn’t come to grips with it until more recently. So it was but it became. Okay, go ahead. But the rest of this story is that I placed my hand on the cabin and I prayed. and then a couple of minutes later, they got quiet. It wasn’t like immediate. If it had it been, it still could have been a coincidence but it was you know. Did you tell that one publicly? Yeah. You did? Yeah. And I didn’t feel like I was being dishonest. It’s just when I’m really, really honest about what happened, I’m like okay well, you can change the details a little bit and make it a little bit more sensational. Now, so okay, now I’m not speaking for everybody this is me. I have no doubt that people listening right now there’s somebody other here’s like well, I got dude I got specific miracles that cannot be explained any other way. Here’s what I can say for myself which is essentially what Link said. I’ve never experienced anything unambiguously supernatural in my life. Everything that I’ve experienced, I can find it isn’t difficult for me to find a reasonable explanation for it. But a lot of it has to do with the fact that this the tradition I came from which we didn’t do miracles and I had a couple of stories when I was doing some stuff with Campus Crusade that I can now see like well, I mean it could also be a coincidence so it’s not definitively, it’s not unambiguously supernatural. But the second part of the question is what would you do if you experienced a miracle, an unambiguous miracle now in the year 2020 thinking the way that you think? For me, if you go back about five years, Yeah. Six years, when I was kind of making the decision to be like I’m getting out of this, I’m not gonna think this way anymore. An unambiguous miracle at that time would immediately brought me right back to traditional Christian faith, the faith of my teenage years whatever right. But I got to be honest with you. If I experienced something unambiguously supernatural now, I would just be like, “Oh, supernatural things happen.” Oh, that is a feature of the universe, supernatural things can happen because I’m not ruling that out but it doesn’t logically follow from me personally given the conclusions I’ve come to up to this point to then all a sudden, undo all those conclusions just because something supernatural can happen. To me the only conclusion that I would come to is supernatural things can’t happen. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, for me, if I would have experienced a miracle while in the faith, then I would have picked it apart because that’s what I was always taught to do because of what I already said. I find it interesting that both of those stories that you told happened that summer when you were in New York. You were serving in churches that were much more what we called charismatic. I witnessed two exorcisms. You what? You didn’t talk about what those are miracles. What do you mean you witnessed two exorcisms? Well, I didn’t believe that they were actually exercised. Because of what we were taught. Even at the time I was like this But you were in it okay so you didn’t believe those exorcisms but man, I want to hear those stories. Nothing special, no voice changes, no levitation. It was like run-of-the-mill, somebody just yelling really loudly and everyone’s saying that they were possessed. So did they– We’re not talking yeah Did they calm down? Did something leave their body? Yeah. They calmed down. They calmed down. Okay. I’ll say they calmed down. That would be, my best explanation. It was underwhelming to you? Yes. It was not believable. But you were in a more open place and you were open to looking and claiming your own miraculous experience because I try ask for give the tongues that summer as well. In that environment. like you would never have asked for to speak in tongues because we were taught that like again, that was a prior dispensation and it was basically just learning other languages. But right, but I but I did. I did ask for the gift of tongues. it didn’t happen. I did not receive it. And yeah, I’ve always just again it’s the combination of what we were taught and just how my brain works. I’ve always been, I didn’t feel like I needed that to have, my faith system was intact without that. So I actually, I didn’t need it. I didn’t need to believe those. I actually feel like right now I hope that I’m more open to miracles now because I never have been. I just want you know, I want… Again, this is what I want and how much does that matter when it comes to what’s true. None. But maybe it does because if you don’t want something, Okay, all right. If you’re not open to it, Preach it brother. Maybe you can never see the truth of it. So I want to be open. I don’t want to be shut off to to God’s activity in my life. I want to cultivate my spirituality. Yeah, I get that. And again that’s what I’ve already said but just to use this, the miracles as an example, I’m instinctively skeptical but I want to be more open. Yeah. I’m with you on that. That sounds good. I like that. Yeah, ’cause why not? I don’t wanna miss out on that. And unless it involves hell, and then I’m like I don’t know, I don’t think I do. I’m not signing up for this kit and