Contemplating The End of Our Days (#699) — https://www.thegodjourney.com/2019/09/27/how-do-i-let-god-provide-699/

Outside the box of religious obligation lies a road less travelled into the heart of a father's affection. Slinging freedom all over the place, this is the God channel. Well, here we sit on the shores of Lake Jocasse in South Carolina. Can you beat a view like this? Oh, it's the best thing. We're out on the porch just looking over the lake and I'm telling you, there'll probably be boats and jet skis go by, so we're going to pick up some extra noise, but man, we couldn't resist just sitting out here. It's mid-September, the sun is out, the lake is flat and beautiful, and we're not waterskiing, unfortunately, we're sitting here yakking. We just cut this, I'm sitting here with Bob Stamps. Many of you have heard him before on the other broadcasts and we'll link his previous ones to you. We've been here working on your book all week, Bob, and we took 110,000 words in one file and cut it down to 47,000 words. Do you hate me? No. I couldn't do it. I don't have a sharpener knife and Wayne is the knife. Wayne is the knife? I don't think I want people to hear that. No, no, no. Sounds like a bad movie, the knife. Wayne the knife. You've been working on this book 20 years. More or more. Yep, 20 years. And I've been working on it about five with you, I guess. Five good years. Come alongside you. 19, 20,000. We talked about it before. We'll talk about it when the book actually comes out. It's a compelling story about two young men in the Civil War era and the transformation that they go through together. You don't know it's fair to talk about it much now since people can't buy the thing, but how does it feel to come to the end of it? I mean, today we came to a point where we felt like the book ended itself. There was more you'd written, but the book was over. Yeah, I would like to kind of give just a picture of it, but it's okay. The book is really the story of my life. I was raised in the deep, deep South. It was a time before integration. I had close personal friends that were African-Americans when I was a child. I have a very young child, but at puberty battians in the deep South at that time, you do not have friends with African-Americans. You don't shake hands with African-Americans? You don't. There's no intimacy whatsoever between people who could have been the closest to friends a few years earlier. Suddenly it's over. Except for the color of someone's skin. Except for the color? That's amazing, isn't it? And you sort of have relationships, Wayne, but you don't have friends. The friendship ended at puberty. You still have relationships. You still nod to each other, but you don't shake hands. You still can be kind to each other, but you never have any kind of parties together or anything as equal. There it is. In the old days. In the old days. In the old days. And how many of those people could have become better friends than the ones you got if you'd had the chance? Much better. Much better. And I think in a way we sort of knew it, but the culture wouldn't allow it. I have a line in it where two young Southerners are talking and they're both struggling with the whole situation of race. They're both in the north at this time and they're having a terrible time treating African Americans as equals. And one young man who's probably the more insightful in it says it's the curse of culture dark died on the brain. And it's a miracle to overcome it. I think people can overcome it without the help of God, but with the help of God. I mean, that is a word from him because there's no question in God's mind that we are all loved with the same love. We're all loved. We're all one. Brotherhood is not just you and me being brothers, but all of us together being brothers with Christ. Right. Christ is our brother as God as our Father. Yeah, we're 99% done and hopefully it'll go tinkering a whole lot more on this thing. We can kind of work through the process of finding a way to put it in print. But how does it feel 20 years of your life and now at the cusp of finishing it and you were almost ready to have a funeral service here? Yeah, I've been sad all afternoon. Why is that? Because they're all dying. Yeah, all these characters you fall in love with them. You know, my wife gave me a wonderful woman character. The main character has a girlfriend and she's just a delightful child. And the older people are people really out of my past, strong women, racially prejudiced men who you would... I say that like Atticus was in Harper Lee's first book. The printer made them take his racist tendencies out and made him that sweet Gregory Peck Atticus to kill a Malkenbird. But in reality, the real Atticus is the mixed character. He's muddled. He has a racist tendency, but he's still a man that can treat other men at least with humanity. Not friendship. Not handshakes. Right. But humanity, he's not going to let an innocent man die. Yeah, but it's friendship that will change us. All together. Wayne has been a genius when it comes to taking a text. I think young authors especially tend to always want to just keep writing and keep writing. It's not enough to just say, George walked out of the bathroom, but George walked over the red carpet and there were clouds through the window and the breeze was blowing. And he got to the next door and opened it carefully. Here's the triple for Robin. Oh, no, no, no. And Wayne just knows how to clean it up. He