A Christian Mystic’s perspective | Pastor Jon Adams

John Adams is a pastor in the deepest most southern part of Texas, right down at the point. I found him because on his YouTube channel, he had one video where he's talking about who is God. And to the Christian mystic, one of the key components of God is that God is a mystery. And I really loved that he was going into that because that's resonated with me in the last few years as I've come to try and understand who God is, who I thought he was. And there is this big mysterious component. And that's been such a breath of fresh air to me as I've been speaking with other people who seem to claim that they know exactly who God is with these 10 things. And that's God. And it just seems like it doesn't uh satisfy. So I reached out to him to have a conversation and wanted to understand how he thinks, how he got to be how he got to be. And it's really interesting. He's a Baptist preacher. I mean, he works at a Baptist church. He's a Christian mystic. He's read a lot of the Christian mystics who have done writings over the last couple of thousand years and uh I think he's really making an impact on his small community which I am just admire tremendously. So I had a really good time talking to him and I appreciate the way that he thinks and I think you will too. Please like and subscribe if you haven't yet. Uh we really appreciate it and uh welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. When did you start getting into Christian mysticism? Because I know you got the YouTube channel. Well, I saw a couple of your videos and that's actually how I found out about you and I thought that was so interesting that you are a working pastor uh who's into Christian mysticism, but now I guess you're at a Baptist church. Uh I don't think I find many people with your kind of profile. I don't come across many people with your profile. So, how did this come about? So, before I tell my story, that's actually changing a little bit. I'm getting correspondence from a lot of people who are in ministry who are going, "Man, the organizational and political side of this is not why I signed up to be a pastor. I signed up to be a pastor because I had these experiences of God that I wanted to share with other people." And there's more room even in evangelical denominations for us to kind of push back against that now and say, "Actually, there's a whole spiritual heart to the faith that we're neglecting." Um, and I'm starting to see that uh even in the work of a lot of mainstream people, they're they're doing the mystical stuff. They're just not using the same vocabulary or the the explicit vocabulary. Um, for me, I so I was one of those uh raised in an evangelical church type people. I participated in the camps and the mission trips and played bass in the band and wore the t-shirts for all of it. And I was just right there doing the whole thing. But then like a lot of us in my late teens, I started to have real questions and doubts about the story that we were telling um for a lot of different reasons, you know, like we're all pushed to kind of deconstruct our faith for for different reasons. And in my late teens, I ended up just being one of those people who was still showing up because that was my community. The church was my family. Um but not being really certain about what I believed or or having really interest any interest in pursuing it or or doing what everybody else was doing. And I, you know, wandered from the faith a little bit. Uh, I'm also naturally inclined to just see the world scientifically, like the scientific answers make sense to me. And so, um, I didn't get the the animosity and the conflict and all the bad blood between science and faith. And if you weren't playing for the church team in that debate, then you were already kind of an outsider. Um, but then I I didn't know what to do with myself. Um, I was about 20 years old and I was into a lot of things that really weren't healthy for me and I didn't really know where my life was headed. And I took a year off of college and I moved to the Sierra Madre in Mexico and I did some months with a missionary family that lives there and they work with the the Taramara the Ramarine is what they call themselves but Tarara is easier for us white folks to say. And uh they I spent a lot of time in the mountains with some other people that were doing missions, but a lot of time by myself and just sort of trying to figure out what I actually believed and if I believed God was real and what my future was going to look like. And it was kind of like giving God one last chance to sort of give my attention. And I wasn't expecting anything out of it. What I felt during that time was I felt like God sort of reconnected with me. And I also felt a pull toward helping people that were like me who were young people who had a lot of questions work through those questions because especially we're talking 20 years ago there wasn't a lot of people that were open to questions that challenged the main Christian narrative. So we didn't really know where to go or who to talk to. And I really empathized with other people that maybe had those same frustrations that I did. And I felt this pull toward ministry and I within a couple weeks of having sort of that revelation, I also reconnected with a friend of mine who eventually became my wife. So she's also from Mexico. And then after that, like that whole experience in 2006 was really like that changed the whole course of my life. So um I looked at a map and I was living in North Dakota at the time. That's where the accent is from. And I said, "Well, my wife's in or my future wife is in Mexico and I'm in North Dakota. I need to get trained for ministry. Where can I go?" And I Texas looked like it was a lot closer to Mexico. So, I picked a school in Texas and I came here. And I found a I didn't want just like a like a hyperchristian kind of Sunday school education. I'd already been there and done that. I wanted more of an academic approach because I felt like that was where the answers were going to be for the questions that I had. And I ended up at a small liberal arts school with an excellent Christian studies department. And these were my professors were people who were very serious about the academic study of the Bible. So I thought I had all these challenging questions and these doubts and like I was being really edgy with, you know, my doubts about God. And my professors at my Christian studies school were basically like, "Man, you don't even know the questions that you should be asking." And so they started to show like how much of the historicity of the Bible can't be proven. Um they showed us like all the logical inconsistencies with uh some of the biblical thinking. They showed the progression and the development of biblical thinking on issues like God and and at the same time these were people who were very seriously committed to their faith in Christ. So they were asking like hard challenging deconstruction questions and teaching all their students how to do that to the highest academic standard while they were still loving their neighbor and serving the community and being faithful to their wives and maintaining lives of prayer and also maintaining like active church lives. And we had always sort of heard that if you if you doubt God then it leads directly into like moral failure. But what I found were people who had all the right doubts about scripture and history and Christian practice and were still some of the to use the word like some of the holiest people that I'd met. So that was really inspiring to see that you can have this life of the mind where intellectually you're asking hard questions of the faith that you say you believe in, but you can still be the kind of person that faith mandates. That that's one of the things that's interesting to me is that you I try and when I'm speaking with different people, there are those that are resting in answers and those that are resting in questions. And I kind of think that sometimes church should be a place for questions and not a place for answers. Um where you know if you come in and they say, "Well, here's all the answers. It's one through 10 or whatever." And then you go, "Well, I have questions about those answers, right?" then they're like, "Uh oh, you're starting to uh oh, you know, and that's not really that never really jived with me, at least as well, uh, in terms of just I thought the whole point of this place was to have questions and explore and figure this stuff out, not to come in and have answers kind of thing." Well, what they thought they were doing was they they thought they were protecting us. So, one of the things I've come to terms with later is that a lot of the people who raised us, like my generation of Christians, had lived very unstable, very unsafe, and very violent lives before they came to church. And when they met church people, they had suddenly found this community of people who actually had a rulebook for how life should go. And it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like, "Oh, there's there's stable principles here that I can organize my life by and deal with some of the chaos from my upbringing." And when we came along and we grew up in that stability and we started to have questions about like the theory of it and then the practice