caboodle. Okay, I think I follow. One of the things I will say is that as a Christian and especially as a Christian in a particular denomination which it was nondenominational but it was essentially like reformed Baptist or something like that, I don’t wanna argue, dude. But we were really good at discounting all kinds of miracles from other traditions, including the Catholic tradition, right. The Catholic tradition is kind of known for ongoing miracles and they have like a whole group of people who like verify miracles that happen at certain locations and they’re kind of more into that. And our perspective on that was all bull. I mean to be quite honest. is it was just bull. It was like it was wishful thinking but it wasn’t actually happening. And it was really like it was so, so easy to not consider Catholic miracles as a Protestant. It was so easy, it was like turning over in bed. Oh easy. It didn’t even cross my mind, it was so easy. So I just find it interesting that like I never I’ve never believed in ghosts. I never really did believed in demons. We have friends now that like talk about seeing ghosts, I’m like well– I just wanna I want to finish my point– Okay, sorry. Because I don’t want to people to think that I’m talking crap about Catholics in particular. What I’m doing is I’m just saying that. You’re talking crap about Catholics? No. I’m saying that the perspective that I was under at the time was that that wasn’t legitimate and so and I didn’t care about whether or not they were offended, right. And so what I’m saying now is that, I believe that the miracles that people, again. I don’t know, my guess is that the miracles that people experience today in the context of church or any religion are probably not actually miracles. That’s my, I could be wrong. It certainly doesn’t help when you’ve got the easiest targets of televangelists rigging miracles. Yeah. Every time you drill down That’s definitively proved again and again. Every time you drill down on on these guys who are healing people is that oh, he’s got an earpiece. Everybody’s got an earpiece. The apologist guy. That explains it. He’s got an earpiece. but finish your point. Ghosts may exist, man. I never believed in ghosts demons and now we have close friends who like talk about specific and ongoing encounters of you know and it’s like well, you know my former self would just be like just almost would talk shit behind your back. Well, you and I would right? Yeah, I don’t do that anymore. Well, I like the idea of ghosts because it makes horror movies a lot scarier and I like being scared. And the moment that you begin just explaining it all away and saying that this does it just can’t happen, then all of a sudden Annabelle’s room is not that scary. You know what I’m saying though? Yeah, I just, and I’m not to that point yeah. So, there could be something there. I’m just again, I’m just trying to give my perspective. Speaking of your perspective, I do wanna get your perspective on leaving me on the side of the road because some people, it’s like they only they got upset with you. Maybe I told the story wrong but to me well, I’ll let you speak but it was like they were angry with you but I guess it was maybe at that point in the story. Yeah. And then you came back. I found it really interesting that people were upset with me. Once you hear the whole story, that’s an interesting take. I think it’s just a misunderstanding but– Yeah and we’re like– I didn’t say anything at the time because you were telling your story, I didn’t wanna, it wasn’t about my perspective so– There’s a few logistical questions that we did get. Like we were on Philip DeFranco’s podcast which should be out by now. We talked about a lot of this stuff by the way and he asked us about a lot of questions about how we’re processing “the Lost Years”. So if you wanna listen to his podcast, we got into it over there and got into some stuff that we haven’t talked about here and that we probably won’t. Yeah. I got a little carried away a few times. Yeah. In a way that I tried to control myself a little bit more on you focused. Yeah, you felt like it wasn’t your show so you could write. Yeah. He asked us a clarifying point that like yeah, you didn’t drive all the way home. You drove over the hill ,you drove over the horizon and apparently parked somewhere where then you could walk and dramatically come over the horizon which you definitely did. Yeah, well just to give you my perspective on this. So, I was I was upset with you for drinking right because I knew– We were in the band. Not because I was an asshole but because we had basically made like a commitment to each other and to God that we’re not gonna do that, we’re not gonna be kids who party. That’s not what we do. Jesus is our party. We were in the “Wax Paper Dogs” and we as a band, had made a commitment. Every time we got together to rehearse which was at least once a week. It was like such an important. We would sit down in a circle and we would pray with each other and we would share struggles we were going through. We would encourage each other and hold each other accountable to not holding up the commitments that we had made and asked our fellow