knows how to set it right. And then when he wants to cut and I scream, he can say, look at this. And all of a sudden it's easy to read. It's shorter sentences. Things flow. And you don't have extraneous material in there. I love the process. By the time we're working on the third section here, we've cut every section. And it's not that we've cut everything bad in the book. There's some amazing things in there that have to end up on the cutting room floor. I like in my own writing when a book takes over itself. And it really isn't you writing the book. The book has the characters or whatever. If it's a nonfiction book, whatever you're trying to say, it has its own momentum. And now you're serving that story. You're not serving what I wanted to write it for, but what this story and how it can be accessed by the people. Yeah. There was an article of several Sundays ago in the New York Times book review that said almost exactly that. There's a time in an author's exercise when you're writing a book. There's a time when it's like you're just writing what's already been written. The book is already is there and you're finding it. Yeah. Letting it come out. Yeah. And we had moments like that. We had moments like that. No, Luke wouldn't do that. Monroe wouldn't do that. I mean, and they're not really here, but they've become characters rich enough that you can't just take them on a side track out of nowhere. You've got to be consistent. For somebody listening to this blog now, this might be, this might clarify. This very day, we were writing and I'd written probably another 50 pages. I think that whole area that would have become 50 pages. And we got to a certain point this afternoon and we both looked at each other and Wayne said the book has ended itself right here. And we all knew it. And we have another guy that's been working with this book, a wonderful medical doctor. Whose phone we're staying in while we look over this gorgeous lake. Yeah, he's staying inside, but he is a wonderful brother. And there's a lot of things about medicine in this story. And he's so good at it so that I don't make a fool of myself on Wayne either. Neither one of us know that much about it. But he and I had worked real hard on the ending. But there was a better ending and it was 50 page shorter than where we were going. The book is working title now is Lucian's Crossing. We're not sure if it's the final title. There's other possibilities with that. But anyway, when it comes available, we'll let y'all know. It'll be a while. Can I just say a little bit more about it? This is a story from my family. I have three cousins, all of which were in the Civil War on the wrong side. And that's made clear in the book. But I took these three guys and I put them all together as one character, a boy named Lucian Lanier. And it's a relationship between Lucian Lanier and a young lad. He was enslaved on my uncle's farm back in Alabama in the 1840s, 50s and 60s. And it's the story of how their friendship is so intense at the beginning, these two lads, and how their friendship has to change at puberty. But in this case, it doesn't go away. But it can't be experienced. It can't be expressed because of the culture that has dark dyed the brains of both these boys. It's a wonderful hero story because the hero really is the African-American lad who just won't let go. I found a piece, a letter in a, I read 150 of my, one of my cousin's war letters. And in one of them, he talks about his young valet in the Civil War, Monroe, on the southern side, of course. And he says that Monroe always wants to be closer to me than I'm comfortable with. And that began the book 20 years ago. Yeah, don't give too much more away, Bob. I'm not going to give away the big thing. I know it's hard to let go. Anyway, it's the most unlikely story. It's how these young fellows regain their friendship over in the midst of the Civil War and immediately afterwards in New York City. You were talking the other morning, we had a series of just times in the morning to have focus on the Lord, but you're in your late 70s, mid 70s? Late 70s. Yes, 77. And you've had occasion to contemplate your mortality of late. You had a pretty serious surgery a number of years ago. It could have ended. We may never met Lucian's Crossing. Yeah. Thankfully, medical science was able to, and the hand of God was able to pull you back from the brink. But I've, many people know of Liston's podcast. I had a series of emails that I put up on my blog from a man whose wife was dying of cancer and then died of cancer and the crisis of faith that accompanied all that. And I thought it'd be fun. I know people say it'd be fun to talk about death. I think it is fun. It's one thing people want to ignore. I've got people in my life that absolutely won't let you make a joke about death, won't talk about death. The contemplation of mortality just scares them to death. Or at least it just, it's so, it's so, something you just don't want to think about because somehow ruined their life on this earth that they have to think about how it ends. I guess that's it. Yeah, that's it. But you talked about it from a very different perspective the other day. Yeah. I think in Christianity we sometimes, we disparage the idea of death. But I don't, I've learned not to disparage that. In fact, I know that in the New Testament when death is disparaged, it's the death away from God. It's death without God. Right. We don't die eternally. We live somewhere else. But