2 Thessalonians

Okay, well, welcome to 2 Thessalonians.

Um, and what I wanted to invite us to do is see uh we reread 1 Thessalonians as well, and um see if two Thessalonians did something for you, one Thessalonians didn't, or brought you questions or comments.

It's a terribly phrased question, but it's really just making space for for your time with these books today.

Well, things haven't changed.

Say more.

Now, I want to follow you up on that, right?

Because Paul's writing to people who specifically are waiting around, or as this man says, loitering because of their religious faith.

This is not a book about people on welfare or social help.

It's really important to differentiate, right?

These are about Christian people who are not actually doing much at all in the world, right?

They're waiting for something to happen.

Does that change what you said at all?

Not really.

I mean, I understand the religious part of it, but I still think it goes hand in hand with people's expectations of what should be happening.

They're waiting for coming.

The other people are waiting.

Some people are I get the picture there.

He was saying some people would just kind of park themselves in other people's houses and sat around expecting to be fed when he came here.

So why were we?

That's why they had to address this.

I mean, what would happen to a society where everybody wouldn't have anything?

Part of that, I think, was because the priests had and the leaders in the church expected to be taken care of monetary.

Like the things that they did, they expected monetary.

But wasn't that part of the plan?

Since the priests didn't have land and couldn't make their living, the combone would go to take care of them so that they could be priests.

I'm asking.

That's true of the temple system.

Now, when Paul's writing this church, remember, churches are like eight people.

That's a church.

There's nothing like St.

Thomas.

There's no public building anywhere when this is written.

First public building, we went to it in Jordan, and you couldn't fit more than 20 people down there, right?

I mean, it was a cave in the ground.

It was hidden.

I mean, it was like a basement.

Um, that's the biggest, oldest church that we found, and again, it was it was it was a secret.

So the people who are priests or presbyters, I mean, they don't get any income from their work.

And part of what Paul says is, look, we could have charged you, but we didn't.

And part of what Paul's saying is that there were these meandering teachers called the sophists or philosophers who basically were tutors.

And the way it worked is they'd received some education, they offered it, and you took care of them.

It wasn't necessarily that you paid them.

This is still, there's a monetary economy in place, but it really is more about rim and board for services.

Okay?

Paul is saying that he didn't even charge room and board for services, he earned that on his own.

He didn't have to do that, but he chose to, so that he didn't owe anybody anything.

But Levites who are serving at the temple do get tithes for their services, they don't do other bits.

So there's a little bit of differentiation going on there.

In terms of people waiting around, you know, I you know, it's really easy to imagine people not doing anything, and I don't know if that's quite the reality we have in church now.

Although I would tell you, I know what people give.

And there are people who give nothing and come every week, which is interesting to me, who have means.

I'm aware that they have means because I know what cars they drive and what jobs they have.

It's interesting, right?

Um, no one else knows this.

I'm sometimes regret that I know it.

I do I don't judge how I do things based on that.

Obviously, I get paid to do what I do.

Um, I am also aware that there are people who have come by my house a few times recently, like the Jehovah's Witnesses have come by, and I just said to them last week, we don't accept solicitors.

And they said, Well, we're not here to solicit, we're here to tell you about the Bible.

And they said, I'm sorry that's soliciting.

Have a nice day.

Because the truth is they want something from me, right?

And um, I told you this story maybe last time, a couple of months ago, these people came by and I was getting ready to take a shower, and I was sort of in a hurry, and they asked what I thought about Jesus.

And I think there's this question we have to ask are those people working for the Lord or are they loitering?

As he put this out.

Are they waiting or loitering?

Now, I what I want to offer, I'm gonna take this beyond like entitlements, but not really.

I wonder if that's entitlement thinking that we go around trying to get people to think what we think, and that's what work in the church is like.

That's really controversial according to how I grew up.

But I want you to spend some time on that.

If the work is think like me, is that waiting or loitering?

Maybe that's not an interesting question for you.

It's difficult to respond to, just I'll give you a minute.

I used to have some Jehovah's Witnesses friends.

This may be and I kind of relate this back to something which I don't understand.

But the church in the old days, they took care of the widows and organs and people that needed.

And at that time I needed help.

And these people always helped me.

I ate with them.

If I needed something done around the house, if they would do it, they would help at one time prepared to sell my house because I was getting divorced.

They didn't take care of others.

I mean, if these people come to you and say we could come from Jehovah's Witnesses, is there anything you need that we can do for you?

Maybe we could have a different reaction.

But these people were witnessed.

I'm not putting down Jehovah's Witnesses.

I'm just talking about the approach if that makes sense.

I don't mean it to be secular.

Oh, no, no, no.

The truth is, biblically, there is nothing secular.

Everything is sacred.

We live in a fake reality.

Okay.

So but if you join a Jewish temple, you pay, you pay dues, don't you?

Only if you want seats on high holy days.

Oh.

Or time with the rabbi, so you don't have to pay, just if you want any services.

It's an interesting approach.

They don't pass the plates.

You pay your dues.

You know, it makes me think of Tim, how you I talked to Father Bob one time at St.

Bernadette about how he doesn't pursue a lot of people who would come to the Mass to St.

Beast.

I mean, he would be full, the church would be full.

But he never did, there was everything done about trying to pursue them, or you know, who are these people?

Take a get a listing of addresses and send them the box of envelopes.

And you know, yeah, I've been running the peerages program.

Okay, so um I I did this thing where I sat down and took took all the volunteers in the church and with the who all the people who were peer to disapproved, okay, and I ran them against the church candidate.

About 60% of the volunteers at the church were not registered at the church.

So that means they probably weren't paying dues.

And they were required to take the virtues because I taught the class in order to do any kind of volunteering.

Maybe the Catholic Church went through all that, and you might have taken the virtues outside.

But um, so it was it was tied into if you want to work, but it was never tied into money, which I mean I I don't know, I don't, I'm not taking sides that it should have or it shouldn't have been.

Yeah, this is tough stuff.

I mean, I would tell you for sure, if you want to be a member, you have to pledge to the church.

But you don't have to pledge your money, you can pledge your prayers or your service, but if you're not willing to pledge to the church, you're not a member.

I mean, even if your letter resides here in my head, if you're not backing something, you're not a member.

Doesn't have to be money because we all choose different ways to give.

But if you're not committed to serving in the church, then you're not a member.

But you'd love to have you, and you're invited and you're welcome.

Do you know what I mean?

But I think they're different things.

And how do you define serving?

