Episode 1: Introduction-Our Mission

This is a podcast called "Appears to be Right" hosted by Lauren and Mikaela. They discuss topics that seem right on the surface but may not be. The name is inspired by a Bible verse. The logo is a lion representing Jesus. They want to reach people who are searching for meaning and truth. They use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and to focus on the message rather than their personalities. They come from different generations and backgrounds. They welcome everyone and aim to help people be better. Welcome to Appears to be Right. I'm your host, Lauren, and this is our other host, Mikaela. We're kind of nervous, guys. Okay, okay, okay. We need to like, we need to soften this up. I know this is starting really badly. This is starting really bad. No, it's not. It's okay. You know, anything you do for the first time. It's hard. It's going to be bad. Yeah. We took, it was a journey for us to get here. A lot of research and a lot of learning about softwares and recording and microphones. So, this is our podcast, Appears to be Right, and Mikaela is going to talk about the reasoning for our name, as well as the logo that you guys are going to see when you hopefully come across this podcast. Okay, so our name is Appears to be Right, and it is taken directly from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 14, Verse 12, and it says, There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end, it leads to death. That's where we got our name from. It's a little bit dark, but the reasoning behind it is the topics that we would like to discuss are very mainstream. A lot of people believe that if you think this way or live your life by these beliefs, you're basically a good person, which appears to be right on like an outside layer, but we're going to basically take a deep dive to explain and to dissect why it appears to be right, but truthfully, is it? Is it really the right way? Is it really what is right? So now, the logo is a lion, and then Mikaela has more knowledge on this than I do. Can you explain that as well? I mean, the reason why we chose the lion, you designed the lion. Yeah, I designed. I'm not going to take credit for it, though, because I love Canva. Canva is like a logo-making editor. I've made photography cards, wedding invitations, things like that, so I love Canva, and that's really where that came from, but I did design it through the internet. Right. So you are very creative, but it is a lion, and the reason why we chose the lion is because, as you will come to find out, this is a Christian podcast. The lion represents Jesus. Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah, which is one of the twelve tribes of Israel. There's two different colors on the lion. My idea of it was two hosts presenting their ideas. As you're going to learn about us, we don't always agree on everything, but that is what makes this very interesting, because we get to give two different perspectives, but also the two colors, as you were saying. Yeah, so I think the two colors sort of represent different perspectives in the world, so not just that we are two different people. We came from two completely different backgrounds, and we were both born just to put that out there so people aren't thinking that we're the same person. We grew up together. We did not. We found each other through our career, but we both came from different generations as well, so there's generational separation there, the places we were born, but it kind of just shows the two perspectives. There's always two sides to a story. There's always two sides to a relationship, to modern-day beliefs like we're speaking about. That's typically what we're going to talk about, and also like you see it in politics, or just every single thing is going to have a side of second story. There's always going to be an outsider or a second person that was involved in whatever you're going to talk about, so that's another interpretation of it. Again, there's going to be another side, so someone will think of that differently as well. And then for, we can discuss our motive, our goal, basically, obviously everything that we're bringing to the table is from the Bible. That is our source. We live by the Word of God, and we want to put it out there so everybody knows. We're not just making up morals as we go. This is biblically based. Also, we're just trying to reach people who are searching for meaning and for purpose and for the truth. Yeah, for the truth, or there's a lot of people out there that you find that, I guess you could say that they're lost. They're always searching for the next love, and they're having trouble staying in relationships, or they're always searching for the next job because they're not comfortable in the career that they're desiring. There's just so many. They're looking for their next spiritual journey, which is so popular. Drugs, alcohol, partying. There's so many ways that you can look at this, but that is our interpretation. We're just trying to reach people who are searching for deeper meaning and to find that final search and to just stop searching, but to find what you're looking for. If you feel like you are trying to find something, you're searching for peace, you're searching for comfort, for a home, for a family, for people who will understand you, you're searching for us. I feel like, if Michaela probably agrees with this as well, we live by the word of God, like she said, so we are searching for a motive that's going to stay true and it's never going to change, which is the Bible. We go to the Bible when we're stressed, when we're anxious, when we're upset, when people are talking about us. We go to the Bible as a baseline, and that is our baseline. We're just hoping to provide some better insight on what being a Christian is, but also we want to reach those people who don't understand religion. Hopefully, if you just keep listening, you might actually agree with some of the things we say. Right. More of who we are. Michaela and Lauren are actually not real people. Yeah, those are pseudonames. We have different reasons for just putting forth pseudonames. If you don't know what pseudo means, it's just basically a fake name. I don't want to say fake. It sounds like the right word. Right. But another kind of background on that, another reason why is to protect our privacy. It's definitely a big part of social media. If you end up finding out who we are, to be honest, we don't really care. We don't have some deep, dark secret. No. But also, we want to kind of preserve the words we're speaking and the Word of God because God is always spoken of in such a high power. He's always spoken of in such a high meaning. People look up to this person. This person isn't always interpreted as a bad person, and he shouldn't be because he's perfect. Perfection. He was perfection. Right. Also, we don't want our personalities and everything that is attached to a name to have an impact on what we have to say. That is some of the reasons why we decided to end like you said earlier. Say you meet someone for the first time, and maybe they just weren't super nice to you, or they didn't smile, or they didn't meet an expectation that you have that they're not going to know that you were expecting. They're not going to