the idea of life having an ending, I've learned it's very, very, it's a good thing. In fact, St. Francis calls death his brother. But what it does, it allows us to judge our lives every day in the light of God's word. What matters most today? What will matter most on the dying day? And when you get to be in your latter years, you begin to think like that. And it's not a macabre idea at all. It helps you to begin to live your life in the light of what will continue after you. What matters now, but what will matter the day after you die? What will be remembered? And once you plant, you know, you don't plant bad seeds. You plant good seeds. And, you know, the fruit of goodness goes on for a thousand generations, the Bible says. And I'd say it goes on past that because a good life continues to live in this world after one life dies. That life continues in what you've invested in other lives. Martin Mark Twain writes a great book, a short story about it. He starts with a butterfly, I think, and just how a guy who brushed away a butterfly, how that the series of events that went on for years and years and years just because of that one event. Now, if brushing away a butterfly can change a kingdom, I think that's the way it ended, that a whole kingdom has changed because of the series of events that were connected. What impact, what change can a good life have upon this world? And we don't know. And the fun thing about it is we'll never get any credit for it because God is the one who makes plans. I've said this the last time I was on the podcast. I do believe in God's providence. I believe God has plans, but I believe that the world is free. And so God's plans, he doesn't compel it to happen, but he makes a plan within the context of a free world. And Jesus last week was a good example. It was the worst thing that ever could happen to God or to humanity, but God made a plan out of it and saved the world. As much in Scripture too that contemplates, asks us to contemplate the fact that we weren't created for this life alone. When we live here, it's hard not to think of the 70, 80, 90 or 20 years we may get in this life, even when somebody dies really young. There's always a lot of wasted life. We're kind of, because we can't think or see beyond the temporal. So we measure everything, even legacy, even what we might leave behind, trying to some grasp at immortality through those kinds of things, particularly people who don't know God and try to do it through buildings and things they put their names on. Or even books. More books. But God invites us to say, you know, life's but a vapor. Get it in your heads. This is not all you were made for. It's not that this isn't grand and God didn't want to be in this with us. But to me, it's the prologue of an adventure. And it sets us up for it. I've been with a number of people who passed away in my presence. By the way, I like that word adventure. I think that's the exciting thing about getting close to dying. I mean, this is a doorway. It's not a closed door. When you get through the doorway, you don't look back and see, oh, the door's closed. No, you keep going. It's a beginning. It really is not an ending. It's a beginning. And when I've been with people who passed away, I have this thought, and it's not what I try to have. I've just had it spontaneously enough times. I wish I knew what they know now. When I just take the last breath and just laying there and now they're no longer with us. Man, what do they know now? You and I guess that. You and I, you know, we've talked to people, come to conclusions about stuff, but we only speculate. You have no idea what's beyond that door you just talked to. But I mean, to me, that's got to be the greatest adventure for which we were created to come face to face. We've just written this book where there's this amazing reunion toward the end of it. And I was thinking about last night as I was trying to sleep, because I'd woken up early. My mind was racing with a lot of thoughts. I finally gave up trying to sleep. But I just thought at that kind of reunion, we know God, we know Jesus in part. We get glimpses of them. We know things that are true about them, but there's that longing, that deep longing that yearns to be face to face with the God that we've loved in our journeys and the God we can't wait to meet. And that reunion has got to be the best of all possible things. And I guess the irony or the contradiction is, I have this friend, his wife just passed away. So if it is an adventure for her, the day she dies is the best day of her experience, right? And the day she dies is the worst day of his. And that's the contradiction. Those that love her, when you're in this world and you're separated from those you love, that's where death is on this side of it very painful. We lose people we love. We lose souls in our heart from the people that filled them with such friendship and warmth and wonder. And now we're left without them. And that's the conflict, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it's not the mourning as if, oh, death's over in the life. No, they're going on to the best of all possible things, but they're genuinely people here with grief and sorrow. Yeah. Yeah. As excited as you and I might be about our mortality finally coming to an end, there'll be people who love us here who will not find that day as exciting as we do. I told Wayne yesterday there are two people that hate to die, the people that have loved living so much. And