Well, this is an interesting thing, and I think this is what we've got to think about, right?

Um, there's people who wash dishes after we have a church meal, and man, we need that service, you know.

There's people who pray for people on the pray list, and I don't even know all those people, and that's a service.

There's people who show up and worship and they're committed to doing it, and that's a service.

I mean, I believe that stuff.

But what I think is great is when people pledge they're gonna do it and they say, we're gonna show up.

And to me, that's what membership is about, is this basic commitment that we're gonna be involved.

Now, again, I have to like peddle with this one a little bit because for me as a teen, um the biggest service was getting somebody to make this intellectual conversion to the faith I had.

That was actually the number one gift you could do is go out there and try to like convert people's thinking to your own about Jesus in church.

And I am sitting here wondering a bit whether in fact that's waiting or loitering.

And yesterday we had a service group meeting.

We're trying to get this service group going here to think about how we do service to the church and can expand it and include people.

And one of the things we talked about is having a food distribution that we're gonna pursue.

And I'm really adamant that we're going to put that in the water bill in Nassau Bay and invite people to help us serve food, who may not go to church at all, and may not be interested in church at all, but are interested in meaningful ways of service.

That's waiting, not loitering, even if they don't think what we think at all.

I mean I'm convinced of that principle.

And I would much rather have, sorry, an agnostic person serve food than somebody with the right beliefs who does nothing for any other person but sits and reads books and has all the right answers.

You would too in your life, but you would much rather have that person.

I think.

I was groomed though to prefer the right answer person.

I was groomed by my church to be that way, but I'm convinced it's wrong.

And I think Paul's talking about that.

It's a it's a very tricky uh problem because there are people, and I think of myself, well, here being in a new church, it's new for us, and we're just we've been here a year though, so it's not like we should use it.

Okay.

And I don't know, um, I guess I don't know how to become part of the of the organization or the church or how to participate unless I know a little bit more, or somebody comes forward and says, What about this?

You know, I come to these classes and I love the small group of people that I and I love what I'm learning.

That's me.

So yeah, I'm we're all kind of I'm a learner, I love to learn stuff.

Um, but then I think you know what I'm saying, Tim, I'd like to be be more active, but I don't know how.

Well, I think this is probably getting to the difference between waiting and loitering is yeah, how do we activate one another?

So I will tell you in this church, as in many churches, 10% of the people do 95% of the work.

Oh, yeah.

That is, yeah.

And sometimes we complain about it, although I would tell you that's how schools of fish swim.

Yes.

There's drafting that happens.

However, there is something really important about schools of fish, which is they take turns.

And so there's a couple of things I think are really important for us to think about.

Number one, if we don't serve joyfully, we're actually doing a discredit to the service.

Because the number one thing that will ruin the ministry is somebody who's bitter about doing it.

And it may not be your biggest joy, but it might be your turn.

So we have to hold on to those things together.

But you know, I think this is what becomes really hopefully empowering when we think about this difference, is for us to activate ourselves and think like, not only how can I do more, but how can we do more together?

So, this again is one of these things we talked about even last night.

Somebody wants to put on a shrimp boil here to do something for Bay Area Turning Point.

I think it's a great idea.

And I said, I've got four people who don't do anything else that know how to do a shrimp boil, start with those people.

And this is what we do in relationships is we start to think, what do you know how to do already that we could leverage for the sake of the community and the Lord?

Now, those shrimp boilers, I don't know anything about their piety, but I do know they'll cook some shrimp.

And that's what we need.

And so this I think is this interesting way about being, and remember the word for church, it's ecclesia, it just means gathering.

This is how we gather more people.

I almost think it'd be nice if we stopped using the word church sometimes because we confine that to buildings or creeds instead of people who intentionally gather together.

So maybe like the new evangelism is to say, look, I see you do that, and I see a way that could serve other people and give them joy.

Could we gather together around that?

Instead of come be a member at my church.

And I think then the thing to say to people is, look, you've shared your shrimp boiling on behalf of the community.

That's membership in the church.

Thank you for being a member of the church.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Uh at some point, I think it's helpful to be to identify ourselves as people of faith.

I think that's important.

However, I don't think that's the most important thing.

And there is, I think, the difference between looking for how people want to serve and cramming them into service.

And there's a difference between saying, you know, look, my church life is really meaningful for me and it must be meaningful for you.

Those are very different.

Sometimes it's helpful, our neighbors may not know that our church affiliation is important to us.

And I will tell you, my last church had this lady who ultimately was on the bishop's committee in San Diego, and I asked her one day about church, and she said, you know, I don't really know what I believe, but this church is full of really good people who do really good things, and that's just enough for me.

You know, and and I and I thought, as a teenager, that was so wishy-washy and wrong.

But then I thought, you know, that's just really humble and honest.

You know, like you've found something greater than yourself.

You're not sure about the cognitive principles, but you are sure about the community.

And to me, that's enough, right?

It's enough.

That that's really more almost that was that's almost it.

Because when you think about well, I'm not in the always question and always asking that.

But it's enough to be with this group.

It's enough to do the Sunday school with the kids, it's enough to see.

I and I think what you said is really, really important to me because when I was a kid, I was taught the story and what it meant.

And it was very hard.

You have to look for your own meaning.

And as a kid, I wasn't raised that there could be.

So you know, there's this story where Abraham goes to sacrifice his son.

Right?

Right.

And I learned as a kid that if God asks you to do something, you do it no matter what.

And here, when I tell the story and I ask children, what do you think?

the children say, Of course you should never harm your child.

And I think they're right.

Like I'm convinced they're right.

That was not how I was taught the story.

And this is gonna sound really strange, if you didn't mind me.

I'm giving another homily here, I'm sorry.

Um, my last rector was telling me that he failed out of calculus his freshman year, but he had to pass it to graduate college.

So later he grew up, he took calculus, and he realized calculus was just a language.

It was a way of understanding and interfacing with reality.

And he said, you know, that's really what church is.

It's a language.

And there's people in the world who don't have the language we have to help them interface with reality, and the church's biggest gift to people is the gift of language.

I mean, I thought that was very, very interesting.

And in some ways, we instill that language in our kids.

Now, look, if I were Muslim, then Arabic would be my language of faith.

It would be.

I don't know how to change my language.

I think you know, some Muslim people do great things.

But I grew up in church, that's the language I was given.

It's my native tongue, and honestly, like it helps me interface with my reality.

And so I'm sticking to it.