that went beyond just following the rules, the practice of Christ of like loving your enemy and your neighbor and reaching out to people in love that was a threat to the security that they had found within the system. So I didn't understand that when I was younger. It was just I was annoyed at the older people for not letting us ask the hard questions, right? But now that I get older and I serve both older and younger people, I realize, oh, the the questions are, it's not just that they're scared of heresy or whatever. We're undercutting like the new psychological foundation that they received for their lives by asking questions that are making them, you know, wonder and doubt. Now that's not an excuse because you know I I like I said I had examples of people who were very holy people who also had uh like they embraced the intellectual side of life. The reaction to that can never be people with no intellectual life who are not holy like in that those aren't the people that Christ came to make. That's not what a disciple of Christ is. It's not someone with no life of the mind who's also like just sort of using their own logic to justify any sort of moral decisions that they make that damage other people. So as much compassion as I have for people who are trying to protect the the community that keeps them safe, there's also a standard and the standard is dictated by Christ and we have to live up to it or we don't get to call ourselves by his name. Um, so you know, I got all Bibled up at Bible school and I came here working at a bilingual church with my wife because we're a bilingual couple and it's like we're gonna we're going to serve these students. We're going to help them ask their hard questions and all that. And then the church that I this church split right out from under me within six months of me showing up. And it had nothing to do with anything that I had been a part of, but we were immediately baptized by fire in all this church drama and all this conflict. And my wife actually had some visa issues right away. Uh, and so she had to be in Mexico and wait for us to get those visa issues ironed out before she could come over to the United States. And I just like I was not ready for my life. I was 23 years old. I was not ready for my life to get that hard that fast. And then within a couple years, I got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And it was like everything that I was trying to do in my career, ministry, and then now with my body and my health was just not on the table anymore. It was like a a train hitting a wall at speed. And that was where my faith had to take a mystical turn for me to hang on to it because I I still had all those old doubts. All my questions hadn't been fully resolved. And then now the life that I was trying to build was not working. And it was like, oh man, I thought that I was like on God's path here and apparently not. You know, like everything fell to ruin. So, how I got into mysticism was not being satisfied ever with the sort of surface level faith that we all were sort of floating around in. And then all of a sudden needing God to be there for me in real ways and wondering if that was something that was even an option. And then I started like a very basic mindfulness practice, like a secular mindfulness practice because it's one of the things that helps with Crohn's disease. And that got me curious about the spiritual tradition of the church. Um, and then in my own life of faith, kind of coming back around to Jesus and his teachings as sort of the center of what my life of faith was going to be. um those two worlds merged like the the mindfulness and spiritual practice and then what Jesus was teaching. And then I found all these historical Christian mystics who were in alternative spiritual community alongside the historical and institutional church who had very orthodox beliefs but who were dead set on conforming their lives to Christ inside and out at all costs. And it was like ah I had never encountered people like this before. People who saw sitting in silence in the presence of God as a priority for their spiritual formation. People who wanted nothing to do with doctrinal debates, but were still very passionate about conforming their lives to the vision that Christ sets out for us. So, I got into those guys, started reading all the original sources and the ancient authors. And then when I went back to seminary, uh, I did my master's thesis on the historical mystical tradition. So I got to talk my faculty adviserss into letting me do that. So then I got to study it at the academic level. And then the YouTube channel is actually just sort of like me trying to get some of those ideas out to help people who might have the same questions or or might be struggling with the same situations that I was. Have you had any push back from being in a Baptist church around some of this? like are they what's been the experience there in sort of sort of like being inside the institution? Do they have their sort of rules that you're supposed to follow or the beliefs that you're supposed to sign on to? And you know, what does that what's that look like? What what does that look like for you? I guess in theory, yes. Uh Baptist churches, and by the way, I wouldn't even consider myself a Baptist. I just work here. Baptist churches are autonomous in the sense that or they're supposed to be. they're they're supposed to be able to make their own policy and doctrinal and staffing decisions based on the needs that they see. So, and and a lot of evangelical denominations are like that. Sort of like the low evangelicals uh or the low Protestant denominations. Everyone, every church situation is different and they're just sort of making decisions based on uh what the community thinks and feels and decides. So I what I will say is like because our church is bilingual, because we're so far from everybody else, because our church has had all this like chaos in the structure of it, I really did get a a pretty good bubble to work these things out in where I wasn't under pressure from anybody that I necessarily had to answer to. So I know that part of my situation is unique. like there was a I I had space to do this that a lot of people in my position in other places wouldn't have had. Um when it comes to communicating sort of the spirituality and the mystical stuff to our people, there's a balance that I found where if we're just doing church life together like like we're in the season of Lent, we're talking about the liberation of the soul. So we're talking about the powers of the soul which I got from an old mystic named St. Maximus the confessor and his diagram includes mind, heart, soul, body and relationships which is Jesus says love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. So, like those were the greatest commandments when Jesus was asked. And but then we're what we're doing is we're talking about those things, but we're also giving them practices like we're giving our people practices that come from the mystical tradition that they can do during the week at a level that's appropriate to them. So, I'm taking the tools from the mystical tradition and I'm sharing them with people, but I'm not forcing the mystical vocabulary because I've found through trial and error that that doesn't work for everybody. Um, if I do 80% Bible and 20% church history and and sort of mystical ideas, that's I'm right on the edge of what works for people. And at the end of the day, like as much as I want to be heard and I want my experience to be validated or whatever, this is a job where I'm I live in the service of other people. So, the filter I have to run everything through is will this be good for the people that I'm serving. What I talk about in my YouTube channel, it has some of the same uh motivation, but in the local context, it's all about am I helping someone live a life that's whole and holy and full of love? And am I helping them work out the stuff in them that needs to be worked out? Am I connecting them to Christ? Am I helping them live in his spirit? And there's like a really immature version of this where I go, I'm just going to give you guys the mysticism because that worked for me and if you're not getting it, then I'm going to pout about it or I'm going to force it on you or whatever. But that's not in service of them. So, I've had to I've had to adapt to the pace that other people learn at and the things that they're interested in and the way that people receive information. And that means I have like this whole toolkit that I can pull from to help people, but it's not always like on the cover of everything that we're doing. Have you run away from the questions of historicity? It it sounds to me like it's easier to lean into mysticism and just ignore the historicity. Is that sort of the playbook? No. Um it's it's always tempting to just go this is a narrative that makes sense to me and so I'm just going to hold on to it no matter what the evidence says. Um, but again, part of my motivation is to help young people work through their issues. So, I don't I don't approach the historicity issue through an apologetics lens anymore. Like, I have no interest in arguing with people about what evidence we can come up with that proves whatever biblical point. Um, the the schooling that I had, like the higher education