we all hate to die in that sense. And then the other people, the ones that haven't lived as they should and wish they could have had another life, I'm saying on this earth, to live better. And not as they should. Not as they should. They'd be more like they squandered the life they had. Yeah, that's what I meant. No, to me, that's a sad thing to think. I was given a life in a world broken though it is, as much pain as there is in the world. There's also so much beauty and wonder if it's only a sunset or the constellations in the sky. I mean, we're in a world of immense beauty, given lives that God meant for us to enjoy, even inside a broken world. Eugene Peterson, I was reading a book, or are you reading in a book? It's a bathroom book. But there's a wonderful passage in it. He was talking about John Calvin who wrote, I mean, he's from 600 books, 600 tracks and pieces like that in his life. And he was living in Geneva, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was beautiful then as it is now and the Alps all around the great lake there at Geneva. And there's not one word about any of that. And he said, John Calvin never looked up from his books to look out the window. Wow. And by the way, Eugene Peterson is a Calvinist. He's a Presbyterian, modern Calvinist. He didn't hate Calvinists like I do. I think you and I probably feel the same way, but Calvin did some good formal theology, but don't get me off on predestination. Well, this is a whole lot about Calvin that drives me nuts. But I'll hear from our Calvinist friends who listen to the podcast because there are a few, quite a few actually. But yeah, I mean, beauty, adventure, beauty, those are the pure things of the creation. We were talking all day about original sin and how we define broken people around us as sinners and there's nothing in them worthy of good or life or love until they come to Christ and do whatever. I think that's what I hate the most in Calvin. I do, too. You know, I believe that sin touches every area of our life, but there are, if we are totally depraved, everybody spouts those words. Which are not biblical words. No, no, not at all. What it means is that when God said, it's good. And now the devil has said, it's bad. Then if the devil has brought us all the way to the bottom so that there's no good left, then the devil's bad has outdone God's good. And I don't believe that. Yeah, there's a growing conversation now about people that are pushing back against the idea of original sin and they're talking about original blessing. Of course it was original blessing. It can't be that way. We believe in original sin, but let's just start. I really, I have another, we can talk about that in another podcast. I think we're contaminated more than we're wired. No, but just to even get our heads around the idea that before we sinned and fell into shame, we were given the blessing of God. I mean, God made us and said it was good. The creation was good. The original thing in our lives would be fruitful and multiply. It was a blessing from God, right? Right, right. We martyred it. Right. We martyred it with our rebellion against God, our self-sufficiency. I'll do it my way. Thank you. I think that we got onto that just because we talked about a squandered life. I would hate to come. And I don't know what you'd do. You come, I mean, I'm only in my 60s, but I do think about it at times. I do think about how have I lived. I don't think it's a, I don't do it with shame, but I do at times lay on my bed at night. This is before I go to sleep sometimes or just when I'm traveling, I'll stop and think, man, am I living well the life God's given me? And I honestly don't have a lot of regrets. I wish I knew things before I knew them, but I learned something new or something more freeing about God. I go, yeah, I wish I'd known that. Yeah. But given the light I've had at various stages of my life, I don't have a lot of regrets. Do you? Yeah, I do. I have a, I'm like you, if I could go back and live my life again or certain, especially certain parts of it, I want to take my brain, what I know now, back with me. I don't want to go back at that stage of my growth. So I'm thankful the way life has grown me, but in the ministry, my wife and I had several, we had wonderful pastorates and we had a cup one that was absolutely devastating to both of us and we had to bring a church to a tremendous trial and we succeeded beyond our dreams, but my wife and I almost lost each other and I and our children were neglected and it was my fault, not hers. My wife is the best mother on earth to my, it's my estimation. She's just fantastic. She was a great wife and we never, it never came down to where we said we're going to have a divorce. It was nothing like that. That's not what I mean. It was never that, but it was neglect because, because I put, because I thought that God was calling me to give, how can I say this the right way, to love Him to the exclusion of the charge that He has given me to my family. And that's not, I'm not, I'm not an exception. Most pastors could say the same thing I'm saying right now. Yeah, I wanted to write an article one time for Leadership Journal. It was called When the Other Woman is the Bride of Christ. And it got to that same point. It's not another woman that's lured me away from my family, but I've so served God's will in the body of Christ that I put my family on a back burner. Because how does a family ever compete with God's will? Yeah, particularly