There are days sometimes where the language breaks down for me, but it's my native tongue, you know, so I'm not looking to change it.

I'm looking to say, how can it help me interface with the world?

And I haven't found the community as generous in anywhere else as I found in church.

And so that's why I'm here.

There's days where I don't know what I believe.

I'm just going to tell you, there's days where I don't, as your priest, know what I believe.

Well, they come back to this language that has carried me and I've seen carry other people, and I say, how can we speak it better?

Sunday, as Richard and I were leaving the service, uh, we both got a call to do a death notification.

And we do death notifications for Harris County Sheriff's Office.

So we left the parking lot, went to the house two blocks away, put on our stuff, and went to um and did a notification to a family there.

Um a mother and an adult son and a boyfriend who was living with caring for them.

And we we did what we do, you know, your loved one has.

Been killed and all that grief sharing.

And when I do that, I it's not I don't label myself as a Christian, I do have chaplain across the back of my jacket because sometimes we go to Muslims or Hindus or whatever, and I listen for what they mean.

There was no Christian talk until the end.

I heard her and she said, When I saw you approach, I thought maybe you were someone from church being.

And I'll just let that go.

And then a little later I said, Is there someone from your church who could call?

And she said, No, we don't go very often.

But I there was an identification, there was a language that I could use at the end, and I asked as we were leaving, would you like prayer?

And she said yes.

So that gave me the permission to use the language that I normally use, and that has meaning to me.

But the point is, it had to be her language, it had to be I wouldn't want to pray in Christ's name unless that had meaning to her.

So I'm I'm grateful for the language of the church that helps me relate not only to people of my faith but to others because I feel like God calls us to love everyone, whatever faith is.

That's interesting you say that about language because when I think about faith language, I think of the of it in Spanish.

Yes, correct.

That's your native tongue.

I guess the most beautiful mass is one said in Spanish.

And sometimes I need you there with me to speak their language because even though if they have the English, their feeling content, their content is rooted in the Spanish, which would be so much more helpful.

Did we beat loitering versus waiting to death here?

Or are there other things outstanding for you?

I really appreciate that perspective about language.

You know, and I think what's if at the risk of beating it to death, I mean, I think the really question is what we define as actual work.

You know, and and I I will tell you, I think this is coming back to the religiosity of my youth.

Like it was work for us to convert people's cognition, and I think because that was, you know, it was only joyful if you won.

But but to be honest, it isn't really much fun.

It's not much fun.

Um and I I, you know, like I'm very happy and joyful to work meaningfully.

I'm not happy to do meaningless work.

And I think this becomes a really important criteria for the church.

Is this work meaningful or meaningless?

And this is one of those things I know I'm a young guy, but you know, sometimes we come into places and people have been doing things a certain way for a long, long, long time, and that's why we keep doing it.

And the question is not whether we've done it a long time, but whether it's meaningful work.

Or whether benefits are meaningful.

And so, like, we believe in resurrection, some ministries need to die.

Um, because God can do something new.

I'm not identifying anything here.

I'm not doing that, but like we these are things that I think are important for us to try and figure out.

You know, one of the things with the religious understanding is when I worked, I worked a lot of nights.

And I would go around, and especially among people who are having surgery the next day, they don't have to be any genius to see their nervous.

And I would sit down with them and say, you know, do you are you afraid?

And they'd say, yes.

And I said, Well, you believe in a being that's greater than you were yes.

Would you like to pray to that person?

Uh yes.

And the Gideons, love the Gideons in their handout Bibles.

They came once every two years to the hospital and handed out little prayer books, white ones to the female nurses and black ones to the male nurse so they could carry it.

I carried mine all the time.

And many nights I sat down and prayed with the people, get them ready for whatever.

Yeah.

And it didn't have to be a religion, you know.

It had to be just someone who cared and tried to release their fears.

Yeah.

And so I think maybe that's my my struggle with these door with door-to-door intellectual conversions, these people never ask my name.

They don't ask me if I have children, they don't ask what I do, because those details are superfluous for them.

What they really want is for me to think like they think, no matter who I am.

And I think, you know, I don't want to say they're bad people.

I'm not saying that.

What I mean is I think that's not meaningful work.

Meaningful work is when we take time to make a relationship, to pay attention to somebody, to pay it just to pay attention.

And then I think we invite people to do things that's meaningful to them and to us.

If you I I I we don't have people coming on that are knocking at our door.

I didn't have it for the first three and a half years I lived here, but somehow I've had a flurry recently.

I don't I don't forest, I live in Brook Forest, I don't know if that means anything, but we've never had anyone.

But I'm just thinking uh in the past, I've experienced that.

And where what would you say to them?

What else might they do that would be really useful or helpful or that?

I think you have to have ears to hear.

So what I say is no soliciting.

I just I do yeah, yeah.

I have a friend who used to tell them, I'm more than happy to listen to you.

If you will come in my house, put your hand on my Bible, and pledge allegiance to this country.

Ooh.

They turned around and never came back because the Bible was a regular Bible and not the ones that the Jehovah's Witnesses use.

And I know that my brother-in-law, he turned from being a Catholic to being a Jehovah's Witness.

Yeah, he well, you have to understand.

But anyway, he called my husband, and it was like four hours on the phone.

I finally walked in and said, you know, what's going on?

And I heard him say, Norman, talk to Mickey and see what she thinks.

Norman started in, and I said, Norman, you can stop right there.

Okay?

I'm not interested in a religion that takes away my birthday presents and my Christmas presents.

And that was it.

We became very close.

Yeah.

But the deal was you come into the house and you don't try.

And include us in your teachings because we're not interested.

But he started laughing.

He said, gee, I've never heard anybody turn down the religion because of presents.

And I said, Well, it's the truth because they don't believe in Christmas.

And they don't, and they take away your birthday.

It's a this is a tough thing to figure out how do we handle how do we make room for people who we don't think are making room for us.

And do it's always really hard.

And I will tell you, um, I'm trying to grow into what Brene Brown says, which is to choose the discomfort of setting a boundary over the resentment that happens if I don't.

It doesn't mean that I have to set the boundary abruptly.

And I sometimes feel like because the way I raised was raised, that boundary setting is abrupt.

But to say, listen, we don't take solicitors, I didn't say that cruelly.

I just say we don't take solicitors of any kind.

I mean, I don't.

I don't want yard people putting their business card in my door.

I've already got yard people.

You know, we're really happy with that.

Um, hey, we're not solicitors, we just want to share.

We you do want something from me, so that's soliciting.