band members to hold us to. So it was something that I had put out there hey, I wanna be a positive example, we want to invite our friends to these concerts, we’re gonna give people an opportunity to like become a Christian. And I don’t wanna blow that by there being cracks in my armor. Basically, we thought– So I invited it. We had to be different and we had to have a tangible difference in our life and one of those easy tangible differences was we don’t get drunk. We don’t get drunk on wine, we get drunk on the Holy Spirit. And so or what was it vodka, I don’t know what you had that night. Some sort of liquor I did not know. We don’t get drunk on some sort of liquor I do not know. We get drunk off the Holy Spirit because of that witness we called it. Once I said that I wanted to get drunk, they put on Merle Haggard misery and gin. Yeah, they knew they got you and got Merle get you but– That’s a good song But because you did that, I knew that– That’s what I was that night. Let’s say it was gin. Okay. You had basically compromised your witness and so you’d compromised the band’s witness and as your friend who knew that, you didn’t want to do that ultimately and you felt bad about it. I was like well, what am I gonna do? I’m going to, and again as we explained on Phil’s podcast, we were, man, we were so dramatic, sensational like everything was like, we was like we were ritualistic. We were trying to create, make everything that we were doing cinematic and like have this ceremonial aspect to it. Sure, the big rock and the little rock that we had in the confessions we had. The blood oath was a ceremony. We grew up in a church where I mean it was it was new form Baptist ceremony like it was like church camp tike ceremony stuff but it was it was meaningful and I think it’s part of that but I think this is also me and just the way me and you have always been. Yeah. In the way we conducted our friendship. We were strange. You name places like you know if you find a tree, we’ll call it “the Tree” with a capital T. You got to make the fabric of life be even more exciting than it already is. I’m not cotton. Right Mylar, we were Mylar. But so, what I was thinking was is like okay, he shouldn’t have done this and I need to communicate two things. I need to communicate judgment and forgiveness. Judgment and mercy. And so it’s like to me, the perfect and I was kind of just pulling this out of my ass as I was doing it. But I was like all right, I’m gonna kick him out with the car and drive over the hill because at that point, he’ll be like damn my friend just kick me out of the car. Yeah. For drinking, I feel I bad. feel the weight of my sin. Exactly and then I was like but I’m not an asshole. I’m gonna park the car and walk back to him in this like moment of cinema and peek over the horizon and come and join you and not say a word. And by coming back over the horizon and meeting you, I’m basically saying hey man you screwed up but I love you, I forgive you, now let’s walk together, let’s get back to the destination. Let’s not do that again. That’s what I was thinking. and I you know I don’t even though I don’t feel exactly the way that I felt at that time, I don’t think the same way that I think at that time like I regret many things in life. I don’t regret any of that. I don’t regret that. Right, yeah. And you know, I don’t regret getting mad at you for getting drunk when you were 16-years-old. I don’t think that 16-year-olds should get drunk, not from a moralistic standpoint but it’s just like hey, it’s probably not a great idea. Yeah. There’s consequences to your actions and it doesn’t have to be that the consequence is that God is then mad at you. You don’t have to go there to know that no no there’s immediate tangible consequences to that kind of behavior. You don’t have to be a genius to extrapolate and figure out what those things are. The risk of swallowing a penny being one of those. Right. You could choke on a penny and die. Yeah, so you know what next time, yeah, next time you do something stupid, I’m gonna leave you on the side of the road. I’ll do it tomorrow. You did plenty of stupid stuff but I never got that dramatic with you, man. Yeah. I didn’t I didn’t do that particular thing I don’t know. The first drink I had You did, it was the girls. For you it was the girls. Besides the wine that we made for ourselves, when we were like 15. Which we couldn’t have got drunk off that. That was a question. We couldn’t have got drunk off that but we thought we could and we were it was just so exciting we had to do it, I mean we weren’t perfect. It was justifiable because– Yeah, it was justifiable because Jesus made water into wine. That’s not how we justified it. We were just like although there are some Baptists who think it was grape juice which still makes me laugh to this day, but… It was the girls for you, man. I liked the ladies. We had to have a lot of conversations. At a certain point, I think you just stopped telling me what you were up to. I mean you gotta figure things out. You would tell me and I would, then the wheels will start turning and I’d be like I think if I’m not upset with him and that might mean I can do it too with