when you separate the two. Yeah. Instead of God's will. You used to teach this, I think at ORU, back when, those of you who forget, Bob was campus chaplain at ORU. He performed the wedding ceremony for Sarah and I 44 years ago. To be married and we're still holding. We're still in that relationship. In fact, Bob wasn't married yet. You were still single, guys. I was single for back in the day. Three years after, no, no, one more year after you. I married 76. You married 75. Yes. But back in the day, I remember you saying, I think I got this from you. You talked about that our first, our first mission is our wife. Our first mission is our family. Our first year. It really clarified, I think through most of my life, I don't know. I look back and did I make decisions that I wish I'd made differently back in the day? I do. I don't mean that by regret so much, but Sarah never got lost in my ministry as far as I know. And she's never told me it has. Either before or after or the kids felt neglected. It felt fish bold a little bit because of the role I had, but I appreciate that. I think it was largely due to some things that you helped Sarah and I understand before we got married. I wish I'd lived them as well as you've lived them. Those principles, I think my wife did feel it. She never really said it. It was obvious the way our life was turning that I had another woman at the bride of Christ. Yeah. It's hard to compete with that. It's hard to compete with the wife. It's like you say, how do you compete with the will of God? Well, I had the wrong idea with the will of God. Yeah. Excuse me. You're not alone. I mean, there's so many wives that I've talked to, particularly former pastors or current pastors, actually, when I've been with their families or been with them. You hear that same thing over and over. How do you compete with that? How do you say, because if I need my husband here, I'm robbing him from the body of Christ and then I'm being selfish and that's a conflict for so many of the wives. And I couldn't understand how a woman would say, I won't ask him for it. Yeah, I won't ask. I couldn't ask that or I would be denying God's will to him. That's so confusing. Oh, it's so confusing. That's why, just with a newly married couple not long ago and just saying, it's why communication is so important. My wife was talking about, well, I'm just going to go along with my husband once here. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You realize that God's given you insight and wisdom that your husband needs to navigate life successfully. It's not just his victim. I think one of the things that Sarah and I have worked at and we're getting better at it now 44 years in the practice are commitment is this to each other. I do not want you to ever be my victim. So I'm making choices. You feel victimized by, come talk to me. Let's talk. I'm going to work that out. And I don't ever want to ask you to do something that violates who God's truly made you to be. So both of those two things, you know, neither one of us are going to give up something that is inherently true to who we are. And neither one of us want the other person to be a victim of our choices. And somehow in the praying and talking to God and finding our way to us, we keep dealing with that every day. Yeah. I just want to say a word to somebody who perhaps is in the past. I teach since I retired. I've taught at American University in D.C. I've taught at Asbury Seminary. I was the dean of chapel over there. And then I'm teaching at Virginia Union Seminary in Richmond. And I have an opportunity to, over a year, I'll have several dozen students. And I tell them always if it comes down to family or church, you go with family. You have to. But I go one step further. And I'm a United Methodist pastor. So the bishop kind of makes decisions as to where I'll go. But the wonderful thing in our domination is that you can leave, you can request to be moved. And I know of almost no situation where you're refused if you feel like you've got to go. And I refused. I, you know, sometimes you, if you're in a situation, I don't care how you want to be the hero. You want to be, you want to be a success. That's really it. I mean, there's a lot of ego in it. You want to be a success. You want to do God's will, but you can't imagine not finishing a task. I had a church one time. What did you not request? Or what did you not want to do? What I'm saying is you can, you could always go to your, in our denomination, you can go to your superior and ask to be moved. Right. And then when did you not get moved? I mean, then when did you not do that? Well, I don't want to say. I don't mean the location, but you mean in that real difficult situation. Right, right, right. You stayed in it. Right. I stayed in it when I shouldn't have, and I should have just said, I've got to move. I'm going to destroy my family. This is going to destroy my family. But I stuck with it. And although the church came out in a spectacular way, my family was, but you know, it wasn't devastated. It paid the price for that. So I'm just, I tell my students, when you get to that place, don't be afraid to say go. So when you look back, you feel like that was a mistake then? Big mistake. Okay. So it wasn't like I endured through it and it was good and grace-bounded, but no. No, no, no. God uses it. God will work it. God works strategy. I try about all strategies. There's that text. The last time I was with you, I think I