So I hope you have a great day.

You know, and I think I can say that very calmly and casually.

Um, when people call me on the phone, I I say, listen, I want you to do me a big favor.

Don't hang up.

Oh, okay.

I want you to remove me from your call list.

Usually, if you ask them not to hang up, they won't.

If you say I want to come off your call list, I usually just get a click.

You know.

Um, I I I don't know.

I don't know, but I do think there's something important about boundaries taking.

There's one other thing I want to tell you that's important that we don't always get in our study here.

And I'll just give you these two words on the board so you can see them in case this matters to you.

I used to be super nervous and I would always write this sort of stuff down on the board.

But there's two, there's two words for time in Greek.

You probably already know this.

Um two concepts.

Um, one is chronos, and this is what we're used to chronos, time like chronological, it's passing time, like tick-tick-tick sequence of events.

The other, though, is sort of like it's only used a few times, very sparing.

It's Cairo's time, and it sort of means like I hate to say like God's time, but like really when we hear Paul say at just the right time, Jesus came at just the right time.

It was not a chronological time, it was just the right time.

And the only way I can think about this mathematically is that chronos time is sort of this ray that there's a beginning, and off we go.

Right?

And tomorrow will just be the next uh data point in the number line.

But the Kairos are these moments in which the infinite shows up in the finite.

So to think about this, I know this is a little bit of a stretching event, right?

Because we can't really conceive of infinity.

But Jesus being raised from the dead happened historically, but it's an infinite event.

It's who God is.

God is resurrection.

So we experience in a historical moment an infinite reality.

That's Cairo's time, when the infinite shows up in the finite.

And so I think this is sort of what Paul is trying to say is look, you're wondering when the parocia is going to be, when it is that Jesus is going to come back.

And you have a choice.

What you do in your chronology, do you wait until that shows up, or do you look for Jesus to show up not just one time, but to show up like that?

I don't know if that makes sense.

And the way we do it here is with meaningful work.

Sometimes we think to ourselves, work is such a pain in the butt, and it's what people got when they were just a baby in the garden.

No, no, no.

When you read Genesis chapter 2, God made a garden first, and then God made the human being to tend to the garden.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

So we were made to work, and God said that work is very good.

Work that produces fruit is good.

Work that produces weeds is bad.

I know that makes sense.

There has been, I'm afraid, a real rejection of work as bad because we've gotten away from the notion of meaningful work.

And sometimes we say making cogs in a factory is not meaningful work.

It is, in fact, very meaningful work.

We benefit from those cogs.

And I'll tell you, as an educator, there was this move, it's still happening, and I just worry about what this is going to do for our kids.

I used to teach math.

And there was this move that everything we taught in math should be a discovery.

Everything and there should be a lab around it.

So, in order to teach children about exponents, we should start with a bouncy ball and measure how it declines and it's bounce as it goes, because that's actually an exponential decay.

And that would get kids interested in exponents, and then they would see how it's modeled and they would love exponents.

I mean, I didn't have enough time to do that.

And number two, there's no way I could trick every kid in the room into thinking what I said was important.

And what we moved away from educationally, this is a problem.

Learning for the sake of learning is alright.

Like it's okay to learn something just to learn it.

It does not have to apply to your life in any particular way when you're five.

What do you know anyway?

You learn because it's rewarding to learn.

So I think this is really, really tense sometimes.

Uh, what we do with waiting for loitering and what meaningful work is.

I hope I haven't ever controlled this.

I'm really talkative today.

Well, well, no.

I think of the Kronos, something happens in the middle, and that that chronos would just be the time of the time, the flow of time.

But something happens in the middle of it that changes?

It can be.

I think I think Kronos is that time when we when like nothing's happening when we're bored, when we can't wait for the next day, when there's nothing meaningful, and Kairos moments happen in Kronos where we say, like, oh, uh, God was in my sleeping child.

God was in that hello I got from the barista, God was in blank.

These moments where God plays peekaboo and we respond are Kairos moments.

And we can wait for them to happen to us, or we can look for them in the middle of chronology.

Looking for them, I think, is about meaningful work.

And again, like I think the best invitation we give to somebody to church is I see you enjoy this and I know other people would love it.

Would you consider sharing it?

People actually really enjoy sharing what they enjoy.

If you enjoy something, you usually enjoy sharing it.

Now, I don't like to run with other people, so don't ask me to do that.

But I do like to cook, and I love to share that.

Because I like people to be pleased with what I make, right?

So I do that quite a bit at my home or here, you know, and I'm really happy to do that most of the time.

And sometimes it's just my turn.

You know what I mean?

And I'm okay with that.

Sometimes it's my turn.

Sometimes it's just gotta be the kids.

Yeah.

And I'm and I'm gonna tell you too, I'm really harsh on clergy here because Paul says if you don't work, you don't eat.

And I have friends who are clergy who talk about all the work they do and they didn't even work at all.

It drive me nuts.

If you start a sermon talking about how hard it was for you to write a sermon, you need to go sit out, right?

This is what our job is to do that.

Like imagine coming in to being a barista and talking to your clients about how hard it is to make their coffee.

Do something different.

I mean, if this is not for you, do something different.

But I have folks who frankly spend a lot of time on their seats in my in my uh vocation, and I try really hard not to be that, so much so that sometimes I end up being a busybody.

So, like this has to get figured out.

You you you know, but but I I think it is important to hold a high standard for meaningful work, meaningful work.

That's like when I interviewed, I'm a retired principal, I interview teachers and I mean interview people for teaching for a job.

As soon as someone said, Oh, I want to teach because then then I'm in I'm at work when my kids are in school, and as soon as they said that, soon as in my head it went, the door went, you know, no, that's why you want to teach, then you need to go somewhere else because I don't want you in my school.

And that that seems seems harsh on the surface, but on the other hand, it's because you're always thinking I mean I did the lesson plans in the shower because I wanted to make sure that's the difference between meaningful work and work that doesn't suit you, right?

Or I didn't like added something to it.

Or in the middle in the middle of a lesson, we're gonna have something and you've got to change it.

You gotta change it.

It's not just service professions that are constant calls, in my opinion.

Now, listen, I used to teach, I didn't take work home, but I worked my butt off while I was at school.

My planning period, I graded everything, but in the back of my head, I was thinking about what I was going to do, right?

But I know machinists.

Yeah.

And that's what they do, and that's how they know that's where they fit, right?

They love machining and they think about it in the back of their head.

That's nourishing for them.