took a more literary approach. So, what they did was they They trace the development of the text and those are things where we have like really good historical evidence for how the text developed and as part of a confessional community where I say I believe that the Bible is true. Uh that can mean different things for a lot of different people. For some people it means if I could go back with a video camera I would see I'd be able to record exactly what the Bible says happening the way that I imagine it. But even a close study of the Bible itself, you'll you'll know that like that's not even the promise that the Bible is making. Um John the Evangelist at the end of John says, "I could have written a bunch of things about Jesus, but I wrote these things because I want you to believe in him and have life in his name." So even the biblical authors aren't pretending to be unbiased reporters of the facts that they saw. That's not the game that they're playing. Um, it's a choice to say there were historical events and then there's the community's interpretation of those events and then there's the later interpretation of the community's interpretation of those events that was written down and passed on to us and translated. And I believe that there's something spiritual about that process. And so I believe that there is life for me in these words. And it's a faith confession. Um, I can do that while at the same time being serious about the holes in the historicity or maybe even just better said the questions that we still haven't been able to answer about certain things. I I'm working on something like an example of that is like I'm working on something about the resurrection right now and how do you prove that someone rose from the dead? Like the only proof that would really work is a body that by definition is not there. So there's never going to be a shred of evidence that we could ever provide to say that Jesus rose from the dead. And we just need to admit that, you know, like the the apostles and the the writers of the New Testament, they knew that they were asking a lot of people to believe that somebody rose from the dead. They knew it was a difficult claim. And so it's an invitation into a spiritual hope that I'm not going to have proof for. And that's not the same thing as saying I'm taking a blind leap leap of faith to believe that everything is exactly true. It's more like saying I'm choosing that hope. I'm choosing to be part of a community that has like held a torch for the hope of humanity's future and has believed for 2,000 years that our ultimate destiny isn't just more cycles of violence and death. One of the things I feel I've been feeling with Christians who grew up with Christianity is that they're replacing the historical Jesus with the the idea of a Christ consciousness. It feels it feels like you're you're close to that, but I'm curious where you're at on like did historical Jesus even need to exist for the the message of the Christ to be just as relevant and powerful? So I find that frustrating also because when you read the old mystics, they were all about the incarnation. It's like they they literally believed that the world of heaven manifested itself in the material world in a person so that like the heavens, hashamayam, everything that we can't touch would come into higher. It's the earth, everything that we can touch and sanctify it and deify it and return it to its creator. So like they had a strong conviction that in the person of Jesus, heaven and earth really did meet not as a metaphor. They actually believe that there was like a a theosis process that happened for all of creation in Christ. And the a lot of the the church fathers problems with the Gnostics was that they the Gnostics were trying to make that into a symbol or a metaphor. And the mystical the more mystical church fathers were saying no we actually have to believe that this happened at least one time that there's an osmosis process where heaven and earth really do like the boundary really does get uh erased and the whole thing becomes one. That was actually part of their cosmology. So for me especially and I I I've always been trying to figure out like why that matters to me so much and I actually believe it has something to do with my disease as my body struggles and fails. Part of the hope that I need to have is that physically I'm also involved in this thing that God is doing in the world. that it's not a platonic sep uh se separation of my spirit and my matter that I really am completely included in whatever God is doing. And look, I I'm I know I'm talking like a pastor. I'm I'm talking about all these things as though they're settled issues. I still have questions about all this stuff. Um this is just the vocabulary that we have for these things. Um but yeah, I I know that there's a trend right now to kind of replace um the historical Jesus with Christ consciousness. What I will say is that I don't know if any of the quests for the historical Jesus ever led anywhere that was productive. We have the Jesus that we have in the Gospels, but we also know that that's a story being told by his fans uh at a later date than when he actually lived. And the gospel writers themselves are admitting to that as they write it. Luke says, "I actually don't like the other versions of the Jesus story. They're too complicated. I'm going to write one that happens in order." And so Luke right there is saying like, "I wasn't one of his disciples. I never met the guy. I don't like the way the story is told by other people. I'm going to tell you my version." That's in the text. And so pretending it's like a newspaper account is crazy. Like it's just not. Um but at the same time my experience with the Jesus that we have in the gospels was when I was struggling the most and when I had some situations in my life that were really not good. I ran out of ideas and I actually opened up Matthew and I looked at some of the things that Jesus had said and I tried to apply his principles directly to the struggles that I was facing. and his way worked not in my best interest, but it actually worked in the situations that I was facing. And so for me, that was kind of the key that unlocked coming back around to the idea of like a personal relationship with Christ, if you want to put it that way, was like I actually ran some experiments and I tried things the way that he prescribed and the result was good for everyone. It didn't favor me. It was actually good for all of us. I had a situation. Yeah. I had a situation where someone was spreading a rumor about me that um let's just say like it could have ended my whole pastoral career. And I couldn't clarify it because I was protecting a minor who had confessed something to me that I had to report. So the accusation was that I was covering up something that had happened to somebody when actually I had reported it to the authorities the way that the law demands and I was protecting this person's experience from a church leadership that wasn't able to handle it. So that church didn't leadership didn't like that I had something that I wasn't telling them and they were already this a couple people were already kind of opposed to me in general. Um, and they were using that to try to force me out of my job. Why was that such a struggle for you? Because my like naturally we wanted to defend ourselves. And this is one situation where I couldn't stand up in front of everybody and actually explain. I had to keep it quiet. Like I had to to out of resp not not just legally, but also out of respect for the child. you know, I'm not gonna stand up in front of my people and tell everyone what happened to them um just to protect my reputation. And so that that rumor that I was covering up something that had happened, it kind of spread throughout our community. And I wanted with every fiber of my being to jump in front of it and set the record straight, but in this situation, I couldn't. So the specific instruction from Jesus that I and this is more about not being in control like this is more about not being in control of a situation like why would that because some people in that situation would be fine with it because they would just have a resolve in their mind that says I can't do this you all don't understand and that doesn't bother me at all. So like what what was the feeling for you? It sounds like maybe you just were out of control. Like you wanted to have control of the situation and this was a situation that you had no control over and that's hard or like what what was it? You know what I mean? Yeah. In in a lot of situations where there's trust between leadership and people, you could say like there's stuff going on here that I can't talk to you about. And I probably have that relationship with the community now. But at that time, what I was worried about was there were people who were going to be damaged. If um if these people could drag me down, it was going to hurt other people that we were serving. I don't know if that makes sense. Um, you know, you I mean, you you sign up for if you're going to do ministry, a lot of people don't understand this, but like if you're going to do ministry, you sign up for a lot of abuse. Uh, people get to say whatever they want to say about you. Um, you become a figure of people's religion and not a person that they