my girlfriend. Not sex. I mean we weren’t even You’re using that term loosely. I didn’t do it. Yeah, just a little petting. We called it heavy petting. It was you, I didn’t do it but if it was– I’ve never heard of the term heavy petting outside of like a purity culture. It’s weird like heavy petting it’s like it’s just a weird phrase. I’ve never seen a “no heavy petting” sign at a petting zoo, so it’s like… Careful. I was not tempted, I did not need a sign. Oh man, I needed that laugh. No heavy petting. I’m sure that’s on a poster somewhere. Okay, I mean– Do you get through everything you wanna get through? There’s one more question that I feel like we should answer even though I think that we’ve probably sort of hinted at this. What? Jeez, a lot of people have asked the question. Well, a guy named Cody asked this question because I did write it down. Just about the part of your story. Again, the question is just about the part your story where you make it a point several times to talk about how real your relationship was with Jesus just to later claim he isn’t real. How could it be both? A lot of people have asked this question like I understand he said that it was real, it seemed like he was as real as if he physically manifested himself to you. Again, this answer is not gonna be satisfactory to anyone who believes that they are actually in a relationship with God or in a relationship with Jesus. You’re gonna conclude that we just never had a real relationship with Jesus if this is the way that we would characterize it and that yes, you’re right. I can’t really, I honestly can’t argue with it. But I believe that we were a part of a community that was committed to a certain way of seeing the world and we had lots of people in our lives who were reinforcing that viewpoint and that was kind of every single thing, it was just. We bought into a philosophy right and part of that religion, part of that way of thinking was that you basically, you’re in relationship with God like basically, you are in a relationship with Jesus but it’s really the Holy Spirit that’s filling you and motivating you and keeping you from doing things. And there were times when I would specifically be singing praise and worship music which was a big part of the groups that we were in. And I would just feel completely overwhelmed and we didn’t do the whole like getting slain in the spirit. Never got knocked down by anybody but had deeply emotional reactions during different conferences in places where you were just like on fire for God and I actually had physical things happen to me like I would feel like a tingling kind of coming down from the top of my head and getting in my ears and there’s like a physical manifestation of what I thought at the time was the Spirit filling me. Interestingly, I can listen to praise and worship music to this day and kind of get myself back into that place. I can listen to “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and that other guy and get into that place. But so I think a lot of the things that I was I mean just the tingling. I was interpreting as evidences of the Holy Spirit when it’s evidences of the way humans work you know and they were deeply emotional and– But there was, and I know this is true of you too but like I was journaling my prayers because I had a hard time actually focusing on praying but there was a lot of praying. It was kind of a one-sided conversation but when you start to, I could sense responses. Oh, yeah. Like you read the you know they taught you, we were taught to read the Bible and study the Bible in a way that the Holy Spirit would bring things out of it like you would gain insight and relating it to who you were and we would seek guidance on every single major decision and it’s certain stints of my life every single minor decision. Yeah. And you really get a sense that you were that I was guided to make decisions by God I mean we even went through workbooks called “Experiencing God” “How to determine God’s will for your life” all of the, it’s like we were trained the practices in order to connect with God and to be guided by God. But for me, making decisions was a huge thing like my journal was filled with everything that I talked about and then the second thing that was filled with was me trying to assess if I could marry Christy, if she was the one for me like I obsessed about this and I felt like on one hand, I became convinced that like okay God is blessing this decision this is a wise decision, this is the right decision. On the other hand, I feel like I missed out on a lot of like experience and like falling in love with my wife because I wanted it to be such a, I wanted it to be something where God granted me permission and give me a sign or give me the specifics and I felt like I got that, those are all aspects of my active relationship with God. You’re the one who made the statement I didn’t make the statement but it’s true of me too. I believe that I did have a real back-and-forth conversational relationship with God. I just thought that I wasn’t good at it and that all the stuff I was trained to do, I just wasn’t motivated enough and it was my shortcomings not God’s that that