I don't want to raise the threshold so we say, like, hey, if you don't love your job, you're in the wrong place.

Because that becomes a little bit crazy, right?

It can be like nail biting, but this bit about meaningful work is really important, and um, it's it's a tough thing here in the diocese of Texas because um the bishop tells us constantly that we don't have enough clergy.

But part of what the bishop means is we don't have enough clergy who are willing to work for nothing.

So uh Mike Brady, who we just ordained at St.

Augustine, will never get paid for being a priest.

And he knew that going in.

And we call this the bivocational clergy.

So on his own dime, he went to like an accredited seminary here at Camp Allen for three years, uh, and he's going to serve, I don't know, like 10 hours a week down at St.

Augustine, and they'll never pay him for that, and he can't.

So, so we're not even sure if a bi-vocational priest can become a vocational priest.

Right now, not, or they'd have to move outside of the diocese a little confusing.

I can tell you, if this weren't my job, I would not be doing it.

So uh God love those folks.

But I mean, this is a thing that comes.

I don't want to overdo this, but like the scripture asks us to talk about this stuff.

You know, it does.

Off the topic.

I hope I'm not too far off the topic.

Picture these little groups of people attending a meeting around.

How do they end up being under the control of Rome where groups of people will get together and decide what we can put in the Bible?

Uh that took a long, long, long, long, long time.

And it it ended up being that Rome was the most influential city in the empire before Constantinople, and therefore the Bishop of Rome was the one who was.

I mean, it it it really is like like political power turns into religious power.

I mean, just just that.

This I think is is our is our witness.

I get real frustrated with the church a lot of times.

I really do.

And I'm convinced God has to be in it somewhere or we wouldn't have survived somewhere.

And that's the interesting thing though, that to think about what uh generous communities people were were functioning as with groups of 10.

And hey, look, we've got about 300 people here in this community that are relatively active, and and I perceive us to be a very generous community.

And uh I do think there is always a question for me, but for everybody else, how do we go deeper?

And how do we invite people to meaningfully serve, even if it's not in the church?

I mean, I think that's really important for us, you know.

They asked us what we would do, you know, would we like to do a Habitat for Humanity project?

Well, not all of us can do that, I can tell just looking around.

So, what I think we can do though is think about meaningful work, and part of the meaningful work we can do is recruit people to do meaningful work.

Okay, maybe we should transition because uh he mentioned persecution, and I want to make sure we've got this down.

I was taught as a kid that Christians were always this horribly persecuted group of people, and it's patently false.

So I want to give you that there were only three major persecutions that happened to Christians.

And the first one happened around the year 64, and it's only in Rome, and it has to do with Nero blaming Christians for burning Rome down, when in fact Nero himself probably burned down Rome.

He did it so that he could build Rome up.

It was a hodgepodge buildings, and he designed the new city.

But because Christians were such a new group, they were thought to be like new age, like not Christian science.

That's more than a hundred years old.

But they were thought to be Scientologists.

When you think of Scientologists, normally you think is go, right?

And so that was Christians for Nero.

So after Run burned down, he didn't persecute Christians, he punished them for arson.

So there's a difference between persecution and punishment for crime.

It's sort of like in a state of the Roman Empire.

There's some kind of persecution going on there.

That's another one that we hear about.

But it's not empire-wide, and it's not people testing your Christian credentials to execute you.

And it's only there.

This really is the major one.

And it's under the Emperor Diocletian, who curiously enough, kills his own daughter and wife because they convert to Christianity.

So he took it seriously.

It is actually called the Great Persecution.

This is the only one in which, empire-wise, if you were accused as a Christian, people could come to you and say, sacrifice to the emperor or die in my presence.

So they could kill you on the spot or they could feed you to animals.

So Diocletian had his daughter and wife beheaded, I think.

That's what nobles got, the quick death.

Peasants got the arena.

That's 12 years long, and notice, please, that that's like 150, or sorry, 250 years later than two Thessalonians.

So when you're thinking about persecution, what you're really thinking is you lose your friends.

You don't get to go to the synagogue anymore.

Those things matter, but they're not like being fed to lions.

Does that make sense?

So there's degrees of persecution.

There's degrees.

And um Paul says, uh pray to be rescued from evil people.

And I think that's a really, really great question, whether or not people are evil, or frankly, whether we live into loitering.

I can't answer that.

People are evil or can people be evil people or do people do evil things?

This is, I think, a really important question.

Both are both.

Well, uh, was Hitler evil?

It's the great hypothetical case, and I'll tell you, when we were living in Germany, a film came out called Der Untergang, which in English is the downfall.

And it came out in English super controversial because it was like Hitler's last two weeks, and it showed him like being nice to his secretary, and Germans lost their mind because they were so used to him having like vampire fangs and all portrayals, you know, and like eating babies and killing puppies.

That here was this guy being nice to his secretary and showing like some compassion for a person, and it was super, super hard.

And I I think that's the question you're asking, right?

To be an evil person, you can't do anything good.

Nothing good.

I mean, that has to be the definition, right?

And do those people exist?

And and I guess then the the another question is we are we are we all capable of evil doing something evil.

I mean just as people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are.

I mean we get angry sometimes, we don't know how to handle that anger.

We can do it evil.

They had a kind of idea.

The psychologist uh came up with the idea of how to torture people.

Um they would ask me about it and he said it was okay.

It's interesting.

Remember in the ancient world, when they're writing this, they didn't ask you anything while they tortured you.

They just tortured you and then they asked you stuff.

When it was over.

They didn't keep torturing you.

They tortured you to bring you to the edge of life itself.

Because then you could really tell the truth.

That was the understanding.

But there was no making it stop.

It stopped when it was over, and then they interrogated you.

It was a lose-lose situation.

So, this is what I love about uh former uh Congressman John McCain, who was waterboarded for years at the Now Hilton and said it's wrong.

It's wrong to do it to anyone ever.

I think that's right.

But I don't think people who waterboard are evil.

I just think waterboard is evil.

So how do they do it?

How do they waterboard people?

What do they do?

They drown you.

They lay you down in a decline and run water over your face with a rag in your mouth so that you basically drown, but really slowly.

And uh and you die, and they can resuscitate you, or they can control the water such that you don't die, but man, um you don't even know whether you're gonna live or die, and you might rather die.

Um again, are those evil people, or do they do evil things?

And I think that's really important.

I have no doubt that people who torture to extract information think that that's helpful.

I think there are both.