know. And you just have to embrace that sometimes. But there are also character assassinations that can happen that can affect people who are at a stage of their personal development where they need you to be the person that they think you are. And obviously we should all be the person. That sounds like a lot of pressure. Yeah, I it was a lot of pressure then. I was also a lot younger so I hadn't been through as many reps of that as I have been now. and also like just straight up. This was kind of before the whole mystical thing. I hadn't done a lot of work humbling myself and crucifying the ego and doing all that. So, it was just kind of like I want things to go well and I want these people that I'm serving to be served and this is an obstacle to me and I'm frustrated. And but when I went to what Jesus said, he says, "Blessed are you when people say all kinds of evil things about you for righteousness sake. rejoice and be glad because in this way they treated the prophets who went before you. And it was like I don't want to do that. I don't want to just be happy that people are talking about me behind my back. I have this drive in me to protect my reputation um for my own good and for the good of other people. I don't know if I can just sit with this and let them say and do whatever they want to say and do, but I don't really have any options here. So, I'm going to try it your way. And that situation worked out exactly the way that it was supposed to work out. It was still ugly. Like it's not it never somebody got hurt like even a year before I knew about it. So it was nothing that I had anything to do with and we couldn't go back and fix that situation. But the situation in our community did work itself out the way that it was supposed to by me keeping my mouth shut. So that was a huge lesson that I learned where it's like if I do what Jesus says in practical situations, maybe there's some truth here. And a lot of people would go, "Well, isn't that what just what Christians are supposed to do?" Right? Like the whole what would Jesus do thing? Just just do it. But most of us don't actually learn Jesus as a teacher for life. We learn him as the sacrificial lamb who theologically absorbs the anger of God so that we don't get punished for all eternity. And so like kind of who cares what he has to say? Let's get him to the cross real quick so that God will forgive us. And a big part of like the mystical shift for me and for a lot of people has been no Jesus actually has really important things to say to you about the life that you're living right now and you either follow him or you don't in all the small ways that actually matter. So what was your first mystical experience? I think we all have them. Uh to quote your guest from last week, um I growing up as a kid, you you feel this connection to nature. Um and you feel almost like you can sense the life that is in all things. Um my first mystical experiences of Christ though came later as I was trying to learn how to sit in silent prayer. Not because I was trying to connect with Christ, but because I was trying to deal with my disease. And uh I don't want to describe it too much because I don't want to make it more than what it is. Like mystical experience, authentic mystical experience is very very very subtle. And you can blow it out of proportion in a way that makes you sound more spiritual than you are or that makes people feel like a fear of missing out if they hear your experience and they wonder why they don't have that same experience. um authentic mystical experience is very subtle. Mine was a sense of like just Christ's presence with me and like in a tangible way. And it was a it was a strange thing because it was like what is this that's happening? But then you go and you read especially like the Spanish mystics like Terresa Vavala and it's in line with what the mystical community has been talking about from the beginning that when you slow yourself down and you the way Thomas Merin says it is you surrender your ego and your inertia and sit in silence before your creator like the the lens is cleared or the antenna gets fined. in tuned and there's a sense of his presence that a lot of us have had and for a very long time people have been testifying to that and witnessing to that. So you you said that when you you said that part of the reason Jesus needs to be have been real is the the intersection between reality physical reality and sort of spiritual reality and for you it it personally affects you with with Crohn's disease and I suppose I suppose you've experienced some healing factor through faith. No, not at all. Um I this is a part of my story that I think is really important for people to hear. A lot of people are drawn towards spiritual practice because they're trying to get control over situations in their lives that are by nature out of their control. I have a disease that myself and a lot of other people have prayed that I would be healed of that I am not healed of and I take very complicated medicine just to live my life. So for a lot of people that's a struggle because what they want out of a spiritual life is well I want to be so close to God that I don't suffer anymore. And what I think you really see in the New Testament is the promise that all human beings suffer. Like suffering is innate to the human condition. We get to suffer with Christ alongside us and the spirit in us that turns our suffering into perseverance and hope and character and all of these things that help us grow as people. I wouldn't wish Crohn's on anybody, but I can say with like 100% certainty that I have grown most as a human being over the last 13 years since I got diagnosed because of my disease. It's forced me to face things about myself that I didn't want to face. It's forced me to humble myself in the face of reality. It's forced me to appreciate more the things around me and be conscious of the relationships and the people that I'm around and uh pay more attention to my wife and children. It's forced me to appreciate all the food that I eat. It's forced me to learn how to pray and actually surrender to God. It's forced me to deal with my anxiety and my sense of conflict and all those internal feelings because those things have a negative effect on your the course of your disease. So it's almost like I was allowed to have this physical feedback mechanism that push me toward healthy spiritual disciplines because while I wouldn't say that I've gotten any healing out of the faith side of things, I have been able to live a life that's better for me because if I don't do that, the consequences are worse. I don't know if that makes sense. It It does make sense. Well, and in some sense, it must be helping because the faith is causing your actions to be better. The actions must have some physical. There's there's a guy Brian Johnson. He's like the $2 million man. He invests tons of money in his body. And he just tried psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. Okay. And he was showing that it has this neuropl neuroplasticity effects and it's I think it's helping his hormone levels somehow. Uh, have you I was curious just because with regards to like how the mystical world interacts with the physical world, a lot of times people talk about mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms. Do you have any experience with those? I have some psychedelic experience. The problem is I got into it recreationally as an angsty kid. And so I never approached it with a proper respect. I have people in my local community and a lot of people have reached out to me through the YouTube channel who have shared their psychedelic experiences and they've had like very profound spiritual realizations through psychedelic experiences. Even experiences where they felt like God was talking to them and telling them to stop doing psychedelics and to seek him. Like I have I've gotten plenty of those emails. So, I don't want to deny the the reality of those experiences for people. My experiences with psychedelics were uh immature and irresponsible. Like very very very deeply irresponsible. Um I wasn't careful about where I was and the substances that I was taking and I never had any kind of profound experience because I wasn't in that headsp space and I was too young for it. So I think some of the thing that that or one of the things that gets lost in the conversation about psychedelics now is that you do actually have to be ready. That the wrong kind of psychedelic experience at the wrong moment in your life if you're not like neurologically mature enough to handle it can have really damaging effects. And so I do have concerns for some of the younger people who hear all of us older people touting psychedelics that they'll experiment before their brains are ready, you know, and and that is something that I do have a concern about and I think it's something that needs to be touched on a little bit more. Yeah. There's stories of people jumping out of out of windows and dying just because they're on psychedelic trips. It's that's very pertinent. Yeah. Yeah. And I also my like my worst experience was one where I had a I had a supply issue. I bought something from somebody and what I took was not what he told me that it was. And that could have been really really really dangerous. And that was before fentanyl. So like we're in