meet an expectation that you have because you have certain expectations that these people cannot fulfill. They can't read your mind. And then everything else that comes out of their mouth, you're just going to undermine because you don't like them. If you don't like someone, let's really think about it. If you don't like someone, you are more inclined to not listen to them versus, say, your best friend. That might be an extreme case. That might truly be an extreme case. Or say your boss. You really don't like your boss, but you like your supervisor. You're probably going to listen to your supervisor or vice versa. Just putting that out there. Correct. And sometimes the message gets tainted by the person who's conveying it. And we didn't want none of that to be part of this. Also, Lauren already spoke to this, but we are from different generations. There's an age gap between us. I wouldn't say large, but I think it's a pretty big one. It puts us on different generations. Definitely. We definitely grew up not only in different countries. One of us is from Puerto Rico. The other one is from the United States. Of course, there's different ethnicities behind both of those. Very different lifestyles and cultures and language is also English and Spanish. Definitely. We want you to at least know that about us, and hopefully that will make you believe or listen more attentively to different perspectives that come from us. Definitely. Today, we wanted to give you a little sneak peek of what we want to talk about in our next episode. I feel like, did we talk about our purpose enough? You know what I mean? I really hope you guys are satisfied with what we explained thus far. Of course, if there's anything questionable, we'll end up doing a Q&A down the road. That is if we have... We're just hypothetically speaking that if we have followers, then this will... Yeah. Eventually, we do want people to be comfortable enough to come to us and be like, would you discuss this topic? Yeah. We want to answer questions. That's why we're here. We're not only here just to speak on the word of God, but we're also speaking from perspective. Also, a little bit of background on religion, if that's okay with you. One of us has been Christian for a very long time, but we both came from Catholic backgrounds. Correct. We haven't just lived one religion. We didn't grow up around... Our parents, neither of our parents were what people would call raging, which is a very extreme word to use, Catholics or Christians. We found Christianity both of ourselves. We tried to help our families understand what it is to be Christian and to follow the word of God. Some of them followed and some of them didn't, and that's okay. We're not here to push that on you either. Just because we speak about the Bible, just because we tell you this is a Christian podcast, that doesn't mean that you can't learn something. We're not pushing religion on you. If you aren't religious, that's totally fine. We're welcoming everyone here to this podcast, to this space, because we just truly want people to be better. The world we live in right now is astronomical. Even opposing voices. I would consider myself to be a very... I don't like conflict, but if I do have to face conflict, I'm going full on, head on. I'm doing it. Definitely. Please do not be afraid to express a dissenting opinion or different perspectives to us. We would love to enrich the conversation. Definitely. We aren't going to, just because we don't agree with something, doesn't mean that we're not going to bring it up, A, or B, completely ignore it. That isn't our personalities. We're not just going to ignore a negative comment. We might find value in that negative comment. There might be a couple words in there that actually are teaching us something. We might benefit from what you guys have to say, whether it's positive or negative. We're not going to be that sensitive towards negativity, because sometimes criticism is a teacher. I can teach you, for sure. We can speak more on our backgrounds, because we're definitely looking forward to giving our testimonies on separate episodes. For today, we would like to talk about something that everyone, even if you're informal speech, you might not even notice when you say, X person is a good person. They could have given you a compliment. You don't know who this person is. You don't know what their morals are, their values, what they've done in the past. Not to say that things you do in the past cannot be corrected, because they can. You can be forgiven. Forgiveness is a beautiful thing, but just because they did that one nice thing does not make them a good person. Are you a good person? Are there good people? Are we good people? Right? I can tell you straight up right now that I'm not a good person. I'm not either. That would be the first word that I would use to describe myself. I would use describing words, of course, but good person would not be what I would call myself, or anyone, for that matter. We're going to talk about it on the next episode. We're going to go through scripture. The Bible does say and shows light into the issue. It says there is no one who is good. Not even one person. It's such a shocking revelation. People get enraged by this. They're like, what do you mean I'm a good person? I literally give to charity. You can do good things without being a good person. Right. Also, you can do bad things and you can come back from that, redeem yourself from that. You can be saved. There's all of these things that you can do to redeem yourself and to ask for forgiveness. It still does not make you a good person just because you've changed. People do change, but good person is thrown around too lightly. It does mean something deeper than it seems. I think that's it on the next episode. Don't worry about it. We do have good news at the end of it. People are probably thinking, this is very dark. This is no hope. There is hope. There's definitely going to be ups, downs. There's going to be dark sides. There's going to be some very heavy topics. We hope you stick around. We hope people watch this. If you are listening and you don't know who we are, then we're very grateful that you've listened to this point. Thank you so much. We're going to just throw our Instagram in there or plug, as people would say. Our Instagram appears to be right. No capitals, no spaces, or no special characters. If you want to ask us any questions, you want to give feedback, we appreciate negative, positive, and all feedback. Anything really, Instagram. Give us a follow, request some questions. We might answer the questions via there or just save them until another episode. Yes. Also, if you would like to stick around, we would like to pray. Lord, we thank you for the opportunity that you have given us and the platform and all the resources that you have given us to reach people with your message. We ask that you open hearts and ears to your word and that we can be good vessels and a good representation for you and that we can enrich people's lives in your holy name. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen. I really hope we do reach people. Definitely share this if you can. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next time on Appears to be Right. He's the lion, it's not the sheep.