I think there are people that, in particular in that scenario, there are people who enjoy doing that.

Um it's rare, I think.

But I think there are evil people.

But I think most people at some point in their life probably do something that's evil for a little reason.

Maybe they think that it's right, you know.

I agree.

I think the majority of people who do evil things because of things in their history common to themselves, or because their ideology is so good that they're they believe that they are doing the right thing by doing this evil thing.

But I also believe that there are people who are born without conscience, there's bright differences.

Um Scott Pegg, people with a lie.

Um his book addresses that.

But I wonder if you're a sociopath, right, and you're born that way, are you evil?

Because you're not making really any choices.

Good point.

And if you're born without the capacity for empathy, how could you be judged as failing to have empathy?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know the answer to that.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And what we do with those people, I don't know the answer to that either.

Yeah.

It's not like you can say, well, you don't have the empathy gene, so we'll just let you run rampant.

You know, I mean, I mean, and then there's juice, it's not their fault.

That's right.

Yeah.

And and then there's just people who experience evil.

Um, I mean, you know, that that yeah, I I remember this was a kind of I remember one, I always worked in inner cities, and one day a child said to me, Something, um I don't remember why, but he said, Miss Stone.

I know that's not Miss Stone.

Every day at the end of the school day, you get in your car and you drive away.

I live here.

I never live here.

And it was a real tough neighborhood.

And that just really though that Jesus Christ is going to destroy that with his breath.

You notice that?

Not with his paddle, not with fire.

And you need breathing is not an image of destruction, it's an image of life.

So Jesus is gonna breathe life into that.

And that's what's gonna take it away.

That's wild, you know.

It's sort of wonderful, and it does it does call up this question about whether or not we punish people to get even, or we try to breathe life into criminals or people that we're scared of to rehabilitate them, and which would be more effective.

I mean, it's an interesting question.

I I believe, again, from working with inner cities, of course, there were young children, uh to sixth grade.

They you can change, I mean, they can children or eyes out there, they could change.

Uh lots of lots of stuff had to happen in the school, you know, and then you don't know then later, like the next year when they move to another school or something, you know, you don't have that control, but was there enough experience in that year at that time that would have made a huge difference?

Yeah, you never know.

I think you do know.

You know that when we try to create kairos moments for people, that that's the best we can do.

And all of us have kairos moments that were ordinary days, and something showed up.

The song was louder, the lighting was there, who knows what it was, but it made the day magical, right?

And people didn't even know they were doing that for us, and they did.

People rarely know they're creating a Kairos moment for us and and they did.

Do you notice Paul says that we're under a powerful delusion because we refuse to love the truth?

And that's a really interesting thought, isn't it?

That we would rather believe a lie than live into the truth sometimes.

It's so funny you say that.

And I can't I mean you're right, and and it's so I mean, just thinking about like girls and body shame, because apparently 95% of women have body issues.

In like we know better, but we live into that.

And we inflict it on each other when we know better than that.

Or when we know that, hey, a human being is somebody.

My dad said this when he came back from Vietnam.

A communist is a man trying to feed his family.

That was his takeaway.

Yeah.

Uh but when he had orders to kill those people, then he did.

Um, and I'm not saying he should have disobeyed orders, but what I mean is it's really convoluted to have that understanding that all of us sort of share, but then when somebody cuts us off in the parking lot, it goes right out the window because we'd had to believe a lie in that moment.

On page 156, um, in the paragraph Ringboat Thanksgiving, uh, it says we do not have peace until we tell you before.

I don't write that one understanding that.

Yeah, I I could I write that down too, and I wonder if they're saying uh until we've dealt with like non-lasting, imperfect, impermanent sort of ways to cope, we don't realize a better way to live.

To me, it seems really hard to universalize because I think there's many people who are taught to be afraid of God who never make it to living at peace with God.

They're taught to be afraid God's gonna send them to hell, and and that's how they live their whole life.

And they never get to like, oh, it was just me that was worried about that, God's not worried about that.

And it depends on on how you embrace in regards to the guilt and yeah, I if it's okay to put forward, I mean, Renee Brown's really helpful for me, the differences between guilt and shame, right?

So guilt means I made a bad choice and I can make better choices, shame means there's something wrong with me.

And I was taught by my church very early on, there's something wrong with me.

And boy, when I feel like something's not going right, then the narrative has power.

Like, boy, there is something really wrong with me.

I'm still waiting on Jesus to fix it.

That was the thing.

I I I I was told he was gonna fix it, and I sort of was like, okay, fix it.

And then it was like, well, hell, you know, like maybe I didn't mean it enough, but I meant it with all that I had.

I mean, I really did, and that's where I, you know, I just can't do that anymore because it never worked.

And what's interesting is it never can work.

It never can.

When do you get confirmation in that belief system that you've been fixed?

And that's what that's the hook you have to stay on, right?

And actually, man, there's this interesting thing, and I I you're gonna think I'm crazy when I say this, but I have some actual empathy for people flying planes into the World Trade Center because they did that and they didn't have to do anything else.

That got them to the next step, and then life was over.

They didn't have to do the daily grind anymore.

They did this one act and they got to go to heaven forever.

And and you know, geez, it's sort of like you know, Constantine got baptized on his deathbed.

He waited because he believed baptism would wash away his sins, and if he did that earlier, he might ascend the next day.

What would he do with that?

Planning ahead.

I just I mean, religious extremism is not unique to one to one sect.

We all we all have it.

I I don't know about the wrath business again.

Like, I I sure hope my daughter's not afraid of God at any point in her life.

I know she'll be afraid of other people, I know she will, and some of that's probably savvy.

Yeah.

Savvy question.

Savvy.

Some of it's savvy.

Although, you know, and that's the fine line.

Like, how do you teach your daughter or your son that hey, um you should be aware and cautious but not afraid.

You know, like those are really, really hard.

Yeah.

But some some of it I think, well, I guess it depends on how the child was raised anyway.

But in terms of girls, because I I raised two daughters and I'm a girl, and I have nothing.

I have a particular became intuitive.

You just ooh.

You had a sense of if it feels wrong or it feels not right.

Uh I I don't know what I think, and I don't know if women in this room do you guys as as women feel bad?

Are you sharp?

Sharper about being in places where maybe was it safe for you or was it uh yeah, I see this person.

That person.

Yeah, yeah.

This way, you know.

That person.

It's tough.

And I see why.

I can tell you, I've never been sexually harassed.

Not really.

Not in a way where I felt like that person had power over me.