a world now where you need to be sure of your sources. uh and all of that like I would not my own children I wouldn't counsel them to experiment with psychedelics whether they do or not is going to be their issue when they're older but I don't think that the risk and reward thing balances out the way that I would like to see it for my own kids and especially when you understand the neuroplasticity findings when it comes to prayer and meditation there are healthy practices that can be they they don't they're not free of risk like meditation is not free of psychological risk. There have been cases where people have meditated themselves into severe psychosis. But there is a more gentle way of training those neurological patterns so they become embedded traits instead of like just jamming the lightning rod of psychedelics into your brain all the time trying to cause certain effects that are and those those steadier practices, those gentler practices can be healthier in the long run and they can produce lasting change in the way that you see things as compared to to these more exciting trips. Well, and I think that they've done studies where they put they put monks into uh the MRI machines, right? Monks who have been meditating for 30 years and then they look at their brain activity and it then they put someone into an MRI who does LSD and they measure that brain activity and they turn out that they're the same brain activity. And so, to your point, it's almost like a meditative contemplative practice. It's like a It's a way to run a marathon versus sort of the psychedelic trip can kind of speed rocket you over to the finish line for a few hours and then bring you all the way back. And so I I agree with you regarding the the danger as well because because the increase in neuroplasticity, but your neuroplasticity doesn't set until you're like 30 or 32. And so kids are already neuroplastic. Like they can already sit there and have experiences that a 40 or a 50 or a 60-year-old honestly can't have. and it takes them much longer as an older person to have. So, I agree with you. It's like the benefits of neuroplasticity are mostly beneficial when you don't have as much neuroplasticity and that only happens into your late 30s and beyond, right? And then also uh there are people with all kinds of different cognitive conditions where their brains do develop patterns where they need medication or some other intervention to break those patterns. Like I I fully believe that. Um and I've seen it with people that we work with and people that I love and care about. Um, so again, I I don't want to be I don't want to have any authority over anyone where I'm telling anybody what they can or can't do. That's not the life I'm trying to live. I just think that there there's got to be a warning label on some of these things because while I I understand the yearning that people have for this kind of heightened spiritual experience where all the real changes are made, it's usually in that like daily practice, that daily discipline. um and building or not even building might even be deconstructing but deconstructing the ego until you can actually find your true self. And sure, can substances and plant medicine take you there? Yeah, people have testified about that going all the way back through all the different historical traditions. Um, but just because somebody heard about it on a podcast doesn't mean that they need to go uh mix up their own bathtub iawasa and you know try to encounter the mother mother goddess in their apartment without any supervision. That's a recipe for a dangerous situation. Well, since since Jesus existed in the physical, do you believe that angels and demons exist just in just as real of a manner? And and it's a two-part question because where I want to go with it is my understanding of meditation is that you open yourself up and you let go of your ego and then you leave yourself open for demons to come and and fill the void. How did how do you protect yourself from negative energies coming in if they're real? So the early the earliest like historical Christian mystics had a very different idea of what a demon was. Um this is something that I'm actually going to be explaining to my people in some way on Sunday. Um we after the medieval period demons became sort of these discrete entities that have names and kind of like a you know like a physical form that's invisible. And the early Christian monks and mystics did not think of demons like that. They thought of demons as these spirits or passions that could take you over and overwhelm you. So when you read the institutes by John Cassian, he's explaining to the monks that are under his guidance how to combat the demon of lust or how to combat the demon of rage. And what he's talking about are things that we might consider emotions but actually go to a deeper level than that. So like something happens and I can be angry but if I become overwhelmed by rage to the point that I'm violent, it really does feel like I'm being possessed by something. And that's not an occult experience. That's a daily experience that we all have where, you know, you might be tempted to do something that you know is morally wrong, but then all of a sudden this passion wells up inside of you and you can't stop yourself from doing it and you feel guilty even as you do it. And the early monks and mystics when they talked about demons, they were talking about that experience. Um, that's not to say that they didn't believe that there were like demons that could possess people to a point where like that person was completely under the control of a negative spiritual entity. Um, but just in the the branch of the mystical tradition that I'm in, uh, I'm actually not worried about like opening my soul up to any kind of negative entities. I'm opening my soul intentionally to Christ every time I pray, trusting that he's in me and will protect me and all that. And at the same time, part of the meditation process is detaching from those feelings and those passions, those overwhelming experiences so that they no longer possess me. So, it's more of a process of exorcism than it is opening yourself up to whatever else is out there. And that's that's the thing I would say probably differentiates the Christian mystical tradition from most of the other mystical traditions that I've studied. It's not an openness to whatever there is out there. It's actually an intentional openness to the spirit of Christ. It has a focal point. So when I talk to like my Hindu friends or my Buddhist friends uh or my secular meditator friends, they're like, "What you're doing is not what we're doing. It's not the same thing." Um and I would actually agree. There's a there's a I think it's pseudodianis talks about the singlepointed attention or focus on the bright abyss of the mysterious cloud of divinity that God uses to hide himself. It's like there's still mystery involved, but I'm actually intentionally focusing myself in a direction. Um, so that that's more of the mystical experience that the older writers talk about. And the benefit from a mystical experience, it causes some sort of spiritual growth, I suppose, or or like what's the feeling? What's how do you feel adjusted after a mystical experience in the way that you experience them? Yeah. It'd be awesome to say like, "Oh, I feel like I'm full of light and I can see the love of God in all things." Um, sometimes. And sometimes you're full of light except for the parts of you that are not full of light and those are highlighted and pointed out with severity. So there's also like a when and Thomas Merton talks about this we're not meditating so that we can present like a new mystical ego to God and for God to reward us for being such spiritual people. We're actually peeling off the masks and the defensive layers and the curtains of our soul so that we can see ourselves the way God actually sees us. And that is not always positive if you're honest with yourself about what's going on inside of you. So there is a convicting experience when it comes to actually being in God's presence that is very humbling and that has to be taken seriously. And when people write to me about their Christian mystical experiences, if it doesn't include an element of I was in the presence of the holy and I realize my own smallalness, then even though I'm I'm usually not somebody who's like aggressive about pointing out what's missing in people's experiences, I try to let people have their own experiences. Personally, it's like I I see those experiences with a lot of suspicion. Do you think that people are innately good or bad in that situation? It sounds a little bit like uh recognizing your smallalness and and not that you know one person is all of God. I've heard it analogized to maybe God is the sun and we are the rays of the sun. Um but when you see that I think that's one of the questions because I sometimes I think there's a lot of shame associated with if the me if the message is we're all bad at our core then you should be ashamed of that. Um and I'm not sure if I see that or not. So I was wondering how you perceive that the so the mystical tradition is quite the opposite of that. The the old mystical writers use an analogy of a coin. The coin is stamped with the image of the king. And so the coin bears the king's majesty. But all of