use this text too, but Romans 8, 28, the better translation is not God works all things together for good, but it sounds like everything turns out, you know, peach and cream. Right. But God works in all things for good. So that there's, God will make good out of everything. Look at Colson. Yeah. Chuck Colson. I mean, he had the worst, he was the most hated, most devious, duplicitous person in Washington. And God saved him and God made a great life out of his. But the first part of it was absolutely diabolical. I guess that's where I look back at my journey too. I know when I grew up, the standard was holiness every day. And every, and I don't mean the holiness imputed through Christ. I mean, your personal holiness and we're so incredibly, we're incredibly sin focused and the idea was someday, I've got to get to this perfect and everything shorter perfection is a, is a frustrating reality to God. I think one of the reasons why I don't look back at my life with a lot of love at this point is because I even see that the choices I made were the best I could make at the time. That doesn't mean I was right. It just means that with the light I had, I made the best decision I knew to make. So I look back and say, yeah, did I make them all right? No, but I don't know that I ever anticipated I would have a perfect journey that I would make all the right decisions. Right? I love that, that we, that somehow God's heart is that we would grow up in the journey, not that we grow up and have a journey, but that we'd be growing up in the journey and that we'd be, I use this for Sarah all the time. My desire has been with her to know at the end of my life that I have loved the woman well. That's what I want God to tell me. That's my prayer every day that I don't die with regret with regard to Ellen. By the way, Ellen and I have recovered our marriage completely. And like I don't want anybody to think listening to this that we were ever, ever even thought about divorce or that sort of thing. Yeah. No, I think that's clear. But we, but we're, we've regained, we've regained that intimacy, that caring for each other that we have. When I share that with people, most people think, gosh, man, I did things in my young, I did this, I did this, and I'm going, it's not that I loved her well every day of our married life, but in my married life I'm learning to love her well. And better and better. The way I love her today, I wish I loved her like that 10 years ago. I do, there's things I discovered about her that changed the way I love her. And, but, and so I look back and say, well, I didn't love her well because back there I did. No, no, the whole journey is learning to love her. The whole journey is learning to live as a lover in the world and treating people better, more graciously, more, it's not go back and, okay, I did some good, some, it's not that so much as it's, I'm learning to love better. And now, when we get on the other side of this and see what love really is beyond death, that to me, the longing in my heart to see what all the substance is behind the things that we only see in part and speculate about, getting on the other side of that door and going, was this what it was? I think, I think I'm going to be as shocked there as I've ever been in my whole life because I just don't think I figured it out. I have hardly figured out today so I'm not worried about what the eternity looks like. Wait, as you get older, you start thinking to your, you begin to realize, as you get, you know, I probably walking as close to God right now as I ever have in my life and I know less about God now than I ever knew in my life. It's not that I don't believe, know or believe everything I believe before, but as you grow closer and closer to God, God gets bigger and bigger. And so you realize that I don't know, what I know is an English P in compared to what I'm going to know. It's like walking to a mountain. You can put your, well, we're looking at him right now. North Carolina Mountains over there. North Carolina Mountains. I can put an old smoky over there in my, right there in my finger. But if I, and it looks small from this perspective, but to walk over there, it's a mountain. We can also talk all about everything we know about that mountain from here, which is almost nothing. Nothing. It's just, it's a green smur. But we think it's complete. And then you go over there. What trail? What rock? What waterfall? What is there to explore over there? And that's just a mountain. That green is our 10,000 trees. Yes. Yeah. And that not just somebody built a home up there and cleared a bit of trees from the very top of that mountain. Oh my Lord. But what does that home look like and why did they build it there and how did they get a well? And there'd be lots to discover over there. And that's what I've come to know about God. I was so certain about the things I knew about God at 25, 26, 30, even the body of Christ. And my journey has been to greater uncertainty about what I know, but greater trust in the Father to reveal to me today what I need to know to live today. I used to think I need to understand everything then I'll know how to live. Right. And I really am not there anymore because I just, it's impossible. But I can't wake up today and say, what light have you got for what it is I'm facing today? And I'm gonna live through that with you. You know, I'll just say one more thing too about, you know, I'm believing what I believe with a greater intensity and