made me feel distant. Yeah well, you know when you’re on staff with Campus Crusade you have, you’re encouraged to do something called “A day with the Lord” every month, right. Right. And this is essentially a day-long devotional. You might have what we call your quiet time or your devotion time every single morning where you get up and you pray and you read the Bible which I was okay, yeah, I had some good runs in there. It’s pretty much a struggle for most Christians. But I always loved the day with the Lord. You did? Oh, yeah I I loved it and what I would do is I would take my Bible and my journal and I would go to some spot in nature and I would just sit there and I would just pray and basically, the funny thing is is I still do this, pretty regularly. I just don’t call it “A day with the Lord”. I just go out into a spot in nature. I don’t have the Bible, I’ve got my journal. I might have a book or something that I’m reading at the time but I just sort through things, right. And it’s just like now I talk out loud to myself whereas I used to just talk out loud to God but tangibly, practically, the experience is no different. I’m not trying to yeah, that may sound like sad or crass or whatever but I’m just saying that. Not trying to be dismissive I’m just saying when I think back on what I was interpreting as a two-way relationship where the Lord was again, I don’t know the nature of the universe and maybe that I was tapping into some sort of spiritual plane that exists that I don’t fully grasp and understand and I’m still open to that. I hope so. Yeah. But I tend to think that what was happening especially during those times is I was just getting away. I was extracting myself from my day-to-day life and all the distractions there and I was just getting some time to just be still you know. Be still and be in a meditative state and kind of just things come to the surface and you kind of work through things. It’s like if you go to the grave site of someone that you love and you talk to them and some people carry on that kind of relationship for a very, very long time. That person never speaks back to them but there are tangible experiences and they remember what they looked like and they remember that you know in the same way that your memories of a loved one are sort of, it’s the raw material by which you have an ongoing conversation with them after they die. I kind of feel like the Bible and church tradition and what you’re being taught is the raw material for carrying on a relationship with Jesus that might just be a conversation with yourself. That’s my best guess as to what’s happening there as I always like to say, I could be wrong. You probably are. Right, I’m sure I am in some way. Yeah. #EarBiscuits. At this point, are we gonna talk about this anymore directly? I don’t know, I don’t. I predict not. But again, as we’ve said before, I think that these things will percolate through in as we continue to reminisce and air every single Ear Biscuit or every couple, I mean we’re always pulling from our past and now we’re able to talk about it in a way that we haven’t been able to. Yeah. Certain aspects of that. I gotta say it’s- So we’ll come up. It’s been really ,really liberating, personally. I think about just being able to talk about it on Phil’s podcast and you know, there was a lot of shame and also just fear around just being honest about our pasts and you know be able to just be like this is who we were, this is who we are. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s a healthier way to live. I’ve experienced a lot of peace. And we can move forward. That’s so important. I feel like, and I’m glad that in this venue, you can come along for the ride. That’s what’s gonna happen. Do you have a wreck? I do have a wreck. I have a wreck and a fact. Hit us with it. I wanted to do this last week but it was your wreck, so it’s a little bit late but I just wanted to shout out Dear Hank & John, which is Hank and John Green’s podcast. Good friends of ours and John shouted us out and I’m not just doing this to return the favor I mean that’s part of this but John has been listening to the podcast. I’m not saying Hank hasn’t, but John specifically said that he had been listening to our stories and our deconstruction and just the way that he described it on their podcast, it just meant a lot to us and they’re also just super thoughtful guys who basically as close to us as you can be in terms of well, two guys who have known each other for most of their lives. Probably theirs are like all their lives who do a business like this and are just trying to be husbands and fathers and live life and figure it out and they’re just incredibly smart, thoughtful, funny guys who have a very smart, thoughtful, funny podcast. But they’ve got this thing where you can only listen to it after you’ve listened to Ear Biscuits. That’s how their podcast works. Right, so do that before– So don’t even try. Yep. to listen to it before you’ve listened to and you’ve fully caught up with us. But then go on over there and they’ll welcome you with open arms. All right. We’ll speak at you next week. Love you. To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.