us as coins we get lost in the mud. And the work of like mysticism and spiritual practice within the Christian tradition is to have the image of Christ restored. So like they they start from a very positive place. Human beings were created in the image of God. We're stamped with the likeness of our creator. We even have an innate divinity that does not compare with the divinity of the creator but is his divinity within us. And when you have those mystical experiences where your flaws are pointed out, it's because that's still mud on your coin. Like there's still there's still tarnish and there's still things about you that are not shining fully with the reflected light of Christ. And so these are things that need to be dealt with. It's not like uh a lot of the the Protestant teaching on us being bad at our core or us being totally depraved or totally corrupt. It's actually very affirming. It's more of the mystical perspective is more that God comes along and he's like, you are acting and thinking and believing and loving and living far less than what I created you to be. And that has to be dealt with because you were not created for that. You were created to reflect my glory and my image in the world. That's interesting. Well, we're we're coming up on time. I want to ask uh I I feel like I have a lot more questions. I want to ask one more. And given that I don't talk to pastors every day, I'll avoid the questions I really want to ask like should I be a Republican or Democrat as a Christian? But I already know the answer to that, so I won't ask. Instead, I I want to know like if as someone who has experience with mysticism, if you had to spend one hour to grow yourself spiritually, uh because I think some people think about this, would would it be better to spend it in service to others, just go out and do or would it be better to go sit in silence in front of God? If you if you had to make a choice, because you do have to make a choice because you only spend every hour in one way. Which would you advise people go do? I know that my spiritual life doesn't work for me unless both of those elements are present. Because in the image of Christ in scripture, we have him disappearing to pray for extended periods of time. We have him fasting and connecting spiritually with who he called his heavenly father. And then it was right back into the mix of people and their their blood and their puss and their wounds and their demons and their psychological trauma. And so for me, I would say that you have to have a balance of those things. What I do with that hour depends on what I did yesterday. If I was alone all day yesterday and I I got a chance to study and pray, then we got to find somebody to serve. But if it's been a long week and I've been right in the mix of people's lives trying to help them, that hour is definitely going to be spent uh outside somewhere with nobody else around and my phone off um just connecting with God because I have to have both. I know people who are not able for a lot of different reasons to sit in silence and pray and that's okay. Like that's their makeup and that's their experience and they need to be serving. And I know other people who the service element of things is really hard for them also because of their background and their makeup. For me, and I think for a lot of us, we we need a balance of both. And trying to get that balance exactly nailed down, I I don't think we're ever going to do it. We're we're all living lives and and doing our best and God's leading us and it's going to change from season to season. I I am curious about if you've encountered Catholic mysticism uh because I feel that the Catholic Church has really allowed for a lot of sort of psychedelic uh experiences. This is this is how I see it in my world view and they've put it in this bucket of mysticism and it's huge inside the Catholic church and I kind of admire the way that they've done it and it seem it feels like you're kind of doing it but you're you're in a more decentralized version of a church which is probably really good because you don't have a Vatican that you report to and and so I'm just curious if you've run across any Cathol Catholic mystics being so close to Mexico especially. There's actually so first of all like almost all the mystical writers that I read are part of the Catholic tradition or part of the Orthodox tradition but usually it's presism so the Catholics still claim them. Um which has been good for me because like growing up in the evangelical version of the faith we're very disconnected from Christianity's historical roots and the flow of Christian history. A lot of Protestant Christians kind of believe that Christianity started with the Reformation and that nobody was really a Christian before that. And being able to trace the spiritual threads of the faith back through the history gives you another 1500 years of authors to read and people that you can engage with. Um, one of the the sources that I used a lot during my thesis was called Spiritual Direction, Thresholds in Adult Spiritual Genesis by Nek and Kums. And I really wish I had read the bio of those two nuns on the back of the book while I was doing my thesis because they their center is about 45 minutes from me where I am right now. And I had never put it together that they were right there. I don't think the writers of the book are still there, but their center for contemplation is actually right here. And I would have made multiple trips up there to ask some questions and to be around uh those people and I just for whatever reason I I was so busy writing my thing that I didn't I didn't read the biographies of the people that I was reading. Um but yeah, there's there's there are people around. I have a friend in Canada who says that the Catholic Church is the most mystical of the Christian groups, but they keep it behind the counter and you have to know what to ask for. And that's kind of been my experience. Yeah, that that's what I'm feeling as well, man. They're really deep into it. Actually, what's weird to me about the Catholic church actually is that if you go into like southern Mexico, they will allow the Mayan traditions, like uh there's a church down in Chamula where they sacrifice chickens still and they'll allow the blood of chickens to be poured out to the Mayan gods on the Catholic altar. And it's like it's so confusing because it's like, man, I grew up so Protestant thinking like you couldn't mix religions, but turns out I guess you can kind of and and you can just kind of say it's mystical, I suppose. I I yeah, I I don't I don't know if I would sacrifice a chicken. Um I I'm comfortable with I'm comfortable with Christ being the final sacrifice at the very least for the well-being of all the animals that we don't sacrifice anymore. So like the the whole sacrificial system was worldwide for a very long time and now we usually don't do human or animal sacrifices anymore. And I actually think that's a a good step. Do do you think animals are worth protecting? Do you think they have some sort of spirit? Whether or not they have a spirit, I don't think is a statement on whether or not they're worth protecting. I think that like but I at the same time in Genesis 2, God scoops up dirt, he breathes onto it, and makes Adam a living soul. And then he does the same process with all the other animals that he makes. So, like every living thing is a union of whatever the divine breath is, plus whatever the planet's made out of. And there's a we have a sacred duty to protect the other creatures that share the planet with us. Um, I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian, so I'm probably being very hypocritical about that. Um, and I do hunt, but that's also like that's where humanity comes from. And so we also have that to deal with. Um so yeah, I I believe strongly that animals and the planet are worth protecting and sometimes I eat some of them and I I I don't think I would survive on a vegan diet um because of my disease either. So I I've tried a few different diets to help manage and I do need to eat some animal protein just because of how my intestine doesn't work. Um, but then you got to ask the question, is my survival more important than the survival of the animals that I'm eating? And, uh, that's a question that's a lot easier not to think about. I think it's fair to say, how do you go hunt the animals? Because I I feel with a bow, it is a bit more fair. I heard it said that if you're going to eat animals, uh, the best thing you can do, like let's say you got to eat a fish, the best way you can honor that fish is to cook it well. Is to is to cook it well and like put intention into how you prepare it and give thanks for who it for giving its life. And I don't know why I agree with you, John. Like I don't know why meat is the most bioavailable, you know, vitamins and minerals that our body needs. And yet somehow, you know, how do we get along without without doing that? But somehow this this flesh needs to thrives on other flesh. But that's the way that I've reconciled it at least is to give thanks for that animal, for giving its life, for my life. And I don't know, maybe one day I won't need to do that or something. But for right now, it does seem like that's what my body wants to live. So like our our fundamental relationship with the land is