assurance that I've ever known before. Yeah. But a lot of things that used to matter to me have fallen away. They don't matter anymore. And, you know, how many discussions did I have on eschatology, that means around the Second Coming of Christ. And I even had books on it when I was a young Christian at Wheaton College. Wheaton College was very, was very much into prophecy and all this stuff. I don't, you know, I certainly believe it. I believe in the truth of the Bible. Whatever the Bible said, whatever the Bible means, I believe it. But I don't make an issue out of things the Bible says that aren't as important as other things it says. And when it comes to the Second Coming of Christ, I just throw it up and say, I believe it. Yeah. I believe it. However, however it turns out, will be the right way. And I don't think God has to go to Dallas Theological Seminary to get a roadmap on how he's going to come back. God in Christ. Or he thinks they got it right. Yeah. I think that's true. I love the fact that we can look and say, I believe everything the Scriptures say, but I'm pretty convinced I do not interpret them well. Oh, and nobody does. Yeah. And thank God we had the old church that put it together. The doctor, the trinity, Wayne and I had a wonderful time this week talking about the trinity. I'm not going to talk about it. Good, because we're done. But it's so much more, it's so much more, Thomas Jefferson called it that impenetrable doctrine. He didn't believe in it, but he never did study it. He had no idea how beautiful it is. But at the same time, we believe it, but we know it's better than anything we can believe. We know it's indescribable. Like you said, no matter what side you pick on the trinity, you're going to be in heresy. Yeah, you're going to, you're going to over-emphasize something to the under-emphasis of it. Right, right. And I love that we can hold it loosely. I love that we don't have to be certain because our certainty is not in my knowledge. My certainty is in the one I'm going to know. That's it. What, what is before we, before we go, I'm going to ask you this, here we go. Let me just say one thing from what he just said. What he's saying is, my certainty, what really matters is not my certainty about this, this and this, but my certainty about the one of this, this and this. Yeah. Christ is the gospel. Yeah. I hope that's what I said. Yeah, you said it. You talk about the things that really matter as you kind of approach the end of it all. Someday? You may live another 50 years. Who knows? No. No, I don't want to. I don't want to live 50 more years. You know, I look back now and know the things that make you rich. We think they are experiences. We try and collect them. We think they are money. Try and collect them. To me, I say the richest thing I have is relationships. It's friendships. It's with God, with Sarah, with my children, my grandchildren, with the friends God's given me, this friendship. 50 years, man, we've known each other, respected each other. We've gone on very different journeys spiritually. And yet, we've always ended up almost in the same place theologically. We hear each other talk and go, I had no idea you believed that. No, I think we do it differently, but we believe the same thing. I don't know of anything I don't really agree with you. Yeah. In terms of the creeds and what we really understand, but the matter, the real matter of Christianity. And I've enjoyed our friendship, brother, for all these years. I enjoy that we're part years at a time. And not so much lately. God connects us. And no, this has been a fun little stand. I mean, I'll miss you. I know you're going to miss the book and these characters. I'm going to miss you and our yearly, our monthly, our every few months getting together to pound out the next section of the book. Yeah. It has been a delight to know you and to love you, even though you live a clean life. It's been a wonderful thing to say. It's been worth the podcast to hear you say that, brother. You're across the country from where you live. Our two wives, for all of you that are on the other end of the pod here, Wayne's dear wife, Sarah, is a delightful human being. And my wife, Ellen, my wife, travel with Corey Kinboom. She's a Dutch woman. And Sarah's travel with Wayne. And I'm not a Dutch woman. I think it's a much more exciting thing to travel with Wayne Jacobs and then Bobby Stamps. But she had nine good years with Corey. I don't know about that. Oh my, what a good time we've had. Great time to be with you. Great time to see you at this lake and enjoy the beauty of it all. Yeah, I'm looking forward to introducing everybody to the book in a few months. I think it'll be, I think everybody will love it. Now we gotta figure out how God wants to put it to print. Yeah, we'll see. God will. The Lord didn't help us write it without us knowing where it's gonna go. I don't know. Some books are like that. You do them and then they don't see the light of day. You know that Mozart, he died before he got his final requiem done. And I wonder, I don't think he ever heard his Gloria song, which is one of the most glorious pieces. Can you imagine dying? You're writing a requiem, which is kind of a funeral service in a choral service. And the most glorious thing he ever wrote, he never heard. Oh, but he did. Oh, but he did. He heard it in his head before he put it on paper. He heard it in his head. That's a good way to say it. He heard it in his head. Yeah. Okay.