But it happens to my wife a whole bunch of times.

It's pretty it's ubiquitous for men.

And I would tell you my experience is pretty universal for men.

There's people who have said things to me, but they had no power to do that.

And we both knew it.

So it does it mean harassment.

I don't know if that makes sense.

I did have a person who I thought really harassed me a lot.

Um, but there was not gonna be any father in that stuff.

It made an uncomfortable work environment.

Um the person was not sexually interested in me, but did sexually harass me a lot.

It made me uncomfortable.

But again, there was no power in that relationship.

Does that make sense?

What they were doing was wrong, but I wasn't gonna lose my job.

And it just was uncomfortable.

And if you're liked.

I was somewhat required.

I was somewhat required, but I could have said stop if I had the the thought to set the boundary.

If I'd done that, I think I could have lived with it better.

You know.

And if you're a woman of color, I I remember my dad said to me when I take a true one time to sleep.

You will always have problems.

And you'll fall down or you apply for a job, and and you won't get it, just get up and keep going.

Go to the next year.

And and I was in in 1992, when I went out the first Hispanic woman of color in Pasadena, Texas, that was placed in a secondary school as an administrator.

Yes, we're in 1990.

Yeah, 1992.

Yes, it's just the same place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's just like the wall.

So I do want to be hopeful about that, if you didn't mind, because I think that sometimes I can't believe how long it takes for us to figure out that, like, hey, there's not women's rights, gay rights, they're just human rights.

Yes, yes.

But I am convinced that making legislation doesn't get us there.

No.

And so hopefully the delay in the coming of the human rights is about meaningful change in hearts growing, not just how we live again.

I don't think we would have gotten all that much.

It's so funny.

Which way does it go?

I will tell you this that if we if New Hampshire had not made Gene Robinson their bishop, there's no way we would have accepted getting bishops just on thinking.

We got there because people did it.

There's no way if they hadn't ordained against the cameras of the church for women to be priests in 1976, we'd have done it by now.

People did it, and then we had to deal with this.

But it's a both hands sort of thing, right?

And if you say, you know, if the National Church said, you must have gay clergy in your church, we'd have to fall down again.

So hopefully we're we're we're slowly growing our hearts, but I'll tell you all, I found out here that we weren't right about that.

A couple of families left when we said we're gonna be open and inclusive, and and I love them.

I do, I love them.

Um I loved them then and I still do, and I hope they'll come back.

Because really, they didn't lose anything, they just don't know that.

They don't know that.

And and this I think is what part of the thing we can we can read through here.

You know, in the beginning, Paul says it's just of God, just of God to afflict your afflictors.

Where are you reading that?

Oh, in the first chapter that there'll be vengeance against those who don't know or obey.

Oh, yeah.

There'll be eternal destruction.

And I want to work backwards if I can just to see if we can enlarge this a little bit.

Little bit.

Eternal destruction is not eternal torture.

Destruction means it's gone.

So at the worst, God vaporizes people.

At the worst, instead of eternally torturing them.

Does that make sense?

But it doesn't have to be people, because the question is what afflicts us?

And coming back to are there evil people or evil deeds or are there evil forces, I don't know where you come out on it, but to be honest, there are things that afflict me like ageism and sexism and workaholism and narcissism.

And it sure is just for God to destroy those things eternally.

Those things, not necessarily those people.

I think it's an option in how we read the scriptures.

Because the truth is, usually we don't read the Bible, it reads us.

The Bible asks what's in your heart.

Whatever's there is what you're going to put on this page.

But I just want to say our hearts can develop a little bit.

That's true.

I mean, you know, like Anne Lamott says, we know we've made God in our own image when God hates the same people we do.

And it's a really interesting, you know, she's one of these really pithy people, but it's quite interesting, isn't it?

Quite interesting to think about.

We sure can read the Bible in such a way that we're justified in hating other people.

We can.

And you can you can define events in your life that way and turn them into negative, bad, and bad.

I mean, they're bad stuff, it's bad stuff, but what do you do?

How do you go beyond that after it's all over?

And where do you go to get help?

What do you do about that?

Um it's kind of like what happens to your heart.

It's just this really interesting phrase for me to come back to, and I say it, but I'm trying to live into it.

You know, like when my daughter, if she's two or three, if she has a potty accident, I don't say, like, how dare you take care of yourself as if she could.

Like, you just clean them up.

You don't torture them by making them sit in that.

That's child abuse, right?

So when people have potty accidents in their lives, you know, we clean them up.

This is what we do.

And if we don't do that, we're negligent family members.

It doesn't matter if they're 73 or 7 or 17.

That doesn't mean there's no accountability.

This is the thing that we often struggle with.

Well, I have to have limits.

Yeah, you do, but limits should never take away somebody's dignity or their personhood.

Right.

And those limits and consequences should contribute to their cleaning up.

That's right, and hopefully they're rehabilitative.

Yes.

You know, returning to the discussion about evil people versus I said there, you know, that there are people who are evil.

But you know, maybe there aren't, because when I think about someone who would enjoy torture or waterboarding or whatever, maybe that's somebody who was abused as a child.

They don't start out evil.

So then if you don't, I think of an evil person as somebody who is inherently that way.

But nobody is born evil.

So maybe there aren't evil people, maybe there aren't evil.

I think the maybe, you know, Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, um, think whatever you want about the Jesuits, but he he has this interesting spiritual discipline, and I think it applies to not only what people say but what they do, that it's our spiritual discipline to conceive of whatever somebody says to us in the best possible way.

So if somebody says, go to hell, you jerk, our discipline is to think about that in the best possible way.

And one of those options is to say, Oh, there are parts of me, I hope, go to hell forever.

Parts of me.

Do you remember Father Chris, we have friends Father Chris Keyn that he asked one day, we're talking about stuff like this.

He said, Is hell an empty place?

Yeah, you know, Augustine said it was.

And Augustine says hell is no place because evil is the lack of reality.

But I'll show you a picture of hell if you want to see it.

You want to see it?

I've shown it to you before I took a picture of it.

This I think is really, really important because Paul is talking about these things like destruction.

So we we went to hell when we went to Jerusalem.

Um, you see how how there's this relative maximum, relative, the mountain bollas is over here and it's higher.

But you can see the relative minimum, hopefully, is here.

This is the bottom of the valley.

And uh, this is called the Gehenom Valley, which gets shortened to Gehenna.

Gehenom is Gehenna.

That's the word in the Bible that our translators translate to hell.

Gehenom.