broken. And I'd like to pretend that that's not true. And maybe in certain situations, certain people can do things where they organize their lives to be more in harmony with the land. And I would love to be moving in that direction, but like humanity and the land right now more than any time in history. There's conflict there and we are eating and we're feeding our kids and I'm trying to do that in a responsible way. I think a lot of people are trying to do that in a responsible way. But the system has gotten so big for how we feed ourselves and and how we provide for our families that most of us don't actually have a lot of control over where those calories come from. And that's frustrating. I I honestly I feel the same way about that that I feel about technology. You know, like I kind of need a cell phone to be in contact with my family and to do the service of other people that I do. like it's a tool that is expected for us to have now. But I'm also not blind to the horrible conditions of the people that made my phone. And that's an issue that is so big and so far out of our hands that it can be it can lead you to despair because of the fact that like we just don't the the individual doesn't have answers for those things. Um, and you could try to do some moral balancing and say, you know, I'm going to going to donate to this or that cause while I take advantage of the system in this or that way. But all of those things for me are like deeply unsatisfying. It's just there's a flaw in the system that we're all a part of. And like I I try to just confess it and ask for God's grace because I I really don't know what to do. Yeah, man. I don't know what to do either. We're struggling with this actually with AI. Matt Matt and I have been discussing this a lot. Like uh I've got a lot of nephews and nieces that I'm, you know, I care a lot about and he has kids he cares a lot about and we don't know how do you give them AI without breaking their brains and do you just shield them from it entirely or will they grow up being too far outside the bounds of of what people consider normally? So, actually, I'm building an AI chat for kids. And this is something I haven't really even announced publicly, but uh it's it's out online and some parents are using it with their kids now. And I my idea was if you can't beat them, join them. Like, give the parents an AI they can talk to about their own values and try to instill in the kids. But to some extent, I kind of feel like I should really just take my fingers off the keyboards entirely. Like, I wonder if we're just at the point where we have to completely back off. I wonder if the if you can't beat them, join them is what we've been doing for the last like 70 years and it's now pervading our farming and like you're saying in the land and everything and I wonder if we should all just be in my case fingers off the keyboards whatever the analog everything else is. I wonder if that's what we should be doing like how do you see that with particularly with AI? I'm curious. Yeah. So I'm really fascinated by AI. It's it's like such a sci-fi experience to be able to talk to like a mind that doesn't exist, right? Uh when we were kids, that was like the distant future and now we're here. Um at the same time, it's going to have a huge effect on a lot of people's livelihood. It's already having a huge effect on the environment. It's having an effect on how people think. It's having an effect on how people think about themselves and the motives of the people that are pushing it so hard are really hard to pin down. And no one asked us if we wanted that world. And there's this idea where it's like, well, no one asked anybody if they wanted the industrial revolution and so this is just the next industrial revolution. And I would argue that's not the case that you think it is. like there were the World War I was a direct result of the industrial revolution and none of the regular people who live on this planet wanted that either. So our relationship with technology, our relationship with the world, like the culture that we're living in, that's a tricky thing that Christians have always struggled with. I think everyone's always struggled with it. And the like the most extreme framing of this is to see how people of faith have dealt with empire all throughout scripture and all throughout history. You know, like starting with the Tower of Babel and then Egypt and then Sumer and Assyria and Babylon and then eventually Greece and Rome. The people of faith have always had to struggle with this culture that is out there trying to impose its will on everybody and how the people of faith respond to those scenarios is different in every situation they but it does take a lot of faith and a lot of hope and a lot of imagination to try to live in a world that is controlled by empire but to live in an alternative world where God is still in control. And I wish more of us would wake up to the fact that we're in the midst of another empire and it's made of of a bunch of different pieces. Maybe it's multiple empires all competing with each other, but that we do actually have the responsibility to imagine a life outside of that and resist in ways where we can. I don't know what that specifically looks like, but like, you know, it's so relevant because I feel that there is a group of people in the world right now really trying to stand up to an empire. And I think it's this I think it's the Sunni Muslims over in Iran. And I think they're trying to throw off the shackles of what they perceive to be an empire. And we are actively dropping bombs from the sky on them. Yeah. So the the question to how exactly to do that is very relevant because everybody's dealing with it and we're all feeling the empire from different sides. I mean I I feel I'm on the inside of the empire being in the United States with the US passport. But I but I don't want it to come to war ever or come to blows with anyone. But how do you how do you control that when your leaders are calling for it actively? I don't know. Or or even doing it without asking our permission or support this time. They just they they're just doing it. And so because of those things, we're we're going through the book of Daniel with some of my midweek Bible studies because Daniel gets taken from Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire as like a war trophy. And then he has to hang out in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar and try to maintain his identity as a Jewish person when he has no control over his physical situation and he has no power to try to oppose it. So the joke I keep making is as Americans, we always want to blow up the Death Star, but what do we do when we don't even know where it is and we don't have the means to do it? And that's where a lot of us in our culture, we just melt down because we don't have any we don't know what to do. We don't have any tools if we can't like rest control away from the people in power uh and then get it for ourselves. What happens when that's not even an option? And in Daniel chapter 1, they change his name. They take him to a new place. They force him into a role that he doesn't want to be in. And then they try to make him eat the food of the empire. And Daniel and his friends famously have a meeting with their capttors and they say, "Would you let us eat vegetables?" Which was the only way in Babylon that they could keep kosher and keep their dietary restrictions. And then if we're healthy at the end of a couple weeks of eating our food, then we're asking you for consideration to allow us to continue. And that stance that they took on food, it didn't change anything. It didn't bring down the empire. It didn't blow up the Death Star. But they were able to plant their flag on one issue and stick to it and oppose the empire in a way that mattered to them. And from there they had kind of a beach head where their identity as spiritual people was allowed to be established. And so like I don't know what to do about politics. I don't know what to do about AI. Um my wife being from Mexico, I obviously have strong opinions about all the immigration issues and the way that that's going right now. Um, and I also have very strong opinions about how Christianity is not thinking critically about the political choices that it's making and not taking responsibility for the consequences of those political choices. But I can't do anything about those things. Like I'm literally not in a position where I have any say or any authority over these issues that affect my life and affect everybody else's life. So I have to ask the question, where am I going to plant my flag like Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and say this is the line that I'm going to hold against the empire. And I know it's small and I know it's pathetic in the sense of like it's not going to do anything to move the needle on all these bigger issues in the world, but I have to do something. And for me, the flag that I've planted is like, I'm going to keep Christ at the center of every decision that I make, and I'm going to keep reminding the Christian people around me that Jesus is the one whose instructions we're supposed to follow. And I didn't think that that was going to get as much push back as it gets. Like the mysticism push back is nothing compared to telling Christian people that we're responsible to do what Jesus tells us to do. that gets all kinds of push back in the cultural climate that we're in. And that's shocking to me or it was when that was the line I was trying to hold at first. But that's the line that's worth holding, you know. And then with my kids, uh, making sure that they have like real authentic human experiences that are detached from the electronic empire that we're all in. That's where I'm holding the line with my family. It's like, we're gonna go for the walk, we're going to go for the hike, we're going to ride the bikes, we're going to travel, we're going to see the thing. Uh, you know, we're going to talk to each other. Um, and like for my kids, uh, I have a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old and they're not getting cell phones for a while. And there's a sense where I know that that's going to set them behind when it comes to technology use for a lot of their peers. But I don't care because I don't think that they need all of that insecurity and all of those image issues and all of the anxiety that comes from having all these different voices shouting at them all the time. And they will have a cell phone someday, but it's not now. And that's a that's a hill I'm pretty committed to dying on. You know what I mean? So yeah, it's like how you said Daniel used diet as a way to sort of establish it was the one point he could stand on because he was a servant of Nebuchadnezzar, right? He would have been killed if he if he really tried to break break too many norms. But he could stand on the one and say, you know, I at least want to control what I put in my body. And if not, I think he also said, don't let your wise men drink wine. Because he had free wine, I think, for all the wise men in that same story. But here you're saying your intellectual diet is something that you can stand on. Yeah. Because it's in theory it should be outside of the political realm. It's just it's just intellectually this is how I want my kids to grow up. I think that's excellent. I think it's an excellent message to push, man. And it involves like paying attention to them and talking to them and listening to them and getting down on their level and experiencing the world with them for the first time with them. Um, is it easier to give a kid a device? Yeah. are do they want to talk to their friends? Uh they're with their friends all the time, but they still want to be checking in all the time with their friends, you know, whatever. And I'm not saying we don't play video games and and they don't have devices. But it's like there's there's a line somewhere where you go, I I cannot let you be consumed by this techno empire that's being built against our will and without our permission. And so you're gonna have to figure out how to deal with this when you're older. But for now, I want to make sure that all those little neurons in your brain connect in a healthy way so that you even have the hardware to deal with these things when you're older and you're exposed to them. Yeah, man. I don't think you can get as much creativity if you're constantly fed the thoughts that you're thinking. I think sometimes you have to generate them just to just to practice the muscle. So your your kids should be grateful someday when they catch wind of what you're doing. Yeah, I don't really care one way or the other. This is the this is the choice that I made for them. And uh I know that they will have complaints and they they're going to have to deconstruct everything that I said. Uh that's that's how life goes. Why do you think people aren't having kids anymore? Just out of curiosity. The younger people in my circles are afraid. uh they've been like so a lot of the the older generation lumps in like millennials and and Gen Z and Gen Alpha kind of as one younger demographic, but the Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids have had to go to school where they felt like they were threatened by extreme violence at any minute. They have been told from when they were little that the planet is dying and it's everybody's fault. But they didn't see any of us older people take any responsibility for it or make any changes. And so where we were given this hopeful vision of the future, if everybody tries really hard and we all hold hands and get along, these kids were told from day one that that was not going to work and that they were in danger always. and then they're hitting adulthood and all of a sudden they're supposed to bring kids into the world and they want to like there's a deep human thing that like I want to have kids and I want to have a family but they were told that this was not the world to bring children into even if it wasn't told to them in so many words. So like a a woman who's 25 right now having a baby is one of the bravest people on the planet. Not because I think that like we are doomed and you shouldn't have kids, but because she's going against all of her programming and all of the fear-mongering that she had to deal with as she grew up to take a step of faith into the future and say, "I'm actually going to have a child because I believe this child has a future." Like, those people are heroes. Yeah, I think that's a good point that that a hopeful population probably has more kids than a population who has less hope. It's probably a pretty good proxy for hope is how many children the population is having. It's a really cool perspective. Yeah. So, we're a lot of churches are getting older. Um I talked to like my friends and other people in ministry and they're talking about like the church is in decline because it's all gay-headed people and and they want to serve these older people and stuff, but the the younger people aren't showing up to church. And I feel so blessed that the community that we have right now is full of children and also the older people are still around and they're in the same space a couple times a week. To me, that is such a blessing because it's more than most of us can ask for at this point. Um, I know that we're the anomaly and I know that the people that we're around who are having kids and we're trying to raise our kids together and we're trying to do this like whole life thing together in the world that we're in like that community is so important to all of us because we know it's kind of like an oasis uh in the world that we're living. I mean that is everybody's I like that because it bring it makes the world much smaller because in reality all of our worlds are small like you can get mad about anything that's going on in any other country or whatever and that's okay but like you can just walk outside and have your real neighbors and your real people at your grocery store and the real people there and that's actually the people who will affect your life the most is if you know if you're if you're paying attention and so having having that community I think that is one of the things that the church has done incredibly well is provide a community for people as they truly don't know their neighbors anymore or stay inside. And so it's really awesome to hear that that's what's happening. And and I do think the vi the vitality of a church is sometimes measured it by the size of their youth group. Um if you had to measure it is because it's you know are is it attracting younger people? And I found that the the gay-haireds they really want that too. That's that's the actually the thing they want the most is to see the the kids ministries growing because it's just showing that this thing's gonna stick around. Yeah. Um uh an older pastor I know says that as much as the older people want to complain, they don't want to be in the building by themselves. Like they they they you know the the the children might make a mess, but a church without children is is not a place that anybody wants to be. even in the older people who want things clean. So, there's some stretching that has to do all around as we make room for different kinds of people. But again, that's that's Christ's vision, right? We're supposed to have I I have a guy who comes to our church who's uh 95 years old and we I just met him a couple years ago and he was a test pilot for like jets in the 1940s and 50s. He was one of the first people to uh break the sound barrier in a military jet. and he's 95 years old and he's a sweet guy. And then we're he's there in church next to babies that are crying. And we've got people with all different backgrounds. We've got the more straight laced people. We have the tattooed people that come from psychedelic experiences that are wondering what the God thing's all about. And to see everybody together with different political opinions and different ideas about the way things should go is actually a very beautiful thing that I'm also very grateful for because I think the table should be set for everyone. And if we can all come together still being ourselves but also bring that together into a community of love and support. I think that's what the the dream is. That's what the vision is. Right on. John, thanks for joining us today. This is really awesome. Thanks for sharing what you're doing down south south Texas. Lower down than some spots in Mexico. That's really cool. Southernmost Texas. Yeah, southern most Texas. Yeah. All right, that's a wrap. Thanks everybody. See you later.