This is a place where a couple of things happen.

So if you're worshiping a sky god, you go up to the top of a mountain to be closer.

If you're worshiping an earth god, you go to the bottom of the valley to be closer.

Right?

Lower down, but closer.

Well, you read about these gods in the Hebrew Bible that people are sacrificing their children to, and including kings of Israel.

Their names are Kemosh or Molech or Milcom.

And there was a shrine to Kemosh, Molech, Milcham here.

This is the lowest point in Jerusalem.

Manasseh, the child of Hezekiah, burns up his firstborn son to Kemosh, likely right here.

This is also the place where if you're offering sacrifices and pouring blood on the ground, everyone's standing on hill.

Everyone's staying on a hill.

So I would suggest to you that, oh, and last thing is because it's the bottom of the valley, this is also where trash gets accumulated and burns.

Now don't think about plastic wrappings, they don't have that.

This is like things you can't do anything else with because all wood that could be repurposed was repurposed.

And when you burn it, you don't torture it, you destroy it.

I mean, it's really important.

So hell is a place where you burn up something that has no redeemable qualities.

It's a place where you sacrifice the most important things in your life, your children, to please God.

And um, yeah, those are the two places.

So think about that as hell.

Hell is where we hurt other people to please God, and it's where the irredeemable things of life get permanently destroyed.

That's kind of true, too.

Or if it's something you absolutely know about, you can burn it up there too.

I would suggest it's exactly the same thing.

Suggest sacrificing lives to please God is irredeemable.

It's awful that they did that kind of thing.

It's awful we continue to do those kinds of things.

Well, yeah, hopefully we don't.

Speaking of something else, I just want to ask you guys your principles and it seems to me watching the news that there's this huge epidemic of teachers trying to have sex with their students.

Did you see that in those days?

That's hard.

It's it's it's been I've been gone for a long time, but I hadn't I hadn't paid attention to that.

Not at this school, I'm proud to say.

Didn't we imply that?

I'm sure that was the case.

I will say I as one of my final one of my final years, remember, I had a teacher who an R teacher, one of the truly one of the best teachers I've ever seen, ever seen, and she became involved with a student, and she was in junior, it was a junior high, and he was in eighth grader.

He was a little older.

They they wound up getting married.

Well, they had children.

Then the marriage did not did not last.

I I did have some contact with the young man later, but they did have two children together.

And uh I did see her.

I ran into her a little bit by accident at another school.

She was in another school district um some years later.

So I don't know what to say.

Uh I have to say, I really don't think this went on.

I mean, I this absolutely are people.

People are people.

Yeah.

Even when I was in high school, one of the teachers got involved with one of the students.

They married it's just more public now.

Yeah, I would I would tell you that I am not sure in the misogyny contest who wins the medal.

No.

JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Clinton, or Donald Trump.

Sorry.

I don't know who wins the first place medal, but I know which one's the most public.

Yeah.

And maybe that is part of the difference.

I don't know if it's right or wrong, but that's part of the difference, is what we make public and frankly what we accept.

G.K.

Chesterson says very few people disagree about what's evil.

What we disagree about is what's acceptable evil.

That's a really interesting thought.

Yeah, it's true.

The other thing that G.K.

Chesterson says is that the root of evil isn't pride, it's impatience.

Impatience.

We try to rush things that aren't ready because we get bored.

And we don't accept that life doesn't have to be exciting.

And I would tell you, I think that's part of the epidemic, the so-called epidemic you're talking about, because that's exciting.

And that's the root of the video game problem we're having because video games are real exciting and real life isn't.

Mowing the grass is not exciting after you do it the first time.

But man, that grass has got to be mowed.

I know, I mean, I mean, I really think there's something to what we're choosing in the digital age to have a station and pattern in our lives because there's always got to be something going on.

And the question is, when and how do we make room for just sort of being.

Still.

And I wonder if that is an affliction that God will destroy in hell.

And it's helpful to remember that again, there's not heaven and hell when you die dichotomy yet.

And it's really important that I would tell you as a priest and a human being that I have lived in hell for years of my life.

And it wasn't gonna happen when I die.

It may happen then too, I don't know, but I've lived in real hell, and I've seen people in hells greater than my own who were drug addicts and alcoholics.

Workaholism at least is socially acceptable.

Um, but they didn't even get that.

I think God is at least as concerned as the hells we live in now as the ones later.

I mean the places we live in now that are destroying us from being who God has in mind for us to be.

This is all different ways to read the scriptures.

You see, the thing is, when we got taught the Bible in my church, we were also told what it meant instead of allowing it to speak on its own and engage our hearts in conversation.

The conversation was preset.

This is about hell or heaven when you die, instead of, oh, what are the options for heaven and hell?

The scriptures don't talk about heaven and hell very much.

They talk about a place of destruction and that's it.

They talk about weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And I will tell you, looking back on my life, I weep and gnash my teeth over things that I thought were so important, and all they did was hurt myself and hurt other people.

I put a lot of energy into stuff that was a waste.

And all it did was make me sad then.

And I lament that I wasted my life doing that stuff.

I didn't have to.

Okay, we're gonna read Philippians next week.

A quick question.

Please.

And you don't have to answer it this way.

I went to a funeral Saturday and there was a eulogy that had a great amount of discussion about the book Heaven is for real.

What's your opinion?

Have you ever heard of that?

Yeah, I did read it.

I actually had a parishioner in my last church who had like died and come back to life, and like that was this real thing for them.

And the the heaven is for real is like this thing, and you know, for them it was like this.

The book talks about what it looks like, but for them it really was about like it's not some fake idea that really is about like living in union with everything.

And I don't know, I'm super skeptical.

I'm real skeptical, but but I am suspicious that you you know, deeply suspicious that it's not that we need a fixed image, we just need trust.

And and I would tell you, my my more deeper conviction than that that I'm trying to grow into is that I have an opportunity to be reconciled with people while I'm alive, and if I can't do it, God will do it for us when we're dead.

I have no idea what that looks like, but if I can't do it for any reason, some of them are very good, God will take care of it.

And won't like shame me for not getting it done.

God will just say, I get why you couldn't do it.

Here it is.

I don't know if that happens in the sky or in the clouds or whatever.

I just sort of think that's how I'm orienting my trust.

Heaven is for real.

Yeah, it's a it's about a little boy who dies and comes back and then talks about all what happened.

There's a lot of research that people with these near-death experiences have very similar bids, and they really have to do with life and with unity.

After my mother died.